One year ago today: June 27, 2022, weird maritime law.
Five years ago today: June 27, 2018, a basketball hit it.
Nine years ago today: June 27, 2014, metacarophelangeal.
Random years ago today: June 27, 2010, more & more attention.
Squirrel wars. The cage works to stop the squirrels, but it blocks the ledge the cardinals need to stand on. If I make the ledge larger, there is a way the squirrels can latch on. I have footage of the newest bird for you. This is probably the female. And I believe the small birds are a tufted titmouse, though they never quite look exactly like the photos. The woodpeckers are the most fearless and are definitely the rare Downey species. That’s if my reference books are right.
The anti-squirrel feeders share a common problem. If the rodents learn to tip them, they can spill seeds on the ground. I’m considering a chicken wire sheath. It will look tacky, but I’m out of ideas. The idea is that only birds smaller than the wire mesh can get to the feeders. On top, I would leave the Chinese hat baffles.
Library again, this time I read a book on raising pigs. Not a pet book, but hog farming purely out of curiosity. How much space, how much food. I could not do it, yet apparently this remains a large hobby in rural areas and I do know there are some fine examples at the Dade County fair. Yes, folks, the kids that raise them do know what happens in the end. Who was that kid I knew whose dad, instead of allowance, gave him one pig to raise out of each litter? I worked with him at a lumber mill in Montana and by the time he was 24 he had something like $60,000 invested. Each pig cost $30 to raise and sold for something like $800. Now it makes sense. I heard later he squandered it all, but even that makes him better off than most of the poor in my era who late in life are still making the same mistakes and he isn’t.
What doesn’t tally is why slovenly people find me. The library was fine, but afterward I went to the old Dunkin on 60. It has 30 chairs and the place was empty until I sat down and opened my book, “Christmas in Carol”, about a dysfunctional family in Washington state. The only other customer who came inside was, in this Florida heat, wearing a long-sleeve hooded sweat jacket and sits at the table behind me. I finally got up and left, then noticing he was also wearing a COVID mask. Why the table next to me? Do these people think I need or want their attention?
This is an old picture of a tree in my yard that I think looks nice. I bought this cabin around the time I was looking at Pulse Width Modulation (PWM). I have only a theoretical understanding. My best Arduino book casually mentions PWM on page 60. Since I have never actually hooked up and operated a PWM circuit (that I know of), I’m taking two to three hours today to study the matter before proceeding.
Talk remains of starting up the Robot Club again, since it weeds out useless people. There are two types of them, you know. And they also fit into the categories of boring and not boring. One type is the ones who leave society alone, which is as it should be. It’s the other type who inflict their uselessness and boredom on others. Ah, I see you know what I’m talking about. The club has a structure, and an advantageous one at that, as proven by our experiences with the NOVA people. Since the focus is on learning, the boring people who fall behind can’t blame it on others. Am I the only one that notices being boring is not an isolated trait in its practioneers?
One cannot simple be boring. You have to also be unread, hobbyless, non-academic, ill-accomplished, and slow at most things. Speaking of slow, there’s a lady at the library who stand-up comics should study. She messes up everything she tries. Here’s a lady who is very close in age to me, but needs instruction and guidance on everything. Today, she decides she’s going to use the photocopier. The staff had to show her how to put a quarter in the slot and she still messed that up. Then she puts the original in upside down, so the staff had to go get the key to the coin box to give her the money back. She even managed to get the paper feed to jam and in the end the staff made the copy for her, which is what she likely was after in the first place.
It’s rare, but I reviewed some of my own writing tonight. I was amused. Over a decade ago I wrote about wealth distribution. Poor people who crab about the rich don’t realize money does not exist on an infinite scale. Or as I put it back then, if you took all the rich people’s money and divided it equally amongst the poor, they would still be poor.
Port Townsend String Quartet.
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Sardines. I like them, on toast, go git yer own. It’s a 92°F afternoon and I’ve got ready plans to re-read my chapter on the Arduino IDE during such heat. That new tower fan in the back room is proving worth the extra bucks. I’ve looked at what’s changed with Arduino on-line over the last time since I read this book, nine years ago now. But I kept the original versions neatly filed because I know they work. Here’s a scan of the “motor” page, showing my habit of writing dates. I first read this material twelve years ago by the looks of it.
The “new” Google search app does not produce sorted results, so the earliest mention I find of Arduino is in November 9, 2010>November 2010. That’s about right, since it took me a year to save up for that first unit and I started in December 2009. That’s how financially strapped I was after that second heart attack. Besides, why would the average person at Google need to sort anything. Sorting is so Boomer, it’s last century.
The Arduino now comes in around a dozen models, all of which do much the same thing. It shows how channelized the discipline has become that there are now such a demand for versions to be sewn in clothing and attached to bicycles. It’s kind of like mecanno sets that eventually were bought mainly by people fascinated with bridges and cranes. They then become offshoots at that level and stay there. There are only so many times a flashing t-shirt is going to impress, except when modeled by a total babe and it’s like, “what t-shirt”?
Trump is vowing to “obliterate” the Deep State. Aha, told you right here years ago the Leftist fanatics, by persecuting Trump, were merely training the forces that will destroy them. The next of many J6 people, wrongly imprisoned for years by the Democrats, has won his case and been released. These people will never forgive Biden & Pelosi, the whole world knows the “insurrection” was a setup when the left wrongly predicted that Trump supporters would resist the stolen election. Nobody but the indoctrinated radicals then or now thinks Biden won.
Trump is a fast learner and this time he knows the ropes. He knows their tactics, their names, and which laws they enacted that can be used against them. They put such laws into place on the presumption they would always be the only side to use them. It’s just a bit uncanny how this out-of-the way mostly non-political blog predicted exactly what would happen so long ago. And yes, many Americans believe that traitors should get the death penalty.
Don’t matter how you slice it, this blog nailed the future six years ago. Not exact, but the morphing of Trump, the political novice, into the hard-bitten professional. Hey, it’s not like I’m saying is all he had to do was read this blog, but it was decades ago this blog pointed out the degeneration of the political process. For example, the upcoming debate is not a real debate. They want the candidates to hash over only those topics they want Americans to think are big issues. And they have prepared scripts to blast back at any question or rebuff.
Then along comes Trump saying to hell with that. He’ll (at least) talk about real issues. The border, corruption, inflation, wars, degeneracy, the failing economy, transies (thymes with pansies) in the military, Obama, the Hildebeeste, the laptop, and the factors that real people are concerned about. Ha, the mass media and the Deep State have no counter for that. For that matter, they can’t even discuss them without now admitting they are real.
Finally getting to a documentary on South Africa and the decline of Johannesburg. From Africa’s richest city to unpainted buildings, blowing trash, and unemployed blacks wandering in the streets. If the plan was to prove all races are equal, this example is a miserable failure. Even given the finest opportunities, some races seem to have a permanent mud-hut mentality. Don’t contradict unless you’ve seen the video. It’s horrible what diversity did. Now there is no regular water or electricity, so the end is approaching soon. It looks like those Hollywood day-after films with roving street gangs and local warlords. The city has become “a feverish hellscape”.
Time for a snooze. I see Fox News has done another round of layoffs following their loss of Tucker. “Admiral” Levine has announced Queer Pride Month will now last all summer. It would appear the Irish government mob has broken the spirit of the IRA, who seem to not even exist now that a real threat to their existence has arisen. They will kill each other and the English, but not the people who will exterminate them as a race.
Enter the Arduino. It can’t deal with 12V, much less the amperage needed to run even a small DC motor. But it can easily drive a transistor that operates those voltages, but again be careful. Leave that thought alone and go back to the Arduino (Uno). If you examine one, you will see six of the output pins are marked PWM. The Arduino has a separate interior clock that can operate these pins without disrupting the chip clock which is needed for data timing and such. These pins can operate at a duty cycle from 0% to 100% but here is the catch. It is on a scale of 0 to 255. (In other words, the resolution is 8 bits, but that’s another topic.)
It’s simpler than it sounds. You use some form of input device, usually a potentiometer, to change the motor speed. The potentiometer is NOT connected to the motor, but to the Arduino. The Arduino senses the input and uses that to operate the transistor base pin. Remember some transistors are designed as switches, not amplifiers. We call then power transformers. The Arduino sends it a signal between 0 and 255 that switches the transistor off and on at the frequency provided by the Arduino clock. If you send the pin a value of 127, the motor will run at half speed, and a value of 64, at a quarter speed. You only need wrap your head around this once.
There is no direct connection between the input and output, and there is one more quirk. Often the input device has a different resolution that the Arduino 8-bit PWM pins. Such is the case with the analog pins on the Arduino, they are 2¹ยบ resolution, that is, they “read” values sampled at 1,023 pulses per second. (It is sampling an analog voltage from 0V to 5V, which is the maximum voltage you should allow anywhere near your precious Arduino.) You as the programmer are responsible for changing that to the lower 0 - 255 range used by the PWM pins. End of lecture. I was up past 10:00PM doing all this reading so you don’t have to. What a swell guy.
