Latest news with #Kelby
The Citizen
5 days ago
- Health
- The Citizen
Family rallies to save lightning survivor after life-threatening complications
Kelby Parker has survived the unimaginable – but now, nearly a decade after being struck by lightning, he's back in a life-or-death battle. And this time, his family is asking for help. Just before Christmas in 2016, Kelby was hit by lightning. Against the odds, he pulled through. But in the years since, his health has remained fragile. 'We thought we were through the worst,' said his wife, Fiona. 'But earlier this year, Kelby started showing signs of what we thought was a prostate issue. We saw doctors, followed their advice, and he even had surgery. But he wasn't getting better, he was getting weaker.' It wasn't until early July that the true cause was discovered: a ruptured abscess in his colon that had caused severe sepsis throughout his body. 'On July 4, he was grey, in agony, and fading fast,' Fiona said. 'By July 7, a gastroenterologist admitted him straight into the ICU for emergency, life-saving surgery.' The operation was harrowing. Surgeons had to flush out his entire system and remove a section of his bowels. Kelby now has a colostomy bag – but more importantly, he has another chance at life. He remains in the ICU at Life Wilgeheuwel Hospital, where his condition is being closely monitored. The family is immensely grateful for their medical cover, which allowed him to receive private treatment, but it only covered R85 000, a figure exhausted within the first 24 hours of his ICU stay. Now, they are reaching out for help – not because they've done nothing, but because they've done everything they can, and it's still not enough. 'No one expects to end up here. We've tried to do it all right, we had a medical plan, we followed the advice, and still, the costs are overwhelming. We're not asking for pity. Just support – from one human being to another,' said Fiona. Their daughter recently got engaged, and her one wish is for her father to walk her down the aisle. 'We still need him. He's still fighting. Any contribution, no matter how small, will help keep him with us,' she said. To support the family, visit their BackaBuddy campaign: At Caxton, we employ humans to generate daily fresh news, not AI intervention. Happy reading!
WIRED
17-06-2025
- WIRED
Grow Anything You Want in Gardyn's Indoor Hydroponic Garden—AI Guarantees It Will Work
I'm in the midst of putting together a buying guide of indoor vertical gardening systems, and the Gardyn—the 30-plant Home 4.0, to be exact—was the first tester to arrive at my house. I had it unboxed and set up within a couple of hours, lights on and water pump running. I'm already a pro! I thought. Sure enough, within a couple of weeks, all of Gardyn's proprietary seed-filled yCubes had sprouted, and a couple of weeks after that, I was harvesting bowlfuls of herbs and salad greens. Even though from setup to harvest the Gardyn required the use of about five brain cells, I was quite pleased with myself, despite having long ago given up gardening outdoors due to deer, rabbits, and my own incompetence with anything other than starts from the big-box store. What I failed to understand, but would come to grasp with subsequent systems, was that indoor hydroponic gardening is just as hard in some ways as outdoor gardening. I had no way of knowing this, however, because Gardyn's pricey add-on app and AI gardening assistant, 'Kelby,' had been doing all the real work via a network of sensors and live-view cameras (two on the larger Home model, one on the smaller Studio). Easy Living My new friend Kelby had been gathering data in order to set its own watering times, schedule its 60 LED lights, and send me the occasional customized task that never took longer than 10 minutes. And this customized maintenance isn't just helpful for convenience, as mold, bacteria, or roots clogging up the plumbing are extremely common in hydroponic gardening. Kelby told me when to add the needed nutrients (included) and how much to add, when and how to attend to the plants' roots, and even when to harvest. Photograph: Kat Merck There's also remote monitoring, of course, and a vacation mode that keeps the plants in a sort of stasis. Most of the work on my end was simply me admiring my plants, and admire them I did. The first time I ever saw a Gardyn was a couple of years ago, in a Parade of Homes show house, adjacent to a floor-to-ceiling wine cabinet. 'Wow, what is THAT?! I want one!' announced nearly every person who shuffled by in their paper booties. Even in a $2 million spec house, the lit-up display of lush herbs, flowers, and vegetables was a showstopper. When I began testing other systems, I was feeling quite big for my britches. At this point, I had successfully grown sunflowers, lemon balm, and even an entire kohlrabi. I've got this! Within five minutes of opening the other systems' boxes and finding pH test strips and vials, manual-dial timers, and multiple bags of supplements, however, I realized I did not have this. In fact, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Gardyn had only made me think I knew what I was doing. And, according to founder FX Rouxel (pronounced F-X, like the initials), that's Gardyn's entire raison d'être. Engineered Growth You might expect the founder of a hydroponic gardening system to have an agricultural background (perhaps even a certain kind of agriculture), but Rouxel is a tech guy. Though he did once work for the French version of the Environmental Protection Agency, his most recent pre-Gardyn gig was at French IT company Capgemini, deploying cloud, automation, and AI technologies. Although he is also a parent, cook, and Ironman athlete, his passion lies in using technology to lower the entry barrier to growing your own food. 'With other systems, they're basically a pump on a timer," Rouxel told me during a recent interview. 'You need to know what you're doing. We looked at, 'Can we use AI to actually solve this problem?' Unlike our competitors, we have a big chunk of the company that is just engineers." They make sure the Gardyn app is constantly adjusting through data collected via the system's two cameras and sensors that track water usage, humidity, temperature, and plant growth. If the system identifies an issue, it will send the user a specific task through the app to fix it. Note that I did find the cameras to be slightly glitchy during the seven weeks I've been using the Gardyn, requiring periodic resets of the system to keep them both online. It didn't seem to affect any of my tasks or plant stats, but I found it irritating nonetheless. Though if I weren't using the Kelby feature, it wouldn't matter, as the cameras are essentially useless otherwise.
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Beyond Paradise detectives face devilish mystery in exclusive season 3 finale clip
Beyond Paradise will delight viewers with its most intense mystery yet, as Kris Marshall's Humphrey Goodman and the team at Shipton Abbott are faced with a strange case when a woman goes missing. In an exclusive clip from the show's season 3 finale, Kelby (Dylan Llewellyn) is left exasperated by a man called Josh Woods who he says will be "the death of" him before the man himself appears, running into the officer and trying desperately get the team's help. His partner Lucy has gone missing but not before she left him an ominous voice message that appears to indicate something bad has happened to her. As Kelby tries to chase Josh around the table it's Humphrey who forces the pair to stop and play nice so that they can discuss the case. Josh reveals he tried to call Lucy but her phone is switched off and she didn't turn up at work at the local hospital, and he shares his concern that her disappearance is linked to the Devil's Hump — a local folktale and legend along the Devon coast. Josh wonders whether the Devil's Hump could be a part of the mystery, saying that Lucy "always cycles over it". Kelby and Humphrey question whether they should be believing in a folk tale, but Margo (Felicity Montagu) says: 'It's said to be put there by the devil himself, if you have bad thoughts when you go over it..." with Josh finishing the quote by saying: "The devil can take your soul." It teases a compelling mystery with a supernatural twist to end the series, with the BBC sharing in their summary of the episode that the Devil's Hump could "hold a vital clue" to the case. Marshall previously told Yahoo UK and other publications that it is his favourite case of the show thus far. "I think the puzzle in episode 6, and the solving of the puzzle, is probably the most incredible —and incredibly intricate— puzzle I've ever witnessed in TV," the actor said. "It's insane, it's so clever. I don't know how they wrote it, it's brilliant." Marshall added that what he enjoys best about the BBC crime drama is how innovative it is when it comes to its cases: "I think what's good about Beyond Paradise is that it has become more representative of this environment, and the sort of rural wild beauty of the place. "I think that's great because it makes you realise there's only a certain amount of ways you can murder someone on a TV series but there are myriad ways that you can rustle sheep or steal art, or commit arson in a show. We've got all those kinds of crimes going on." The Beyond Paradise season 3 finale airs at 8pm on BBC One and BBC iPlayer.
Yahoo
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Sterling K. Brown reveals the touching reason he stopped going by his middle name
Sterling K. Brown uses his name as a tribute to his late grandfather. The 49-year-old actor went by his middle name of Kelby until he was in his late teens, but explained that because by that point, he had been without his grandfather for six years, he adopted the moniker he uses now to remember him by. Speaking on 'The Kelly Clarkson Show', he said: "I went by my middle name, I went by Kelby til i was 16 years old. My dad's Sterling Brown Jr. My grandfather Sterling Brown Sr. I'm Sterling Kelby Brown. "I wanted my own name, and it felt like Sterling was like an old man's name. "But because he passed away when I was 10, by the time I turned 16 and I hadn't heard his name for five-and-a-half years, I was like, I kind of just want to hear that name again, so I asked people to call me Sterling." The 'Behind These Hazel Eyes' hitmaker was left visibly moved by his revelation and was almost on the verge of tears. She said: "Okay, okay, that was so sweet and beautiful." Sterling has become a household name in recent years thanks to roles in 'This Is Us' and 'American Crime Story: The People v. O. J. Simpson' but in the early days of his career, he managed to avoid having to get another job by being "so frugal-minded" with the way he lived, including eating as cheaply as possible. His manager of 25 years, Jennifer Wiley-Moxley, told 'There are so many careers built on offers that Sterling had and wasn't available to do. 'Sterling just never had to work doing anything else. He was one of the rare actors who never had to have a side hustle because he was willing to live so frugal-minded that he rented a room in a Harlem townhouse, didn't have his own bathroom, couldn't afford a gym membership. "He would get a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts and eat them in front of me at my desk like, 'Well, these are my calories for the day!' He was very fun and very quirky in that way. That grit of 'I'll do whatever I have to do to get it.''
