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

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Like my brownhouse:
   entirely too much Jersey Shore
Saturday, April 7 2012
I love the Arduino hardware platform and have been using some form of Arduino controller to do the thinking in my hydronic solar energy collector since late 2006. More recently I got a Makerbot Thingomatic, which is controlled by the most advanced iteration of the Arduino, the Mega 2560. Of late, though, not all has been well in Arduino land. My solar controller has a history of crashing and hanging (a problem probably caused by the noisy electrical environment in which it dwells). About a year ago I figured out how to take advantage of its built-in watchdog system to auto reboot it when this happens. But I've noticed that it still crashes and hangs even with the watchdog there to reboot it. Since going back to summer-season solar collection (when the boiler is off and solar becomes the primary means of heating household hot water), this hanging behavior has become a real problem. Sometimes a good part of a sunny day will happen while the controller lies in a coma, unable to open the valves and turn on the circulation pump. So today I decided to try to get to the bottom of the problem. Was the master Arduino hanging up, or was it the slave? And could the slave keep the system in a crashed state despite the watchdog on the master? And, finally, if the slave wasn't the problem, could it be used as a hardware-based watchdog? So I put some code on the slave that would send occasional output to the LCD, which would allow me to see that it was still working even if the master ended up hung.
Then I made the mistake of trying to upgrade my Arduino IDE to version 1.0 (it had been in "alpha release" until very recently). But it turns out that a lot of the libraries have been re-written for 1.0 and break all the old code. I tried fixing some of this, but it was such a mess that I just didn't have the time. I'd made the mistake of trying to use it to remotely update my solar controller, and so now that was broken too.
I was interrupted from this stuff my the monthly first-Saturday event at KMOCA. Sarah the vegan showed up at our house and the three of us (with our three dogs) carpooled to the Rondout. It was a little chilly but if one was wearing a light jacket, hanging out in front of the gallery was the comfortable place to be. In addition to us, two people had brought their puppies. Periodically young women would walk by who looked like they'd watched entirely too much Jersey Shore. Michæl had brought a four pack of Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA, and I had one of those (9% alcohol) and a glass of cheap wine, which made me perhaps a little drunker than I should have been. But that's a fun way to experience a gallery opening. I don't remember much about the art, but there were lots of landcapes painted on small rectangles of glass. Taken individually, they weren't much, but as a group they were gorgeous.

Nancy, Linda, and Adam all showed up late, well after we'd decided to go out for Indian food. (Last night Linda had said she'd had a bad experience from eating Indian food while pregnant and probably won't be eating it again until after giving birth.) There ended up being ten or more of us at the Kingston Indian Restaurant in Uptown Kingston. There was a buffet, but it was looking especially bedraggled, so all of us ordered off the menu instead. I was sitting between Gretchen and Tricia and across from Michæl and his wife Carrie, and I was being a bit louder and more obnoxious than normal. The conversation kept taking sharp turns for the politically incorrect, which is always a refreshing thing (apologies to those with mental challenges who could overhear the things we said).
On the drive home, we noticed that a terrorist had spray painted "LEAVE WOMEN ALONE" on a banner hanging on the chainlink fence in front of Coleman Catholic High School. The banner had said something about protecting life from conception to a natural death, and had depicted an old codger holding a baby (but not an eyedropper containing a blastocyst). Really? We're supposed to care about a ball of cells?


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