|
|
|
something a bit squirrely happening
Sunday, July 14 2019
I got up fairly early (for a Sunday) just to see if I could get https working on the speakerbot. Aside from one little thing, getting that working wasn't too hard, at least with a so-called "snake oil" (self-signed) ssh certificate. Google Chrome loses its shit when it sees a page with one of those, but it's possible to click through all the warnings to get to the page. And, because I was coming in through https (shady though it was with a snake-oil certificate), Google now allowed me to use its media capture capabilities to record audio directly from a client computer's microphone. This was copied to the backend (in this case, a directory on the speakerbot), where it was immediately available for playing through the megaphone, just like any other audio sample in its library. (Last night I'd also added features allowing those files to be deleted and renamed, which will be important as unwanted recordings accumulate in the library.) Gretchen and I later tried out recording and then playing audio using a Chromebook, and the audio coming out of the megaphone on the remote speakerbot was of unexpectedly good quality, Anyone wanting the source for this project should check out the disturbatron repository I've made on Github.
I was feeling unusually drag-ass today, perhaps because of the landlording chore I had to do. Before cracking down on the obnoxious neighbor of the Brewster Street house, the building inspector wanted us to do a few more repairs to the solid wooden boundary fence. Eventually, though, I developed the motivation. I loaded up Ramona and drove out to Lowes, since I'd been to Home Depot and hadn't liked their options for metal fence posts, which I wanted to use to stabilize the bottoms of wooden posts that might've rotted through at the ground. Lowes had good, tall metal fenceposts off in the outdoor garden area, so I gathered up five of them and walked all the way back through the store (an employee walking behind me chuckled and said that I must like to torture myself).
At the Brewster Street house, there was only one wooden post that looked like it needed to be righted, and one of the metal posts pretty much did the trick, especially when braced with a short diagonal steel stake. I used another stake to further firm-up the wooden post I'd worked on last week, first pulling it as plumb as possible with some rope strung across the yard to the gate on the other side. Meanwhile, Ramona (who'd sought shade beneath a table) quickly became bored, though she briefly found something interesting in the makeshift stone fire pit (which, Gretchen discovered, is technically illegal). As always, there was something a bit squirrely happening at the Brewster house while I was there. Today it took the form of a scrawny white guy on the front porch whose entire attention was evenly divided between his cigarette and his phone. Such people never acknowledge my existence, which makes them seem even less legit than they otherwise would.
After doing a small load of laundry back at the house, I felt I'd earned a nap, for which Ramona joined me. With the ceiling fan blasting, the upstairs bedroom was perfectly comfortable despite the relentless blaze of the summer sun.
I noticed a couple weird issues with the hydronic solar controller today. In the middle of the day, the circulation pump wasn't running, and it turned out that the system had switched itself to winter mode. And then when I wanted to remotely see what it was doing, the only data coming out of the serial cable was strings of "@" characters. This was easily fixed by replacing the Max232 chip, but that raises an important question: why do none of my Max232 chips last any longer than a month or two? They're connected to the laboratory via a 70 or 80 foot cable, but the other end of that cable is now just a Raspberry Pi. Perhaps I just have a batch of bad Max232 chips, which wouldn't be surprising since I only ever buy the cheapest options on eBay. To hedge against that possibility, today I replaced the bad Max232 with a Max3232.
Meanwhile, Gretchen had worked with Neville at the bookstore in Woodstock. Gretchen wore her "sexy girlscout" dress, which got plenty of compliments. Later, when she was in the Hurley Ridge Hannford, someone said they recognized her from the bookstore just because of that dress. When Gretchen got home, she and I made pasta with tofu and Chinese pesto, which we ate while watching the first episode of the third season of Stranger Things. I've never much liked Stranger Things but I've watched it as something to do with Gretchen. This season, though, is looking like it might (for me at least) be unwatchable.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?190714 feedback
previous | next |
