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Frightfully delightful!

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Frightfully delightful!

5 Sep 2026

Up early in the morning to get chores done, I found this massive spider web in the yard. It was pretty impressive!

After chores, we were off to sell Popcorn for a Scout fundraiser. It started out a bit slow, and both Arya and her partner got a bit heat sick as we were getting blasted by the sun for the first hour, until it got high enough to shade us.

Meanwhile, shenanigans are afoot! Little buddy is getting bigger all the time!

Meagan took the kids to a Spirit Halloween store. Garrett and Randal had a great time getting scared by the animatronics and checking out all the cool things!

Our little viking warriors were checking out the gear to ensure they were fully equipped!

Garrett and Randal have fun with the trash can monster at Spirit Halloween! They got over their fear of the displays and were having fun scaring themselves!

Garrett is having a great time learning about and playing with the candy bowl!

Time to get ready for Halloween!


Thanks for reading! Sign up here on the blog or on our Patreon to know when posts get published! I share these automagically to the Journey of the Wolf and Raven Facebook page if you prefer that. You can also follow me on the fediverse via @alan@www.wolfandraven.blog, or on Friendica at @alan

Fizzling Thursday

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3 Sep 2026

Evan and Meagan got to practice early, and started doing some drills. Meagan made Evan a bet that if he blocked more shots than her, she would do his dishes(!). Sadly, he did not succeed.

Garret being a goober, as usual of course.

The other notable thing that happened today was our Ninja toaster oven started to go on the fritz. Which was rather disappointing and only then did we find out how much we really relied on it.

Drippy Friday

4 Sept 2026

Nothing quite like going out to the chickens and finding one randomly dead in the morning. No apparent signs of struggle or injuries.

Wildly crazy loud geese!

After animal chores, it was off to lunch with friends, then to the store. We were running low on our favorite peanut butter. Which, it turns out, was apparently also quite popular as there was none on the shelves when I got there.

Then it was time to change the oil on the truck. I was going to use my new oil extraction pump, but something wasn’t compatible with the setup – either too long of a hose or it couldn’t get down to the oil pan. I had to by a longer piece of tubing but it still didn’t reach.

Meanwhile, there was chess club. Garrett is learning to play, although he has a bit of trouble with losing.

The rest of the kids had a good time. Jarek and Evan can beat everyone there, however; so we need to find them some stiffer competiiton!

Fortunately, I had a Fumoto valve installed, which made it much less messy.

Normally, this results in a partial oil bath for me as 3 gallons of oil is liberated.

Of course, there is no time to change oil like when you are dodging rain showers!

I see a little person got a hold of my phone…


Thanks for reading! Sign up here on the blog or on our Patreon to know when posts get published! I share these automagically to the Journey of the Wolf and Raven Facebook page if you prefer that. You can also follow me on the fediverse via @alan@www.wolfandraven.blog, or on Friendica at @alan

Wacky Wednesday

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2 Sep 2026

We tried a little experiment, well two actually. One was cutting back the feed for the chickens, and two was using the Tractor Supply delivery service.

Cutting the feed back wasn’t that great. It caused a slow down in their eggs, and I’m not sure if it is related or not, but seemed to trigger a molt. Egg production pretty much stopped (writing this a couple weeks in the future..) and took a while to recover.

Tractor Supply also took their time delivering, missing the original promise date and stretched out the delivery over a few days. That was a little annoying as well.

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WordPress Plugins!

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I’ve made and released a couple WordPress Plugins. I went looking for solutions to these problems, but, not finding any, decided to do it myself. After all, if not me, then who?

Email verification. Pretty basic, but most if not all of the plugins that I found were gateways to services that would try to sell you access to an API to figure out if an email was valid or not. They didn’t actually have the user verify their email. So, now we have a plugin that does just that!

#EmailVerification #VideoProcessing

https://wordpress.org/plugins/argentwolf-email-verification/

For videos, an issue came up when I posted a video: family across the country on a slower connection mentioned that it did not stream very well. Apparently posting raw cell phone video, while very high quality, is too high for the internet. So, now introducing the ArgentWolf Video Processor plugin. This plugin processes your videos on server, no APIs, and implements HLS, which allows your browser or devices to choose the appropriate resolutions for streaming based on your Internet connection.

And while yes, you can render it all before hand, that is a much more unfriendly workflow. This, all you have to do is load and go. Great for self hosted sites or a VPS, shared hosting may be more of a mixed bag depending on the hosting policies. Version 2.0 is in the works with PeerTube support, which will offload the processing to a PeerTube instance instead of the blog host!


https://wordpress.org/plugins/argentwolf-video-processor/