Here we are having breakfast and watching the lone Crested Barbet between all the opportunistic starlings at Lower Sabie at 10:30. We were out of the Skukuza gate at 0600, of course we were… but sometimes the first bird does not get any worms at all. So breakfast time it was.
After breakfast there was a commotion on the bridge. Hmmm, couple lions on the move.
I went wide, hoping to catch up with them, found some elephant, no lions. So we went back over the bridge, found some more elephant.
Brown-hooded Kingfisher.
So we went back to the bridge where more lions had come out the woodwork.
A female and two not-quite-cubs-anymore. Yea, hard to make them out. I like taking pictures like this one:
Tanya taking the shot above.
Drove around some more, found Kori Bustards and a Burchell’s Coucal.
(Conveniently skipping over the three days it took to get here — by the time you join us it is 0-dark-hundred and we are waiting for the Pretoriuskop gate to open so that we can sally forth and conquer the park).
Because of booking late (well, by summer standards I was fine, but Kruger is booked long in advance in winter, I learned the hard way) we had one night in Pretoriuskop, three nights in Skukuza, two nights in Letaba1 and two nights in Lower Sabie2.
Skukuza can be busy and sometimes it’s hard to get a spot, and we had a nice spot at Pretoriuskop, and Pretoriuskop was one of the few campsites which were not fully booked. Also, we only had to vacate our campsite at 11 or some such, and the gates open at 6. So the plan was, take a drive up to Skukuza, have breakfast, see if there’s a lekker campsite, squat on it with a chair, come back and fetch the teardrop. Alternatively, change our booking to Pretoriuskop for the next three nights.
But we found a nice site, and we squatted a chair on it, and all was good.
Southern Ground Hornbills are listed as endangered but they are quite common in Kruger.
They’re also hella curious.
(Concerning the Big Six, our count for the trip is 5/6. We saw two Eagle Owls this trip, have yet to spot a Pel’s).
While going back to Pretoriuskop to get the teardrop, we spotted (1) a gaggle of cars and (2) a male lion kind of far off, lying in the grass. Then he put his head down, didn’t get a photograph. Then while towing the teardrop back to Skukuza, same thing (different lion). This time we snagged a pic.
This is with a 600mm lens on a 2/3 sensor with about 3x “digital zoom” a.k.a. cropping. Shot handheld out the window because sometimes that’s all the chance you get (jockeying for position while towing is not that simple). Never fear, better pics ahead.
Green-backed Heron from the Skukuza bridge.
And a Giant Kingfisher.
Much further north than we like. But all I could get at the time.
Having been to Kruger many times in summer, we figured we should go see what it’s like in winter.
(TL/DR: It’s a bit like the dude looking for his keys under the lamp post — the Kruger weather is excellent, much better than in summer — but the light’s not so good for photography).
I also decided to vary the route a bit. Cape Town – Sutherland1 – Fraserburg – Loxton – Victoria West – Britstown2 – Hopetown – Kimberley – Bloemhof – Ventersdorp – Krugersdorp – Pretoria3 – Witbank4 – Middelburg5 – Dullstroom – Lydenburg – Sabie – Hazyview – Phabeni Gate. And back, Malelane Gate – Baberton – Badplaas6 – Bethal – Nigel7 – Warden – Bethlehem – Fouriesburg – Ficksburg8 – Ladybrand – Bloemfontein9 – Colesberg – Middelburg10 – Cradock11 – Addo12 – PE13 – Mosselbay14 – Cape Town.
Overnight at Kambro Accommodation. A good place to stay over. Although next time I’ll stick to the N1 to Three Sisters and sleep in Kimberley.
Mainly to drop off a gun but also to catch up with the friends we stayed with.
To drop off a bunch of guns at Classic Arms.
Where Tanya bought some really crappy steak from the Spar in the Middelburg Mall.
Avoid this route. Can’t tell you why I don’t learn. Take either of the passes to Machadodorp (now “eNtokozweni”, but the streets are still Voortrekker, Potgieter and the like) and go from there.
Because my GPS is evil. I swear to Finagle, the toll road people must be paying Garmin to route via as many toll roads as possible. The sane route should have been Badplaas – Ermelo – Standerton – Vrede – Bethlehem. The Nigel route added 70km and R175.50 in toll roads.
Because I had to pick up a gun. Stayed at the Green Acorn. Eclectic but not terrible.
In this case I agreed with the GPS. The R26 from Ladybrand to Wepener should be canonised, and while the N1 outside Bloemfontein is technically a toll road, there’s no toll gate.
The other one.
Now “Nxuba” with great fanfare and absolutely no increase in quality of anything for anybody.
We had not been to Addo before. It’s recommended. More later.
Because I had to… pick up a gun. Also, Tanya wanted to visit an old friend.
We have friends there, stayed over, drank too much.
I need air helpers. But they’re expensive. Tiguan springs, maybe? (It’s the fridge and the beer in the back of the Golf, the teardrop’s only about 30 kilos on the hitch, even loaded — I can (and had to) pick it up when the jockey is giving me shit).
It’s been raining all week. It’s set to continue for the rest of the week.
As mentioned before, this house did not come with storm water drains. The gutters drain directly into the soil, and since this is basically a river bed, from there on down to the ocean.
With the paving, however, it takes a bit of time to drain.
Some people are upset because they think Facebook made Grampy into a Qanon. Others, because they think Insta gave their kid anorexia. Some think Tiktok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama bin Laden. Some are upset because the cops use Google location data to round up Black Lives Matter protesters, or Jan 6 insurrectionists. Some are angry about deepfake porn. Some are angry because Black people are targeted with ads for overpriced loans or colleges
And some people are angry because surveillance feeds surveillance pricing. The thing is, whatever else all these people are angry about, they’re all angry about surveillance. Are you angry that ad-tech is stealing a 51% share of news revenue? You’re actually angry about surveillance. Are you angry that “AI” is being used to automatically reject resumes on racial, age or gender grounds? You’re actually angry about surveillance.
There’s a very useful analogy here to the history of the ecology movement. As James Boyle has long said, before the term “ecology” came along, there were people who cared about a lot of issues that seemed unconnected. You care about owls, I care about the ozone layer. What’s the connection between charismatic nocturnal avians and the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere? The term ecology took a thousand issues and welded them together into one movement.
The Fruit & Veg had a special on green bell peppers, so I bought too many. This… is not uncommon.
Looking for a way to use them, I found a recipe for white chicken chili which is pretty damn good. The recommended cooking times are a bit screwy though — it’s a 6-8 hour slow cooker dish which only takes 5+7+1+10 minutes on the stove? Nah-ah.
So what I did. Two chicken breasts, on the bone, cut into four pieces each. Black pot with some oil, fry until brown all over, maybe ten minutes. Remove from pot. Add some more oil, slowly fry celery, one onion, one large green pepper (all diced). Aim for 15 to 20 minutes. More if you have it. Add the four cloves of garlic, two teaspoons cumin, some chili flakes (which is what I had on hand) and maybe half a teaspoon red and another half black pepper.
Then I added some frozen chicken stock and a stock cube and one tin white beans, simmered the whole thing for maybe half an hour.
In the mean time, cook rice in the instant pot, 3/4 cup rice, one cup water, 2 minutes on high, open up, add a handful of frozen corn, close the lid and give it some time to percolate.
Fish out the chicken, shred it off the bones, stir back into the pot, serve.
All in all it took me maybe an hour and a half. I would suck in a quickfire challenge.
Our main driveway gate motor went intermittent. It would always open, but sometimes not close. Percussive maintenance mostly worked as a short-term fix.
Priscilla Snow’s Windows PC had “a few hiccups over the past couple of years”. She couldn’t open display settings, a MIDI keyboard interface stopped working, task manager would start to hang until force-closed, video capture cards had trouble connecting. Then, while trying to figure out why a remote desktop session wasn’t working, the task bars on Snow’s PC disappeared. The PC refused to launch any settings panels. After updating drivers and restarting the PC, the taskbars returned, but only for six days…. (long sad story on Ars Technica)
It turns out that her Hisense TV was generating “random UUIDs for UPNP network discovery every few minutes.” Windows, seemingly not knowing why any device would routinely do this, sees and adds those alternate Hisense devices to its Device Association Framework, or DAF. This service being stuffed full of attention-grabbing devices can hang up Task Manager, Bluetooth, the Settings apps, File Explorer, and more.
The fix is deleting hundreds of keys from the registry. Snow did the same, and everything—Task Manager, MIDI keyboard, remote desktop, even a CRT monitor she had assumed was broken—started working again.
OK, so the Hisense TV is spewing out noise. Not very civilized, I get it.
Snow notes in chats attached to her post that she disabled “Set up network connected devices automatically” on her “Private networks” settings in Windows. And, of course, she recommend not buying the same Hisense 50Q8G she bought, or at least not having it on the same network.
So Microsoft Windows is trying to be too clever by half, filing everything it sees on the network for future reference to the point where it runs completely dry on resources, and that’s OK?
In all fairness, Ars Technica did kind of get it right in concluding:
The mystery is solved, but the culprit remains very much at large. Or culprits—plural—depending on how you think a Windows PC should react to a shapeshifting TV.
