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finally the screen stopped rotating
Sunday, August 9 2015
Gretchen and I had our weekly coffee this morning and then she went off to work at the bookstore. Because she hadn't taken the dogs on a good walk, I tried to take them on a better one later on. But they only came with me a short distance up the Farm Road before slowing down, stopping, and then heading back home. That late in the day it seems they fear they might miss out on a fun Gretchen-provided adventure if they accompany me for a ho-hum firewood gathering foray in the forest. Without them following me, I turned left into the woods early, entering the Chamomile gorge below the Farm Road. I attacked a big fallen trunk of oak I've cut pieces from in the past, though the wood tends to be wetter and contains more rot than I normally find acceptable. I suspect the tree is a fallen Red Oak, a species that tends to aborb more water and rot more rapidly than the more common Chestnut Oaks of this forest. Nevertheless, I got a nice big chunk of it, which I carried down to the Stick Trail. As I was preparing to assemble a pack of that and other pieces I've cut in the past, I could hear Ramona barking in the distance, so I hurried back without the backpack, carrying 18.5 pounds of previously-cut wood in my arms. By the time I got home, whatever crisis Ramona had detected had passed. Later I returned and assembled a 95 pound backpack load that included that big chunk of moist redoak. Today's firewood haul thus came to 113.5 pounds.
This afternoon, I assembled a circuit board dominated by an I2C backplane for the weather station client I am building. In addition to the I2C stuff, the board contains headers for serial lines coming from the Arduino Mega and the barometric windvane, and also for a toggle switch allowing me to connect directly to the windvane for software upgrades and debugging. After some testing and a few false starts, I incorporated this backplane into the loose so-far case-free assemblage of boards I am using to develop the software. This later allowed me to add a DS1307 realtime clock board, to which I'd added a short cable that allowed it to plug directly into the backplane. Using some code copied from the Arduino sketch that powers the Solar Sufficiency controller, I soon had some commands for setting and reading the time and date in that clock.
The Digole LCD display I'm using in the weather station client comes with a micro-SD card slot, and this evening I wired it up and wrote some code that successfully created a text file and wrote some content to it. Now I have the software and hardware basis to proceed with my plan for regularly logging weather data to a micro SD card with a view to eventually displaying multitrace graphs of that data.
In other news, today I finally vanquished a vexing problem with my EliteBook 2740p, which is a "tablet convertible" that I never intend to use as a tablet (without touch sensitivity, it wouldn't be any fun to use that way). The problem was that it still seemed to hope I would use it as a tablet, and it had a tendency to regularly come out hibernation with its screen shifted from landscape to portrait mode. Portrait mode renders a laptop unusable; its trackpad becomes so counter-intuitive that the only way out is to know the key sequence that can fix it. But by that point all the windows have been restacked and resized, since they didn't find themselves fitting the screen when it was in portrait mode (and you know what I think of that). While not a deal breaker, this random format switching infuriates me. What idiot allowed a product to ship with such a fundamental problem? (I have a feeling Carly Fiorina is ultimately to blame.) Up until yesterday, all my Google searches hoping to find a solution had come up empty, referring to a non-existent checkbox in a version of a graphic controller control panel that I do not have and cannot find. Today, though, someone somewhere made reference to a place in the registry called EnableRotation that can be set to 0. I didn't actually find that entry in the registry of my computer, but I did find something called Display1_EnableRotation and something else called Display1_IndependentRotation. I set all such things to zero, and since doing that, the screen has stayed in landscape mode after multiple hibernations.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?150809 feedback
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