Silicon Valley Redneck

Aches and pains, wounds and sprains, and a spaceborne plague or two

Oy... I mentioned sore appendages?

In tugging on various heavy objects yesterday, I definitely tugged too hard, or at a bad angle, or both.  Messed up my left elbow pretty good.

I don't think anything is seriously damaged, but the arm will be on light duty for a while.  In normal times, I might (probably after a few days) take this sort of thing to a doctor... who'd send me home with a prescription for naproxen and a suggestion that I not do any left-handed heavy lifting for the next couple of weeks.

Well, I've got a decent supply of OTC naproxen, so dosing myself at more than the OTC rate but less than prescription levels may be the best approach right now.  Controlling inflammation seems like a good idea.

Gotta get some stuff accomplished today, though; tomorrow through Thursday are supposed to be somewhat rainy.  More mowing today (not with the strimmer!), and indoors stuff the following days.  Maybe even some product-development activity!

 

(Filk reference in title.)

OK, so that does work.

Finally got the tractor rigged for mowing (loader and tiller off; belly mower on), and took 'er for a spin on a fine dry afternoon.

Moderately overgrown vegetation is no problem... but some of the really impressive stuff down in the mud near the pond is dense enough to stall the engine if attacked at mowing speed and with the mower deck set at anything like lawn height.  Setting the cutting height near maximum and going slow gets through.

I ventured somewhat beyond the bunny slopes, but decided that some of the more challenging areas Out Back should be left for a while: if I let them grow to mature-hayfield height, the hay guy will deal with them and haul away the cuttings, after which maintaining nice paths through those areas should be a lot easier.

There are still some areas out front that call for the tractor, in terms of having excessively tall vegetation, and some that call for the strimmer, in terms of being too close to ditches and such (also trees and whatnot).  Then there are the areas that seem best attacked with the ZTR mower.  And... well, there are some areas that may call for yet another piece of equipment, possibly a self-propelled walk-behind mower.  We shall see.

Maybe I'll take the ZTR out after dinner.  Probably not, though; I acquired some very sore appendages wrestling with the equipment.  For now: rest, hydration, and naproxen.

Addendum:  Perhaps, though, I should have gone for a tow-behind finish mower instead of the mid-mount type?  Less maneuverable, true, but that's why I also have the ZTR - to fill in the maneuverability gap.  Would have needed more learning time, but... well, there are tradeoffs everywhere.

Saturday night coyotes

I don't know where the coyotes went for the winter, but they were back last night and raising quite a ruckus.

Maybe we'll put the trail camera out and try to get a look at them.

Another day... this was Saturday, wasn't it?

So easy to lose track.

Anyway: I got some more planting done, in the annuals patch: about as much ground-level work as I wanted to put in, besides getting a fair amount of sun exposure.

The afternoon mail brought a RasPi 4 kit, so I snapped the pieces together and installed the image on the flash card.  Well, tried to.  Twice.  Wouldn't verify...?  Then I fired up gparted, which said there was no partition table.  Huh.  So, create a partition table, populate it with an ext4 filesystem, format it, and all seems well.  Try rpi-imager again, and it seems to work.  By which time, it's time to fix dinner.

After dinner: set about rigging the tractor for mowing.  Shove the belly mower under it, because I'm not happy about driving over things.  (Shoving the mower sideways is a lot more work this time than it was when I dragged the thing out from under the tractor.  Funny how that works.)  Discover that the aft linkages aren't going to lower far enough while the tiller is in place.  Foo: gonna have to park the tiller, outdoors, before installing the mower.  Meanwhile....

Well, as long as I'm in the barn, might as well park the loader, since I probably don't really want that installed while mowing.  Consult the man page for ld(1), er, I mean the instruction booklet for the LA435 front loader.  The parking and dismounting procedure is supposed to be straightforward, but I'm not quite understanding what the instructions are telling me.  Back to the house and look for a vid.  Oh, look: I'd already seen this one, but I think that was before I had the hardware in front of me, so it didn't stick.  Anyway, things make sense now... but it's starting to get dark out there.  Guess I'll deal with it in the morning.  Plenty of time before the grass gets dry enough to mow, anyway.  Park loader, park and secure tiller, drive back into barn, attach mower: how long can that take?

Maybe I'll try booting up that RasPi yet this evening.  It's meant to become the interim entertainment-center computer, until I get something more suitable configured.

Update:  Looks like the RasPi is a suboptimal choice for home entertainment: neither Prime Video nor Netflix plays nice with any browser supported under Raspbian.  There may be workarounds, but maybe it'd be easier just to find some fanless mini-PC with an amd64-architecture processor and an HDMI output.

The hardware does seem up to the task of playing 1080P video files, but if the streaming services won't talk to it, that's not all that helpful.

And, actually: I'm not so sure the hardware is entirely up to the task.  Video playback, yes.  Talking to the network, maybe not.  Not without some way to connect a real WiFi antenna, at any rate.  And!  The WiFi manager dingus in Raspbian is not terribly helpful in terms of displaying status... doesn't even seem capable of indicating whether the network is broken or you gave the wrong password.  Speaking of which, it'll happily show your saved network passwords to anyone with physical access to the display and mouse.  Might need a little work, given that the target hardware, viz, a RasPi, is an obvious thing to use for a guest computer for use by untrusted visitors.

Now, here's a wild stat.

Seen here, via link from this bit of tin-foilery:

According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, roughly 800,000 children are reported missing each year in the United States -- that's roughly 2,000 per day.

Er.  That's... roughly ¼ of 1% of the entire population going missing, every year?  Can't be right.

I suspect that the number really means: 800,000 missing-child reports are called in every year.  And that most of those turn out to be "Oliver decided to play pirates with Roger after school and didn't tell anyone."  I'll hazard a guess that a lot of kids are reported missing more'n once, on account of having a penchant for running off and/or having the sort of mothers who are quick to call 911, so some of those 800K reports will be the same kids, over and over.

Makes a fine scare headline, though.  Or a basis for some really top-shelf tin-foil-hattery.

Russian rednecks or English comedians?

New from Garage 54, Where Are You?:

Using 600 bottle caps as tire studs

Or, why not collect those little plastic bottle-tops and screw them upside down to your tires?  This will give the sensation... of driving... on little plastic bottle-tops, turned upside down and screwed to your tires.

Old from Flanders and Swann:

Design for Living

Google stupids up its presentation again

Google Finance just pulled another fine stunt.

The boxes on the main page, showing individual ticker symbols / indices and their maybe-current values?

Used to be actual links that could be opened in new tabs.

Now they're non-links that are Javascript-clickable, having the effect of a regular click on a regular link, i.e., opening the destination page in the current window/tab.  No more user-selectable actions!  All must view the data in the approved manner!

Also, the "World Markets" tab seems to have gotten even sparser in its coverage of overseas market indices.

A lot of other stuff seems to have changed and/or disappeared, too.

"If it ain't broke, fix it till it is."

Got a little stuff done

Planted some things in the perennials patch: a baby fig tree, various vines (including a hardy kiwi, which I think is a wingless fruit with hairy feathers or something), and a small flock of asparageese, or whatever one calls more than one asparagus.

Did various minor chores.

Cleared out the really big pile of aged cardboard.  (Don't ask.)

Planting took longer than expected; aside from anything else, I discovered that the fluorescent string I'd bought for marking off regions frays like crazy when cut, and doesn't tie worth anything.  So, off in search of a cigarette lighter: none to be found (I thought there were some here from last spring, but maybe not, and the box with a bunch of them last seen in Palo Alto may have stayed in Palo Alto).  Rummaging through the boxes of lab stuff did turn up a couple of little-bitty butane torches and some spare butane, so that solves the synthetic-fiber-string problem for the moment.

Tomorrow, probably putting some seeds in the ground in the perennials patch, and also some mowing. Got to run the ZTR around some close spots, and also stow the tiller (which I don't expect to use again for a while) and the loader (which will have to live in the barn, where there's a solid, level floor; I'll be using it again soon), put the belly mower back on the tractor, and see how that does for mowing large, not-too-steep areas.

Good thing I slacked off yesterday

I did various indoors stuff, but never quite got motivated enough to get out in the cool gray weather and do any planting.

Well, it seems to have gotten a bit frosty overnight.  So, just as well I didn't plant out the seedlings.

I guess I could be putting seeds in the ground, but perhaps the already-sprouted stuff should wait a few more days.

What's wrong with this picture?

Seen on Amazon:

I, er, don't think that's quite right.

Well, I did order a set anyway.  Come Saturday, I'll see if they're really like that or if this is a case of botched photofakery.

Update:  The ones I received are marked correctly.

The things you don't know you don't know

Looking ahead to planting time, and, hey, this calls for plant labels.

I've got various sorts.  For the trees, I have aluminum tags that I figure on stamping (not set up for engraving at this point) with the tree's identity.  For annuals, I have plastic stick-in-the-ground labels.  For perennials other than trees, metal stick-in-the-ground things to which labels may be affixed, or they can be written upon directly, the label zone having been painted white at the factory.

So, um.  For the non-tree ones... what to use for writing on them?  I assume I don't want to use a Sharpie for the perennials, because the dye will fade with sun exposure, right?  But it'd be OK for the annuals, maybe?

Do a bit of looking around on the Internet.  Normal Sharpie ink is expected to last maybe 3-4 months outdoors, which is rather less than a growing season.  There's something called a Sharpie Extreme, which is promoted as better for outdoors with sun exposure... but the reviews are not good.  At all.  Like, fades even faster than regular Sharpie ink.

So I guess I'll be using paint makers.  Time to order a several-pack of black fine-point paint markers.  In the meantime, I have at least a couple of maybe-suitable markers around here.

How do I e-commerce?

Hey, look!  Amazon Pantry is back!

Check it out; look at the things that crop up on high-level summary/suggestion-type pages.

Click on a few of them.  Currently Unavailable.  Every dagnab one that I click on.

And I don't see a way to filter by availability, a problem shared by Kroger's site.

Guys?  This shouldn't be difficult.  Digi-Key has had filters for "In Stock" and "Normally Stocking" since forever.  And filtering out the ones that aren't available now and won't be available in the foreseeable future before presenting the teaser page is just common sense, innit?

Busy day yesterday

Conditions were dry enough, and the wind held off for a while in the early morning, so...

Early morning: spray persistent herbicide around the barn, house, and assorted stonework.  Make sure to get the areas around the heat-pump external units; I'm reliably informed that having tall vegetation grow up around those is Bad News.  Then (as the wind is picking up, alas) spray insecticide on some bushes where wasps and such seem to be congregating.

Later: pull up a row of wooden posts in the area that's designated as the perennials patch - an extension of the area where I'd already planted toe blueberry bushes.  Then, while I'm at it, remove the wires and staples from the posts that are around one corner of the house, where once they supported blackberry vines or similar.  This, as always, takes longer than it should.

Afternoon: fire up the tractor, extend the perennials patch, and have another go at the victory garden.  Tippy the Tractor gets scary on uneven terrain - even on the bunny slopes - but I manage to get through the process without a serious panic attack, never mind a rollover*.  Just running right over the former raised beds, repeatedly, with the tiller does indeed turn out to be the way to flatten them - that and redistributing the loosened soil with a shovel (or with the loader, but on this scale the shovel was easier).

Today is supposed to be rainy, pretty much straight through.  Tomorrow afternoon looks like planting time!

Oh, and lessons for next time.  When preparing to turn an area of old lawn/hayfield/etc. into a planting zone, maybe start a week or so early, mark the corners with snow stakes or something, mow it, and spray it with non-persistent herbicide.

Also, I should probably have a drag harrow to pull across the area just after tilling.

* Going over even a modest-sized lump, on either tractor or mower, has me thinking: why doesn't this thing have a full roll cage and 5-point safety harness?  Not that anything I normally drive has such features, but somehow I feel much less secure on a tractor or mower than in a car.

Sometimes jargon means things

Headline:

China Created a Fail-Safe System to Track Contagions. It Failed.

A fail-safe system... how's that work?  I'm curious enough to skim the article.

I see nothing that in any way resembles a fail-safe system.

Fail-safe systems are a thing.  I deal with them from time to time.  Usually, once the product is in the hands of the customer, I have to add an override feature, because things that are designed to be intrinsically safe with regard to specified failure modes tend to be mighty inconvenient to install and troubleshoot.

What China had appears to be a sort of mandatory reporting and tracking system.  A fail-safe system for such a thing would have to involve automatically detecting missing inputs... and good luck with that. How do you detect that a case of a reportable disease hasn't been reported?  I mean, apart from having spies in all the hospitals... and making sure the spies don't have the same incentives as the doctors.  Or, perhaps, tracing usage of a drug that's uniquely used to treat an as-yet-undiscovered disease?

Awright, this has got to be wrong

Seen here, via this:

In Padua, the autoimmune medicine Tocilizumab has proven effective, but can only be used once it is established that no other viruses or bacteria are present in the patients’ bodies, he said.

Er... somehow, I think this has been mistranslated via journalistic discomprehension.

Where are you going to find a patient with no bacteria present in his body?  (Maybe the intended meaning was viral or bacterial pathogens?)