Quick Note: Global HF Pirate Radio Weekend Coming Up

This Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.  Hm, by Zulu time it's already Friday.  Anyway, details at The SWLing Post.

A Local Source of Caffeine

Yaupon tea, made from yaupon holly leaves, is described in detail over at Atlas Obscura.

Hm.  I've got a backyard full of the stuff and have been chopping the overgrowth out of mountain bike trails for decades now, but I've never tried brewing it.  Think I'll try some commercially prepared first, in order to know the taste to be roasting for later.  In any case, Amazon has numerous suppliers, there's a good place to start.  Also, here's another informative article that spells out how to roast and use it, as well as a bit more history.

ps: Don't mistake it for privet.  One is (probably) good to drink, the other will kill you.  Don't know the difference?  Look it up and learn for yourself, I'm not going to attempt internet instruction on life-and-death matters like this, beyond putting out a general warning to not mistake it for privet.  So know before you... drink.

Backup Plan. Always have a Backup Plan.

And that's the topic of this week's The First 40 Miles podcast.  Redundancy, fall-back plans, etc.  A second way to clean up creek water, it's a good thing to have.  Have a listen for the rest, or just click on the link and read through them quickly.

Back to the topic of back-up water, it's also good to have more than one container.  I rely primarily on a 3 liter Camelbak bladder tucked into a sleeve in my pack.  While I've never actually had a hydration bag like that fail in the field, it could happen.  Think I'll pick up a couple of 1 liter collapsable bottles to serve as backups.  They'll also come in handy for on-trail refills – won't have to unpack the main bag to get at the hydration bladder.  Nice to have for extra water in camp too.  One top-off of all three containers in the evening, then there's plenty of water for cooking and a full Camelbak at the start of the next morning's miles.  Probably wouldn't hurt to pick up a Sawyer Mini filter as a back-up too.

For what it's worth, here's a post from last summer on water treatment complete with CDC links and some discussion.  TLDR version: Filter, then disinfect.

BTW, with last weekend's out-and-back trip on the Tuxachanie, my backpacking total for this winter comes to exactly 40 miles.  A milestone?  Yes, but a very small one.  The bugs and snakes are starting to stir, and it's time to get back on the mountain bike until next October.

Good Words on that Spitfire Tent

I'd put together a short tour and first impressions on a Eureka Spitfire 1 tent back in September, but after a couple of real trips it's worth noting that it's performing as well as initially expected.  Just a few things to add, and they're all positive:

• The non-door side vestibule is just big enough to hold a 50 liter pack vertically.  It leans snugly against the aluminum frame, is out of the weather, and is essentially invisible this way.
• The MSR mini-groundhog stakes aren't quite big enough to hold down the vestibule reliably.  A couple of the full-sized model (actually, similar from Coghlan's...  $0.75 each at Wally World) do the job.
• Some reviewers complain about the pointy ends of the tent (see below) being wasted floor space, but I find them handy for shoving clothes down by the foot or for room to keep a flashlight and other implements for when things go bump in the night up by the head.  Can't do much else with these ends, so nothing else impedes on these key functions.  Call it a feature, not a bug.
• Similarly, the stand-out points midway up the tent make for a little bit of bedside room for odds and ends.  Even room for a fully-equiped ham set-up, as you can see in last Sunday's post.
• While it's not completely free-standing, it's close.  It could be set up and moved much like a dome tent.  It'd be a little floppy until the two end stakes were driven in, but it'd work.  It's impressive how this eliminates about five feet of aluminum spine-pole and shaves the corresponding weight.

Bottom line is that with a winter's use of this thing, it's looking handier by the trip.

Weird Pointed Ends: Feature, not Bug

Sneak Peek at Kacey Musgraves' New Album

Golden Hour, over at NPR.  Whole enchilada.

Route 650 has been playing some songs from it for at least a week.

Drink It Black

Yeah, skip the weird additives in your coffee.  That's the advice over at one career site.  Better yet, err on the safe side and drink it black.

Sounds like good advice.  Also Eat Bacon, Don't Jog.

Backpacking & Playing Radio

Just back from a nice overnighter on the Tuxachanie Trail.  I'm still letting a cup of coffee settle in and revive the extremities before I start unpacking, but here are a couple of key pictures:


The first shows the campsite (north side of the lake at the POW Camp, well back in the woods; tent on left, ham radio gear on right), while the second shows the ham shack after being moved inside, after dark.

Here are some highlights:

• got the pack weight down to 38 lbs, made a big difference re last trip's 43 lbs.  More to lose though.
• The LNR EFT-10/20/40 antenna was strung out horizontally at about 5 feet between several bushes.  It tuned well – perhaps well enough to ditch the tuner – and performed admirably in this configuration.  For example, talked to a guy in California on 20 meters using a measly 5 Watts.
• There was a ham contest going on this weekend, with all of the usual meaninglessness.  While seemingly a good way to make contacts, it was too easy for a QRP signal to get lost in the kilowatt pile-ups and a net detriment to QSO count.
• When I'd had enough of that, I finished re-reading Santiago while listening to an Art Bell re-run in the background.  The FT-817nd did a good job of pulling WHAS's AM signal out out of the murk.
• The hike back went quickly, taking only 3 hours.  I attribute it to the lighter pack.
• Remember to remove eyeglasses from tent pocket before rolling and stowing in pack.
• While this was a well-spent trip, fundamentally I am a mountain biker, not a backpacker.  Things are warming up now, and I'll make a few more backpacking trips next winter, but it's time to get back on the MTB and get some breeze through my ripped jersey.
• More notes & details to come.

ps: Post-unpacking highlights:

• Sorting through miscellaneous crap I hauled and didn't use, some weight improvement is possible:
• Sans FT-817nd, there's every hope to get the loaded weight below 30 lbs.
• With the FT-817nd, there's every hope to get the weight below 35 lbs.
• The eyeglasses survived the tent roll-up without trauma!  Wonders never cease.

Winter Field Day Results

Even though the real reward was in the doing of the event, here are the Winter Field Day 2018 results.  I came in in the top quarter of the "Home" class radio stations, way better than I'd expected.  I'd really wanted to venture into the woods as an "Outdoor" station, but a cold driving rainstorm kept me bottled up.  Still, it's amazing what you can do with eight AA batteries and a pot of coffee.

It was a fun event and I look forward to doing it again next year.  The WFD people put on a great event; hats off to them.  And here's to better weather in 2019!

It Only Rains on Weekdays? Complete Reversal.

Hm, things are looking up in the extended forecast:

Well today's a pretty day, and the weather looks reasonable for Saturday and Sunday too.  I'd better get going here.

Silca Pumps Continued

Reading through the Silca site, I see that they've re-introduced the classic aluminum body Impero frame pump.  I used to have the cheaper plastic-bodied one (all I could afford in grad school), and even that was a monster at pumping tires.  Today's price of $165 is getting up there, but not crazily-so.  Still, I'll be sticking with CO2 inflators for the foreseeable future, mostly because they store better inside bags and out of the off-road spray of gunk.

By the way, the Impero pump has an interesting history behind it.  The first recorded use came in 52 BC when Julius Caesar aired up his tires using a prototype and won that year's Tour de Gaul in a crushing final sprint over Vercingetorix, to not only seize the Yellow Jersey but to also consolidate the Empire.  Hence the name.

Well, that's what I heard.  Anyway, these Silca Imperos are damned fine pumps and I used one for nearly ten years, finally selling it with the bike.  Would've kept it, but it wouldn't fit on my slightly smaller frame sized fat-tubed Cannonade.

A Real Bike for the Real World

Following up yesterday's upbeat post about Silca Pumps getting onboard with everyday financial realities, here's some more good cycling news: Salsa has introduced a butt-kicker of an entry-level gravel bike, aptly dubbed Journeyman.  Available with drop or flat bars and wheel/tire options spanning everything from road-only to true mountain, this bike covers 80% of all bases for 80% of bikers.  No, you will never win the local crit nor a downhill race on this thing – but really, how many of us do crits or competitive downhilling?  It will amply cover a local charity metric road century, a friendly gravel grinder, or even keep up on a recreational group ride on most mountain bike trails.  Referring back to last month's post on The Case for One Bike, the Journeyman checks a lot of boxes.

Here are some more details: article at Dirt Rag, press release at Salsa, and the catalog page at Salsa.

Now about price points... $900 and $1100 (for the two different component build-ups offered) are not cheap by any means, especially for someone just dabbing a toe into the waters.  However when you consider that this one bike does what it would've taken at least two bikes to do competently twenty years ago, it looks a bit more reasonable.  Fold in yesterday's posting about the value of quality tools and it becomes even more reasonable.

It's not just Salsa that's doing this either.  Look around down at your local bike story, there are many other brands cranking out similar does-everything-OK jewels.  The bike industry is moving in a very good direction lately.

Silca Bike Pumps – the news is good!

In the past I've bagged on the now-made-in-America incarnation of Silca bike pumps and accessories for coming back but only with $450 and $235 offerings.  However today the news is much better: Silca has re-introduced their basic Pista floor pump for a reasonable $125.  

Now you may balk at $125 for a bicycle tire pump when you can find a similar-looking item down at the big-box store for a fifth the money, but a quality tool is a quality tool and there's no such thing as a free lunch.  As of this year I've had my Pista floor pump for thirty years.  Having overhauled and replaced the leathers in it fifteen years ago, it works like new and is still better than anything else on the market.  Perhaps that's the best part – the pump is serviceable, you can get replacement parts, and it is a tool that is worth overhauling periodically.  Say, every decade or two.  How often to you see that these days?  Isn't this exactly the kind of they-don't-make'em-like-that-anymore quality everyone is longing for?  And if you want to go all political-economic on the matter, these pumps are made in America and widely recognized as the world standard in the field.  Knowing this, who would even want to buy a disposable plastic overseas-subsistence-labor-made pump in the first place?

Take a visit over at the Silca site and look around.  In addition to this working man's pump, they have some interesting accessories.  Nothing there is cheap in the dollar sense, but then nothing there is cheap in the quality sense either.

More later on this topic.

Movie Review: Atomic Blonde's 80-20 Rule

80% style and action, 20% story.  This really is a beautifully made movie and it was a blast to watch – exactly once.  It captures the style and feel and sound of certain aspects of 1989 right down to the rivets in the leather boots and the black-and-white striped table lamps.  For that, it's worth a watch.  The acting is impeccable as well.  The studio paid for a first-rate cast (Theron, Goodman, etc.) and in return got first-rate performances.

Where the movie stumbles is on the story line.  "Completely disjointed plot" is not the same as "filled with surprise twists that keep you mentally engaged."  It is enough to move things along however, if you're not a stickler for some logical progression of events, and by the end of the movie things get wrapped up in ways that somewhat make sense.  This is by no means a failure, but it could have been so much more.

Let's wrap this one up with a bottom line appraisal of 2-1/2 stars out of 4.  But to take this review a step further, call it 3 out of 4 for a first watching, and maybe 2 out of 4 for subsequent views (which will for me be a long time in the future, if ever).  It was fun to re-visit some aspects of 1989 and remember the hope, possibilities, and hot blondes of that time period, but without a coherent story to carry things it ultimately amounts to very little.

Hey Look! The Weekend's Here!

And how can we tell it's the weekend?

Oh right.  Never mind.

Harper Lee's Estate Sues Over Broadway Version of "Mockingbird"

Good.  Here's the full article at the NYT, and here's the bottom-line quote:

In the complaint filed Tuesday in federal court in Alabama, the estate argued that Mr. Sorkin's adaptation deviates too much from the novel, and violates a contract, between Ms. Lee and the producers, which stipulates that the characters and plot must remain faithful to the spirit of the book.

It's about time.  After decades of watching scriptwriters mangle well-regarded works of literature into generic story lines resulting in movies and plays that neither convey the author's original ideas nor actually turn a buck, it is gratifying to see an author's estate go after these hacks.

In other news, I hear that the estate of Robert Heinlein has despatched a crack team of up-armored camel spiders to Paul Verhoeven's last known location, in retribution for the theme-reversal job he did on Starship Troopers.

Long-Term Trends in Oyster Development

Long-term trends in oyster development – on the order of 80,000 years – are discussed in part of this week's edition of Big Picture Science (link).  It's the first segment and only about 16 minutes long, which makes it convenient to just click and listen at your computer, no downloading needed.

The take-away is that production is enhanced by limiting the harvest of large oysters.  This is a complete U-turn from the current laws which forbid the harvesting of undersize oysters.

Amazing what insights can be gained by carefully observing nature.  Sometimes things that seem completely, well, wrong turn out to be right when given a closer look.

I'm sure you've been hearing about Hawking all day,

... so I won't re-hash the news.  But it is worth perusing this article of memorable quotes.  Then there's the time he threw a cocktail party for time travelers – and didn't send out any invitations until afterward.  The man had a sharp mind and a sharp sense of humor to match.

Huh, so it is Pi Day

And here I was struggling for something to blog up.  Happy Pi Day!

From The Argyle Sweater.

Unbelievable

Stunningly beautiful and clear today, tomorrow, and the next day.  After that, here's the extended forecast:

Yes, it really does only rain on weekends.

Cheated the Weather Yesterday

Despite a standing policy of "it only rains on weekends" around here, that little leading front that was supposed to keep people from mountain biking rained out as it crossed Louisiana.  The key point here is always have your gear ready to go.  I'd changed an aging chain Thursday night so it was just a matter of pumping the tires and filling the camelbak.  Turned out to be a beautiful day on the trail after all.

Doesn't look like much, the scale's hard to judge, but this ravine's about fifteen feet deep.

It was a good day at the Bethel Trails.  Not just for biking either, there were a lot of nice people out there enjoying the reprieve in the weather too.  However, today the weather has some payback in mind:

A good day on the bike yesterday, a good day to stay inside today.

Yes, It Really Only Rains on Weekends

*ahem*

Oh and yesterday (not shown)?  Stunningly clear blue skies.  The extended forecast for next Saturday?  Rain.

40 Backpacking Hacks, now x3

Which makes 120.  The good people at The First 40 Miles podcast (earlier blogged about here) have a new third volume of their short tips out.  On each week's episode, the couple who publishes the podcast present yet another hack; when they have 40 (a repeating theme here) stacked up, they bundle them into a book.  None of these will greatly change your life, or even upgrade it like say a new backpack might, but a lot of these little tricks can make your time on the trail more fun and most of them cost in the cheap-to-free range.  Here, go read their blurbs at TF40M then click through and do some book shopping.

"Annihilation" Revisited

If Monday's review of the movie Annihilation still has you a little weirded out, consider this possibility: there's pretty fair indication that something like this already happened, as discussed here at the blog nearly five years ago.   [after note: The second author's real-life lab is located within the fictional bounds of Area X, about 12 miles west-south-west of the lighthouse.  Draw whatever conclusions you wish here!]

Not saying that it did happen, mind you.  Though it would simplify the explanation for that genetic complexity curve's sudden appearance at 10^5 base pairs.

Nice garnish.  Now if we could get them to grow sweet potato hooves, it'd make a complete meal.

More on WWV, Frequency Alignment, and Yaesu Radio Data Modes

Last month I posted a tip on how to exorcise the built-in – and incomprehensibly documented – data mode offsets in some of the newer Yaesu radios.  This past week I've spent some time helping a friend sort out the same problem on his FT-991A.  A couple of hours into this process, we likely still have at least an hour more to go.

Now I see that other people are having the same problems, and documenting their solutions on the web.  Generally this involves using WWV's signal as a set of reference frequencies while plowing through menus and manuals, zeroing out unwanted pre-set offsets one by one, and muttering small curses all the while.

If you've got the patience to fix these factory-standard defects, now is a good time to pick up otherwise fine radios at fire sale prices.

It's Island Week at Atlas Obscura

Like the title said, it's Island Week over at Atlas Obscura.  Every day, something new about one or more islands: how it got there, what it's doing geographically, the people who live there, etc.  It's worth a few minutes' going over.

My favorite islands probably won't get any mention, for which I am grateful.

Movie Review: Annihilation – What was the question? Were you saying something? Huh.

Some stories encourage us to ask questions, but give no answers of their own.  Take Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.  While reading it was clear that the book is all about asking questions and not about giving one-size-fits-all answers.  The author even says so in some of his subsequent essays.  (Try to read answers that aren't there into that book and you just get mid-60's hippie communes passing around glasses of LSD-tinged water.  Yuck.)  Then some stories are all about asking the correct question.  For example, the film adaptation of Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life into Arrival is one.  While a bunch of .gov people are rushing around making things worse by demanding answers right-damn-now to the question "Are the aliens a military threat?" (to which the clear answer is "almost certainly not" – they're overwhelming and have the jump on us, yet are out in the open and trying to communicate) the main character in the story is asking "How do we talk with them?"  In the meantime, the overall story line asks "What are the ramifications of understanding alien ways of thinking?"  Good mind-expanding stuff.

Taking this one step farther, Jeff Vandemeer's book Annihilation seems to ask "What is this 'question' construct of which you speak?"  The... whatever the hell it is... is clearly more than just a mindless interstellar biological infection, but even the concept of 'question' doesn't really apply here.  Things just are.  And they are overwhelming.  By the end we see that all attempts to shape things into neat little human Q-and-A understanding have been defeated, and yet somehow human existence continues to exist.  The amazing thing is that the book trilogy pulls this off without devolving into formless obscurist crap.

The movie adaptation of Annihilation, while a heavy-handed attempt at a commercially viable film, keeps this central theme of the book alive.  For that reason alone we should thank the studio by buying a ticket and watching.  Because film is a visual medium, this skews the movie more toward the horror side in showing the changes the alien whatever is making.  That's understandable, though sometime hard to take.  But in the end, the basic story is preserved, and that is an increasingly rare thing.

Now for the down sides.  It really doesn't look anything like the St. Marks area.  For me that's a small disappointment, but I don't think many other people care.  The more serious problem is that some (though not all) of the adaptation is needlessly heavy, chopping out most of the biologist's motivating background here, randomly adding in an affair sub-plot there, etc.  It's another case of a screenwriter run amok: "I am the great screenwriter.  This is nothing but a well-regarded book, which I will now largely discard and replace with my own hack writing.  Now where did I put my crayons?"  This keeps happening, and the resulting movies that are marginally successful keep getting made.  Occasionally screenwriters are held in check, and in those cases we see great and financially successful movies like Lord of the Rings.  This movie skirts with that tar pit, mostly avoiding it but still taking a few sticky missteps.  At least the main themes of the original story were preserved.

So, bottom line?  Call it 3-minus out of 4 stars, for a B- effort.  Go see it if you want a quick sample of the New Weird without all the hassle of plowing through what can be fairly slow and content-thin reading.

No, I Really Don't Understand This Either

Though I kind of get the "walking past the Earth's poles" analogy.  Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson discuss the time before time over at Popular Science.
1crystal - Create, Discover and Share GIFs on Gfycat
Well, at least the illustration is pretty cool.  Don't stare at it too long though.  You might fall in, and then who knows where you'd come back out.

About those Secret Family Recipes

As it turns out, a lot of them come from advertising copy and package labels.  Article over at Atlas Obscura. 

Of course, our secret family recipes can't come from these kinds of sources, because these written recipes give definite, repeatable measurements.  Most of our family recipes come with quantity descriptions that are some variant on the phrase "Oh you know, enough."  This has lead to a lot of reverse engineering these past eight years, let me tell you.