May 22, 2022
by dhoytt
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Fantastic Tri-Tip

Wanted a nice quick cook this weekend but something substantial so bought a package of 2 small tri-tip pieces of beef. I just cooked one of the tri-tips out of the package to try out a slightly different cooking method on my Trager Silverton 620.

Today I took the tri-tip out of the fridge rubbed it down with peanut oil,I then used a dry brine of coarse kosher salt, brown sugar and coarse black pepper in a gallon plastic bag for about an hour letting it hit closer to room temperature. During that time I had the Traeger grill all heated up @ 225 degrees Fahrenheit. I washed the brine off after an hour and rubbed the tri-tip with my custom beef rub and a sprinkling of a commercial steak blend. I placed the tri-tip on a pan I like to use to make cleaning a breeze that has raised grills and was sprayed with canola oil.

Sticking to a simple quick cook I placed a whole peeled red onion, some asparagus and a potato in with the tri-tip. After the tri-tip hit 125 degrees Fahrenheit I hit it with some apple juice and butter mix and 10 minutes in foil. I heated up my gas grill and after it reached temperature right around 500 degrees plus Fahrenheit (the gauge isn’t reliable) I put the potato in foil on the gas grill, then did a quick sear on the tri-tip about 2 minutes per side, then placed it back in the Traeger @ 225 for another 10 minutes in foil. I then took the ti-tip out and let it rest for about 40 minutes and in that time it reached 138 internal degrees. I rolled my potato over a few times and then placed it back in with the asparagus and onion on the Trager to keep warm.

The tri-tip was super tender and tasty and the asparagus had that nice smoked taste along with the red onion and the potato was nice topped with chives from my garden, butter and sour cream. I also have a special tri-tip sauce I make with Worcestershire, butter, olive oil, garlic. dry mustard and some other ingredients. The tri-tip was special with the sauce or without the sauce. I will be making this my go to tri-tip process and may try this with veggies again as well.

Tri-tip, potato, red onion, asparagus ready for the grill.

Ingredients on my Trager Silverton 620 starting up.

Another view of ingredients on Trager Silverton 620.

Tri-tip with smoke ring and showing how juicy it is.

May 6, 2022
by dhoytt
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Pulled Pork Dishes

Did half of a pork shoulder last weekend that I had vacuum sealed earlier this year and it turned out great! Just fell apart when I pushed it with my fork even though It only went to 185 farenheit internally. I used some Desi Ghee clarified butter, honey and my custom mix of spice rub. I made some Swiss Chard slaw for the first nigt over Hawaiian rolls and it was delicous. The subsequent nights I made some tacos, for breakfast some pulled pork, potoes and eggs.

Tonight I topped it off my pulled pork week making some pulled pork hush puppies with shrimp, peppers, onions and cheddar cheese, fried in peanut oil wow! The hush puppies will be a favorite now going forward!

May 3, 2022
by dhoytt
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Rebuilt Zoneminder Got Shinobi up and Updated Web SSL Certificates on Site

Not sure what was occurring with my Zoneminder CCTV but it seemed my database was corrupt or had issues authenticating with my streams periodically over the past week especially one camera. Then today they all went dark and Zoneminder couldn’t talk to any of the cameras.

I started getting errors like the following for all streams :

Can't open memory map file /dev/shm/zm.mmap

Then the management UI gave me this error after I tried to restart Zoneminder:

ZoneMinder Error
Unable to connect to ZM db using dsn mysql:host=localhost;dbname=zm

SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] Connection refused

ZoneMinder will retry connection in 26 seconds.

The mariadb logs gave me the following errors:

2022-05-02 10:47:55 0 [ERROR] mysqld: Server GSSAPI error (major 851968, minor 2529639093) : gss_acquire_cred failed -Unspecified GSS failure.

2022-05-02 10:47:55 0 [Warning] mysqld: GSSAPI plugin : default principal 'mariadb/coral@' not found in keytab
2022-05-02 10:47:55 0 [ERROR] mysqld: Server GSSAPI error (major 851968, minor 2529639093) : gss_acquire_cred failed -Unspecified GSS failure.  Minor code may provide more information. Keytab FILE:/etc/krb5.keytab is nonexistent or empty.

I hadn’t really did anything except updated the OS Rocky Linux a Centos 8 fork the day before and I checked that it didn’t update Zoneminder but maybe it did some where along the line because it said it was at 3.6.12 and the Zoneminder database was still at 3.6.8. The update script (zmupdate.pl) failed with DB user authentication errors as well.

I tried a number of quick remedies before I decided to just drop the Zoneminder database and start over but was still having issues so I uninstalled Zoneminder and attempted to reinstall using the repositories and proceeded to get another list of errors and issues:

Error:
 Problem 1: package zoneminder-httpd-1.36.12-1.el8.x86_64 requires zoneminder-common(x86-64) = 1.36.12-1.el8, but none of the providers can be installed
  - conflicting requests
  - nothing provides perl(DateTime) needed by zoneminder-common-1.36.12-1.el8.x86_64
  - nothing provides perl(Data::UUID) needed by zoneminder-common-1.36.12-1.el8.x86_64
 Problem 2: package zoneminder-1.36.12-1.el8.x86_64 requires zoneminder-common(x86-64) = 1.36.12-1.el8, but none of the providers can be installed
  - conflicting requests
  - nothing provides perl(DateTime) needed by zoneminder-common-1.36.12-1.el8.x86_64
  - nothing provides perl(Data::UUID) needed by zoneminder-common-1.36.12-1.el8.x86_64
(try to add '--skip-broken' to skip uninstallable packages or '--nobest' to use not only best candidate packages)
[root@coral log]#

I ended up having to install/enable the powertools repo:

dnf config-manager --set-enabled powertools

Once everything was up and installed and Zoneminder was running the services without crashing again I still had to get in the mariadb cli and correct the mysql password user I had been going back and forth changing to the correct password. Then I was in Zoneminder again able to recreate all my prior sources except one. I have two Speco cameras and there’s no way to hard reset or otherwise reset the password to factory settings. I’m fairly certain I have the right passwords but both cameras initially wouldn’t let me in. Then one camera let me in using the password I knew, and I created another admin user, so I set that camera source up just fine in Zoneminder along with my other 4 cameras. The other Speco camera just would not let me in and the other Speco I had created the other user with suddenly would let me login but kick me out unless I used the new user. I ran into this behavior a few times with the Speco cameras and this time I’m ordering another camera that will be here later today through Amazon with much better resolution. I’ll put the new camera in see how it performs and maybe upgrade other cameras afterwards. The Speco gives good resolution in night conditions so if the new camera matches that with more robust features I will go that route.

In parallel while looking through Zoneminder forums and ultimately the Zoneminder wiki on starting fresh I downloaded and configured Shinobi CCTV on the same Rocky Linux system and pointed it to the storage area I use for storing Zoneminder events. I had looked into Shinobi about 4 or 5 years ago and ran it in parallel with Zoneminder and tested it back then. Shinobi is much improved! The camera source URL’s aren’t out there for you to see easily any longer plus its fairly intuitive in comparison with Zoneminder, I just have more familiarity with Zoneminder now.

Shinobi did have some issues with the stream of the Speco camera I was able to configure with Zoneminder and I stopped there as Zoneminder was responsive now and I had other things to do like eat and minor domestic stuff in the kitchen plus caught some of the games on TV.

I then went to my dhoytt.com site and was hit with the web certificate being out of date as of today. I went to Godaddy downloaded the certs and in 10 minutes had the new ones in place.

What a Monday I thought would be relaxing and making progress on other things. Oh well that’s how it goes sometimes!

So Zoneminder is back up will evaluate Shinobi some more and my web certificates are up to date on my site. I will incorporate newer cameras into the mix and I also need to look into the release notes of Zoneminder as I noticed some new authentication methods with streams so maybe that tripped me up. Bedtime is here!

April 9, 2022
by dhoytt
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Awesome Front Yard Roses 2022

The front yard small as it may be is looking great due to the roses. Each year certain bushes always produce well. Other years some rose bushes produce more than other years. This year the yellow rose bush is more prolific early than it has ever been. The blooms are even larger on the yellow roses.

The white roses by the fence and the long stem red roses by the door continue to produce beautiful flowers every year. My pink roses on the other side of the garden haven’t been as plentiful the past 2 years but the hybrid purple roses behind them are growing and popping out more flowers this year.

I gave them a nice feeding of slow release fertilizer and a mix to fight off insects like aphids so they will continue nice and healthy this year. I put down some more black bark down earlier this week to keep weeds out and sets the flowers off nicely with that background.

Night time shot of roses earlier this week in the evening after putting the black bark down.

Full shot of the roses in the front. The way the homes are configured the grass or white rocks in the front aren’t mine or they would be looking different.

April 3, 2022
by dhoytt
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Removed Replanted Gourmet Collard Greens

I removed the “gourmet collard greens” that seemed to have gone to seed that I had replanted from last year and brought up from seed . The gourmet greens had a huge amount or aphid like bugs the other collard greens didn’t have. I think I could have nursed some production out of them but figured the other collard greens would take up the slack without all the bugs that weren’t on them. I placed some celebrity and large cherry red, tomato plants from the discount pack that I had in the place of gourmet greens and stevia from last year.

The stevia from last year I had in a planter and had given up on. The stevia had went dormant suddenly back in February after seeming to flourish then in a week was gone ! Very unusual to see a plant go from flourishing to dormant that quickly, then I noticed growth in the planter box and it wasn’t even getting water but the stevia came right on up!

I also made some adjustments on the drip system and tested that along with some snipping of rose bushes in the front of the house. A lot of tiny buds ready to bloom into roses in the front very soon on each of the rose bushes, with some having blooms already.

Garden spot where the gourmet collard greens were pulled from with more tomato plants and stevia in their place.

This side of the garden blooming but will need weeds pulled aggressively this week.

March 28, 2022
by dhoytt
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2022 Vegetable Garden in Pool Ready Good Food Weekend Done

Finished my custom pvc pipe tomato trellises for now. I even added some more vegetables to my already over crowded vegetable garden when I couldn’t find poblano\ancho chilli pepper plants sprouting in my garden. I picked up some poblano\ancho peppers, Fresno peppers and another habanero pepper plant as well putting them in various spots.

I went to the old traditional pool store I had used for most of the time the past 25 years until they consolidated to one store in 2009. This store was quite a bit further out than the second store they had they closed and picked up some pool filters, I left my automatic pool vacuum to be repaired as well. I normally do repairs myself on my pool vacuum but with supply chain slow downs and no time I let them do it. They also had the filters no one else had in stock locally. After finishing vacuuming all the dirt from my garden excursions that collected on the pool bottom and some shock treatments, getting my pool salt content up to what it should be making sure the chlorinator was working the pool water is looking inviting! Once the pool gets a bit more warm I will start up my pool workouts doubling my cardio from treadmill sessions and eventually back to my road courses.

This week I picked up whole chicken as my protein of the week. I fire cooked with pellet apple wood on one of my Traeger grills after a nice 24 hour plus brine. The cook went well and the chicken was tender after letting it rest for awhile with the juices pouring out when cut. Even the breast meat was as juicy as a thigh. I ate with some store bought lobster ravioli and shrimp in garlic sauce along with some collard greens from my garden.

On my pvc pipe trellises I used tie wraps and heavy duty rubber bands made to resist heat and outside weather. On one row I will use traditional wired tomato baskets to test against my custom trellises This also satisfies my mission not to have useful things around the yard not being utilized and in my way.

I already have lots of tomato blooms and one beefsteak tomato on one plant. I should start seeing produce from recent plants as soon as two weeks. My transplants from the previous season are already producing as they recover, especially the herbs.

March 27, 2022
by dhoytt
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Brisket 2 Weeks Ago Various Dishes

Picked up a small brisket from Costco a couple of weeks ago, injected it with a custom beef enhancing mix and rubbed it down with my custom beef rub. I smoked this baby on my Traeger pellet smoker starting Friday into Saturday evening using hickory pellets.

Over the week I made sandwiches, various breakfast treats but the best leftover meal I made was beef stroganoff with the tacos being almost as good. The spaghetti brisket with marinara sauce wasn’t a hit, not bad just not the right sauce with a smoked brisket.

March 20, 2022
by dhoytt
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Experimenting with New DIY Trellises in Garden

Below I have some DIY trellis pictures I am trying out to grow my vegetables vertical this year with several varieties. I want some sturdy trellises that will fit the dimensions of my garden so DIY is the key. Most trellises from the stores have cheap connections and aren’t the correct dimensions nor are they adjustable like I intend my trellises to be. plus cost a lot more than they are worth.

I think I will go with four 5 foot 3/4/ inch PVC braced at the top with 1/2″ PVC and plastic stakes with flexible metal core at 9″intervals for my tomatoes. I played with drilling in the PVC pipes and threading the flexible plastic stakes with the metal core through the PVC pipes and then tying them off with Velcro. I will not be drilling through the PVC using that technique it took too long and the PVC chipped off or broke a time or two.

Will go with this for my tomato plants at 9″ steps.. 3/4″ PVC, plastic stakes with flexible metal core tied with tie wraps.

March 7, 2022
by dhoytt
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The 2022 Vegetable Garden is Officially Started

On the larger west part of my garden, I got the whole garden foundation set finally. After nearly emulsifying the soil, roots, and remaining plants that I didn’t transplant I made rows and redid the drip system Sunday.

I ended up making 12 inch rows with 10 inches between the rows to get my cultivator through later when I want to get weeds easily and also so I can service the crops and remove weeds from on top of the rows with ease.

This year I wanted to try some ¼” soaker hoses instead of my typical drip fittings with sprayers and bubblers. I ended up running them both in parallel with a water faucet splitter to go back and forth and test with. Should this work, I will use on the other side of the garden as well. The goal is to use less water and let the water soak in the soil and hope the roots go deeper to get the water. So far it seems the soaker puts a lot of pressure on the system and comes out way too slowly. I switched over to my old system for the night and foreseeable future until I can test some more.

I ended planting dill, yellow bell peppers, poblano peppers, jalapeno peppers, Ichiban eggplants, summer squash, black beauty squash, 2x yellow pear tomato plants, 2x red cherry tomato plants, celebrity tomato plant, minefield tomatoes, Bok hoi, more Swiss chard, mixed salad greens, more sage, and bush beans

I also started from seed, mustard greens, spinach mustard greens, beets, turnips, burgundy gush beans, bush beans, peas, potatoes, and red onions. I think I missed some plants and seeds that I planted but will list them later.

I still have some areas to fill in and have some more tomato plants from a discount six pack. That’s way too many tomatoes but will find a way to utilize them.

For now, I will turn my attention to cleanup and building some DIY trellises to grow my squash and cucumbers vertically this year to save space in the garden. I will use pvc pipe and fittings that I already have plus another 10 feet I got from the store to cut up. I did some vertical gardening last year. It’s going to get interesting

I even used my GoPro camera to show some footage of making my rows. Boring I know but I must use that equipment sometime since I haven’t been fishing. I have been waiting to finish this post until it finished joining the various video chapters into one video but it’s taking too long and I’m going to bed.

The rows are made 12 inches wide and 10 inches in between for my cultivator to remove weeds in the future.

Laying out plants and seeds prior to planting for planning purposes.

Faucet splitter I’m using to test out 1/4″ soaker hoses and my normal drip layout.

The other side of the garden currently with my replants not recovered yet.

March 5, 2022
by dhoytt
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Vegetable Garden Getting Closer to Finish

This is the weekend to get this vegetable garden in full gear. Check out the changes as I get the garden set. I chopped up the roots pulled some weeds and the pesky mint plants and roots. I then threw some mulch into the mix with the rototiller. I also got a chance to use my new electric cordless 80v Kobalt cultivator that I just picked up.

I took the 5HP Intek Crafstman rototiller down 2 feet to turnover the soil and chop things up going over the garden twice, then a 3rd and 4th time to get the mulch mixed in.

Next to get the rows in and this year I will try out some 1/4″ soaker hoses on my drip system to see if they can lay between the rows and still effectively water the plants. I’m thinking this will get the roots to go deeper and help me use less water as well.Many plants will do well without getting the leaves wet constantly I believe. I tried this years ago at this house and about 15 – 25 years ago at my other house I used a 3/4″ soaker hose connected to my hose pipe controlled by a mechanical timer.