Posted on Nov 8, 2025

Previously…

Gratitude

• I received a lot of feedback on my daily post yesterday and people had a lot of nice things to say. It made me feel good. Thank you everyone that sent a message, I tried to respond individually.

Yesterday recap

Started the day with asking folks for feedback about these daily posts. I received a lot of nice messages and the consensues was to keep them in the main feed. I’m going to do that and then re-evaluate in a month. At the moment I think I want to change the blog homepage with curated posts instead of latest so it is not just a wall of daily posts.

I had a weird route for winterizations, with 3 early in the morning and then 2 late afternoon. This left me with a 3 hour gap that I didn’t want to spend sitting in my truck. Luckily the sites are only about a half hour from my house, so I came home, ate lunch, and hung out with the kids.

I got a note to explain what a sprinkler winterization is and I realized I should probably do a better job of explaining my work in these posts.

A sprinkler winterization consists of connecting an air compressor to the sprinkler system and pressurizing the lines with air to blowout the water in the pipes. Doing this will help prevent mainline water ruptures and emergency fixes during the freezing weather season due to water expanding when forming into ice and breaking the pipes, fittings, or valves. For example, one year on Thanksgiving my sprinkler mainline broke and I had to dig up a huge pit to repair it, while it was snowing. Blowing out the lines also prevents the lateral lines for each of the zones from breaking and reducing repairs to the system in the spring.

During a winterization service I will also insulate the points of connection. I make them using home R30 insulation cut into phone book sized blocks and tied off inside of a trash bag. Sealing the insulation is critical. If you don’t, it will get wet, freeze, and turn into an ice cube, making the water line freezing issue worse.

All part of regular maintenace on a sprinkler system.

When I got home I finally put up the paracord grid over the dog area. It is ugly, but functional ( a lot like me 😉). The grid needs to be just close enough to disrupt the wing span of the falcon to prevent it from swooping down and trying to grab our dog. I doubt this will ever happen, but better safe than sorry.

Wife made homemade pizza and we watched WWE Friday Night Smackdown. My son was distracted all dinner and clearly has something going on in his friend group. I need to think of a way to bring it up today and chat with him about it.

I spent the time during wrestling to work on the Surface TUI build. I got helix, glow, tmux, and the associated bits for text editing all installed and configured. Set up all the ssh bits, too. I need to re-think some of the other TUI apps since the Surface RT is a armv7 CPU and most modern apps no longer support that architecture. I knew this would be a problem, so trying to be flexible with it.

Gorls had a stay up as late as you want night. Wife and I watched the second half of Rambo First Blood and then watched Dead End Drive-In, an awesome mid-80s Australian dystopian flick that hits hader in 2025 than it did in 1986.

How are you feeling today?

Getting better. Not as depressed, but still subdued.

Todo

Chores

• Replace batteries in the gorls bedside clocks. These are small clocks adhered to the wall, so probably has watch-size batteries I’ll have to order.
• Pick up the rat parts on the side yard. That prairie falcon we’ve been seeing on and off for the last couple weeks is leaving rat guts around the house. Its not fun.
• Empty tool box and dry it out. Always fills with water when it rains like this, no matter how I configure it in my truck.

Fun

• I finished my Reacher book, but still want to make time to chill and play Powerwash Simulator. Probably mid-afternoon.
• Play board game with wife. We skipped last night, will play tonight.

Projects

• Run monthly server and data backups. A more complicated process than I like because I have a few external drives I carry with me that I want the data on. Plus, I have a mirror server, a laptop in an emergency kit, and a bootable USB SSD I want the data on, so it is a longer process than I like. I really, really need to simplify things. But, it is just too much fun to build all these projects.
• Write cyberdeck cheatsheet. I need something in the case that has IP addresses, URLs for services, what OS on which device, guest logins, backups, etc. Probably make as a printed sheet and a text file in a NFC tag.

Thank you for reading! If you would like to comment on this post you can start a conversation on the Fediverse. Message me on Mastodon at @cinimodev@masto.ctms.me. Or, you may email me at blog.discourse904@8alias.com. This is an intentionally masked email address that will be forwarded to the correct inbox.