This simple hack cut my mowing time to about a third of what it used to be. I’m not sure of the exact cost because most of the parts were scrounged. Even the mower was a $30 garage sale special. In total, I probably spent less than $50 for the whole project, including the mower.

Lazy Lawn Mowing from Doug Smith on Vimeo. (Also available on Youtube.)

I should mention that this is a rewrite of an article I posted on my old Web site several years ago. This updated version contains revised information, ideas for improvement, a spiffy new cross-section illustration, and a video. Yet another version appeared in the O’Reilly book Smart Home Hacks by Gordon Meyer (which is a book I would still recommend even if I didn’t have articles in it.)

Before we get started, I must give this warning: What I am describing is how I have mowed my lawn and not a suggestion of how to mow yours. This could be very dangerous. I am not responsible if you injure, mame, or kill your pets, family, or neighbors or damage property. (Just ask my wife about her former strawberry patch.) This article is for your entertainment purposes only. With that out of the way, here’s my story.

Thinking About Not Mowing

My lawn is nearly an acre in size. The back yard, which is the largest part of that, is mostly one large rectangle with almost no trees. It used to take me nearly four hours to mow, and that was required twice a week in the spring. That gave me plenty of time to think about how to get out of mowing it!

I realized that two slightly overlapping circles would cover the bulk of our back yard. It was then a simple matter to modify a self-propelled mower to cut these circles by winding a tether cable on a spool. While the circles were being mowed, I used a second push mower to trim the corners.

Collecting and Assembling the Parts

My mower has a 21-inch cutting width and I just happened to have an old wire spool with a circumference of 19 inches. That gives a perfect overlap as the mower makes each pass around the circle.

I went to the hardware store and bought two short steel pipes that fit perfectly one inside the other. I attached the narrower pipe so it stuck out of the bottom of the spool. The larger pipe acts as a mount for the whole assembly and is set in the ground with a little concrete. The concrete is sunk low enough to be covered with a layer of dirt and grass. The top of the pipe protrudes only enough to be level with the ground surface. It is barely visible and not high enough to be a tripping danger.

Note the notch in the ground pipe. The spool pipe has a bolt threaded into it that fits in the notch to keep the whole spool from spinning

(I later learned the hard way that it is good to put a cap on the pipe so it doesn’t fill with dirt. It is also good for that cap to be a bright color so the pipe can be found in the Spring without a metal detector.)

The cable also came from my local hardware store. It is made of stranded steel wire with a plastic coating. I used one longer piece along with a shorter extension to make it easy to mow my two different sized circles. Cable clamps were used to make loops on the ends of each section.

Clips with spring latches make it easy to quickly attach the cable sections together and to the mower. I attached large eyelets to both sides of my mower so I could change the direction of mowing. That helps keep the grass from getting matted down in one direction.

Let’s Mow!

I had to defeat the mower’s self-propelled safety lever to make it run without me holding the handle. A simple clip made from an old piece of metal did the job.

As you can imagine, safety is a big issue here. I only ran this with supervision, in my fenced yard, and only after first inspecting the yard for toys and objects that could get hit. No children or pets were allowed in the area while the mower was running.

That’s about it. I put the spool in one end of the lawn, let it run in circles until all of the cable was wound up, then moved it to the other end of the lawn. It usually finished just before I completed the parts outside of the circles.

Getting to Know the Neighbors

I experimented for a few weekends before getting everything working just right. The first time I fully let it run was a holiday weekend and our neighbors had guests visiting.

The mower was making circles and I was happily mowing the corners by hand. I was keeping an eye on the circle mower but hadn’t noticed what was going on behind me. A small crowed had gathered along my fence to watch the show. I looked up just in time to see everyone standing there with one lady running off yelling “I’m going to get my camera!”

We were new to the neighborhood and my mower antics served as a great ice-breaker for getting to know several of our new neighbors.

Improvement Ideas

I’ve thought of a few improvement ideas but have no reason to test them since I now use robot mowers. They might be of interest to others, though:

• It should be possible to connect a safety mechanism to the engine kill switch. This could be activated by a bumper if anything gets in the mower’s path. It could also activate if the cable goes slack, which would be an indication that the mower got away (recall that strawberry patch). The bumper could also be constructed to touch the spool when the cable is fully wound and stop the mower so the wheels don’t leave mark in the lawn from spinning in one place.
• There are some ways a larger oval could be mowed. One possibility is a system where the spool or a ratchet mechanism slides back and forth along a straight cable anchored at each end. The cable could be tied to trees or tall stakes with the spool hanging below. A stop on each end of the cable would not allow the mower to get close enough to hit the trees or stakes. This should mow straight on the sides and wind up half a turn on each end.

Well, there you have it. This was an incredibly fun project, and one that my friends and neighbors still talk about. For those of you interested in robot mowers, check out my Robo Mower Wiki site I created for robot mower enthusiasts to share information.

Actually, it’s more about being a garden geek.

We have a rather large garden; probably around 2,400 square feet. We also have fruit trees, berries, and grape vines. Everything is totally organic so we get a little geeky when it comes to methods of growing the best produce and in learning to understand and manage our local pests and plant diseases. The payoff is some really great tasting and healthy food.

I like to joke that the purpose of our garden is to grow salsa. But just one kind of tomato and one kind of chile (pepper) won’t do for a garden geek. This year we have nine varieties of chiles (planted in order from hot to mild, of course) and ten varieties of tomatoes. We have lots of other veggies and herbs too.

We sort of follow a champion-challenger method in choosing what to plant. The champions are the favorite varieties we plant each year. The challengers are the new varieties vying for position in next year’s champion list.

So obviously we would be eager to try a new variety of tomato.

Well, I happened across a blog post by Neal Campel of GeekBrief.tv where he told a story about very tasty heirloom tomatoes at a local farm market that cost $8.

Neal was kind enough to share some seeds he saved, which grew wonderfully. We picked the first fruit today. It was huge with amazing flavor, which brings me to lunch.

One tomato slice was enough to cover our extra large slices of homemade bread. I had mine with homemade hummus, roasted cubanelle sweet chile, onion, basil, lettuce, salt, pepper, and a little mayonnaise. Since I already mentioned GeekBrief.tv and Cali keeps talking about bacon on the show, I must add that my wife had the same but added plenty of bacon. It was a wonderful summer sandwich and one of the best tasting tomatoes we’ve ever grown.

I think we have a new tomato champion on the list that we will always refer to as “Neal’s Eight Dollar Tomato”.

It connected to my blog effortlessly and allowed me to easily add categories, tags, and a photo.

Great job WordPress team!

I only have a couple minor gripes that I hope will be addressed later:

1. It would be easier to type if the application supported landscape mode and the wider keyboard that provides.

2. It’s too bad WordPress does not extract and store the GPS information along with the other metadata it grabs from photos.

I would love to hear comments from others who have tried it. How has it worked for you?

Fortunately, WordPress 2.5 has a way for plugins to add additional color schemes. So I whipped up a quick plugin to add the style necessary to mark those visited links in a different color. You can grab a copy from my downloads page for admin color scheme: Fresh Plus Visited.

I believe they are still taking registrations, so you may not be too late to sign up if you haven’t already.

Every spring I recall an old Looney Tunes or Merrie Melodies cartoon from my childhood. The cartoon starts out looking like a nature documentary as the camera pans through the forest. Then the narrator says, “It’s spring … even the porcupines are in love.” Two porcupines repeatedly pucker up, kiss, then jump back in pain with an “ow ow ow ow!” You gotta love that classic Looney Tunes humor.

So here’s a little spring quiz for everyone. What is the name of that episode and is it available anywhere?

My kids are probably tired of hearing my wife and I quote it every time someone mentions spring. I’d love to show the cartoon to them but I can’t find it. It would stand to reason that it may be a Pepé Le Pew story, but I’m not sure. We own the first three Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD box sets and it’s not on any of those.

I know, purists might only celebrate at 1:59 and 26 seconds, but we saved it for dinner anyway.

Then the spam flood came that most of us have seen by now. These spam comments are harder to detect because they seem to be written by a human and customized to somewhat fit the post content. You can often tell only by the URL they promote and the awkward wording of the comment that shows they don’t truly grasp the topic. More of them are slipping through the trusty spam-fighting superheroes: Akismet, Bad Behavior, and Spam Karma.

A little research showed that my URLs were ending up on lists of dofollow blogs on sites made just for the purpose of gaming Google’s Pagerank. (I won’t link to them and give them publicity.) The lists are all neatly sorted into groups with the highest Pagerank sites at the top.

And then today, I found comments with a referrer from a site that sells a script to help you find blogs without nofollow. I was tempted to buy it to see how it worked so I could block it, but I just couldn’t stand the idea of giving them any money. (It’s dofollowblogs.net, which I also will not link to.) What really irks me is that they refer to this as white-hat link building to make it sound palatable to the average Joe! (Oh joy, here’s another one: http://www.commenthut.com/)

I still believe that using nofollow fails to stop spam, however, I am now convinced that:

1. Turning off nofollow can be a spammer magnet.
2. Some sites are promoting dofollow to increase the number of sites available to abuse.
3. Some sites are promoting displaying a dofollow graphic on your site only to make it easier for them to find you.
4. Not using nofollow may effect Google search results ranking. It may be coincidence, but I had a site that by every statistic should have ranked #1 for certain keywords, yet it remained at the #3 position for many months. The site leapt past the competition to #1 within a month of turning nofollow back on. I can’t prove a correlation, but further study is certainly warranted.

Well, I’m still not ready to give up. So what can we do about? Here are a few possibilities:

1. When you run across sites like this, report to Google through their webmaster tools.
2. WordPress users should flag these comments as spam in Akismet. If we all work together, we can make a dent in the sources.
3. Use a dofollow plugin with advanced features, like the one I mentioned above.
4. It may be possible to block some of these with some .htaccess rules looking for referrers including “nofollow” or “dofollow”. Be careful, though, as it’s easy to block legitimate traffic or yourself with this, e.g., I had to quit blocking those so Google searches for this post would get through.
5. Don’t display the little graphics announcing that you dofollow unless you rename the files so they’re not so easy to find with a Google search.

Anyone have any more ideas or know anything about the scripts being used to abuse our blogs?

So here are just a few of the smaller OS X Leopard features that stood out to me. I don’t claim they are undiscovered new things. In fact, some are well-documented. But they are nice touches that I’ve found particularly useful.

1. The whole print dialog is rearranged to be much cleaner and to bring the most commonly used options to the front. Click the disclose triangle next the name of the printer and you get a very useful print preview that updates live as you make changes.
2. Help has a new search feature right there in the help menu. In some applications, help also contains an animated arrow and highlighting that points out specific menu items. Some help content is even enhanced with online tutorials that walk you through a topic step by step.
3. Quick Look works in Mail. Now instead of ignoring the Word and Excel documents people send me, I can click the file icon and tap the space bar to see what’s inside. Out in the Finder, Cover Flow and Quick Look work nicely to examine folder full of photos and even fonts.
4. Notes in Mail can contain to-do items. It’s great for grouping a series of things to do that go together. Each item also shows up in the Mail to-do list.

5. I’ve always missed Apple Data Detectors since switching to OS X. It functions a little different in Leopard and it only works in Mail, but it seems to do a very good job. For example, I received an e-mail telling about the date of an event in one line and listing the time range in another. Data detection was smart enough when I hovered over the time to put it together with the date and offer to add it as an iCal event. It will also figure out dates in phrases like “do you want to have lunch next Thursday?”

   Mailing address are recognized too, and can be mapped or added to Address Book.

   Let’s hope Apple enables this feature system-wide in the future and makes it easily extensible like the old OS 9 version. There are a few nuggets in the developer tools that look promising.

6. Web clipping to make dashboard widgets is more useful than I expected. It’s really smart about identifying an HTML div area but doesn’t limit you to that. This instantly brings simple widget creation to the masses. This was a quick hit with my kids.
7. The new bright yellow animated highlighting of text when finding within a document certainly addresses one of my daily needs. It’s so easy to see what you’ve found instead of it being buried in the text with a dim highlight. Apple advertises this as a Safari feature but it also works in Text Edit, Preview and other places. Strangely, it does not seem to work in Mail.
8. PDF manipulation in Preview allows basic moving, adding, and deleting of pages and combining of documents. You can also annotate PDFs with notes. Both of those features previously required purchasing a copy of Adobe Acrobat or other software.
9. Parental controls is much more flexible and I love being able to manage it on our multiple family computers from my laptop. The parental controls in Tiger ignored Web content within frames. Leopard not only notices frames, but also javascript and flash insertions of content from other sites, such as widgets and ads.
10. Leopard seems to have cured the crashing on our family iMac that was apparently related to the video drivers.
11. Spotlight search is much more flexible. I like being able to easily use AND and OR conditions with search terms. When searching in the Finder, be sure to look at the options under “Other” for the type of data being searched. There are a huge number of useful additions that can be added to the menu with the check of a box. And being able to do calculations and dictionary lookups in the spotlight search field is a nice little extra too.
12. Background scrolling has proved to be incredibly useful already. I often want to scroll a window in the background because I’m comparing the contents with my current window. Being able to hover and scroll the background window completely eliminates the problem of activating a window that covers the content you are trying to see.
13. Search in Mail is actually fast now.
14. I use a lot of photos that I have stored in iPhoto, so having the iLife browser integrated into the file open dialog is a real time-saver.
15. Leopard now notices what network I’m on and sets my default printer appropriately for work and home. That’s a nice touch.
16. The Keychain show password feature now defaults to the “Allow” button so I can authenticate and hit enter. I think this will be more secure for people because they will bypass using “Always Allow” when it isn’t necessary.

As is to be expected, all is not perfect in Leopard. I have also have a short list of little niggles that bug me. But I’ll save those for another post.