One year ago today: November 12, 2016, embarrassing low tolerance.
Five years ago today: November 12, 2012, “science” connection, my eye.
Nine years ago today: November 12, 2008, my new keyboard.
Random years ago today: November 12, 2013, at the Grand Canyon.
Here’s a unique scene. This is a tiny courtroom diorama from the museum last day. The entire setting is in copper. The flags, the desk, the jury you can partly see to the right side, all made from a thin sheet of copper with no visible welding joints. To gauge the size, the desk is around 3” long. This was picked up at a yard sale and donated to the museum. There is no explanation of why the artist would go through so much trouble. Then again, I play bass, don’t I?
Here’s another twist that would get past a fool. There is a disbursement ready for me at the insurance office. Things moved along politely and they said all that is required is I drop by and pick it up. Sounds good. Until you ask why is it required? Is it now? Four figures, can’t they just mail such a small amount to me? I’ll test them next week by asking if I could have somebody else drop by. You know, just to check for the reaction. Could it be they really still have not found me? Could it be they just want me to show up so they can eyeball my condition? Could it be I’m not going to willingly give them that much edge?
My ribcage. I was useless, so I found the last of those little $3 kits, oh where was it I got those. They were $12 kits but I got the box at a going-out-of-business. I can easy solder standing up, so let’s see what I have here. It says electronic cricket. “Can be used for recreational purposes or to simulate a hot summer night. Automatically comes on when darkness falls. Uses 9V batter not included.” Okay, into the shed it goes, with a capacitor, regulator, and solar power supply. Added security. Nobody wants to mess with an angry cricket. Made in Europe by velleman-kit
That’s where this clipping from the funnies comes in. That’s from the strip ‘Mary Worth’, about as un-funny a comic as exists. This panel caught my eye because in isolation, I think it conveys a lot about my ex and I. Still not getting it? Let me add the sound effects. Think of the ‘oo’ sound in ‘moon’. Got it? Okay. “Ooooo. OoooOOO-OOooooo. Ooooo.” That’s it. Keep going . . .
The Southeastern Bluegrass Association.
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Who’s with me on the wise move to cut down the 62-foot tree from my back yard a year ago? Show of hands. Wow, unanimous. Good, because I don’t usually drive down Lemon street just a block northwest of here. Lookie what happens when you plant non-native ornaments in your yard. Right through his front door and out the back door. Instant duplex. Consider further, this tree was the same size as mine, and was located in the same direction from his house when the breeze came through. In fact, if it wasn’t for the other trees in his backyard and a couple of churches, you could almost see my place from here. BWAAA-ha-ha-ha-ha.
Let me take a break and read the Polk county newspaper. The Ledger, these people need my opinions to validate their work most of the time, they just don’t admit or realize it as much as they should. It says here a 74-year-old motorcyclist was killed when a fan pulled in front of him.
There should be a mandatory five years in prison for people who cut off motorcycles. That’s opinion number one. It says here somebody at Briarwood Estates spilled 30 gallon container of chlorine. The meth lab people should be looking into who has that much chlorine lying around. Opinion number two.
It says here a lady school teacher was fired for not telling the county she had been formerly discharged for having a “sexually charged” text with a student. If she’d been a man, she’d be doing hard time in the fun house. Check, opinion number three. It says here a doctor got four years for health care fraud. Wrong, it should say a Cuban doctor named Joaquin Mendez, so people will remain aware of who exactly is causing the high Florida crime rates. You got it, opinion number four.
ADDENDUM
Just great, I wake up with “heavy lung”, that morning-after smoker’s condition. This I don’t need the week of Operation Early Monday. It laid me low for a day, so I read up more on PWM, the digital control method that is poised to make a difference. As with most electronics, there is an easy way to do anything that never quite works right. Ss usual, I’m more fascinated by the operation at component level and I know most others couldn’t care less about that. But read anyway, this would not be the first time this blog has hit upon something years before the rest of the world.
This photo may help bring PWM into focus. Right how, this motor has two settings. Full on and full off. The traditional way to control speed is to feed it a partial current while it is winding up and down, or to run the current through a large capacitor. Both waste power and heat, and do not provide for really fine control. The biggest strain on the motor and the power is when you flip the switch on. On the other hand, PWM could cause this motor to slowly accelerate and run at any intermediate speed, within reason. (Down below 30%, the motors tend to sputter on their own.)
It takes only a bit more imagination to realize that PWM can be used for a lot of other things, some of which I suspect have not yet been discovered. If I had the brains, I’d invent something useful that everybody could use. PWM right now is used for trivial things like dimming lights and it is the reason you need an extra little driver circuit board to operate digital speakers. Probably the best thing to invent would be a game so the basement dwellers of America can waste more time as they let in the unskilled labor that takes away their jobs so they can’t afford to move out. Yeah, a PWM game is the way to go.
To turn the PWM on, there is a simple write command and that’s all most people need. I was reading how the function operates internally. I’ve mentioned the three timers that can be used to keep the modulator going without making demands on the system clock. You may not realize how often you see videos of robots “sputtering” that are probably the result of PWM interrupts taxing the CPU. Add that to the list of things the rest of the robot world will discover years later. These three separate timers each have different operating characteristics, and that is what I was reading. To me, this is actually more interesting than reading the new and crappy Time magazine.
As usual, my descriptions are for understanding, not for accuracy. The accurate stuff can quickly get lost in its own complication. What’s happening is the timers are controlled by a set of registers, and unlike the experts, I’ll tell you what a register is. Most memory locations are made up of 8 bits called a byte which is sufficient to represent most binary symbols and characters. But sometimes that is overkill, and that’s where things like bit arithmetic and registers come in. You can have each of the 8 bits represent a condition. By now you’ve figured out this involves some tricky computer code.
Sadly, the field is populated by nerds. And the worst kind of nerds, the ones who do not understand what punctuation and the shift key are for. So don’t even ask them to grasp that little space that appears between words. Using registers, you can use a single byte to represent 8 conditions by “reading” the individual bits. That’s the part of PWM that I’m studying today and I’ll give an example. What’s interesting to me is that although each bit has only two settings, it can be operated on by three commands. This is easy, are you ready?
The first command looks if the register bit is on, the second looks if it is off. The third one, possibly the most useful, looks at whether the bit is on or off AND changes it to the opposite. The command is called ‘invert’. All this is making me wonder if I could build a register. I’m taking a guess these register commands move on your computers parallel bus so all eight potential setting arrive at once. Seems to me that would speed things up so well that it explains why computer have both parallel and serial busses, which must add to the manufacturing costs.
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