Silicon Valley Redneck

Vacation in Murfreesboro

Not me.  A long skinny parcel from Home Depot.

It sure spent a long time there.  Guess it was having a good time and didn't want to leave.

Its reappearance may have been triggered by my purchase, in person, of a replacement.  (Not wasted money; I expect to need a couple more, eventually, once the barn gets turned into a workshop.)

A not very productive day.

I guess I got some small fiddly stuff done.  Nothing on any serious projects.

It's still Winter out there - while the temperature ventured above 60°F this afternoon, it was in the lower 20s in the early morning.  Regardless, the frogs are starting to come out of hibernation.  Which... their big breeding swamp, down at the bottom of the Annex, hasn't filled up.  It's flooded every spring we've been here, and I walked blithely across it this afternoon with not so much as a squishy squelch.  So, unless we get a lot of rain soon, the frogs may have a problem this year.  (There's a fair bit of water in our pond, though it's nowhere near full, but it lacks the sort of extensive shallows frogs seem to like.)

Maybe doing a little catching up today.

Already renewed the VariCAD update subscription.  Might as well keep that current; I don't think I'll be switching over to FreeCAD as my primary mechanical CAD platform in the next year.

Got two things to attend to before February comes to an end: put the current-year license stickers on the remaining vehicles, and pay the various property taxes.  I think the former happens this afternoon, along with checking the tire pressures on the truck (probably low); the latter, most likely Tuesdayish.

And, lots of stuff to do in garage and basement.  Tidying up; preparing boxes and such for disposal; that sort of thing.  Maybe I'll get around to installing new shelving in the garage, though that's more likely a tomorrow thing.

This might also be a good time to get some seeds in starter pots: tomatoes, peppers, and artichokes, I think.  Once things warm up a little, I can fetch some potting soil.  Artichokes will need a fair bit of protected growing time (basement, or the front porch once we get it screened in) before being planted out, given how much bunnies seem to like them.  (Plans for this Spring/Summer include fencing in an area adjacent to the chicken pen, letting the birds eradicate the weeds, and planting perennials there - blueberries, artichokes, whatever - protected against bunnies and unsupervised birds.)

Update:  No shelving today.  Got some trash removal accomplished, and, while pulling the truck up to the garage for tire-checkery (all four were slightly low), decided it was Time to give the upper driveway a scrapin'.  So, move the Venerable Prius to the front lawn, fire up the tractor, do a bit of box-blading, back-dragging, and just driving back and forth over high spots, and the driveway is somewhat presentable now.  (It needs a dose of additives, maybe sand and/or concrete, to improve cohesion.  That's for later.)

And, remember that the lawnmower is sitting there, idle, with its nearly-new battery.  Pull the battery, lug it to the garage, and put it on a charger: 89%, not bad.  Let it charge to 100%, then put it back in the mower, where it should be OK until mowing season.

Swamp gas.

A hoax.

A weather balloon.  Yes, that's it!  That mystery thingamajig that's apparently been drifting over North America these past few days, lingering over sensitive military installations, is a Chinese weather balloon.

And it just happened to drift there, as balloons do.  Wasn't sent there on purpose or anything.

Never mind that it's apparently been under command this whole time, changing altitude to get into wind that's heading in a convenient direction.

It's a zombie balloon of the stratosphere, and somehow not only has Commando Cody Larry Martin retired but we don't have any way of shooting down balloons that are that high up.

Wait.  Isn't the Mongol invasion of North America supposed to be carried out with airships?  And here we are with no defense against airships?  Yeesh, does no one even read comic books?

Afterthought:  The government needs to commandeer Chairface Chippendale's giant laser.  If it can engrave his name on the Moon, surely it can bring down a silly balloon.

Update:  The drama in the Montana sky, hours after the balloon meandered on, does appear to have been an actual hoax.

Too much caffeine this morning.

Getting a sluggish start, trying to get going for the day....

And of course the effects were time-lagged, so now I'm all jittery.  Groggy or jittery, I'm not being terribly productive.

Must focus.

Ah, search terms.

The sort of bread rolls I favor having gone out of favor with the supply chain, I head off to Amazon in search of "roll pan", half expecting to be offered roll pins (which I dislike intensely).

What I actually get is "Are you looking for a roll pan that fits your Toyota Tundra?"

No.  No, I am not.  I'm looking for bakeware, not truck parts.

And, changing the category to things baking-related, what I get is jelly-roll pans, which are not even vaguely the category I want.  I'm looking for a pan for baking, in general terms, 6" sub rolls.

Ah, seems "sub roll pan" is a thing.  And some of them look like the right category... now if only I can find a listing that gives the cavity dimensions rather than the overall dimensions.

OK, so a mini-baguette pan seems the nearest approximation.  Cavities are about 7" long, which is mildly excessive.  Width is about right.  It's a 4-holer; if I decide I like it, I'll probably buy a second one so's I can bake 8 rolls in one session.

 

Meanwhile, I somehow have an injured toe this morning.  There's a definite cut, or scratch, on the end of my left big toe. I don't recall anything happening to account for that.  Hypothesis: while I was sleeping under an actual blanket last night, owing to the bedroom being unusually chilly, one of the cats decided to attack The Thing Under The Blanket.

Childhood memories (albeit not mine, exactly)

What with all the talk of this new Velma show totally ruining Scooby Doo by taking a simple, goofy, lame kids' show and making everybody horrible, totally changing the attitude, and losing the dog....

Well, the childhood memories weren't mine to ruin, exactly, because I'd seen maybe one or two episodes when I was a kid.  My TV time was strictly rationed, so I had to pick and choose rather than keeping up on all the shows that all the kids were watching.  (Left me lacking in the shared culture of my generation, a condition which has persisted.)

Anyway, between that and barely understanding the references in the latest installment of the Lesbian Squirrels saga, I figured maybe I should catch up.

Now, you might think that the grand release of an abominable re-imagining would be the occasion for simultaneously releasing a DVD box set of SD:TOS for those who want to refresh their childhood memories, but you would apparently be wrong in this.  I did scare up a kinda-sorta DVD set-like thing of uncertain provenance.

And, now having seen Episode 1, I gotta ask: how did Velma get her glasses back?

More repairs.

Sent off the down-payment check for the roof job.

It's a big number, but then it's a big roof.

We're only having the front half done at this point; while the back may also have installation issues, it doesn't see the extreme wind gusts that the front does, and we haven't had any problems with it.  The front... does need a complete redo.

Not seeing any woodchucks this morning.

A squirrel, yes.  Woodchuck, no.

No shadows either, at least so far.  Rain earlier, clouds now, probably clouds later too.

Oh, and we must have caught the edge of a humdinger of a storm; UPS says a parcel from Kansas, originally scheduled to arrive tomorrow, has been delayed until Monday because of the weather.  Weather map early this morning showed quite a band of excitement West and North of here, but mostly passing us by.

New compression algorithm?

Today's e-mail from Horror Fright proclaims:

10% OFF ALL ICON STORAGE

Hm.  Not that icons take up all that much space anyway, by modern standards, but for embedded webapps and such, any little bit of storage saved is a good thing.

(Load images.)

Hm.  Pictures of bloody great toolchests.  People store their icons in those?

No, my brain isn't right today.  Why do you ask?

And a Mondayish Tuesday to boot.

Well, not entirely Mondayish.  I did in fact get some useful work done.

But then... I went to test some additional aspects of the toaster project.  This involved, among other things, using the comm test program, which runs on the loaner PC.

After a while, the program got wedged.  I killed it and restarted it.  Strange error messages ensued, with a vague hint of "maybe you should reboot it, like a good little Windows user."  OK, so tell it to go reboot itself.

Win 10 hadn't had an opportunity to update itself in a few years.  It gave me the "0% updated, please don't turn me off."  Half an hour later, 21%.  Several minutes after that, it commenced rebooting.

I think it did, anyway.  Did something vaguely suggestive of maybe a reboot, and the screen went blank.  Maybe the screen just went blank because the screen-blanking time had run out.  Anyway, it went blank and stayed blank.  No output on the VGA port either.  But the disk activity light is on, and occasionally blinking.  So maybe it's still installing updates?

Well, I don't think I'll be getting much more work done today; it kinda depends on that PC being operational.  I hope it'll come back eventually.

Time to figure out what's for dinner.

A very Monday sort of Monday

The Mondayness actually started around 2200 last night; I'd been asleep for maybe an hour when Joy injured a finger while packing up holiday decorations and thought a ride to the ER might be a good idea.

Eep.  Try to get awake enough to drive....

Set course for UT Medical Center, hoping we won't have to wait many hours.  About the midway point, see an urgent care place - obviously closed for the night.  But there's another one, just ahead!  Pull into the parking lot: nope, also closed.

However, at this point Joy decides that the bleeding has diminished to the point it's maybe not so urgent, never mind an emergency, and she really doesn't want to sit around indefinitely in that waiting room, so we head back home for some home bandaging and we'll see what the new day brings.

Morning... I need to sleep in, but can't.  Joy seems to be doing better, but really needs to sleep in, and can.  Tend critters, fix breakfast (including BACON!, whereof course Southmoon demands a share), attend to father, make a grocery run because Joy most urgently needs ice cream and a few other things are creeping up the need-soon list.

Have a rather nonproductive day, overall.  And the afternoon brings a USPS mystery!  Informed Delivery shows three packages delivered here (confirmed) and one available for pickup... at the originating post office... in Maryland.  Huh?

Joy spent rather a long time on the phone with a negatively-useful USPS phone bot (I'm beginning to suspect someone told the Legions of the Damned to learn to code), but now seems to be talking to an actual human-type person, trying to determine what the heck happened.

(Apparently the package in question should contain some sort of ornament, not something awkward like a herd of live goats.)

Ah, well.  Almost time to button up the coop and fix dinner.  Dinner tonight is going to have to be something easy and not demanding of attention, 'cause I'm still not exactly focusing.  And meanwhile ToasterCo is running into issues on the new model that I thought we'd fixed on the previous one, so maybe the fixes in the FPGA code didn't propagate...?  Anyway, I don't think I'll be able to make sense of that before morning.

Sneaky chemicals

Some substances are just escape artists.

Usually they eat their way through containers, but not always.

I just went out to the garage to refresh my memory on the presence, or lack thereof, of brazing materials.

I found silver brazing wire, and a jar of corresponding flux.

Turns out the flux had been leaking out of its jar.

Out the top of the jar.

The jar, having been opened once, had been sitting there upright for a couple of years.  The flux had somehow been managing to creep up the inside and out under the cap.

I think it needs some sort of secondary containment.

Saturday morning. Much to do.

And... I woke up with a headache.  Adding caffeine made it worse.  I really should go back to bed, but can't for at least a couple of hours.

Those flashbacks that started Wednesday night are continuing.  Making me ponder, in many aspects, the Trousers of Time, and how a slight change in, say, 1976 could have drastically altered the course of my life - in ways somewhat predictable, in general terms, for the following couple of years and filled with unknowable possibilities both good and ill thereafter.

No, this is not a subject about which I'm prepared to elaborate under my own name.  It would need to be thoroughly laundered and published as fiction.

Anyway... got toaster stuff to work on over the weekend, and into the coming week.  I didn't get nearly enough done yesterday.  And the household to-do list keeps getting more longer than shorter.

Mnfxt.  Headache getting more worser.  Need nap.  Various cats are misbehaving.

It's Friday, isn't it?

Must be Friday; I'm wearing a Hawaiian shirt.  That's a pretty good sign.  Otherwise, the days tend to get all scrambled.

Had to do some further setting up for the ToasterCo project: communication didn't appear to be happening, so I figured I should connect the serial console to the loaner PC and have it and the comm test program in the same place.

So, install TeraTerm.  Find a couple of USB extension cables and string them from the PC to the work table.  Plug in the serial dongle.

Windows can't find the driver.  It needs an Internet connection.  Grrrr... find a Cat 6 cable of suitable length.  Connect it.  Fiddle with... wait... find where this flavor of Windows keeps those settings, then fiddle the settings from what worked with the odd-hack 2019 network configuration to the current slightly less odd configuration.  Unplug and replug the dongle.  Shows up as a Prolific PL2303, which makes sense; I bought a few non-FTDI serial dongles because the FTDI driver on Linux conflicts with using FTDI-based non-UART dongles.  Try to use it; it doesn't work, and I notice that to the COM3: name is appended a message about it not being a genuine Prolific chip.  Guess somebody sole me a Prochoicic chip somewhere along the line; plays nice with Linux, but not with the official driver.  Dig around in the storage bins for another dongle: this one works.

Step away from the tech stuff and make a shopping run: Home Depot (for a top rail for a shelving system, which somehow I'd forgotten to buy along with the rails and whatnot) and Walmart (for various stuff, including a bargain on a bunch of 12 quart storage bins).

Let the indoors chicken play with the rest of the flock on the lawn for a while, meanwhile (while Joy guards them) replacing the soiled coop-straw with fresh and hauling the old stuff down to the compost heap.

Remainder of the day... aside from fixing dinner and whatnot, I need to run some sort of comm test on that toaster setup and poke things with a scope to get a handle on what's going on.  I hope I just have a wire wrong somewhere.

 

Oh, yes: dinner.  Reminds me that yesterday I made my first batch of from-scratch biscuits in living memory.  Found a basic recipe on line, substituted white whole wheat flour for regular flour, substituted butter for "shortening", and went for it.  Came out basically OK, though I think the recipe needs some fiddling to accommodate whole wheat. Anyway, it worked a heck of a lot better than the recipe on the Bisquick box.