I started this story on our other blog but I think I will continue it here. In the last installment I was just waiting for the coop to arrive and beginning to design a run.
Last weekend when we got back from Ireland we had some arrivals, Miss White:
Goldie:
and Henrietta:
Miss White and Goldie are already laying one Free egg per day, Henrietta should start soon. So how much do Free eggs cost? Well quite a bit really. £20 per bird, £100 for the coop, about £100 for the materials for the run that I made. £10 for the feed dispenser, £10 for the water thing, about £20 for some food and corn and grit and worm stuff. I spent an evening assembling the coop and a couple of weeks of evenings building the run (if you ever need to attach chicken wire to a wooden frame don’t use a manual staple gun, get an electric one like I didn’t). I now spend a bit of time every morning letting them out and filling up the food and a bit more time every evening putting them away and shoveling an astonishing amount of chicken poo into the compost. It would be a lot less money and effort to just buy eggs from the supermarket. But I don’t want to do that, because these eggs are Free, and that is cool! To bring the topic back to the webbook, the software on the webbook is Free. Free as in Freedom, Free as in Free Range, Free as in Free eggs. Sometimes it can require a bit more effort than the supermarket variety, but it is much much better because you can see everything that went into it.
This is soo koool! Your new chickens are really cute but I like Henrietta the best ^___^
[...] Michael Joyce asked about e-book readers for the webbook, specifically for reading Project Gutenburg texts, it turns out there is indeed a great reader for them, GutenBrowser. This can be installed from the Synaptic package manager, just look down the list for gutenbrowser and install it. It does not appear to have added an icon to the menu but you can start it from alt-F2 then type gutenbrowser and hit the run button. The first thing you have to do is go to Settings-Server Settings and point it at a Gutenburg mirror. I had some problems with the UK mirrors so I am now pointing at the project Gutenburg reading room at the bottom of the list. Once you have selected a server you can go to Library-update to collect the list of titles available, then just browse the list and it will download books on demand. Currently I am reading “A Manual or an Easy Method of Managing Bees” and contemplating the possibility of having Free Honey to go with my Free Eggs. [...]