electronics, I.T., self sustainability, solar power

I lost a voltage sensor the exact minute thunder struck very close to the house, Nicole happened to be filming because it was an impressive mix of rain, hail & thunder. Does thunder create some sort of EMP? Could be a coincidence but the timing is really suspicious. Sorry I mean sus.

dead sensor :\

Oh, well I’ll just buy a replacement.

And fuck, I forgot we screw over allies and suck up to dictators now. Phidgets come from Canada, I never found any comparable alternatives in the realm of current sensing that goes beyond small hobbyist projects. And I don’t really want to relearn/recode a whole new deal anyway. I just want replacement parts.

Extensive searching pointed to robotshop.com having Phidgets parts in stock. So I grabbed spares for everything to get a few thunderstrikes ahead and buy me a few years. For the top 3 parts, I grabbed everything they are left.

The battery voltage sensor is actually important these days as automation uses it to make decisions on which circuits to turn on/off. So for a few days until I got the part, I moved the panels’ voltage sensor to the battery. Sensing the panels is informational and has no real consequence on function. With anything solar, I have appreciated having spares at hand so it was time to spend some money and make that true for the monitoring side of things which we became more dependent on over time.

self sustainability, wood

Only half of the work is done having felled a tree, or when nature makes a choice for you as pictured bellow. Then begins the careful process of bringing it all down on the ground. It takes careful reading of limbs, tension points, and interactions, to make safe cuts. I’ve improved this skill over the years and will work through a tree with accurate anticipation of what movement a cut will yield. The delivery of the cut can also make a difference. I’m not aware of a word to describe this process of reading a tree and releasing it fully from suspension.

The heavy root system will pull the trunk back upright suddenly past a certain point.

electronics, I.T., plotters

I can make them pretty fast now, I bought top notch stepper drivers and servos for it. It’s so much quieter than the previous one. I’m learning that it makes no sense to buy cheap hardware when you’re not doing volume. The few bucks saved will be paid for many times over in wasted time. I took pictures for documentation but I’m not sure if I’ll have the time to sink into it.

A lot of refinements went into this one, from the thousands of hours that the previous model was in use.

This was the very first model, built long before I got into tabletop plotters:

It’s pretty pathetic to look at 🙂 but it was a good stepping stone. I built another other one for teaching based on cheap 28BYJ-48 steppers. All this to say Gondola PlottyBot v2 is very much the result of a journey.

self sustainability

Well, that’s it, we’ve been off grid (minus the internet) for 10 years. Add that to the list of things I started counting in decades. And really, I’m not sure how much there is to say about it. It’s nice to acknowledge as an… achievement? But it doesn’t feel like much of one. We didn’t go through a marathon of hardships and stuck with it through thick and thin, instead things quickly became remarkably normal. Sometimes though, my brain snaps back to an earlier era, and I’m reminded that these are all uncommon and formidable adventures, only we got used to them. It’s wonderful how little I’ve had to say about all things off grid in recent years, though I figured that the 10 year anniversary would be worth a few remarks.

Maybe it’s only coincidental timing, but it’s hard not to notice that the intensity of these adventures is directly correlated with a spur of creativity and productivity in me that went far beyond building the things we needed. And as things started quieting down around year 7, so did that energy. Maybe it’s just the ebbs and flows of aging, having knowledge and energy in my 30s. Or… maybe my brain kicked into overdrive when faced with very consequential challenges.

The amount of learning by necessity that happened these past 10 years is quite frankly amazing, and that in term has made me even more curious about everything in the world. I clearly stand on the shoulders of giants, I am deeply grateful to all the people who shared their knowledge with me. I’ve talked with so many people about so many things. Phone calls, walks over to neighbors, colleagues, any question was met with generosity and patience. I’ve learned to recognize what I’d describe as a particular breed of hands-on New Englanders. People extremely smart, sharp in their observations of the natural world, of mechanical systems, coupled with decades of practice, good common sense & practical mind. Often times with a touch of humor, sometimes a little superstition, but I wouldn’t allow myself to do anything but nod, these are extremely smart and honest people, and I aspire to their greatness. On occasion and more these days, I too get questions and I’m all too happy to do my part within this great culture of knowledge and generosity.

I remember vividly moving into our tiny “house”, which was barely up. No insulation, no heating, no water, no electricity, no internet, no nothing. So what? I thought. Was that it? When flashlight batteries ran out the day was over, it’s really not as bad as it sounds. A 50% battery on the music player and a little wine were all it took to be truly happy. These first few weeks were very freeing and felt incredible. Through the years we definitely improved and ran into many joyous firsts: first water, first plumbing, first internet, first refrigeration, and many more. The goal was not to reinvent a suburban house with all the amenities, though there are things we quickly learned we wanted back but had to do without for a few years. And then there are things we’ve learned we won’t budge on. Wood heat is amazing: it’s resilient, abundant, cheap, and gets us out in nature. Solar power is plentiful but requires some management. It’s incredibly resilient and it feels like we found a universe hack to get free energy.

Winter came that first year and with it many doubts about the integrity of the new house. Its ability to withstand wind, withhold heat, and repel water when 4 tiny walls were all that stood between us and a blizzard. I did my best to be reassuring to wife & kid, and I rationally believed it, but I wasn’t exactly at ease either. So we’d talk about our escape route to the neighbors just in case. Today the house has much more mass, with multiple sections and 2 stoves. We can be in a room that doesn’t have every side shielding the anger of a storm. And it’s gone through 9 winters just fine. These worries are long gone but the first couple of years, blizzards really felt like they were trying to pry open the house to get us.

Our house is bigger, and our systems are so much better now too. It’s welcome by all, but I know the comfort we have gained is directly linked to having fewer amazing experiences. Challenging and amazing often go hand in hand this isn’t a surprise. When we didn’t have any wood storage inside, I found myself outside at night in the dead of winter many times to fetch more wood. These were surreal experiences. I often thought of earlier people and how intense nature feels when you’re more exposed to it. I have no doubt I’d believe in the supernatural if all my mind had known were such vivid experiences. The comfort of modern life has a way of toning down the intensity of the natural world. Now we have wood storage inside the house, and then again on the covered porch, and the routines in place to stay a good 3 weeks ahead so we can ride multi-day storms comfortably, which also means without surreal experiences… But it’s ok, things are supposed to get easier, in fact we are thinking about older age and we want to stay on this trajectory. Yet I am glad for having had these experiences, and they still happen on occasion.

I’m also glad we were able to overcome all these challenges. There wasn’t anything written that said we would, and there were definitely many paths that could have led to worse outcomes. Somehow we avoided them all and were able to keep making things better for ourselves. It’s impossible here not to acknowledge Nicole’s partnership in all this, the endeavor was doomed to be a massive train wreck had she not been fully on board and pushing hard just as I was. In some way, now that I know what we are capable of, I regret not having gone deeper in the middle of nowhere. But realistically I know it is better to have neighbors and some civilization nearby.

Beyond the challenges, we had a few “oh shit” moments, but nothing ever really bad fortunately. One night I got out for wood in the middle of a blizzard, and upon walking back to the house I realized after a bit I wasn’t at all headed there. No problem, I know the land well enough to get back, but I understood then all the stories I heard of people getting lost in snow storms. We also had a couple of moments at the tail end of stove season when threw our very last log on the fire and had to go out to get a tree immediately following, preferably something dead or an ash, but hey who are we to be picky? We’re often a little behind on wood, but not that terribly :).

Where we are now is that we truly live in a piece of paradise that is very hard to leave. It’s objectively picture perfect, and we get the added dimension that we know how rough it once was, and how much sweat went into softening it. The house is still unfinished but it’s quite ok and we love it. I have stopped pushing as hard as I used to and get to just enjoy things. Slowing down + things being nice is a great recipe for happiness. What’s in the future? For now we want to keep refining and enjoying what we already have. We definitely have projects: root cellar, solar for a car, green house to name a few. Just nothing our livelihood depends on, so we’ll get to them when we get to them.

nature encounters

A group of ravens (I think, I still can’t quite tell them apart from crows), has taken over the area. I try to remain zen and admiring toward nature, but they are so fucking annoying. I feel bad for saying so but it’s the truth. They make the ugliest sound, and they make it all the god damn time, starting at 4:30. Any time you step out the door, it’s a riot cause they gotta let everyone on the whole hill know that something’s moved. They steal eggs if we leave them outside 5 minutes. The noise they constantly make is a loud swear over all other song birds. To top the ruckus, they do this weird dance I can’t quite place.

And of course they do it all the time and everywhere. I thought it was some sort of courtship behavior, but they’ve been at it for days at this point. You’d think they’d be done with it. I’ve looked at all sort of videos on raven behavior, and I really don’t know what they’re up to.

AI, I.T.

Last time Esther wanted some coloring pages, I guess it’s time to battle with a bazillion sites trying to monetize everything. Jump through hoops here, web inspector there, the usual “this will take a minute” turns into another tech ordeal. Wait… I could just ask ChatGPT for some black and white stuff made for coloring.

The cool part? Esther gets a say into what she’d like to color. Well, she likes cats.

Then I realize that instead of asking for the generic stuff we’re used to seeing on coloring pages, we can ask for specific moments of her life.

Playing with an umbrella on a pile of woodchips? No problem:

Jumping on a trampoline full of Duplos? You got it!
And quite a few more:

Beyond the cool factor, I wonder if coloring her lived experience has a similar effect to journaling. Maybe, this helps process things?

More could be done to clean up the SVGs but this is quite sufficient for us. Evidently though, artists who were in the kid’s coloring niche have some competition :\.

One of the things that blows my mind with AI is all the things it can already do but have yet to be discovered.

All images above clickable for SVG, if you end up coloring one please send a pic 🙂

nature encounters

It’s only a wing I found on the ground, but it’s making me hopeful. We’ve seen Luna Moths only once 11 years ago. We were fresh transplants to Vermont then and didn’t realize it was rare. When I ask, people tell me they’ve only seen them once or twice in their lives.

nature encounters

Skunks don’t cause much trouble, their great defense is the only thing that makes them so darn undesirable. I wouldn’t mind them at all if I wasn’t worried we’ll run into each other unexpectedly. I’ve learned to shoo them on, they really don’t care about anything, but if you’re mildly annoying (from a distance), they’ll move along. And moving along is the whole point, for if they pick your stuff for a den, they’ll need to go and that’ll be a guaranteed mess.

life in the U.S.

An ideology became so ingrained in education its flag was flown alongside that of state and country. And the people who wished Jesus were there instead high on the wall, turned to the ugly demagogues who would hear their grievances. In the tug-of-war between competing ideologies, both sides had been willing to erode the fundaments of democracy, too happy were they to see public institutions sanction their ideologies disguised as righteous truths.

Raising kids in the middle of America’s culture war can be jarring.

I.T., maniacal paranoia

I get disproportionally upset with websites playing videos which pause when you background their browser tab. I don’t understand why browsers respect the focus and blur event at the window level, clearly they only benefit nefarious purposes seeking to milk a poor soul. Either by forcing them to watch content, or by building a better model of their attention behavior. Attention which we all know is a currency to be extracted on the internet.

A while back I added a Tampermonkey script to catch the registration of these events, and invalidate it. Out of curiosity, I added reporting to it these past 10 days. I was curious to know how prevalent the practice was.

Out of 140 domains visited these past 10 days, 28 cared to know whether my eyeballs were pointed at them or not. 8 were in the constellation of Google.

Now of course, I don’t use social media, I have pretty established work routines, and 2 layers of ad blocking. I suspect both the numbers of domains visited, and the number domains interested in my eyeballs would be significantly higher if I disabled ad blocking. But do I really want to subject myself to 10 days of ads? No, I really don’t, not even for science.

agriculture, self sustainability

Some of the stick we put in the ground 8 years ago are starting to look like real trees. They have barely yielded any fruit so far, and so we hope that they’ll decide to produce a real crop one day. It’s been interesting to compare how well everything we bought from various nurseries performed. The best nursery by far has unfortunately closed. Another one I won’t name has given us only bad performers I’m tempted to just pull out of the ground after years of tending to. Worst failure rate, worst growth rate, worst everything, bleh.

plum

pear

I.T., miscellaneous, plotters

As is now tradition, I taught my session on X,Y coordinates to local 5th graders.

As before, the collaborative drawing website I made worked wonder for getting them to time-share on the drawing machines. Each of them picks a square and works on it, I disable actual drawing for the class and they can only “code” with go_to(x,y) type commands. When they submit their drawing, the machines get to work. Kids absolutely love the idea of controlling the machines, and having that bit of time to shine as their drawing is being rendered. They are all extremely motivated to figure out the minutia of the code to these effects.

It looks like I bring a new machine every other year, we started with the tabletop plotter, then I added the gondola one, and of course this year it was lasers!

The kids really loved it as I suspected they would. I have learned that light management is a bit of an issue in the classroom when it needs to be dark but not too dark. Something to improve for next year.

It was a good crowd this year and I’ve been tempted to see if I could do something extra having some of them build the etch-a-sketch plotter.

maniacal paranoia

I’ve struggled more and more with the idea of posting things on the internet as of late. I’ve kept a reasonably high bar on personal stuff (thank you gifs for your terrible quality), but the reality is that it’s not high enough. Beyond privacy, I’m questioning why even toss nicely curated & authentic pieces of information into the sewer, I enjoy doing so less and less. Algorithms seem to gain new exploitative dimensions every few years, making everything you posted before a retroactive liability. The advent of AI clearly is one such evolution. Where social media fed off our attention, the fuel for AI is authenticity. Just as I absconded from social media early on when its extractive nature became clear, I seek to avoid fueling models, nor do I want them used against my family.

I don’t think I want fractions of our lives to be digested and regurgitated, this is especially true as my kids are getting older. I do realize the same was said about nascent photography, and I know it’s a funny thing for me to criticize generative models given my work with markov chains. That is how I feel nonetheless, and don’t get me wrong I love AI, just with someone else’s data in it :).

This blog has definitely turned into a bit of a personal journal over the years, and I don’t want to lose this as I often refer back to it. But in reality, there’s a lot I refrain from journaling here because it’s too public, and now more than ever it also feels dirty for a myriad of reasons all stemming from the current state of the internet.

I’m in a pickle, how does one filter for reasonable humans? Well, on this imperfect internet, the least bad solution I can find is to password protect some posts. And so I’ll do this from now on, and I’ll have to be better at segregating personal content from what is meant for public consumption. It’s unfortunate really, the projects I work on are deeply intertwined with our life, and will be more dry separated from it.

If you’re a reasonable human and you know me, the password when used is where I worked from 2003 to 2004.

Theme by Bloompixel. Proudly Powered by WordPress