August 19, 2015

Yesteryear
One year ago today: August 19, 2014, cooked streamer.
Five years ago today: August 19, 2010, scooters on file.
Six years ago today: August 19, 2009, bicycle tours, never happened.

MORNING
           After the breakfast meeting, Agt. M and I get this idea we are going to go visit a hobby store. The snag is that everybody from sewing outlets to Radio Shack call themselves a hobby store. So we wound up touring through all those industrial parks west of Oakridge Mall and found some great places. These are generally wholesale outlets so we picked the ones that had showrooms.

           Here is a place with all the glue products you’d likely need. We also found everything from discount drill bits to a place that sells model ships. Or you can buy the kits. I know a guy who bought one and it took up his coffee table for three years. We found model brass cannons and the foam inner cores for surfboards.
           However, we are both still hobbling around like a couple of hunchbacks who forgot our crutches. And talk about exhausted, it’s like we caught the sleeping sickness. Do not vacation in Florida in the summer unless you already require a siesta every afternoon. We stopped twice for extra coffee and that didn’t work.
           I don’t know about working with fiberglass. The fumes knock me out and for prototyping I’m now used to wood. Isn’t that fiberglass dust just as dangerous as asbestos? It also seems unreasonably expensive except where other materials would deteriorate. I can’t think of any place any robot we build would go, including Mars, that would require the fuss and bother of fiberglass.
           To sum up, I found a lot of these little shops to have better quality tools and product at prices lower than Home Depot. But the club had a rule to never go shopping the first time with money. Good, because if we had taken money along, we’d be broke. I’m going back tomorrow because I found a complete set of rare drill bits in 64th inch sizes for $9, where they cost about that each everywhere else. A fun morning but it is now nap time.

NOON
           Aw, isn’t that nice, I get an e-mail from Grace Dokie, who says she liked my Facebook profile. That’s nice, except I don’t have a Facebook profile. You can see a copy of Grace’s scam letter, but unless you read German, it’s a little hard to follow. It is just information about the anti-scam website. The letter is in English. The poor, poor, girl is at an orphanage, albeit an orphanage with Internet service. Maybe she works there, unless Nigeria has orphanages for 30 year old women.

           Another poll shows Trump surging ahead, no matter what he says or does. The opposition, including a very hostile press, has resorted to desperate attacks. They are clutching at lame straws like saying his supporters won’t really get out and vote for him. They are so wrong. But most of them are establishment trolls hoping desperately to avoid the massive changes that would ensue when Trump gets in. Like opening news commentators to libel suits, that would be nice.
           Don’t we love the way they begrudge how they can’t bring Trump down with their rehearsed trick questions, or by digging up his artifacts? Or the way they hope he runs as an independent because their indoctrination is that no independent can possibly win. They underestimate how fed up Americans are with the other parties. This is the only time in my life I even bothered following a campaign, but Trump is right about one thing. If he does get it, in another term there will be no America.
           One thing is for sure. No matter what else happens, even if the system does a Kennedy on Trump, the ideas he has introduced are going to stay on. He has permanently altered the landscape. The detractors say Trump is weak on specifics, but I say he would be unwise to try to please everyone at their own level. He is best to just say what he will do and leave it at that. As for Trump talking like a four-year-old, that’s because he wants his opponents to be able to follow what he says.

NIGHT
           Here’s a picture for the sake of a picture. It makes the blog easier to read, and as usual, contains information. These appear to be sticks of balsa wood substitute. The bundle to the right is real balsa, about $180 worth. But this bundle is light rigid foam of some sort. For the few dollars difference in price, I think I’d prefer the balsa wood. It's biodegradable.

           This concept of having a single Arduino control more than one 7-segment display without using a chip (BCD or binary to decimal integrated circuit) is captivating. I reach these conclusions that it cannot be done, but electronically, it all can be done. So I relocate to Starbucks midst the laptop crowd and draw the schematic of how, in theory, it is possible. See diagram (in my own handwriting). Duplicating this wiring on a breadboard would be a monumental task.
           Yet, to not breadboard it is purely asking for trouble. My solution, 4.5 hours in the making, says that any standard approach of counting will not work. Instead, treat a matrix as an EEPROM, and use a secondary or submatrix system to keep track of which “numeric display” has been last read, to a depth of three layers. Those layers are the hundreds, tens, and ones, beyond which to progress is a matter of further cascading each module, which I don’t have to prove.
           Some programmers despise matrices, but I have no choice. I need to display more LED segments than the Arduino Uno has available pins. The traditional solution is the employ POV, or persistence of vision. This is the concept that the human eye thinks your lamp is on, but it is really flashing 60 times per second. What I have in mind is establishing three local variable in a loop and use the unconventional approach of writing them out as global variables outside said loop. If this works, I win.
           Tomorrow, I’m taking an extra coffee break to map out the loops. In my mind’s eye, I imagine those counters I built with chips years ago, where I could not slow them down enough to read the single digits. Well, isn’t this similar? The one’s digit changes the most and therefore should be the innermost loop. The trick here is to get the think to count without using a factory chip. That can’t be done unless you understand all the steps.
Do check back.

ADDENDUM
           I still don’t like this O’Reilly guy who spends more time flapping his jaws than the person he is supposed to be interviewing. Most of those bozos do that these days and it is inconsiderate. So he brings up the point that food “is rotting” in the fields in California because Americans won’t take the harvesting jobs at $17 per hour. Which is probably nonsense, but he fails to mention that over 35% of the American population is on welfare.
           I’ve said it plenty of times before. Those on welfare should not be allowed to reside in large cities—not as a law saying they cannot, but as a condition of receiving welfare. They must move to a small town, and I go further to say their names, pictures, and amount that they receive should be posted in a public place. They are burdens on society and that is that. Move these people out to where these so-called $17 per hour jobs are available. I mean, at the least, they should be picking their own food.
           And if Trump is getting his military from television, that is probably where the people asking him this question get theirs. I mean, where do they think he gets it? He isn’t president yet.


Last Laugh


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