Thanksgiving logistics, mastodon, USPS

Thanksgiving

cooking

Once the forecast started showing the 24th as sunny I figured I could cook a Thanksgiving (or Thanksgiving-adjacent) meal in the crock.

The original idea was to do a cornish game hen, since it would fit in the small crock and also look like a small turkey. None were in stock in the stores I checked; I assume turkey inventory drives this week. I looked around for some turkey bits that would fit in the crock and settled on a wing.

Thanksgiving crock, v1.0

oil crock liner

layer in the following:
0.5c water
cabbage
carrots
cubed potatoes
fresh green beans
sliced onions
turkey  wing
bacon

season with black pepper

cook on HI for 4-5 hours

power and heat

After inverter losses this meal will take 0.95kWh to cook, which is why good solar was critical. The high today is in the 50s so the heat from the crock will be a welcome guest. On hot days I sometimes run the crock in the cab with the curtains drawn but on this cooler day it’s sitting in the sink, mid-ship so to speak.

This will be in the crock for five hours, and come out right in time for…

Cowboys game

I found a park whose parking lot offered proper van orientation. The OTA antenna is on the back window so I parked facing east. With this setup the antenna faces the Davis mountains to the west where the transmitters are located. The local affilliate comes in and the MythTV recording rule has been set up.

Mastodon

I started playing with decentralized/federated social around 2011 (Identi.ca), which I probably heard about on the old Linux Outlaws podcast. I let that account lapse and focused on twitter. I’ve been frustrated by Twitter’s functionality but dealt with it.

When Elon started his pothead/troll joke about buying twitter I figured it was time to start sniffing around. Now that it’s turned into full-on troll-enabling chaos I landed on Mastodon.

limitations

• The only limitation I see compared to twitter is the reduced networking effect (userbase)
• it suffers from post non-portability when changing accounts (same as twitter) but at least there is discussion about fixing/changing that

wins

The overarching benefit here is decentralization, which allows intentional (digital) communities to federate/cooperate as they wish. I like this in digital life and in real life. It is also built on open standards and not controlled by a single entity.

From a user experience perspective there are tweaks that address my main gripes about Twitter:

• you can mute a user for a specific amount of time. Sometimes a user is interesting but goes off on tangents about sportsball, corgis, etc. I don’t need to see that.
• you can mute their posts, replies, or retweets (“boosts”) separately. There are people whose original writing I like but who retweet truckloads of material I don’t need to see
• the user can block an entire server, if it comes to that. This means it doesn’t have to be done at the server level. I didn’t think this would be useful for me, but I ran into a severely obnoxious troll who effectively said he set up his server for other obnoxious trolls. I don’t expect anything useful to come from his team.

going forward

I have stopped posting on my personal twitter account but will probably maintain the campervan account for the near future. I will be crossposting to Mastodon (see below).

USPS

The glacially-slow USPS hiring process finally moved one more notch. They want to start orientation on Dec 17th. I will decline; I needed seasonal work, not something that will begin once the season is mostly over.

That is all. Need to check on the turkey (wing).

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