Cat Shelves

Here's a quick, easy project for all you feline fanatics out there.  Cats need a place to jump, climb, and scratch, and if you don't give it to them, they will jump, climb, and scratch all over your furniture.  We recently adopted a new kitty, and to welcome her to our home I decided to build a set of "cat shelves" (for lack of a better word), to give her a place to climb around in our living room.

The idea is rather simple, and I didn't think of it on my own.  There are plenty of examples of this sort of thing floating around the internet, I just adapted it to the available space and decor of the room in which I wanted to install it.

I made the shelves out of inexpensive 1"x8" pine boards that you can pick up at any big-box hardware store, or if you're like me, you might even have some lying around in your scrap lumber pile.  I measured the area, put my design down on paper, and cut the boards to the desired lengths.

Next I pulled out a router with a Roman ogee bit to add a little decorative detail to the edges.  I made a couple of passes around the three exposed edges of each board, and then went over the whole board with 220 grit sandpaper to prepare it for painting.

I painted the bottom face as well as the three routed edges, first with primer, then with two coats of flat white interior paint.  Once the paint was dry it was time to install the carpet for the top of the shelves.



I stopped by a local carpet store, told them what I was doing, and asked if they had any remnants they could sell me.  Instead they showed me some scrap they had lying around and told me I could take what I needed from that, so the carpet cost me nothing.

I cut the pieces I needed with a razor blade, and trimmed them up with scissors.  I used Liquid Nails to adhere the carpet to the pine board, which I may have done differently if I had it to do over again.  The Liquid Nails bonds excellently, but it has a seven day cure time, and stinks of solvent the whole time it is curing, so it delayed me bringing these into the house for longer than I had planned.

As for how to mount the cat shelves on the wall, I left the decision up to my wife.  She picked these decorative brackets from Amazon, and I think they compliment the room excellently.  It's important to take one's time and use a level to make sure the shelves are mounted in a visually appealing fashion.


In addition to the shelves, I also added a "climbing wall" to the area.  I had a couple of 2'x'2 carpet tiles lying around that I cut into sections and mounted to the wall by using drywall screws through the carpet and into studs behind the drywall.  The cat can then climb up the carpet on the wall to reach one of the platforms.  This provides her exercise, as well as gives her a chance to scratch something other than the furniture.


I hope you've enjoyed this short but entertaining project.  Hopefully it will inspire some of you to build your own cat-play-area.  If you have any questions about adapting this design to your own space, please let me know in the comments below.  Thanks for reading.

Using the Raspberry Pi to Pen Test Wireless Networks or The Coconut-Pi

Inspired by Hak5's wireless pen testing device named the Pineapple, I decided to pair a Raspberry Pi with a USB WiFi Adapter to create a small, portable device for monitoring wireless traffic, analyzing  wireless access points, or penetrating wireless networks.  Because the Pineapple was my inspiration, and I used a Pi as the basis, I've decided to whimsically call this device the Coconut-Pi.  Because of the potential for one to use this device for evil, I will place the standard disclaimer here:  I am not advocating the use of this device for anything illegal.  Do not attempt to gain access to any network that you have not been given permission to access.  Do not use this device to spoof any network with the intention of tricking people into logging onto your device.  Despite the fact that I find these disclaimers pointless and ineffective, seriously, prison does not seem like a good place to end up, so please use the following information responsibly.

The idea is fairly basic.  It uses a Raspberry Pi  connected to a USB WiFi Adapter capable of being put into monitor mode.  The Pi 3B comes with on-board WiFi, but the chip on the Pi does not support monitor mode, so the adapter is required.  Specifically, I used an Alfa AWUS036NHA long range USB Wifi Adapter, which utilizes an Atheros AR9271 chipset.  There are probably better WiFi adapters I could have used, but I purchased this adapter years ago, specifically because it could be put into monitor mode, and the driver came preinstalled on Kali Linux.  Conveniently enough, the driver is also included with Raspbian Lite, which is the OS I will be using.  If we want to make this rig portable, we can't forget the 5V rechargeable Li-ion battery as well.

One could ask the question, if this is supposed to be a pen testing rig, why would you use Raspbian Lite instead of Kali Linux, since Kali has also been ported to work on the Raspberry Pi?  The answer is simply, in my opinion, Kali does not run well on the Pi.  It's been a year or two since I tried it, so I can't remember exactly where it fell short, and there may have been improvements since then, but I prefer to stick to using Raspbian on the Pi whenever practical.  We will mainly be using Aircrack-ng and TCPDump, both of which are in the Raspbian repositories, and since both Kali and Raspbian are Debian-based, anything else that I end up needing down the road can also be installed on Raspbian.

When I first conceived of this project, my intention was to use a Raspberry Pi Zero.  I planned to use the Pi's UART to console into the Pi from a laptop, and then use a male micro USB OTG to female USB-A adapter to connect the WiFi adapter to the Pi.  This would have worked well, and I still may build that in the future, but since the Pi uses 3.3V TTL for serial communication on it's UART, I would need either a TTL to RS-232 converter (max232) or TTL to USB converter, and I didn't have either lying around in my shop.  I did order a couple 3.3V TTL to USB converters, but even with Prime 2-day shipping, I didn't have the patience to wait on it to arrive, so I redesigned the project using a Pi model 3B.  With the Pi 3B I can use the Ethernet port and a cross-over Ethernet cable to connect my laptop to the Pi, so no level shifter is required, and the Wifi adapter can plug directly into one of the 3B's female USB-A ports.  Bottom line, I ended up using a more expensive Pi, but saved some money on adapters, so based on cost there is little difference between the designs.

Setting up the Raspberry Pi

There really isn't too much set-up to this project.  I installed Raspbian Lite on an SD card, stuck it in the Pi, and did the basic Pi set-up (changed password, expanded the file system, enabled SSH, changed locale, timezone, and keyboard configuration, etc.).  If you need any instruction on doing basic set-up for the Pi, see my first Raspberry Pi post here.  The Pi will need an internet connection to do installation from the repository, and I'll be using the Ethernet port to connect to my laptop, so I set the Pi's built-in wifi to connect to my home network.  Another way to do this would be to change the settings on the laptop to allow the Pi to share the laptop's internet connections, but I chose not to do that.  As I mentioned before, to connect the laptop to the Pi I used a cross-over Ethernet cable, which simply swaps pins 1&2 with 3&6.  These days, thanks to auto-MDIX, you can use any old Ethernet cable and get away with it, but I'm stuck in the past, so I made a short cross-over cable for this project.

At this point, you will either need to assign static IP addresses in the same subnet on both your laptop and your Pi, or simply allow them to assign themselves their own link-local addresses via DHCP.

If the Ethernet ports on both your Pi and your laptop are set to DHCP, when you connect them directly they will soon realize that there is no DHCP server to give them an address.  Once they become aware of this, they will assign themselves IP addresses from the link-local address space of 169.254.0.0/16.  You will then need to find the Pi's self-assigned address by using the command: ifconfig.

If you choose to use static IP addresses, be sure to choose an obscure subnet such as: 172.30.253.0/30 to avoid conflicting with any wifi network you might be auditing.  Using this example, the /30 subnet (or 255.255.255.252) only has two assignable IP addresses, so we'll call the Pi ".2" and the laptop ".1".

To change the IP address on the Pi, find your Ethernet interface name with ifconfig, and edit /etc/dhcpcd.conf to add the following lines:

interface enx...  # replace enx... with your interface name

static ip_address=172.30.253.2/30

To change the IP on my laptop running Kali Linux I went to Settings>Network>Wired>Add Profile... and created a new profile with the following settings:

Address: 172.30.253.1

Netmask: 255.255.255.252

Leave Gateway and DNS blank

To change the IP on my laptop running Windows 10 go to Control Panel>Network and Internet>Network Connections>Ethernet>Properties>IPv4 Properties and set the following:

IP Address: 172.30.253.1

Subnet mask: 255.255.255.252

Leave everything else blank

Up until this point we have needed a monitor and keyboard to do the initial configuration on the Pi, but now that we can remotely access the Pi using our laptop, we can do everything else via SSH. (Actually it is possible to do all the prior steps headlessly as well, but that is slightly more complicated, and a subject for another post.)

If you're using Linux you can SSH into the Pi using:

ssh -l pi 172.30.253.2

(obviously if you used a different IP address then use that instead)

And in Windows I like to use Putty for SSH.  Since I will be using this connection again in the future I made sure to save the Session for future use.

So now we're logged onto the Pi, and the Pi has internet access via its wifi, so let's install aircrack-ng and tcpdump:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install aircrack-ng tcpdump -y

And that's it.  The Pi is ready for its initial mission.  Plug in the Wifi adapter, watch the lights flash, and run ifconfig to verify the Pi recognizes it.  I'm sure that I will install additional functionality in the future, and scripts will be written to simplify tasks, but for now, we should be good.  To test to make sure everything is working run:

sudo airmon-ng

note the Interface name of your Wifi adapter

sudo airmon-ng check
sudo airmon-ng check kill
sudo airmon-ng start wlx...  # replace wlx... with your interface name noted above

If you are using a new version of Raspbian (Stretch or later) which uses predictable network interface names, after the command above you will receive a message that the name is too long, and it will be renamed using the old style, which in this case is wlan1 (or more specifically wlan1mon now that it's been put in monitor mode.) Quick note, I put the three commands above followed by another airmon-ng into a bash script so I can now put the adapter into monitor mode with one command.

So now that we've got a WiFi interface in monitor mode, what can we do with it?  First let's see what Wifi networks are in range with:

sudo airodump wlan1mon

This gives all sorts of useful information, such as channel, encryption, and BSSID, which can be used for a number of different useful tasks such as capturing encrypted handshakes or monitoring traffic  on a specific network.  Speaking of monitoring traffic, now that we're in monitor mode, we can also use tcpdump to literally pull wireless packets out of the air like so:

sudo tcpdump -i wlan1mon

This information can be fed back to the laptop, or to a desktop, to be analyzed by Wireshark or any script you can dream up.  Any unencrypted traffic will be easy to decipher.

So that is as far as I'm going to take this post.  I may make another post on using this device in more detail in the future, but for now there is plenty of information out there on using aircrack-ng and tcpdump.  Since we have two WiFi interfaces on this device, one could even do a man-in-the-middle set-up if one was so inclined, but I would like to stress once again that I strongly advise against using this device for any illegal activity.

What do I plan on using this device for?  It's intended purpose is wireless network auditing.  I plan to write a python script that analyzes the data from the output of airodump-ng.  For example, if the Coconut-Pi detected two networks of sufficient strength operating on the same wireless channel it could note that on an audit so that it could be adjusted.  I'll also admit that sometimes when you are sitting in a hotel room it can be entertaining to watch the wireless traffic just to see what people send through the air unencrypted.  It will make you value a home VPN server even more.

One last thing I'd like to mention is that if one were to use this device to capture a wpa2 handshake with the intention of trying to crack it, whatever you do don't use the Raspberry Pi for hashing.  I imagine you might be able to do it faster with pen and paper.  I joke, but seriously, use a different machine for hashing, unless you are cracking something for future generations to see long after you're deceased.

Voyeur Bluebird House with a Raspberry Pi

     Previous readers of my blog may remember my initial foray into filming birds using the Raspberry Pi.  That first experience was inspired by coincidence, as a family of wrens made their nest on the windowsill of my basement workshop, and proceeded to raise five young babies.  I built a small wooden enclosure to house a Pi, motion detector, and camera, and set it on the windowsill adjacent to the nest.  Each time the mother flew in to feed the babies, or the babies started to move outside the nest, the camera would turn on, and continue to film until movement had ceased.  I enjoyed the process of filming these birds so much, that I decided to try to recreate the project.  This time, however, I doubted I could rely on fate to deliver another family of birds to my windowsill.

     I decided the best way to ensure birds would nest in a place suitable for filming would be to build a birdhouse, and install a camera inside.  I decided on Bluebirds as the species of bird I wanted to film, and a quick Google search told me the dimensions of the birdhouse and opening I would need to attract that specific variety of bird.

     If you are not interested in how this project was done, and would just like to see a video of the chickadee that originally settled in the birdhouse, as well as the final video of the baby bluebirds, just scroll down to the section entitled "Filming the Birds", and watch the two YouTube videos.  I would hate to see people get bored by the technical specifics of the project and stop reading before they get to the videos of the birds.  If you are interested in how I built this project, or would like to build one yourself, please continue reading.

Building the Birdhouse

     I chose cedar as the species of wood to build the birdhouse due to its resistance to insects and rot.  I purchased cedar that was rough-sawn on one side to give the birds a surface that they could easily sink their claws into.  I also chose not to build a perch outside the entrance hole.  Instead, I flipped a piece of the cedar so that the rough-sawn surface was facing outward, allowing the bluebirds to grip the surface with their claws, but making it less suitable for predators, or other species of bird that would likely kill the bluebirds and steal their house, such as sparrows.  Also, since I was concerned about potential heat generated inside the birdhouse by the Raspberry Pi, I decided to add a small sheltered area to the back of the birdhouse that could protect the Pi from the elements, but also keep me from having to place it inside the actual birdhouse.  Since there are literally thousands of birdhouse plans available on the internet, and anyone emulating this project will need to pick a species native to their geographical location, I won't go into great detail on the construction of the birdhouse here.  If anyone has questions on the specifics of how the birdhouse was built, please feel free to ask in the comments at the end of this post.


      One thing to keep in mind as you are assembling your birdhouse is that you don't want to make the top of the birdhouse airtight.  Instead, make sure to leave some air-gaps, and even drill a few holes in the side near the top as well as in the bottom to allow cool air to flow in through the bottom of the birdhouse and hot air to escape out the top so it doesn't get too hot in your birdhouse during the summer months.  Also, keeping in mind the way my first project filming birds ended (see the end of this post), I made sure to do everything in my power to protect the birdhouse from predators.  I covered the mounting post with PVC pipe to make it more difficult to climb, and I added a squirrel baffle between the PVC and the birdhouse to keep anything that was able to climb the PVC from reaching the house (this is not the exact baffle I purchased, but it is similar.)  If a squirrel or other large rodent was able to reach the birdhouse, the double wall around the opening would make it more difficult for anything to widen the opening by clawing at it.

Installing the Hardware

     With the birdhouse constructed, it was time to figure out how to film the birds.  Since it was going to be dark inside the birdhouse, I decided to use a infrared night vision camera.  I also needed to find one with an adjustable focus, since the birds would be very close to the camera.  Here is the link to the particular camera I purchased for this project.  In addition, I was going to need an infrared motion detector that could be powered by 5V DC, but would be capable of sending a 3.3V signal to the Raspberry Pi, which I found here.  Finally I decided to add an LM75A Temperature Sensor inside the birdhouse so I could ensure that all the electronics did not cause the temperature inside to get too hot.

     With hardware in hand, I needed to find a way to mount the camera, motion detector, infrared LED, and temperature sensor inside the birdhouse.  For the camera and infrared LED, I settled on using a small piece of clear acrylic that I cut and drilled to fit.  I then epoxied some 12 awg insulated solid copper wire to the bottom of the acrylic so that I could mount the wire to the back of the birdhouse, and then bend it to point the camera in the exact direction I needed it to point.  Once the acrylic was in place and focused towards the center of the birdhouse, I wedged the motion detector between the acrylic and the side of the birdhouse.  A couple of drops from the hot glue gun made sure everything stayed in place.  I allowed the temperature sensor to hang slightly below the rest of the electronics to allow it to measure the temperature closer to where the birds would be nesting.

     The Raspberry Pi model I chose for this project was the Raspberry Pi Zero W, because of it's much lower price point, and it's smaller size.  I purchased it in a kit that came with a plastic case, so that I could mount the case inside the enclosure on the back of the birdhouse, and easily remove the Pi from the case for maintenance.  I then ran the camera ribbon cable from the Pi on the back of the birdhouse to the camera inside the birdhouse.  A few more wires to get power and signal to the motion detector, power and signal to the temperature sensor, plus power wires for the infrared LED, and the Pi was ready to go.  Feel free to use any of the GPIO pins on the Pi you would like to use, just be sure that the pins referenced in the Python script match the pins used on the Pi.



     I used a 16GB USB flash drive as a hard-drive to store the video files.  Other options would have been to use the SD card that held the operating system, but that would have limited space, and could shorten the life of the SD card.  Alternatively I could have just automatically sent the video files to my file server, but that would involve another point of failure, so even if the Pi was up and running, if something knocked the server offline or the power flickered and the server powered down, then any files being sent from the Pi would be lost.  The flash drive seemed to be the simplest solution, and as long as I transferred the video files remotely and wiped the USB drive at some point before I collected 16GB of video, I should be OK.

     One last detail, in order to be able to plug in the power supply for the Raspberry Pi without having to worry about the length of the power cord, I mounted a 120V AC outlet inside an outdoor enclosure on the back of the birdhouse.  I then attached a piece of outdoor-rated flexible power cable with a three pronged plug to the outlet.  I could now power the outlet using this power cable, and just plug the Raspberry Pi power supply into the outlet on the birdhouse directly below it.

Writing the Software

     With the hardware complete, all I had to do was to write the software, which is pretty much the exact same Python script I used in my last post where I filmed the birds in the windowsill with an added bit of code for the temperature sensor.  Regardless, in case you would like to copy the script for use in your own project, I will post it below.  Don't forget to add a line to /etc/rc.local to tell the Pi to run the script on boot.  Here it is:

 #!/usr/bin/env python  
   
 import RPi.GPIO as GPIO  
 import picamera  
 import time  
 import smbus # lets us access the i2c bus  
   
 MOTION_PIN = 4  
 BUS_NUM = 1 # 1 is the I2C bus (board pins 3 and 5)  
 TEMP_SENSOR1 = 0x48  
 EMAIL_THRESHOLD = 98  
 GMAIL_USER = 'email1@gmail.com' # email account used to send email  
 GMAIL_PASS = 'emailpass' # password for email account used to send email  
 SENT_FROM = GMAIL_USER  
 SEND_TO = 'email2@gmail.com, email3@gmail.com' # email recipient for alerts  
   
   
 def take_video(channel):  
      print 'motion detected' # for troubleshooting only  
      timestamp = time.strftime("%m-%d-%y-%H-%M-%S")  
      #camera.annotate_background = picamera.Color('black')  
      #camera.annotate_text = timestamp  
      camera.start_recording('bvid%s.h264' % timestamp)  
      print 'recording started'  
      camera.wait_recording(10)  
      while GPIO.input(MOTION_PIN):  
           camera.wait_recording(5)  
      camera.stop_recording()  
      print 'recording stoped'  
   
 def WRITE_TO_FILE(temp):  
     print 'writing to file' # for troubleshooting only  
     timestamp = time.strftime("%y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")  
   
     f=open('/mnt/usb/temperature.txt', 'a') # this opens a file for writing.  
                          # the 'a' means append, which will   
                          # add anything written to the end  
                          # of the file.  
   
           # The line below writes to the file we are appending  
     f.write('%s %d \n' % (timestamp, temp))  
     f.close() # This closes the file we just appended.  
   
   
 def CtoF( Ctemp ): # this function converts the Celcius temperature passed  
                       # to the funtion to Fahrenheit and returns it.  
     return((Ctemp*9.0/5.0)+32)  
   
             
 def GET_TEMPS( sensor_add ):  
   print 'getting temp'  
   Ctemp1 = bus.read_byte(sensor_add)  
   Ftemp1 = CtoF(Ctemp1)  
   return Ftemp1  
        
        
 def SEND_EMAIL ( temperature ): # This function sends an email  
   
     timestamp = time.strftime("%m-%d-%y %H:%M:%S")  
     subject = 'Birdhouse Temperature Too High' % (location) + timestamp  
     body = 'The temperature in the birdhouse is %d degrees.' % (temperature)  
   
     msg = MIMEText(body)  
     msg['From'] = SENT_FROM  
     msg['To'] = SEND_TO  
     msg['Subject'] = subject  
   
     try:  
       server = smtplib.SMTP_SSL('smtp.gmail.com', 465)  
       server.ehlo()  
       server.login(GMAIL_USER, GMAIL_PASS)  
        server.sendmail(SENT_FROM, SEND_TO, msg.as_string())  
        server.close()  
        print 'email sent' # for troubleshooting only  
     except:  
       print 'email atempted and failed' # for troubleshooting only  
             
 # Begining of Program  
   
   
 bus = smbus.SMBus(BUS_NUM) # sets the variable bus to refer to I2C bus 1  
   
 camera = picamera.PiCamera()  
 camera.led = False  
   
 GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)  
 GPIO.setup(MOTION_PIN, GPIO.IN)  
   
 GPIO.add_event_detect(MOTION_PIN, GPIO.RISING, callback=take_video, bouncetime=1000)  
   
 while True:  
      Ftemp_1 = GET_TEMPS ( TEMP_SENSOR1 )  
      if Ftemp_1 > EMAIL_THRESHOLD:  
           SEND_EMAIL (Ftemp_1)  
      WRITE_TO_FILE(Ftemp_1)  
      time.sleep(300)  
             

Filming the Birds

     So that's the how-to, and now onto the fun part: filming the birds.  I set the birdhouse up outside my house in August of 2017 and plugged it into one of our outdoor outlets.  Honestly, after a few months I had forgotten all about it.  One day in late spring of 2018, my wife Courtney saw a bird fly out of the birdhouse and asked me to check the camera.  Much to my surprise, the Raspberry Pi was still up and running from 8 or 9 months prior, and had captured plenty of video.  All that time outside in the winter weather hadn't cause any issues with the Pi at all (that's some well made hardware!).  Upon examination of the video, it appeared we had a chickadee moving into our bluebird house.  Well, I'm not one to discriminate, I was just happy to have a bird enjoying the birdhouse, and I was even happier that the video recorder was working.

     We continued to check the camera from time to time, watching the chickadee as it gathered it's nest building materials and meticulously arranged them just so.  Then one day, all of a sudden, there was a bluebird in the birdhouse.  I reviewed the videos, and narrowed it down to the change, but there was no "event".  One video showed the chickadee working on it's nest, and the next video showed a bluebird checking out his new pad.  If there was an altercation it must have happened outside the birdhouse.  Alternatively the bluebird may have just moved in, and when the chickadee returned to find a bigger bird in his house, he just decided to move on.  Regardless, I was now filming bluebirds, which was my original intention.

     Fast-forward about a month, and the blue bird had completely revamped the nest, and laid some eggs.  I was very excited to see them hatch.  Unfortunately, I underestimated how often I would need to clean off the USB flash drive that was holding the video once the bird had laid eggs.  When the birds were building the nests, they would make an appearance here and there, and then go back out to forage for food, and find more nesting materials, which only created a limited number of videos.  Once the eggs were laid, the bluebird spent most of her time sitting on the eggs inside the birdhouse, and consequently the flash drive filled up with video in just a few days.  Once it was full, it stopped saving the recordings, so unfortunately I missed the moment of hatching while we were out of town for a weekend.  Once I returned home and realized what had happened I quickly downloaded the existing video and erased the drive, so I was at least able to film the majority of the young birds' infancy.

      Below is a montage of the baby bluebirds I put together .  The total span of the videos is only a couple weeks, so you can see that they grew quickly.  I lost my infrared LED a few days after the babies hatched, so the lighting is a little off in the second half of the video, but of course I couldn't get into the birdhouse to change the LED until after the birds had vacated the nest.  It still turned out great in my opinion.  My wife Courtney thinks these little guys are cute, but personally I think they're ugly little spuds before their feathers fully grow in.

My Morning Routine

Good morning, and welcome back to my blog.  Anyone who has read my blog before knows, that while the topics can be eclectic, my posts typically deal with how to build something, be it using wood, electronics, computers, or a combination of mediums.  Since this is my first post after a year-long hiatus, I thought I would try something a little different and write a short post about my morning routine.  Over the past year, I have made several major life-changes, including quitting smoking, reducing my alcohol intake to next-to-nothing, drastically altering my diet, and starting a weightlifting routine.  The result of these changes are a healthier, happier me, and I would recommend any of them to anyone looking to get more enjoyment out of life.  Today I want to focus on a small, but important aspect of these life-modifications that has helped improve my life, and enjoy my days more thoroughly: my morning routine.

The way one starts and completes each day frames all of the experiences within.  By beginning the day on a positive, productive, and pleasurable note, I am able to set the tone of the day, and I have noticed a considerable difference in how I feel, and what I am able to accomplish.  The first item on the list was actually the most difficult for me, and I can't claim to be successful in this endeavor every single morning, but the first thing I strive to accomplish is to NOT HIT THE SNOOZE BUTTON!  I have struggled with waking up in the morning all my life, and had formed a habit of hitting the snooze button for anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour (or more) after the first time my alarm sounded.  The experts say that one actually feels more tired after hitting the snooze button than they would have if they had just woken up after the first alarm.  I don't know if that is true or not, but I doubt I get any added benefit from the additional sleep I get in 5 or 10 minute increment using the snooze.  One of the advantages I can attest to is more time in the morning, resulting in less stress and more productivity.  Also, if I successfully drag myself out of bed without hitting the snooze, I feel a sense of pride and accomplishment first thing in the morning, which is a nice way to start the day.

Once I am out of bed and have made a quick pit stop in the bathroom, I head to the kitchen, and turn on all the lights to make it as bright as possible.  This helps let my body know that even if it is still dark outside, my day has started (circadian rhythms and whatnot).  I notice that I feel significantly more awake after just a minute in a very bright room.  If you find yourself continuing to feel drowsy after getting out of bed in the morning, try adding some extra light in the room you spend your first 10 minutes in, and I would be willing to bet you will feel a noticeable difference.  If the sun is up when you get out of bed, then I would recommend stepping outside for a few minutes, as the the sunlight is tremendously more effective at waking one up than synthetic light.  Unfortunately I don't have the luxury of waiting for daybreak to start my morning, so man-made light has to suffice.

As the light begins to signal my brain that I am now awake, I turn my attention to hydration.  Assuming you do not wake up in the middle of the night to drink water, you will have gone without water since you fell asleep, and possibly longer.  As you will be able to surmise by the color of your morning urine, most people wake up dehydrated and craving fluids, whether you realize it or not.  I cannot claim credit for my morning cocktail recipe; it came from an excellent book by Aubrey Marcus titled Own the Day, Own Your Life: Optimized Practices for Waking, Working, Learning, Eating, Training, Playing, Sleeping, and Sex, which I highly recommend.  Aubrey's recipe is simple: water, sea-salt, and lemon.  I personally use the juice from 1/4 lemon and a pinch of Pink Himalayan Salt in about 16 oz of water.  Don't let the demonization of salt scare you away from trying this.  Unless you already have a serious heart condition, the salt is not bad for you, and will help your body absorb the water.  There is no need to chug it either.  Take your time, sip your water, feel yourself hydrating, and think about the great day you are about to have.

About this time the sun is beginning to peek over the horizon.  As sunrise begins to happen later in the morning, I may need to reorder my routine, but for now, it is time to feed the chickens and clean the coop.  Yep, you heard correctly, we have chickens.  As a matter of fact, my wife Courtney and I are planning on starting a chicken blog in the near future, and when we do, I will place a link to it here for anyone interested in taking a look at our fine feathered friends.  Anyway, the point here is not to specifically care for birds, but to accomplish some task, or set of tasks.  Some people recommend making your bed.  As long as you set your mind to doing something productive and accomplish it, you have set your brain on the right track for the day.

The next goal for myself is to get my heart rate up and get a little exercise.  Recently, this has been accomplished by taking a one mile walk with Courtney, but any physical exertion will do.  Sometimes we do a short steel maceworkout (trust me on this one and give it a try).  This is also a good time to get in a little stretching to keep the body limber and free from injury.  I don't do any serious weight lifting or cardio this early in the day, just enough to get the blood flowing.

Now that my body is nice and warm, it's time for my favorite part of the morning: a cold shower.  Seriously.  Not only has this been proven to have positive health benefits, it will also guarantee that you are fully awake.  In addition, it is one last test of willpower that will tell your mind and body that if you can endure this, you can accomplish anything today.  And in all honesty, it really isn't that bad.  I start my shower with warm water.  Since I bathe at night before I go to bed, all I do is rinse off in the warm water before I turn the knob to cold.  The key here is not to think about it.  Don't prepare yourself physically or mentally, just do it.  No need to torture yourself for too long, just a few minutes is all that's necessary.  Before I know it, it is time to get out, dry off, and head back to the kitchen for some well earned breakfast.

With all my other morning activities checked off my To-Do List, it's breakfast time.  Personally I like to have scrambled eggs loaded down with vegetables (onions, bell pepper, mushrooms, spinach, and whatever other left-over veggies or garden veggies we have that might go well in eggs.)  If eggs aren't your thing, eat whatever you like, but I highly recommend staying away from processed carbs, and certainly no refined sugar.  Anything with a high glycemic index will spike your blood sugar, and subsequently your insulin, and cause you to be hungry again in just an hour or two.  Starting your day off with an insulin-induced blood-sugar roller-coaster is a recipe for dietary disaster, not to mention the damage it can do to your pancreas, kidneys, and heart, among other things.

Last but not least, with breakfast out of the way, it is time for my morning coffee.  You may have noticed that I didn't mention coffee earlier in this article when I first got out of bed.  For over 20 years brewing coffee was the first thing I did in the morning upon getting out of bed.  If you just can't live without caffeine first thing in the morning, then an early cup of coffee or tea won't kill you, but I find with all the other stimuli I have early in the day, I really don't miss it.  Waking up without that jolt of caffeine in the blood is actually more pleasant, and if you really miss that jolt, reread the paragraph on a cold shower.

When it comes to additives to your coffee or tea, I would like to stress that I highly recommend passing on the sugar.  At no point in the day is refined sugar good for you, but I find it particularly destructive to your diet, appetite, and self-control first thing in the morning.  If you cut the large majority of sugar out of your diet all together, you will find that you no longer crave the sweetness, and things that used to need sugar will now taste fine on their own.  In addition to leaving out the sugar, if you add a little fat to your coffee it will slow down the absorption of the caffeine and give you more sustained energy instead of a quick jolt followed by a crash.  The traditional cream or half-and-half works fine for this, or you can go the more extreme route and use butter, as advocated by fans of bulletproof coffee.  Just remember, if you think using skim milk in coffee is a healthier option, lactose is just sugar, so skim milk is just sugar water that came from a cow.  Just say "no".

And that's my morning routine, for now.  As always things will continue to evolve, hopefully towards the positive.  I hope some of you were able to gain something from this post, and maybe even improve your own morning routines a little.  For everyone else, don't worry, I have several more posts on the way, including setting up a VPN using OpenVPN on a Raspberry Pi, building a bluebird-house with a built-in video camera activated by a motion sensor, building a chicken run, and live-streaming video from the chicken coop.  Until next time, stay safe and keep building.

EDIT: After my initial post, I was discussing my morning routine on reddit.com in the /r/productivity subreddit.  A user by the name of /u/iEphemeralX recommended I read the book The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life (Before 8am).  Since I prefer audio books, I hoped over to Audible.com and picked up a copy.  While I can't say it was the absolute best self-improvement book I ever read, it was good enough that I finished the book in two days, and I would certainly recommend it to anyone looking improve their life.  Since reading the book, I have also adjusted my morning routine slightly.  I now get up at 5:30 instead of 6am, and I have added 15 minutes of meditation, followed by prayer, gratitude, and intentional thinking.  If you are looking for a little motivation or some direction on how improve your life, I recommend you give it a read.