Tue 2013-03-19 
Again from last spring: a red-headed cardinal beetle, Pyrochroa serraticornis (Coleoptera: Pyrochroidae).
Photos taken in the field below Chazey Wood, near Caversham, UK, on 2012-05-13.
Mon 2013-03-18 
From last spring: a black-headed cardinal beetle, Pyrochroa coccinea (Coleoptera: Pyrochroidae).
Photo taken in Whiteknights Park, Reading, UK, on 2012-05-11.
Sun 2013-03-17 
From last summer: longhorn beetle Agapanthia villosoviridescens (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae).
Photo taken in the field below Chazey Wood, near Caversham, UK, on 2012-06-19.
Sat 2013-03-16 The Ruby Version Manager RVM is one of the key components in a Ruby development environment on non-Windows platforms.
Yesterday I wanted to install it on my Ubuntu laptop. The recommended way of doing is to run the following command in a terminal:
curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable
Unfortunately this gave SSL certificate verification errors. Visiting rvm.io in Firefox and Chrome indicated that this was due to the site's security certificate having expired.
A little Googling revealed the recommended workaround which is to use Gihub instead of rvm.io:
curl -L https://raw.github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/master/binscripts/rvm-installer | bash -s stable
Sat 2013-03-16 
Fungus Bulgaria inquinans growing on the trunk of a cut down oak tree (Quercus sp).
I took the above sample and from it got the following spores (magnification x600, image width 86um):
The spore size of about 11.5 x 6.5um agrees well with the the range 9-17 x 6-7um given here at MushroomExpert.com.
First photo and sample taken in Whiteknights Park, Reading, UK, on 2013-03-09.
