Black bean veggie burger with mango peach salsa, on a ciabatta roll… darn tasty.
Exploring Mars
Last night I took Lauren (my grand-daughter) to the National Geographic Exploring Mars presentation at the Holand Center. Kobie Boykins was the speaker; Kobie is originally from Omaha and manages the engineering team that designed and built all of the moving parts of the Mars roving science lab Curiosity. Pretty awesome evening! Lauren and I both enjoyed it. Many thanks to Lisa Van Stratten for providing the tickets. After the presentation Lauren got to meet Kobie and had her picture taken holding one of the wheels used for testing a couple of the earlier Mars rovers.
AWESOME garbage collection job!
Man, the City of Omaha and Deffenbaugh are aces. What a fantastic job of not only picking up the garbage, but making sure our street stays nice and quiet… since you cna’t drive down it without zig-zagging around the chicanes.
Back to building
Between HR 3708 and S.2103 and the FAA’s recent decision to look at some easing of the third class medical requirements, I am hopeful enough that I will be able to fly the RV-7 that I’ve decided to keep it and continue building. I’ve ordered the fuselage kit and am finishing up the wings while waiting for it to arrive (which will be 8-10 weeks).
I was just about to pull the trigger on a Champ to fly… but just couldn’t do it. I’ll have to content myself with flying with a CFI for a while, and/or bumming rides whenever I can.
Squelching SIP attacks
Since I run an Asterisk server, it seems every third-world slime crawler wants to see if they can get free phone calls. So far none have succeeded, but if you let a million monkeys keep pounding on keyboards, eventually they’ll guess something right.
Unfortunately Asterisk doesn’t have any facility for doing anything with SIP attacks other than logging them. I finally got tired of seeing thousands of connection attempts from various places and blocking them individually, so I came up with a script to add the offending IP addresses to my iptables filter. When an invalid connection attempt comes in, I block their entire /24 net just for good measure.
#!/bin/bash
/bin/grep "No matching peer found" /var/log/asterisk/messages|cut -d "'" -f 4 | \\
cut -d "." -f 1-3 |sort -n |/usr/bin/uniq >> /root/anti-sip-attack.tmp
for d in `cat /root/anti-sip-attack.tmp`; do
c=`grep -c $d /root/anti-sip-attack.lst`
if [ "$c" = "0" ]; then
/sbin/iptables -I INPUT -s $d.0/24 -j DROP
echo $d >> /root/anti-sip-attack.lst
fi
done
rm /root/anti-sip-attack.tmp
This script gets run from cron every few minutes… so far it’s worked quite well. The next step is to tee the Asterisk log file and do it in real time, so they only get one shot and they’re blocked. As it is now they have up to five minutes to try to brute-force their way in.
Thai Chicken pizza is back
I just want to publicly thank Papa Murphy’s for bringing back the Thai Chicken pizza. It is simply awesome.
Now, having seen the nutrition information for the aforementioned pizza… I need to eat a whole lot less of it.
Pursuit of a new airplane
It looks like I won’t be able to fly the RV-7 (barring a major change in medical certification requirements). I can still fly with Sport Pilot privileges, as long as I can self-certify that I’m fit to fly. Since both my regular doc and the cardiologist agree that there’s no reason I can’t fly, I’m looking forward to getting on the air again.
The problem? There are no light sport aircraft around here to fly. No one rents them, and as yet I have not found any clubs or partnerships that offer one. My attempts to get my own flying club to look into LSA ownership were met with considerable resistance… odd, given that we have lost or are losing at least three memberships due to lost medical certificates, and there is at least one other member who hasn’t flown in quite some time due to – yeah, you guessed it, no medical. Still, the average pilot who does NOT have to fly LSA knows virtually nothing about light sport aircraft.
Anyway, it looks like if I want to fly again in the foreseeable future, I’m going to have to either own outright or form a partnership or club. I’d looked into forming a partnership to purchase an RV-12, but we were only able to get two partners together — wed need at least 4, preferably 5. After exploring all other options, I have pretty much settled on an Aeronca 7AC Champion, commonly known as a Champ.
Why a Champ? There are a number of reasons. Cost is a big one. Champs are plentiful and relatively inexpensive. With tandem seating (front & rear seats) they’re roomier than, say, a side-by-side Taylorcraft or Luscombe. They’re faster than a Cub, and are flown solo from the front seat instead of the rear. They also generally cost less than a Cub. If equipped with a (slightly) upgraded engine, say an 85 HP C-85 instead of the original 65 HP A65, I’m told the climb and cruise performance is quite good for the type.
There are plenty of flying Champs out there for sale. I’m chasing one or two “projects” that will need to be restored. Why do that, when I can get a flying aircraft for about the same cost? Simple. These planes were built in the mid to late 1940s. If I’m going to fly it, I want to know that every single tube, weld, fastener and part is sound and airworthy. While rebuilding I can use all new hardware and replace or repair any part that is not 100% up to snuff. I can also take the opportunity to do some updates to the plane — better brakes, for example; newer fabric, better seat restraints, etc. How far i take that depends a lot on what kind of deal i can get on an engine, since either of the ones I’m looking at will need the engine replaced. Of course it’s also a balancing act — literally — to put what you want in it, but keep the empty weight as low as possible.
Of course, this doesn’t mean I wouldn’t consider a flying example if the right airplane comes along at the right price. I would not complain about a year spent flying instead of building.
Elvis With a Tan
We picked up some peanut butter with cocoa from Costco. TOO good. So this morning I tried a new variation of Elvis oatmeal — 1/3 C oatmeal, 1/3 C + about 2 TBSP water, 1/3 C almond milk, 1 tsp chia seeds, 1 TBSP cocoa peanut butter, 1/2 TBSP maple syrup and about 1/3 of a ripe banana, thinly sliced. The extra water is for the chia seeds; they’re optional for those of us in the clogged artery club. If you put them in, let the chia seeds and water sit for 10-15 minutes before adding the rest of the ingredients. Nuke for 2 minutes 15 seconds, stirring a couple of times along the way. Dee-lish.
Elvis Oatmeal
This morning I tried something new for breakfast.
1/3 cup Quaker quick oats
1 Tbsp. organic peanut butter
1 tsp. organic honey
About half a banana, sliced thinly
1/3 cup skim or 1% milk
1/3 cup water
Microwave around 2 minutes, stir once or twice while it cooks and stir thoroughly afterward. Next time I may try either a bit less peanut butter or a bit more water or milk. Or maybe not, it’s pretty good. Not something I will eat every day, but if you’ve got to eat oatmeal you need to change things up every once in a while.
Our first month all-VOIP
It was about a month ago that I switched our land line number, which we have had for many years, to VOIP. After running my work and Hamgadgets numbers over VOIP for a couple of years, I figured I had things worked out well enough to handle the home line without hassles as well.
The only complication that arose prior to making the switch was due to the Linux distribution I’m running. I decided on CentOS a couple of years ago because of its long term support; I didn’t want to have to rebuild my server every year or so. Well, great — but just because the base OS is supported doesn’t mean anything else will be. The DAHDI kmod (kernel drivers for the analog phone line interface card) packages stopped getting updated about a year or so ago. So, I could either run an increasingly out of date kernel, build the kernel modules by hand (every time the kernel gets updated), rebuild the entire server, or just dump DAHDI.
I settled on the last option. After some cursory research I ordered an Obihai OBi200. This little hockey puck sized device has one POTS line jack, one POTS phone jack, an Ethernet port and a USB port. There’s a USB wifi dongle for it that I also ordered. It’s been a perfect solution. Now our household cordless phones are seamlessly connected to the Asterisk server over wifi.
So far there have been zero complaints from anyone, including myself. Incoming calls to our house number arrive via VOIP and ring both the household cordless phones, and the Cisco phone on my desk. I have Asterisk voicemail turned on with a delay long enough that the caller will get the phone’s answering machine if we aren’t home, but if we’re on the phone the Asterisk system will take a message. The only thing I really want to change: I can’t pick up the house line on my office phone if the call has already been answered on the house cordless phone, and vice versa. It’s not as easy a fix as you’d think, but it’s also not a big deal. I can transfer the call if needed.
The real story is told by two things. First, our total cost for phone service with Cox was $41.59 per month (assuming no long distance charges at all). The first month on Flowroute cost us less than $11 (including long distance), not counting the $7.50 charge to port the number. Second, if I had not told her about the change, I don’t think Lisa would have even known… except that caller ID no longer shows up on the TV when a call comes in. I don’t miss it.
So aside from saving $30 a month, what do we gain? Well, a few nice things. We have quite a few blacklisted numbers from telemarketers and scam callers. Before the switch the cordless phone would recognize up to 30 of them and drop the call AFTER it rang a couple of times. Now the call gets silently refused and we never even know it happened. I can also re-route calls to our cell phones, either in place of or instead of the house phones. FAX reception is automatic, with received FAXes emailed to Lisa and I both in PDF format. The list goes on, but overall — it’s a win.
So, our first month since about 1980 or so without a wired phone line, and no regrets.