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microSD hell
Tuesday, September 8 2026
Whatever was wrong with Gretchen's leg seems to have faded away and she's back to walking regularly in the forest. Today she went on a walk with our neighbor A, though she snuck out so Neville wouldn't get excited about his "favorite aunt." (Gretchen pronounces that last word like she does the one referring to the wingless social insect in the order Hymenoptera.) Later, though, after the hike when Gretchen and A were in the back side of the yard talking, Neville could tell he was missing out on something, so he eventually went out and got to spend a little time with A and her dog Henry. Neville has been pretty sedate this past month, perhaps due to all the medication we keep him on, but in A's presence he was bounding around a little like a puppy and Gretchen was worried he would get his heart rate up. But of course nothing bad happened.
Later in the morning, someone was down lower on Dug Hill Road repeatedly shooting a small-caliber gun. Had this been the bad old days, they would've been at the old school bus turnaround. But that's been closed for years, with signs forbidding target practice and large bluestone boulders to prevent parking. So this person was probably parked across the road in a new makeshift pulloff, shooting at his own ad hoc targets. I'd driven by a guy doing precisely this last week and had leaned on my horn to signal my displeasure. Evidently he was back.
I spent much more time today than I would've preferred trying to get one of my Raspberry Pi Zeros working again as a network camera so I can use it to keep tabs on Neville. As you may recall, I built numerous remote network cameras using Raspberry Pi Zeros starting back in 2019. Some were for security or other monitoring tasks and others were to capture photographs and videos of various charismatic birds (such as nesting pileated woodpeckers or feeding ruby-throated hummingbirds). I also built an experimental non-camera device for remotely playing audio clips. I'd subsequently lost interest in those devices, particularly once I lost access to an ssh-tunnelling service that had been free and discovered all the things I could do with the much more limited (and less power-hungry) ESP8266. But I still have those Raspberry Pi Zeros, which is great, because they were cheap back when I bought them ($5 to $15), and these days, due to LLM-caused tech inflation, it's impossible to get one for less than $30. Happily, many of these devices have been running since the beginning of the covid pandemic without any sort of maintenance, which is much greater reliability than they initially had led me to expect. But getting a new one working has been a challenge, and this was partly due to the half-baked nature of how Windows 10 handles the plugging in and removal of SD cards (in this case microSD cards plugged into a USB-3-based card reader). I'd plug one in and try to either read from it or write to it with a program blike Rufus, Balena Etcher, or Win32DiskImager and inevitably the program would get hung. And by hung, I mean it would be so stuck that I couldn't even kill it with the task manager. And once it was hung, that was it, the card reader was useless until I rebooted the computer, a non-trivial procedure on a computer where you have multiple things where you want them. Sometimes I'd then try doing the same thing on one of my two ThinkPad E595s, but the SD card reader on one of them reliably crashes the computer and is thus useless. Fortunately, though, the other contains my most reliable SD card reader, and so I was able to do what I needed to do using that. But in the process I had other problems, particularly when I wanted to test a newly-prepared microSD card in the laboratory's network camera setup, which is a Raspberry Pi Zero with various peripherals on a wooden board attached to the wall near the window out to the laboratory deck. Because of the way it is attached, the microSD card must be installed using needle-nosed pliers or a pair of tweezers (that's my bad!). So of course I somehow fumbled the installation on one occasion and the card bounced out onto the labortory deck and fell through the gap between the decking planks onto the roof below. This was what caused me to walk out onto that roof for the first time in years, and fortunately I found and retrieved the tiny card. Eventually I got my new camera working using an image of the microSD card from my old Disturbatron, the device used to heckle people remotely.
This afternoon I took Charlotte for a walk down the Chamomile Gorge Trail and then back up the mostly-dry creekbed of the Chamomile itself, though Charlotte disappeared somewhere along the connecting path between the Gulley's Trail and Crazy Dave's cottage and I didn't see her again until I got back home. As I was coming back in the creekbed, I came upon a small (three foot) rat snake with a distinct diamond pattern in her otherwise black scales. As I tried to get a good picture of her, she started developing loops back and forth in her neck to make for a better strike at me, so I backed off and eventually let her slip away.
Regarding my health, it's important to say that I still wasn't feeling 100% today. I had mild intestinal discomfort and well as little needle-like aches in weird places like on the tip of my big right toe. I also felt a general malaise that kept me from doing anything too involved. This evening, after a guy came by to take pictures of Gretchen and the dogs and cats for a publication, I took my second bath in two days, mostly for my infected left middle toe (which is actually healing).
When I was in the bed this evening while Gretchen was washing the dishes, Neville spontaneously decided to go up the stairs on his own and climb in bed with me. The exertion didn't seem to fatigue him much, so we decided it wasn't a bad thing and even that he could sleep upstairs with us tonight, though we closed the bedroom door so he couldn't wander off in the middle of the night.
The snake I came upon today in the dry Chamomile creek bed. Click to enlarge.
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