March 3, 2014

           I love a mystery but here’s one that left me cold. I saw this circuit on a Makezine video about a different topic, but could not figure out how it works. It is two switching transistors, two capacitors, and some current-limiting resistors. Yet it alternately flashes two LEDs. I thought I’d be able to figure it out by building it. Nope. Here it is; it works fine. But I don’t know why. Somehow a photo of my banana porridge breakfast got into this composition, but too late now. As shown, here is a real “breadboard”, which I also copied from the video. I’m pointing to the schematic, if anyone wants to give this a try, or better yet, send me an explanation I can understand.

           Fred’s come into some kind of fancy Gibson guitar, which he phoned to see if I wanted. How, I ask, after all this time, is it so many people don’t remember that I can’t play guitar. I’ll head over and take a look at this, as Gibson is a famous brand name. He only wants a hundred bucks for it. Somebody couldn’t pay their bill, so it is not like a collector’s item.
           I’ve been lax on the trivia lately but the good trivia takes time and that I don’t have. I’ll make it up to you this week—I can’t take this pace even if I’d like to. Instead, I drove up to Homeless Depot for supplies. And I’m up $17 over it, hooray. Some time ago I’d bought the wrong wire gauge and went to exchange it. During the interval, the correct gauge had gone on sale for half price and I got me a nice juicy refund.
           Since I’ve allowed for the calories I treated myself to an order of fast food fries and a coffee. Life is good on days like this. I’ve gone back to deep-read the textbook on Qbasic programming. That means I study every word and do the questions at the back of the chapters. There must be a lot more to the procedure of reading files than the book is letting on. Oops, even that is an error. A procedure cannot read data, only the main program. Anyway, time to dig out that chapter on the Arduino write command and see if I can find a way to save files in that format and read them with Qbasic. Why? Because Arduino can interface with the real world and Qbasic cannot. Or put another way, Arduino can actually throw the dice, but I would not care to program Arduino to do the same job as Qbasic.

           Millet. I finally decided to find out if it was on my health food list. It is, but unless they can do something about the bland flavor, I’ll stick with rice. Any grain can be made palatable with enough butter and salt. Now I feel guilty a bit for having given Memphis (my budgie) a steady diet of that for so many years. Wiki and others are understandably not that enthusiastic, stopping short of saying it tastes a lot like sand. Then again, so does grits if you don’t add your condiments. Even the largest producer, India, admits “some consumers prefer the taste of other grains”. To be fair, I will try to find a recipe other than boiling the seeds.
           I found several sources with exactly what I expected. Almost every interesting flavor has to be added to millet. Most common are pecans, walnuts, maple syrup, and coconut. These very items are listed by my doctor as best avoided. I picked up this bag of millet grains and tried them as porridge. For now, I’ll experiment with that but even dry oatmeal tastes better. A lot of the other recipes called for ground millet flower. But I haven’t seen a grindstone since in a Texas museum fifty years before I was born.
           The scooter is still running rough, that carburetor and ethanol do not get along. I stopped to see Miguelito and that part is going to cost me $65. Plus labor. Mario was there, saying he had one for sale, but I’d rather wait and get one new from a reputable dealer. Mario’s the guy who messed up my motor job, the motor I had to replace last month.
           Radio Shack is completely out of control. Their prices have surged, in some cases, ten times. What? Well, in the case of capacitors. A package used to be $1.50. Now they are individually packaged and sell for $1.47 each. Take a look at any circuit board and count the number of capacitors. Mind you, we are still trying to figure out why so many are needed and nobody on the Internet seems willing to tell us about that. Meanwhile, Radio Shack is selling their solder by the ¼ of an ounce. And their batteries, forget it. I’ll buy in bulk at the dollar store and take my chances. I have nothing to prove Radio Shack batteries are any better than other brands. But I’ve heard they still have their battery exchange policy, which I will look into, if only because they aren’t pushing it in their advertising. That means they may be locked into something they’d rather get out of.
           DRM, Digital Rights Management. If you are not using counter-surveillance measures, you should be careful about any downloads. What else can I tell you? It is not about copyright protection, it is about money. The people who come after you are not representatives of the artist or author, they are lawyers who purchased the distribution rights. They probably own all the rights, but the one they are interested in is distribution. When you download a file, you are duplicating it. They do not show up at your door and arrest you, that is not what they are after. They want M-O-N-E-Y. They don’t get it if they put you in jail.
           Instead, based on what I consider an invasion of privacy, they determine your computer has been used to download—they should be going after whoever is offering the files because for all we know, they are doing it themselves. Then you receive a registered letter basically stating you have to give them $1,000 and sign a document saying you won’t tell anybody about it. This is their favorite tactic. They avoid an expensive court case. But if you don’t pay, they send the police with a search warrant, the idea is to confiscate your computer. A system that Hitler himself would have loved.
           My side on the issue is simple. Go after the pusher, not the user. It is clear the way the system works that those who enforce the law need major criminals to remain free. The courts rely for their daily bread solely on the continuous prosecution of an on-going stream of small-time junkies. The rule of law is good, but not when it be enforced by coercive means. Look at the hardships I’ve already had merely pleading not guilty to a traffic ticket. This is the system that says you’ll get a fair trial? Maybe at some point back in history.
           So, if you get such a letter, completely reformat your hard drive. It does no good to claim you did not personally download anything, if you or anyone in your family did, they can hold you responsible. And avoid downloading from Pirate Bay. That’s who they are watching with a vengeance. Copyright owners are rarely inventive people. When they can’t make money practicing law, they will make money practicing blackmail.

ADDENDUM
           Closer examination of the file structures produced by the Arduino show that they are essentially serial lists, or our old friend, the comma-delimited style used by, you guessed it: DOS. So here indeed is a potential link, Qbasic to Arduino, But I skipped the chapter on saving Arduino data as back then, I had no need to store anything of the kind. As predicted, Arduino now dominates the microcontroller market, so tomorrow I will search for somebody who solved the same problem. For now, where can I get masses of data to test? Maybe say, a dice throwing program. It would only have to be modified to save the data as well as display it.
           Then, I could once and for all examine individual records on a hard disk. I tried this before, but there was no apparent correlation between data size and file size. But if I knew one of the sizes for sure, I could calculated the other. And maybe find out what the actual overhead is on serial files anyway. Qbasic does give a complicated formulas but they are not very intuitive. I suspect that the files produced by Arduino must be the simplest structure possible. Since I can read machine code, I am confident I can parse anything that uses ASCII.
           For you eggheads out there, I’m going to run the die program to produce 100,000 data records. Then use DOS to find out what I’m up against. I will also find out how Arduino files things away. If there is any common point between the records, we’ll have a way to analyze sensor data without the nightmare of C+ programming. Why? Let’s just say there are other serial records I would like to take a look at. Like those huge strings of Registry data that MicroSoft obviously does not want you to know about. And I do NOT buy that theory that there are any real computer geniuses out there working for MicroSoft. Youngsters are no smarter today than they were a thousand years ago just because they are now using a computer.
           If I discover a link, the first task on my agenda is to begin to store files on hard disks without using the standard Microsoft filing systems, such as NTFS.

           And here is a picture of my capacitor supply, thanks to Rick from Miami. Rick, we still cannot get an “electronic” piston to work to build the Rick-motor. We’re working on it.