updated the GL.iNet router, Thanksgiving, infantry support

firmware

The GL-AR300M wifi router has been acting a little flakey when repeating sketchy wifi sources, so I logged into it to look around, reboot it, whatever. I noticed there was a 3.x to 4.x firmware update available. Rebooted the router while the fw downloaded. No change after the reboot.

I backed up the router, installed 4.3.7 (openwrt-ar300m-4.3.7-0913-1694589403) and it came up fine. The Raspberry Pi OS that triggered the whole adventure started downloading at a much higher route and with zero timeouts. I’ll call this a win.

near-freezing Thanksgiving morning

It’s 35F this morning, so the battery warmer comes on periodically to keep the bank at 50F. It’s clear now but supposed to be partly cloudy later.

breakfast

Since it’s chilly I’m going to pan-fry some hash browns over propane. This will give up some BTUs into the chilly van interior as well.

lunch

Hopefully there’s enough solar for my Thanksgiving cooking plans. I bought some clearance turkey necks and will pressure cook them a good while to extract the flavor and allow whatever meat is present to be deboned. Then I’ll cook rice in the broth/bits. I also picked up some cornbread dressing and black olives, the minimum needed for Tgiving dinner IMO.

Cost:

• turkey necks $3
• rice $0.22
• stuffing $0.50
• olives $1.85 (only full-price item in the meal)

Total $5.57, enough for 2-3 meals.

Power:

• pressure cooked necks for 1 hour, deboned meat and strained broth. Cooked rice with broth and deboned meat: 280Wh in the IP. I forgot to separate them out.
• sauteed onions in melted butter, simmered with broth for stuffing. 181Wh on lab hotplate.

Total 461Wh.

Harvest peaked at 521w local solar noon (1152 MST). This is 69.5% of rated not bad for flat-mounted panels in late November. Cooking complete at 1215, SoC 74% and charging at ~27A. If the pattern holds bank should be 100% by 1330.

Update: clouds set in so the system never reached Vabs. It did hold ~13.6v long enough to get the bank to 99% SoC. As of 1600 the solar has made 2.36kWh today.

The Game

The MythTV setup has a search defined to catch Cowboys football games, so I was surprised not to see a recording scheduled. Turns out the local CBS affilliate has a very short EIT window so that schedule info isn’t transmitted yet. By game time the data should be transmitted and the game scheduled to record.

infantry support

Because things got weird at my blood draw I forgot to relate this story.

In the waiting room I got talking to an 11B¹ and we got talking about Germany. Turns out his unit was providing perimeter security for my unit when we were in the field. He got to the former FRG about a year later than I did but we would have overlapped for ~2.5 years. We would have never seen each other as the infantry guys weren’t stationed with us in garrison, and on site we were separated geographically, by role, and clearance.

The only other person I’ve ever met related to my duty was an Air Force pilot who was tasked with recon over our field emplacement sites to evaluate our camo rigging. Met him in a graduate-level GIS course at UTA in the early 90s IIRC.

1. US Army infantry ↩