Shdwdrgn

I'm wondering if anyone has found (free) sources of data to use for live elections results, specifically the Presidential race? I've been building a map of poll results but would also like to put something together to watch the race tomorrow night.

I would love to have them light up like a scoreboard as each representative takes the floor, showing all of the commandments they have broken. If people want so badly to bring religion into politics then lets just show them exactly who they've been voting for. Maybe we can get the news networks in on this too, displaying it on the side of the screen similar to a sporting event.

I've spent the past day working on my newest Poweredge R620 acquisition, and trying to nail down what things I can do without checking. Google has shown me that everyone seems to be having similar issues regardless of brand or model. Gone are the days when a rack server could be fully booted in 90 seconds. A big part of my frustration has been when the USB memory sticks are inserted to get firmware updated before I put this machine in production, easily driving times up to 15-20 minutes just to get to the point where I find out if I have the right combination of BIOS/EUFI boot parameters for each individual drive image.

I currently have this machine down to 6:15 before it starts booting the OS, and a good deal of that time is spent sitting here watching it at the beginning, where it says it's testing memory but in fact hasn't actually started that process yet. It's a mystery what exactly it's even doing.

At this point I've turned off the lifecycle controller scanning for new hardware, no boot processes on the internal SATA or PCI ports, or from the NICs, memory testing disabled... and I've run out of leads. I don't really see anything else available to turn off sensors and such. I mean it's going to be a fixed server running a bunch of VMs so there's no need for additional cards although some day I may increase the RAM, so I don't really need it to scan for future changes at every boot.

Anyway, this all got me thinking... it might be fun to compare notes and see what others have done to improve their boot times, especially if you're also balancing your power usage (since I've read that allowing full CPU power during POST can have a small effect on the time). I'm sure different brands will have different specific techniques, but maybe there's some common areas we can all take advantage of? And sure, ideally our machines would never need to reboot, but many people run machines at home only while being used and deal with this issue daily, or want to get back online as quickly as possible after a power outage, so anything helps...

I have a self-hosted matrix-synapse server up and running on a Debian linux server, but before I open it up I want to at least get a captcha service in place to reduce spamming. The only module I've seen to handle this function appears to require setting up a Google recaptcha though, however I would prefer to keep all of this entirely self-contained for the privacy of my users. Can anyone recommend a module that allows for a local captcha option? For that matter, can anyone also recommend a captcha system that is pretty straightforward to set up (which is compatible with matrix-synapse) and uses basic preinstalled code bases like perl or python?

And while I'm here, I would also like to provide the option of registering with an email address, but I'm having trouble finding any clear how-to pages on this. Seems like that function might be built directly in to matrix-synapse but I'm just not finding anything helpful. Any suggestions?

I'm fairly new to matrix in general, but I have an initial setup running with the homeserver, Element web page, and an IRC bridge, so if I can just nail down the validation part of registrations I'll have what I think is a good starting point to launch from.

I was reading another article which discussed taking measurements of distance stars at 6-month intervals to create a 3D map of their relative positions and direction of movement. This got me to thinking... has anyone proposed 'dropping' stationary satellites outside of Earth's orbital path for continuous monitoring even when our planet is no longer in that spot? It seems like such an arrangement could provide constant monitoring of things that are happening on the far side of the sun, and they could each act as a relay to each other, bringing the signals back around where we could receive them.

It could be fascinating to be able to constantly monitor the path of know comets, or perhaps even to detect large meteors which are safely away from us now but might some day pose a threat. Studies like mapping star positions could rapidly expand with the availability of continuous data feeds, and I'm sure if such a tool were available scientists would come up with a host of new experiments to try.

A couple other things also come to mind. First off is radio telescopes, which can gather more sensitive data by having sensors further apart. Of course in this case they would only be able to peer in two directions unless you set up the array to rotate as a singular ring (which greatly increases the complexity). The other idea was that I know some phenomena are so large that it takes a huge array of telescopes or sensors to even detect them, and something this large could detect truly astounding low frequency events. Throw in some gravity detectors and watch as the waves propagate through our solar system.

I'm just thinking there's a lot of possibilities here and a lot more data could be collected if we could drop four or eight satellites along the way. I would assume the idea has been proposed before, I just didn't know if this is even feasible?

Turns out both grow in my area, and look identical to this when young. Yikes! So based on a post yesterday, I took this outside and sliced it in half. So far it looks promising (I think?) and I'm not dead yet.

This was found growing in a Colorado yard near the base of an elm tree, in an area where there are also rotting cottonwood roots. Altitude is right at 5000 feet. It wasn't my yard so I'm not sure how many days it may have been growing before I picked it today. I have put both halves in the fridge for now, is there any other information I can provide to help identify it?

A full size copy of the inside can be viewed here: http://sourpuss.net/projects/mycology/2023-08-13/IMG_7239.JPG

First pics of my first pins. I cut slits in the bag on Sunday and saw the first pins appear yesterday morning, now they're growing fast. This clump is already a full inch (25mm) tall, and I have four openings in the bag that are all pinning. I've been misting them a couple times a day but now I'll be working from home until next Monday so I can try to spray them more often.

For anyone who hasn't seen my previous posts, I started out with a very small sample of spawn from ebay just over two months ago. I expanded that out in jars of rye berries and popcorn kernels, and then on July 4th I split a jar between two fruiting bags with pasteurized straw (I also have two bags of blue oysters and opened one of those on Sunday, but no pins from it yet).

This is my first time trying to grow mushrooms so I've been researching and asking questions every step of the way, but so far so good! I also have never tasted oysters before so that will be a new experience too. Now I just have to temper my impatience until it's time to harvest...

[Update] Adding a second pic this morning. This is about 12 hours later and they've grown significantly again. For reference, the bag is about the size of a sheet of paper.

[2nd update] It's been five days now since I opened the bag for fruiting. Here's a pic of what the mushrooms currently look like. As far as what I've read, I expected them to get MUCH larger than this, but with the upturned caps I really believe these are done growing and should have been harvested yesterday (note this image shows the largest clump of the group). Any thoughts?

My first oyster pins appeared today and I've been thinking about humidity control. I have this big tub I made my still air box from and I've been wondering about using it to hold the two fruiting bags I have. I was concerned that maybe the X slices wouldn't get enough fresh air if I covered them, but then I've been worried about keeping up the humidity. Now that I'm seeing some pinning though I'm feeling like the humidity is more important? I live in Colorado, which isn't quite desert but the humidity in the house typically drops below 40% during the day (it's high right now because we've been getting some rain showers).

For reference, my SAB is a typical DIY, made from a large tub with just a couple hand-sized holes cut out. There's not a lot of airflow in that room anyway, and I'm not sure how much fresh air the mushrooms need once they start growing. Of course I realize they won't be able to stay in the SAB too long, I know they'll outgrow the available space, but I'm just thinking for the next few days, or however long it takes them to really fill in.

So, any thought on this? Should I close them up in the box or just leave them in open air?

So my two bags of pink oysters, which haven't appeared to be doing much on anything, have suddenly pinned right behind the air vent on both bags. The first picture is a bunch of little guys like I expected it to start out as, but the second bag is one massive stem as wide as the cap! For reference, the air vent patch black clicks on these bags are about 1.25" wide.

Did I do something wrong in sealing the top of the bags, or is it common to see this happen right behind the vent? Maybe I put too much straw in the bags? It's hard to see in the pictures, but they seem pretty healthy, however there has been VERY little mycelial growth in these bags so far and it seems premature to start opening them up. Any suggestions?

I have some pink spawn which was being expanded out in jars of rye berries and popcorn kernels. There's been good growth and since a couple weeks ago the jar appeared to be completely colonized (at which time I left one jar sitting and moved another jar to a couple fruiting bags). It's been sitting on the basement floor since then, but I've noticed some pink coloration that seems to have gone throughout the jar, and there seems to be a bit of the pink also in the fruiting bags.

I prepared some jars of blue oyster spawn at the same time, using the same batch of rye and popcorn, and those jars are still snow white. This has me wondering, could I have possibly gotten contamination ONLY in the pink oyster jars while all of the blue oyster jars somehow escaped contamination? Or is this pink color natural for pink oysters? It just seems like an awful big coincidence that only the pink oysters would get contaminated when everything was prepped together in the still-air box and there was definitely cross-exposure between the jars.

Since this is my first batch of oysters I'm just not sure what I should be expecting.

At the suggestion of another member I tried expanding my spawn on popcorn kernels. This involved boiling for about 20 minutes, drying, then pressure-canning for 90 minutes at 15psi. After cooling my spawn was divided between the jars, which were allowed to grow for a little over two weeks. On Monday I transferred the contents of a couple jars to fruiting bags with pasteurized straw and started seeing growth by the next day. I thought all was well.

On Wednesday, I started noticing some green stems. As I've been watching, this is actually growth from the popcorn kernels, and it's happening in all four bags! Now I'm quite frankly amazed that the cheapest generic popcorn from the store even has the capability to sprout, but after I put it through all that cooking I would have assumed it simply wasn't possible. I also wonder why it didn't start trying to grow in the original jar, and why it waited until it was in the bags?

So is there anything I should do about this? It will probably be at least another couple weeks before the mycelium is grown out enough to open some air holes for fruiting and I'm worried the corn will be trying to create its own holes before then, but maybe the bag is tougher than it looks. Anyway, any suggestions other than letting it go and waiting to see what happens?

tl;dr: Spawn grown on popcorn kernels, now popcorn is sprouting despite extensive cooking.

[Update] It's NOT the popcorn, there were other seeds in the straw!

I've lost track now of how long since I started on this, but I think it's been 2-3 weeks since I transferred my original spawn to grain jars? All of the jars have been fully colonized except for one jar of pink oysters, which fought against some kind of contamination but seems to have gotten going again. It had some good looking growth though, so I decided to use that jar plus one jar of blue oysters (but grown on popcorn kernels) for my first attempt at fruiting. If it is too weak and fails, well if was worth a shot and I wouldn't have gotten anything else from it anyway.

I'm using some 8" fruiting bags from ebay, and pasteurized chopped straw in a lime water bath overnight then let it drain today for about 2.5 hours. Each quart jar of spawn was split between two fruiting bags.

Now here comes the scary part... I didn't have room inside to work on this, and knew working with the straw was going to be very messy, so I set up a table in the yard. I wiped everything down with 91% ISO as I went, but being outside has me worried about the chances of contam. Guess we'll see?

So now I have four stuffed fruiting bags hanging out in the garage where it will be a little warmer than the basement. I had considered putting the bags in my garden but I'm worried about squirrels and such getting into them (especially when they start to fruit) so I figured the garage was safer. I'm expecting another 2-3 weeks of expansion before they're ready to fruit, but it's just a game of wait&see now. And assuming I get some mushrooms from this batch, I can bring it back full-circle and start a new batch of spawn (this time directly in the grain jars) from what grows.

One question I have for everyone... I have three more jars of spawn that are pretty well completely grown in (one popcorn and two rye berries). Should I put these in the refrigerator until I'm ready to transfer them to fruiting bags? I'm not sure how long they can survive at room temperature but I seem to recall they can hang out in the fridge for 3-4 months without any problem?