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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decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   birds seemed to have faith
Sunday, February 23 2020
This morning I tried to take the dogs on a big-circuit walk starting at near the south end of the Farm Road and then cutting through the expanse of scrubby trail-free forest to near the southernmost point on the Stick Trail. But I lost the dogs early in the walk and did most of it by myself. There was still a morning chill at the time, but the day was sunny and the birds seemed to have faith that Spring was on the march.
Unusually, the dogs joined me this afternoon when I set out on a firewood salvaging foray that took me about a half mile from the house down the Stick Trail. There I felled several small dead oaks and put together a heavy load of very dry wood. Normally I try to undersize my loads when I have to schlep them so far, but my now dual-frame backpack system makes it easy to assemble a stable load with a high center of gravity. For whatever reason, I've found that. all else being equal, the higher the center of gravity the easier the load is to carry. As I was cutting up the wood and creating a new firewood depot, someone was down at the bus turnaround using a gun to destroy the calm. Neville had vanished somewhere, but Ramona stayed with me, waiting patiently and soaking up the low-angle winter sun. Temperatures at the time had risen into the 50s.
Not long after I returned home with my firewood, Neville materialized with a bone he'd found in the woods. It looked like a radius or a tibia from a deer, though I preferred to think of it as a human bone. I know of at least one person who disappeared into these nearby forests whose body was never found.
Meanwhile Gretchen had returned from her socializing-heavy trip to the City and gone directly to work at the bookstore, not even stopping off at the house. A little before she got home, I made a pot of chili, though it turned out she'd eaten a sandwich that had tasted funny, made her feel sick, and ruined her appetite.
Earlier today I'd found some additional hardware for my weather sensor setup, and it gave me some joy to put it all together. All I had left to do was find a site to put it and some hardware suitable for holding a three-quarter inch pipe vertical. Since the Raspberry Pi Zero has a place to attach a camera, I'd decided to add a camera to the weather station. I drilled a small (quarter inch) hole in the side of the electrical box containing all the circuitry and stuck the camera in that hole using epoxy. I then used some silicone caulk to put a rectangular scrap of glass over the hole, protecting the camera from the weather. This setup seemed to work great, though of course there can be no pan/tilt with a camera fixed in place with epoxy.


Ramona and Neville out enjoying the sun this afternoon. Between them on the pallet (which the roofing for the screened-in porch came on) is the Disturbatron, the solar-powered Raspberry-Pi-powered megaphone for harrassing people remotely. There has been enough sun lately for it to work for a few hours a day. Note, this picture is edited; I pasted on the head and shoulders of Neville from another picture so he'd be looking at the camera. Click to enlarge.


Neville with the "human" bone he found this afternoon.


The inside of the weathertron today. At the top is the Raspberry Pi Zero W, on the left is the handmade interface board, in the middle bottom is the Arduino Mini Pro, and on the right is the epoxied-on camera.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?200223

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