A series of photos showing the opportunities for walks near to home re-discovered thanks to the lockdown imposed in an attempt to stop the spread of Covid-19.

The site started off as we passed this rather ugly overflow from the Grand Union Canal to the River Nene near where the Towcester Road crosses both. It comprises mainly a series of galleries of the photos. Clicking on one of the small gallery photos will bring up a larger picture and some comments along with navigation arrows to show the next picture.

There was a pair of grey wagtails flitting about on some weeds that had caught on the lip of the overflow. Pretty birds that we haven’t seen very often. Naturally I had no camera with me so I resolved to carry my Panasonic Lumix TZ70 on our walks in future. This is a compact camera with a big zoom which I find handy when there are birds a good way off which we couldn’t identify. The results at high zoom are not all that good as is obvious in the picture of the Grebes on Sixfields Resevoir but plenty good enough for later identification. Even more naturally we haven’t had a glimpse of the wagtails again.

The site uses probably the world’s most common blogging software – WordPress running on the most common server setup on the internet – LAMP. That’s Linux Apache MySQL Php. What is probably far less common is that it originally ran on a Rapberry Pi 4B on a home internet connection. This is one reason why the site has been kept simple. I have since moved it to commercial hosting after producing a friendly pensioners forum which needed more reliable hosting than could be achieved on a home internet connection.

Left here but now only history…

I noticed that the Pi4 ran rather hot so I got a case with a cooling fan which worked well in keeping the temperature down which should improve reliability.