--- /dev/null
+Title: Holiday Update, July 4, 2019
+Date: 2019-07-04
+Category: misc
+Tags: bee-keeping, scuttlebutt, mesh, gypsy wagon
+
+
+Happy Independence Day, my fellow Americans, and similar sentiments to my
+international friends.
+
+## Bee Journal
+
+Our last hive inspection was early last month, and we decided to let some weeks
+go by before we opened the hive again. We added a second brood super to the hive
+during the last week of May, and upon our last inspection the colony had only
+just started to draw comb on the new frames. It has been a long, cold spring
+with lots of rain. The beehive, the garden have both developed slowly this year
+for it.
+
+It's been warmer this past couple of weeks, and both the gardens and the hive
+have certainly perked up. Yesterday the colony started to beard on the front of
+the apiary. I'd read that this was normal and could mean a healthy hive that
+needed more room. We decided that bright and early this morning we would open
+the hive, give a quick inspection and add a honey super. We'd been continuing to
+feed until this point, and when I opened the top feeding super it was very full
+of bees, the sugar jars covered and a thick cluster clung to the inside of the
+cover when I lifted it. After giving a couple puffs of smoke to the entrance and
+inside, I tapped off the bees and we lifted off the top brood super to see what
+was going on below.
+
+Confirming what we'd expected, the bottom brood super was full, all ten frames.
+While we opted not to pull out any frames this time, it was easy to see bulging
+drone caps and smooth worker caps from above. While we didn't see the queen, her
+work is evident. When we open the hives we like to work fast, so we quickly
+reassembled the hive, added the new honey super and closed it up. There were
+still probably a couple of hundred bees clinging to the removed inner cover and
+feeding super, so I tapped them off on top of the hive and put the equipment
+away. Over the next hour the lingering bees found their way back inside, I hope
+to start filling the honey super.
+
+Speaking of honey, there were plenty of swollen honey cells at the top of the
+brood frames, and a bit of comb had stuck to the bottom side of the inner cover.
+We scraped this off and squeezed out our first taste of our backyard honey, and
+it was good! I'm hopeful we will see our first harvest in August.
+
+## Scuttlebutt, Decentralized Content
+
+A couple of years ago I learned about and started using an interesting protocol
+and application called [Scuttlebutt](https://scuttlebutt.nz). This is a
+decentralized, peer to peer social network, more or less, built upon it's own
+custom protocol and developed by some notable hackers in New Zealand. While I've
+been using Scuttlebutt for some time, I'd fallen off since I don't really have
+any friends on there, and I'd become disillusioned with some of the attitudes
+expressed on the platform. A [recent
+podcast](https://soundcloud.com/epicenterbitcoin/eb-290) featured Scuttlebutt's
+(SSB) creator, Dominic Tarr, and after listening to it I've found my interest
+renewed.
+
+After having fired up my client, [Patchwork](https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork),
+I waited for a few hundred content updates to sync and found the community to
+which I'd connected to be about the same. The focus is certainly on the
+development of the platform and the social concerns of that community, which
+seems to be quite influenced by the thinkers at
+[Loomio](https://www.loomio.org/) whom I admire. Much talk of consensus and
+inclusion. I've begun once again to post here and there, in Esperanto and
+concerning bees, so far.
+
+I've also decided to try hosting my own pub server, a sort of super-peer used to
+get around the limitations of IP4 and NAT, and to pull my community focus
+towards something more local to myself. I've nearly got a working kubernetes
+deployment assembled, just working through some peculiarities around loading
+configuration into a hosted volume. More to come there, as I expect I'll have it
+working by the end of the long holiday weekend.
+
+## Mesh Networking, Redux
+
+I'm starting to revive an older project. A couple of Pi-days ago I gathered all
+the [RaspberryPi](https://www.raspberrypi.org/) single-board computers I could
+borrow and built a small mesh network using the Open Mesh Project's
+[batman-adv](https://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki). I had a bunch
+of success, and I even teamed up with a colleague to run his Kubernetes cluster
+on it. I started writing some code using the
+[alfred](https://www.open-mesh.org/projects/alfred/wiki) distributed data store,
+and there is a [GitHub project](https://github.com/coyote240/alfred-client) with
+setup instructions and some of the Python I wrote to handle native messages.
+Like a lot of projects, after the initial push my effort petered out, but this
+is tech I care about and I finally am starting to push myself to pick it up
+again.
+
+During my [recent Erlang training]({filename}/erlang-training.md), I
+realized that the binary message passing that I'd been using Python for might be
+better handled using Erlang's excellent binary pattern matching. It should be
+fairly straight-forward to handle any combination of Alfred or batman-adv
+messages quickly. I've got a handful of Pi Zero Ws ready for the task, I'm
+starting to get the basics set up and to experiment running Erlang on each.
+
+## Even Tinier House?
+
+So, last thing, we traveled to visit the in-laws and our oldest son last
+weekend. We met his girlfriend for the first time. She's a bit of a bad-ass, I
+have to admit, and she lives in a ~200sqft. tiny house she built with her
+family. We drove out to take a look and I was immediately inspired. No, tiny
+house living is not in my future, but I have daydreamed in the past about
+building a Gypsy or Basque style wagon into the back of a 1967 Ford F250 we have
+parked out back. I'm starting to see what it would take to get the truck moving
+again (tires, fresh gas, etc.) and maybe start to sketch out some plans.
+
+Serendipitously, my mother sent me this great book for my birthday just a few
+days after we got back. Derek "Deek" Diedricksen at
+[RelaxShacks](https://relaxshacks.blogspot.com/) wrote this great book, __Humble
+Homes, Simple Shacks, Cozy Cottages, Ramshackle Retreats, Funky Forts and
+Whatever Else We Could Squeeze in Here!__. His web site is a bit of a nightmare,
+but look him up on that video streaming site I heard of or check out the book.
+It's a lot of fun and is full of inspiring ideas that just might help lead to a
+hand crafted camper truck.
+
+Ĝis la revido, kaj feliĉa kodumado!
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