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reupping the pine needle stockpile after two years of missed pine needle windows
Monday, October 18 2021
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
In the remote workplace today I found myself suffering yet again through multi-minute compiles of TypeScript into Javascript. These delays were further aggravated by a mysteriously new problem: constantly being hassled about SSL certificate errors. All my work was happening either on localhost or on a single machine on my local network, and there was no need to worry about certificates being correct. Ideally, Google Chrome would have some setting allowing me to tell it to ignore such errors if that's a risk I want to take. And there is indeed a startup parameter called --ignore-certificate-errors, though it doesn't seem to work (or perhaps it once worked, but recently stopped working). I tried multiple techniques to get these errors to stop, but they persisted, and at some point I just came to accept them.
Interestingly, a similar problem has been causing Gretchen problems on Badger, her desktop computer. She'd go to some (but not all) https sites and get a ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID error on a page saying "Your connection is not private," and forcing her to click a few extra things to see a page such as Zombiebox.com (which sells a sound-deadening container for loud generators such as the one we have at the cabin). In the past, such problems were always the result of the computer's clock being off by a few minutes. But that wasn't the problem with Gretchen's computer.
This evening (after I got out of the bath), Gretchen told me her computer was getting worse and worse with SSL problems. So I did some further research and learned something I hadn't known: the operating system itself has a trove of certificates browseable using an application called certmgr.msc, and that sometimes these certificates expire and must be replaced. This probably happens automatically on a modern operating system, but Gretchen's computer still runs Windows 7, and I've disabled all updates for its operating system. Happily, I was able to trash all the Trusted Root Certificates and install new ones using a helpful guide on the web that hopefully didn't lead Gretchen's computer to be taken over by Bulgarian hackers. As a test, I saw that it was now loading Zombiebox.com correctly. Later, though, Gretchen would tell me this fix hadn't solved all her SSL problems.
But I'm getting ahead of myself in the story of what happened today. Earlier, before Gretchen returned from the bookstore but after I was done working for the day, I raked up a wheelbarrow load of pine needles off Dug Hill Road in front of the house. In the past I've always tried to gather needles in the short period of time after they begin to fall but before they get too rained on and either get contaminated by deciduous leaves (which fall later) or get vacuumed up and hauled away by the Hurley highway department. But somehow I missed that window for two years in a row, leading to serious depletion of our pine needle stockpiles. The lack of pine needles going into storage (I keep them in an old dog house) coincided, you see, with the early pandemic, when we had fires in our fire pit on a regular basis. And to have good fires, we'd frequently feed the flames a steady diet of pine needles, which burn like rocket fuel. Other uses for pine needles include incense, compost bulk, and even insulation (though it's not recommended for a building whose loss would be catastrophic; the only place I've used it for that was the brownhouse).
After that I made spaghetti dinner with fried chonkiness consisting of onions, mushrooms and tofu. There were, unfortunately, no vegetables to cook with the noodles, but that didn't bother Gretchen, who said she'd eaten a bunch of vegetables earlier. She also said that the pasta I'd used contains spinach somehow in its ingredients, contributing to its weird gamey flavor.
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