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Reblogging

Music: 

Shonen Knife - Summertime Boogie

I've started an un-advertised reblogging section on the site here so I can share stuff with Natalie without inundating her with email all day. The things I post there will just show up in her RSS feed and can either just be skipped or looked at more closely.

We'll see how that goes. The first item is the post a few minutes ago about Hep Cat Restorations.

Much of the reblogging feed is likely to be me rambling about some piece of furniture or something, at length, so the raw feed might not really be much use.

Enjoy.

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Mid-Century Home Tour

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I imagine you've either seen these guys, or already read them religiously:
Hep Cat Restorations. I've been looking through the site briefly and there's some incredible stuff, and video tours of the house and everything. While I really dig it, this is what would happen if you just went nuts and bought every single awesome thing ever. It would just look like a furniture store at the end, which in our house can't work.

I think a lot of that probably just has to do with them being professionals, so you're just going to have a ton of stuff hanging around.

If you look at the shop you just might cry.

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Vintage War Planes in Nashua

Music: 

Today we went briefly to Biore Field in Nashua to see the CAF Airpower Squadron fly a few vintage aircraft. It was pretty small, 3 planes, but it was neat, and for $10, not a bad way to spend an hour of our morning. Plus, little kids are adorable when they see big planes making noise.

I took a ton of photos for the very short time we were there:

Curtiss SB2C Helldiver, with very excited temporary gunner:
Sat, 06/11/2016 - 11:03am - Curtiss SB2C Helldiver, flown by CAF Air Power Squadron, Nashua, NH 6-11-2016
csFlickr

SB2C Flyby:
Sat, 06/11/2016 - 11:18am - Curtiss SB2C Helldiver, flown by CAF Air Power Squadron, Nashua, NH 6-11-2016 csFlickr

B-29 Flyby:
Sat, 06/11/2016 - 11:52am - B-29 Superfortress, FIFI, flown by CAF Air Power Squadron, Nashua, NH 6-11-2016
csFlickr

C-45 Taxiing:
Sat, 06/11/2016 - 11:20am - C-45 Expeditor, Bucket of Bolts, flown by CAF Air Power Squadron, Nashua, NH 6-11-2016
csFlickr

C-45 Flyby:
Sat, 06/11/2016 - 11:51am - C-45 Expeditor, Bucket of Bolts, flown by CAF Air Power Squadron, Nashua, NH 6-11-2016 csFlickr

And a random bi-plane that happened to be there:
Sat, 06/11/2016 - 11:21am - IMG_2694 csFlickr

Natalie also took some short videos with her phone:

B-29 Taxiing:

B-29 Takeoff:

Curtiss SB2C Helldiver Taxiing:

Beechcraft C-45 Taxiing:

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KRS-One in Manchester

Music: 

Clearly I need to post more music stuff, last night we went to KRS-One.

... and it seems that my camera has fucked every photo I've taken in the last month. So enjoy oddly-cropped KRS-One:

"Mic check, mic check, louder, louder more! more! ('Turn them shits up!') whoops, shit, no power":

"But no problem, we don't need power":

Temple of Hip-Hop:

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Cow Power in a Can

Music: 

Outrun background music

My family has a long and complicated history with Choc-Ola. My mother's family lived in South Indianapolis. She went to Southport and Beech Grove. Her family went to the same church as the Normington family, who gave Choc-Ola to the world. It was, therefore, at all church functions. At least one of my uncles drove semi trailers full of Choc-Ola across the midwest. I've been hearing about Choc-Ola for 35 years, seeing their logo everywhere, and never have had the chance to try a drop.

From this rather large family, I've never talked to one person who says "I enjoy drinking Choc-Ola". When Choc-Ola came back around as a product in recent years, the people I mentioned it to were kind of wishy washy about it, "Oh that's nice for them, hope it does well". Do you want some? "Nope, not really".

So now Choc-Ola is back and selling product, and thanks to the Wonders of the Internet, I have a case of it. And I can taste test it for myself, against a more Northeasterly drink, Yoo-Hoo

So let's start the hyphenated chocolate-milk-but-safe-on-a-shelf beverage test.

Tue, 03/31/2015 - 6:52pm - Choc-Ola vs. Yoo-Hoo.  Choc-Ola wins hands down. csFlickr

You can see right away that Yoo-Hoo is much lighter in color. It's also a thinner liquid. They're similar in odor, but Choc-Ola tastes much more "Chocolatey". Natalie also reports that Yoo-Hoo is more "Chemicalley".

Yoo-Hoo also seems to have had more trouble integrating its solids back into the liquid in a glass:

Tue, 03/31/2015 - 6:55pm - Choc-Ola vs. Yoo-Hoo.  Choc-Ola wins hands down.

(Yoo-Hoo is the one with the un-integrated gunk) csFlickr

I promise in the name of scientific integrity that each of these products was shaken with great vigor, and drunk within moments of pouring. This photo also represents the residue from the "first pour" of each drink, the "top half", so that gack at the bottom of the Yoo-Hoo glass isn't gunge I scraped from the bottom of the bottle.

One thing Yoo-Hoo does have going for it is its much more complicated, modern sounding and exciting ingredients list. Choc-Ola makes one think of sitting on a porch at a farm, drinking chocolate milk. Yoo-Hoo lets your mind wander to men in lab coats and vast manufacturing facilites lined with vats containing palm oil, dipotassium phosphate and corn syrup solids.

Long story short, my family is goddamn nuts. It's at this point that I'll point out that my grandfather was a milk man. I believe a couple of my uncles were as well. Meanwhile, my mom grew up with no milk in the house, drinking Pepsi and eating Velveeta. This may account for some of the preference issues noted at the top there.

Choc-ola is great, and you should buy some of it. Bother your grocery store until they buy some. I successfuly annoyed my local grocery store into buying the frozen White Castles back in the '90s, so I know it can be done with persistence.

Unleash the Cow Power.

Edited: Natalie tells me I'd be remiss in not posting our own piece of Choc-Ola history:

Tue, 02/12/2013 - 9:25am - My wife found this old Choc-Ola crate for our kitchen.  My uncle used to drive for them, and this makes me remember being 4 or 5 or so and getting to sit up in his big brown semi.
csFlickr

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Blowing Minds With Natalie

Music: 

Elvis Costello - No Action

We are ramping up to Viva Las Vegas 18, and Natalie has really killed this outfit. She made and then painted this skirt of the neon signs of old Vegas:

Thu, 03/26/2015 - 7:51pm - Natalie painted this awesome skirt for our trip to Viva Las Vegas 18 next week!                               csFlickr

Thu, 03/26/2015 - 7:29pm - Natalie painted this awesome skirt for our trip to Viva Las Vegas 18 next week! csFlickr

Thu, 03/26/2015 - 7:28pm - Natalie painted this awesome skirt for our trip to Viva Las Vegas 18 next week! csFlickr

And, at the last minute, her brother came through with this TV prop jacket:

Fri, 03/27/2015 - 10:28am - Cherry tears cndFlickr

Updated:
Thu, 03/26/2015 - 7:26pm - The jacket. cndFlickr

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Wildlife

Music: 

A few minutes ago Natalie got all panicky and had me come running to see these deer hanging out in my neighbor's driveway. They were just poking around until some dog barked a block away and they moved off into the woods. They were obviously keeping an eye on me, but not taking off because of us.

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Satellite

Music: 

New York Dolls - Trash

This should buff right out. My old man's a television repairman, he's got this ultimate set of tools...

Edit: Natalie took another one. There's this mounting plate on a collar attached to the main support. That whole thing is ruined. Also, I like the neighbor's pristine reference implementation in the background.

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Simple location aware ssh tunneling for Chrome (Mac)

Music: 

Hall and Oates - Private Eyes (Seriously, it just came on randomly)
and really, just as I finished formatting the stupid script, Big Brother from Humanwine was playing.

This is both a nice toy to have in a Big Brother Is Watching sense, and a glaring example of why one should never log in and use a Mac (or any other system obviously) as an Administrator. Just have a Regular Guy account, and escalate to Administrator/Root when needed. For example, this tool could be inserted by a script to cause all your browsing traffic to route through a proxy server of an attackers choosing. If you're not running as an Administrator, you can't write the file without escalating. (Example of the risk, though it wouldn't help here, since there is LCE to root...goddammit Apple...)

I had a use case recently where I wanted to have multiple copies of Chromium start in different profiles and with different proxy settings. I'm getting to the point at which I don't think that's really feasible, in that any new instance will assume the proxy settings of any already running instance.

BUT, I did get some cool location aware-ish proxying set up. Since one use case involves laptops, I'd like to see it use a local proxy when I'm home, and a remote proxy when I'm not at home (hosted VPS for instance).

I'm using ssh to set up a SOCKS5 proxy, and push all traffic including DNS through the tunnel, ssh'ing to different hosts based on different local system IPs. I have it checking en0 and en1 and if their IPs match my home subnet, it ssh's to a local system, if they are anything else, it will run against a publicly hosted system to which I can ssh.

Next step is to clean up after itself, so when you run Chromium (or Chrome), it will detect IPs, ssh to the appropriate host, and connect using that tunnel. When Chromium closes, it cleans up the SSH session so it's not just hanging around.

To use - Have a local and remote host you can ssh to using keys, and which allow you to forward. On the Mac, navigate to /Applications/Chromium.app/Contents/MacOS/. Rename Chromium to Chromium-bin. Drop this script in, chmod appropriately, and name it Chromium. Now when the Chromium app is run, it runs our script to set up proxies and launch the browser:


#! /bin/bash

ip0=`ifconfig en0 | grep -v inet6 | grep inet | awk '{print $2}' | awk -F "." '{print $1"."$2"."$3}'`
ip1=`ifconfig en1 | grep -v inet6 | grep inet | awk '{print $2}' | awk -F "." '{print $1"."$2"."$3}'`

if [ -z "$ip0"  ]
  then
   if [ "$ip1" = "192.168.30" ]
     then
       ssh -C2qTnN -D 8181 username@192.168.30.241 &

       proxypid=`jobs -p`
       /Applications/Chromium.app/Contents/MacOS/Chromium-bin --proxy-server="socks5://127.0.0.1:8181" --host-resolver-rules="MAP * ~NOTFOUND, EXCLUDE 127.0.0.1" --profile-directory=Tunnl 2>&1 /dev/null

       kill $proxypid

      else

        ssh -C2qTnN -D 8181 username@publichost.com &

        proxypid=`jobs -p`
        /Applications/Chromium.app/Contents/MacOS/Chromium-bin --proxy-server="socks5://127.0.0.1:8181" --host-resolver-rules="MAP * ~NOTFOUND, EXCLUDE 127.0.0.1" --profile-directory=Tunnl 2>&1 /dev/null

        kill $proxypid

      fi

  elif [ "$ip0" = "192.168.30" ]
    then
      ssh -C2qTnN -D 8181 username@192.168.30.241 &

      proxypid=`jobs -p`
      /Applications/Chromium.app/Contents/MacOS/Chromium-bin --proxy-server="socks5://127.0.0.1:8181" --host-resolver-rules="MAP * ~NOTFOUND, EXCLUDE 127.0.0.1" --profile-directory=Tunnl 2>&1 /dev/null

      kill $proxypid

  else

      ssh -C2qTnN -D 8181 username@publichost.com &

      proxypid=`jobs -p`
      /Applications/Chromium.app/Contents/MacOS/Chromium-bin --proxy-server="socks5://127.0.0.1:8181" --host-resolver-rules="MAP * ~NOTFOUND, EXCLUDE 127.0.0.1" --profile-directory=Tunnl 2>&1 /dev/null

      kill $proxypid

fi

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In which I am annoyed at the radio

Music: 

"(Consumers are) getting their raise through the gas tank rather than their employers" - Sudeep Reddy, Marketplace

Sorry Kai, but yeah, that is a really weak statement. Between that quote last week, and all the stories about consumers already buying bigger more gas-guzzlin'er trucks and SUVs because pump prices have gone down, I just got annoyed enough to write this.

People don't really look at what's their ultimate best interest, they don't make math-based decisions. They think "Wow, gas just went down by 20%, so I can buy a car which uses 60% more fuel". Here is math:

At 90 miles/day, I drive somewhat more than the average person (78% of people have a less than 20 mile commute? DAMMIT). My 2005 Toyota gets a consistent 34MPG. Gas has gone down by 60 cents around these parts.

So what does that mean?

270mi per week (I work from home two days a week)
8 gallons of gas

$28.40 - 8 gallons of gas at $3.55

$23.60 - 8 gallons of gas at $2.95

$39.85 - What I'd pay at $2.95/gal for the 13.5 gallons of gas I'd use if I bought an SUV making 20mpg

(So all this means that I pay $7.80 every day to sit in traffic for > 3 hours, before factoring in maintenance / wear & tear)

That means that the difference caused by this precipitous drop in prices is $5 per week, for me. That's not even enough for a pack of smokes. So much for people "getting their raise through the gas tank". $260 per year, thanks a bunch guys, but I'm better off with even a 1% pay increase. Even with the 20MPG Jeep that I had prior to the Toyota, it would still only be a $9/week difference. Not exactly enough to finance payments on a new SUV, let alone the fact that you now burn much more gas than is offset by the price decrease.

Being able to do arithmetic also accounts for why I don't drive a Prius or whatever. There's no way the increased milage would pay off over the facts that a Prius costs $10000 more (base) than I paid for the Corolla which is fully paid for. Even if I were to get a new car, it's unlikely the Prius speicfically would be worth the extra cost for the extra 14MPG, that's not even factoring in battery changes, which aren't cheap, and which I'm sure I'd have needed a couple of to match the 220,000 miles on my Corolla.

I don't pretend to know or care why people make the choices they do, but it's almost certainly more that they "feel" things are "good", and so decide to splurge on some new car, telling themselves that gas is cheap, so it doesn't matter.

People probably feel this way because of glib statements by people they perceive as being subject matter experts.

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