Skills

Meatballs are the ultimate feast food, in my opinion. There are as many ways to make them as there are cooks, and maybe more. This recipe was created based upon a video by Country Life Vlog in Azerbaijan, Turkey. While Aziza (the cook) doesn’t give you amounts or any real instructions, I pieced this together by watching her cooking the meal. It’s incredibly delicious!

Ingredients:

For the broth:

• 6 cups water
• 1 lb beef soup bones
• 1 lb beef, diced
• 1 lb pork, diced
• 1 head of garlic, halved across the middle, paper still on it
• 1 large onion, quartered
• 1 hot pepper (dehydrated or fresh)
• salt, pepper, bay leaves

For the meatballs:

• 1 lb ground beef
• 1 onion, minced fine
• 1/3 cup rice, washed well
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp black pepper
• 1 tbsp turmeric
• 1 tbsp dry mint (crushed fine)
• several dates, figs, or prunes

For the rest of the recipe:

• 3 large potatoes, peeled and split in half the long way
• 1 can chickpeas, well rinsed
• several threads of saffron

Make your broth first. Add the broth ingredients into a large pot and bring it to a boil. Reduce the heat and allow it to simmer for at least 3 hours, adding water as necessary to keep it from drying out. If you want to skip this part, you can use 6 cups of beef broth, and add the other ingredients to it, and let it simmer for 30 minutes before moving on.

While the broth is cooking, work on your meatballs. In a large bowl, add all the ingredients except the figs. Mix together by hand, until everything is well distributed. Let this sit, covered, for at least 30 minutes and up to 2 hours.

When the broth is ready, remove all the ingredients and strain it to be sure there’s no hot seedy surprises lurking in the bottom. Return the broth to the pot, and taste it. Add salt and pepper to taste. Bring the broth back to a simmer while you form the meatballs.

For a pound of ground beef, make 3 to 4 meatballs (yes, they are LARGE). Really manhandle the meatballs, slapping them from hand to hand to make them fairly solid. In the center of each meatball, place one fig, and form the ball around it. Set the meatballs aside.

Mix together a tablespoon of turmeric, a cup of water, and a dash of salt, and whisk to combine. Use this turmeric water to “wash” the outside of the meatballs. This adds a bit of flavor, but also smooths the outside of the meatballs to help them hold together better while cooking. As each meatball is done, place it into the simmering broth. Make certain the broth covers the meatballs most of the way. Cover the pot, and allow to simmer.

Peel and slice your potatoes in half now, and slide them into the broth around the meatballs. Add the rinsed chickpeas, a few figs, and the saffron, as well. Be careful not to squish the meatballs, as they aren’t firm yet and could fall apart. If there isn’t enough liquid at this point to cover everything, you can add a bit of beef broth or water, or even a dash of red wine, to bring it up high enough. Using a large spoon, gently nudge the meatballs to make sure all sides are getting evenly cooked, and they aren’t sticking to the bottom of the pot.
Simmer until the meatballs are cooked through and the potatoes are soft and just beginning to crumble a bit. You can check the meatballs with an instant read meat thermometer. They should register at 165°F when they are ready.

Serve up this delicious meal with a side of pickles or beets if you would like to be immersed in Turkish food culture. Alternatively, a slice of bread never goes wrong, either.

Notes:
When I made this soup, I found the broth to be so spicy that I couldn’t eat it. I used a dehydrated poblano pepper, and it was just too much for me. I’m not a big heat person. Family said that it was warm but not hot to them, so your mileage may vary! I served the broth in small bowls on its own, and then put the meatballs, potatoes, and chickpeas on a plate. That way, people could use as much or little of the broth as they wanted. This was a very hearty meal.

The Country Life Vlog video:

There are two network time protocols in use today. One is the NTP protocol, the other is PTP. I have no idea what the PTP looks like, I know that it requires hardware support.

The goal of NTP is to create a local clock that is accurate to less than 1ms from sources that have up to a hundred times that in latency.

The fact that this works at all simply amazes me.

I have 7 servers acting as an NTP cluster. That is to say, they all work to come to a consensus as to what time it is, and then each syncs to that time point.

They do this via actively querying each other every 64 seconds. The protocol knows that the referenced clock time is somewhere within the total time from query to response. Using complex statistics, it can get it much closer than just “somewhere” or “middle”.

As I am writing this, one server believes it knows the time to the network with a standard deviation of less than 500us. It has one nailed down to less than 83us.

Within the local cluster, it believes it knows the time within 50us for all the cluster members. For a few of the cluster members, they agree on the time within 3000ns (3us). That’s not bad.

So what are the problems.

The first problem is that I have a clock that claims to be very accurate, but which I know is slightly wrong.

The clock is fast by 957us with an SD of 57us. I believe it to be worse than that. The issue being that the clock is influencing the rest of the time cluster.

I did that because I had a usable fudge factor for the clock. Now I need to bring it much closer to “real time”.

To that end, I’ve reconfigured the server with the GPS clock to never use the GPS time. Instead, it will use the network servers to converge on “the time”. Once I know “the time” I will be able to adjust the GPS offset better.

The second issue is that USB injects jitter into the signal. We don’t know when the USB port received the time message from the GPS unit. Hopefully, we have a good estimate, but it is still very jittery.

It is nearly impossible to get down to 1ns or less with a clock that has a 500us jitter.

What does this mean? I need to stabilize the time signal. We do that with a PPS. This pulse tells us that the second happened on the rise or fall of the pulse. This is configurable. The second starts on the rising edge of the pulse. With a PPS input, we can reduce jitter to a few nanoseconds.

The issue still is, “What is the offset detecting the leading edge from the “real” start of the second?”

This value comes from the delay along the antenna cable and other such speed of light delays.

Which takes us to the conclusion of this article.

The GPS units I purchased came with a small ceramic antenna. The antenna is about 10 mm on a side. It has a 10 cm connector. This means the unit and the antenna are very close to each other. The antenna isn’t a great antenna.

With this taped to the inside of the window, I was picking up 3 satellites. I replaced it with a cheap, yet “real” antenna. I’m not locking on to 10 or more satellites. More locks mean better time keeping.

If you are doing this yourself, do yourself a favor and order a real antenna to go with your project.

In addition to being “real”, the cable is 3m long, giving me options on where to place it. And it is a water proof unit.

Mask mandates probably weren’t the best thing out there, but I’ve seen enough evidence to know that masks do help stop the transmission of many illnesses. Vaccine mandates probably aren’t the best thing out there, but a lot of long-standing vaccines are the reason we don’t have people in iron lungs anymore. Disease and illness is a problem that human beings will always have to deal with. Our methods for dealing with them change as we develop better ways of fighting disease, but the fight will always be there.

As a prepper, disease is something we need to be concerned about. There are likely going to be more pandemics in the future (because there have been many in the past, and it’s the type of pattern that doesn’t change much). It’s in our best interest to learn how to deal with the most likely diseases to bother us, should a SHTF scenario happen. So which diseases should we prepare for?

Diarrheal diseases are the first things we’re likely to see. These happen for a variety of reasons, sometimes with very little change. The food you are eating may change if a large scale emergency happens, and that can cause changes in bowel movements (in either direction, I might add, and both are bad). The “big” diarrheal diseases are cholera, typhoid, gastroenteritis, and dysentery. Changes in food and sanitation will make these four diseases something to be feared. You combat them by making sure you’ve addressed good hygiene in your emergency preparations. Be sure to have clean water to wash your hands in, if nothing else. Keep bleach in your preps so that you can sanitize things. Be prepared to use boiling water to sanitize some things. Good sanitation will take care of a lot of the things in this category, but not all. Consider keeping hydration mixes on hand in case of gastro or other diseases causing dehydration.

Nutritional diseases will eventually show up. Lack of vitamin C can cause scurvy. Vitamin D deficiency can bring on rickets and osteomalacia. Low iron and zinc can bring on all sorts of issues. Eating too much protein, or not enough protein, can cause mental confusion. Severe weight loss due to lack of food or lack of GOOD food can cause problems, too. We tend to think of losing weight as a positive thing for SHTF, but it isn’t. Rapid weight loss of that kind can bring on a bevy of health problems that we’ll be in no shape to deal with. Read More

“In all her life Laura had never tasted anything so good as that savory, fragrant, sea-tasting hot milk, with golden dots of melted cream and black specks of pepper on its top, and the little dark canned oysters at its bottom. She sipped slowly, slowly from her spoon, to keep that taste going over her tongue as long as she could.” — from By the Shores of Silver Lake by Laura Ingalls Wilder, pp 204

Anyone who knows me, knows that I have an uncontrollable fascination with the Little House series. It was my introduction to Christianity, and the reason why I invited the minister to dinner when we moved to New England (Ma insisted it was right and proper, so therefore it was what I ought to do, yes?). I’ve been through the series so many times that I’ve had to buy new copies on several occasions, the older ones having worn out. I learned morals and ethics from them. For me, Laura and Ma and Pa and the other people there are just as real as you and me.

Several years ago (several severals of years ago), I was living on the west coast and had managed to become unemployed and rather destitute. I was scraping by on unemployment insurance payments, but it was pretty dicey. My partner D and I were approaching the Christmas and Yule season with as much joy as we could muster. After all, we had a roof over our heads, heat, and each other. It was lean, but love fills a lot of gaps.

Some kind soul had told the local fire department that we were living lean over the season, and a soft spoken gentleman brought us a hamper of food. I tried to protest, but he insisted that it was alright, we weren’t taking anything from someone else. I’ll admit, once he was gone, I tore into that box like … well, like it was Christmas morning. D and I went through the rice and pasta, a tiny canned ham, some fresh vegetables, and then at the very bottom we found the single precious can of smoked oysters.

We could have eaten that can of oysters in two seconds. We’re both in love with them, their smoky flavor, savory and oily… But I looked at him and ran to the book shelf. I pulled out “By the Shores of Silver Lake” and went skimming through it to find the New Year’s Eve scene. There it was, Laura’s description of the oyster soup Ma had made for their guests. He and I started laughing, and we recreated that soup for Christmas Eve for ourselves. It was a wonderful meal.

A while ago (before I couldn’t handle dairy anymore), I wanted to make the soup again. I remember how delicious it was way back when I was barely an adult. Tastes change, though, and I wondered if it would still be as magical. I picked up three cans of cheap smoked oysters and sacrificed some of my coffee half-and-half, and made the soup as a starter to our Yule meal last night.

Everyone enjoyed it. I made enough that I assumed there would be much in the way of leftovers, but there wasn’t. Barely a drop was left in my soup tureen when we were done! It was just as Laura described it, with the oil and butter, the salty sea taste.
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We are in the process of moving from the image above to the image below.

At least in terms of what the infrastructure looks like.

Today I decommissioned an EdgeRouter 4 which features a “fanless router with a four-core, 1 GHz MIPS64 processor, 3 1Gbit RJ45 ports, and 1G SFP port.”

When they say “MIPS64” you can think of it as being in the same class as an ARM processor. Not a problem for what it is.

The issue was that there are only 1Gb interfaces. That and I’ve come to hate the configuration language.

This has been replaced with a pfSense router running on a TopTon “thing.” I call it a thing because it is from China and intended to be rebranded. It doesn’t have a real SKU.

It is based on an N100 with 4 cores and 8 threads. 2 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, 2 10Gb SFP+ ports. It can be upgraded and has multiple extras.

Besides the hardware, this is an entirely different animal in terms of what it can do. It is first, and foremost, a firewall. Everything else it does is above and beyond.

It is running NTP with a USB GPS unit attached. It runs DHCP, DNS, HAProxy, OSPF and a few other packages. The IDS/IPS system is running in notify mode at this time. That will be changed to full functionality very shortly.

So what’s the issue? The issue is that everything changed.

On the side, as I was replacing the router, I jiggled one of the Ceph servers. Jiggling it caused it to use just a few watts more, and the power supply gave out. It is a non-standard power supply, so it will be a day or two before the replacement arrives.

When I went to plug the fiber in, the fiber was too short. This required moving slack from the other end of the fiber back towards the router to have enough length where it was needed.

Having done this, plugging in the fiber gave me a dark result. I did a bit of diagnostic testing, isolated the issue to that one piece of fiber. I ran spare fiber to a different switch that was on the correct subnet, flashy lights.

Turns out that I had to degrade the fiber from the other router to work with the EdgeRouter 4. Once I took that off, the port did light off. But that was a few steps down the road.

Now the issue is that all the Wi-Fi access points have gone dark. Seems that they are not happy. This required reinstalling the control software and moving them from the old control software instance to the new one. Once that was done, I could see the error message from the access point complaining about a bad DHCP server.

After fighting this for far too long, I finally figured out that the pseudo Cisco like router was not forwarding DHCP packets within the same VLAN. I could not make it work. So I disabled the DHCP server on the new router/firewall and moved it back to the Cisco like router. Finally, Wi-Fi for the phones and everything seems to be working.

At which point I can’t log into the Vine of Liberty.

I can see the pages, I can’t log into the admin side. It is timing out.

3 hours later, I figured out that there was a bad DNS setting on the servers. The software reaches out to an external site for multiple reasons. The DNS lookup was taking so long that the connection was dropping.

I think this is an issue that I have just resolved.

But there’s more.

Even after I got the DNS cleaned up, many servers couldn’t touch base with the external monitoring servers. Why?

Routing all looked good, until things hit the firewall. Then it stopped.

Checking the rules, everything looks good. Checking from my box, everything works. It is only these servers.

Was it routing? Nope, that was working fine.

That was one thing that just worked. When I turned down the old router, the new router distributed routing information correctly and took over instantly.

So the issue is that pfSense “just works.” That is, there are default configurations that do the right thing out of the box.

One of those things is outbound firewall rules.

Anything on the LAN network is properly filtered and works.

But what is the definition of the LAN network? It is the subnet directly connected to the LAN interface(s).

Because I knew that I would need to be able to access the routers if routing goes wrong, my computer has a direct connection to the LAN Network attached to the routers. The Wi-Fi access points live in on the same subnet. So everything for my machine and the wireless devices “just worked”

The rest of the servers are on isolating subnets. That are part of the building LAN but they are not part of the “LAN Network”.

I know this, I defined an alias that contains all the building networks.

Once I added that to the firewall rules, it just worked.

Tomorrow’s tasks include more DHCP fights and moving away from Traefik. Which means making better use of the Ingress network.

We’ve used the term “grey man” a few times over the last couple of years. There’s been a bit of debate over what it is, how useful it is, and when to use it. I wanted to address a bit of that.

For me at least, the “grey man” is the person who just blends in.  You don’t notice him. It isn’t that he dresses in grey, it’s that he’s dressed just like everyone else. He walks like everyone else. He talks like everyone else.

This means that sometimes, the grey man has a gun on his hip (when it’s common and everyone else does), and sometimes it’s concealed. It means sometimes the grey man wears a camo jacket (my neighborhood, for instance, is rife with people who do this), and sometimes a golf shirt and boat shoes. Sometimes he has a “two on the top and one on the sides” and other times he has hair to his waist. It depends entirely on where you are at any given moment.

The best grey man is the one who can switch his look to match his surroundings. We see this in movies, as people like Tom Cruise drop wigs and fake mustaches into trash cans, and turn jackets inside out. In reality, it’s a lot less dramatic. It means taking off your patches when going into big cities, for instance. Wear a plain jacket instead of a camo one. Slip your side carry into your waistband carrier and out of site, rather than having it under am arm or in plain view on your hip.

The big thing that I see right now is the desire to be grey man combating with the desire to just be ourselves and fuck the Left. I think there’s something in the middle, and that it’s important to find that central position. It allows you to swing both ways, to coin a phrase. I like the jacket that Chris has, which has velcro spots for patches. They come on and off easily, and you can simply add the correct camouflage to your outfit, be that a 2A patch, an American flag, or a rainbow.

Only you know what your area is like. I can’t judge that. No one but you and your family can, honestly. I know that in my neighborhood, it’s perfectly okay to be a firearms owner, to enjoy shooting and hunting, and to engage in a variety of household preps like gardening and such. No one gives us a second glance. In Chicago, I would not do a quarter of what I do here in New Hampshire. You have to look around you, and judge how to blend in based on who you are and what you do, and where you live.

My father taught me this recipe just before I moved out of the house, and he learned it from his mother, my Nagymama (Hungarian for grandmother). It’s one of those stick to your ribs recipes, and can be made with a variety of ingredients. This is the base recipe, and I’ve included some additions at the end, for inspiration. This is the perfect thing to make when you know you’re going to be shoveling snow for hours, or you have to do other outdoor work in cold or damp and chilly environs.

Ingredients:

• 16 oz kielbasa sausage, coined
• 6 to 8 potatoes, cubed
• 4 cups broth
• 3 to 6 tbsp sweet paprika (Szeged brand, please)
• 2 tbsp vegetable oil
• 1/4 package of bacon, diced
• 1 large onion, diced
• 3 to 6 cloves of garlic, minced

In a large soup pot, add the oil and heat on medium. Add onions, and cook until softened. Stir in half of the paprika. Add bacon and sausage, and cook until they are thoroughly browned and bacon is beginning to crisp. If necessary, pour off some oil (though it will lend a lot of flavor if you leave it in).

Add the potatoes to the pot (do NOT stir). Pour in the broth until it is just barely above the top layer. Add more paprika, to make everything quite red. Bring everything to a boil, and then lower the heat to lowest setting and simmer for about an hour. Please note, this may stick a bit to the bottom of your pot. Don’t stress. As long as it doesn’t burn or char, it’s perfect that way.

After an hour, check on your stew. The potatoes should be soft and beginning to fall apart. Stir well, and add some salt and pepper to taste. The end result should be a stew thickened by the potatoes, and filled with tasty sausage.

Notes:

You can make this with any sausage, or technically any protein. Kielbasa was my Nagymama’s way of making this meal, but it can also be made with Andouille, Polish sausage, and even breakfast sausage or hot dogs if you’re in a pinch. When stirring, use a wooden spoon or spatula. Bits of potato will stick to the bottom a bit, but they can be scraped up gently and will make the stew taste even better! Also, if you like a bit of spice, you can also use some or all HOT paprika, as opposed to sweet. Beware… good quality Hungarian paprika is very flavorful, and the hot stuff is quite hot. I recommend “Szeged” brand, which is available in Market Basket, Shaw’s, and most other big box grocery stores.

I’ve made this with pretty much every kind of cheap meat out there. You can use any protein at all, but if you’re using a raw meat, cook it first. I prefer to use sausages and pre-cooked meat because it makes this trivial to pull together quickly. You can also make this in the crock pot by cooking up the onions and meat, then tossing everything into the crock pot and cooking on low for 8 hours, or high for 4. This freezes well, too, so if you have leftovers you can make up single serving packages and toss them in the freezer.

I serve this up with dill pickles and bread, because it’s what Nagymama always did. It goes well with just about everything, though.

I have hundreds of dollars worth of GPS equipment. Not counting the cell phones we all carry with us.

I wanted to try to create a Stratum 0 NTP clock.

The last time I attempted this, I used a Garmin handheld GPS. Time to sync was in minutes and while the power draw as trivial, by the standards of the day, it would still burn through AA batteries.

Because you, kind readers, told me that there were cheap options, I went looking.

What I found was a GPS module that is about an inch square. For $15 I could have one delivered. It comes with a header containing VCC, GND, TXD, RXD, and PPS. I figured I could solder in the provided header then run them to a GPIO that has an attached UART.

Well, the darn things showed up a day early, and I didn’t really want to do any soldering. I plugged it in via the USB port, put it in the window. A few minutes later, it had a hard lock.

After installing gpsd and configuring, chrony I now have a system that is locked at less than 1ms accuracy, NOT using the PPS option.

That will be next week’s project. Getting that PPS signal to the motherboard.

If I had a Raspberry Pi with a good interface, not wifi, I can see that this would make a darn nice little timekeeper.

My wife read my article on passwords and “got it”. Which is nice. I was attempting to explain how password crackers use rule sets to modify input dictionaries to create more guesses from a single word list.

I decided to see how much things have advanced. To say I was shocked would be an understatement.

In 2013, the game “Battlefield” was hacked and the entire password database was captured.

This is not the major security threat you might instantly leap to, but it is bad.

Stealing Passwords

I worked in the Systems Group at my University. We were tasked with all software maintenance, installations, upgrades, and in house improvements to the operating system.

The systems group had taken the original manufacturer’s operating system and extended it to the point where it was no longer the same operating system. Having done this, we gave back all the code we had written to the manufacturer, who incorporated what they liked into their next release.

We had developed a long term backup plan. This plan was three tiered. We took daily backups of the entire file system. This was a rolling tape backup. There were 30 days of daily backups performed before the first tape was overwritten.

We also performed weekly backups. There were 52 weeks of weekly backups. So a total of 82 backup sets.

In addition to this, we did end of term backups. These were done just after the term ended. These tapes were kept.

What this meant was that if your file were to live for at least 24 hours, you would be able to recover to any particular day in the past 5 weeks of your file.

If your file were to exist over a weekend, you could recover that file to how it was on the weekend it was dumped for the past year. And if your file were to exist over the term break, it would exist for the lifetime of the storage. 9 track tapes now being dead, I’m not sure what the University did to preserve those old tapes.

In addition to these backups, we took a separate backup of the “password” file once a day. There were 30+ days of password file backups.

That is the setup. The actual story:

We used to give tours of the machine room. The operators enjoyed bragging about the quality of our backup system.

One of these tours, a little monster took one of the password backup tapes and put it in his backpack. He walked out of the machine room with that tape. Nobody noticed the missing tape for the next 30 days.

Said monster took that tape over to the engineering department, where they had their own 9 track tape drives. He read in the file.

He was presented with 10s of thousands of clear text passwords.

This had financial implications because we sold computer time.

We changed our policy to always encrypt the password file before it was written to tape. I have no idea if that encryption standard was any better than Sunday comic page ciphers.

No more Plain Text Passwords

The number of times somebody in a movie has gotten the idiot to give them somebody else’s password is astronomical. The truth is that most passwords are stored in an “encrypted” format. We don’t have access to your password.

We can reset your password, but we can’t tell you what it is because that isn’t recorded.

At the university, they were still storing passwords in plain text. They only encrypted the password when it was written to tape.

Modern systems store that password in an encrypted format. The old method was what is called “descrypt”.

The first two characters of the encrypted password is the “salt” and the rest is the DES hash of the password. This is NOT the same as encrypting your password with a secret and then being able to decrypt it with that same secret. Instead, we use your password to encrypt a given, known, piece of text. The encrypted result is what is stored.

When you provide your password, we encrypt the same text string with your password. If the resulting text matches what we have stored, you have proven you know the password.

Here are a couple of hashed passwords: SD2PFyBHY1oUY, q5M9nJsU/JSwI, sTd5NrAIMrisU, 8MbLuguRAeo92, $1$OcbNKu2y$l9faj.aCWodfonXiSlgnV0, $1$hh765lOJ$lrZ4jkCtUkG3qPBuFJQ/2., $5$2W0fdlfY.a/iXErF$xbzHcX8CfPc89vJkxsiC/BjDmqxI20Yk.Vj9OLL/6e2, and $5$HxfQ9B30d8GdmyPo$J6FWaeGKSez2cLbw3cktvaYgPvsTFaXdMzYp4yDcQjD.

These are all hashes of the same password, “hello world!”

Slow Them Down

Storing passwords in plain text is stupid. But computers are faster than you think. Thus, we want to slow down the speed at which computers can make guesses.

We do this by using a salt.

Consider the situation where you had 74,577,451,608 guesses you wanted to try. If you were to create the hash for each of those guesses, it might take you a bit of time. In the end, you would have them all. Now it is only seconds to look up the hash in a database/file and get the plaintext password used to generate that hash.

To fight this, we use the salt. The salt modifies the hashing process such that for any given password, there are many possible hashes to represent that password.

As shown above, even when using the same “hashing algorithm” we got many results.

This is to slow the guessing of passwords down.

And the results

In 2013, the game “battlefield” was cracked. They escaped with around a 1/4 million password hashes. These are not clear text, you can’t just type them into an account and get in, they are still “protected”.

I used a starting source of 184,000 known passwords. To this, I added an American and a British word list. I didn’t bother to get name lists for a total of 282,000 unique test words.

In the simplest case, with no salt applied, that is 184,000 * 282,000 different combinations to test.

In 2 minutes and 50 seconds, on my medium GPU and medium CPU, we tested 74,577,451,608 different passwords against 282,546 password hashes.

We were able to guess 7.30% of the passwords, or, 30943 passwords.

That is more than enough to make money.

And you can see how bad they can be.

Security is a concept that Chris talks about a lot in his computer babble. I want to talk about a different kind of security, though. Prepping security is a multi-layered woven mess of gods-only-know-what. Still, it’s vitally important to untangle the knots and figure out what you’ll do should shit go south.

The first aspect of security is always the most simple and visible. How do you protect you, your family, and your stuff? We’re all 2A folk here, and so firearms and other munitions are a part of what we do to keep ourselves safe. Firearm security requires a lot of practice and information, ranging from knowing how to use your firearm in a safe and rapid manner to how to store it both safely and securely. Along with firearms, you have other lethal and non-lethal methods of physical protection. These include knives, IEDs, tasers, bear spray, bows and arrows, slingshots, atl atls, and other fun “touch them from a safe distance” tools.

For grounds security, I always recommend the usage of high decibel horns. A friend of ours was having problems with teens defacing her garage with swastikas, and it was very disturbing to her because she’s Jewish. I suggested an air horn as a non-lethal response, something she very happily used. The first (and last) time the miscreants came back, when they opened her gate they got blasted with a huge air horn that alerted the entire neighborhood, and apparently left behind a fecal sample for the cops to work with. This is a “works once” sort of thing, of course, because once Bad Guys know its there, they can find a way around it. Still, if you have hidden trip wires, change them on the regular, and switch things up, it works, and works well.

Glitter bombs and shit bombs also work wonders, while the popo is still at work. Again, this is a non-lethal response so you’re unlikely to get into trouble. It does mark the offender well, though, and makes it very easy for the popo to find them. It’s also disturbing when it happens, so anyone who’s stupid enough to trip it is going to be freaked out. And I’m here to tell you, as the parent of children, glitter is forever, like herpes. That person will never be able to show their face in your neighborhood again, because no matter how much they bathe, you’re going to notice your signature color sparkling in their hairline or up their nose.

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