The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 127-133)

over 4 years ago

Day 127. (TFC Making A Mixtape, Reflecting On The Year, Writing About The Last Day Of A Decade & Having A Pleasant Day)

It was a rather brisk and chilly day but at least it was sunny and the sky was a beautiful bright blue that I found to be quite vibrant. The wind blew gently all day and carried with it quite the chill so I spent the majority of the day staying inside and was careful to keep the door shut as much as possible so the breeze wouldn't rob the shelter of it's warmth.

I was hoping for slightly warmer conditions outside so that I could play some music and have a fire but instead I worked on a new year's mixtape and was content to listen to it indoors at low volume over my laptop speakers.

All in all I mostly just enjoyed digging through a bunch of my old mixtapes and piecing together a new track with odds and ends from them. Although I didn't at first intend to share the mixtape I wound up liking it so much that I posted it online just for shits and giggles.

Late in the afternoon I spent incredibly too long writing a new year's post for Steemit and tackled the challenge of trying to sum up the previous decade without getting into excessive detail which turned out to be quite the challenge.

When I started the article I had no idea what the heck I was going to write and almost immediately hit a wall after only writing the title because the fucking complexity and enormity of the previous decade's adventures defied being 'summed up.'

So I told myself 'hey you already wrote all the fucking details in all those journals you keep toting around from place to place with you...and here you just need to keep it simple and share something both meaningful and digestible for folks!' Which seemed to have been the right thing to tell myself because the article turned out pretty good and the real highlights turned out to be choices that I made that lead to me improving my life in one way or another.

All that said. As much as I would like to romanticize the previous decade I just cannot bring myself to do it. It was a challenging time and one fraught with peril, weirdness, stress, determination, fortitude, deprivation, hardship, loss and a slew of out and out difficulties! But hey I made it through somehow and am incredibly thankful for what I learned, the good choices that that were made that ultimately lead to even better choices and the sort of person that I became which is enough for me!

It is hard to not crack a wry smile whilst reminiscing about the past but damn that sort of smile just seems like a way to avoid looking at the more painful aspects of things especially around things like making poor choices and even worse is when looking at the flimsy justifications of those poor choices. The biggest thing I think that I truly learned is that I always have more options (choices) than I think that I have and it is sometimes best to not choose at all especially if my intuition is sounding alarm bells.

Anyway all that jazz aside it turned out to be a really pleasant day and I was quite content hunkering down in the shelter with the dogs and not doing any wild partying to celebrate the new year. It was an excellent day of just staying well within my 'happy place' and not being even remotely inclined to venture away from it.

Well that is about it for now. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night. Cheers and Happy New Year!

Here is the Steemit article that I wrote: https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/2020-a-year-of-hindsight-or-just-doublevision

Here is the mixtape that I made. (If you look in the description on Mixcloud there is a download link.)

It was quite the beautiful day!

Day 128. (TFC Having A Nice First Day Of The Year, Staying Warm As The Weather Turned Much Colder & Looking At The Daunting Task Of Editing Three Years Worth Of Daily Posts)

I woke up rather early on the first day of the year which is not all that surprising given that I fell asleep not long after dark the night before.

My expectations over the years for new year's festivities has really shifted to where the only thing that I really care all that much about is that the dogs do not get frightened by gunshots and fireworks. Just before drifting off to sleep I heard some gunshots in the distance but they were not close enough to even remotely perturb the dogs. Once again my heavily insulated walls in the shelter muffled the sound rather well!

Throughout the day the weather steadily got colder and although the wind never actually blew very hard it carried quite the chill with it so I mostly avoided going outside altogether.

The only time that I really ventured outside for very long was to eat some yummy potato cakes at the homestead proper and spending some time rummaging around in my tools looking for an appropriately sized screwdrivers to dismantle some hard drives with.

Unfortunately I did not have the correct screwdrivers to disassemble the hard drives so I did a bunch of research online about what sizes I would need and wound up ordering a cheap kit of Torx bits from an online store that should do the job.

Anyway I have been attempting to find the motivation to dive into getting a book together concerning my last journey and although I will undoubtedly write new content to put into it, I think that the bulk of it will be comprised of all the daily posts that I wrote during that nearly three year period which will amount to a heck of a lot of editing as well as what will assuredly turn out to be several proof readings.

Knowing that this will be the case with the writing I decided to have a peak at a few of those old posts to get an idea of what I am really in for. Although I did pretty good at catching a lot of the typos in those posts while originally writing them, the structure for most of them is a bit of a mess especially since I published so many of them as 'blobs of text' without breaking them into paragraphs.

All in all it is going to be quite the task but the sooner I start on it the sooner I will be done doing it. I am still unsure about taking on the whole self-publishing thing but hell the damned material is not going to edit or publish itself!

Well that is about it for now. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.

More blue skies today!

Day 129. (TFC Waking To A Rainy Day, Doing A Supply Run & Binging Out On A Blockchain Game)

As the title says I awoke to it being a rainy day and although the temperature was not all that cold I could tell by the cloud cover that the precipitation had really settled into the area and probably would not let up until it had 'rained' itself out!

The rain sure makes traversing my shelter ramp tricky but I have been doing rather well on navigating it and the immediate mucky vicinity of it without taking another fall or tumble. I have assuredly come close to losing my footing a few times but thankfully I was holding the corner post (of the roof structure) each time and was thus able to keep my balance.

With all the rain and me and the dogs foot traffic that big rock near the ramp has much more of it's surface revealed so lately I have been using the top of it (which is very coarse) as a stepping stone down into the dog yard which works rather well. I do not use it in the opposite direction though because stepping up onto it means that my foot on the ground is in the slippery muck and the last thing I want to have happen is for it to slip backwards which would result in me face-planting into the surface of the big rock.

All that jazz aside. It was a pretty mellow day and in the afternoon I went out on a supply run back to that same store I went to last month. I found out that they had not actually previously overcharged me on the dog food and it had been on sale a few months back when I first saw it there. At 18.99 USD per fifty pound bag it isn't that bad of a deal and the proximity of the store saves an incredible amount of driving compared to where I was going before to purchase dog food. It basically cost four bucks more than the other place but it also makes for just one place to visit because I can also get my propane tanks refilled there.

I did actually get a single propane tank filled yesterday and so far I am averaging about one twenty pound tank a month to accommodate my heating needs which is fucking spectacular considering that at the last place I lived I was using (on average) two twenty pound tanks a week!

My tiny new shelter really holds the heat well and although it is small inside it gets plenty of airflow from the window in the door and the open port created by the exhaust fan even when the exhaust fan is not running so that is pretty nice because the air inside never seems 'stale' or anything like that.

Anyway. Late in the day I started playing that Steem blockchain video game again and whoa have I become thoroughly addicted to it in a rather short time. Making actual money playing a game is pretty bizarre to me but so far I have racked up some nice earnings playing it and have basically doubled my initial investment which is pretty cool. It has definitely been a fun way to relax and spend my winter downtime thus far so I guess I will keep doing it!

Well that is about it for now. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.

The cloudy and dreary weather returned!

Day 130. (TFC A Very Grey Day, Getting My 'New' Pre-Owned Desktop Computer In The Mail & Fabricating An Internal Hard Drive Caddy)

There really was not much of a day for me today because I did not get out of bed until just a few hours before dark. I did not stay awake late the night before or anything but every time I woke up I looked out the window in the door to see what I thought was the pre-dawn sky so I just went back to sleep thinking it was still early in the morning.

As it turned out it was actually just an incredibly overcast day but my sleepy brain could not quite grasp what was going on. Suffice it to say that I was rather shocked (when I actually did get up) that the entire day had passed me by.

A few minutes after waking I got a message from one of my fellow homesteaders that the computer they ordered me as a Christmas gift had arrived and soon afterwards I hiked down to the homestead proper to open it up.

I was quite relieved to find that there were actually all the parts (motherboard, RAM, CPU, hard drive) inside of it and that it was also very clean inside the case. Ordering pre-owned stuff online can be really hit or miss and this time it was definitely a 'hit' especially considering how inexpensive the unit was.

I was still pretty groggy headed after retrieving the computer and carrying it back to the shelter so I just cleared some space for it on one of the shelves above my writing table and let it sit there until I got enough espresso in me to feel like I could actually focus on trying to accommodate a second hard drive inside the computer.

The computer case is a SSF (small form factor) case so there is not much room inside of it but after close inspection I saw where I could mount a second hard drive. The difficult part was that I lacked a caddy to mount the hard drive in so I had to get creative to come up with a solution.

A while back I had ordered two one terabyte hard drives and as I previously mentioned (in a different post) they came in quick release server mount enclosures (caddies) so after removing all the plastic parts from the enclosures I had a nice little metal caddy (that the hard drive fit in perfectly) and I was able to screw it in place inside the computer case with just two screws.

It actually came out pretty nicely but whoa did it just barely fit and the cables for the hard drive just narrowly miss touching one of the RAM modules inside the computer but overall it should work out just fine.

Having an actual desktop computer again after all these years is pretty fucking amazing and although I have yet to really dive into setting it all up and seeing what it can do I feel rather confident that it is exactly what I needed and will prove to be quite the 'work horse.'

Well that is about it for now. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.

This is how close the hard drive cables are to the RAM module.

Day 131. (TFC A Restless Day, Tinkering With My New Computer & Preparing For Another Cold Snap)

I have no idea why but I could barely get to sleep last night. I kept trying to fall asleep but each time I would just wake back up again and after about a half dozen times of that occurring I gave up altogether, turned the light back on and decided to work on that new computer more.

When I did eventually get to sleep it was around four in the morning and I woke up again two hours later and went right back to tinkering with that computer again. The entire day afterwards I felt quite restless and although I tried to nap I just could not do it!

Anyway during the wee hours of the morning (after giving up on sleeping) I decided to put a few flavors of Linux on that one terabyte hard drive that I previously installed in the new computer. The Bios on the computer was password protected but after a little online research I found that there is a jumper on the motherboard that I could remove to disable the password so after doing that I was able to access the Bios to make the changes to it that would be necessary for having it setup the way I wanted it.

Let me say that although modern Bios systems are pretty damn slick I was thoroughly disturbed/disgusted with just how much stuff I found built into it that would 'call home' to one service or another which (to me) amounts to a bunch of backdoor security holes baked into the Bios software.

Anyway I disabled all that shit and got the device boot order all setup so that I could boot from first a USB drive (to install Linux) and then to boot from the second hard drive and thus bypassing the first hard drive altogether.

I once again installed one lightweight 32-bit Linux for gaming and a 64-bit Linux for doing everything else on. Having that sort of setup on the laptop I have been using has been incredibly handy so I thought it best to do it again on the desktop computer.

All in all the Linux installations went flawlessly and within an hour I had them both installed. I spent another hour or so updating and configuring the 64-bit system which only took that long because the internet is slow here. Once I wrapped all that up I fell asleep for those two hours I previously mentioned.

Once I was awake again (at 6 a.m.) I decided to tackle the part on the computer project that I had been dreading...the Windows 10 installed on the hard drive that came with the computer.

If I have not clearly stated it recently...I fucking absolutely loathe Windows and furthermore I do not trust it at all but I want to have it available for development purposes and decided since it came with the computer...why the hell not give it a spin and see how it has evolved over the years.

Like any good paranoid (cautious) person I don't trust the honesty/integrity of some random online seller that installs Windows for free on the computers they sell and thus took some precautions before even booting into Windows.

What I did was install an antivirus program on one of my Linux operating systems and after updating it's virus database I scanned the entire hard drive that Windows was installed on. The scanning process took a few hours because the Windows 10 takes up fifty fucking gigabytes of space!

Anyway when the virus scanner finished running it found nearly six hundred potential threats on the Windows hard drive! Some of those were probably false positives but many of them were actual trojans so I quarantined them all and crossed my fingers that doing so did not break anything.

After all that jazz I was tempted to just format the hard drive and say 'fuck having Windows' but I booted to it anyway mostly out of curiosity to check it out. There was not a 'user' setup for the Windows so it went through this lengthy setup process which took nearly as long as it took me to install both the versions of Linux that I put on the other hard drive!

I will spare you the details of what ensued from there but somewhere around five hours later I had all the data collection, telemetry collection, auto updating and a ton of other useless crap (Microsoft spyware/adware) disabled and almost felt that it might be safe enough to connect it to the internet...almost.

Honestly I do not know if I will ultimately keep Windows on that hard drive unless it proves incredibly handy for doing development stuff on.

Anyway I could go on and on about that unsavory topic but I am going to just stop myself before I really start ranting and raving.

Well that is about it for now. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.

She is such a good dog!

Day 132-133. (TFC Spending A Chilly Day Tweaking My New Computer & Pretty Much Just Enjoying My Winter Downtime)

I have been trying to avoid combining two days into a single post but at this point it seems better to do so than just writing two very short posts and posting them on separate days. I have also failed to take any pictures the last two days (other than of the dogs) so there won't be much in the way of imagery to 'fluff' this post out!

Yesterday dawned a very chilly morning and was the 'restless' day that I described in my last post and I went way down the technology rabbit hole further setting up my new desktop computer as well as re-configuring how I have all the peripherals (mice, keyboards, sound, monitors) setup at what has become my computer work station but is actually my writing table.

I had more or less been procrastinating setting things up so that the new desktop is my primary computer because honestly I did not want to spend a bunch of time setting up all the necessary stuff on the new computer that I already have setup on the laptop that I have been using because after all the laptop has been working flawlessly for the last several months so why the hell would I want to change anything!

Nonetheless I finally started installing all the software I like to use on the new desktop which is basically a little something of everything like multiple web browsers, audio editing software, video editing software, so forth and so on. It always surprises me a little at how I wind up always needing/wanting all the tools to do all forms of media production and/or consumption.

There was also lots of personalization that I did to the new desktop which mostly amounted to tweaking a bunch of the Linux settings to give me the interface that I am most familiar with or that I just find convenient which amounts to disabling all the damn 'effects' that seem to (in my opinion) be completely frivolous or a waste of resources.

Suffice it to say that I really like the new computer thus far and it is both rather stable and absolutely much more powerful than any computer (or laptop) that I have ever owned. Something sort of funny is that the graphics card that I bought for the other computer (the one that was an empty case) is less powerful than the onboard graphics card on the new computer so I might not even need it now for gaming purposes.

I am thinking that with the computer parts here at the homestead now I have pretty much everything except a hard drive to put together another computer which could be put to good use here perhaps as a media server or edutainment device.

Anyway. I have been thoroughly enjoying my winter downtime and for me the stuff I am doing (like setting up all the computer stuff) is both fun and provides me with opportunities to learn new things. There are always things that I am learning along the way while doing that stuff but it is all so niche and specific that to spell them all out in these posts would be quite tedious and probably would not make much sense to non-techie folks but hell I love advancing my skills even if I fail to document them.

Anyway. I don't really have much else to write about at the moment so I am going to wrap this up and call it good enough.

I hope that everyone is doing well and has a wonderful day/night.