Silicon Valley Redneck

Things maybe improving

Southmoon seems to be responding well to the anti-parasite treatment; at least, she's acting healthier today.

I developed a suspicion last night that a soft spot in the mattress might be aggravating my back problem (which mostly gets worse at night), so we rotated the mattress around 0200.  I'll see how that turns out tonight.

We're hoping to get parasite ID from the vet in a couple of days.  Presumably we'll have to treat all the cats.  And... if the parasite is one that also afflicts poultry, maybe we'll need to treat the chickens too.  One of them has had messy stinky poop for a long time, and that was one of the ones we had indoors for thawing out.

I haven't accomplished much this weekend, but sometimes one needs recuperation time.  Now if only I could put grass, weeds, beans, tomatoes, and suchlike on hold.

Bleah.

Not posting much....

Got all manner of urgent stuff I need to be doing.

But.

Back trouble is acting up.  Apart from anything else, this messes with my sleep.

Past couple of days, I've had something else doing on that makes me awfully draggy.  Could be secondary or tertiary to the back thing; could be some cruddy little virus, maybe.

Wednesday and Friday we had vet outings - Huckleberry for sinus crud and lethargy, and Southmoon for ongoing digestive trouble and slowly wasting away.  The vet clinic is right nearby, but overworked, so wait times are long.

I'm still not properly waking up this morning.

Update:  It was a totally unproductive day, but, as it gets to be evening, my back isn't bothering me so much.  Maybe I needed an official useless day?

Grrr.

Various credit cards are about to expire.

New cards being in hand, I activated them.

Then I set about updating payment info with various companies.

One of those is AAA, with the next half-year due to be charged to one of those cards in a couple of days.

Sorry!  Can't update payment info now.  Try again after your payment is processed.

Argh.

Well... maybe payment via the replaced, but not yet expired, card will go through.  Maybe.

And it seems that some companies - PayPal and Verizon that I've noticed so far - automatically get card info updates from some banks.  Which is convenient, as long as there isn't some zombie account charging one's card periodically with the login long forgotten and no way to shut it off; one wants the payment info for those to expire!

Green beans are happening.

In copious quantities.

I decided to try bush beans this year and skip the trellises.  Seemed like a good idea at the time.  Comes harvest time, though... them's short bushes.  Beans are close to the ground, and harvesting involves rather a lot of crouching.

Guess I could have done staggered planting, and just ripped up entire plants for harvesting purposes.  I think next year I'll go back to pole-type beans but put more thought into the support system (better trellis, actual poles, cages, or whatever).

Tomatoes are starting to happen, but birds are getting to them, and most of the ones that should have been ripe now have split because of that heavy rain a few days ago.  There are lots of green ones in the upper parts of the plants, so if the weather more or less cooperates we should still get a bunch this summer.

Corn is probably a week out at this point, and then it looks like there'll be a whole bunch.

The weeds are, alas, going strong.  Time to put on boots, grab gloves and maybe a rototiller, and head back down.

Ah, the things that get misplaced.

Looking for an example AVR project, not using Arduino.  I've done many such projects in past years.

I found quite an old one, that has everything except using avrdude to program the chip.

I know I had a project, at JCM, that used an AVR and the Makefile included avrdude usage.  But apparently that didn't make it into Subversion.

Oh, well.  I should be able to find an example Makefile out on the 'Net.  But it should have been in my archives, doggonit!

 

... And, found one.  Somehow hidden from grep, but, taking a further look just now, there is indeed a complete project (for a Tiny, but it can serve as an example) sitting around in a more or less reasonable place.

I guess threatening to look on line makes local files appear...?

Update:  Hey, look!  I found the JCM thing I was looking for.  It was for Project Spyglass, and it was under personal projects (where grep definitely should have found it), not under JCM, but whatever.

Update 2:  Looks like this is Documentation Week, not AVR Week.  Now I'm searching for the correct ancestral documents for the project at hand.

Useless day

So, basically no sleep last night; acute stress piled on top of chronic stress... yeah, not being productive.

Most productive activity of the day so far has been a nap.

Oh, and I'm also feeling kinda fevery today.  No actual fever, just the feeling.  Bleah.

Plenty of stuff I need to be doing, but most of it involves exertion and/or dangerous machinery.  Heat, humidity, and current health status are not conducive to exertion.  Lack of sleep precludes engaging in potentially dangerous activities.

Oh, right: there's also thinky work I need to be doing.  Not a day for that, either.

Dagnab wasps

Out mowing; just about to finish up the last walkway of the day before coming in and starting to prepare dinner.

Something gets in my hair.  I brush it away.

Much ouch.  Very pain.  That something was apparently some aggressive species of wasp.  The tip of my left middle finger hurts.

Decide not to finish that walkway.  Back to the barn, park the mower, lock up, and back to the house.

Wash hands, find bottle of Benadryl, consume two.  (Yes, I have a couple of packets in my pocket first aid kit.  The ones in my air-conditioned office should be fresher.)

Fetch the blood-pressure machine.  First reading is quite high, but I've just been moving around.  Subsequent reading are also on the high side, which I guess means I'm not, so far, having a dangerous anaphylactic reaction.  I think the time I did have a reaction it took about half an hour for systemic symptoms to show up, and it hasn't been that long yet.

Dinner may be a bit late tonight, but at least I don't think I'll be needing a trip to the hospital this Saturday night.

Update:  No anaphylactic reaction this time, but the pain in my fingertip kept me awake most of the night.  I need to take at least one big nap today.  I also need to do a lot of stuff today.  (Buttons: "Take a nap" and "Do important stuff while sleep-deprived."  Pick one.)

Also, after having determined that I wasn't going to faint or anything, I set about fixing dinner - Taco Tuesday come on a Saturday this week.  Needed more taco seasoning mixed up, which is Joy's job.  When she went to re-close the bag of finely-powdered cayenne pepper, some of it poofed out into her face, causing eye pain (she's OK, but needed some serious eye-washing).

Busy week.

Work, household chaos, and I'm not sure what else.  Today was pretty much a writeoff, between sleep deprivation, interruptions, and an unscheduled errand.

Um.  Except that I took a much-needed nap after a teleconference yesterday, during which the thunderstorm that dropped 1.7" of rain on us also just happened to trip the AFCI breaker that feeds my office... and by the time I woke up and heard the plaintive beeping of an unpowered UPS, the UPSes that feed the computers had run down, so everything needed rebooting, files needed reopening, and so on.

The garden still looks muddy this evening.  Maybe I'll do some weeding (and some tomato-picking!) tomorrow, and give the fallow fields another pass of the tiller on Sunday.  Also tomorrow: more herbicide spraying (not around the garden), and some mowing.  Maybe strewing some seeds upon an unsightly mound of bare dirt.

I also need to find some work time over the weekend, 'cause there's a bunch of catching up to do.

Getting back into Ruby

Which I haven't been using much the past couple of years or so, so there's a bit of relearning.

Also, version 2.7 has some features that are absent in 1.8.

I have need of converting various objects to binary, with a specified format.  This calls for stuffing the data into an Array, then using Array#pack to make it a nice array of bytes.  This works.  (I may refine the technique a bit, as some objects need multi-byte fields in host order and some in little-endian order... which happen to be the same on the current platform.)

Anyway, there'll also be the need to convert binary things (imported C structs and the like) into objects.  Easy-peasy, right?  Get the array of bytes, and use Array#unpack... oh.

Yeah, there's an unpack method... but it's String#unpack.  Not all that helpful when the incoming data will be in a byte array.  Or will it be a String?

Hm.  So far, my Ruby code is only ending packets, not receiving.  When I send, I send a packed array of bytes.  Have to see what the receive operation gives me.  If it's a String, maybe things get easy.  Looks like maybe it is?

Inkjet strikes again.

So, back before I got the inkjet printer working again, I was thinking of getting an exact replacement so as not to waste the case of ink cartridges I already had on hand?

(Well, that and there doesn't seem to be a functional equivalent at any reasonable price.)

Trying to use it again today.  Printing is spotty.  A couple of head-cleaning cycles help, but, hm.  Looks like Mr. Cyan is just about tuckered out.  Well, I'll just grab a replacement....

Wait.  That case of ink cartridges isn't where I though I remembered.  Backup location has toner cartridges for the laser printer.

Did I use up the ink and not re-order?  Or did it end up stored elsewhere for some reason.

Quick-like: order more ink from Amazon.

And, thanks to one of the Laws of Magic, the missing case turns up almost exactly where it should have been... almost... but hidden behind a camera bag.

So I tried real pizza flour

The '00' stuff, from King Arthur.

I ignored the instructions on the bag and did what I'd normally do with some mixture of bread flour and white whole wheat flour.

As advertised, it's easier to form into a pizza crust, and the cooked crust does come out crispy.  Win!

But... I think it needs some technique adjustments.  It was stickier than what I'm used to, and had lower tensile strength.  Probably needs more kneading and a bit more flour.

Guess I'll experiment further, and eventually try milling my own (bran and all, since whole sproutable wheat berries is what I've got in the way of soft wheat).  Maybe eventually I'll try growing some of that strain of wheat, though then I'd need to sort out harvesting, threshing, and winnowing (no, I don't own a miniature combine harvester).

Air quality: unhealthy.

And getting worse.

Those ongoing fires in Canada, that are ongoing?

We're getting the smoke again.  Very hazy out there.

This is supposed to be a day for remaining indoors anyway, all buttoned up with the air conditioning on, so's I can focus on work.  But the home renovation stuff remains disruptive.

Oh, well.  I'm making some progress.  Also running into some weirdness of the CANbus subsystem on the RasPi.

Oh, yes: I thought I'd found an answer as to how the latest Ruby might be compiled for the RasPi, but apparently that applied to an older version of the RasPi software, and the solutions offered aren't working for me.  So, going the C demon route, and trying to figure out from some reference-ish code just how one uses a CAN socket.

Well, so much for that trick.

Defining the requisite constants (borrowed from the Linux header files) does not suffice to get Ruby 2.7 to open a CANbus socket.

Oh, well.

Probably not gonna muck about with trying to install Ruby 3.2 on the RasPi.  Well, maybe.  Worth a quick look, I guess.

Fallback plan involves a little C demon that opens the CANbus interface and provides a UN*X socket interface for Ruby to talk to.  Now I gotta get back up to speed on UN*X sockets, which I haven't used directly since forever.  At least 2.7 does support SOCK_RAW, which I think is what I want.

Update:  Quick look at Ruby 3.2 for Raspberry Pi is disappointing.  While the Pi 4 is officially supported, my attempts at building both 3.2.2 and 3.2.0 give error messages on Context.S, which comes out containing a bunch of instructions the assembler doesn't like.  This is a Pi 4 running the latest (as of a couple of weeks ago) version of the OS, so I guess I must be missing something.  The C demon is probably easier.

Meanwhile, Amazon...

... Sent this month's subscribe'n'save stuff in a zillion different boxes instead of the usual just a few boxes.

Which makes each box less heavy, yes.  But it's a lot of boxes.

And one of the boxes was sent UPS... but it was UPS Surepost, so final delivery is through the overworked little post office along with all the other stuff.

Supposed to be coming sometime today.  I hope.  USPS backed off from "by 8:05 PM" to "by 9:00 PM", and I'm not too sure about that either.  Got to have the garage door open when the deliveries show up, lest the boxes be left out in the rain, whereof there may be more on the way (or not).

Now we get rain.

Big dangerous thunderstorms coming through!

The first one mostly missed us, but we still got 0.4" of rain in a short time.  There were a few lightning strikes in the general neighborhood.

Now there's more rain happening.

Well, the plants need it.

Somehow, I haven't gotten any toaster work done today.  I'm not sure what did happen to the day.

Skrunch.

Came a sound that could have been a utility trailer bouncing up the driveway, only the windows are closed so it had to have been louder.

Look out the window.  There's a pickup truck coming to a stop a little way to the left, and a small car coming to a stop a little to the right.  Also what appears to be a tire, maybe with the wheel included, on a lawn across the road.

Wander down the driveway.  Looks like a job for tow trucks and insurance adjusters.  No need for me to get in the middle of it.

Cops show up after a while.  Then a tow truck, for the pickup truck.  Cops are currently at the small car - they'd started over by the pickup truck - and it appears that driver may be in trouble.

Oop: make that definitely in trouble; he was just firmly escorted out of my view, presumably to the paddy wagon.  Now someone's searching the car.  Driver was of small stature; might have been a kid.

Maybe there'll be something about it in the Tuesday paper.  (Local-ish paper comes in the mail, so no Sunday nor Monday.)

One of the renovation guys is supposed to be showing up with a trailer this morning, to collect a pile of trash currently cluttering the all-too-cluttered garage, but that sound, as we have seen, wasn't him.

Coming to the end of Friday

Hot and humid out there - more so than usual.

The overnight/morning rain we'd been promised disappeared from the forecast during the night, so I had to reconnect the long hose and go water the garden.

While I was down there, I decided it was time to give the first expansion field another pass with the tiller.

That having been done... well, there's that half-acre-ish second expansion field, recently mowed; I suppose I could make a start on tilling that, before the grass'n'stuff grows again and needs to be mowed again.

So, more tillin'!  The Very Uneven Area is going to need a few extra passes, maybe some dragging, and maybe some more fill from the Strategic Topsoil Reserve.  I actually got the whole thing done in a couple of hours, modulo dragging and fill (TBD).

This being the first application of a tiller to that land in a couple of decades or so, the result is quite lumpy, but if I till again every couple of weeks until sometime in September it should get smoother and the grasses and weeds should get deader.

Somewhere along the line, I'll add in a bunch of high-test fertilizer.  Then, before we get too far into Fall, I'll apply seeds - probably some mixture of alfalfa, pasture- and lawn-type grasses, and clover.

Oh, and I should give it at least one pass with that rock bucket I haven't bought yet.

After tilling, nap time and lunch.  Then some mowing in the afternoon heat.  Maybe I should have been wearing sunscreen?  Then a largely unproductive afternoon.

Gotta spend much of the weekend (which maybe will be rainy) on ToasterCo stuff, some of which is urgent.  I think the next thing on the list is futzing around with the version of Ruby on the RasPi to see if I can get it to talk to a particular flavor of network interface that's supported by the kernel but Ruby 2.x doesn't know about it.  Maybe it just needs some constants imported, or maybe I'll need a little demon written in C.

It's one of those days, isn't it?

Wake up a bit late.

Go to check overnight e-mail.

This computer isn't communicating with the Internet.  Looks like the mini-server's WiFi has disconnected again.  (This had been happening occasionally the last couple of days.  The workstation's 'Net connection is via the mini-server for historical reasons.)

Try to fix the problem, including a couple of reboots and power-cycling the access point.  Nope; it'll sometimes find the access point, and sometimes connect, but it won't stay connected.

Eventually try connecting on the 2.5 GHz band instead of the high band.  That works.  Go figure.

After lunch: want to print a schematic ToasterCo sent over, on B-size paper.  Fire up the foot-wide inkjet printer.  It's not wanting to wake up properly, and keeps going into a weird blinky-lights state.  Find the manual.  Blink pattern means "call key operator" or something to that effect: service call may be required, or, in real terms, it'll cost more to fix it than to buy a new one.

Try blasting the dust out; that seems to help, or at least it gets further through its startup cycle before getting blinky, but blinky it still gets.

Foo.  Might gotta go over this thing on screen, where making highlighter marks isn't rightly a thing.  Printing on A-size paper with the laser printer gets a completely illegible document.

Oh, well.  I did get some yard stuff done before it got too hot.  Some mowing, and a fair bit of much-needed herbicide spraying.

Update:  I bought that printer in June of 2017, so I guess the warranty has well and truly expired.  That model is still available, though the price has gone way up.  Guess I'll order a replacement (since picking an alternative takes a bunch of time, and I still have a bunch of ink for this one), and try to fix this one up eventually.

Hm.  Maybe look for an alternative on Canon's site?  Can filter by paper size... but 11x17 isn't one of the options.  Foo.  It does appear, however, that the model I currently have is pretty much it, unless I want to go to a much more expensive, large-format printer that won't fit where I need it to fit.

... Wait.  I wonder...

Unplug USB cable from turned-off printer.  Turn power on.  It runs through its startup cycle, and... sits there with the power light solidly on.

Reconnect the USB cable.  Print.  Get a borderline-legible schematic.  (The original is formatted for C-size paper, but, as previously noted, I don't have room for a real large-format printer.)

Now I'm recalling a time, many years ago, when my laser printer (whatever one I had back then) kept waking up with a blink pattern that translated to: Main board defective.  Replace printer.  Turned out the actual problem was that the next job in the print queue contained something that the printer's firmware just couldn't cope with.  (How do you say "Halt and Catch Fire" in Postscript?)

Prime Day

Yeah, I got sucked in.

Circle-cutting attachment for a Dremel (I did confirm that it'll work with at least one of the Dremels around here, that being the cordless one).  I expect I'll have uses for it.

New Kindle Paperwhite (last year's edition); the one from 2013 has been getting kinda draggy and needs rebooting rather too often.  More memory and more moderner are nice things, and I can always use the old one for carrying around where it might get lost or damaged.

And, what the heck, a few SSDs, mainly for upgrading older PCs.  They were cheap.  (I think FedEx is supposed to be delivering another older PC today, so topping up the SSD supply is good.)

Pan pizza

Got inspired by a vid on the YouToobz a week or so back, so yesterday I got around to trying it.

Of course I didn't follow the recipe.  This is man cooking!

Make up a batch of wet, sticky, sloppy bread dough - not wet enough to be batter, but awfully wet for dough.  (I'm pretty sure this wasn't how the guy did it, but it's what I wanted to try.)  Discover in the process that I don't have a reserve supply of white whole wheat flour in the basement, so it ends up being mostly bread flour.

After it's had a couple of hours to ferment, dig out the biggest cast-iron skillet, oil it up real good, and decant the dough into it.  Turn the dough over to get it oily on both sides.  Smoosh it down, let it rest a few minutes, smoosh some more, and gradually distribute it so it covers the bottom of the skillet and extends slightly up the side all around.

Apply sauce, cheese, and toppings.  Be fairly generous with the cheese.

Bake at 400℉ for what turns out to be about 20 minutes.  Remove from oven and let sit for several minutes.  Separate pizza from skillet and slide onto a flat surface (e.g., cookie sheet) for cutting.

This actually worked pretty well.  Maybe should have run the oven a little hotter.