First thing to mention, which doesn’t really have a category: I walked
from my home in New Westminster to UBC in one day; it was about 32km,
which is the longest walk I’ve done in one day. I am mulling the
possibility of walking across the US when I’m 60, and this is the kind
of daily distance I’d want to maintain. I got some good blisters and
was sore the next day, but not crippled; I think I could have done
that again. It’s a good sign.
Webby
Hardware hacking
-
More work on the weather vane; got it mounted on a peanut butter jar
lid. If that sounds silly, then in my defense it turns out to be
very handy to have a standalone mount for a project.
-
Made an HTML page to display readings from the weather vane, using
javascript to rotate an arrow graphic to reflect the direction it
was measuring. Surprisingly handy.
-
Bought an Ikea Vindriktning, aiming to read its measurements
directly with an ESP32. Took a while to figure out how to get
it working – turns out that a common ground between the ESP32 and
the sensor board was necessary to get the UART working – but I
think it’s coming along.
-
Took apart a coffee maker that died on us to figure out what was
wrong, and it turns out to be a thermal fuse that blew – apparently
this is quite common. Will be picking up a replacement and seeing
if I can get it going again.
ML/AI/Earth Observation
Space
- After nearly 5 years of searching, I have finally got a job in the
space industry: beginning January 9th 2023, I’ll be working for
Wyvern Space. They are building satellites to do
high-resolution hyperspectral imaging; my position is senior devops
software developer, helping to build and operate their image
processing pipeline. I couldn’t be more thrilled. 😁
Trying to get back to doing these things on a regular basis.
Hardware hacking
-
More work on an electronic weather vane, following these
instructions. Lots of figuring out what size of bearings I
should order.
-
Some soldering to make a battery holder for some ESP32 camera
modules I’ve got.
-
Weather station:
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Try to get the tipping bucket rain meter working; there’s a loose
connection somewhere, and periodically I see that Burnaby had 5
metres of rain in the last 24 hours. I never realized just how
much you have to pay attention to loose wires.
-
Sketch out a new rain meter based on inexpensive flow meters, then
order some. We’ll see how this works.
Webby
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Going through a number of online courses/resources:
-
Coursera UMich Web Design for Everybody course: excellent,
though aimed at people quite new to development of any sort. One
thing: I’m lucky enough to have my employer pay for this, but the
lecturer, Colleen van Lent, writes:
My motivation for creating this course content was to spread the
mission of free education to everyone. Unfortunately, many of
the platform changes has put the material behind paywells. I
highly encourage students to take the courses individually
(rather than as a specialization) to access them for free. Even
then, some of the assignments may be hidden. I am hoping to
launch a new more open version in Fall 2018.
-
Shay Howe’s HTML & CSS course; also excellent
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Javascript.info: awesome walkthrough of JavaScript
-
Trying to get the basics down, then look into React or some other
front-end framework.
-
Gotta say, I’m really fascinated by the tie-in between JavaScript
and DOM manipulation, which I had not really grokked before.
-
Project-in-progress is a refactoring (not a redesign, as I want the
look to remain about the same) of The Floating Head of Ayn
Rand, which has been more or less untouched for HOLY CRAP
twenty-one years. (State of the art at the time was
table-based layout, which I adopted enthusiastically 😬).
-
Changed the CSS for this site to have the post titles be a bit more
prominent:
.posts-list-item-title {
font-size: xx-large;
}
Data
- But also web: begin taking up work on the New West Trees page
again.
- Newest feature: adding links to the Wikipedia page for a
tree species!
- Coming soon: adding common names for species (eg: English Oak
instead of Quercus robur)…which turns out to be surprisingly
tricky.
- Tried pytaxize, which was a yakshave to get an NCBI API
token, then gave me problems re: rate limiting
- Tried pygbif; better results, but still not great for
trees. Example: Quercus palustris is resolved to just “Oak”,
but Wikipedia clearly resolves it to “Pin Oak”.
- But this gave me the idea of trying wikidata or
wikispecies; this is up next.
Web development:
- I’ve become interested in web development recently, and have begun
working on a habit-tracking project called, unoriginally, Habit.
Currently it’s a good exercise for becoming familiar with Javascript,
Jquery, Bootstrap, Flask and SQLAlchemy.
Hardware hacking:
- I ordered a bunch of AI-Thinker ESP32 camera modules from
Universal Solder (Canadian vendor of Arduino, ESP32, electronic
components, etc; I’m a happy customer & recommend them thoroughly).
Started digging into how to make it into a timelapse camera.
Random:
- I signed up for a free account with [The SDF Public Access UNIX
System][3]. I’ve got a totes-real homepage at
[http://saintaardvark.unixcab.org][4], just like the old days.
[2]: The SDF Public Access UNIX System
[3]: http://sdf.org
[4]: http://saintaardvark.unixcab.org
Road trip to Ontario in an EV with my family to visit my parents.
Wonderful time.
Hardware hacking:
- More playing with ESP32. Try making an open-window detector with
the built-in Hall effect sensor, and sending a Grafana annotation
when it’s open.
Programming:
- Refactor my .emacs files to use a
lisp directory, and switch to
use-package rather than Cask. This is easily the longest-running
project I’ve been working on:
commit 85b1d148afdc135d725498c0384d58e7baa0866d
Author: Hugh Brown <hugh@chibi-laptop-01.(none)>
Date: Tue Mar 3 21:13:57 2009 -0800
New repo.
…and that commit came after declaring bankruptcy in the last one.
Data science:
No ML/DS work this month. But I am beginning to get interested in
microscopy, so…
Hardware hacking
-
Does it count as hardware hacking if it’s all software? A question
for the ages. Anyhow: set up motion on the Raspberry Pi running
the birdhouse camera. Set up a cron job on the Pi to copy the
captured movies back to my home machine. Set up a cron job on my
home machine to make a gallery out of it using PiGallery 2,
which is just what the doctor ordered.
-
The weather station had been saying for a while that my in-laws'
place was getting 14m of rain per day, which seemed excessive. Took
a look at that, and broke readings from the anemometer as
well. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ Dug more and discovered that the connector
between those two pieces of equipment and the Cat5 cable (ask your
parents, kids) had rusted. Soldered up a replacement and we were
back in business.
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A friend of mine (hi Matt!) gave me an OBD bluetooth dongle to try
on the car. I spent a truly stupid amount of time trying to query
it with Python, which led me into Bluetooth Hell. I love Linux but
OMG sometimes it’s the worst.
-
Set up an MQ135 to try and read CO2 levels at home. Getting mixed
results, which seems to be par for the course. A collection of
links in no particular order:
