Catching Up

Covid For Christmas – The Great Pi Famine -Lettuce In December – Weather – Dreams

---

Covid

So on Dec. 23 MrsGF got an unwelcome Christmas present, Covid. Don’t worry, she’s doing fine. She still has a nasty cough but she’s feeling much better and has been testing negative for two days now so we’re hoping it’s all over. Somehow I avoided coming down with it. I took precautions, staying in the basement most of the time, eating our meals separately, wearing N-95 mask whenever I was upstairs, etc. But even so I figured I’d come down with it too. Well, I still might. She’s been testing negative for 2 days now. They say that the incubation time for the current strain is about 2 – 4 days, so I’m not going to be able to relax much for another couple of days.

And me… I’m a hypochondriac. All through the pandemic, every time I coughed or sneezed or my head got stuffed up, I was convinced I had Covid myself. And I have some pretty nasty upper respiratory allergies on top of it, so I pretty much have mild symptoms that could be mistaken for the early stages of Covid all the time.

The Great Pi Famine

If you’ve been following this blog for a while you know I like to fiddle around with electronic gadgets and gizmos and tinker and build stuff. One of the mainstays of the electronic tinkerers out there as a controller of electronic equipment of all types has been a tiny little single board computer called a Raspberry Pi. They’re available in a variety of types ranging from tiny little units that are used as controllers for a variety of gizmos, to a full blown Linux computer that’s smaller than a deck of cards, the Raspberry Pi 4 and now the new, more powerful Pi 5. There are four things that make them attractive. They’re small. Very small. They are designed to make it easy to interface them to the outside world in order to use them to control robots, motors, actuators of various types, collect data from sensors, etc. And three, they’re relatively easy to use, easy to program and enormously powerful for their size.

And the fourth thing, they were cheap. Like really cheap. The Pi 4 which is basically a full blown Linux (using a variation of Debian) computer with up to 8 gig of RAM, built in WiFi, HDMI video, USB 2 and USB3 ports sold for about $40 or even less. If you ever wanted to play around with Linux to see if it could be a viable replacement for the ever increasing horror that is Microsoft Windows, a Pi 4 is an easy and cheap way to do it. Just plug in a monitor, keyboard and mouse, get yourself a good introductory book on the Pi computers, and away you go.

Sidenote: I was just reading an article the other day that illustrated just how much computing technology had advanced in the last few decades. Someone pointed out that the Raspberry Pi 4 is six times more powerful than the original Cray 1 “super computer”.

Note that I used the past tense there. They were cheap. Then the pandemic hit, supply chain problems hit, demand for Pis increased because people were stuck at home and were looking for things to do, and, perhaps most importantly, the profiteers struck. Scalpers, profiteers, scammers and the like snapped up every Pi they could get their hands on, and then turned around and re-sold them for three, four times their original cost. I saw Pi 4s, a computer that sold for about $35 – $40 originally, being sold for $250 or more.

Pre pandemic I had a half dozen or more of the things laying around the house. But I gave them to a friend who was an electronics experimenter and solar power experimenter before the drought hit. Get them back from him? Yeah, well, he lives in Barcelona half the year so that ain’t gonna happen.

After the pandemic, when I couldn’t get them for a reasonable price any more, I switched to using Arduinos for the fiddling around I was doing. But while they and other microcontrollers are extremely useful and fun to play with, they aren’t computers.

But now prices have finally started to settle down. They’re still over priced when compared to what they were before the pandemic, about $75. But that’s cheap enough that I’m willing to get one and start playing around with it.

To make a long story short the nice fellow from UPS dropped one off here (two, actually) and I spent a couple of hours setting it up, updating the software and fiddling around with it last night. So you might be seeing some more stuff pop up here concerning Linux and the Pi in the future.

If you want to fiddle around with one of these yourself and you’re new to the Pi I’d recommend you get something like this from a company like CannaKit in the photo below.

It includes everything needed to get the thing up and running. The Pi 4, a power supply for it, HDMI cables to connect a monitor, a case for it along with a tiny cooling fan, heat sinks for the CPU and two other chips on the board, and a micro-SD card with the operating system pre-installed. It’s more expensive than buying a bare bones Pi but it has everything needed to get it operational. Just plug in a keyboard and mouse, and a monitor.

Lettuce In December

From about the end of may through September we had fresh greens whenever we wanted them out in the garden. All we had to do was go outside, clip off some of the lettuce mix we’d planted, and graze to our heart’s content. I really missed that. And then I was in the basement doing stuff and saw the little portable green house we used to start seedlings in the early spring with the grow lights and heater and thought why the hell aren’t we using that to grow some fresh greens? So we did. And this is what we ended up with.

We didn’t put in a lot because we weren’t sure it was going to work, but as you can see it worked very well indeed. We got more than enough for a couple of good sized salads plus a bit more. And yes, it tasted very, very good. 😊

Other Stuff

The PreciseRF magloop antenna continues to work surprisingly well for me. I was concerned about it’s survivability when set up out in the weather but it’s been holding up well despite the rain, snow and colder weather we’ve had. But the real test is yet to come when it gets really cold here. It’s been abnormally warm here all through December. Even now, on Jan. 3 at 4:30 AM, it’s 35 degrees out there. We’ll see what happens when it’s -30 and blizzard like conditions.

Weather

If we ever get cold weather, that is. Temperatures have been running well above normal here. I vividly remember one New Year’s Eve before MrsGF and I got married. When we got out of the pub where we’d spent the evening it was -34F with a stiff wind and everything, including the car, was frozen solid. We spent the night at a friend’s house and managed to get the car started the next morning, somehow.

It was brutally cold for weeks that January. On Jan 1 after I got back to the farm I had to put a new alternator on one of the tractors. It was so cold that the insulation on the wires the old alternator shattered when I bent them. I managed to get the tractor running well enough to pull it into the heifer barn and then close everything up. 30 or so young heifers put out a lot of heat and it was warm enough in there that I could get the job done. The heifers thought it was great fun. They were all crowded around watching me.

What’s Coming Up

I got a woodworking project going. This is a joint project by ES (Eldest Son) and myself. One of his hobbies is doing stained glass so I’m making a backlighted frame for a piece he did. That promises to turn out to be pretty interesting. More about that when it gets closer to completion. That’s still in the planning stage.

One thing, though, dear sweet lord has good quality lumber gotten expensive! I’ve been spoiled. Years and years ago I bought a whole pickup truck load of very good quality, kiln dried, white oak about 1 1/4 inches thick, 6 feet long and of various widths that ranged from 6″ up to 13″. That’s pretty much run out now so I had to actually go out and buy wood and prices of good quality, furniture grade hardwood are absolutely nuts.

I don’t really have plans for the Raspberry Pi. It’s something I wanted just to be able to play around with Linux and mess around with. If something develops from that I’ll let you know.

Dreams

Dreams are weird. At least mine are. I was up at 3 AM this morning and just couldn’t get back to sleep so I came out here dealt with my email and then started writing this up. I do vividly remember the dream I was having when I woke up. I rarely remember my dreams, but when I do they are often extremely vivid and detailed. This one was like that.

MrsGF and I were having dinner at a rather fancy restaurant with a very nice young couple from India. I have absolutely no idea who they were or why they were in this dream. Nice people, though.

When MrsGF and I left we went out into the parking lot and the car, my Buick, was gone. We thought we mis-remembered where we’d parked it so I pulled out my phone to use the app that tracks my car. And my phone didn’t work. It had been infected with some kind of malware that just kept cycling through obnoxious ads over and over again.

There was a strip mall nearby and a T-Mobile store was there so we walked over there. They were about the close but a nice young woman kept the place open. She got me a replacement phone right away, restored all my stuff and got the phone working. We went back to the parking lot and activated the tracking app and yeah, the car was gone. We called the police and they found it, and the thief, rather quickly.

Elon Musk had stolen it. He’d been at the table behind us and had overheard me making disparaging comments about how utterly hideous his “cybertruck” looked so he’d gotten huffy, hacked the electronic systems in my car and took it.

Still, it’s better than the vivid, realistic dream I had about painting the garage. That was the entire dream, painting the garage. That was it. It was so boring that I bored myself awake.