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In my continuing effort to locate tasty treats that have a long shelf life and can be prepared after the zombies attack.  I am now trying out Vigo’s paella valenciana, it is not recommended for criminal enterprises though.  The box has an expiration date of about 18-24 months in the future.  It wont keep forever but it will be something that you can stock up on and rotate them into your regular meals always pushing the date further back.

The box contains a bag of rice with seasoning already added and a can of vegetables and seafood.  There is an allergy warning that it contains shellfish, which is good because paella valenciana kinda requires shellfish

According to the cooking instructions you will need 3 cups of water, a shallow saucepan with a lid and enough heat to boil the water for 1 minute and simmer the rest of the time.  This means that it is not that difficult to make while camping or if the zombies do attack.  Cooking time is about 30 minutes with 25 of those minutes sitting there doing nothing, so it is not a chore to make.

In a post apocalyptic world, assuming that you are not part of a criminal enterprise, you might want to have some bacon.  If you do not have any piggies or if all the piggies in your area were previously eaten or otherwise died or became contaminated, you might be relieved that you bought some canned bacon.  Yes, I am talking about Tactical Bacon manufacturered by CMMG.

This is 9 ounces of already cooked bacon.  Just heat and serve, and if you do not have any heat, you can eat it cold.  The pre-cooked weight is 3 pounds of bacon, and if you compare the price of this bacon to raw bacon at the grocery store you will see there is not much of a difference.  The advantage is that this bacon will stay on your shelf for 10 years.   Will the post-apocalyptic world currency be made of bacon?

The disadvantage of this bacon is there is the same amount as 3 pounds raw bacon in this can, and once you open it you must refrigerate it.  That is a lot of bacon!  Serving size is 3 strips and there are 18 servings in a can, so if you have bacon with every breakfast and you are feeding a family you will need 2 cans a week.  4 people would consume 1 can about every 4 days.  You will go through it faster if you are also having BLTs or mixing bacon in with green beans or other dishes that require bacon.

I recently discovered that Zombie Squad, Inc is a criminal enterprise.  They commit the same types of felonies that Al Capone & John Gotti did.  I also discovered their coveted trademarks have a defect in the applications that make them invalid.  I cannot challenge them unless and until they first try to enforce the trademarks.  For those that want to scream this is slander, get a dictionary slander is spoken.  For those that want to go to the fallback libel, I can prove everything I have said here, it is not libel if it is true.  I can prove that they solicit funds under fradulent pretenses, that they are wholely illegal in their operation, and that they are breaking state and federal laws on a regular basis.  The question that now remains, will they file a lawsuit and force me to prove this, or will they just acknowledge their actions and eek off into the shadows and “ignore” this.  I have informed Kyle Ladd, one of the “board members”, about my intent to do this, he acknowledged with invalid URLs to the trademarks (I already knew their numbers, how else would I know they were defective?)

When the zombies attack you may find yourself unable to leave in a safe way.  Roads may be closed or blocked with broken down cars.  Fuel may be all but impossible to get.  Your vehicle may have been wrecked by someone panicing to get out.  You may have shredded your tires driving over zombie corpses.  Whatever the cause, it is always nice to have options.  Options can keep you alive.

I have heard many people talk about go bags.  If you do not know these are pre-packed bags with everything you need in case a disaster hits.  Some people put 1-2 changes of clothes, medicines, money, and anything else they think they will need in the immediate aftermath of a terrorist attack, natural disaster or other event.  There is however one item I see lacking in most of these bags which can save your life.

I obtained the following information from an image scan of a Yaesu document.  This information has been available for some time, although I have yet to find it anywhere in plain text so I am providing it here.  Any typos are surely mine, although I did fix what I thought were some typos in the original document.  In any case, if there is a conflict of information between this version and the original, the original should be assumed to be more  accurate.

This came out of research into a software mod for the FT-897 and FT-857 radios.  I know based on my memory map where to write the data, I just wanted that data to be easier to figure out what is proper and what is not.

I have an Asus 1000HE eeepc.  I like it, mostly its battery life.  I installed eeebuntu not being a big windows fan and was displeased when I discovered that you could not directly install to a root cryptofs.  I did it anyway, although it takes a round-a-bout method to accomplish.

For those that do not know, cryptofs is a whole disk encryption solution in linux.  It is transparent to the user, aside from having to enter a passphrase (which can be very long) when you mount the disk.  Making / (root) cryptofs requires some modification to the initrd so that it will load the appropriate modules, set up the proper pseudodevice entries, and then mount the disk.  Swap can also be made encrypted making it even more difficult for anyone to get anything out of your system should it fall into the wrong hands.

Unlike some of the other tutorials out there I do not require you to do an intermediate temporary install, this means that your entire disk except /boot can be encrypted in one go.

The zombies have attacked, infrastruture is down, there will be no more cigarette deliveries made.  How will you get your nicotine fix?  I recently started smoking electronic cigarettes, they are composed of a tip which you add a couple drops of nicotine infused oil to, an vaporizer which heats the oil into a vapor, and a battery.  The whole thing looks like a cigarette, smokes like a cigarette and provides nicotine like a cigarette (which helps my legs, I have RLS and PLMD which about 10% of the population has to some degree).

Smoking can also give away your position due to the odor given off, electronic cigarettes give off water vapor so they do not pose the fire hazard, but also they do not have the odor, as a result no one will be attracted to the smell of them, ensuring at least a little bit of safety.  There was an FDA report that came out, it said that some manufacturers (but not all!) contain some potentially bad chemicals, some contain nothing deemed harmful.  Some have twice the normal amount of nicotine, but most are accurately labeled.  The biggest complaint appears to be the flavors, they come in chocolate, cherry, vanilla and more.  The claim is that they only make these flavors to get kids to smoke therefore the entire industry must be banned.  Its insane logic at best.  Electronic cigarettes do not have a tobacco tax since there is no tobacco, they also do not have tar or about 4000 other chemicals that are present in regular cigarettes, while this is still fewer than normal air, things like carbon monoxide are not present which makes it somewhat healthier.

As some of you are aware I dabble in FreeSWITCH development. Last night in a fit of insomnia, I wrote an event scheduler in LUA for FreeSWITCH that is capable of allowing multiple nodes to process the events without duplication. This speaks to the power of FreeSWITCH that something trivial can add such functionality.  This means that you can have a cluster that can all process the events without assigning specific events to each switch.

Potential applications for this include “hotel style wake up calls”, “blind date rescue calls” and even the infamous “get out of a boring meeting fast call”.  You just need to insert a small row in a MySQL database which includes the API command to run (such as originate) and the timestamp to run it at. 

About 15 years ago I bought an optoelectronics scout frequency recorder.   I thought it would help me find fun and interesting things to listen to on my radio, and it has not let me down.  After 15 years however the nicads that came in it were showing their age and it would not operator for more than 15-20 minutes on a charge.  I looked for a replacement battery and optoelectronics wanted $40 for one, and other vendors were not much better.

I decided there had to be a cheaper way.  After a trip to Fry’s electronics, I got everything I needed for $10 including tax.  Here is a brief explanation of what I did.