During the course of life and work I had crossed paths with a huge amount of applications for the Macintosh platform. I have compiled a small list of the most useful applications that I cannot see myself go without.
My Pearl Goby just died ☹
Here is a picture of him:
I think he died due to malnutrition. When I bought him he was very thin - almost like here. But it was my fault that he died. See I had him since 10 September and thus I could have kept him longer in QT until he was nice and fat again. But instead I thought he would have more food in the main tank thus get better faster. I guess I was wrong ☹
If you like Apple Machintosh computers like I do, and you have recently purchased a MacBook Pro you'd also be frustrated at the increased delay (20-30 seconds) when trying to sleep the notebook.
My G4 usually went to bed in 2 seconds. Since I very regularly need to take my notebook with me to meetings and clients, I use sleep intensively.
The reason for the increased delay is NOT due to the Intel architecture. It has everything to do with a feature called SafeSleep. The idea is basically to save a snapshot of RAM just before sleeping, but instead of turning off the notebook it goes to sleep. If you turn it back on before the battery goes out, it will resume from volatile memory. Otherwise, if it dies due to battery running out then when turning it back on, it will resume from the saved RAM image - just like hibernate in the Windows world.
In my scenario, my notebook is never suspended for longer than a couple of hours. This means the likelyhood that the battery will run out whilst suspended is very close to 0.
So I did the following to reset the system to the behaviour prior to MacBook Pro's and whichever vesion of Mac OS X that introduced this feature:
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0 sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage # Optional but reclaims disk space
My Feather Star lost the center piece of it’s body - I assume this is where the mouth is located. This means it will die shortly since it cannot feed anymore. Lesson learnt - if the literature says an animal is IMPOSSIBLE to keep alive, trust them. You are not more special than the guy next door. Stop buying these animals then hopefully they will be left on the reefs where they belong.
A picture from when I just got him
At the end of September I started a new tank - a predator fish only tank. The idea originally was to use the QT tank for this purpose once I had a fully stocked main reef aquarium, but then a couple of things happened that made this unpractical.
Firstly, the QT tank is too small for the fish I actually wanted - the Volitans Lionfish. That fish can grow up to 38cm, and need a turning area of the same width. The QT tank is only about 32cm wide...
Secondly, if I convert the QT tank and one of my fish become ill? And what will happen to the new members of the FOWLR tank since they cannot be quarantined?
Thirdly, and this one I only realised after I purchased the new tank - once you start adding nice predator fish to the tank you want to add MORE ☺
So I got a 400l tank, started it with a deep crushed coral substrate (I want to add some Garden Eels later), and took some of my equipment from the QT tank (such as my Tunze 9015 skimmer). Therefore the tank’s costs itself was limited to the cost of the tank, substrate, salt mix water and new lights. Oh yeah I also added another fluidised sand bed filter for biological filtration.
This was the tank whilst setting up:
The tank to the left is the QT tank.
However as all things aquarium related goes, soon this was not enough. The water temperature fluctuated between 25C (my heater’s set temperature) to 30C in the late afternoon. This was mostly contributed by the 4 x 54W T5 tubes I have in the canopy. So I had to get another chiller (sigh). At least now the tank is nice and stable.
The only thing I would consider adding rather soon is another topup unit. This really makes life MUCH simpler.
In order to stock the tank, I took a bit of a different route. I used a smallish phosBan reactor from the QT tank that had some special ammonia and nitrite reducing media in and placed that in the predator tank. The idea was to move as much of the biological filtration from established tanks as possible. I also added 10kg of LR from my main display tank’s sump. So I now had 10kg of LR and a small fluidised filter for biofiltration. The large fluidised sand bed filter had also been installed and is running, however since it is new it would not immediately add to the biological filtration.
I made 450l of RO/DI water (took 2 days) at SG of 1.022. I mixed the salt in containers for a couple of hours before pouring in to the tank. Once all the water was in the tank I let it run for 72 hours as is.
After this time I purchased my first Volitans Lionfish and Zebra eel. The idea was that since the tank was empty, there was no need to quarantine the fish. If they did show an outbreak of some kind of disease, I could just as well treat in that tank or move them to QT.
I carefully measured Ammonia, Nitrite and Nitrates during the first two weeks. Free Ammonia never went higher than 0.03mg/L NH3 - 10 times lower than the level considered dangerous. Nitrite went up to 0.16mg/L then down to 0 again. Nitrates peaked at 0.443mg/L then went down to 0 again. So the filtration seems to be adequate.
In the mean time I purchased a Leaf Scorpionfish and two frogfish, which went in to the sump of the QT tank. The Leaf Scorpionfish I have since moved to the main predator tank, and the frogfish yesterday. Unfortunately one of the frogfish died this morning. It was the one I purchased with a belly the size of a large marble. I thought it ate something big at the LFS, since it also refused to east whilst in QT.
I thought maybe once in the big tank it would eat better - since it was not diseased or anything. I was wrong. 20 hours after moving to the main tank he (she) died.
The other frogfish seems to be doing just fine.
I also added some 10 Turbo snails to help with the algae that is always inevitable.
3 days ago the tank looked like this:
Here is the Volitans Lionfish:
The Leaf Scorpionfish:
Zebra Eel (sorry for the bad picture quality):
Frogfish (the one still alive)
Great. Today my solenoid decided to break. So my Ca reactor had been running for more than 10 hours with no CO2 supply... This caused the whole tank to be cloudy.
I am wondering whether this is the cause for the sudden cyno outbreak on the LR?
I took the easy way out - I have decided publishing my MacJournal diary entries to a new blog site would be the best to keep it neatly organised by topic.
Check it out!
I have switched over to ReefCon Pro since the last entry, and have been using it ever since. However since I started using the new Beta version because of the new tank log feature, I have stopped writing in here. So 1 October I ran into a small dilemma. The software expired. Even though I purchased a license, the BETA expired and there is no indication the publisher is going to release a new version anytime soon.
The dilemma now is whether I should fall back to using ReefCon 1.6 (and loose out on all my tank log entries), start using Maquarium (for Mac OS X), stop using a software package alltogether or carry on writing in here.
Using a software tool allows me to draw graphs of my water parameters. But then, in the past 4 months I only ever looked at the graphs once... It is also more structured so it is easy to gain an overview of your tank’s status. But then, it does not really tell you more than that. I am wondering whether it might not make sense to carry on using this diary. At least then I can explain some things and motivate others whereas I could not in the other software.
Obviously I have lots of info in there that is missing from here. So this entry will double as catch-up.
An oldish pic (30 July 2006):
I have changed the aquascaping a while ago to support better reef structures when adding new coral.
After aquascaping (26 August 2006):
A bit more recently (9 September 2006):
