Smokin’ Christmas present

Posted on December 27, 2021 by james

For all sorts of reasons I shan’t go into in this post I’m really not into Christmas, but now the dust is starting to settle I have to share details of a present I received that I’m actually quite excited about:

Yes, it’s a cardboard box 🙂

Well, ok, sort of… It’s a cardboard box (actually a cardboard tube inside a cardboard box) that is intended to function as a cold smoker. I’ve been promising myself I’d build a smoker for years but you know… life… so I’m quite looking forward to having a play with this.

Just visible in the top of the box is the smoke outlet (can’t really call it a chimney) which is just a hole about 20mm in diameter. Opening up the top gives access to three racks sitting on supports formed by pushing in the edges of the inner cardboard tube.

and directly under the bottom rack in that photo you can see a drip tray to catch any gooeyness that falls off the food being smoked.

The real business end of the smoker is behind the flap at the bottom of the box.

It’s a mesh “spiral” intended to be filled with sawdust, basically.

The tea light is used to start the sawdust burning whilst the spiral is outside the smoker, then removed before the smoking sawdust is put into the base of the smoker.

I also received two bags of sawdust to get things under way.

Though as we have quite a few fruit trees as well as beech, oak, ash and sycamore I shall be tempted to experiment with my own sawdust later on.

The smoker box measures about 29cm by 29cm by 54cm which I calculate to be a volume of about 45 litres. The sawdust burner is supposed to be good for volumes of up to 150 litres, so should I wish to in the future I could probably make a larger box up of around 40cm x 40cm x 90cm and still use the same one (there’s a higher capacity one available for larger volumes). That would probably suit some old oven racks that I have lying about (I always knew there was a reason for keeping them :)) and I could put a door in the front rather than having to load and unload the smoker from the top. I have actually been keeping an upright freezer around for the purpose of making a smoker, though that would require the larger burner, but a book that also came with the present suggests that a filing cabinet can work well and I have one of those that I’ve recently removed from my office too! See? This was clearly meant to happen 😀

I think my first experiment will be with some cheese and perhaps a few bulbs of garlic since I have home-grown garlic this year (though we’re getting through it at quite a rate). Smoking meat and fish will be the long-term goal, but I’ll start with the easier stuff first.

Posted in Smallholding, Smoker | Tagged | Leave a comment

An unexpected ssh “gotcha”

Posted on December 24, 2021 by james

I have a number of ssh keys used for various different purposes where it makes sense not to share the same key across different environments. Up to now that’s worked just fine. Today I added another. Some time later, I tried to log into a local system and without any kind of prompt I got an error saying that there had been too many authentication failures when I know it worked yesterday.

At first I didn’t understand what was going on as I could log in fine from another machine, but after I while I twigged what was happening. The ssh server at the remote end obviously has a limit on the number of failures it will accept when trying to log in. That’s fine and expected. However, when I tried to log in the ssh client process tried each available key in turn. Before it could get to the valid one however, it reached the limit on the number of authentication attempts and the server killed the connection.

I guess there are two obvious workarounds for this. The first is to raise the limit on the number of failed login attempts for the ssh server, but that seems a fairly crap way out of the hole. Short of any other bright ideas, my favoured option is to edit my personal ssh configuration file and force the IdentityFile option to use the key I want.

Posted in Computing, Linux | Leave a comment

Raspberry vodka

Posted on December 24, 2021 by james

As I mentioned a few days back, I had some vodka left over from making sloe vodka. A bit of a dig around in the freezer turned up a load of raspberries, and raspberry vodka was so popular last time I made it that it seemed like a good plan again. My recipe was:

  • 150g raspberries
  • 170g granulated sugar
  • 70cl vodka

It’s really just a case of dumping them all in the same container and shaking each day until the sugar has all dissolved, much the same as sloe vodka. After three months or so, strain off the liquid and bottle it. If you have enough, hide a few bottles where no-one else will look otherwise you’ll be beating them off with a stick.

Mine’s already progressing well.

The raspberries actually did pretty well this year and I have quite a few more in the freezer. It’s now quite tempting to buy enough vodka to fill up that demijohn and perhaps another as well.

Posted in Smallholding | Tagged | Leave a comment

Now I’m getting somewhere!

Posted on December 23, 2021 by james

As I posted yesterday, the kwh_accumulator process in emoncms requires Redis to be available. Fortunately there’s a Docker image for that and it was just a case of pulling the image and starting it. I came up with a systemd unit configuration once I’d checked it was running:

[Unit]
Description=Redis Container
After=docker.service
Requires=docker.service

[Service]
TimeoutStartSec=0
Restart=always
ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker stop redis
ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker rm redis
ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/docker pull redis
ExecStart=/usr/bin/docker run --rm -t -p 6379:6379 redis

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

and then it was just a case of

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start docker-redis

to get it all going.

I was fairly sure I had my emoncms Docker image pretty much where I wanted it at this point, so I produced another systemd config to start it as well:

[Unit]
Description=emoncms Container
After=docker.service
After=docker-redis.service
Requires=docker.service
Requires=docker-redis.service

[Service]
TimeoutStartSec=0
Restart=always
ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker stop emoncms
ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker rm emoncms
ExecStart=/usr/bin/docker run --rm -t -p 80:80 -v /var/lib/emoncms:/var/opt/emoncms emoncms

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Happily that also appeared to work first time using

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start docker-emoncms

I cleared out all of my existing configuration and re-entered it, restarted my script that publishes the data from the RFXcom unit to MQTT and within seconds had data appearing in the emoncms feeds!

I’m very pleased to have got this far. Now I want to go back and submit a few pull requests for various bits of emoncms to resolve the occasional problem and add the supervisord functionality, but first I’ve just discovered that I used the wrong script to grab data from MQTT and push it into emoncms (there are two, near-identical, and I chose the wrong one!), so I need to update my image to use the correct one.

There’s more I want to look at with emoncms, but before I can do that I think I need a bit of data to play with, so I’ll probably let things run for a few days and come back to it next week.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Piano progress after two weeks

Posted on December 23, 2021 by james

It feels much longer than two weeks. I wonder what that suggests? 🙂

I’ve been practising for about an hour each evening (I skipped one when I had to do a 550-mile round-trip to pick up my son from university). Generally I’m quite pleased with how I’ve progressed. I’m finding that I can now play the early pieces in both the Faber Adult Piano Adventures and Alfred’s Basic Adult Piano Course books fairly easily now. Yesterday however I did have terrible trouble with “Ode to Joy” from Faber pp.24-25 where I just couldn’t get my right hand to play the correct notes in the third section for some reason. The rest I could do fine. By comparison I was particularly amazed that the fourth section where both hands are playing the same notes an octave apart (and therefore fingers are working in opposite orders) came very easily.

I have to admit that I’ve been a bit lazy about working through the theory sections of either book. I remember a certain amount of music theory from dabbling with instruments in my childhood (though that was a few years ago now), but I really should go back and check I’ve not missed anything as I’ve noticed an odd notation such as “1 on _?” appearing in the Faber book.

As time has gone on I’m finding I prefer working with the books than YouTube, though there are occasionally helpful videos there. I’ve mostly abandoned Andrew Furmanczyk, but I may stick with Bill Hilton for a while yet. My preference just be a reflection of the fact that I’m used to learning from books, I guess.

Of the two books I’m perhaps starting to prefer Faber, though I think perhaps doing the exercises in Alfred might help focus me on the theory a bit better. Another reason I’ve passed over those is possibly that I just wouldn’t write in a book. What I might do is photocopy the pages of exercises and do them on the copies.

One thing I’ve started doing this week is turning on the metronome feature of my keyboard. I’m finding it quite useful in terms of keeping to the correct rhythm, though I found it very hard to get used to at first and I swear it speeds up when I set it to 3/4 time rather than 4/4 😀

Watching a few videos of progress at one month from YouTube it’s hard to believe I’ll be anywhere close to most of them in another two weeks. It’ll be interesting to find out 🙂

Posted in Learning piano | Leave a comment

Swimming, 23rd December 2021

Posted on December 23, 2021 by james

Last swim before Christmas and for undetermined reasons it was a very tough one. I really wasn’t on the pace I had yesterday and it took some time to get there. Certainly it wasn’t for lack of trying. My arms were shaking when I got out of the pool at the end of the session and I could definitely feel the tiredness in my lats.

My son, meanwhile, racked up 2.2km in easy 200’s and then 100’s with plenty of time to spare and showing everyone else up in the process, despite not having swum the entire time he was at university last term. It’s quite sickening really 🙂

I now have six days off as the next session that works for me isn’t until next Wednesday. That’s going to be an “interesting” session.

Posted in Swimming | Tagged , | Leave a comment

My first foray into sloe cordial

Posted on December 23, 2021 by james

I’ve never tried this before, but with about 1kg of sloes left over after I’d made the sloe vodka it seemed worth a try. It’s really quite straightforward to do, too. I used:

  • 1kg sloes
  • 1 litre water
  • juice of 1 lemon
  • granulated sugar (amount to be determined)

Initially I put the sloes (still frozen in my case), water and lemon juice into a pan and simmered them for five to ten minutes, then took them off the heat and mashed the sloes up with a potato masher. Back on the heat I simmered them for about another ten minutes.

The next step is to strain the mixture. I used a jelly bag, but I imagine a sieve with some muslin inside or something similar would do the job. I left mine to drip for several hours until there was nothing obviously still to come, but I didn’t squeeze the sloes to get the very last of the juice out in case doing so made the cordial cloudy.

I measured the volume of juice, returned it to a saucepan and added 80g of sugar per 100ml of juice, bringing it up to a simmer whilst stirring in the sugar to dissolve it. Once it had all dissolved I poured the juice into sterilised bottles, though as long as the temperature is above 60°C and the bottles are safe from cracking I imagine the heat of the juice itself will sterilise them — they just need to be turned upside down for a few seconds once closed to make sure all of the inside of the bottle gets hot.

This was enough to make about three pints of cordial, perhaps a shade less.

First thoughts having tasted it are that the flavour isn’t as strong as I expected. I might be tempted to use more sloes or less water next time. Also for my taste it’s a bit too sweet (I don’t have a particularly sweet tooth). I will probably drop the amount of sugar down to somewhere around 60g per 100ml for the next batch.

It’s definitely one to make again though, and I’d quite happily make far more given sufficient quantities of sloes (not really a problem around here — there’s more blackthorn than you can shake a hairy stick at around the neighbourhood. In fact, if I had three or four kilos of fruit available I might well try a few different combinations of sloes, water and sugar to see what people preferred.

Posted in Smallholding | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Never mind steps forwards and backwards…

Posted on December 22, 2021 by james

Over the last couple of evenings I think I’ve been all around the houses 🙁

I pushed my new device templates into emoncms, but they just wouldn’t work properly. The various processes didn’t get set up and I kept getting errors. Tonight I decided to mount up a development partition with the templates in so I could modify them “in real time” when the Docker container was using them, but that made things even worse. Sometimes they just didn’t work at all and I was offered no device templates whatsoever.

After quite some time I discovered that the code for reading the templates isn’t really very fussy about matching names of files. Perhaps not as fussy as it should be. It was picking up my editor temporary files and assuming they were valid templates, which of course they’re not. At that point everything bombs out. But only when I had a template open in the editor 🙂 Editing the code to make things a bit more strict made life somewhat simpler and after messing about cutting down templates and moving between a working one and my own I discovered a subtle error in mine. That’s now fixed and I think this is the final form the RFXmeter template will take:

{
  "name": "single-input RFXmeter",
  "category": "RFXcom",
  "group": "Power",
  "description": "1-input RFXmeter",
  "inputs": [
    {
      "name": "count",
      "description": "CT Power 1",
      "processList": [
        {
          "process": "scale",
          "arguments": {
            "type": "ProcessArg::VALUE",
            "value": 0.001
          }
        },
        {
          "process": "kwh_accumulator",
          "arguments": {
            "type": "ProcessArg::FEEDID",
            "value": "power"
          }
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "feeds": [
    {
      "name": "power",
      "engine": "Engine::PHPTIMESERIES",
      "unit": "kWh"
    }
  ]
}

I am now able to create my devices and have inputs and feeds automagically set up. Go me.

Not so fast, sadly 🙁 It turns out that the accumulator processes need to have Redis running and I don’t. I don’t really want to pull it into the Docker image I’m running either, so it looks like I need another Docker image for Redis. That’s the next job then. Get the image set up, start it from systemd, then plumb it into emoncms and see what else blows up in my face 🙂

Posted in Computing | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The cleanest seed in all the county…

Posted on December 22, 2021 by james

I allowed some of my coriander to run to seed this year. I didn’t want the seed to replant as that particular variety seems to gallop into flower at the slightest sign of sunshine. I was interested in having some for cooking though. Before the seed fell off the plants I gathered up the tops and hung them in a plastic bag in the polytunnel to dry out.

Once dry, rubbing the seeds between my hands seemed to be reasonably effective at removing the seeds from the stalks, but I ended up with a mixture of material somewhat like this:

Real Seeds have plans for a “seed cleaner” on their website however, so I decided it was worth putting one together to see if it would work. Here’s the result.

It was all built from bits and pieces I had lying about. I could do with some sort of catch for the flap that keeps the chaff door closed and I might have to buy that, but otherwise not a penny has been spent on this specific project.

I started with a 600mm x 420mm piece of 9mm construction ply for the back. Onto that I drew all of the locations for the various parts to ensure that I got them in the correct places with the appropriate spacing. It also meant I could measure off the angles where timbers join when they’re not at 90° or 45°.

Almost all the rest of the wood is from the slats of an old double bed. It happened to be exactly 70mm wide, so fitted the requirements of the plans perfectly. All the pieces are glued and screwed onto the ply, and where appropriate, to each other. The triangular “steps” against which the seeds fall are actually made from elm that came from the roof of our converted barn, so are probably over 200 years old!

Before fitting the clear front I drilled the holes for the funnel, vacuum hose and vents using a hole saw and screwed on the legs. The perspex sheet has been sitting around in the workshop for years. I actually have no idea where it came from. It may have been left here when we moved in. It wasn’t quite long enough so I had to extend the parts covering the bottom of the channels at each side. Even the screws holding it on were left over from fitting some lights in the workshop — they were supplied with the brackets and I didn’t use them.

Finally the flap at the bottom of the chute for the chaff is made from a scrap left over from flooring in the barn conversion, which I have been told originally came from a church in Winchester so is probably quite an age too. It’s attached to the sloping side of the chute by a hinge, and for the moment I have a couple of screws on the other side that means it can be kept closed with an elastic band.

The vacuum is quite powerful and I possibly need another vent hole despite the nozzle not being a tight fit into the top. I didn’t have a hole saw of quite the right size, so what I’ll probably do is 3d print an insert of the correct size and stick it in with silicone sealant. I also really need a large diameter funnel and a proper set of feet rather than just resting it against the saw-horse.

As it is though, it did a fine job. I poured all my coriander mess through and ended up with these:

There are a small number of bits of stalk still attached to the seeds so I might have another go at loosening those and the put the seed through for another pass. Oh, I also found a dried-out caterpillar chrysalis too. Good job that didn’t end up in someone’s dinner 🙂

Overall though, I’m really pleased with this. I didn’t exactly spend a lot of time on it and it has done a fantastic job.

Posted in Projects, Smallholding, Veg plot | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Sloe vodka time again

Posted on December 22, 2021 by james

My sloes have been sitting in the freezer for a fair while waiting for me to get around to doing something with them. I finally got to it.

After purchasing such a number of bottles of vodka that it’s embarrassing to be seen putting them in the recycling at the same time, I’ve gone for the following proportions of ingredients, in wonderfully mixed imperial and metric units:

  • 3 litres vodka
  • 3lbs sloes
  • 12 oz granulated sugar

All put into a demijohn and shaken up on a regular basis. I’ll keep on giving the mixture a shake until all the sugar has dissolved and then leave it for a few months. In fact I had sufficient sloes and vodka for two demijohns so it seemed a shame not to use them:

In fact, I have a little vodka and about 2lbs of sloes left over, so I might try making some sloe cordial and perhaps a different fruit vodka depending on what I can find in the freezer.

Posted in Smallholding | Tagged | Leave a comment