Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   scavenger cat on Middle Road
Wednesday, February 12 2020
As I was driving homeward on Middle Road this afternoon, I saw a cat in the road. The cat was very much alive, but there was something dead as well. It turned out that the dead thing was a crushed squirrel. I don't know if the cat was eating the crushed squirrel or just curious about it, but he or she was likely to experience a similar fate if he or she stayed there. So I stopped the car and put the dead squirrel along the fenceline, well out of the road. The cat was initially startled by my approach, but then sat there watching me because I had become more interesting than the squirrel. Only then did I remember to take a photograph.
Back at the house, I used my newly dual-frame firewood salvaging backpack to gather some more of that white ash near just above where the Stick Trail crosses the Chamomile. The pieces I was cutting were a bit long and, being from near the bottom of the trunk, thick. So I could only carry one at a time. So I finished out the load with some smaller pieces from other skeletonized white ashes, of which there were several. (The Chamomile provides the moisture these trees prefer, or did prefer before being wiped out by the emerald ash borer.)
I then proceeded to paint a small painting of a holstein cow in a grassy field, thus buying me the right to drink some alcohol. I tried not to overdo it, though I'd had120 milligrams of pseudoephedrine earlier, and that always makes me want to drink enough to suffer the next day.
Some months ago, I wanted to make use of a MAX7219 to perhaps replication my Ahmed Mohammed clock. But I quickly ran into a problem: the individual 64-LED cells of the matrix were oriented wrong, so they displayed content (sometimes from two adjacent characters) rotated 90 degrees from the way they needed to be. I altered a web-based MAX7219 character set editor so that I could bulk-rotate characters, but this didn't solve the problem because characters are of different widths and often span boundaries between individual units. Today, though, I tried a different library that can be configured to deal with matrices wired the way mine are. It worked great, once I figured out how to configure the library. The key was this line:

#define HARDWARE_TYPE MD_MAX72XX::FC16_HW

In the process of all this, I kept swapping arrays of loose wires with 0.1 inch connectors between devices. Inevitably a digital control wire went to the wrong pin, causing at least a half hour of puzzling uselessness. Since I tend to be a cheerful pessimist, when this sort of thing happens I always fear that I've managed to destroy my electronics, though that is seldom the case.


The cat and the crushed squirrel along Middle Road this afternoon. Click for a wider view.


Today's cow painting.


And the double-flip version.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?200212

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