Took a look at douyin and its interesting that it kept my interest about equally long as tiktok, and ended up with basically the same set of themes.

cursed hype cycle intersection

basilisk seeming not a bad outcome right about now

Asian pear blossoming

hm, I guess I've probably faciliated more people checking ssh private keys into git than almost anyone else, come to think of it

https://etckeeper.branchable.com/

well this fridge failure is a good opportunity to test my old cube fridge on AC power.

I used to run it on propane, which feels decidedly last century by now.

Compressor is hot to the touch. Like almost burny hot.

This does not bode well for my chest #freezer. Struggling to cool to 10C.

Apparently no exposed coils to clean (checked the bottom too) so probably the compressor or coolant.

If you have some broccoli seedlings maturing inside today is the day to set them free.

Broccoli is one of our biggest producers thanks to Anna’s careful planning and our new caterpillar protection method which blocks that seemingly harmless moth from making you nourish her young at the expense of beautiful broccoli plants.

The post Time to plant broccoli first appeared on WetKnee Books.

solved a trolly problem this morning

til #gitAnnex is used in some way involving trams and buses in Poland

Front Street art studios, Dayton OH

Here is my most recent video:

Here is my most recent poem:  

They’re Flippin’ Another Home

Way back, in the height of our nation,
Before the houses were flipped
in this gentrification,
Before presidents who golfed on their vacations
While the poor sunk and the "woke" got impatient

We were sitting on our front porches
Laughing at lost passing Porsche's
We were a diverse community
Now we're watching them plead immunity
As they "flip" half of the hood
Shaking brown hands over the fence to kinda make good.

Now most of the originals that I meet
At the corner of the street
Look worn and seem to be growing old fast
With a glaze in their eyes trying to see past

I know that certain gaze
Trying to remember the old days
When our own family was the oddity
But our house was a home, not a commodity. 

Here are some recent paintings:

Whipped up some home made #sourdough French toast

Checked off todo list today: "add low water level float switch to the spring collection tank"

Replaced with: "redo pump control box mess with DIN rail and decent wire management"

Do you have friends jumping on the chicken bandwagon this spring? Then I hope you’ll point them toward my Getting Started With Your Working Chicken, entirely free in ebook form and dirt cheap even as a (brand new!) paperback. I think of this title as a bit like the bare-basics books at pet stores intended for folks impulse buying a new type of animal. The goal is to bring new chicken keepers up to speed in half an hour so they don’t get overwhelmed by the deluge of options right off the bat.

Want to help me out by spreading the word about the paperback release (and possibly win a copy)? You can enter our rafflecopter giveaway here.

Meanwhile, we’ve been hard at work coming up with a new ebook in the Permaculture Chicken series. Building a DIY Chicken Waterer will launch next month, and you can preorder the ebook for a buck off. (There will be a paperback too, but I’m still working on it. As you can likely tell, the font size needs increased. Stay tuned for a preorder announcement soon!)

And, finally, the third chicken book on my plate this year is an update to Thrifty Chicken Breeds. Want to share your wisdom and win a free copy of the ebook? Just comment below with your favorite breed(s), a photo (which can be emailed to anna@kitenet.net if it’s hard to leave in the comment), and a short writeup of why you prefer the one(s) you prefer. If I use your info, you’ll get a free copy of the revised ebook once it’s ready to go.

(Oh, and in case you’re curious what Mark’s up to this photo, it has nothing to do with chickens. He’s adding a clear roof to his newest porch planter box to prevent roof runoff from swamping our crops. I’m hoping this will also make for an even lower-blight situation for tomatoes this summer. Stay tuned to find out if it works!)

Update: Building a DIY Chicken Waterer is now live in print and available to preorder as an ebook!

The post New chicken books first appeared on WetKnee Books.

just browsing https://www.ycombinator.com/companies for no reason

 The first video in this playlist is the oldest one.  The last one is the one I made today.  So watch all the videos if you can in the list.

link:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLG7UExVGnQgeE41xe7-4bRXLpK0fx5iHu

In case you are new to "playlists" or Youtube, a playlist is when someone puts together a collection of videos for people to watch all in a row.  You can skip ahead if you see the list of videos on the side if one isn't as interesting to you.

Actually since I am on the subject of explaining things about Youtube, since a lot of my family doesn't seem to know much about it, let me also encourage you, if you have a google account, to subscribe to my channel.  Subscribing can help me someday monetize and can help my channel grow, and doesn't cost any money.  All you have to do is click where is says subscribe near my channel name.  

I've built myself up to 652 subscribers so far.  If I reach 1,000 I could possibly someday make some money off of my videos, which comes from ads, just for your information.  

Thanks for watching and reading!

before they flagged it away, they retitled it from "YC Is Asking for a Bailout" to "Ugent: Sign the petition now"

( HN has a pervasive habit of retitleing anything that is at all critical of them or any established company to something anodyne. They have various specious justifications and policies about it.)

so YC posted a petition to get a goverment bailout for SVB, and the #HackerNews post for it attracted so many people telling them to go jump in a lake that YC flagged it right off their own website

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35114009

turns out monkeys use stone tools and sometimes flake off stone knives in the process

but unlike humans they don't have any use for the knives

guess that tracks

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/982264

Flowering quince

#NASA listing 3 libraries I built on top of their copilot library as related projects is the best thing that happened to me today.

https://github.com/Copilot-Language/copilot#related-projects

(Best thing yesterday was even more surprising but I can't discuss it.)

retrocomputing has come for my own product https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/the_slink_and_a_half_boxed_set/

@ncommander #debian

Today I stumbled upon this youtube video which takes a retrocomputing look at a product I was involved in creating in 1999. It was fascinating looking back at it, and I realized I've never written down how this boxed set of Debian "slink and a half", an unofficial Debian release, came to be.

As best I can remember, the CD in that box was Debian 2.1 ("slink") with the linux kernel updated from 2.0 to 2.2. Specifically, it used VA Linux Systems's patched version of the kernel, which supported their hardware better, but also 2.2 generally supported a lot of hardware much better than 2.0. There were some other small modifications that got rolled back into Debian 2.2.

I mostly remember updating the installer to support that kernel, and building CD images. Probably over the course of a few weeks. This was the first time I worked on the (old) Debian installer, and the first time I built a Debian CD. I also edited the O'Rielly book that was included in the boxed set.

It was wild when pallet loads of these boxed sets showed up. I think they sold for $19.95 at Fry's, although VA Linux Systems also gave lots of them away at conferences.

Watching the video of the installation, I was struck again and again by pain points, which the video does a good job of highlighting. It was a guided tour of everything about Debian that I wanted to fix in 1999. At each pain point I remembered how we fixed it, often years later, after considerable effort.

I remembered how the old installer (the boot-floppies) was mostly moribund with only a couple people able and willing to work on it at all. (The video is right to compare its partitioning with old Linux installers from the early 90's because it was a relic from that era!) I remembered designing a new Debian installer that was more modular so more people could get invested in maintaining smaller pieces of it. It was yes, a second system, and developed too slowly, but was intended to withstand the test of time. It mostly has, since it's used to this day.

I remembered how partitioning got automated in new Debian installer, by a new "partman" program being contributed by someone I'd never heard of before, obsoleting some previous attempts we'd made (yay modularity).

I remembered how I started the os-prober project, which lets the Debian installer add other OS's that are co-installed on the machine to the boot menu. And how that got picked up even outside of Debian, by eg Red Hat.

I remembered working on tasksel soon after that project was started, and all the difficult decisions about what tasks to offer and what software it should install.

I remembered how the horrible stream of questions from package after package was to deal with, and how I implemented debconf, which tidied that up, integrated it into the installer's UI, made it automatable, and let novices avoid seeing configuration that was intended for experts. And I remembered writing dpkg-reconfigure, so that those configuration choices could be revisited later.

It's quite possible I would not have done most of that if VA Linux Systems had not tasked me with making this CD. The thing about releasing something imperfect into the world is you start to feel a responsibility to improve it...

The main critique in the video specific to this boxed set and not to any other Debian release of this era is that this was a single CD, while 2 CDs were needed for all of Debian at the time. And many people had only dialup internet, so would be stuck very slowly downloading any other software they needed. And likewise those free forever upgrades the box promised.

Oh the irony: After starting many of those projects, I left VA Linux Systems and the lands of fast internet, and spent 4 years on dialup. Most of that stuff was developed on dialup, though I did have about a year with better internet at the end to put the finishing touches in the new installer that shipped in Debian 3.1.

Yes, the dialup apt-gets were excruciatingly slow. But the upgrades were in fact, free forever.

PS: The video's description includes "it would take many years of effort (primarily from Ubuntu) that would help smooth out many of the rough end of this product". All these years later, I do continue to enjoy people involved in Ubuntu downplaying the extent that it was a reskin of my Debian installer shipped on a CD a few months before Debian could get around to shipping it. Like they say, history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.

PPS: While researching this blog post, I found an even more obscure, and broken, Debian CD was produced by VA Linux in November 1999. Distributed for free at Comdex by the thousands, this CD lacked the Packages file that is necessary for apt-get to use it. I don't know if any versions of that CD still exist. If you find one, email me and I'll send some instructions I wrote up in 1999 to work around the problem.

can anyone recommend me a float switch that has stood the test of time for you?

Looking for a tethered or vertical one. My first tethered one failed after less than 2 years.

Also would appreciate suggestions for a thru-wall side mount one that still works when angled down at a 30 degree angle. My current one is too finely balanced at that angle for my liking.

#plumbing

Another advantage to using a planter box is how easy it is to cover delicate plants in hopes of surviving a dip down to 20 degrees.

I made a rectangle the size we needed and attached just one layer of Agribon fabric. The literature says only use one layer for optimum results.

We are hoping this new method in the planter box will help the Snow Peas make it to our table a little faster than last year.

The post Agribon fabric protection first appeared on WetKnee Books.

Elon 1 day ago

imagine paying umpty-billion to be a literal laughingstock

salad of fresh spring peas with feta and a little vinagrette

I probably moaned once or twice

resizing one of my #linode's disks so I can drop it back to a plan that costs half as much

enjoy your 20% of that Akamai, I'm sure the pennies of disk space will be worth the ill will

tea time... homemade #sourdough with blackcurrant jam

got sunburnt today. summer is here

somehow my #podcast downloader got spammed with an entire podcast I never subscribed to. Downloaded 37 gigabytes of podcast episodes.

It appears to have been a temporary replacement of a podcast's rss feed with another. None of the feeds I'm subscribed to contain those episodes anymore.

This is a new one to me! Accident or malicous I wonder?

I like to direct-seed leaf lettuce under a row-cover-coated caterpillar tunnel in early February, a holdover from gardening half a zone warmer than where we are now. Most years, those early lettuce either don’t sprout or sprout and perish. This year is the outlier that makes me keep jumping the gun. Lettuce planted on Valentine’s Day is well established now at the end of the month.

Meanwhile, the more dependable way to get a jumpstart on the garden year in our climate is by starting seedlings inside. I usually go for all-in-one flats, but Mark bought me a bunch of smaller containers that fit into a flat and I’m getting a lot out of the mix-and-match approach. This way, I can start a flat of veggies that germinate at different rates, leaving the slow germinaters (like parsley) behind under cover while pulling out the fast germinaters (like broccoli). Then I can start more seedlings to fill in gaps atop that all-important heat pad.

I’ve even gotten into starting peas inside, but those I do in fifty-section flats because the seedlings have to be set out as soon as the tops are up. Here, I’m planting the first flat into Mark’s porch raised bed.

Seedlings are fun, but what about goodies we can eat right now? Most years are so cold up here that, even under cover, leafy greens perish before spring. This winter, in contrast was mild by our standards. A few kale plants are hanging on under the row covers while uncovered arugula is already growing and putting up flower heads. Looks like we’re having sauteed arugula for dinner!

What’s going on in your garden?

The post Jumping the gun on the garden year first appeared on WetKnee Books.

(Tap tap. Oh, this devblog is still on?)

View branches are a neat corner of git-annex that have remained kind of obscure since I implemented them back in 2014. Not many improvements have been made from back then until recently.

Today I implemented a longstanding todo, unifying view branches with adjusted branches. The result is that you can enter an adjusted branch from a view branch, or a view branch from an adjusted branch, and get what you would probably expect.

For example, to sort your annexed files into directories by author and year, and have all annexed files in the view be unlocked:

git-annex adjust --unlock
git-annex view author=* year=*

Earlier this month, I addressed probably the main missing feature of view branches, by making git-annex sync work in a view branch, updating it with metadata and files pulled in from remotes. Although it there is room to make it ?faster still.

Also, view branches can be made that include files that lack metadata. Such files are put in a directory named "_". And can be moved out of there to other directories to set their metadata. For example:

git-annex view author?=*

Views combine nicely with graphical file managers, and Yann Büchau has recently built an integration with Thunar that supports most of these new features and can be seen in action in this screencast.

This work was sponsored by Lawrence Brogan, Erik Bjäreholt, and unqueued on Patreon

Walked this morning.  Saw one of my favorite people, hadn't seen since October.

 No videos today...  Would just be puddles and droplets.

My Caldecott winner is coming right along.  Writing children's literature is a special skill, if it's going to be something a child might like. Trying to pair down all of the excessive language.  

You'll see!

 I am feeling like I have outgrown the channel name thru schizoaffective eyes - regarding my youtube channel name...  But just made this blog...  So keeping the blog name if fine.  But thinking of rebranding myself back to my actual name, Maggie Hess on youtube at least.

 Been a long time since I blogged.  Have been vlogging.  Going to start importing my videos here, but probably just new ones dumped in every week or some such thing.

Life has been good.  I'll post writing here too.  Here is one of the many videos I created today.  Make sure to subscribe to my channel if you want to follow along.

-Maggie

forsythia is in bloom. spring peepers.

this is probably gonna mean early pear blooms murdered by a late frost for the 3rd year in a row, right?

daffodils, shorts, no socks, sweating

wait, it's stll *February*?!

working on a water tank that takes 5 hours to fill and 4 hours to drain is putting long compile times in perspective

Looking over the Libreplanet schedule. I am not attending. I was at the past 6 in-person ones. It was a really good conference for a time.

The two for comparison. Not much different at all really but the plastic one has 1 thread that is smaller

I'm I guess halfway decent at plumbing by now, but had a close call today. The water tank has a 2 inch threaded outlet, which I needed to reduce to 1/2 inch. I found a reducing fitting at the hardware store.

When I started to screw it on, it cross threaded. Tried again and again, and it kept cross threading severely.

I was scared I might damage the (plastic) threads on the water tank, so stopped before it was more than a few threads in.

Compared it with the plug that came with the tank and the threads were actually different.

So I reinstalled the plug and installed a new 1/2 inch bulkhead fitting instead. Seems it will be ok.

The reducing fitting I bought was supposed to be NPT. I have used NPT reducing fittings on identical water tank outlets before.

wtf? (anything involving #plumbing and thread standards is a wtf really)

Got the 525 gallon water tank installed today, including digging out its pad.

It's filling now from the spring for its first fill test and flushing out. Wonder if it will be full by morning?

One of our neighbors has a sawmill and he’s been making his own boards for his first chicken coop.

We offered him money for this truckload of firewood but he was more interested in getting rid of these end slabs that didn’t quite make a proper board.

I like to cut the pieces to fit our stove and hack up the thinner pieces for kindling.

The post Foraging for firewood first appeared on WetKnee Books.

learned a skill, hauled a tank, read a paper, fixed a bug, prototyped an aquaduct, celebrated (w pizza)

The purpose of this water tank will be to catch water from my seasonal spring. It replaces a ~150 gallon spring house that has a slow leak I've not been able to quite stop.

Especially in weather where #solar pump is not running, being able to catch an extra hundred days or so of water will be very handy.

When the spring is trickling, even catching water overnight
will be a nice capacity boost.

This will increase my house's water storage capacity to 2500 gallons. #offgrid

successful haul!

(only just... truck lost all oil pressure on the way home)

fired up my pickup for only the third time since covid and somehow it still seems to run

gonna either haul in a 525 gallon water tank tomorrow, or break down on the highway and walk home lol

#starlink pulling 130 Mbps through the smoke plume from its installation brush fire