Brassica Bugs

From back in April: a pair of brassica bugs, Eurydema oleracea (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae) mating on a garlic mustard (Allaria petiolata) leaf.  These bugs come in black and white, black and red, and black and yellow variants.  I have seen all three variants on the same plant.

A black and yellow one from a few days earlier:

And from a recent walk, what I think is a nymph of the same species:

This was on a mullein plant (Verbascum thapsus) but still only a few metres from where I saw the above specimens.  The stand of garlic mustard had by then gone to seed and its leaves had turned purple.

Photos taken in the field below Chazey Wood, near Caversham, UK, on 2011-04-24, 2011-04-17 and 2011-07-11, respectively.

Wacom Bamboo Pen on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

Last year I bought my daughter a Wacom Bamboo Pen CTL-460 tablet. I quickly got it working with Gimp and Inkscape on our Windows-XP PC but was unable to get it to work at all on our laptop running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. And that was how I left it, until last week when I came across this page at the Linux Wacom site.  What I hadn't been clear to me last year was that both a kernel driver (input-wacom) and a X11 driver (xf86-input-wacom) were necessary and that Ubuntu 10.04 LTS has only the X11 driver included.  Last week I simply downloaded and installed the kernel driver following the given instructions and now the Bamboo Pen works perfectly on the laptop too.

Update on Mon 2011-10-17 by Tristram Brelstaff

Every time you update the Linux kernel you need to reinstall the Wacom kernel driver.

Moth

On getting back from a walk round the lakes I found this on our front door.  It is a least carpet moth, Idaea rusticata = Idaea vulpinaria (Lepidoptera: Geometridae).

Photo taken in Reading, UK, on 2011-07-14.

Vervain

Common vervain (Verbena officinalis).  The leaves look like this:

Photos taken in the field below Chazey Wood, near Caversham, UK, on 2011-07-11.

Hoverfly

A small dark hoverfly covered with golden hairs: probably a Pipizella sp, possibly Pipizella virens (Diptera: Syrphidae).

Photos taken in Whiteknights Park, Reading University grounds, Reading, UK, on 2011-06-13.