Every Day Carry - Altoids Survival Tin

It's been awhile since I posted.  Got a job at a cool place to work and kind of threw myself into it.  Today I'd like to post something about another passion of mine, Every Day Carry - EDC.  What EDC means is these are the items you carry everyday, to survive.  Survival takes many forms - a forest ranger or farmer has very different EDC needs than someone living in the city.  And if the proverbial shit hits the fan, SHTF, then your EDC will be extra important.

Couple years ago I did an Altoids EDC kit for friends and family as a Christmas gift.  A photo of it can be found on Instagram courtesy of my friend and ex co-worker, Ben Ellis.  The podcast can be listened to here and a photo of me is here.  Ben is a fantastic photographer and he can make anyone look good!

The kit was a lot of fun to make.  It was personalized by person as my sister has way different EDC needs than my brother.  For example, her kit included a cork screw.  His kit included a fishing kit.  I'll have to look and see if I have any photos of the kit in general.  I've started making a public list on Amazon with most of the items in the Altoids EDC kit as well as many other items I love for the inevitable Apocalypse.  

I wanted to include some pictures.   

The first one shows the Gerber SLT 2.5 in the Altoids tin.  You'll notice that the thin, compact design makes it fit nicely into the Altoids Tin at 3 3/8" long, 3/16" thick and not very wide.  

Choose your fire starters - You can have flint with striker, mini bic, you must have some fluff to start the fire, water and wind proof matches and of course, the obligatory fire starter paracord.  That red twist is the flammable component, but you can purchase 50' of it and have great climbing cord.

The knife with packaging as well as the awesome strong lumes little flashlight

Similar to the other pictures, medication is another item where options abound.  You can get a small metal container and fit all your normal OTC in it, get some pre-packaged items like shown here. Don't forget the Benadryl and Imodium as seen in photo in upper left hand corner.  I trim the bubble packaging to minimize space.  another alternative is wrapping your OTC in tinfoil and labeling with a sharpie for what it is, e.g. A for aspirin, Nap for Aleve, T for Tylenol, etc.

Security Breaches and My Password Thoughts

Facebook security breaches have been in the news every day lately.  Are you concerned?  No, because you think you're a smarty pants and have changed your Facebook password, so there!  Well, that might not be enough.  Have you ever went to a new website and they asked you to sign up and offered you the convenience of using your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or Google account?  If you elected for convenience then you opened yourself up to the Facebook breach.  Never choose Facebook or Google as a login for accounts, always use your email address.  There is always another choice although often it is a little harder to find.  

What is the Facebook or Google or LinkedIn convenience login called?  In the tech industry we call this the "you as" login or officially OpenID.  We'll log you in as.....your xxxxx account.  

How does it work?  How do it know?  When you click the button for the app to log in as, that website goes out and queries the app (Facebook, Linkedin, Google, whoever) and asks for a token.  The website then stores that token forever for when you come back and login.  That token contains your password from the app.  

What does the Facebook security breach have to do with that token?  If your account info and/or password was stolen from Facebook then the bad guys have access to any site you used the "You as" login on.  That means you've spread your vulnerability across multiple entities.  

Do you believe that the Facebook breach only affected 50,000,000 users?  Of course not silly! Facebook has 2.23 billion user accounts.  

What are the best practices i should follow?

Never use the "You as" feature for new sign ups to 3rd party apps
• If you’re using an easy to see pattern for customizing your passwords for each site or service, then change that pattern (and all of those passwords) 
• always a good idea to have different passwords for accounts involving money, those passwords should be complex.  Pet + a number is NOT complex.  A password CAN be complex but easy to remember.  Here's an example --  a sentence -- Dawn is the best person I know and funny too.   Take that sentence and convert it ---  DitbpIk&f2      That's a complex password but easy to remember for you.  It's the first letter of each word and convert things like and to a symbol and the too to a 2.  Complex passwords should have lower case, upper case, special symbols/characters, and number(s)
• Implement 2 factor authentication on your important accounts, like brokerage, banks, credit cards, etc.  Also called MFA or 2FA (Multi Factor authentication) - basically, it texts you a code that you put in after your password.  Here is an excellent short video explaining 2FA
• Change your birth year on Facebook.  If you put all your personal information on Facebook and someone hacks your Facebook could they use that to get in to other accounts?  Your pet is Fido.  You were born in 1980, your dog was born in 2016, the hacker knows that because you put his birthday party on Facebook.  So chances are really good that some of your passwords are Fido1980 or Fido2016.  Change them!
• Personally, I go as far as putting an incorrect day, month and year as my birthday on Facebook.  My friends know it's my birthday when it's my real  birthday.  I don't care about anyone else....

Trouble remembering all your passwords?  There are many alternatives.  One is the free version of lastpass.com which I use, to store and populate passwords online.  It's free for personal version, costs $$ for companies.  There are other password 

Low tech?  This works great!   https://www.amazon.com/ Password-Keeper-Galison/dp/ 0735344620/ref=sr_1_13?ie= UTF8&qid=1514996876&sr=8-13& keywords=password+book

That book is small enough to hide.  Has tabs with alphabet to quickly find things.  oh and let me state the obvious, if you write them down, don't take the book with you, ANYWHERE

Want more information? Here are some links

Facebook breach and 3rd party apps using Facebook Connect 

What is this "You as" feature?  here

These opinions are my own.  You are responsible for your own account security.  

Tomato Update #2 - 2016

All the plants referenced below were purchased from Tomatomania in March and planted in the beginning of April.  

Aiko is a Japanese olive sized and shaped cherry tomato.  I was convinced at Tomatomania to purchase this from a regular shopper who buys them every year, loves them and says it's a huge producer.  Well, check out this picture.  It surely is.  It is apparently not as sweet as the Sun Gold and a bit larger.  Very healthy in the TSK and fed the PCH today 8-10-10.  I've started to pinch him at the top because well, it's just a lot of tomatoes!

My Sun Gold is in the hanging planter.  Very healthy this year.  Fruit ripening already and I've actually eaten about 5.  Very sweet.  Almost every cherry is cracked.  Perhaps the hanging planter is not right for this tomato.  I used to grow the sweet 100's in it and they never really cracked but this is year 2 or 3 for the Sun Gold and every year it cracks.  

Tomato Update 2016

Wanted to write an update to some of the plants I've got in containers and the ground.  All the plants referenced below were purchased from Tomatomania in March and planted in the beginning of April.

Black Sea Man - has nice sized fruit already, about the size of tennis balls.  Healthy looking plant and it's planted in the Tomato Success Kit from Gardener's Supply. We'll call that TSK for the rest of this blog. Fertilizer 5-6-5 was applied mid May.

Blue Gold - aka Siberian -- Healthy plant in TSK.  I just got around to fertilizing him today and when I was aerating the soil for the fertilizer to go through I discovered two inch long caterpillars of some sort in the soil.  The bottom of the plant had holes in the leaves so clearly they were the culprits.  They weren't horn worms though.  After fertilizing I spread some organic slug killer down. No idea if that will help but what the hell.  This one got PHC fertilizer today 8-10-10.  Obviously higher in calcium.  It will be interesting to see what the difference is.  It's water soluble and you feed from above and it will soak through the container soil.

Chocolate Cherokee - full size tomato not the cherry - This plant is in my wooden wine barrel.  It is off the hook!  The stalks are about 3/4" thick and it is a strong, sturdy plant.  Fruit is growing everywhere and I'm excited to see how big they get.  Fertilized mid May with 5-6-5.

Jaune Flamme - not sure how I got talked into this one.  It was "sold" to me by a Tomatomania staff member as a "early girl" replacement but it clearly is not.  It's actually a golf ball sized tomato not a full sized.  Disappointing as I have too many smaller fruiting plants.  It's also a spindly thing.  It's in the other wine barrel that was started with expensive organic amended soil but still it's a skinny thing.  It has fruit and perhaps it knows I'm irritated with it?  Flamme got 5-6-5 in mid May.

More later on the others.

Addition to our "smart" Home

Recently our timer on the front porch lights went out.  Frustrating as I had only just replaced that timer a few years ago.  Like most timers they are all frustrating as you have to keep setting them depending on time changes and the setting sun.

I was wondering how I could solve all these problems once and for all.  My solution was to add a smart switch to our Wink system.  Currently we had two GE wink bulbs that I purchased in a kit that included a hub.  These smartly do what I easily programmed them to do and that's to go on at dusk (whenever that is) and go off around 6 hours later.

The smart switch I decided on was the Leviton Decora Z-wave compatible one.  I ordered it from Amazon and installed it when it arrived.  The issue was when I tried to add it to my existing Wink system.  What I didn't realize is that the GE kit I purchased just had a little GE controller in it for the lightbulbs and not a real Wink hub.  Off to Home Depot I went and purchased the real Wink Hub.  It is extremely large for what it does in my opinion.  

Set up was a piece of cake and quickly I had the light switch categorized with my other two GE bulbs (one for the living room lamp and one for the outside side light).  I really just followed the on screen instructions in the Wink app on my iPhone.  On the iPhone 6s now in order to edit a light or group you press and hold.

   As you can see by the photo those are my lights.  They are all in the same group - I call it the "security" group.  Wink added some new icons which are adorable, especially the holiday ones.  They even have a Menorah.

So we have an even smarter home now!  Two lightbulbs, a light switch and a Nest thermostat.

Road Trip 2015 - Northern California

After a very long Sunday drive from Los Angeles to Red Bluff, Monday was more about the journey while Sunday was about the destination - aka just getting some mileage behind us.  500 miles on Sunday to be exact.   Monday we headed out of Red Bluff - east.  Some people love to do the coast but we really wanted to see Lassen Volcanic National Park and then do the entire Volcanic Scenic Byway tour up through Oregon.

In some ways we hit Lassen at just the right time and in some ways it wasn't.  The park had just opened the roads a couple days before and as a result the park was virtually deserted.  This allowed us to do the park quickly and give Geppetto a great snow play time.  There was tons of snow as we ascended up towards the peak of Mount Lassen.  I'm sure much of it had melted but at the highest point on the road there was probably a snow bank of about 3'.   Normal snowpack for this area in winter is 331 inches, this year - 71".  23% of normal.  In a normal year this park doesn't open until June.

The bad news was that most hiking trails were closed - but that's ok because dogs are not allowed on any trails.  I had planned for that.  Just outside of the park were several trails we were going to hit.   As we cruised out of the park on the Northern end we stopped to admire Lake Manzanita.  Beautiful.

Off to Old Station, CA just up the road and a hike at Spatter Cones trail.  For some reason as we drove up to the trail head the gates were closed but I noticed a service road a little ways up.  We took that and snuck into the area behind the bathrooms.  You can look at some info of the spatter cone trail here.  We saw a cool looking jack rabbit at the start of the trail.  Silly Geppetto didn't even see him.  Bright orange inside his ears, never seen anything quite like that.

After that we drove the short distance into Old Station and stopped at the only place in town - JJ's Cafe.  Wow.  The BEST pastrami sandwich I've ever had.  I think it was equal to Carnegie Deli in New York frankly.  Dena and I split one which was accompanied by some fantastic french fries.  All the beef used is cured locally and is raised right behind the restaurant.  Yummy!  I regretted  not being hungry enough to try a hamburger too!

After that it was off to the subway lave tube.  That was truly amazing.  It was huge, about 1/3 mile long and pitch black.  We had a flashlight and my cell phone which were quite inadequate.  Geppetto had no issues in the pitch black.  I was a little nervous to tell you the truth.

Sorry, no time to upload pictures, check Facebook.  We also hit Burney falls before going to our AirBnB stop in Fall River Mills (best IPA I've ever had!).

VMworld 2014 - Day 1

I'd call this Day 0 but apparently it officially started yesterday.  Or early this morning.  I landed at SFO at 1pm and never got a second break until 9pm.  That's just day 1 for me.  I walked over to Moscone West and let me tell you - I felt the room vibrate from anticipation - and I don't just mean the vibration from the 6.0 earthquake in Napa early in the morning!

I picked up my free backpack, notebook, t-shirt and water bottle - the essentials really to a successful geek fest.  From there I tried to check in to my hotel but the room wasn't ready.  Back over to Moscone South this time.  Webcor Builders is remodeling or expanding or doing something to the Moscone complex.  I'm not really sure exactly what it is but it's already huge! wow!

At  2:30p I wandered over to Moscone South - trying to find my way.  The first thing I ran in to was the VMware store.  Is it just wrong that I am more thrilled about shopping there than at Nordstroms?  After salivating over all the VMware stuff there I wandered down to my first session - v101 - basically - the "how to" navigate VMworld for newbies.  We were handed a button upon entering the session with a baby pacifier on it and the words - vmworld baby.  Telling.....

After that it was no break and straight in to the Solutions Exchange "hall crawl".  I have worked and perused many a exhibitors area before and thought my experience would serve me well. It did but Wow!.  It's huge and overwhelming to some extent.  I was there for over 2 hours and worked the floor methodically and calculated like I am want to do but I didn't even come close to doing about 20% of it.  SWAG wise?  Total score.  For the 1/2 day today I walked away with 12 t-shirts and all manner of trinkets.  it's not for me - it's for my guys.

I met some great people and got some valuable information but quickly came to the realization that significantly more time would be required.  I've vowed to start at 7am sharp Monday morning.  Wish me luck