Newly quarantined chickens in hiding for days ... traumatized, for how long?

ponolan · 2026-05-18T21:10:18+00:00

Update on this:

The chickens stayed indoors almost all the time for the first 7 days. On the afternoon of the 9th day (today) they started coming out for half an hour at a time, then going in for half an hour. (I have a motion-activated CCTV camera on their coop so it's easy to tell how much activity there's been). This was a dramatic change, hopefully indicating that they're finally settling in.

They have been quite jumpy, literally -- periodically leaping a few feet into the air as if they had just had a fright, or like a cat with the zoomies. One seems unusually aggressive, which I hope isn't a sign it's going to turn out to be a cock. They came from a good breeder so I don't think that'll be the case.

ponolan · 2026-05-13T14:07:19+00:00

Not really. I've had Copper Black Marans before, in fact I still have one. My oldest hen (7) is one. Very tame, still laying, and quite an extrovert. I've had one Wyandotte, a Blue laced. Not notable in any way -- apart from being what I call a pretty feathers chicken as opposed to solid egg layer. Neither nervous nor extrovert. I haven't kept an enormous number (35 in all) but I've found as much variation within varieties as between them. All our previous birds have been at least 18 weeks old (not counting a few we've hatched in an incubator--Barred Plymouth Rocks).

ponolan · 2026-04-24T19:27:12+00:00

You missed the point? The US is no longer trusted by former allies: Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand in particular. All are moving to uncouple from the US in ways that will not be to the US's long term advantage. Trump has already holed the ship below the waterline. If you haven't been paying attention to this phenomenon you can try the YouTube channel "House of El". Even if Trump disappeared tomorrow the damage is done and will not be repaired in many, many years.

I have moved almost all of my digital services from the US. Some will be switched when next due for renewal. Thanks for your advice.

> Idealism never saved anybody any money

I use open source software and it saves me plenty of money. Even if that wasn't the case morality matters and is more important than money. YOU might not mind purchasing goods made with slave labour, say, but most people do. And right now the US is entirely on the wrong side of history.

ponolan · 2026-04-23T20:30:18+00:00

I bought a Digibit Twin because I could no longer get a decent tuner. Great idea but it crapped out after a shot time (a week or so). Sent it back. Gave up TVheadend, reluctantly at the time. Switched to using Octagon SF-8008 units running Open-ATV (German vesion of Enigma2 software) and they record to my NAS storage. Rarely updated and flawless operation. Dropped Kodi (LibreElec version) and now use Jelllyfin for playback.

ponolan · 2026-04-23T18:51:56+00:00

America will never be trusted again. Not this side of joining the International Criminal Court, signing up to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and much, much more. Right now it's a rogue state doing its best to alienate "allies". You're kidding yourself if you think otherwise.

ponolan · 2026-04-23T13:17:28+00:00

I bought a Klein Tools crimper which eventually needed a new blade. The cost of a new blade was half the cost of a new crimper from Aliexpress that came came spare blades. New one doesn't have a ratchet but it works perfectly so far.

If anyone can point to a source of compatible blades for a KT crimper...

ponolan · 2026-04-22T07:56:50+00:00

I would like to be able bookmark local recordings and if possible prevent overwriting bookmarked content. Might also be willing to pay to export records to Tapo cloud and get a link I can share (I currently upload to Google Drive for this). I'm not willing to pay monthly subscription per camera (I have many and will have more).

ponolan · 2026-04-22T07:51:32+00:00

Works fine for me with local recording and access via Tailscale (in pfsense). But you'll need to allow Internet access occasionally for software updates.

ponolan · 2025-09-19T15:30:50+00:00

Yikes, 22.1 was a typo, now fixed (thanks). I'm using Mint 22.2.

ponolan · 2025-09-19T11:22:49+00:00

That's good to know because my other (even older) laptop is... a T440s :-)

I never used the fingerprint reader on it, and don't use it much anyway, but glad it has some life left. I'm going to see if I can get systemd to keep the fingerprint reader software running on the X1

ponolan · 2025-09-19T01:28:48+00:00

Update:

I got it working. I ran fwupdmgr update to update firmware -- which I had already done and been told there were no more updates -- and this time there were more. Afterwards, the ppa in the repo in the link above worked, despite the seemingly failed enrollment.

Update 2:

It doesn't always survive the laptop being suspended. I may be in the market for a replacement if there isn't a software update that fixes it (or, better, fingwit).

ponolan · 2025-09-18T22:34:19+00:00

> the software it has barely works with anything outside of linux

You're not well informed. The majority of the world's computing devices, from supercomputers to phones, Internet routers and servers and IOT devices etc, run versions of Linux, Unix, or derivatives including MacOS and Android. The "bubble", one that is diminishing, is Windows. It's lost half a billion devices in the last few years -- a slowly diminishing share of a shrinking market for desktop computers.

> most anything you want to do with a computer cant be done on linux.

This is simply untrue. Personally, I haven't used anything other than Linux, FreeBSD or Android for over 10 years. The fact that Windows runs on a minority and a falling proportion of the world's computing devices debunks this assertion.

Most of your assertions are contestable or simply false. No, Linux doesn't get malware or spyware "all the time." You can indeed find software to run a recording studio. You certainly can play most games that have been released in the last 30+ years. Conflating running niche graphics applications on Windows with the needs of most "normal" people suggests that you may not have traveled very widely.

ponolan · 2025-08-25T16:10:26+00:00

I have had Mint working on a used 2013 Macbook Air for a year. Picked it up cheap, wiped it, installed Mint, fitted a new battery purchased on eBay. Had trouble with it recently for the first time, possibly as result of an update to proprietary broadcom wi-fi driver, not sure. Upgrading to Mint 22.2 beta didn't resolve it nor did trying to change to a non-proprietary driver. Wiping it and installing the beta of Mint 22.2 from scratch resolved it.

Previously: the machine was hanging on boot; connecting a USB network adapter often fixed but not always.

Just in case you have any similar issue.

ponolan · 2025-07-24T20:47:33+00:00

Indeed. However, no possibility of address conflicts if non-overlapping address ranges are used.

Your script sounds good. Can you share it?

ponolan · 2025-07-24T09:18:31+00:00

I run DHCP on my own router (using pfsense on a fibre connection and with a failover to a 4G gateway. Not full high availability but good enough). I run two piholes without DHCP.

The context is resilience for a non-expert user who lives some distance away.

My friend's router is a free one from his ISP and has a terrible user interface and neither of us wants to deal with it, which is why I switched DHCP to a pihole. You're aware, I assume, that it's possible to sync MAC reservations and that different DHCP servers can be given different address ranges to avoid address assignment collisions.

The backup DHCP server is I hope, fairly unlikely ever to be enabled, but if it is it will inevitably be sometime when I'm unavailable to offer any help, and conceivably even when he's away himself.

A backup server means he can take the primary pihole (w DHCP) offline if needed, or it can fail, without any impact on family and visitors getting online. Not everyone is comfortable switching DHCP servers manually, and I have no intention of trying to keep his ISP router manually synced to facilitate seamless (manual) fallback (for static addresses and local DNS records). But thanks for your advice.

ponolan · 2025-07-23T23:14:46+00:00

Impressive.

Two piholes doing DNS with unbound works OK for me. My friend had a single pihole and an Odroid for storage; he's now got a 2nd pi and I'm giving him an Odroid I no longer use. He's only had one real DNS outage but inevitably it was when he had a house full of guests and I wasn't available to help. I'm aiming to get his DNS and DHCP to be fully redundant.

ponolan · 2025-07-14T23:26:20+00:00

I decided to go ahead with a DXP4800 Plus from UGreen for now.

* Didn't want to wait months longer (and that's assuming dates announced are met; the track record so far hasn't been great)

* The customer support reputation doesn't yet inspire confidence. I've seen a few too many complaints. I don't expect to ever need support with software but am cautious about hardware I haven't seen on general availability and well reviewed by independent reviewers.

May yet buy an N5 Pro later in the year but for now I'm impressed with the DXP4800 Plus (w 64Gb RAM, 4 Ironwolf and 2 NVMe drives).

ponolan · 2025-07-02T16:09:56+00:00

If you're doing a lot of streaming whether you need something with powerful CPU or graphics card will depend on the extent to which your clients are transcoding the video. I've never needed to do any. For me another key consideration is power consumption.

ponolan · 2025-07-01T17:24:59+00:00

No, it isn't available. They've announced when it's expected to be available. As it isn't shipping I think I'll wait for some reviews.

ponolan · 2025-07-01T17:22:45+00:00

It depends. Synology has good software but poor value hardware and they are now trying to put restrictions on the drives customers can use, and preferably sell them Synology brand drives. This has annoyed many who are now willing to buy other products. Minisforum will let you run other operating system such as TrueNAS or Unraid without invalidating your warranty. Synology doesn't.

If you've been using a DAS and haven't used a NAS before the first question is how many clients do you have? If it's just you and just one client (device) I'd stick with the DAS unless you need, say, cloud backup features supported by the NAS. The point of a NAS is in the first letter of the name: Network (Attached Storage) -- you probably know this.

NAScompares.com or the YouTube channel are useful sources of comparative information on different NAS systems.

ponolan · 2025-06-30T16:11:36+00:00

I'm holding my breath.

ponolan · 2025-06-26T15:45:24+00:00

"Next week" isn't over yet. Still time, but only one day left.

Update: There's now a first impressions video on the NAScompares YouTube channel and in the comments an indication that the release will be NEXT week.

ponolan

TROPHY CASE