A great gift from our neighbors, they had it felled by professionals as it was menacing their house. All I had to to was show up and buck it up, which still took a full day.Ā Several limbs were the same size of the full trees I usually go after. I had to move the main trunk logs with the tractor, splitting them will be a whole other matter.
A sugarhouse / tool shed / tractor garage / soap making shop, is being born. We’ve had many projects lacking dry space. I’m barely documenting anything, I also have to post some pictures of how incredible the garden is this year. This has all become less than extraordinary: growing awesome gardens, putting together buildings is simply what we do now. A sign of the completeness of the transformation we undertook 8 years ago. In a lot of ways we feel like we don’t need to achieve anything anymore while looking ahead to several large projects for the coming years. Maybe all we had to achieve was making this who we are, everything else follows naturally without fuss.
3 pillars which will be buried to support the lean-to part of the building
Site prep day, truck got stuck
Concrete pouring day, I’ll skip the stresses of dealing with contractors
12′ walls are no joke
He can help more and more but it’s still hard to have him around the site for all the dangers
Not the most conventional framing method but the computer model says it’ll work and I’ve grown accustomed to not questioning what the computer says. I braced the building because there won’t be shearing rated sheathing on the walls and we do get high winds. The roof line will be broken by a sizeable cupola. 20′ rafters also are no joke.
Starting to look good š 
at least for the next few years, until we could shield the hives better during the long winters. We were going to put things on hold until we had a shed or a greenhouse to move hives in. I have to say beekeeping as fascinating as it was is extremely disappointing especially when compared to doing maple syrup. The way we keep bees in the West seems to be full of human dependence. Fumigating with chemicals, feeding refined sugar, neither of which is exactly local or sustainable.
Through the past couple of years I’ve wondered if some bugs would find residence in the hives which have been sitting empty outside.
Today as Nicole & the kids were in the yard, they had the privilege to witness a swarm of bees descend on one of the hives. A swarm sitting in a tree is impressive as it is, a swarm in motion is really something. Everything was buzzing around everywhere around the house.
It’s really quite a spectacle and we feel like we’ve just received a gift from Nature. Or gift from a beekeeping neighbor š hard to tell.
It’s kind of mind blowing to think of a swarm having a several miles radius to look for a new house, to pick our land, and specifically our hive. It really gets you thinking about the how smart the bees really are. They sent scouts everywhere, found an obviously good house (literally built for them), and somehow it won the popular vote through frenetic dancing. How amazing is this? Pretty fucking amazing if you ask me.
So here we are, bees in our hive, it’s a real pleasure to go see them. They’re already super busy coming in and out of the hive incessantly. We’ll give them a couple of days to acclimate, and we’ll see what we do next.
We have a brooder on our hands, she’s always resting on the eggs and super defensive. She barely gets out to feed. I’ve never seen a chicken display such behaviors, she makes herself bigger as you get closer and makes aggressive noises.
It also looks like her big mama attitude has triggered other chickens in seeking comfort under her feathers.
Someone ripped an early version of Mandalagaba, removed any mention of it, translated it, and is hosting it as their own.
Feels like I somehow made it as a developer to have my work stolen :). And honestly I don’t really give a crap I don’t have too many qualms about using code myself.
Today’s Mandalagaba would be very hard to reverse engineer, it’s way more complex, has more server components, and the client code is more obfuscated. In my opinion that’s how you retain control over your work, at least as a coder.
That’s it, after 4 years of slowly learning and ramping up our solar production, we figured out enough to run a fridge. In truth we’ve had capacity for a while now, but I had things wired sub-optimally in a way that prevented us from running anything requiring surge power (power tools, condensers). Silly me for wiring our load to the “load” port on the charge controller, this port is apparently only intended for small loads. It always blows my mind how incredibly disparate information is about solar installs online. There’s so much fuzziness, various understandings, theories, concepts which apply, or not, no one really knows. Most posts are a person asking some random simple question followed by 50 answers going deep in the weeds on some highly specific aspect, unrelated to the question, and that no one but its writer gives a crap about. In one of these random threads someone alluded to this fact, that the load port on the charge controller isn’t really meant for anything surging. Sure enough, after wiring the inverter straight to the batteries, I can power fridges, ACs and power tools. It’s a very nice step up.
Now of course because nothing is ever simple I had other issues with our inverter so I just got another nice one which is really the cat’s meow.Ā We now have a full backup solar system, extra panels, batteries, charge controllers and inverter. They just all suck a little more š but I’m sure they’ll be useful somewhere some time.
After 4 years of battling with various shitty refrigeration arrangements.
I added 2 batteries, the fridge is a power hog.
Oh and I used the opportunity to revamp the solar monitoring page, mainly I separated the 12VDC circuit from the 110VAC one and recalibrated the sensors.
We’ve been catching up on all the ice cream we missed on (note that we ate plenty in the past 4 years, just not as much as we would like, which is too much) 
Now, having a fridge is really really nice. I joke that if I had remembered beer was so fresh in it, I would have solared us up enough to power one upon arrival. The reality is that I had to learn how things work and make plenty of mistakes along the way, and that the solar project competes for time against all the other projects.
We did question the need for a fridge for years, we were hoping to change our eating habits to not need one. The truth is that we didn’t (cheese is just too good), and that our eating habits “degraded” immediately after getting one. The fridge is always full and holds a lot of less healthy food we did with less of only a few weeks ago.
Our main concern however, and this may come as a surprise, is the noise that a fridge makes. Our house used to be extremely quiet, it’s something we noted when we moved in, just how eerily quiet the house was. Neither of us had experienced a house this quiet, and it’s something we appreciated. I thought the fridge noise would get on my nerves, but in reality I find it soothing because it makes me think about all the good stuff in there that’s being kept nice and fresh. Did I mention fresh beer is yummy? It looks like 4 years of not having a fridge made me appreciate how nice they are.
Now the coolest thing about this whole deal, is how we’re turning Sun heat into cold. It feels like cheating, and it’s elating. The hotter it gets, the more cold we can generate. How does that even make sense? I’m sure I can understand it but I choose not to, it’s just too good left as universe breaking supernatural magic.
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I finally got the tractor to where it could work on the monstrous wood chip pile, so much fun!
then I dropped the biggest tree I ever cut. It’s been a good record breaking day, I took down 6 giant pines and several others which were all within striking distance of where we’re getting ready to build a sugar house.
the final boss today: one big fucking Christmas tree
I was apprehensive at first, I had never cut anything this large. Everything went well except on the smaller trees when I was rushing a little more and 2 didn’t go where they were supposed to. All the big ones did, experience is really nice, not that it removes all surprises. A few years ago I would have been shaking approaching anything half this size with a chainsaw.
No more plastic wedges for me
No one was allowed anywhere near the site of the treepocalypse for several hours, the house shook several times. When the carnage was over, Robin got to tame a sea of green to build Fort Awesome.
And it’s still updated š
It’s funny and a little cringy to go back to the early posts when I didn’t have many interesting things to say. It feels as though I eventually found my voice. Part journal, part project documentation & sharing. One of the unintended and very nice side effect of documenting projects on a public forum is that it forces me to finish them well. I’m an itch scratcher and it’s easy to move on from an 80% finished project having seen the results. The remaining 20% are all boring polish and documentation. By putting them online, I’m obligated to present them in a fully baked form and I’ve never regretted having done so. I’m not sure who the audience is besides myself, the sections are a bit all over the place. What I do know is that some posts are more popular than others, some surprisingly so. Even though I didn’t do a good job at keeping logs through the past decade, here are the most popular posts today, using the month of March 2019 as a snapshot in time:
#1 – Somehow I’m maintaining the most popular MAC address to IPv6 link-local converter online. Not sure how that happened but here we are, 12370 hits, 35% of all visitors on my blog are people curious about this. That’s what happens when you’re the first result on Google. Not super glamorous eh?
#2 – My article exposing the idea, tools, and techniques for turning the visitors of your websites into a super computer. 2793 hits, 8% of traffic.
#3 – Glamor galore: the original blog post from which Mandalagaba was born. Now, this is just the remnant of what is now a separate entity, yet it has it tentacles into enough things online to bring 1986 hits (6% of traffic).
#4 – You just got to convert your IPv6 link-local address back into a MAC right? 1829 hits, 5%.
#5 – Some obscure piece of Python interaction with SNMP. 936 hits, 3%. I think we’re starting to see the power of documenting weird little pieces of computer lore I had a hard time gathering myself.
#6 – and I’ll stop here with 407 hits and 1% of traffic, my well documented foray into writing PAM modules. This has picked up recently with a widespread push for multi factor authentication.
All the following ones are of the same nature, some script or method I came up with and documented. Together they account for a large portion of visits. I guess no one cares about life on a homestead or Duplos :).
There’s what happens on a standard month, and there’s the temporary effect of having something chosen by the internet for its 5 minutes of fame. These waves put things into perspective and it’s surprising how quickly they fade away.
Even though it’s not the most popular post on the day by day basis, the biggest wave by far was generated by the original post of Mandalagaba (only #3 above). I lost these logs to destructive auto-rotation but they amounted to ~200,000 visits in 24 hours and ~100,000 trailing in the subsequent few days. The first hours were pretty brutal for a poor 3Mbps DSL connection.
Mandalagaba is now hosted in the cloud for its propensity to generate such waves so it doesn’t count in the logs after this. Otherwise It’d be my daily #1 by far, and responsible for the 2nd and 3rd biggest waves. I’m hoping I’ll be able to repatriate it back home once we get fiber, hopefully some time this year.
In the absence of Mandalagaba, the 2nd biggest wave is my article on turning web traffic into a super computer with ~50,000 visits including ~24,000 in the first 24 hours. I was pretty worried when I released it that reaction would be very negative given the more than gray subject matter. To the contrary it was very well received, even yielding the best compliment ever thrown in my general direction:
Thank you Mikerg, your comment made my day!
While the popularity of Mandalagaba happened to my surprise, I had a suspicion that the Super Computer article would make some kind of a splash once released. It happened immediately and it was nice to see. Let’s just say I had been extremely obsessed by browser based computing in the months leading up to it. And I felt like a mad man with a mad idea at the bottom of a long meandering rabbit hole. Coming out of my hole and seeing minds blowing up left and right was reassuring in that I had in fact seen something, and I wasn’t the only one seeing it. We were all left thinking “oh, I guess that’s possible now”, with the promise that things only get more intense with more acceptance of standards such as WebAssembly.
Little meta anecdote: while I did not run any computation to keep things as clean as possible during the wave, the Super Computer article at its height gave me a nice Super Computer comprised of 500 nodes :). I can only imagine the amount of computing power a piece of popular culture could yield. It’s interesting to ponder how the attention economy could impact access to processing power.
Even though the number of hits is lower on this article, I think the reception is more impressive for how niche the topic is. Everyone likes to draw a mandala, very few people know what the heck is going on in this one.
That’s about it for the big waves. It’s interesting to note they both happened very recently in the decade this blog has been online. Maybe I’m finally getting good enough at something I can actually contribute to the world :).
One thing is for sure, I really like self hosting. I’ve been running my own mail & web servers for 17 years, it was for fun and learning at first. It was economical second.Ā As time went on and saw various platforms rise, fall, consolidate, or turn into cesspools of the worst human traits, it became about control. Self hosting is more satisfying today than it ever was. The internet was supposed to be decentralized and so I enjoy placing my pebble against the few towering mountains.
No ads, no greedy incentives, no privacy violation, no monetization attempt, no influencing or building of any sort of followership. At some point along the way, I decided to stay in the information age and not step into the attention age. That’s my pebble.
And it’s been a wet one.
So wet I can’t get the tractor anywhere it could be useful, I Haven’t been able to make it past this mess.
So wet ducks decided to come live with us. Never seen ducks on the land before.
IĀ can’t scoop the wood chips with the tractor so it’s all shovel & elbow grease.
I found some snow digging deep in the wood chip pile, I threw a snowball at Robin and his friend thinking I was so smart to throw snowballs in May.
Then this happened 
But it didn’t last. We are adding to the orchard as we do every year. More importantly we replaced the blueberries that didn’t take, and moved the raspberry which never did well. Not everything we put in the ground thrives 
I doubled the electric fence to maximize our chances of zapping pests.
We build a movable chicken coop, and tidied up their fence, of course they quickly found their way out.
Everything is in full swing, cleanups, the garden, the wood pile. Time is sparse and I have little time to document it all, or interest to do so as after 4 years, this is has all become less extraordinary in the best way possible.
One is almost impossible to find.
Everything looks miserable when the snow melts. We can’t quite tidy up all this with the remaining snow and mud but we’re itching to.
Dead animal warning.
Robin stumbled upon our much cherished porcupine in the woods… It was the land’s mascot, had just come out of one more tough Winter, we thought it was made of steel, and that it would outlive us all. Tough to tell what happened to it, I’m not even sure what porcupines can die of besides old age.
We’ll set the trail cam back on it’s house to see what’s going on there now.
We pulled the plug on the sugaring operation after a small but satisfying season.
We boiled for 4 days and made 5.25 gallons. Enough for our needs and some padding.
Sap started flowing a full month later than what we’re used to. For a moment we were worried the season wouldn’t even happen in the first place.
As always, early flow is clearer
This is the last year we are boiling outside. This Summer we will be building a proper Sugar House. I suspect our production will drastically increase once we don’t need to spend days outside.
A Sugar House will also make things easier logistically, we will be able to let half boiled sap sit a night not worrying about bears, we will be able to can on the spot, raise the tank to gravity feed into the evaporator.
A Sugar House will prevent the much dreaded nightly walk carrying 5 gallons of steaming hot almost syrup back home through the mud, snow and ice. Nicole took a picture to celebrate my last such walk.
The snow is still way too deep for the ATV, so this is a sled year.
30 gallons of sap is almost impossible to pull by hand on anything but snow, so the ATV takes over on the plowed paths.
Mound of snow = easy gravity transfer
Vermont can use a little more humidity.
The end of 2 days boiling, pulling at night right before it’s at syrup density. We filter at every transfer.
Finishing inside on the stove, this allows for finer control of the evaporation and the mason jars are right there for when it’s ready.
This Dragon which found its way into the Mandalagaba digest. I haven’t seen anyone really touch recursion yet, and then this shows up.
This is my absolute favorite thing about adding features to Mandalagaba: seeing them used in ways I didn’t even realize were possible. Here recursion is used to create ethereal traits. Of course mirror symmetry is used for the face too but that I had seen before :). The hours spent hammering out recursion are all of a sudden, absolutely worth it.
The artist is here: https://www.instagram.com/laralaubert
