The Potato Witch

I was feeding the chickens when I heard Wyatt do the Bad Bark and found a snake coiled under a sage bush inside the yard. Which, good job, Wyatt, that is exactly your job, but please next time be easier to call away from the potentially venomous snake

Anyways, got Wyatt away and put him in the garden, and went to see what he found, especially since the rattle I heard sounded... off

Just a bull snake vibrating its tail against an old scrap from a potting soil bag. Further confirmed when I saw the end of its tail and when the "rattle" stopped making noise when its tail moved over soil instead of debris

But it was still being a little jerk and wouldn't leave and then tried to "strike" at me, so I went to get some gloves and something to turn the snake into dinner and a hat band.

Got my gloves. Found the point shovel! (it had been missing for weeks) And by the time I got back, the snake was gone. A quick inspection by the dog confirmed no more snake in the yard

So today's snake encounter was with a rattler, and I could tell for 2 reasons:

First, it happened at night

And second, the rattle. I don't care how good of a mimic a bull snake is, whether they're hissing or shaking their tail against debris, their "rattle" always sounds off

This was not off

All I was trying to do was fill up the cats' water from the IBC tank I've got out by the garden, and I don't know if I nearly stepped on it or what, but I shrieked and ran back inside the fenceline

It happened outside the yard, so I'm not gonna fault it. Plus, it ran away as fast as I did. I came back outside with a flashlight in seconds and couldn't find it, but also didn't hear it rattling anymore.

look up recipes (especially snack recipes) that are child/toddler/baby-friendly

Since wifi is just a standard for sending data through radio waves, and radio waves can go a pretty long way if you use ‘em right, it’s not that difficult to connect two computers by wifi from across town. Then you just keep adding more computers to the network and you’ve got internet!

Small antennae, like for connecting across the neighborhood, can literally be built out of trash

And a larger, more accurate one can be built pretty cheap too

(You can also reuse an old satellite TV dish, or really anything else that’s roughly parabolic)

There are LoRa meshnets in places like New York, India, and all over Europe: Spain (pictured below), Greece, Austria, Germany, etc

As for sharing fresh mëmês, the network to go to is Scuttlebutt. Unlike most social media, Scuttlebutt posts are stored on your computer and sent directly to your friends’ computers (rather than being stored on the cloud and sent to a central server). It works just fine over traditional internet, but you can also view and interact with it offline, and it has protocols for connecting over any means that two computers can share information - that includes LoRa, as well as hardwired connections, sneakernet (basically mailing a USB stick back and forth), etc

What that means is you always know that your info is just as safe as the network it’s sent on and the computer that receives it - no one even theoretically has the ability to collect and sell it all. And, since it’s all run on your computer, there’s no servers to go down or companies to go out of business that could destroy the whole thing