Trying my hand at woodpile art
although “art” is a big word for this, I’m still pretty happy about it for a first attempt :).
If it’s not keets, it’s chickens
We ordered 12 more Rhode Island Reds, they will be our 3rd “batch”. They are indeed a good breed in the cold. They arrived with their beaks trimmed which is 100% barbaric and we will never order chickens from this place again. The old timer farmer we had gotten them from thus far stopped doing it so we had to look for alternatives. It didn’t even occur to us that this could happen, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised when stepping out of a personal interaction with a local farmer, and into one with an out of state large scale breeder. This shall serve as a great reminder to not ever do that for chickens and anything regarding food or animals. Fuck these guys.
Shrooms
The past few days have been amazing for mushroom of all sorts. The diversity of mushrooms within a few square feet is amazing.
The only one we looked up because it looked so peculiar: American Caesar Amanita.
A day later, same mushroom:
Yoink
“I’m gonna have me some of these”
Random Caterpillar
I stumbled upon this little guy climbing with all his might.
The Wordiest Word
With Markov chain based random word generation, I essentially have tables of the probabilities for letters sequences. With this I’ve always wanted to know what the most English word was. The word with the highest probability of each letter following its predecessors.
I finally bit the bullet and produced it; well them, because it varies depending on the corpus & depth used. All in all it’s not that impressive, just kind of cool to know. I don’t know what I was expecting, some amazing word that would rock my socks off.
Without further ado, here they are:
| Corpus | Depth | Wordiest Word |
| basic_english_words | 1 | st |
| basic_english_words | 2 | st |
| basic_english_words | 3 | struction |
| basic_english_words | 4 | statement |
| basic_english_words | 5 | store |
| unabridged_english_dictionary | 1 | prerererererererere… |
| unabridged_english_dictionary | 2 | press |
| unabridged_english_dictionary | 3 | press |
| unabridged_english_dictionary | 4 | preconcer |
| unabridged_english_dictionary | 5 | preconcertification |
-1 racoon
After the keets were taken out by a racoon, we bought a trap. We left store bought corn in there for weeks, but the racoon has standards and prefers local organic stuff. So instead it destroyed some of our corn plants not 10 feet away from the trap. As with the keets, leaving 80% the food untouched. Their modus operandi: destroying everything and taking a couple of bites is extremely enraging.
The day I found our half eaten corn cobs on the ground, I decided it was time for the big guns. I opened a can of super fancy French canned fish we reserve for special occasions.
I reluctantly shared a tiny bit of it with the trap, and special occasioned the rest myself.
It had been many nights of failure, but this stuff is potent, and so the very same night, the racoon was trapped. Proving once again that French food is to die for.
Notice how it pulled inside 30′ of the string I had attached to the trap’s handle and proceeded to gnaw and pee on it. It’s only fair that it would spend all night being a jerk under the circumstances.
I had setup the trail cam next to the trap,
[mejsvideo mp4=”http://ben.akrin.com/videos/DSCF0604.AVI.mp4″ ogg=”http://ben.akrin.com/videos/DSCF0604.AVI.ogv” webm=”http://ben.akrin.com/videos/DSCF0604.AVI.webm” poster=”http://ben.akrin.com/videos/DSCF0604.AVI.jpg” width=”640″ height=”360″]
and now I know there’s 2… So far though, second one seems to have wisened up to what the trap means, or maybe the stench of pee and fear hormones isn’t an enticing accompaniment to a fancy diner.
The Secret World of Leaves
Some sort of eggs under a zucchini leaf.
There’s a Japanese party at the currant plant.
I have no idea what is going on there, at a first glance, it looks like ants are gathering sunflower seeds (this is a sunflower plant); yet upon closer inspection, other insects are involved and and the seed looking things could be their cocoons. Maybe some aphids the ants are raising?
I found several of these neatly folded birch trees leaves. Some halfway done and tied up with some web. I opened one up but whatever natural cycle this is was already over and there was nothing in there but refuse of some sort. I love the idea that some insect is making a little sleeping bag with available material.
Petals are leaves come on, a bumble bee got in and the other insect decided it wasn’t welcome in that flower any longer.
Slow-mo Bird Song
I love recording birds in slow-mo to hear the complexity of their calls. My brain can’t process them at actual speed.
[mejsvideo mp4=”http://ben.akrin.com/videos/slomo_bird.mp4.mp4″ ogg=”http://ben.akrin.com/videos/slomo_bird.mp4.ogv” webm=”http://ben.akrin.com/videos/slomo_bird.mp4.webm” poster=”http://ben.akrin.com/videos/slomo_bird.mp4.jpg” width=”640″ height=”360″]
PHP file upload to a Google storage bucket
Download
Google setup & use
1- Create a storage bucket for the script to upload into
Go to the Google Cloud Console, click on “Storage”, “Browser”.
“Create Bucket”
Give it a name and click “Create”.
2- Create a service account for the script
Expand the “IAM & admin” section, click on “Service accounts”.
Click “Create Service Account”.
Give it a name, check “Furnish a new private key”, JSON, and click “Save”.
Save the JSON credentials file which you are prompted to download into a safe location.
3- Grant “Object Creator” permissions on the bucket to the service account
Go back to the storage bucket you created
Edit its permissions
The JSON credentials file you just downloaded contains the email for the service account you created, copy it.
And paste it into the “Add members” field, select the permission to be “Storage Object Creator”. This service account doesn’t need permissions for anything else than dumping files in there. Not even viewing them.
Optional: if you want the files uploaded by the script to be publicly viewable, add the permission “Storage Object Viewer” to the user “allUsers”. Accounts are all referred to by email in Google land, but there exist special keywords such as “allUsers”.
Done with the Google setup 🙂
4- Running the script
If you haven’t already, download the script at the top of this page. Decompress it and edit the config at the top.
$credentials_file_path is the full path to the JSON credentials file you got from Google when you created the service account. It should be a secure location.
$destination_bucket_name is the name of the bucket you created
$access_token_cache_file_path is a location where Google’s OAuth tokens are cached, it too should be a secure location.
Run the script with only 1 argument being the file you want to upload. The script can also be included and used outside of CLI, in that case simply call the upload( $filename ) function. 
The script returns the URL to the file in the bucket.
Voilà:
A small milestone
The millionth penstroke on Mandalagaba since the code rewrite last February
There’s more data I’d like to pull out of this. For example the average length of a stroke, average time, how many human lives where spent drawing mandalas, et cetera :).
Counter Measures
The fauna has taken a huge bite out of our work this year. A woodchuck ate the garden, crows ravaged the blueberry plants, deer went after young fruit trees & currants, finally a racoon simply killed all the keets and didn’t even eat them. One animal after another has gone after our work and voided much of it, this is the first year this happens to such a scale and it is making us feel besieged.
It’s interesting just how much brutal competition there is in nature. I used to think of nature as an idealized garden of Eden, but it’s closer to a ruthless competition which often ends in death. I despise man’s expansionist dominance over nature, yet living closer to nature means participating in the competition. Hawks circles over our baby, ticks & mosquitoes suck our blood, raccoons take out our flocks, deer reap the fruits of our sweat. I’m fine with letting nature get its share but nature is perfectly fine taking it all. I don’t enjoy exerting human dominance but I can’t let that go, it’s time to be more aggressive.
Intel gathering
The little fuckers parade around the chicken coop like they own the place
Unfortunately not at a set time at which I could throw them a little welcome party
A trap does stay up all night, notice to pull string in case the skunk gets in there
Well at least I caught something with the box the trap came in
Super scary scarecrow
The trees are now in prison until they have more mass
Keets
The chickens were “gifted back to nature” last Winter. No egg production and a new baby in the house brought this shortcut we didn’t like taking.
I’ve updated the list of traditions and cultural artifacts I understood since moving to Vermont for the occasion. It made me understand how so many religions have the concept of sacrificing animals to deities, and the idea of offerings to gods in general. I heard the coyotes come from the next hill over the same night and rejoice at the bounty. I never had issues with coyotes, coincidence? I think not. Everything happening at night feels supernatural. It’s not the first time we take animals deep into the forest to be cleaned up, and this was likely a frequent occurrence in the lives of humans when religions popped up.
We’re populating the coop this time with Guinea Hens. Apparently they’re like guard dogs, but they also eat ticks, and snakes, and they require little feeding.