jc blog - tales of a modern-day nomadic hunter-gatherer

Follow jcomeau_ictx on Twitter This is the weblog of Intrepid Wanderer. You never know what you might find here; graphic descriptions of bodily functions, computer programming secrets, proselytizing for the antichrist, miscellaneous ranting and kvetching, valuable information on living off the land... if you don't share my rather weird interests you may want to try slashdot instead.

You can consider my Del.icio.us links an extension to my blog, as are my LifeTango goals and my other to-do items. My to-buy list is also public, but only for sharing any useful ideas that might be there; I'm not requesting charity, neither do I offer it.

You can find me easily in google searches, as jcomeau, jcomeau_ictx, or jcomeauictx. There are lots of other jcomeaus, but AFAIK I'm the only jcomeau_ictx out there so far.

If you want to comment on anything you see here, try the new Facebook comments, reachable by clicking the "[comment]" link at the end of each post. If for some reason that isn't working, go ahead and email me, jc.unternet.net. You know what to do with the first dot. Make the 'subject' line something reasonably intelligent-looking or it goes plunk! into the spambasket unread.

This RSS feed may or may not work. Haven't fiddled with it in forever. RSS Feed


2018-12-28-1511Z

I just finished Life of Pi from a PDF I downloaded somewhere off the web, on the recommendation of a Facebook friend. a truly amazing story. for me the most interesting part was the carnivorous island teeming with meerkats; how useful would it be to find such a natural desalination plant and replicate it throughout the tropics! [comment]

2018-12-27-2236Z

did some experiments with those little YACC stoves I made last year. first tried with those little bottles of purported 96% alcohol "Angel" from Arámburo. fail. I doubt if those are much more than 40%.

then I tried with the Michoacano I bought in the 1-liter glass bottles. yep, that's the real deal. took about 15 minutes to bring a pint of water to a boil, but it did work. and now I have coffee for the rest of the afternoon. [comment]

2018-12-26-1735Z

if you have to redirect a site that has hard links in it, and it's difficult or impossible to change the source (such as when using clickfunnels), you could find your forms broken because the POST gets converted to a GET.

this can be fixed by changing the Apache status code from the default 302 to 307.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com/$1 [R=307,L]
[comment]

2018-12-26-0001Z

both the DJIA and Bitcoin are back where they were a year ago September! [comment]

2018-12-25-1958Z

tried something new: roasted coffee in oil (avocado oil, in this case). advantages: roasts much more quickly and evenly, even on my modified butane/propane camp stove. disadvantages: the oil would likely gum up the works of my hand coffee grinder, so I had to grind it in the molcajete. and pouring hot water into the molcajete and then into another container didn't work very well: I spilled a lot, and still there's a lot of coffee grounds in the molcajete.

and there's going to be lots of spices in this first batch, from all the previous uses of the molcajete. but it should be interesting. I'll be having a cup in just a few minutes. [comment]

2018-12-24-0421Z

tonight I did things a little differently: instead of watching a movie and drinking beer, I made some more coffee and did a little programming, a Chrome extension to keep my Facebook feed set to "most recent posts". then I put it up on the Chrome Web Store to see if anyone is willing to pay for it. I doubt it, there are other, free, extensions which purportedly do the same thing. but it gets my foot in the door. it cost me $5 to register as a developer, that was $100 pesos out of my food money, but hopefully it was a worthwhile investment. [comment]

2018-12-23-1451Z

strange dreams last night. one thing that stood out was the critters that looked like tiny Brazil nuts lying on the ground. they were actually little gelatinous blobs that occasionally elongated and pulsed out in a pattern that made them look as if the ends and middle were spinning in opposite directions. they particularly seemed to like resting and pulsing in my underarms. [comment]

2018-12-23-0429Z

if I had had painkillers on hand last Monday night I'm pretty sure I would have taken some. I couldn't sleep from the pain in my left foot and was worried I wouldn't be able to for a few days. however, by 4AM or so I slept from sheer exhaustion and by Tuesday night the pain had diminished to where I was able to get a good night's sleep. so I'm glad I don't have any. I might never have realized how good my body is at healing itself.

those Tevas I bought at a yard sale down here in La Paz a few years ago and have been keeping in storage fell apart after just a month or so wearing them. the sole is peeling right off. this isn't the first pair I've had this problem with, either. it's as though nobody makes quality footwear any more.

trying to cure my athlete's foot again. I have my wetsocks on with bicarb inside, but this time there are small holes in the socks and I'm not sure it's going to work. it seemed that the key a few years back was the alkaline "steam bath" I kept them in.

finished my tourtiere meat yesterday. it was a good experiment. next time I'll have to also try a vegetarian version using shredded jicama.

I had a little work with getting a broken clickfunnels site back online. when I took on the job, I had no idea what clickfunnels are, and I'm still fairly clueless on the subject. it looks as though they keep everything deliberately obscure, so that not even their clients know what's going on. their whole website is encoded in their own jargon. I finally realized they're using cloudflare for hosting the pages their software generates, but I could never find out how to configure it such as adding .htaccess files or installing an SSL certificate. I finally ended up using my client's clickfunnels.com subdomain and redirecting to his home page from his own domain instead of trying to deal with their clueless customer support.

roasted a microbatch of green coffee beans today, first time in years. one really cool thing about La Paz, and possibly many cities in Mexico, is that green coffee beans are sold in just about any supermarket. I've never noticed that back in the states.

I had more things to share but I've forgotten. maybe it'll come back to me later. [comment]

2018-12-22-0609Z

so as it turns out, I didn't injure my ankle after all, just the heel of my left foot. you'd think I'd be able to localize it better than that, but whatever, it took a few days to know for sure. anyway, the pain has lessened to where I could do my 15 minute jog again today.

if I'd had painkillers on hand Monday night, when the pain was so severe I couldn't sleep, I might have taken them. glad I didn't. by the next night the pain was totally tolerable. by this (Friday) morning it was all but gone.

I had a little job recently dealing with clickfunnels. what a crock of shit that company is. they package a product in total gobbledygook. nobody even knows what the fuck they're getting, everything on their page is their own made-up jargon. you have no control over what they give you, and when it fails you have to hope you get someone in customer support who knows what's going on.

as it turns out, all they provide is webpage generation, and hosting which is in turn provided by cloudflare.

anyway, after failing to get clickfunnels to remove the redirect to SSL (https), which wasn't working because the cert got deleted somehow, I finally redirected the A record to the client's Godaddy site, for which at least I had control over DNS and .htaccess, and put in redirects to the [client].clickfunnels.com page. this seems to be working well. [comment]

2018-12-20-1827Z

just got the BCH back from my other wallet. this time when I did the "split", I tried to bypass the 2nd step and send directly to my existing BCH wallet, but it ignored my selection and sent it back to the same account. oh well. I only lost 1% of my holdings, and I gained an equal amount of BSV. overall a gain. [comment]

2018-12-20-1407Z

almost made my first biggish mistake with cryptocurrency. I claimed BSV from BCH without first using the splitter tool -- in no way is it clear that the warning is a link to the tool.

anyway, I lost my BCH for the less valuable BSV. only a few dollars, but it hurt. so I opened a ticket with Coinomi support (free!) and got the answer within an hour! just had to open a new BCH wallet with derivation path M/44H/236H/0H, which gets the BSV funds automatically, and then run the splitter, sending all the funds back to itself through a Coinomi intermediary. once that transaction clears, I can then send those to my original BCH wallet and delete the temporary wallet.

then I have to do the same to the Coinomi wallet on my other phone.

saved from my hastiness! [comment]

2018-12-20-0142Z

my evening attempt at a tourtiere hand pie worked out to be the best so far. shaped by hand a bottom piece on the comal, put some of the tourtiere meat on it, and hand-shaped the top, pinching top and bottom together. cooked both sides, covered with an inverted Pyrex-equivalent bowl. used the remaining dough to make some decidedly non-Kosher rugelach. [comment]

2018-12-19-0053Z

left foot was in so much pain last night I didn't think I'd ever get any sleep, but ended up with probably 7 hours of it between 8PM and 9AM. jogged a few blocks barefoot today to start re-training my style back in the Raramuri groove. [comment]

2018-12-16-1558Z

I was musing over my morning coffee about something that comes into my mind occasionally, that idea of Warp and Weft from KSR's Years of Rice and Salt.

the warp would be street gangs. every male in a neighborhood would be a gangster. that doesn't mean he terrorizes his or surrounding neighborhoods, raping and pillaging; it just means he takes responsibility for his tribe, arms himself and trains, not just in fighting but things like first aid, radio communication, and local wild food sources. of course women could also take on this role, but it maybe wouldn't be expected of them.

as an example, I could be of the La Cresta Ridge gang, which would be delimited by the stretch of Hill Blvd from English Street to La Cresta, and then everything up the hill. we'd share the open space with the other neighboring gangs, perhaps with some low-level fighting for dominance to make sure we'd get the pick of the deer that roam the ridge and ravine. we'd patrol as our families gather plums and blackberries.

the weft, as I may have mentioned before, is a network of clans based on interest or ability. for example, I would align myself with the technician, programmer, kinetic sculpture racing, and kayaking clans. clan membership is what facilitates travel between areas, keeps warfare between tribes (gangs) at a low level, and just helps to tie things together into a mostly peaceful quilt across large areas.

the idea needs to be fleshed out a lot more. perhaps I should write some short stories illustrative of the concept. [comment]

2018-12-13-1721Z

while crypto is still looking dismal, the Dow has finished a top formation very similar to the one from early this year. right now it's comparable to March 20, 2018 where it might begin another climb up, or it might crash. if the latter, I expect funds will start trickling back into metals and cryptocurrencies. [comment]

2018-12-11-0001Z

deep-frying breads recently has had some major flops due to the fats getting bubbly and tasting bitter and soapy. what was saponifying them? I thought it was just getting old until I tried a brand-new container of lard and the same thing happened. turned out it was baking soda! so I tried deliberately saponifying it. didn't really work. it made the grease water-soluble but not really soapy.

anyway, mystery solved. from now on, all frybread has to be yeast-leavened. [comment]

2018-12-04-0057Z

I fasted all day up to an hour or so ago, when I ate some yogurt with cacao powder. thinking of eating some meat for dinner, but not sure I'm ready for it. [comment]

2018-12-03-0853Z

woke up and vomited my guts out. note to self: when the body says "enough", don't tell it you have to get your money's worth out of that 2nd Ballena. [comment]

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