Author: Lisa

OwnTracks WebSockets MQTT SSL Error

A few weeks ago, we stopped getting location updates from OwnTracks on our phones. Checking the status, I see an error indicating that the connection failed because my certificate does not have a SAN. Which … true, it does not. I knew some consortium agreed that all certs should have SAN values (and RFCs had been updated to reflect this new direction). Evidently version 2.2.2 of OwnTracks has added SAN verification. I reissued the certificate from my CA and added a SAN. I had to put the cert on both my MQTT websockets reverse proxy and the mosquitto server; but, once both were using the new cert, OwnTracks connected and cleared through the queued updates.

Meatless Bacon Cheeseburger Pizza

Scott always wants a bacon cheeseburger — and, occasionally, I make him one. But that’s more of a “out at a restaurant” meal … and we’ve not been out at restaurants for a long time. A few weeks ago, I got the Impossible meatless ‘ground beef’ stuff to make meatball subs. It’s a little expensive to make a couple of burgers (8$ a package, and I’d use three or four packs to make a handful of burgers), but I immediately thought of bacon cheese burger pizza.

I mixed up my usual pizza crust — about four cups of white flour, a third of a cup of vital wheat gluten, yeast, water, and about a tablespoon of olive oil. Crisped up a few rashers of the MorningStar Farms fake bacon. Then I sautéed the Impossible ‘ground beef’ in the pan

I made a smokey maple barbecue sauce, sprinkled the crumbles, then added cheese.

Baked for about 15 minutes at 550F and then topped with the fake bacon.

The Avenger, Part 2

Our Avenger has been a bummer — one of the two cartridges didn’t work out of the box. It doesn’t advance after a shot. You can disassemble the cartridge and tension the spring. Unfortunately, the gun loses about 500 psi overnight! There are a few other problems too — front rail wobbles even when tightened, the barrel shroud slid forward about 1/8″ and has oil leaking from it. We’ll be getting a replacement early next week.

 

The Avenger

Our new gun arrived today! Ordered a 25 caliber Air Venturi Avenger on Monday. It had a bit of a side trip heading east, but a really helpful fellow at FedEx seems to have gotten us sorted and our package resumed its westward journey.

We added a brick of putty to the stock since it’s incredibly front-heavy otherwise. One of the two cartridges seems to have a spring issue — it doesn’t advance unless you remove and re-insert the cartridge. Luckily, it comes with two … so we’ve got a functional one. It’s assembled, pumped up, and we got fourteen shots in before it was too dark. We’ll finish getting it sited in tomorrow.

Bigger Pumpkin Hat

Anya asked me to make her a bigger pumpkin hat. When she was less than a year old, I made her a hat with a green stem and leaf and ribbed orange hat body to go along with her Halloween costume. Which meant I had to figure out a way to increase the hat size but retain the pumpkin ribbing. The hat is made with double crochet stitches (x in the chart below) and the ribs are front-post double crochet stitches (| in the chart below). The last row is Anya head-sized, so I am repeating that row until the hat is large enough for her. Then I’ll probably finish the hat with a row or two where the pipebars become front-post half-double crochet stitches and the x’s become back-post half-double crochet stitches.

I’m just getting to the ribbed section on the hat — but it’s much more Anya-head-sized that the one I made her in 2013!

On Secession, Part 2

Friends have been discussing a Cosmo article that views secession talk from the perspective of a liberal Southerner. I, for about a decade, was a liberal Southern. A vegetarian in a barbecue capital. I can’t say the article changed my mind. It seems to presume there’s a *good* solution. The existence of a good solution is often over-simplification or an idealization of the situation. I laud the people in Texas protecting others who simply want to use their rights. I feel awful for the people who live in a state that doesn’t care about the environment, loathes redistribution of wealth, think we’re wasting our money educating citizens. If the options were “everybody stop doing that” or “keep doing it but some states secede”, I would be on board with ending the secession talk. But that’s not reality. As it stands, the whole country suffers because of a minority’s opinion about what’s right and wrong. The choices are “stick together and keep doing it” and “split up; some of us, based on where we live, can stop doing it”.

 
It’s easy enough to say “step one is to reorganize yourselves based on political beliefs”. Doesn’t work well in practice. There aren’t a lot of people who can just move. They need to find a job, a place to live, pay to have their stuff moved (or buy new stuff). They may need to find childcare. Or a medical specialist. There are minors who don’t gt a choice in where they live regardless of their personal beliefs.
 
The only reason I see to stop talking about secession is that I don’t see it as logistically possible. I remember being intrigued by Lesotho — it’s a country completely surrounded by South Africa. How exactly does a country end up in the middle of a whole other country?! I knew the history behind the Vatican City State … kind of accepted that as normal because (1) I’d encountered it at an early enough age that I didn’t really question it (2) you could literally walk from Italy into Vatican City — no customs, no passports — so it didn’t seem like a different country, and (3) it’s so small {and this is before “online” was a place to see maps, thus ‘zoom’ didn’t exist} that you only saw it if you were looking at a street map of Rome. Lesotho? It’s large enough to see on a map of Africa. Secession seems like it would produce a *lot* of Lesotho’s — Memphis, Austin, Asheville, New Orleans. I want to focus on a viable solution to eliminate the oversized influence low population-density states have in the Federal government. Undo the gerrymandering that exacerbates this over-representation.

On Secession

I’ve seen talk of secession since SCOTUS reused to hear Texas v Pennsylvania et al. I’ve also heard liberals wish them a fond fairwell. Unlike the Civil War era were the nascent industrialized North had financial need for the agricultural production of the South … it’s a different financial picture today. Unfortunately, the net balance of payments to/from the federal government gets cited as a depiction of this economic reality. Deficit spending means *most* states get back more than they pay in — there were less than a dozen states with a negative balance of payment, and the federal outlay in Virginia alone exceeded the total excess intake from those states. But, yeah, I expect many liberal states would be economically viable. As would many conservative states. Liberal states that aren’t economically viable should be OK too — accepting redistribution of wealth is a tenant of liberalism. It’s the poorer conservative states that have a problem.
 
Of course the secessionists haven’t thought it through; they are throwing a tantrum. As a thought experiment, though, I tried to think through the creation of Trumptopia. I cannot conceptualize a fully functioning, unified nation. A common enemy is a great way to unite people. Get rid of that common enemy (so-called socialists), and I expect they’ll discover a lot of disagreement. More prosperous states won’t want to subsidize poorer states (a resentment I remember from German unification — glad to have the country reunited, but the economic hit for former West Germans really sucked). And, generalization aside, there are urban, liberal outposts like Memphis, Austin, etc. that won’t be keen on getting dragged along with the rest of the state. Unless secessionists are looking to go the route of Greek city-states, which brings its own set of challenges.
 
Even if Trumptopia managed to form somewhere, I expect Republicans have a libertarian/bear problem … letting industry self-regulate sounds good while we have a lot of federal regulation because we’re free to imagine industries as honest, pretend there’s enough competition for consumer choice to force acceptable behavior, and assume consumers are sufficiently well informed in their choices. Same with individual freedom — we’re making an a priori assumption that everyone else’s decision will line up with our rationalizations (see: above bears).

Zombie Monster Invasion

Anya went almost eight years without developing any imaginary monster fears — right after she entered preschool, she thought there were generic monsters that might be lurking. But I invited them over for tea and cake, we’d chat with them, and she was OK with our new monster friends. She read The Last Kids on Earth series six or more months ago. Tonight, about twenty minutes after he went upstairs to bed, asked to come down and say goodnight again. She was worried that monsters were going to fly zombies into the house. She sat with me, and I explained that the best thing about imaginary fears is that you can come up with imaginary solutions. And eagles are great protection from zombies. And there are a lot of eagles in our area — big golden guys, even bigger bald eagles. Lots of eagles. And they all eat zombies (and probably monsters). She’d forgotten to take the compost out, so she took out the bowl. And realized she forgot to bring the chickens into their coop (which was really odd since she went outside with food and water specifically to bring the chickens in … and she did fill up their food and water. But left the chickens in the tractor). She apologized to the chickens, snuggled them all to warm them up, and came back into the house. I sang her a goodnight song and we chatted about the eagles perched on the top of her bed — a golden girl she named Goldie, a bald eagle she named Balder, a golden guy that didn’t get named yet, and Balder’s mate was over at the lake getting a fish for them (we told them to eat over the fish tank so they didn’t get fish guts all over Anya or her bed). Goldie had an egg that she gave to Anya to keep warm. There were a few zombies, and Goldie ate them. All of the eagles have kevlar jackets that prevent zombie bites, so there won’t be any zombie eagles. Then the egg hatched. Anya put fifty kevlar jackets on the baby eagle (and herself) to protect them  from zombies. And Goldie got some small fish from the lake to feed the hatchling. So Anya’s feeding her baby eagle while three grown eagles watch over them. Hopefully that’s sorted the zombies.