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Remote Ready
Monday, November 11 2024
Last night it had rained for the first time in weeks, hopefully doing something about a number of ongoing brush and forest fires in the Catskills. Enough water had fallen to fill in the shallow basin I'd jackhammered into the slab in front of the door, leading me to joke about how we now had a second house with a lake.
In recent days, I'd gathered some beautiful pieces of bluestone for the front slab repaving project, but I wasn't happy with any of them, because few of them seemed to work in the game of Tetris necessary to retile what needed retiling. So I went on multiple forays throughout the day, sometimes with Charlotte, once even with Neville, in an effort to get more, diverse pieces. I started with a visit to a little microquarry one hundred feet above the Stick Trail about a quarter mile from home, a place I'd gotten great flagstones from in the past. Then I went on another foray up the Chamomile from the Stick Trail looking for small durable triangles (which are always needed when tiling with bluestone). Then later I went most of the way down the Farm Road and came back home along the top of the escarpment to the west, where I knew there to be a sprinkling of good small bluestone pieces. I spread all of these out on the grass near where I was doing the repaving, but I didn't make any actual progress on it. Indeed, an old piece of bluestone I'd put down 20 or more years ago delaminated while I was playing some preliminary Tetris to see what kind of pieces I still needed.
Meanwhile, throughout the day, I gradually spiralled into knowledge of how the fuel level gauges for LP tanks work. It turns out that the gauge has a float mechanism similar to the one in a fuel oil tank, though it's sealed away under the high pressure necessary to make LP into a liquid that things can float in. To communicate that level to the meter on the outside, it uses the relative strength of a magnetic field, with a fix magnet that moves inside the tank depending on the fuel level. Most of this information was essentially impossible to find using a search engine, since the results for my queries tended to be filled with unrelated propane grilling products for me to buy (thanks, enshittification!). The only way to get answers to my LP fuel gauge questions was to use an AI chatbot like ChatGPT (not yet enshittified!). Eventually, though, I hit the limits of what ChatGPT could say, so this led me to wade into search engine results (I've recently replaced Google with Bing on Woodchuck, my main computer), and this was how I came to learn about "Remote Ready," a standard that allows fuel level gauges to be attached to digital devices so that the fuel levels can be logged in a database or whatever. Then I looked at a photo I'd taken of the fuel gauge on the propane tank at the cabin and saw that it had a partially-broken-off "Remote Ready" tab. This was great, because it meant it would be easy to electronically monitor fuel levels at the cabin, providing me yet more useful data on the cabin's web-based dashboard. Now the only real challenges remaining to getting that working are getting a linear hall-effect sensor (to snap into the place where the "Remote Ready" tab is) and finding a way to power an ESP8266 at the propane tank, where there is no power.
I took an early bath this afternoon, which put me a bit off my game later in the evening when Gretchen came home. Normally I cook dinner on Monday nights, but we had so many leftovers, we'd agreed that I shouldn't. But then the kitchen was a mess, because I hadn't really done anything in there all day except make a bagel, which sprayed sesame seeds all over the island. This seemed to put Gretchen in a grumpy mood, making her ask what if anything I'd been doing all day with my free time. But she'd recovered after Jeopardy! enough to want to watch Shark Tank. But that was so full of meat-heavy business ideas that Gretchen compared watching it to experiencing the looming second Trump administration. The only segment we ended up watching was one about an idea for a yard game called "bucket golf."
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