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
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dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

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Like my brownhouse:
   lithium battery flashlights in the forest
Monday, November 18 2024

location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY

The fact that I have such good data coming from the cabin and can turn energy-hungry devices on and off remotely means that I can do experiments from afar, sort of like with the Voyager space probes (but with much lower data latency, given the only one millisecond round trip of light). So at some point this morning I switched on the minisplit and wanted to monitor how much power it used with outdoor temperatures in the low 50s. It ran for awhile and then seemed to switch off, though the data from the controller said that it hadn't switched it off. Digging into the data, though, it was clear that the controller ESP8266 (which provides remote control for all devices except the generator) had crashed and was no longer polling the server. This was a problem I'd seen in the past, particularly for the ESP8266 that serves as the cellular hotspot watchdog. Once it enters a certain state, it's dead, and no longer does anything, much less poll the server. This reflects an unacceptably high level of unreliability in ESP8266s. If they can only be counted on to run for a few months at a time, they can't really be counted on at all. So I did ome research to see what the problem might be and if there was anything that could be done about it. This eventually led me to an article where someone described what sounded like the exact same problem. The solution that seemed to work for this problem was to put WiFi.persistent(false); in the code before WiFi.begin();. If that's all that needs to be done, the fix will be easy. But in the meantime I'm helpless to do anything remotely at the cabin except to turn on the generator until, that is, I drive there.

This afternoon I took advantage of surprisingly balmy weather to continue work on the repaving project in front of the front door. A few other stones had delaminated, and now I had to jackhammer away yet more material to prepare the site for new stone. This also meant that I had to find more stones, since now the area needing to be repaved had at least doubled. When I took Charlotte for a brief walk up the Farm Road and back, I checked out that most recently discovered micro-quarry near its southern end to see if there were any more pieces from it I could use. At this point, nearly all the good pieces are gone, but I still found a few, which I cached for later pickup in a vehicle.
Late this afternoon, I made a pasta meal consisting of campanelle pasta cooked with cauliflower and a big pan of seared tempeh, mushrooms, and onions cooked with a lot of black pepper and a good amount of tamari and salt. Eaten with Rao's marinara sauce and some shavings of ghost pepper, it tasted like something I would very much order again at a restaurant.
But before Gretchen got home from work, I did some more work on the emerging stonework I've been doing at the bottom of the mountain goat path behind the woodshed. It now includes an impressive stone ramp making a gradual transition from the flatland of the terrace below to the slope of the mountain-goat part of the path. Additionally, I've been improving a stone wall that runs on its north and northeast side using rocks that are unsuitable for the stone ramp. There is a lot of rock nearby in the talus slope, but most of it is weirdly-shaped and better for making rough walls than anything else.
After dinner, I took my first bath in many days. Then I went on a drive to pick up the bluestone I'd cached along the Farm Road earlier. While I was in the area, I thought I'd go check out a somewhat larger microquarry somewhat further into the forest to the east. I had a flashlight, so I figured I'd be able to find it based on my knowledge of the land. In the darkness, though, with limited visibility into the distance, it proved difficult to find. I did eventually find it, but then I ran into a technical limitation of a flashlight powered by modern rechargeable lithium batteries. When it ran out of juice, it just stopped working without any sort of warning. (An old flashlight powered by alkaline batteries gives plenty of warning as it gradually fades out, but a lithium-powered flashlight seems fully charged right until it has nothing left.) So there I was in the darkness of the forest with only the autumn moon to light my way (fortunately the moon was up and had been full only three days before). I grabbed a piece of bluestone I could make out just so I'd have something from this misadventure, and slowly picked my way back to the Farm Road. Periodically I'd try the flashlight and it would work for a few seconds, and I'd make good progress.

Back at the house, Gretchen somehow convinced me to watch the Princess Bride with her, as there had been a clue about it on the episode of Jeopardy! we'd watched today. Initially I was reluctant, because I don't have the attention span for that sort of thing any more and I wanted to get started on my propane tank monitoring project. So Gretchen suggested we just try to watch 20 minutes of it, and I agreed. Ultimately, I was like the sick grandson to whom Peter Falk reads the "story" (which is told as story-within-a-story). I started out initially dismissive but then gradually got sucked in and wanted to know how it ended. It was a bit goofy for my tastes, but I enjoyed it nevertheless.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?241118

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