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acorns and sunflower seeds
Monday, April 4 2022
Today while doing other things (mostly involving Azure DevOps), I also was looking into how to get my NodeMCU device communicating with the Blynk backend. It turns out that anyone can host their own Blynk server over which they have complete control, and I actually managed to get one working on my Debian-based RandomSprocket.com server, the one I mostly use to forward my asecular.com email and download media files. The Blynk backend is written in Java, perhaps the only popular computer language I have zero experience with. All I had to do was execute the .jar file and then it worked. But to begin logging data and such, I would need to get the API keys working, and this required getting email sending to work on the server. That might've been easy, but the possibility that it wasn't was enough to stop my progress completely. At this point it might be best just to find some example of a NodeMCU shipping JSON to an endpoint, because I know it would be a simple matter to handle things from there. I have working PHP code for this already implemented for my Weathertron project, which even includes Javascript-based graphical display of data.
A minor triumph today came while playing the New York Times Spelling Bee, whose panagram today was "laughed" (with "h" in the middle). When I was down to only having two words left to achieve queen bee, I knew one word was a four letter word and one word was a five letter word. I found the last four-letter word fairly quickly by putting a "d" on the end of a three-letter word (the game only accepts words four or more letters long, so it's easy to be blind to three-letter words, and thus the longer words they can be part of). With that out of the way, I went hunting for four-letter words that could take various endings. One promising ending was "age," so I tried sticking this on already-found four-letter words. This was how I found "haulage" and made queen bee.
After work, I took the dogs on a walk up the Farm Road and then up the escarpment west of the Farm Road and then back homeward along the terraces up there. Somewhere along the way, Neville found a pair of articulated deer leg bones that he and Ramona briefly fought over in the yard as I was trying to take my customary Monday evening bath. I'd brought my camera and took a few pictures along the way, including of a large bear turd that I'd noticed a few days ago in the Farm Road. It had since been washed by rain and now revealed its essence: mostly acorn shells, sunflower seed husks, and black fur from grooming. The forest is still full of acorns, but I suspect the sunflower seeds are mostly from bird feeders (though they could be from sunflowers grown down in the fields of the Esopus Valley, assuming the seeds somehow weren't all eaten by birds over the winter). I also got a photo of some sort of woodpecker [which I later identified as a yellow-bellied sapsucker]. [I'd never been aware of this species before other than as something in bird books.]
The dogs on the Farm Road today.
Click to enlarge.
A rain-washed bear turd on the Farm Road. Note the acorn shells, sunflower seed husks, and bear fur.
Click to enlarge.
A yellow-bellied sapsucker.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?220404 feedback
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