Merry Christmas!
Here is hoping that the happy man in the red suit brought you all you wish.
More importantly, I wish you health and happiness in the coming years.
-Chris
Happy Hannukah!
For those of the Jewish faith, I want to wish you a happy Hannukah. May your latkes be delicious, may your oil last all eight nights, and may the darkness of the year be driven away by the light of the candles. 🙂
The Weekly Feast – Jello Cookies
Okay, I made these because they seemed funny and amusing, and very retro. I am making more because they’re also easy and REALLY yummy. They also have a lot less sugar than some of the cookies I’ve seen out there, which is nice. This is based on an early 1970s Jello recipe.
Ingredients:
- 4 cups sifted all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon double-acting baking powder
- 1-1/2 cups butter (room temperature)
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 package (3 ounces) jello gelatin, any flavor
- 1 egg (room temperature)
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
Preheat your oven to 400°F. It doesn’t take long to pull the cookie dough together, so you should be ready about the time it comes up to temperature!
Sift your flour and baking powder together. I don’t normally do that, but because these are technically spritz cookies, the dough is supposed to be very soft. Sifting helps the dough come together the way it should. If you don’t have a sifter on hand, pour your flour and baking powder into a strainer and tap the side of it until all the ingredients fall through.
In a separate container, cream your butter. If you’re doing it by hand, you can use a fork or whisk, and work it. I recommend using a stand mixer, however. Using the wire whisk attachment, whip the butter until it’s soft and fluffy. At that point, add in the sugar and Jello packet, about a quarter cup at a time, creaming it well after each addition. This makes the dough very light and fluffy, which is necessary. Add the egg and vanilla, and continue to beat well.
Gradually add in the flour mixture, and ensure that you mix well enough that the dough is smooth each time before adding the next portion. About half way through the process, if you’re using the whisk attachment, you’ll want to switch to the paddle attachment on your mixer. The dough gets a bit thick, though continues to be light and fluffy.
There are two ways to make the cookies. They both start with lining two or three baking sheets with parchment paper. Do not grease them.
For shaped cookies, force the dough through a cookie press. Decorate however you wish.
For round cookies, use your hands to make inch-wide balls of the dough, and place them onto the parchment paper. Lightly grease the bottom of an appropriately sized glass or cup, and press gently into the dough to make it into a circle. It ends up looking almost like a wax seal, to be honest. Again, decorate as you wish. This is the method I used, and I put on sprinkles to most of my cookies. I just shook them on, then pressed very gently with clean hands to seat the sprinkles into the dough. I also did one batch with “snow” on top, by baking them and adding powdered sugar AFTER they came out of the oven but when they were still very hot. To do “snow” you add a tablespoon of powdered sugar to a small sieve and then tap the side of it over the cookies. The sugar will fall through and dust the top of the cookies. You can even use pre-cut shapes like stars and trees to decorate with “snow”.
Bake your cookies for 13 to 15 minutes, or until they’re golden brown at the edges. They can be frozen, or they can be stored in a loosely covered container.
Notes:
I used orange jello for my first batch, and the result was very tasty. The “snow” batch had a sort of orange creamsicle flavor to it, and the rest it was hard to taste the jello. The color definitely comes through, though. I also used margarine for my cookies, since I can’t digest dairy. They turned out just fine!
What Time Is It?
I own a pocket watch. It is beautiful, but I don’t use it very often.
I know that I own a couple of watches. One of them is a battery powered solar recharging thing.
My standard “watch” today is my cell phone.
When I was in high school, I was very interested in accurate time keeping. As was my father.
This meant that we would call the “time” phone number to set our watches, at least once a week.
My grandfather had a “railroad watch”. This was a wristwatch that was approved by the railroad for time keeping. It was approved by the SooLine for use as a time keeping device. Amazing, until that model of watch was approved, the railroad required the use of pocket watches.
This was because a level of accuracy was required that only pocket watches or well regulated wristwatches could maintain.
The big thing in my youth were “quartz” watches. Instead of using a tuning fork or a mechanical balance/regulator, they used the vibrations of a quartz crystal to keep track of the time.
What this meant was that you had devices that were now able to maintain the same wrong time over an extended period of time.
The user had to set them correctly.
As an example, for years, maybe even to today, my wife would set her car clock (and many other clocks) 10 minutes fast. “So she would be on time for appointments.”
I set my car to my phone’s reported time.
One of the fun things that I did as a kid was to call up the Naval Observatory to get the current time. This was reported from their atomic clock. One of the most accurate time keeping devices in the world.
Accurate Time
Many protocols require accurate time. It is wonderful that you have a time piece that is accurate to within 1 second per year, but if it is reporting the wrong time, it is not particularly useful to the protocol.
What we want, is to know what time it is right now, and then to set our time to that.
We get the current time from a known, accurate time source. Today, that is often GPS satellites.
If you have ever wondered how GPS works, it works because your device knows where each satellite is at any instant of time. Each satellite transmits its ID and the current time. Over and over again.
That is all they do.
And here is the magic, if your device knows what time it is, and it knows where the satellite should be at his time, it can calculate the distance by comparing the difference in time.
If you are directly under a GPS satellite, it takes about 67ms for the signal to reach your device. From this, we can use the speed of light to figure out the distance traveled. Then some simple math and we know the location of your device.
We can also get accurate time by listening for the atomic clocks via radio. If you know where you are, and you know where the clock is, you can calculate the delay between the atomic clock and your device, then match your device to the atomic clock.
Today, when people want to use that type of process, they use a GPS device and get the time ticks from the device.
How long did it take?
This is where it starts to get complicated.
The standard for communications with a GPS device is 4800 or 9600 baud across a 3 wire serial connection. The protocol, the text being transmitted, specifies the time when the last character is transmitted.
That data is being received. Your device is processing it. Your device takes a certain amount of time to process the record it just received. It takes time to process that record. All of that is latency.
If you do not know the latency in your device, you do not know what time it is. For grins, just think of that serial link being 300,000,000 meters long. That would put a 1-second latency by itself.
There are ways of calculating the latency, but I do not remember what they are.
Latency is the important piece of information.
Calculating Latency
Many network people have run ping. It is a tool for testing reachability and latency between your device and some other device on the Internet.
ping -c 5 8.8.8.8
PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=1 ttl=116 time=11.1 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=2 ttl=116 time=11.1 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=3 ttl=116 time=11.6 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=4 ttl=116 time=11.1 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=5 ttl=116 time=11.0 ms
--- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4004ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 11.022/11.179/11.616/0.220 ms
This is a test from one of my faster machines to a Google DNS server. This tells me that it takes 11.179 ms to reach that DNS server. Testing to one of my network timeservers, the average is 78.094 ms.
This means that the time reported by the timeserver will be off by some amount. In a simple world, we would guess that it is 1/2 of 78.094.
But, I use NTP. NTP does many transmissions to multiple timeservers to discover the actual time. It is reporting that the latency is 78.163512 ms. A little more accurate. It tells me that the dispersion is 0.000092 ms.
How does it know this? Because of many samples and because of four different time stamps.
When my device sends an NTP request packet, it puts the current time in it. When the server receives the packet, it puts the current time in it. When the server transmits the response, it adds the current time again. Finally, when the reply is received, the current time is added to the packet. This gives us four different time stamps from two different sources.
We compute the total latency via mine(R)-mine(S). We know the processing time by server(S)-server(R). The difference between server(R)-mine(S) and mine(R)-server(S) as the symmetry between the two paths the request and response traveled.
From these values, we can calculate the network distance, in seconds, between us and them.
Assume we transmit at time 0(M), it is received at 100(S), the response is transmitted at 105(S) and we receive it at 78(M).
How can we receive our reply before the server sent it? Easy, we have to different views of what time it is.
The latency is 78. This means that the halfway point was at 38. It took 5 to process the reply and get it on the wire again. If we do simple stuff, this means that our time is off from their time by 67.
But we can do better. By looking at the reported latency between the two legs, we can actually calculate how long it took for us to receive the reply.
NTP uses multiple timeservers to get a consensus as to the time. It monitors each timeserver to determine which one jitters the least.
All of this means that we can have very accurate times.
And having accurate measurements of the time, NTP will calculate how much the computer’s clock drifts over time. It will then modify the clock rate in parts per million to get the drift as close to zero as possible.
This means, that the longer your device runs NTP, the more accurate it becomes.
Grey v. Jennings
In two days, we will get our next cup of tea leaves.
On the 16th, Gray waived the 14-day waiting period for distribution of Petition. They requested that the case be distributed for the January 10th conference on December 24th.
They did, indeed, get their reply in on time. Amazing how the good guys get their paperwork in on time while the state, with nearly infinite resources, is forever requesting extensions.
What does this mean?
As of the morning of the 21st, all three Second Amendment cases seeking cert are now fully briefed. Two are at final judgement and the third is about preliminary injunctions, so being in an interlocutory state is not an issue.
We have three cases teed up and ready to go.
All three cases are simple cases if the Court follows their own president.
Are “assault weapons” arms under the Second Amendment? Yes.
Is this a gun ban case? Yes.
Is this class of arms in common use for lawful purposes? Yes.
Done.
Are “large capacity magazines” arms under the Second Amendment? Yes, but with a bit more language. Magazines are to arms as ink is to free speech.
I this a ban on a class of firearms? Yes.
Is this class of arms in common use for lawful purposes? Yes.
Done.
Is a violation of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution a violation of a Constitutionally protected right? Yes.
Done. Irreparable harm has been committed if a Second Amendment protected right is violated.
Gray’s response points out that there is a circuit split. It points out that a violation of any constitutionally protected right that cannot be fixed with money is irreparable harm.
Prove it!
The state is arguing that the plaintiffs (good guys) “…failed to prove they will more likely than not suffer irreparable in jury while proceedings are pending.”
The petitioners (plaintiffs and good guys) did make a showing that they were suffering irreparable harm. They argued that violation of intangible Second Amendment rights is irreparable harm.
The state argues that they didn’t even try to prove irreparable harm. They counter with the proof is that it is irreparable harm because it is a violation of a Constitutionally protected right.
Force of Law
Yesterday was a good day. But you don’t want to hear about nerd rants.
I took my wife to the hospital for minor surgery. It was successful, and the patent lived.
There are hardly any places in this state that are “gun free zones”. Post offices, courts, and jails are the limit, as far as I know.
While schools are “gun free zones”, the law says that if you have a permit to carry, you can carry in school zones.
Certain parts of court buildings are gun free zones. When I went to support a friend, I was in the court building, carrying. There was a metal detector between me and the courtroom, which was a true gun free zone.
Post offices were made “gun free zones” when a postal worker went bonkers and killed some of his coworkers. Under leftist logic, that means that The People need to be disarmed when entering postal property.
Postal property including the parking lot.
This is being challenged in court.
If you look at the image, you will notice that there are no references to any legal documents.
For example, the signage in Massachusetts has “G.L.C. 266 § 120” on it. New York’s signage says it is a felony and “Penal Law § 265.01-D, Penal Law § 265.01-E”. Texas signage says, “Pursuant to section 30.05, penal code (criminal trespass), a person may not enter this property with a firearm”.
The sign on the hospital? No such verbiage. That is because it does not have the force of law behind it.
In my state, a NO GUNS sign doesn’t mean anything.
If the owner of the property discovers I’m carrying, they can have me trespassed. That’s it. It isn’t the sign, it is just their right as a private property owner.
They can trespass anybody they want for any reason.
It is nice to live in a free state.
Prepping – Gift Giving
So last week I wrote about what cool gifts you can find on the internet and beyond, to give as gifts to your favorite prepper. This week I want to talk about making Christmas gifts.
There’s a lot of crap out there, people. In the grand scheme of things, do we really need snap lights and solar generators and Leatherman tools? We might want them, but they aren’t necessary. What’s necessary is food, shelter, warmth, and love. With all the commercialism at this time of year, I think we forget that.
This Christmas, I’m making bread for people. I’m baking cookies. I’m sewing cute little boxes to store things in. I’m making ornaments out of scraps, and cross stitching things. Why am I making things? Because there is no greater gift I can give than my time.
If I had the money, I could get everyone flashy stuff from Walmart or Amazon. I did get a few things that are useful and fun. But even when I had more money, I tended to make at least some of my gifts. When I don’t make them I try to buy local, from artists and folk in my neighborhood, because I want to support the people who live around me.
What kind of gifts can you make? Well, cookies are always a good one. I’m making Jello cookies this year, which I originally tried because they sounded funny, and am continuing to make because they’re both cool and tasty. I pulled out my holiday sprinkles and am tossing them on the dough, and I end up with these beautiful little cookies I can put in a decorative bag and gift to my friends and family. You can make things like a sugar scrub, or flavored oils and vinegars, or hot chocolate kits (with or without a side of Bailey’s Irish Cream).
If you’re of a Certain Generation, you might consider making a “mixed tape” playlist on YouTube for a loved one. Or make a movie night, and pick a movie, get popcorn and your favorite sweet snack, cuddle up on the couch, and enjoy a glass of wine. Make a coupon book full of things like, “Take out the garbage,” and “Unload the dishwasher,” for when your loved one is feeling overwhelmed.
Beyond all this giving of gifts, homemade or otherwise, is the idea that if the world were a bit different we might not have Amazon or Target to get gifts from. Think about what would have been worthy to gift your partner a hundred years ago, or if there were no stores within driving distance and no Amazon delivery available. What things could you give or do that would be memorable, and show the depth and breadth of your love and devotion?
I am feeling less like we’re going to have a civil war these days, but I think about this stuff, because we *could* have one. Bad things could happen at any moment. We need to stay on our toes, and be vigilant. Sometimes, that’s the best gift of all.
A conflagration of DIY gift ideas:
- from Country Living
- from Pioneer Woman
- from Good Housekeeping
- from The Spruce
Friday Feedback
Continuing Resolution
DOGE has its first confirmed kill!
The continuing resolution is the legal device that the government has been using to avoid passing a budget. It has been nearly 30 years since Congress completed all its appropriation bills before the start of the new fiscal year.
The last time a budget was passed was in December 2020.
A continuing resolution is supposed to say, “We are going to keep going at the current rate.”
This was not a continuing resolution. This was a barge of pork barrels. Maybe three or four barges.
The last CR to be passed was around 29 pages. This thing was over 1500.
Elon posted a one sentence message to X with a picture of the printed CR. Ever seen a bigger piece of pork?
People decided to read the bill. And what they found was infuriating. In addition, people took to using Grok, X’s AI to look for pork in the bill.
This caused The People to light up the switchboard in Congress demanding that this monstrosity not be passed.
Not Budget Related
It appears there were items in the CR to limit the ability to investigate the J6 commission. To give Congress critters a $100,000/year raise.
It wasn’t just money pork, it was congress critters trying to save their asses.
Too Many Nerd Postings
I have an issue where I need to get packets from here to there securely. Not only must it be secure, it must be fast. Add to this that there is a network routing issue that needs to be solved for multiple systems, the obvious choice is to move to an overlay network.
The overlay network methodology I picked was OVN.
OVN is well documented, if you want to use a OpenStack or Kubernetes. If you don’t need or want the overhead of OpenStack, then things are more complex.
Why am I avoiding K8S? It is too expensive in the cloud. Using a container-based system just makes more sense, for me.
After spending 10 to 12 hours researching and testing, it is difficult to be interested in the stuff going down in politics or the courts.
I wrote my first article on OVN yesterday. It is published but not yet linked. There will be more.
Court Cases
In 2022, we were anticipating the Supreme Court taking the first Second Amendment challenge since the 2010 McDonald case. The first case we were hoping for was New York Rifle & Pistol Assn. v. New York City.
The city and state of New York worked overtime to moot the case, and succeeded.
The Supreme Court instead took the Bruen case, which resulted in a new landscape of Second Amendment litigation.
It felt much like the giddy times after Heller. You might recall that there was a time, shortly after the Heller decision, when Washington, D.C. was a constitutional carry city. They changed that in a hurry.
The same thing happened after Bruen. A boat load of new cases were opened. We waited to see what would happen when the rogue, inferior, courts got involved.
We found that it was the same shit in a different color. The Seventh Circuit court still thinks they are better than the Supreme Court. The First, Second, Third, Fourth, and Ninth circuit are still playing games to keep unconstitutional laws on the books.
We were hoping that the Supreme Court was going to stomp on those nasty, evil, duplicitous, lying inferior courts. Instead, the Supreme Court kept sending cases back down because they weren’t ripe yet.
Today we are at the same point as we were in 2022. Waiting to see which cases the Supreme Court decides to hear. There are three big ones lined up. My expectation is that they will take all three and consolidate them.
The consolidation will allow them to create a single opinion. This will keep the rogue inferior courts and the state from picking and choosing language from the three different opinions to create confusion.
Question of the Week
When did you hear about the CR? When did you find out it was a pork barrel of non-essential and frankly terrible bills stuffed into a must pass bill?
What is your opinion of Elon’s method of addressing the CR?