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chipping away at the ice deposit
Tuesday, February 25 2025
Late this morning I drove into Uptown Kingston and went to the state office building (the ugliest one in the city) to get a RealID at the Department of Motor Vehicles. When I'd gotten my driver's license renewed a year or so ago, I'd neglected to get a RealID, and that meant that soon I would no longer be able to use my driver's license to board a domestic flight, something Gretchen thought would be a problem. She had gotten a RealID, which meant that we'd have different kinds of IDs, and we'd have to remember to bring my passport even when just flying domestically. So there I was at the DMV getting a RealID. I'd thought ahead this time and pre-arranged an appointment, which was a good idea because, unlike in the recent past, the Kingston DMV is no longer a place where you can just drop in and get an ID made. These days, it's always crowded by people who are just a little irked by the situation. I didn't really have time to fill out the driver's license form completely, though that didn't turn out to be a problem. What could've been a problem was the utility bill Gretchen had printed out for me, which is part of the additional documentation necessary to get a RealID. Our printer had left a little too much smudge on it, which the clerk thought made it look too much like a photocopy. (What choice did I have, though, since we've made our bills about as paperless as one can, meaning there are no official printouts from Central Hudson mailed to our house?) But that didn't turn out to be a problem either because I'd brought my passport, a document not even mentioned in on the DMV website. It turns out that if you have that, then you don't even need a utility bill. Due to the timing of my new ID, the clerk handled it as premature license renewal, which meant I had to have a vision test, one I easily aced even without my glasses.
After that, I drove out to the Home Depot, mostly to get superglue and small pan-headed screws, which I've recently been using in large amounts. (Unfortunately, hardware stores do not actually sell such screws that are quite small enough to easily attach small circuit boards to wooden panels, but I can usually make their smallest screws work for this purpose.)
We experienced a nice thaw today, and I kept returning to the driveway to chip away at the mass of ice that has been there for more than ten days. I also began the work of breaking away the ice in the pathway connecting the driveway to our front door. Once I'd done a good amount of that, Gretchen took a turn at it and chipped away most of the rest.
This evening, Gretchen made a pizza with a second pizza dough she'd bought at Hannaford when she'd bought the pizza dough for my birthday pizza. Knowing how flavorless Hannaford pizza dough is, though, she dusted it with salt and slathered it with pesto oil from some greasy pasta she'd had last night. She also cooked up some faux meat based on lion's mane mushrooms, and the combination of these things ended up making for an especially good pizza.
Meanwhile, throughout the day, I continued working on fixing the little annoyances remaining in my ESP8266 firmware since adding the FRAM local storage. At some point today I nearly gave up on it in despair beause yet again the FRAM wasn't saving data, and I figured that was it, I'd run into the wall of impenetrable complexity. But then I saw that some of the wires connecting the FRAM module to the rest of the circuitry had come off their pins. Once that was fixed, I made good progress on the other remaining bugs, eventually fixing the code that changes an inter-record delimiter that also holds the status of the preceding record. I then put some effort into building out a system to send "quick" commands to an ESP8266 from a tool on the backend-hosted administration site. Such commands are simply written as file in the web server's file system and their commands picked up when the ESP8266 polls the backend. I was using this to do essentially what I'd been doing through the serial connection, a functionality that mysteriously stopped working and that I haven't been able to fix. But sending commands this way, from a tool on a web page that ultimately reaches the ESP8266 via WiFi and not serial, will allow me to easily send commands to an ESP8266 from anywhere in the world. I might even figure out how to divert messages that the ESP8266 sends out its serial port (in response to such commands) to a packet sent via WiFi that I can then display on the command-sending web page.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?250225 feedback
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