The third Avenger arrived today — pumped it up and we’ll see if this one manages to hold air!
Avenger, Part 4
Air Venturi Avenger Tuning Tests
We tested various regulator pressure and hammer spring combinations to see where we get the best accuracy. Using 19.91 grain H&N Barracuda Green pellets. Looks like 1200 psi with the hammer spring two turns in wins.
1200 psi:
Hammer spring at 1 turn:
Left side of top right target has hammer spring at 2 turns.
Right side of top right target has hammer spring at 3 turns.
1400 psi:
Hammer spring at 2 turns.
Hammer spring at 3 turns
1800 psi:
Hammer spring at 1 turn
Avenger, Part 3
The second gun arrived and seems to be a refurbished / used gun. Scuffed up, worn o-rings. Pumped it up and lost a couple hundred psi overnight. Better, but not good. Sigh … hopefully our third attempt arrives in a few days.
Candied Almonds
Made two batches of candied almonds for Christmas presents — the ginger/cinnamon candied almonds are really good, but I think next time I’ll make a batch with cinnamon and a batch with ginger.
The maple ones weren’t as crispy as expected — tasty, but an odd texture.
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.