|
|
|
a fancy toilet seat for Brewster Street
Monday, October 7 2019
The day was warm, though not especially pleasant owing to nearly-constant rainfall, which was fairly heavy at times. In the early afternoon, I drove down to William's Lumber (north of Rhinebeck) to get some supplies for a landlording chore I would be doing after work at the Brewster Street house. There needed to be new caulk put around the freshly-resurfaced bathtub and the toilet seat needed to be replaced (Gretchen was embarrassed by the cheapness of the one our general contractor had installed). But once I got to William's, I realized that I didn't know an important piece of information: was the bowl of the Brewster Street toilet circular or oval? I tried to call Gretchen to confer, but for some reason there was no good cellphone signal (at least on the AT&T network) at William's.
After work, I drove through the rain to the Home Depot (where I took a chance and bought an oval toilet seat) and then to the Brewster Street house via Albany Avenue and Fox Hall Avenue (a street I had little use for before getting a job on the East side of the Hudson while having occasional landording tasks near the Kingston hospital). The woman who rents our house works at night and sleeps during the day, and apparently of late she's been sleeping in the living room. It was blackout dark in there when she let me in. Apparently there had been some miscommunication and she'd been waiting to take a shower until after I caulked the tub, something she seemed impatient for me to do. Not knowing what else to do, I caulked the tub and told her to try her best to keep water off the caulked parts for the time being. As for the toilet seat, that was a pretty straightforward replacement, though I couldn't figure out how to use the bolts that were supplied (they stuck up too high and there were no instructions suggesting they needed to be cut off). In keeping with Gretchen's pattern of late, I'd spent about $10 more on this toilet seat than I could've in order to get a fairly high-end one, the kind with internal springs that keep it from slamming shut. Our financial situation now is considerably better than it was two and a half years ago when we were rehabilitating the Brewster Street House, and we've been overcompensating for the corners we cut back then.
This evening, after a bath, I tinkered more with the information jungle that is LoRa. Using the working 933 MHz gateway as model, I managed to also get the 433 MHz gateway communicating with the TheThingsNetwork.org. And then I had a bit of a breakthrough: the bytes showing up in the data packet log at TheThingsNetwork.org from my 900 MHz LoRa attached to an Arduino were obviously encrypted, but the number of bytes showing up were exactly the same number as the ones transmitted. This suggests I need some way to decrypt them, probably by using the Applications functionality of TheThingsNetwork.org. But that was a another rabbit hole, and it was already time to climb into bed with the dogs (and, as it happened, Charles the Cat). Gretchen returned home from her prison poetry class about an hour later.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?191007 feedback
previous | next |
