We’re finding that winter is a rather tough time for our chickens and I think this has contributed to Mildred’s ill health lately. She hasn’t been well for quite a few days now and it doesn’t look good unfortunately. Theres been talk of putting her out of her misery but none of us can bring ourselves to do it, I’ve even thought about releasing her into the fields behind the house but that would be rather cruel if she were to get gobbled up by Mr Fox. So instead it was back to converting the disused out house like before to make her as comfortable as possible.

Mildred has always been the smallest of all our girls and shes been with us for over a year now. She had a bit of a rough time being at the bottom of the pecking order but soon settled in and was getting into mischief. She even figured out along with her partner in crime that she could use the cat flap in the back door to enter the house and nibble our cat’s food.

She was always reliable when it came to laying eggs too though you could always tell which eggs belonged to her due to their funny shape and size.

Its horrible when pets are ill.

I know it may sound a little odd but I have been collecting rocks for over ten years now (see a previous post about my collection here). The plan is to keep a stone/rock from the memorable places I visit and then return them all when I retire, revisiting the places I enjoyed when I was younger.

I pulled out a few of the more memorable items in my collection and photographed them. I then made a mini zine out of them and these will soon be hidden away in geology library books for the public to discover and hopefully enjoy.

If you would like a copy (or just a random zine pluked from the many I make) just drop me an email with your address and I’ll pop one in the post for you. Please pop by my new zine site, the Rusty Rocket for regular updates.

I would also be interested to hear what things you collect too.

I have been spending some time now reading up on best practices when writing a web app for the iPhone and worked on an existing idea of mine to produce one myself. I have called it Whit Twit and what it does is monitor Tweets in real time for key words and displays the number of hits if finds within a five second period. This is a great way to see trends forming and the cycling numbers every five seconds is somewhat hypnotic.

Unfortunately the keyword still has to be hardcoded in but I’m working on it so you can chop and change whenever you feel like it.

Theres more…clicking on the bird image will display the top 5 most recent tweets with your keyword.

It even has an icon on my iPhone complete with the bird image which looks really nice.

UPDATE: Since posting this theres been a couple of realltygood suggestions from readers including an alert to let you know when the number of tweets about a particular topic reaches a certain level. This is such a simple idea but one which will allow my app to function a little better.

I always like to receive interesting mail and by trading my zine this month, a number of interesting packages from the other side of the world have arrived as a result.

I love them all and have read them a couple of time over as some of the content is really well written and somewhat inspirational. They’re now a valued addition to my ever increasing library of self-published work from around the globe and seeing my collection just confirms to me even more that theres some really creative (and generous) people out there. Why not pay this month’s traders a visit by popping over to Barf Color and tamagokkoh.

If you’re interested in trading your creative goodness too you should check out We Make Zines and the recently stumbled upon Trading Network.

The Five Zines of February

Seeing as though the zine trading has got off to a great start this year, I’ve set up the Rusty Rocket as a place to advertise my zines and to act as a kind of trading post. I have produced a series of bookmarks with the Rusty Rocket address on it and they will be included in all outbound packages in the hope of generating more traffic to the site.

So click here, take a look and have an explore using the arrows on the posters. Who knows, if you wait long enough your train might arrive.

I’ll be adding more detailed listings of all my zines and mini-zines just as soon as I find the time but there should be enough content already up there to wet your appetite.

I remember years ago when I was a teen camping out with a few park rangers as we guarded a marquee overnight which was being used for a show the following day. To keep us occupied we managed to hook up an old radio and listen to one of the forces’ radio stations which was broadcasting a live baseball game from the US. I have to admit, I don’t have much interest in the game but the fact that we were listening live from a country park in Lincolnshire just amazed me. I guess from then on I’ve always been interested in radio, quickly become a fan of the old Radio 5 before it sold out to sport. I even had dreams of starting a radio show with a friend from round the corner when I was a kid (I dug out the old test transmissions, you can hear them by clicking here). More recently I discover number stations and you can hear an eerie one that I recently found here thanks to Ev’s shortwave radio.

Anyway, this week the Gadget Show did a review of the top 5 apps for phones and OoTunes featured quite highly. Its a rather nice app that lets you listen to live radio stations from around the world with added features like the opportunity to record. I am now finding myself streaming some of the US talk show stations while I’m feeding Charlie and I’m completely hooked. I know I live in a more technologically advanced world compared with the one when I listened to American baseball but I’m still fascinated by the concept of listening to live radio from the other side of the world.