Saturday October 2, Rocky, Missy, and Dismal Wizard clambered aboard Das Auto to make the 2+ hour trip to Mechanicsville Virginia where James River Greyhounds, https://jamesrivergreyhounds.org/ was having its first reunion of the COVID-19 era. In 2020, public health travel restrictions canceled that year’s reunion. In 2021, relaxation of gathering rules allowed JRG to hold the reunion.
Dismal Wizard took Missy and Me to the “puppy beach” at First Landing State Park. Oh, my, that worked. WordPress let my editor upload a live photo! I just can’t put it on the masthead. So we had to put a regular one there.
Saturday was a busy day. We got like the last parking place in the car park and had to walk, and walk, and walk to the beach trail head.
As we were walking the planks, we met a lady with 2 Portuguese Water Dogs in tow. They looked funny in their curly coats. One was a tux-puppy and the other was a cow-puppy. She told us that the Portuguese Water Dog national specialty meet was in town for the week. Nice calm dogs. They were in sporting cuts looking trim. Suspect they were on stage later in the week. Nice field dog.
We walked the ramp down to the beach. Nice doggies were starting up the ramp as we were coming down. This access is wheel chair accessible with belting leading down to the firm sand below the high tide line. The tide was part way so the beach looked like this.
Now you know why this is the “puppy beach”. The surf is not to big and not too small. Offshore is a sand bar that uncovers at low tide.
We walked the other way for about 10 minutes and then back. Today, I met some children, my first in a while as the pox has limited children’s activities in the heighborhood. Most were good but one was a bit worrisome. Parents listened when DW told them child was asking for a chomping.
The first thing kids need to learn is that, when meeting a dog, the dog makes the rules. Many of us don’t have a lot of experience with kids so first greetings must go at our pace negotiating what comes next. The kid that runs up and throws arms around us will likely be bit! Listen when we object.
Some kids just can’t wait. They don’t get it that we make the rules and take a dim view of aggressive children. I like the calm ones who let me have the opening greeting. But once I decide to greet you, I’m likely to give you a big sloppy kiss.
We walked back, taking the beach photos used in this post. We had the sun at our back so these were nicely exposed. All iPhone 11 point and pray shots. Finder washes out. All one-handed as I probably would have gone looking for the car. Not completely sure of this place.
iPhone11 is the first one that is dunk proof. We did not test that feature. But, DW was pretty wobbly standing in the break.
Featured image courtesy of Darko.Audio [1]
I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb here and recommend a piece of kit that I don’t actually own or use but that is a close cousin to kit in use here at Dismal Manor.
When Jason Stoddard, co-founder of Schiit Audio, has one of his periodic ask me anything interviews, a viewer invariably asks if Schiit will make an inexpensive streamer. Jason invariably answers, “no, that’s not our thing”. Jason has wisely chosen to avoid all the pain of what works with what in Linux Land.
But the question comes up sufficiently often that folks might like an answer. Back when I was looking for a streamer to replace AirPort Express and ChromeCast bits, I happened to discover John Darko’s Darko Audio YouTube channel. One evening, John reviewed the Allo Digital DigiOne Signature streamer and gave it marks that placed it firmly in high end sonic company with the Bluesound Node. After a bit, I ordered the boards and enclosure and put one together that I use in my lounge as my main stream receiver. I have a secondary HiFiBerry stream receiver that I use with the TV and video players.
In this article, I’ll tell you about a newer Allo Digital product that takes a bit different tack that will work nicely with today’s kit. That product is Allo Digital’s USBRIDGE Signature [2]. We’ll also look at what the more commercial products offer that is not part of the DIY streamers.
The Dismal Manor Gardens have a new accessory, a WeatherFlow Tempest weather station. This post introduces the device and the company. Our little device includes a rain fall sensor and a lightning sensor that supplements the live sensors (greyhounds). We get a pretty good idea of the amount of rain that has fallen and the amount of nearby lightning.
WeatherFlow collects, refines, and analyzes meteorological data, produces refined data from it, and produces near-cast forecasts using national forecast guidance with the local data.
WeatherFlow offers several applications of its refined observations and model results. Interestingly, the example applications do not require a local sensor as they use near-cast offshore conditions and activity specific models to make judgements about the suitability of the forecast conditions for the several sailing sports and fishing.
These questions are too deep to answer here. I think two things are at play.
I think the young folk who entered the trade in the microcomputer age are resigned to dealing with unsupported and community supported products. It wasn’t always that way and some products come with robust support even in 2021.
Today, I dropped by church to update the campus WAN network settings in preparation for Cox retiring the address segment our house network was on. Being an old codger, I asked myself if I was satisfied with my backup. I wasn’t so I tried to cut a new one. It didn’t save. I tried to change my WAN address to the new values provided by Cox. They didn’t take.
Backups worked when I last did maintenance in early July, so I return home, tail between legs, to see what the buzz was.
Well, part way, we have a Wallbox EVSE. A VW ID.4 lead sled is on order and the black forest elves are tinkering away on it as I write. In Order Locked limbo awaiting on the boat state.
So, in this post, I want to write a bit above EVSE shopping, and evolving plans to de-carbon Dismal Manor which currently has gas hot air heat and gas hot water.
In an earlier article, I wrote about using EuFy wireless cameras in the latest HomeKit Secure Video enabled series to realize the Greyhound’s Doorbell. Since then, I have added a HomeBridge with HomeBridge UniFi Protect plugin to allow me to bring in the UniFi Protect G4 cameras. UniFi Protect is not currently integrated with any of the smart home ecosystems as Ubiquity’s primary market is professional network system integrators installing video surveillance and entry control systems.
For a million years I’ve been scowling at Apple Music and the iTunes Store as Apple sold lossy-compression renderings of all of the music offered. All of the gripes to Apple Feedback finally payed off somewhat with the initiation of Apple Music Lossless. An earlier article explained the switchology of setting up Lossless streaming and downloads. This article talks about the results. It’s simple, Apple Lossless delivers the Red Book original. Spatial and Dolby Atmos are another thing. It’s all about the mastering, who did it and their goals for the mix.
Cox offers IPv6 home service but with not much of a knowledge base for setting it up. In the simple case, DHCP6 does all that is needed. If you have a Cox provided or supported router, Cox will do all you need. If, like Dismal Manor, you have Ubiquity UniFi software defined networking, some additional configuration is possible.
IPv6 was designed to solve the network address exhaustion issue and make routing simpler. It does this by providing an explicit network number and a separate host address field. IPv6 allows the local network to partition the host space into slices using several of the high order bits of the IPv6 host address. In this article, I’ll explain how they are used here. This setup requires visits to several UniFi SDN configuration pages. Find the proper page and setting using the search tool.
Ubiquity continues to work on the UniFi SDN configuration capabilities and is delaying release of a UniFi SDN user guide until they reach some internal milestone. Keep an eye on UI.COM support to see if this has happened.
Apple now offers bundles of online service under the Apple One logo. Here at Dismal Manor we have
Since my storage plan was $10/month, Apple TV+ was another $10, and Apple News another $10, changing to Apple One Premier was the same out of pocket and allowed me to add Apple Music to the mix. Read on to learn my impressions of the new Apple Music Lossless offering.
Dismal Manor Dispatches 
You must be logged in to post a comment.