Beginnings of Niade
We got started back in late summer 2019 with what is now essentially a public-facing workbook and journal, concerning in the first instance a freshwater aquarium that was going to have live plants. Once upon a time hosted at egads.uk and subsequently rehosted on niade.com, the project has mostly stayed on topic, with occasional digressions into vaguely related sideshows like programming and electronic publishing.
From time to time, when I think I have learned something of sufficiently general relevance, I have a go at a more formalised guidebook-style write-up. The general idea was that these pages might help people who arrived through a one-off Google search, long before anyone anticipated AI-generated summaries scraped from the web.
Niade has turned out to be mostly an introspective record. If you find aspects of it interesting, informative, entertaining or useful, that is a bonus win, and you are welcome to comment or participate if you like.
Original concept for the Fireplace Aquarium
The goal is to do something nice with this victorian-era fireplace seen on the left of this photo of the dining room. The big brick wall on the right is the back of the inglenook fireplace from the main reception room. The rounded-looking thing between the two is the back of a bread oven from maybe 1800? Rooks would drop twigs down the chimney of the fireplace in a vain attempt to build a nest in the chimney. We installed a bird excluder that kept the rooks and twigs out but for a long time had the empty fireplace with a tangle of fallen twigs and debris at the bottom. We used to have fish in our previous place and I thought it might be nice to put an aquarium inside the space of the fireplace, to living things up and with the lighting from the aquarium also brighten up an otherwise dark corner.
Subsequent evolution and the second aquarium
After a while, I thought it would be nice to add some shrimp to the Fireplace Aquarium. Turns out fish eat shrimp! Finding a new home for the shrimp led to the creation of the Shrimphaus. Probably we’re good at drawing the line at not having more than two aquariums…