La Vie En Rose - Ukulele Chords

Cynthia Lin Music has an amazing ukulele channel on Youtube with lots of tutorials both for songs and for basic ukulele technique.  Of the online ukulele teachers, she comes across as one of the most professional music teachers, but a very organized approach to teaching from beginners to intermediate work.  (she may have more advanced work but I'm not there yet in my playing).

Here's one of my favorite videos she made:

I made a quick music sheet based on this tutorial so it was easier to follow along and then go practice on my own.

Cuban Pulled Pork

When it comes to hosting a meal, I'm a big fan of pulled pork.  There are many varieties and it can be made as fancy or as simple as you like. This recipe is based on a freeze-ahead slow cooker recipe from IAmThatLady.com as part of one of her $150 Aldi shopping plans where you prep twenty meals.

I liked the idea, but once I got my Instant Pot, I no longer really needed to prep as much ahead.  You can make this is an hour and a half so I can start it when I get home or even on weekends after we clean up from lunch.  Here's my adjusted version.

Cuban Pulled Pork

• 2 lb Pork Tenderloin
• 1/2 Large Sweet Onion - Diced
• 3 tsp garlic - minced
• Juice from 1 lime
• 3/4 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp black pepper
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• 1/4 tsp garlic powder
• 3/4 cup beef broth

1. Combine all ingredients in Instant Pot.
2. Cook at high pressure for 60 minutes
3. Natural pressure release for 10 minutes. Then shred pork and stir back into juices.

I generally serve with small flour tortillas and some guacamole.  Served that way, this recipe will serve 6-8 adults.  

Ukulele Hymn - O God Beyond All Praising

Heard this hymn at church, something I've been hearing for years and decided to try it on the uke.  Not an overly complex song, although some quicker chord changes if you're still a beginning.

Download the PDF here.

Privacy and the Internet - Part 2 - Easy and Free

As with all things free, you shouldn't expect the support of paid services. Since the Opera VPN services are available to many people, it may be a choke point. On top of that, your cell phone will need to handle encryption duties it doesn't normally handle. Here's the difference on my (admittedly underpowered) Nexus 5x.

Certainly serviceable for surfing on a cell phone, and would provide enough speed for most video streaming applications.  But let's compare to speed with the VPN off.

The download speed is obviously much faster, but the real difference is in the upload speed, over 12 times faster! This has to do with network choke points, the processing needed to encrypt the information and possibly the limited RAM in my system.

One of the biggest concerns about the free VPNs is always a question of how do they make money.  In some cases "free" VPNs are limited to a lower amount of data, hoping you'll pay for more once you hit the limit and are happy with the service.  This is how Windscribe works (a system I tried for a while and found was rather speedy and had plenty of data for basic browsing, social media, etc).

Some insert advertising into your browser or as pop-ups.  I still use the Opera browser on my phone because it drastically reduces data usage and blocks ads.  Once every few dozen pages I get one ad, but by that point its blocked dozens, so I consider it a win.

The real concern are the ones who may be selling your traffic data to third parties.  I suspect these are not common, but we don't know.  What we do know is you wind up in the same situation you were in with your ISP; namely that one company knows about all of your online history. 

If I had to give advice I'd say a safe browsing VPN from a known company like Opera is safer than open browsing on public wifi.  Not a great solution but definitely the lesser of two evils.  If however you plan on going VPN full time, its worth considering a paid solution.  I've bit the bullet and use NordVPN, but that will be the next blog post.