EggFarmerFunny

I just got a laugh from the full page ad in the Wall Street Journal taken out by America's Egg Farmers - a message to the American people.  According to them, they cannot produce a product safe enough for "over-easy".

That's top quality for you.   Since more than 99% of our eggs are produced by large-scale jokers, that means the extintion of certain kinds of food we eat...

How safe is our food supply?

For people who live their lives blissfully unaware of where that burger came from - they probably have no idea.  Those few who strive to consume small batch local products are free to worry about their family and friends -- content in their relative safety.

The massively scaled U.S. food production and distribution system -- which generally favours 'food stability' over 'food taste' and actually anticipates fecal matter in its final product  -- could use some improvement.  It's surprising how little consumers care about it until people start dieing.

But its only 5,000 people who will die this year in the U.S. -- at least according to the CDC.  I guess that's more people than will be killed by terrorists from Afghanistan...  I'm sure that next week the same people will pick up the pack of 97¢ eggs.

It's cheaper to eat clean good food that you cook yourself than it is to eat fast cheap food -- even with unfair subsidies propping up the system.  Save a life -- teach someone to cook.

Dude, you still got a light out

$880 million dollars, and they can't fix the light that's been out for months?



View from 28203.

Watering My Plants FAIL

Well, they're still alive -- but the system failed.  Earlier I drew a diagram of my plan.

The X10 controller -- which I wasn't even using in it's X10-electrical-wire-transmit-glory because, probably, it sucks -- worked flawlessly for a week prior to me going on vacation.  I was using it in it's RF capacity, via the Firecracker attachment.  Windows scheduler ran a batch file to cycle the Firecracker.  I was pretty sure about this part.

I wanted to be able to supplement watering on hot days, or when my plants were visibly wilting.  My Touch Pro phone was setup on a tripod downstairs to ftp images every couple of seconds back to the webserver over wifi. Unfortunately, I knew I would have problems with this setup.  The phone would overheat in the sunshine and stop recharging the battery.  So I had to have it reboot itself a couple times a day to be safe.

I don't know how long it lasted, but on the second day I couldn't access the website.  It seems the Savant web server went down without asking me.

And I couldn't ftp in to check the pics, but I may have never opened up ftp to the outside...

But at least I could VNC on in and run the watering cycle.  At least for a couple days.  Apparently that failed too.  I thought the power went out...  Nope, UltraVNC went down.  And it never does that.

But the scheduler kept trickling along every day to supply just enough to keep them alive in the 100 degree heat.  At least until the day I returned.  It seems that the X10 receiver received the ON command, but not the OFF command.  I think it was trying to break my pump.

So I'm going to try an isolated arduino approach.  It should function as a basic fine-tuned timer with push button instant gratification and optional programming opportunities.

How to run Teenpup on a really old computer

So I wanted to run Teenpup2010mini on a 500MHz PIII with 192MBs of RAM and about 4GBs of storage on a second partition.  I wanted to use Amarok to manage and play FLACs over wifi from my music server.  Internet streams would be nice, too.

Lucid Puppy was my first choice, but I couldn't get Amarok to work with a "frugal" install.  Teenpup comes with Amarok pre-installed so I went with that.

I used the LuPu to mount and extract the Teenpup .sfs to its home on the second partition -- after converting it to the proper squash file format with the included utility.

I put the vmlinuz file in the first partition, since my grub can't access stuff on other partitions.  One Grub menu entry boots into a root on the second partition. [I'll have to copy the grub entry here...]

Thanks to the excellent Puppy developers and folks at murga-linux!  It works flawlessly, so far.  Now I have a dependable, lossless, wireless music manager & client for my stereo.

Rebuild Day

Today was a fairly productive day for me.  For starters I fixed my bicycle.  The derailleur had shifted, so it was a pretty easy fix to shift it back.  I had been without transportation for a few days, though, until I figured I had enough time to take it apart.




I rebuilt an animatronic crow.  I guess 'animatronic' is a bit of a stretch... Still, I had to rebuild an electric motor and gearbox.  It had seized up due to years of moving parts and failed grease.  And most of the lights had burned out.  Unfortunately it's hard to come by Christmas lights in August.  I replaced the old ones with those from a used string that I found - testing each and every bulb like a persistent, thick-headed moron.  In a couple weeks I should be able to get some good LED strings that I can use to replicate the creator's original design.

I fixed the air-conditioning in the Volvo.  After Jeff told me recharging worked out great for his Jeep, I decided to inquire at the parts store.  Jose down at the Scaleybark store showed me how to do it.  Friggin amazing because last time I was in the store I had to walk out after some dude implied I was stealing since I had a backpack full of groceries.

And speaking of commuting by bike:  This week the Creative Loafing published a response from CABA's Zimmerman, et. al. to Servatius's idiotic anti-bicycling piece I commented on earlier.  Um, and I didn't see her column in there... ;)  Excellent!

I also fixed the Volvos headlight and taillight by jiggling the wires.  I guess that doesn't really count as fixing them.  Still, now I know I really need a new wiring harness from my headlights.  I noticed the insulation flaking off about four years ago.  I wrapped them with electrical tape the best I could, but I think that's starting to fail.  The rear running light bulb just wasn't seated properly, so it's fine.

My plants are fine now that I have them controlled by the computer.  I have an opensource X10 controller called fireck32 that is called by a batch file to run the pump for five minutes.  Windows scheduler runs it daily to keep them from dying.  I can VPN on in and click the shortcut if I want to add some.  I would still like to set up a little web server and cam, though, to be on the safe side.