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Americans are a dark-fearing people
Sunday, October 1 2017
I got some good work done this afternoon while waiting for the dogs to get back from their morning excursion in the woods. Gretchen had gone to her Sunday shift at the bookstore in Woodstock, but she wanted me to bring Neville there if he showed up. So there I was, doing various things in the laboratory and periodically checking to see if the dogs had returned.
One of the things I did was paint a painting of a bicycle on a tiny one by two inch canvas. It was a ridiculous thing to do, but it bought me the right to drink today.
The other day I'd taken delivery of a small microcontroller device called an Onion Omega2, which bundles memory, flash storage, WiFi capability, numerous GPIO pins, and a 500 MHz processor running OpenWRT (the lean Linux distribution) onto a tiny postage-stamp-sized board costing $9. The business model for Onion appears to be the various stackable boards they convince you that you need in addition to the Omega2 itself, but if you have regulated 3.3 volt DC, the board should work fine on its own. Unfortunately, though, when I powered up my Onion Omega2, it did not boot up enough to become visible as a WiFi hotspot. Later when I hooked up to its serial port, I saw the boot was hanging about ten seconds after starting. I opened a trouble ticket, but the bother of having to fuck around with an unreliable device costing only $9 is enough of a barrier that I might not pursue it much more.
The dogs finally returned a little after 4:00pm, and I immediately packed them into the Subaru and drove to Woodstock. Gretchen wasn't in peak form at the bookstore and admitted she would've liked to be able to lie down. But she had more than an hour left in her shift.
On the drive from Woodstock out to 9W, I stopped at the Tibetan Center thrift store to look around. There was a nice big plastic Tyrannosaurus rex, but he was a bit too stylized for my tastes. Then I was momentarily excited by a pair of Netgear WiFi routers, but they were WGR614s, which (I learned from some on-the-spot research) have little memory and almost no flash space. Since I'd packed up Ramona and headed off before giving her a chance to drink any water, I filled a container of water from the thrift store bathroom and gave that to her in the backsear of the car.
After buying some liquor at Miron, I went into Home Depot mostly looking for leak sealant (my brownhouse cistern has developed another leak around its supply pipe from the gutters). While there, I saw there were a couple new LED lightbulb products. One contained a battery, though I'm not sure how that would work. (Would the bulb stay on after you switched it off?) And another had a built-in motion sensor system. The motion-sensor bulbs were only $8, which is about as cheap as 120 volt motion sensor lights shipped directly from China are. I never run out of uses for motion-sensor illumination, so I bought two.
I was only back home in Hurley for a few minutes before Gretchen and Neville returned from the bookstore shift. Lately she's been complaining about swelling in and around her left ovary, which is probably related to the infection she's been fighting since her early-September hospitalization.
As for the cheap motion sensor bulbs, in actual use I'm not loving how they perform. They seem to activate too easily (perhaps even from drifting motes of dust in the air) and then they stay on far too long (maybe it's only five minutes, but that seems like an eternity). It's hard to find a good motion-sensor system that does what I want: pick out a moving human from a great distance and turn on, but then turn off within a minute. The best such devices are the little LED arrays on the end of articulated metal necks that plug into a 120v outlet (and can only be bought straight from China). I have two of these in the basement hallway and two in the teevee room (I modified one of them with an old hard drive platter so it casts its light backwards instead of into the eyes of the person watching teevee). I've bought numerous simple motion sensor sockets from Home Depot, but for the most part I find they either don't work at all or they work very poorly. It's possible that my tastes in such bulbs are too Chinese, and that motion-sensor systems for Americans are designed to stay on longer and trigger more easily (because Americans are a dark-fearing people who don't mind paying for electricity).
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