The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 99-105)
Day 99. (TFC Researching Ways To Overcome Satellite Latency To No Avail, Going On My Monthly Supply Run & Physically Looking At The Locations Of Nearby Cellular Towers)
Although it was much sunnier today it was still a bit chilly outside so I mostly just stayed hunkered down in the shelter early in the day and did some research on possible techniques to reduce the latency from the satellite internet here so that perhaps I can play my favorite video game online. Unfortunately there is just no way to reduce the latency caused by the signal having to travel twenty-two plus thousand miles into space and back again. I was hoping that there might be some kind of 'workaround' but the only low latency satellite connections are from ones that are at a lower orbit which some other satellite internet providers use but not the one we have here at the homestead.
On a different note I went on my monthly supply run in the afternoon which was pretty nice even though I went shopping for dog food at a nearby locally owned hardware store because the last time I went there (to get propane) I noticed that they had fifty pound bags for a reasonable price. It is always weird visiting a small town store like that because I always get that 'you are not from around here' vibe from the workers and other customers at such places and this place was no exception! I am still unsure if the cashier accidentally did it or not but she tacked on an extra two dollars per bag of dog food and I didn't quite catch it until I looked at the receipt afterwards. I was hoping that I could start getting my dog food there each month (instead of shopping at a very out of the way chain store) but after yesterday I am not feeling all that inclined to do so. I am still debating about it and in the end I might give them a second chance. I am thinking to bring my receipt with me next month and bring the error to their attention and see how it goes from there because it is definitely more convenient to get my dog food there.
Other than all that jazz the supply run went rather well other than the grocery store being swamped with people and the person that brought me getting stuck in the store for much longer than they wanted to be and us not heading back to the homestead late in the day as the sun was going down.
On the way back to the homestead I started talking about trying to get a better cellular signal with my cellular repeater(s) and the person with me knowing the area very well showed me all the various cellphone towers in the area. They even drove me past the homestead itself and up the road a bit to the closest tower which as it turns out is only 1.18 miles away but unfortunately there are two rather big hills between the homestead and it so go figure!
Late in the evening I reconfigured the angle of my 4G panel antenna (for one of my cellular repeaters) to hopefully overcome the obstacles created by the hills and I also aimed it directly towards the closest tower to absolutely no avail. At this point I am not feeling all that optimistic about getting a usable signal but I have not given up on it entirely...yet.
Well that is about it for now. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
Day 100. (TFC Trying To Capture The Elusive Cellular Signal & Finally Admitting To Myself That I Probably Will Not Get To Do My Annual Winter Online Gaming)
It was a frosty and chilly morning but it eventually got pretty nice in the afternoon except for the occasional gust of chilly wind that reminded me that winter is rapidly approaching.
As far as the weather goes it has assuredly been a chilly autumn which makes me wonder just how the winter is going to be. Overall though I am not too concerned about the weather over the months ahead because my little shelter is so damn warm and cozy!
Once it warmed up a bit outside and the frost melted on the roof of the shelter I decided to once again try getting a good signal with my cellular repeater. I tried adding more tilt to the panel antenna hoping that might help but even after slowly rotating the antenna pole around in every direction the signal did not improve. I even aimed it straight up hoping to maybe capture a signal above me but that didn't work either.
All total I spent roughly four hours trying different configurations with both antennas which basically amounted to changing the antenna angle, rotating the pole and with each change having to go indoors, look at the phone I was testing the reception with and then going back outside and trying again. I have no idea how many times that I climbed up on the roof, went up and down the ladder, in and out the dog yard gate and in and out of the shelter whilst doing it all but suffice it to say it was too damn many times!
Late in the day I decided to try getting the antenna higher in the air so after locating a spare roll of coax and a specialized union (for attaching cellular type coax together) I scavenged around the homestead until I found some old galvanized television antenna poles and hauled them to the shelter site.
The poles themselves were in pretty rough shape and one of them had a rotational motor affixed to the end of it that was once used to rotate a television antenna but is just a piece of seized up junk at this point. Between the two poles that I found and one other metal pole that I already had I created a thirty foot pole which was so dodgy that it bent in three different places as I tried to erect it so I decided to not use it because one strong wind would probably topple it onto the shelter roof and probably break something (like my cellular repeater antennas) in the process.
Anyway I wound up using only one ten foot section of metal antenna pole (the most intact piece) and then added my fifteen foot fiberglass pole to the top of it. At twenty five feet off the ground the cellular repeater should have gotten a better signal but all the gains achieved by the higher pole were counteracted by line loss from all the extra coax wire I had to use so go figure!
I was pretty fed up by the whole project by the end of it and finally just had to accept that I won't be doing any of my traditional online gaming this winter. I keep wondering if I should keep trying to get a cellular signal or just spare myself any further aggravation and give up on it. I am not all that fond of giving up but at this point I am not feeling all that optimistic about overcoming the terrain here and solving the problem of cellular connectivity.
Well that is about it for now and I am going to wrap this up. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
Day 101. (TFC Making A Community On Beta Steemit, Finally Fixing The Section Of Bent Fence In The Dog Yard & Starting To Get Some Sort Of Illness)
Early in the morning I read a Steemit article about the release of a 'communities' feature on the beta Steemit site and how it was now open for the public to test out so of course I just had to check it out and see for myself what it was all about.
After perusing the various communities on there I decided to go ahead and start one named 'Homesteading' because there are a lot of homesteaders on Steemit and I think that having such a community could potentially be a really good way for homesteaders to not just connect with each other but also share what they know with folks that are interested in homesteading in general.
The actual community creation process was a bit weird because it required creating a new 'hive' account that is the 'owner' of the community and my personal account becoming an 'admin' of the community. Honestly I wasn't counting on having yet another account to manage but thought it worthwhile nonetheless.
Since there weren't any guides to setting up a community on beta Steemit I had to figure things out on my own and was a bit annoyed that my newly created community did not immediately appear in the community listing. It actually took most of the day for it to show up in the listing which makes me wonder if all the newly created communities are being manually vetted.
Anyway late in the afternoon I decided to finally fix that section of fencing in the dog yard that the dogs had pulled down the other week. I had a shovel holding the fence up there but a few days ago my boy dog put his feet atop the fence again and although the shovel held firm the top of the fence bent over again and I decided that one way or another I would properly fix it this week. Of course fixing it was pretty simple because all I had to do was dig a hole, put a post in the hole, back fill the hole with dirt and rocks, tamp everything down and then sandwich the fencing between the post and a board that I screwed to the post. All in all it was pretty simple and I have no idea why I procrastinated doing it for so long!
Anyway by late in the day I started sniffling a lot and although I had been concerned the last few days that I might be getting ill it wasn't until my nose started running that I finally admitted to myself that I had actually caught something. A few days back some folks around the homestead had a touch of a cold (or the flu or something) and although I have done my best to avoid getting it also I wound up with it anyway so go figure. Hopefully it passes quickly and my head stops feeling like it is stuffed with cotton balls and I can get back to truly enjoying the beginning of my winter downtime.
Well that is about it for now. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
Day 102. (TFC Dealing With The Sniffles & Just Wanting This Illness To Pass)
Thankfully I have not had more than a runny nose and a bit of congestion in my chest all day. I just keep telling myself that it could be much worse and that hopefully it will pass soon.
Feeling ill definitely did not help me to feel very motivated to be productive and by the end of the day I just felt grumpy and annoyed.
To compound my agitation the online ladder for my favorite video game reset and although I tried to play it the lag (latency) from the satellite internet made the experience both unbearable and totally unenjoyable so I quit playing after a few minutes and decided to spare myself the aggravation.
Like I have said numerous times in these posts over the last few years playing the winter ladder reset is something that I look forward to doing throughout the entire year and is probably the most fun few weeks of my life each year.
It is incredibly frustrating that there is a cellular tower only 1.18 miles away that I could undoubtedly use for an internet connection if I can somehow overcome the terrain here and actually get a usable signal but so far nothing has worked to accomplish that goal.
So here I am feeling sick, being frustrated without much in the way of solutions and just wanting to scream a little to vent my frustration but of course I won't be doing any screaming and I will probably just keep taking long naps until I start feeling better.
Sorry that I don't have anything good to really write about at the moment but it is what it is. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
Day 103. (TFC Getting Plenty Of Rest, Feeling A Little Better But Still Sick, Purging Lame Accounts I Am Following On Steemit & Doing Too Much Reading Online)
As far as days go today was not all that exciting but at least that illness has moved out of my sinuses. Unfortunately I now have a lot of congestion in my lungs but as long as I do not breathe too deeply I don't really notice it. If I do breathe deeply though I immediately start hacking up a bunch of gross looking phlegm.
I spent the majority of the day alternating between taking naps and reading stuff online. The naps assuredly improved my overall mood a bit because they left me feeling very rested but all the reading that I did was not about stuff that was all that exciting or even all that interesting.
My retention level from what I was reading was pretty damn low and pretty much just kept me distracted from being annoyed over being sick and being agitated that I can't play my favorite video game online. I guess the 'distraction' worked nonetheless because by the end of the day I was just feeling rather 'meh' about it all.
Late in the afternoon I took some time to begin the ardourous process of cleaning up the list of people I follow on Steemit. When I first started using the platform I got a bit over enthusiastic and just followed anyone that either upvoted my stuff or that I saw something posted by them that I liked which lead to me having a much larger number of people that I am following than people that are following me.
It was a rather disproportionate amount actually because I was following over twice as many people compared to the amount of followers that I have. Slimming down the accounts that I follow was a tedious task but I got nearly two hundred of them removed before my Resource Credits (basically how many actions I can do on the blockchain) got depleted to below the fifty percent mark and I stopped for the day. When my Resource Credits recharge (in two more days) I am going to dive back into removing more accounts and get my follower to following ratio a bit more balanced.
The other thing that I did that was rather time consuming was to modify who my fledgling Steemit curation bot votes on because although it did pretty good for almost a week it's Voting Power eventually got too low that it couldn't quite recover enough to keep voting at the rate folks were posting at. So I dug through the list of accounts it is set to vote on and manually looked at each account and the quality of their posts. Out of nearly one hundred and fifty accounts that it was previously voting on I wound up with only eighty seven by the end of the day. I had originally used a list of homesteaders that I had found on Steemit to vote on as well as some homesteaders that I already knew but in hindsight I should have vetted the list better because although many of the folks claimed to be homesteaders their posting habits had nothing to do with homesteading (or DIY stuff) at all.
Eventually once my curation bot gains enough Steem Power of it's own I think that I am going to only do manual curation (voting) with it but for now the automated approach is much more appealing because it saves me a heck of a lot of time.
I know that all that Steemit related stuff does not make much sense to you non-users of the platform but it is what I spent my day on and this post wouldn't be very long at all if I excluded it!
Anyway that is about it for now. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
Day 104. (TFC Slowly Recovering From This Illness, Fixing A Woodburning Tool For A Fellow Homesteader & Talking A Lot About Steemit)
Early in the day it rained for a very brief time and I mean really brief as in for just a few moments. It was by far not as rainy as it was forecast to be but at least it stayed rather sunny out and the muck in the dog yard dried up at long last.
The way the entrance to the shelter is set up is still pretty treacherous (even aside from the ramp) and with just a little rain it tends to get pretty damn slippery even with all the straw spread around because there is a pretty steep little slope to the right of the door.
I knew that particular area of the yard would be problematic and although I planned to have my pre-built decks setup as a porch (which would make the slope irrelevant) I just haven't had the ability to get the heavy and now waterlogged decks moved to the shelter site and installed. I really should prioritize doing that before things get really mucky in the springtime.
Anyway yesterday I mostly focused on doing Steemit related stuff but I also fixed a fellow homesteader's wood burning gun. A tip for the tool had gotten broken off inside the threaded barrel so after a little drilling the broken brass piece was nothing but a bunch of shavings and the barrel was cleared. Unfortunately the soft brass threads inside the barrel got worn smooth during the process so I wound up crimping the barrel slightly (thus narrowing it) and the tip created new threads in the soft brass when it was screwed in.
All in all it worked out well and perhaps now my fellow homesteader will be able to create more woodburning art. They had previously been using the wood burning tool with the tip screwed in only halfway which made it quite wobbly so I am excited to see how they do with a more stout setup.
I didn't really do much else other than slowly continue recovering from this illness and talking a lot about Steemit related stuff with my fellow homesteaders. Our conversations on the topic are often wonderful but we also tend to spend a good bit of time discussing various frontends (software/websites for interacting with the Steem blockchain) how to use them and interesting tidbits about the things we have learned about them and the Steem ecosystem itself.
Anyway that is about it for now and I am going to wrap this up. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
Day 105. (TFC The Botcave Story, Working On Some Social Media Automation & Getting Waylaid Once Again By PITA)
It was not a very exciting day and if anything it was a massive PITA (pun absolutely intended) but I still managed to be rather productive doing some social media automation.
There has been an ongoing campaign on Steemit for folks to share more Steemit content to other social media platforms and although I have been dabbling in it for the last few weeks today I decided to contribute a good bit more to it by setting up some simple automation tasks (a bot) to monitor new posts and then forward them to the chosen platform.
It might sound easy but there are so many steps to the entire process of fetching an RSS feed, parsing said feed, adding hashtags to each individual posts and ultimately posting it in a quality format to the desired destination.
The bot does not make me money or even cryptocurrency and is intended to simply spread awareness (visibility) to some great content on the Steem blockchain in the hopes that more people will start utilizing the platform.
I have been working on online automation stuff so much the last several weeks that I have taken to calling the shelter 'The Botcave' and often I have begun to say to my fellow homesteaders when I am departing the homestead proper...'To The Botcave!' with a flourish just as I am leaving.
Anyway all that jazz aside I am still feeling under the weather and it is looking like I might be staying hunkered down in the Botcave for the next few days as the actual weather turns cold and rainy.
Well that is about it for now. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
https://steemit.com/writing/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-1-7
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 8-14)
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-8-14
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 15-21)
https://steemit.com/diy/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-15-21
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 22-28)
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-22-28
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 29-35)
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-29-35
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 36-42)
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-36-42
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 43-49)
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-43-49
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 50-56)
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-50-56
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 57-63)
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-57-63
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 64-70)
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-64-70
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 71-77
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-71-77
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 78-84
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-78-84
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 85-91
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-85-91
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 92-98
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-92-98
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