My Red Cherry Shrimps

It's about time that I post another aquarium update.

Well, I have red cherry shrimps now. I really struggled to find male shrimps. When I went to the aquarium store, I asked for a mix of males and females. The seller didn't seem to know the difference between males and females. So I made sure that I got a few that had a male-like appearance and waited. After a few months, all 10 of my shrimps had the "saddle". This is the white line of unfertilized eggs that appears on the neck of female shrimps. So yeah...all my shrimps were female. Then I went to another shop, got 4 more shrimps. Again, all female. I figured that stores don't sell males here, either because they are less colorful or because they don't want people to breed shrimps themselves.

Please enjoy some pictures of my virgin female shrimps:

And here, a picture of the ugliest female shrimp in the world, it's basically a man with eggs:

My females were in a desperate need for some male companions. My solution was buying some more shrimps, this time from a private seller. If you buy from a private seller, you can be sure that they have both males and females because they are breeding these shrimps themselves at home. A friendly woman came to my house to drop off these:

Baby males! Less than 2 weeks later, my females were pregnant with eggs, also called "berried" because the eggs look like berries. Interestingly, the eggs have different colors depending on the female. I had some with light eggs, some with dark eggs:

After that, my shrimps have been living happily ever after. They like eating shrimp pellets, but also fish flakes and vegetables like broccoli:

Adding custom dictionaries to Kobo devices

I recently bought a Kobo Glo. Great little e-reader, that one.

I spent a while struggling to figure out how to install a Turkish-English dictionary on it, because it's not supported by default. I decided to write a little tutorial about installing other dictionaries on a Kobo device, in case I or anyone else ever need it to do this again.

Check whether the dictionary you want is already available

1. Check here whether Kobo already made the dictionary you want. If yes, download the file, connect your Kobo device to your computer and place it in the ".kobo\dict" folder and you are done. If not, go to step 2.

2. Check here whether someone else already made a custom dictionary for the language pair you want. If so, you can skip to step 13 for instructions on how to put the file on your Kobo device.

Make a custom dictionary

3. Download the dictionary you want in StarDict format. This website has a lot of dictionaries.

4. Unzip it the .tar dictionary file. You will get a .dz, .idx and .ifo file. Rename the .dz file to .gz. Extract the .gz file so you end up with a .dict file. Give the .dict, .ifo and .idx representative names, eg. tur_en.dict, tur_en.idx, and tur_en.ifo.

5. Go here and download the latest version of Penelope.

6. Unzip the Penelope script and place it in the folder of your choice, for example "c:\Penelope". Put the dictionary files in the same folder as the Penelope files.

7. Install Python 3.3.4.

8. Download the marisa.zip file here or here. It containes two Windows executables It was built from open source Marisa code by the user EbokJunkie on mobileread.com. Penelope script invokes these executables. You can put them anywhere; I put them to "C:\tmp".

9. Right click the file penelope3.py and choose Edit with IDLE. Find the variables MARISA_BUILD_PATH and MARISA_REVERSE_LOOKUP_PATH and set their location to "c:/tmp/marisa-build.exe" and to "c:/tmp/marisa-reverse-lookup.exe" respectively, or wherever you saved the marisa files. Save penelopa3.py.

10. Open the command prompt and make the Penelope folder your current folder by typing the command "cd c:\Penelope".

11. Type the following command to start the conversion: "penelope3.py -p tur_eng -f tur -t eng --output-kobo". Replace the variable "tur" with the language you want to translate from and "eng" with your target language.

12. You will end up with a Kobo dictionary file now, for example dicthtml-tur-eng.zip.

Transfer the dictionary file to your Kobo device

13. Connect your Kobo device to your computer and go to the ".kobo\dict" folder on the reader.

14. In order to get your Kobo device to recognize the dictionary files, you have to use it to replace an existing original dictionary. To do this, you have to use the file name of an existing original dictionary. For example, I don't use the Spanish dictionary, so I renamed the file "dicthtml-es-en.zip" on my Kobo device to "dicthtml-es-en-backup.zip", so I will still have a backup in case I need it later. Then I renamed my Turkish-English dictionary to "dicthtml-es-en.zip".

15. Unplug your Kobo device, tap a word in a book and use the "Spanish" dictionary to look up words in your dictionary.

Credits:

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=196931

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=2575208

https://github.com/pettarin/penelope

Propagating African violets

This is the newest addition to my plant family: a beautiful blue miniature African violet.

I wanted to try propagating this plant by taking leaf cuttings. This is what I did:

Cut a few leaves from the plant. I've read that it's recommended to take the leaves at the bottom of the plant, not the center. The stalk should look like this:

18/03/12

Put them in moist pot soil. The soil shouldn't be too wet, but don't let it dry out either.

2-4 weeks later, roots will start to develop at the base of the stalk.

05/04/12