The silk on the Hickory King corn is really pretty
Corn Silk
Heritage Turkeys
In addition to growing open pollinated, heirloom vegetables — we’ve got a flock of heritage turkeys. These guys are Black Spanish turkeys. Unlike the broad-breasted turkeys raised commercially today, they walk around and do turkey things all day. They are all waiting by the gate as we walk over to the poultry pasture, and there are always a few turkeys following us around if we’re working in their area.
The two males we have from last year were amazing with the little poults this Spring. They’d take a share of poults and snuggle them at night to keep them warm. They’d march around them as the little ones pecked around during the day. Even now that the younger turkeys are almost fully grown, the older turkeys stand guard and make sure everyone gets access to food and water. Watching the adult turkeys with the younger ones has been right educational, and I am eager to hatch some of our own poults next year!
Knitting – Finally
I learned to knit and crochet at the same time — crocheting was something I could do easily but knitting? It was awkward and never really worked. I’ve always suspected I was just doing something wrong — if only someone who knew what they were doing could spot it. I even managed to teach a friend of mine to knit, and she couldn’t show me what I was doing wrong.
I got Anya a knitting book — it wasn’t quite enough for her to figure out knitting, so I let her find a few videos on YouTube. She has gotten to where she knits quite well. At first, she was using pencils — but I got her some knitting needles with little cats on the top. And she decided to teach me how to knit. Casting on — check. Knitting — not a check. It’s this strange awkward motion and the yarn ends up way too tight on the needle. So she sat and watched what I was doing — corrected the couple of things I was doing wrong, and …
I am actually able to knit now (yes, there are a few mistakes … but the tension is reasonable and it’s reasonable looking).
Really Big Tomato
While these Mortgage Lifter tomatoes grow really large … they have a lot of bits that need to be trimmed. Seems like a tomato bred by turkeys and chickens (who get to enjoy all of the trimmed off bits).
Managing Photos
We have a lot of photos — I expect that is true of most people. When taking a picture required someone to make sure there was a roll of film in the camera, take a picture, and then develop (or get developed) the pictures? We didn’t have that many pictures — my family, I recall, had a pile of undeveloped film and a few albums of photos. With the advent of digital photography, I took a lot more pictures. But it was still a manageable quantity. With smart phones — a camera available any time you have half a thought to record something for posterity? We have a lot of pictures. 264 already this month, 4727 last year! And then we have movies. While it is awesome to be able to preserve all of these memories, it’s also impossible to find anything. Ideally, you could search for files tagged with ‘garden’ and find all of the garden pictures.
Which brought us to a quest for a good photo and video tagging application. Haven’t found one yet, but I have discovered that a lot of applications use their own database. Dolphin stores its tags in Balloo — I remember encountering something similar with Windows Media Player and a shared music library — we thought we were making changes that would be visible to everyone, but the changes didn’t even persist if you blew away your local store and repopulated your library. I’ve found apps with sqlite, ones with an external MySQL server, etc — but it’s something that locks you into their application. A few (DigiKam) have a feature to sync their data over to the image metadata, which (I think) will have to suffice.
Worse still, I haven’t identified any reasonable consistency to where metadata is stored — when you add ‘tags’ in the Windows File Explorer, the tags appear in “Subject”, “LastKeywordXMP”, and “XPKeywords”
Tags written in DigiKam application, however, don’t appear anywhere in the metadata by default– it’s all hidden stuff in the DigiKam database. Since we have SQL servers, we could just share a database for tagging our images. But that seems silly since the file metadata already has places to include these images. I could write something that reads from the SQL tables and uses something like exiftool to write the file metadata. Fortunately, there is a configuration option to actually write the tags into the metadata:
Now tags are written into IPTC “Keywords” as well as XMP CatalogSets, Categories, HeirarchicalSubject, LastKeywordXMP, Subject, and TagList. Which is sufficient for Windows to display something in the “tags” column.
Tags written in Darkroom can be stored in a sidecar file — which is messy, adds to the backup requirements, and generally doesn’t work for me.
GThumbs lets you multi-select across a directory and bulk-add tags. These get added to IPTC Keywords and XML Keywords — which do show up in the “Tags” column of Windows Explorer.
Building Vouch Oauth Proxy
I am using an NGINX container which is based on Debian 11 — following the vouch-proxy build instructions failed spectacularly on the first step, reporting that “package embed is not in GOROOT”. It appears that Debian package installation gets you go 1.15 — and ’embed’ wasn’t added until 1.16. So … that’s not great.
As a note to myself — here are the additional packages I install to the base container:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install vim wget net-tools procps git make gcc g++
To manually install golang on Debian:
- Find the version you want to run on https://golang.org/dl/ and wget that tar.gz file
- wget https://go.dev/dl/go1.19.linux-amd64.tar.gz
- tar -vxf go1.19.linux-amd64.tar.gz
- mv go /usr/local/
- vi /etc/bash.bashrc and append the following lines:
export GOROOT=/usr/local/go
export PATH=$GOROOT/bin:$PATH - Log out and log back in. Test the go installation by running:
- go version
Now I am able to run their shell script to build the vouch-proxy binary:
- cd /opt
- git clone https://github.com/vouch/vouch-proxy.git
- cd vouch-proxy
- ./do.sh goget
- ./do.sh build
- cd configure
- cp config.yml_example_oidc config.yml
- ./vouch-proxy
Medina County GIS — Accessing Linked Data
There’s a lot of data that I’ve been using the old Medina County GIS system to access because I couldn’t figure out how to get it from the new Medina County GIS platform — finally got it!
The first step is to select a data layer that has linked data — this could be surveys, old tax maps, building permits, septic permits, etc.
Once a layer is selected click on the “Identify” icon — a blue circle with a letter I inside of it. I’ve been using “Draw Point” — this changes your cursor
On the map, draw your point on the icon for the data element — for tax maps, this is a gray box with some text in it. Building, septic, etc have colored shapes.
The trick, then, is to scroll down on the “Identify” tab — it’ll always start with the general parcel information (ownership, parcel size). But, if you scroll down, there will be new sections specific to the data layer you selected. Here, it’s the archived Tax Map scans. Click one of the “View” links …
Voila — you’ll have the information.
What does that RPM actually do?
To view the scripts being executed by an RPM, use rpm -qp --scripts packagename
XRDP Logon Hangs on Black Screen
I’m writing it down this time — after completing the steps to set up xrdp (installed, configured, running, firewall port open), we get prompted for credentials … good so far!
And then get stuck on a black screen. This is because the user we’re trying to log into is already logged into the machine. Log out locally, and the user is able to log into the remote desktop connection. Conversely, attempting to log in locally once the remote desktop connection is established just hangs on a black screen too.
Zoning, ORC 519.25, and 8%
ORC 519.25 says:
The board shall adopt a resolution if there is presented to it a petition, similar in all relevant aspects to that prescribed in section 519.12 of the Revised Code, signed by a number of qualified electors residing in the unincorporated area of such township included in the zoning plan equal to not less than eight per cent of the total vote cast for all candidates for governor in such area at the most recent general election at which a governor was elected, requesting that the question of whether or not the plan of zoning in effect in such township shall be repealed be submitted to the electors residing in the unincorporated area of the township included in the zoning plan at a special election to be held on the day of the next primary or general election. The resolution adopted by the board of township trustees to cause such question to be submitted to the electors shall be certified to the board of elections not later than ninety days prior to the day of election at which said question is to be voted upon. In the event a majority of the vote cast on such question in the township is in favor of repeal of zoning, then such regulations shall no longer be of any effect. Not more than one such election shall be held in any two calendar years.
Which made me wonder how many people, exactly, 8% would be. Well, the last election for Governor was 2018, so a quick trip to the Board of Elections site for the 2018 precinct result details shows
| 2016 Governor’s Race | |||||
| Precinct | Registered Voters | Votes Cast | |||
| Hinckley A | 1437 | 1009 | |||
| Hinckley B | 1253 | 867 | Total Cast | 4059 | |
| Hinckley C | 1134 | 735 | 8% | 324.72 | |
| Hinckley D | 1213 | 803 | |||
| Hinckley E | 902 | 645 |
Since the number of signatories needs to be greater than or equal to 8%, that’s 325 people. Which … isn’t really an insurmountable obstacle in a township with just over 5,900 registered voters — about 5.5% of the registered voters.