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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Tuesday, March 26 2024
I had another good day of progress on my remote control system. The main advance was figuring out how best to handle situations where the server starts sending gzipped web pages. (I'd tried to implement unzipping of such data, and I even found a library to do this for files. But in my case I had to unzip either a string or a stream, and I couldn't find a way to do that without having to wade into the details of how this stuff works, so it seemed like a workaround for gzipped data was prudent.) My initial solution for this was to test to see whether a JSON string arrived at the microcontroller, and if it did not, it would go into a mode where, with every request, it would increment a counter holding a pin number and send that to the server, and the server would see that and know to only send data for one pin, which (for multipin setups) would be a fraction of the data, hopefully whatever the limit is before the server starts gzipping. The problem with this was that the code was unaware of what pins were bing used. So today I added some code to also send a brief list of the pins that the database knows about. The microcontroller then uses that information to narrow down what pins it needs to cycle through when avoiding the sending of gzipped data. To help with my debugging of problems, I also added a feature where the microcontroller updates the server with its understanding of what values its pins should have, thereby confirming to me immediately what devices it thinks should be on without my having to wait to see the effects of their being on in the electrical and temperature data.

Meanwhile the weather outside had become considerably more pleasant than it had been for the past week or so. It was cloudy, but it was also fairly warm. It was nice enough that Gretchen took Charlotte on two different walks and then insisted that I take her and Neville on a walk. So at a little after 5:00pm I set out, surprised that Neville would actually leave the house when Gretchen was around. We went into the forest west of the Farm Road and then continued west of our uphill neighbor A's house. I noticed a bunch of new survey flagging at the southwest corner of her place and wondered what that was about. So I continued westward for not all that much further until, to my surprise, I encountered a new house being built somewhere south of Reichel Road's intersection with Dug Hill Road. This was the closest new house to our house that had ever been built in the 21.5 years we've lived here, so it came as a shock. I climbed up a short, steep bank above a temporary creek out into the massive clearing that had been made for the house (people sure love to tear down trees when they build a house!) and had a look around. The ground was covered with millions of small chips of shale, indicating a lot aof bulldozong had taken place. The house itself was a prefab with ugly grey-blue vinyl siding. All the components were on the site, though it was all waiting for a crane so it could be assembled. A basement had been dug and cast in concrete and looked to be for a house about the size of our Adirondack cabin, though it lacked provisions for access from the outside. Interestingly, the concrete walls of this foundation had been covered on the outside with styrofoam, though that foam was only about a half inch thick. Overall, it was a depressing thing to behold. But for most of my time in Hurley I've had it pretty easy when it comes to the depression caused by suburban sprawl and the replacing of nature with lawns that must be mowed. That sort of thing doesn't happen in New York the way it does in Virginia. I don't know if this is because of zoning laws, building regulations, enforcement, or a combination of all those factors. But it keeps houses from being built and helps preserve nature. I know that the result of this is that in blue states, housing is unaffordable for Millennials and Generation Z, and that's a problem. But I'd much rather the solution be the building of high-density dwellings in walkable cities instead of the creation of highly fossil-fuel-dependent single-family homes surrounded by massive yards.
Back at the house, Gretchen had been going throught the freezers finding various odds and ends to cobble together into a meal: spring rolls, sausage patties, faux chicken nuggets, and dumplings. With this, she made me a couple sausage burittos with ranch dressing that were pretty good.
Meanwhile, the dogs had been having a big adventure on their own in the forest. Neville was the first to get back, so I started to worry a little about Charlotte. Fortunately when I went out to look for her, I found her lying on the edge of the yard chewing on a delicious boned she'd found.


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