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first Github contribution to a stranger
Saturday, August 31 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
This morning after coffee and collaborative Spelling Bee, I turned my attention back to the problem of radio reception in the Chevy Bolt. On a whim, I disconnected the coax cable going into the the antenna amp I'd exposed beneath the trim above the back hatch window and touched a 40 inch piece of copper wire to its inner conductor. The reception for the marginal station I'd tuned in (WEXT at 97.7 MHz, broadcast from Amsterdam) immediately went from a wall of static to crystal clear. Clearly that amplifier was playing a role in FM reception. But how? I couldn't see any other wires going from it except a big structural ground (secured by a 10 mm bolt) and the coax cable input. So I removed the antenna amplifier to look at it in detail. After doing that, I saw a tiny three-wire connector on the side of it. When I touched my long copper wire to its pins, the FM reception dramatically improved. Clearly, something was supposed to attach to that connector. But I couldn't see any loose connectors anywhere. But then, looking somewhat further afield, I saw the correct connector stuffed away in a hole that exposed a little more rear window glass. With some tugging, I managed to pull that connector and a couple inches of wire out of the hole. When I connected it up, FM reception was restored.
In the course of doing all that, I'd been communicating with ChatGPT, asking questions such as might the wires used for defrosting the rear window also be used as an antenna (ChatGPT seemed to think so). Ultimately, though, ChatGPT hadn't been much help, and neither had Google. A Github repository with Bolt information had mentioned the antenna amplifier, which was a little helpful, but nowhere had I seen mention of how the antenna integrated into the rear window. So I submitted a pull request to that somewhat-helpful Github repository, and to my surprise a blurb I wrote about the FM radio antenna was accepted and merged with the existing text. This was the first time I'd ever contributed to a code repository (though admittedly thiswas just text, not code) of someone whom I do not know.
Cloud, rain, and some pain in one of her feet kept Gretchen away from the dock all day. But I went down the trail several times to do things like gather rocks, stack an elaborate cairn about half way down the Mossy Rock Trail, and use bits of bluestone from the hundred or more pounds I'd driven up with to further improve that trail in various places.
This evening Gretchen made some sort of hot dish comprised of polenta, faux sausage, various greens, and tomato sauce. It was better than expected, as I don't much care for polenta.
Later she wanted to watch one of the many a movies I have on the old media server hard drive, which I usually keep at the cabin as a form of remote backup. I didn't have my travel laptop, and I've found it's essentially impossible to access a Windows share from a Chromebook, so getting this all to work was going to be tricky. But I did have an old Windows 10 laptop whose hinges were all busted but that might otherwise work. Its screen turned out to no longer be working, but I was able to attach it to a monitor using a mini (or is it micro?) HDMI adapter and it was able to access shares on Hyrax, the Windows 7 laptop that functions as my fix upstairs workstation. Gretchen didn't scroll far down the movies before she found one to watch: A Million Ways to Die in the West, a star-studded Set McFarlane homage/parody of Westerns. Initially it had us losing our shit with laughter, but towards the end it dragged a bit. Also, Gretchen noticed that it was offensive in ways that definitely dated it to 2014. As a member of Generation X, the few uses of "retard" didn't bother her. But she was aghast when McFarlane made a joke about black men stereotypically liking large asses on women. As for the "Runaway Slave" shooting gallery at the fair, that seemed more daring than offensive, given that McFarlane was trying to parody how fucked up the 19th Century truly was.
It turned out that Gretchen had actually seen the movie before, but I hadn't.
[REDACTED]
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