antipaucity

We raise chickens.

For the last few years, we’ve only had layers – and they’ve all been full-grown by the time they arrived at our home.

This year, we decided to buy some chicks because our layers are starting to age-out of being able to lay, and we’re interested in trying our hand at raising a few birds for butchering ourselves.

Since you need to wait to add new birds to your flock until the birds are 6+ weeks old, we need a place for them to grow (they were ~8 days old when I bought them).

Here are some pictures of the first collapsible coopette for your viewing pleasure – after which I’ll describe how I put these things together ?

The first one (shown above) was the initial implementation of my idea…in which we decided hinging the access door on the top is less than ideal, and we discovered we need 3 hasps to hold the ends on rather than 2.

Materials used:

• Pressure treated 1x6x8 fence pickets (bought 29 for both coopettes, ended-up with about 3.5 left over – the second coopette is sturdier (and a little prettier)
• Half-inch opening, 36″ wide hardware cloth (need ~22′ per coopette; ~30′ if you choose to make bottoms (I opted to not make coopette bottoms this time around)
• Quarter-inch opening, 24″ wide hardware cloth (happened to have a perfectly-sized piece left from another project I could use on the second coopette door)
• Staples
• 1 1/4″ ceramic-coated deck screws
• 2.5″ hinges (5 per coopette … though I wish I’d gone with 3″ hinges instead)
• 3″ hasps (7 per coopette)

When folded-up, the sides collapse to ~3″ thick. The ends are about 2″ thick, too.

Total space needed against the side of your garage/shed/etc to store the coopette when you aren’t actively using it is ~3′ x 8′ x 6″, or slightly more than a folding table ?

Construction was very simple – I made the sides a smidge over 36″ wide so that I could attach the hardware cloth without trimming for more than length ?

The ends have a pair of 36″ long boards cut into trapezoids with 30° ends, and a butted ~30″ trapezoid, again with 30° ends (see photo for detail). The butt joint is secured via stapled hardware cloth (wrapped around from the outside to the inside (see photo), and a small covering inside screwed into both upright pieces. I used various pieces of scrap for those butt joint covers

Wrapping the hardware cloth around the ends was the single most time-consuming (and painful!) aspects of construction. Start with a 36″x36″ piece, laid-out square to the bottom of the end. Clamp in place (these 3″ spring clamps from Harbor Freight were a true godsend), and staple as desired … I may have gone a little overboard on the stapling front ?. On the second coopette, I relied more on sandwiching a little extra fence picket material to capture the hardware cloth, and a little less on staples.

Lessons Learned

Prototype 1 was quick-and-dirty – too much stapling, shouldn’t have had the door hinge at the top, needed to be more stable (sandwich the hardware cloth better)

And two hasps holding the ends on is not sufficient – you need three (one more-or-less at each corner) to really keep the end locked well, and to enable easy movement

Prototype 2 was not as dirty … but moving from fence pickets to 5/4 would be preferable

Likewise, wish I had put enough support at the bottom to be able to put some casters on at least one end to facilitate moving around the yard (to prevent killing-out the grass underneath)

What would I do differently in the future?

• Make them longer than 8 feet (if you use 5/4 deck boards, buy the 10, 12, or 16 foot variety)
• Make the sides slightly higher than 36″ to reduce the need for cutting hardware cloth (a very time-consuming task!)
• Add wheels to one end for easy movement
• Plan for an suspended waterer (the gap at the top happened to be wide enough to sling on up using a little rope and a couple carabiners – but it easily could not have been)
• Hard-roof one end instead of using a tarp … or use a slightly larger tarp that would cover multiple coopettes at once instead of small ones that cover one at a time

Some of the content is mildly dated, but this series of posts a few years ago is still something I refer to quite often:

I’ve recently been asked by several people to investigate websites (especially e-commerce ones) for reliability/legitimateness.

Thought someone else may find my process useful, and/or have some ideas on how to improve it ?

So here goes:

1. Pop a terminal window (I’m on a Mac, so I open Terminal – feel free to use your terminal emulator of choice (on Windows, you’ll need to have the Subsystem for Linux or Cygwin installed))
   1. Type whois <domain.tld> | less
      • I’ll use this domain (antipaucity.com) for an example
      • you may be able to use whois.com (eg whois.com/whois/antipaucity.com)
   2. Look at all of the following:
      • Creation (Creation Date: 2006-02-22T01:12:10Z)
      • Expiration (Registry Expiry Date: 2023-02-22T01:12:10Z)
      • Name server(s) (NS3.PAIRNIC.COM)
      • Registral URL (http://www.pairdomains.com)
      • Registrar (Pair Domains)
      • Contact info (should [generally] be anonymized in some manner)
   3. Possible flags:
      • If the domain’s under 2 years old, and/or the registration period is less than a year (we can talk about when short registrations may make sense in the comments)
      • If the name servers are “out of the country” (which, of course, will vary based on where you are)
      • If the contact info isn’t anonymized
2. Load the website in question in a browser (use an ingonito and/or proxied tab, if you like) and review the following types of pages:
   • Contact Us
     • Where are they located?
     • Does the location stated match what you expect based on the whois response?
   • About Us
     • Does it read “naturally” in the language it purports to be written in?
       • Ie, does it sound like a native speaker wrote it, or does it sound stiltedly/mechanically translated?
   • Does it match what is in the whois record and the Contact Us page?
   • Do they provide social media links (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc)?
     • What do their social media presence(s) say about them?
   • Return/Refund Policy (for ecommerce sites only)
     • What is the return window?
     • How much will be charged to send it back and/or restorck it?
   • Shipping Policy (for ecommerce sites only)
     • How long from submitting an order to when it ships to when it arrives?
     • Where is it shipping from?
   • Privacy Policy (only applies if you may be sharing data with them (ecommerce, creating accounts, etc)
     • What do they claim they will (and will not) do with your private information?
3. Is the site running over TLS/SSL?
   • You should see a little padlock icon in your browser’s address bar
   • Click that icon, and read what the browser reports about the SSL certificate used
   • Given that running over TLS is 100% free, there is absolutely NO reason for a site to NOT use SSL (double especially if they’re purporting to be an ecommerce site)

Reviewing these items usually takes me about 2-3 minutes.

It’s not foolproof (after all, better fools are invented every day), but it can give you a good overview and relative confidence level in the site in question.

I’ve been running an M1-powered MacBook Pro since late April.

Here’s my experience so far: it Just Works™

That’s it

That’s the tweet

Want more? Sure!

Battery life is bonkers-awesome! I can run for over a full working day with my VDI client, YouTube, web browser sessions, ssh, several chat apps (including video and audio chat) sans being plugged in.

This is the laptop we’ve all wanted.

I half wish (or is it “wish”) I’d gone with the 5G-enabled, M1-powered iPad Pro instead … but this laptop is phenomenal.

There has been nothing I’ve wanted to do in the last 3 months that I could not do with this machine.

Kudos, Apple.

Kudos.

It took Apple 5.5 (or 6, if you count last week as really hitting it) years to introduce what I called the MacBook Flex back in 2015.

With the 13″ MacBook Pro available in an M1-powered edition (which is so much better than the top-end MBP from 2019…it’s not even funny), and now a 5G-enabled iPad Pro running on the M1 … it’s here.

deeply-broadly-carefully

Please feel free to use/share/copy/adapt this image

A couple weeks ago some folks in the splunk-usergroups.slack helped me using accum and calculating with a modulus to make a grid menu from a list.

My original search had been along the lines of:

| inputlookup mylookup
| stats count by type
| fields - count
| transpose
| fields - column

Which was great … until my list grew more than about 12 entries (and scrolling became a pain).

A couple folks here helped me flip it to this format:

| Inputlokup mylookup
| stats count by type
| eval num=1
| accum num
| eval num=num-1
| eval mod=floor(num/12)
| eval type.{mod}=type 
| fields - mod num type count
| stats list(*) as *

Which works awesomely.

Unless the modulus value (currently 12) gets too small (if the total list grows to more than modval^2 .. each individual box is no longer in alphabetical order (and then alpha from box to box).

So I made this modification so that regardless of the size of the list, the grid will automanage itself:

| inputlookup mylookup
| stats count by type
| eventstats count as _tot
| eval modval=ceil(sqrt(_tot))
| eval num=1
| accum num
| eval num=num-1
| eval mod-floor(num/modval)
| eval type.{mod}=type
| fields - modval mod num type count
| stats list(*) as *

Dunno if that’ll help anyone else, but wanted to share-back that self-managing aspect I added in case anyone was interested