The Idiocy of Rural Broadband, Pt. 2

In an earlier post, I talked about the struggles with had with a local provider, finally settling on a Verizon hot-spot for our needs. 

It worked well but this post will warn other rural Internet users about a device often connected to televisions: Amazon's Fire Stick. 

 Our usage amounts to limited streaming (an hour or 90 minutes), one Yoga class online, and a 30 minute office hour meeting with students in a week. Thus we never went through more than 70 GB of our 100 before hitting the data cap and having speed slowed down. I understand from friends who watch a lot of films, TV, or play games online, that blowing through a Terabyte in a month is not unusual. 

Watching anything streaming meant attaching a laptop with a series of adapters that would make Rube Goldberg proud. An in-law with (of course) unlimited fiber Internet suggested Amazon's Fire Stick. We got the lowest-cost model, running 20 bucks with free shipping. It installed in a snap and we watched without issues a documentary about those who raise show chickens, plus an episode of All Creatures Great and Small. With Alexa and an intuitive control, I figured we had it made.

A few days later, Verizon notified us that we'd hit 90 GB of use on the 6th day of the month.

The verdict? Fire Stick. These devices will continuously auto-update (and the updates are not tiny) while the TV is off, as the device connects to one's router. Moreover, when using Fire Stick, it defaults to the highest video-quality possible, a Niagara of megabytes per hour. Finally, it plays previews and other features that devour 1s and 0s faster than a sailor on leave with pay in his pocket.

The solution is simple: unplug Firestick. We've used half a gigabyte since. We will plug it in again when we next watch something. But even then, the updates would begin to download, many of which we would never need. Thus there's some very good advice here about how to reduce data usage. We turned off all the data-gobbling settings right afterward, and unplugged the AC adapter.

We are considering Starlink, with its 1 TB cap, or awaiting the coming of fiber to our part of the county.

Many of you will not have that choice, and a cellular router of 4G or 5G may be the best choice. But watch those "smart" devices that hoover up data. These now include many appliances, security cameras, and the like.

Most of them can be dialed down if you know how. It's not in the interest of Big Telecom or firms like Amazon to tell you.

Incidental and ironic postscript: 

A Google search for the string "The Idiocy of Rural Broadband" turned up no hits for my own blog, one they host! Perhaps nothing shows because I refuse to run advertisements here.

Microsoft's Bing did turn my site up faster and as a second or third hit. I'm using Bing on my iPhone for the default search engine, for what that's worth, since it links right to Apple's map application (Safari does not take you to Apple's own map application, incidentally!). 

Google seems only to want to push advertisements to us, not feature free content. At least Microsoft, a company I've long mistrusted, got it right. 

Large companies are not our friends. They see us as revenue streams, not people. They have no one-on-one relationship as a locally-owned merchant or service may.

Act accordingly whenever you can. 

Image source: Tom Woodward at Fickr.

A Beginner's Tool Box, Part I

 

Some time back, I focused on four (+1) essential shop tools. Today I'll go out to the lumber-yard with my tool bag (or box) to focus on the hand tools for woodworking that every beginner needs. I use a lot of cordless and some corded saws and drills; more on these later. Lately, for a lot of simple jobs, I forego power tools. In fact, for a big job I went hybrid: I used a cordless drill to make pilot holes in 200 or so pieces of weather-board siding, fearing that my new nail gun would split the wood. Then I hand-nailed about 600 siding nails. Worked like a charm. The hardest part of finding the right ringshank nails!

With some luck, a beginner could score all of these tools and a decent tool bag for under $300. A good box may cost more. I won't go into brands in most cases. For saws and hammers, however, some work better than others. Buy the best you can. Check Facebook Marketplace, estate and yard sales, too. Some fantastic tools from the 50s-70s can be had for pennies on the dollar.

Do not let your box look like that! Now here goes for picks:

A Toolbox Saw: A small crosscut saw can do a lot of serious work. I've got two by Stanley called "Fat Max" that I love.

A Hand Plane: These can cost big money, but a savvy DIYer can find excellent antique planes for under $50 that need some refurbishment. I sold a pile of them for $20 each at a farm-swap this year. I've kept several others in good shape for my own use, having seen new planes that run $100-$200. I use planes occasionally for a final fit on a piece of wood, when only a little bit needs shaving off. You'll find many other uses for these versatile tools. Here's a beauty from the article "Unlocking the Mystery of Hand Planes" at Wood News Online.

A Level (or two): Spirit levels come in many lengths, but for the toolbox, get a shorty of 2' or less. Get a vintage one at a yard sale or FB marketplace. They can be had cheaply.

A Framing Hammer: I love Estwing's hammers. I think mine is a 22 oz, which my friend Jeff Warren recommended for it's power but also because a heavier hammer simply wears you out. That's my brand-plug. I've used Stanley claw hammers for years, but a framing hammer that is well made does all a claw hammer can plus has better ergonomics. The  longer handles let a framing hammer do more of the work, at least to a point. 

On a Habitat build once, since the nonprofit will not let volunteers bring nail guns, they issued claw hammers to a bunch of unskilled folk on a framing job. I joined in but I quickly got found out: I drive nails well. Me and the Estwing then got a hell of a workout, since the other volunteers were bending more nails than driving them. They got other tasks while I ended up sore for days. I must have driven 300 nails that day but we stood all the walls before sunset. I felt suddenly Amish.

A Dead-Blow Hammer: This works great for lots of tasks where you did not wish to leave a Mark. The modern plastic version is full of shot. I find it great for tapping in a board when building. The one pictured is 10 bucks at Harbor Freight. I find a cheap one like this works as well as fancy ones. It's an occasional tool. I'd aim for a weight of 3 or 4 pounds. They can scale up to sledge-hammer size!

 

A Nail Puller (or three): I use these often, sometimes in partnership with the puller on the framing hammer to remove nails. I like having a big and little one handy. 

Carpenters Clamps: I have some favorites and will recommend them: Irwin bar clamps. I have dozens of clamps, from antique C-clamps to some beautiful wooden clamps, but the Irwins are a delight: they snug down with hand pressure and release fast. I've used them for holding things during auto repair, too: the plastic jaws, if clean, will not scratch metal. Start small for the tool box, with a pair of shorter ones, but you'll end up with huge ones soon enough, hanging on the wall of the shop.

Wood Chisels: You'll need this for many small jobs to shave off a tiny bit of wood when joining things. Get a set.

A Magnet: Nails and screws and essential parts fall into the grass. Get a magnet on a handle to find them. It saves money and keeps you and others safe later. I once kept half a dozen bored college students occupied on a Habitat for Humanity build, when the crew had no more work for unskilled helpers, by asking the kids to walk the site with two buckets: one for nails, another for screws. We found a gallon or so of each. The one pictured is 8 bucks at Harbor Freight. I have some that are long bars scavenged from machinery, and put on cords to drag over the ground. Sure beats a flat tire on the pickup truck!

Roll of Masking Tape: Tape? Sometimes I need to hold a small piece of trim and don't have a helper. Sometimes I've used tape to mark a spot I'm going to cut, or to keep a piece of wood from splintering when I saw it. It's a cheap companion. And if you want to write measurements on wood without writing on the wood itself, tape to the rescue.

A Speed Square & a Try Square: I managed to finally use a Speed Square to measure angle when we made rafters for a run-in built over an old shipping container. It's the first time I've done that. I then used the square to check the angle on other rafters from a chicken-coop kit. The second tool I love is my try square. These tools often have a small level built in, but for me the magic of the try square is its ability to mark a straight line on a piece of wood that needs to be cut with a circular saw. I use a Sharpie or a pencil.

I found a page on measuring pitch with a speed square, a page with other uses for that tool, as well as a nice resource with all sorts of neat marking tools and advice on measuring here.

A Pair of Rules: I love retractable tape-measures, but I have also begun to carry a folding wooden rule. Why? When you are measuring a long distance without a partner to hold a tape, the old-school wooden rule lets you work solo. Otherwise, I always use a tape.

 So that's my list. What did I forget?  I'll do another post on tools for working with metal and, just maybe, rudiments for my favorite haunt, the auto-shop.

Thanks 2022

 I do believe that I have given thanks in this space before, so in no particular order:

• Courage to say “no,” when a publisher let me know that my planned first-year textbook would cost students $200 per copy.
• Hope from the Midterm results. Evil got its due, and while it could have been better, it could have been far, far worse. I have recurrent bad dreams of neo-fascist militants who worship a certain evil man coming down our driveway. Guns won’t save us. What will? Community and fortitude.
• Perseverance, a related idea. I fixed things on the farm that seemed un-fixable at times: a stalled diesel tractor, a balky electronic ignition in an old truck, an old lock for our pop-up camper.
• Curiosity to try new things, from listening to some new music, reading new authors, to visiting the Grand Canyon. 
• Gratitude that my wife and I enjoyed relatively good health and prosperity. My own arthritis has been stable and my flexibility improved. A good osteopath, Yoga class, and diet have keep my as limber as possible at my age. We found a talented visiting vet to tend to our livestock dogs, and two of them with persistent health issues have also enjoyed better health in consequence.
• Luck when we had a porch finished, despite delays in materials or builders’ mistakes, the fallen white oak that guaranteed enough firewood, or decent fishing so we brought home dinner a few times.
• Company of others, fighting my antisocial tendencies to visit with family and friends.
• Temperance, not a virtue of mine, whenever my academic job seems pointless, my students anxious and depressed about the world we are leaving them, and my university ever more corporate, concerned more at times with branding than substance and learning.
• Restraint, also not my strength, when I kept my mouth shut instead of screaming. I am still working on that one!
• Knowledge to know when to “call some guy” to fix or make something, when to quit for the day, when to stop looking at screens, or when to let others have the last word.

So you get the last word. Tell me what makes you thankful in 2022?

Slowing Down To Save Time

Yes, this sounds paradoxical. But one thing that 10 years of rural life have taught me is this: when you have plenty of space to put things, you can get sloppy about it.  

That is not my tool box. Not by a light year. But before talking about why,  let's consider socket sets. Yes, sockets.

I have hundreds of the things, mostly inherited. The few dozen I brought with me from town were well organized in an old tool box I once purchased with S&H Green Stamps. I could always put my hand on what I needed, fast.

Finding myself with three places where we store equipment, I could see why my father-in-law put tools everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Unlike my small stash, however, these tools were not sorted. He worked at a breakneck pace and the work was good, but organizing things for later use? He called that "piddling," and it was not real work to him.  He had buckets of tools, jars of fasteners, and sockets every darned place you could imagine.

I'm Type-A about clutter, so it drove me bonkers until I discovered a simple truth about any pile of stuff: if you go after it methodically and do not add more stuff, it will eventually sort itself out. So this Fall, I began to organize sockets: 1/4", 3/8", and 1/2" drives, SAE, Metric, "deeps," "shallows," six-point and twelve-point sockets. I have specialty ones for removing oxygen sensors and spark plugs.

I am nearly done, and guess what? I have a full set for each of the places where we park tractors or cars. My father-in-law was always hunting for just the right size. When I'm done, I won't have to do that any more. Any sizes I'm missing I'll buy individually, until everything is ready to roll without me walking to another building to get one measly socket.

Makes one wonder what we might do if we addressed every mess that way. We confront messes daily but if we also clean up a little bit daily, without adding to it, we might save our mental health, our neighborhoods, the places we call home. 

We might save the world.

Creative Commons image from Publicdomainpictures.net

The Day Everything Broke

Today, so close to Halloween, offered up a share of tricks.

Last week, we cruised in our 1968 Chevy truck to go to an apple orchard. I rewarded the truck by putting it on the lift and changing the oil. Afterward, it would not start.

I was not quite ready  to curse. When our John Deere 1250 backhoe would not start, I cursed plenty. I needed it for digging holes to plant some bushes and trees.

I cursed in private, then recalled my recent lessons about turning frustration into gratitude.

So I got serious about diagnosis. The truck? I'd flooded it trying to start it by the throttle under the hood instead of the gas pedal. Solution: pull the spark plugs (due for a change anyway) and let it sit on the lift (for whose repair I'm thankful) and try  again when the new plugs come from Amazon (than you, Jeff Bezos: our local auto-parts store was clueless). While I was at it, I prepared to update everything to an electronic ignition: an invisible and relatively cheap (under $400) upgrade that makes starting an antique vehicle vastly easier.

The backhoe? I spent about $150 for a new battery (being thankful that I had diagnosed the starting problem) but after the beast ran for 5 minutes, it quit. Would I curse more?

A little. I cursed once or twice, until I recalled how my talented brother-in-law Joe fixed a similar problem on a different diesel: a small fuel leak made that tractor stall after a few minutes, as the fuel system pressurized.

I checked the lines on our backhoe. Sure enough, a plastic bowl that separates water from fuel had cracked, and fuel leaked out, starving the big Yanmar motor as it warmed up. A bit of epoxy provided a quick repair, lasting long enough to move the tractor and dig one hole in the ground for a shrub.

A new fuel bowl is on its way. 

By the way, I recalled how my father-in-law pinned himself under the rear tire of that selfsame backhoe, when he did something in haste. He survived, a miracle, but was never the same again. Life is short: make haste slowly, or festina lente, as the Ancients Romans said.

Let's face it: machines are easier to fix (and break) than humans, at least if you know something about machines. Yet some of these same Tractorpunk ideas might help with a difficult, even broken, human.

But first, let's dig some big holes in the ground and burn some rubber!

Gleaning Time

This word will be a good one for my workplace blog, where I propose a Word of the Week and Metaphor of the Month.

On the farm, or even in a small garden, gleaning has a strong purpose of connecting us with the final turn of the season of warmth to the colder, darker months ahead. I tend to glean--gather whatever remains from my final heavy harvest--on the day of first frosts. That would be tonight and tomorrow night in Central Virginia!

I filled a bushel basket with some summer squash, a lone cucumber, a few tomatoes, and many, many hot peppers bound for chopping and fermenting. It sounds sad, this last picking of fruits, but really it's a fun way to say "thank you" to the garden beds and "hello!" to fall plantings: broccoli, lettuce, kale, garlic and onions mostly. 

Nan and I then put heavy row cover on the smallest seedlings and trucked giant piles of dying weeds and garden debris to our two compost piles (a long-term one for weeds, a shorter-term pile for soil amendments, leaves, and kitchen scraps).  We spread fresh straw around the new plants we have for fall (Kale appeared just as the basil finished up) and continued to glean lessons from a rather bad year in the garden. Mostly that was my fault: late start, travel in May, laziness in July and August.

 Next year we will change how we manage our raised beds and mowing our paths, and remove any remaining weed-block fabric. We will rotate basil more mindfully (black spot appeared on it at season's end, so it cannot be composted).  We also gleaned some good ideas about planting a second crop of squash in late August, to beat the squash-bug cycle.  One lesson we gleaned involved herbicides: sadly, we cannot manage 300' of fence-line without some judicious application. With a good deal of that fence now covered in thick vines, we'll cut, spray, and maintain it better to keep weeds out and the sun on our garden. We lost a lot of produce to the shade this year. 

That all said, I managed to put up a gallon of tomato sauce in pint jars, nearly that much Blackberry and Fig jam, and get a fair onion crop. The garlic did not get harvested in time, so it sprouted. I gleaned all that; the soft-neck variety will be trimmed and pickled; the hard-necks went right back into a new bed. Next year, hard-necks will be our speciality as they keep so well.

I hope the lessons you gleaned from your gardens help in 2023.

Better Safe Than...Botulism

When my weirdo friend Gary and I were little, as precocious little boys with a love of reading do, we would say the names of ailments and diseases. We would then laugh like busy pint-sized demons.

Leprosy!
Jungle Rot!
Hernia! (This one we thought should be a first name)
Rickets!
Malaria! (Also a name)
Botulism!

Not so funny now, and we've lost Gary (to none of those listed).  For my part, I want to avoid Botulism if I can. When I can. During canning.

I put up a fair quantity of my Middle-Eastern tomato sauce this year, using my typical recipe and adding lemon juice to each jar, as today's varieties are not as acidic as those our grannies grew.

And being stupid, I canned them in a water bath, as I have long recommended at this site. All the jars sealed, but today I'm going to pop the lids, empty the jars, re-sterilize them, add more lemon, reheat the sauce, refill and can the jars in my pressure-cooker canner.

Why all that work? One, I love that sauce. Two, the jury is out on water-bath canning or pressure-cooker canning for tomato sauces, with my canner's manual recommending boiling water for salsa (is my recipe that?) and the National Center for Home Food Preservation (yay academia!) recommending pressure-cooker canning for spaghetti sauces without meat. Here is their FAQ page. They wisely advise on that page "The specific recipe, and sometimes preparation method, will determine if a salsa can be processed in a boiling water canner or a pressure canner. A process must be scientifically determined for each recipe."

So let's call my sauce vegetarian spaghetti  (without even one meatball and therefore, no bread. Google that one). And I will use the pressure-cooker method the National Center recommends, since it guarantees that food reaches 240 degrees. That will kill off any bacteria that can cause botulism. 

Boiling water is not hot enough.

Friends, do not trust all the homesteading and DIY-bloggers on this matter. Go with the scientists, and good luck with your late-season food prep.