Plurrrr

Sun 29 Nov 2020

Molting time

In the afternoon I discovered that the Chromatopelma cyaneopubescens I keep had just molted. It was resting next to its shed exoskeleton.

Chromatopelma cyaneopubescens resting next to its shed exoskeleton
Chromatopelma cyaneopubescens resting next to its shed exoskeleton.

It was already very lethargic for weeks and had been refusing food. Three days earlier I had moistened part of the substrate and placed a single drop on the hammock it webbed. Possibly this triggered the molt?

If you're interested in my current set up for this species I took some photos the 13th of November, 2020.

Also three days earlier I removed the molt of the Psalmopoeus irminia I keep from its enclosure. The tarantula had ejected it from the cork tube it hides in. I am not sure when it has exactly shed this exoskeleton. I also haven't seen the animal itself yet, because it is still hiding in the burrow it dug underneath the vertical cork tube.

Yes, I use Nix

I’ve been on the Nix train for about half a year now, and I have to say that it has completely changed how I look at my development setup. Before Nix, setting up my computer on the Mac was always a mess of Homebrew packages that I would install, being dependent on whatever’s available in the repository, and being forced to have everything installed globally. There’s also not a good way to keep track of what I have installed, there’s potential for conflicting packages, it’s just not great.

Nix changed all of that. I could now version check my environment, I could try out a package in a subshell before installing it globally, I can even easily pin a package to a specific version using Overlays. Installing things is very fast in general because Nix has great caching, which it can download and install from without any compilation or linking.

Source: Yes, I use Nix, an article by Bouke van der Bijl.