Silicon Valley Redneck

Hmmm, incubator.

Probably buy a small-capacity one on Amazon.

But now I'm pondering.

The ones on Amazon have automatic turning, as well as temperature and humidity control, but I'm not seeing a user manual on line, so... what other capabilities do they have?

It seems that duck eggs should have the humidity setting changed at one point in the cycle, and, IIRC, turning discontinued at some point before expected hatching.  Is there a setting for this?

Is there a setting for just turning the eggs, without heat, while accumulating a clutch?

Pondering further: if the eggs are supposed to be kept at around 60°F while the clutch is accumulated... that's not ambient around here, so they'd need slight cooling.  Should the incubator be heated/cooled with a Peltier module?

So now I'm having thoughts of a controller system, with open-source firmware, maybe using an ESP32, Pi Pico W, or some such (because connectivity), that could do the "turn eggs while maintaining 60°F" thing as well as a programmable incubation cycle, and maybe a 3D-printable incubator/turner to go with it.

Yet another thing to occupy my copious free time.  Great.

Sunday update

Boy, are my arms tired!

No, I didn't just fly in from somewhere.  I turned over the compost heap.

Which, when there's a lot of as-yet-uncomposted long stringy stuff near the top, and one doesn't have a brush grapple... well, there's a lot of manual labor involved in getting the uncooperative stuff moved.

Then the loader can be used to scoop the more-composted stuff from the bottom of the old pile over the top of the crunchy stuff that's now on the bottom.

I also did a bit more driveway fixery.  I think it'll take a few more iterations, and maybe a bunch of fine crunchy rock, to get the parking area and the final slope leading up to it really properly packed and in place.

Also, I need to shovel a bunch of stray gravel from the lawn back to the driveway, but my arms are tired.

Our one female duck has commenced laying eggs.  Maybe I should get an incubator and see if I can hatch some of them.  We should also (once it gets to be properly Spring) get a few more ready-sprouted ducks to add add some genetic diversity to the flock.

Various seeds are now in little containers of potting soil in the sprouting cabinet in the basement.  This would have been about the right time for starting them last year, with the very late Spring.  I think this year planting season is going to happen early, so the home-sprouted plants will be late to the party.

And, we get another patch of winter.

Temperature almost got up to 40 today.

The coming afternoons are supposed to be substantially warmer - afternoons possibly venturing into the 60s - but early-morning lows look like 20s.  Tomorrow morning, low 20s.

We don't seem to have a lot of rain in the near-term forecast.  We need more rain, to fill up the pond!  Preferably well before planting season!

I just got around to upgrading the lighting in the plant-starting cabinet, adding 80 Watts of bonus full-spectrum illumination.  Now I need to get some seeds in pots (which I meant to do in January).

The chickens are up to 3~5 eggs/day, sometimes with an additional failed egg (fragile or incomplete shell, or no shell at all).  Maybe I need to fiddle further with their diet; they're currently on 19% protein pellets that claim to have plenty of shell minerals... but they also get scratch grains and whatever they can forage for, and they don't seem to have any interest in their nice crushed oyster shells.

No duck eggs yet; if the she-duck does start laying eggs, maybe I'll want to try hatching them.  (We should probably also buy a few more ducklings this Spring, in the interest of genetic diversity.)

I need to build a stand-alone, 2-holer nest box for those times that the chickens are hanging out in the duck pen (or any other area that doesn't include their coop).  I'd been worrying about keeping rain out, but, really, it can live in a sheltered spot, or just be kept on the back deck except when the chickens are out and about on a nice day.  Shouldn't take long to throw such a thing together, once other priorities are out of the way.

 

I installed the new KVM switch today.  It woiks!  The loaner Windows machine sees the keyboard and mouse - by their own identities, not as emulated devices (I have no idea whether that was one of the problems with the old switch, or if it was just a matter of the USB not switching to port 4, nor, eventually, to port 2).

 

One toaster project seems to be out of my hair, based on results received Friday evening.  Another... I think we've come up with a way to meet a bunch of customer requirements that assume that "a box with software running inside it" means "a general-purpose computer running a general-purpose operating system and connected to the Internet."  Blindly applying the standards for such would (1) involve an entirely unreasonable amount of effort not in the original budget, (2) almost certainly fail, and (3) be looking at entirely the wrong things.  But, there are certain things that should be examined and tested, and this is a chance to add those things to The Process.

Things are FUBAR all over

Still no official word on what was going on Saturday night, other than that the fugitive's GF definitely wasn't home at the time, being as how she was in custody until yesterday.

Amazon showed a package definitely going to be delivered yesterday, except that it didn't show actual shipping progress.  This morning, it shows as "On the way, but may be late" - and as "Shipped with USPS" - but it has a UPS-format tracking number, not USPS.  Er, hello?

Apparently the Senate finally got around to passing the border bill last night, with everything related to our own border stripped out.  That's... ever so Washington.

And I have no clue, from the available public sources, what happened to the stonk market this morning in Europe.  Japan was happy.  China was shut down for the New Year festivities.  India was happy.  Europe, very unhappy.  U.S., very unhappy.  Hello?  Yeah, I know: financial news reporting is no longer a thing, and all the information that drives trading by the big players is meticulously kept non-public.

Update:  The fugitive was apprehended this afternoon, around 1530, in Knoxville.  Rumor has it that several of his associates have also been rounded up.  Still no word on what was going on Saturday evening.

In favorable news, the chickens are ramping up production.  Four eggs today!

Year of the Dragon brings Interesting Times.

That fugitive?

The one the cops have been searching for the past two days, in an area the other side of the big crossroads, 20 minutes or so away?

Based on the twinkly lights, shouty voices, gunfire, and flashbangs, it seems he returned to his girlfriend's singlewide.  Which is about (checks Google Earth) ⅓ of a mile from here.

Anyway, the drama seems to be over; he's presumably either captured or dead.

Update:  Nope?

About an hour after things got all dynamic, the roadblocks went away.

Shortly after that, news articles appeared: he's still at large, and the reward has been increased.

So... I dunno what was going on over at what I presume to be the GF's singlewide.  Joy suggests that there's something much bigger going on; maybe the traffic stop that kicked this all off wasn't just a traffic stop?

Awaiting further reports.  Did they catch somebody over there, or did the trailer turn out to be vacant?

Coming up on Chinese New Year!

And the weather seems rather non-conducive to midnight fireworks.  Well, maybe there'll be a break in the rain at the appropriate time.  We shall see.

Winter freeze became early-Spring warm days, and now cool early-Spring rain.  Supposed to continue through Monday, more or less.  Going on a quarter-inch so far.

Woke up late last night; the weather radio was warbling its song of fear.  Grab glasses; stumble out of bed.  Radio has switched to voice.  Garble warble farble something something... oh, a description of a person.  My phone said there was a Blue Alert, but when I tried to click the link for more info it just closed the popup announcement.  Oh, well: no tornado, so back to sleep.

Comes the morning: turns out there was a cop killed, and another injured, during a traffic stop... not that far from the crossroads with the stores (other side of the crossroads from us).  Perp fled in a vehicle, and as of midafternoon is apparently still at large.  So, somewhere in the general area, probably.  Which I guess is another reason (aside from the rain) for staying home today.  And a scan of the morning headlines?  Looks like there's been an outbreak of crazy.  I mean, more than what's become usual.

On the work front, interesting times (mainly of a non-bloggable nature, unless I really file the serial numbers off).

Oh, well.  Got some waveforms to ponder.

Update:  That fugitive?  Still at large, as of 1800.  At some point, the cops went to the home of his girlfriend, on... oh, my goodness.  That's not a very long road; the closest point is under 0.2 mile from here, and the furthest is about 1.8 miles away.

I didn't see the woodchunk nor his shadow...

... but it looks like we're not getting more winter any time soon.  Conditions have gotten decidedly vernal: sunny, highs in the 60s, nighttime lows sometimes venturing a little below freezing but not much, and probably a stretch of warm rain coming up in a few days.

The frogs were out (though not in full force) yesterday evening.  The grass is starting to grow.

The lawnmower does start.  I installed a new air filter; it still needs its oil (and oil filter) changed.

I wandered around the yard, looking at all the things that need doing soon.  Lots of overhanging branches (live or otherwise) that I really ought to deal with.  A walkway that I built up last fall is in need of just a little more building up, and another attempt at planting lawn mix.

Oh, and I talked to the neighbor about that crime scene.  Turns out someone hit a deer on the road in front of his house, and he dragged the carcass down to the point on his lawn furthest from any dwellings to let the scavengers have a go at it.  On closer inspection, the large white feathers turned out to be clumps of white deer hair.  So, all explained.  Unrelatedly, he moved his goats into a larger pen last year, leaving their old pen as an area of damaged lawn in which weeds had been eaten and manure deposited, so that'll be this year's garden patch.

So here it is Woodchunk Day already.

Looks like I'm caught up on my UPS deliveries....

Talked to the driver yesterday.  Apparently the backlog packages weren't piled up in the warehouse; they were being stored in trailers... and the tracking system isn't designed for that situation, so nobody knew for sure what packages were in which trailers.  The distribution center is just about caught up now, but —

Seems the distribution center for the area north of the river is even more messed up, and is likely to take another week or two to get caught up.  Like, totally FUBAR.

Meanwhile, on the ToasterCo front, we're trying to sort out ongoing issues with two projects, and a third one (that I thought was finished several months ago) just had a new set of requirements drop.  I don't know to what extent I'll be involved in that one.

I think I need to design and 3D print a new egg holder, suitable for organizing eggs of ludicrous girth.  It's bad enough that some of the hens lay very long eggs, but Weird Chicken is back to laying actual eggs and they're very large and nearly spherical.  The current organizer doesn't deal with them very well.

And one of these days I need to chat with a neighbor about the crime scene on his lawn: the remnants of a deer carcass, a bunch of large white feathers, and a game camera watching the vultures (and whatever else might be coming along to pick at the remains).

Just for extra fun, either Huckleberry or Top Hat knocked over a humidifier this morning, so I had to mop up about a gallon of water from the living-room floor.

Also fun: I bought a used mini-tower PC to substitute for the ToasterCo-owned one that holds a special I/O card for testing certain models of toaster, because the one on hand doesn't play nice (nor, indeed, at all) with my KVM switch anymore.  I figured a slightly newer model might work.  But no: it's gotta have its keyboard & mouse plugged in directly, or maybe it needs a different model of KVM switch.  BIOS is the latest.  Windows 10 is current.  Maybe I need a new KVM switch.  Or... I wonder if power-cycling the KVM switch would do the trick?  Gotta try that in a while (crawling under my desk is involved).

Meanwhile, time to go check on the poultry.

Update:  That problem with the Windows PC and the KVM switch?

Looks like that port on the switch had gone intermittent, and is now defunct.  And the port for the mini-server has crapped out too now.  Connects the HDMI OK, but no keyboard nor mouse.

So, time for a new HDMI/USB KVM switch.  Maybe one with more ports.  I'd figured a 4-porter would be a great plenty at my desk, but throw in a Windows machine and a RasPi, and I keep having to move cables around (though the RasPi is now headless, and access is via VNC).

Aaand... switches beyond 4 ports get seriously pricey.  The current situation should be temporary anyway; someday, a 4-port switch will once again be enough at my desk - workstation, token Windows machine, and 2 extras.  Just ordered (for delivery this coming Thursday) a 4-port switch that does everything the current one used to do before it stopped, isn't horribly expensive, and gets good reviews.

The newly-acquired PC?  Might still use it for the original purpose; it takes up less space than the loaner.  Or it could end up in the lab.