Author: Lisa

Wood Chips

Some of the Metroparks have a free wood chip pile. I’m sure they bring in a big, industrial tree chipper machine and a dump truck to clear out downed trees throughout the park. The chips are then dumped into a large pile and free for anyone who wants to haul them. We discovered this last year and started making a wonderful path through our woods — a path that did an awesome job of replacing the usual muck road we travel during maple season. We’ve been watching the location for a new pile of wood chips this year, and Anya spotted the pile a few days ago. It’s a bit of rush to collect them — local landscaping companies show up with large trailers and clear the place out.

We got a lot of wood chips the last few days. The first day, I shoveled and Scott ferried. There was a lot of time lost to driving, so he put together a rear hitch mount for one of our carts. We can now tow both carts simultaneously. The second day, I shoveled while he used a pitch fork — a far superior tool for moving wood chips — and then hung out with Anya while he ferried the carts. Today, he pitch-forked and ferried while I consolidated the pile and did a few other tasks (turned compost, disassembled the temporary hop greenhouse). We’re up to 38 cartloads of wood chips! We’ll probably move some more tomorrow, but it’ll all be soggy from the rain tonight.

Decoy Garden

We’ve had a lot of trouble with deer eating our veggies — corn, beans, lettuce. All very good deer munchies. We had a little luck playing talk radio all night long, but I think they get used to it pretty quickly. Then eat all your not-quite-ready-to-pick sweet corn. This year, we put in a decoy garden full of deer’s fav foods. There are brassicas, beets, radishes, oats, and rye grains. Scott tilled up a big area where our garden used to be, I raked it out to level the soil, and then I spread a bunch of seeds. We did it in three sections — the north-east quarter was finished first. The south-east quarter and west strip were done second, and the strip in the middle was done last. The first section is coming in quite vigorously. The second section is just starting to come in, and the final strip is pretty much dirt. We’ve been lucky to have a few heavier rains since the seeds were spread, so everything is watered well. This should be really cool. My next adventure is to replace some of the lawn with a wildflower seed mix so we’ve got plenty of bee chow available.

Excel – Converting Unix Timestamp to Human Readable Date(time)

You can use the formula =(B2/86400)+DATE(1970,1,1) to convert a unix epoch time to a human readable date (or date time). In my case, I have the unix timestamp in microseconds so I’ve got to divide by 86400000. The value you get is a not-so-meaningful float … but that’s actually a date.

Select a date format to display the value as a date

Or chose a custom format and use something like “m/d/yyyy hh:mm” to display a date and time.

Hop Greenhouse Redux

So we’re supposed to get five or six inches of snow tonight, and tomorrow night will get down to 28 degrees or so … which means the hop greenhouse is back! It’s sturdier this time so it’ll handle the snow load. There are two logs on each side, both with a long 2×6 board run across. Shorter 2×4’s were laid across the long boards to provide support for the roof. There are additional boards diagonal from the “roof” to the ground. The whole thing is covered with greenhouse plastic, and 4×4’s (and a few large logs) weigh down the edges.

I’ve also got plastic bags over the blueberries, raspberries, elderberries, baby pawpaws, garlic, and baby black walnuts. There’s a tarp over the part of the deer garden that’s actually sprouted. Hopefully everything fairs well. The hazelnuts aren’t protected — they’ve gotten quite large, but they should have plenty of energy in the root system. The kale isn’t protected either, but it survived the winter already … so that should be fine.

Trout Dough Ball Recipe

Scott’s going fishing, and Anya and I made dough balls for trout bait. Mix 1 cup all purpose flour, 1/3 cup corn meal, and 1-2T garlic powder (I used 1.5T of garlic powder, and it’s really garlicy).

Add enough water to make a firm but slightly sticky dough.

Pinch a bit of dough and roll between your palms to form into blueberry sized balls. Some of ours got a little big!


Drop in boiling water for 1-2 minutes.


Remove and place on napkin/towel (or, in my case, a perforated silicone baking mat) to dry. Cool for an hour then freeze overnight.

Blocking Device Internet Access

We block Internet access for a lot of our smart devices. All of our control is done through the local server; and, short of updating firmware, the devices have no need to be chatting with the Internet. Unfortunately, our DSL modem/router does not have any sort of parental control, blocking, or filtering features. Fortunately, ISC DHCPD allows you to define per-host options. Setting the router to the device’s IP (0.0.0.0 may work as well) allows us to have devices that can communicate with anything on their subnet without allowing access out to other subnets or the Internet.

Viewing and recording packets using tshark

This time, I’m writing this down so I don’t have to keep looking it up. To display some packet info to the screen while writing a network capture to a file, include the -P option (older versions of tshark used -S)

2021-04-18 13:58:58 [lisa@server ~]# tshark -f "udp port 123" -w /tmp/ntpd.cap -P
Running as user "root" and group "root". This could be dangerous.
Capturing on 'enp0s25'
1 0.000000000 10.x.x.x → x.x.x.18 NTP 90 NTP Version 4, client
2 3.898916081 10.x.x.x → x.x.x.199 NTP 90 NTP Version 4, client
3 7.898948128 10.x.x.x → x.x.x.20 NTP 90 NTP Version 4, client
4 7.928749596 x.x.x.20 → 10.x.x.x NTP 90 NTP Version 4, server
5 9.898958577 10.x.x.x → x.x.x.76 NTP 90 NTP Version 4, client
6 9.949450324 x.x.x.76 → 10.x.x.x NTP 90 NTP Version 4, server
7 10.898981132 10.x.x.x → x.x.x.185 NTP 90 NTP Version 4, client
8 11.009163093 x.x.x.185 → 10.x.x.x NTP 90 NTP Version 4, server

55 Days of Grilling: April 16

We’d made ribs a few weeks ago using my usual pressure cooking-followed by high temp cooking to caramelize the sauce approach. While that works well in an oven — where the falling-apart-tender ribs sit safely in a baking dish — it’s not great for grilling. Scott wondered how cooking some ribs just on the grill would work out. I spent some time researching how people make bbq ribs on gas or electric grills and came up with a cooking approach that sounded reasonable — low temp, long cook, and wrapped in aluminum so they don’t dry out.

After washing the ribs and removing the silver skin, I rubbed them with a blend of salt, paprika, chipotle pepper, black pepper, cayenne pepper, thyme, and garlic. I put the grill’s temperature sensor into a thick, meaty section and wrapped them in aluminum foil. The grill was heated to 300° F. The ribs cooked for about 90 minutes — the internal temperature was 180° F, which was in the range the cooking technique indicated. I took them inside and carefully unwrapped the foil.

I cut the rack in half because we had two different sauces we wanted to try. The larger half was liberally brushed with Guy Fieri Apple BBQ sauce, and the smaller half was brushed with the Brown Sugar version from the same company. The apple one smelled like some hand soap that had come with the house — not like actual apple, but like apple fragrance oil. I read and re-read the ingredients trying to figure out what the smell was, but didn’t find any artificial flavors listed.

I cranked the grill (set to 600° F, but never got over 550° F) and cooked the ribs for five minutes.

I then brushed more sauce over the ribs, flipped them, and cooked them for five more minutes.

I flipped them and allowed them to cook for another minute because the sauce on the side facing up hadn’t caramelized.

I brought the ribs inside and let them rest for a bit while everyone got ready for dinner.

Scott sliced the ribs, and dinner was ready. The BBQ sauce wasn’t great — the sauces were quite vinegar-y too. The ribs weren’t falling apart like the double-cooked ones we made a few weeks ago, but it could have used a little more time on the grill to get more tender and fully render the fat. But it was a nice meal (and an interesting experiment).

LARPing the Trial

I wish live action role playing were permissible in jury trials. As we’ve been watching the Derek Chauvin trial, the defense presented body worn camera video from a 2019 traffic stop that involved George Floyd. The retired police officer testified that Mr. Floyd was not following instruction and such … then they rolled the video. Dude goes up to the car and yells something like ‘show me your hands’. Mr. Floyd raised his hands in the air. The officer then repeatedly yelled for him to both “unbuckle your seat belt” and “show me your hands” … two contradictory commands. The officer then ordered Mr. Floyd’s hands on the dash and the officer on the other side of the car ordered (him? the driver?) to put their hands on their head. The officer then shoves Mr. Floyd’s hands to the dash. This doesn’t seem to be someone refusing to follow instructions — this seems like someone trying to follow instructions while two different people shout two different directions.

What’s that got to do with LARP’ing? Well — imagine if you were on the jury and jurors were paired up. Each sat in a chair six feet apart (which is more distance than provided in a car) while two people with guns drawn march up behind them and start yelling orders to them. How well do you think you’d do at following the instructions from the guy closest to you?

Does it now seem more reasonable to say things like “I don’t want to get shot!”? And, since it’s a demonstration, you know the guns aren’t loaded. I’ve had a gun waved in my face exactly twice in my life — once when I took too long to pull over on a traffic stop. The second when I was visiting a friend at work and someone decided to rob the joint. In both cases, it was incredibly frightening. The cops, in the second instance, were somewhat bemused by the fact I couldn’t tell them a single thing about the suspect but could have spent an hour detailing the gun.