Silicon Valley Redneck

AM Kitteh!

Huckleberry's having a nap on my desk.

He just shifted position, and I started hearing AM radio, along with 60 Hz buzz.

I've heard of picking up AM radio on dental fillings, but on a kitten who isn't supposed to have any metal parts?

(He'd kicked the speaker cable, which had thereby attained just that degree of looseness that allows it to act as an antenna, and the speaker system had become a rudimentary radio.)

"That's the second-biggest bumblebee I've seen this week!"

Spotted at a bus stop on my way home from morning walkies: a slightly chubby Sikh wearing a yellow turban and a yellow-and-black-striped T-shirt.

I'm not sure where the week went...

...but somehow it got to be Sunday already.

Making preparations for visiting my parents this afternoon; my father's been doing all the cooking these past many months, and getting tired of it, so I'll be taking dinner: got a chicken in the smoker, bread dough in the works, and corn soaking in slightly salty water in preparation for grilling in the husk.

Inbemongst of that, I'm declaring a Day of Weekend to deal with stuff like installing a new showerhead and assembling the Bixler (now waiting for the glue to set on the GPS module (inside the nose, above the battery) and the aft antenna (just forward of the tail servos), and the Pitot tube is in place (poking through the nose, above the battery, next to the GPS)).  Initial testing will be with the store-boughten radio, which doesn't use any of those amenities, but they'd be hard to add once the fuselage is glued together.  Oh, and I still need to add a pair of little teeny eyes (hardware type), up top, 71mm aft of the leading edge of the wing, for balancing, and mayhap a third somewhere out toward the tail, for hanging from the ceiling.

And, last time I headed out back to tend the smoker, I found Southmoon playing with the Bridgeport.  At least she didn't have it turned on (and she'd also need to turn on the phase converter, which is probably a step too many for a youngster who doesn't even have opposable thumbs).

Downside, upside, all a matter of perspective

Apparently Martian soil has a very high (~ ½%) concentration of perchlorates.

The downside: the dust would be a significant health hazard for Terran settlers.

The upside: it's great fertilizer for stage trees!

...Maybe there used to be a Slaver stage tree farm on Mars...?

Moral philosophy: "Live each day as if it were your last"

Schizmatic illustrates.

Note that this is antithetical to the Way of the Engineer, and its "Build everything as if you would still be using it a century from now."

Information security

Sometimes, old-school metadata can be important.

Fer example: an ex-military colleague once explained to me how newspaper clippings could wind up classified.  It's not the content of the newspaper article that's significant; it's the little scribbles in the margin, or just the fact that someone in this office thought this article interesting enough to cut it out and file it.

Now, let's consider the Snowden Files.  They're computer documents, released to the public by a person of dubious reputation.  They look official... but how many among us know what actual official NSA documents look like, and would comment on the matter in public?  And how many of those could verify the actual authenticity of the documents, or even the plausibility of the content, even in general terms?

Right.  Hardly anyone.

But!  We now have metadata.  Specifically: various government departments have been sending forth directives cautioning their employees not to look at the classified documents (or not to do so on government networks reserved for unclassified material).

While I'm sure our masters in Washington would like us to believe that the NSA has been totally behaving itself, and the scandal is all a hoax, and anyone can create documents on a home computer and slap the NSA logo on them... the official reaction is based on the documents being authentic.

Not exactly the traditional "neither confirm nor deny", nor even a "Senator, you know I can't answer that question one way or the other in public, but if you'd care to arrange a private meeting I could answer it for you."  Nope.  We got public officials telling bald-faced lies, then, when documents of dubious provenance show up exposing their lies, their reactions confirm the authenticity of those documents.

Can't anyone play this game?

Rules to live by: check before you connect

And, on this occasion, it's well I did.

Got a dinky GPS module, model GP-635T, from Spark Fun, along with a matching cable (6 wires, JST SH connector on each end, fiddly 1mm pitch thing; ready-made cables are good, 'cause I don't have the correct krimpatul*).

Got a matching header designed onto a board, going by the connections in the GP-635T datasheet.

I connect one end of the cable, and pause to consider the situation.

The cable has one white wire, which I take to be a pin 1 marker, unless of course it's pin 6.  Assuming it's pin 1, it should be, according to my board, ground.  According to the GP-635T datasheet, pin 1 should be ground... only the actual ground connection on the board (according to my continuity beeper and a bit of exposed ground plane) is at the other end of the connector.  Somebody, here, is decidedly backward.

Oops.  That could have been an expensive mistake.

Did I goof up the footprint?

And so I dig out the SH datasheet, and look through the drawings, and the end where the white wire is definitely matches "Circuit No. 1" on the drawing.  So, the cable and my board agree with the connector spec.

It's the GP-635T spec that has the pins numbered wrong way which.

Ergo: hot up the soldering iron and turn that sucker around.  Also, flip the connections in the pending respin (the respin was needed anyway, and planned before I'd even gotten the first batch of boards back from fab).

Update: the connector having been duly reversed, everything (re)connected, and the serial port taken away from its default debug-console function, I'm now getting a stream of what looks like GPS data.  What's more, it's giving the location of my house; I hadn't really expected such a tiny unit to find the satellites when indoors, but it seems to have done so.

Update 2: install gpsd on the RasPi, run it, and it Just Works.  Except... running xgps for a look at the output, I see that my workbench is moving at anything up to half a mile per hour, and drifting from 100 feet above sea level to 5 feet below sea level.  So... perhaps using that dinky GPS module indoors doesn't work all that well.  Have to try it outdoors sometime soon.

* Update 3: just for giggles, I looked up the correct krimpatul (or, anyway, the cheapest officially-approved option).  Nigh unto $1100 for a hand crimper?  I have this $60 tool from Spark Fun, and, while it works great for slightly less tiny connectors, it seems to be making the conductor crimp for the SH just that little bit too flat and wide... mostly too wide... and the result doesn't quite fit into the connector body.  Maybe if I tried 28 AWG instead of 30?  But I'd need 28 AWG wire with very thin insulation.

Update 4: I got out the SR (1mm IDC) connectors again.  Supposed to be for 30 AWG stranded wire.  I have some nice 4-conductor cable with 30 AWG stranded conductors and thin insulation... but just can't get it to connect to the SR (possibly because the wire is badly tarnished).  However!  Turns out 30 AWG wire-wrap wire, punched down with a tiny jeweler's screwdriver, works nicely.  I'd much prefer stranded, but it shouldn't be seeing all that much flex, and the wire-wrap stuff is handy.  Meanwhile, on the 28 AWG front... well, I'd have to order it, in rolls of 100 feet for each color, and it's amazing how expensive basic hook-up wire has gotten, especially if you want thin (ergo, not PVC) insulation.

And furthermore: that other, 4-wire, cable I built with the SR connectors?  Meant to carry the I2C bus out to a remote sensor, a coupla feet away.  Well... it kinda-sorta worked for a while, then (perhaps because the wires got a little twistier and thus the capacitance increased just a tad) not only did the remote sensor get flakey, but one of the local sensors ceased to work at all... 'twas detected (sometimes) by i2cdetect, but wouldn't answer a read.  A reminder, kids: I2C is the Inter-IC bus, intended for connecting chips a few inches apart on a single board, and anyone running it across a backplane is either a nitwit or following a telco standard written by a nitwit.  (The main issue with regard to the common use in telco equipment is noise immunity, which I2C lacks.  The problem here looks (at a guess) to be wiring capacitance, given that there's not much noise about.  Voltage thresholds offer further opportunities for Fun, Negative Amounts Of.)

Wait, aren't those DC?

Just got a shipment of LiPo batteries.

Label of each battery has sundry logos: CE, FCC, RoHS, and the like.

Er, FCC?  Doesn't their jurisdiction start at several kHz?

Swarf mice

The past few days, the kittens (especially Huckleberry) have been obsessed with the far corner of the garage, and will dart out at every opportunity and go exploring.

They've been spending a good part of the day out there.  A little exploring, a lot of napping.

A little while ago, I was in my office, minding my own business, when Top Hat came in and proudly presented me with a small bundle of aluminum drill swarf.

Ah, the generosity of cats!

(Don't worry, they're not having a build party out there.  Or, at least, I haven't heard the machinery running.  And they don't have opposable thumbs.)

((Hmph.  Silly Typepad spell checker never heard of "swarf" nor even "opposable".))

Tribal warfare

So, word is the House Republicans are planning a restrictive abortion bill (Tenth Amendment?  Wozzat?), which of course stands no chance of actually becoming law, but it's just one of those things they do.

As Number 6 once famously asked: Why?

Well... it's come to me that when Democrats pass a restrictive gun law, or Republicans pass a restrictive abortion law or a put-religion-back-in-biology-class law, they're not expecting it to benefit the public.

Nor are they expecting it to benefit themselves.

Nor to benefit supporters, though it may draw money from certain high-dollar supporters (*cough* Bloomberg *cough*).

And it's not really that useful in getting the base to show up and vote... especially in an odd-numbered year.

So why do they do these things?

It's not to benefit anyone.  It's to harm, or annoy, or demonstrate the weakness of, the other tribe.

Passing a noxious law, or even just getting it reported out of committee, is a display of strength.  "Look, we can pass these laws and you can't stop us!"

It's a way of counting coup on their enemies.

And remember: to the faithful of either party, anyone not a Party member is an enemy.