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i followed a typical saturday routine: ride down to haymarket in the late morning for some cheap produce before heading to my parents' place in the early afternoon. it was relatively warm today, temperature hitting the mid-50's. still cold enough to need a jacket, but i warmed up pretty quickly after a few minutes on the bike. on this day last year, we had the hottest february day ever, a record which was just broken a few days ago. all this warm weather might make one forget we are still in a new england winter, and a cold snap could be just around the corner, likewise another big snowstorm.

but the sun was out this morning and the solar monitoring app showed glorious production, a straight line to a 6kW plateau. but i knew it wouldn't hold up because as soon as noontime rolled around, it became cloudy fast and eventually the sky became grey. we'd already made 2/3 of a normal high production, so it wasn't a bad day, the final count was 24.51 kWh.

it took me 20 minutes to ride the 3.5 miles to haymarket. i ended up buying: 20 navel oranges ($5), 1 asparagus ($1), 3 boxes of cherry tomatoes ($1, for my mother), a 2 large box of blueberries ($2, going to make a batch of muffins using fresh berries), and a large pineapple ($1.50). it was warm enough that i crammed my jacket into my backpack, which turned out to be a mistake, as the sun disappeared on my ride home, and it was actually kind of chilly.

i spent 15 minutes squeezing a fresh container of orange juice before riding the 2.7 miles to belmont. i wore my jacket this time around. i got there close to 1pm. my mother was out this morning getting a haircut. afterwards she and my father took a walk around the belmont reservoir (my mother wants to increase the daily pace on her activity tracker) then out to belmont street to check out linda's donuts, where she bought a ham and egg bagel sandwich and gave to me for lunch (i hadn't eaten yet all day). maybe i was hungry, or maybe it was the most delicious ham and egg bagel sandwich i've eaten in a long time.

my mother cooked up the haymarket asparagus for dinner and couldn't get over how good it was, just the right amount of tender and flavor. later we tried the haymarket pineapple, and it was the most amazingly sweet pineapple i've ever eaten. fyffes gold brand (costa rica), it's marketed as a super sweet pineapple, and they weren't kidding. there wasn't a trace of sourness, and it was so juicy, like drinking sweet pineapple juice. it made me regret not getting more when i was there earlier. maybe next week they'll still have some left.

i installed DD-WRT1 on my sister's old tp-link router (TL-WR841N v8.4). it was actually pretty easy, the hardest part was just finding the firmware. the firmware came in two parts, flash factory-to-ddwrt.bin first, then tl-wr841nd-webflash.bin afterwards. i logged into the new DD-WRT admin page and activated guest network, but i didn't test it. i did notice that i could still get into the admin page from the guest SSID, so i probably didn't configure it right. later i upgraded the firmware on my own tp-link router. it was a little risky, because i could've bricked it, but i had the spare DD-WRT router in case that happened. that too was also very easy, and the new firmware allowed me to use the tp-link tether app, which i can use to see what devices are connected to the router. i spent the rest of the evening porting over all the reserved addresses and port forwarding rules.


1 this wasn't my first time installing DD-WRT onto a router. my first time was october 2014 when i flashed my purple linksys G router. i've also done forays in other networking adventures, like installing m0n0wall on a used PC to create a captive portal (june 2008).