Growing Peppers Indoors Part 2

Anaheim Flower

In my previous post the pepper plants were placed in the window and endured a freakishly hot final week of March. Since then the weather turned to the usual April affair, that is, mostly rain with a bit of sun and snow thrown in to mix things up a bit.

A few creepy crawlies have made their attempts at the peppers, the subject of paprika has sparked my interest in another area and there were some problems with seeds. So a few weeks on and it is time for an update.

Growing Peppers Indoors

Growing Set-up

One day, several years ago, the BBC website asked its viewers if they wanted free seeds. Having not grown plants for decades (yeesh, that sounds old), I decided to apply… and hey presto, a hobby was born!

Fast forward to the present day and a south-facing window exists in my flat with the sole purpose of growing edible crops, well, it also functions as a window but that should go without saying. This year said window is dedicated to peppers, that is, sweet peppers and chilli peppers.

Magnifying or Zooming Shadowbox

Shadowbox is one of the better lightboxes, which in turn are fancy Javascript enhancements for displaying content; they display it by placing the content in a relatively bright box on the centre of the screen. I have been looking to enhance Shadowbox for big images.

When you click on an image, Shadowbox can either load the full image scaled downward to the user's screen resolution, or it can display part of the image and allow the user to scroll around. I was looking for an option that comprised both ideas and found it by using a jQuery plug-in called Loupe.

Running Django with XAMPP on OS X

I am not really sure why I originally started this process, but several months back I decided to install Django on OS X. Sensible Django developers stick with the development web server that’s included with Django, but coming from PHP, I wanted to get it working with Apache. This is something that’s somewhat straightforward, but I also wanted it to work with MySQL. Not only that, it should be the Apache and MySQL that’s encapsulated within XAMPP.

Over the last several months I have tried a few times and given up, deciding instead to learn new PHP frameworks, so for that reason, this isn’t a step-by-step tutorial. This is brief description of the steps that I can remember taking on this journey to a working Django install. Please don’t expect it to work fully. Use this article in combination with the multitude of other articles that cover the individual parts of the process.