Tralfaz

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  • Latest Binge – Poirot

    Latest Binge – Poirot

    My latest Netflix binging is the ITV adaptations of the Agatha Christie stories “Poirot”. 12 season, beginning in 1989, and concluding in 2012 (not continuously of course), set in the pre-war England, they are intriguing tales of suspense, and the sleuthing of Hercule Poirot, the Belgian investigator.

    Ok, not really binging, but I have been watching them, and just broke into the 5th season. The tales are tight, compact, and enrapturing. Always starting with a murder or some foul play, the engagement of the infamous Hercule Poirot, and the details being the key to solution.

    About 6 months ago, I purchased the collections of Poirot by Agatha Christie (on a lark, I believe it was $8 for the Kindle), and I was fascinated with how closely the stories were translated to the shows. Having watched them in the past, and then read the stories, it was amazing the translation to film.

    Additionally, one of the reasons that I enjoy watching, and have continued watching, is the cinematography is fantastic, and the attention to details are remarkable. Period dress and costumes are spot on, the automobiles, and other modes of transportation are spectacular, and quite enjoyable.

    The lead actor, David Suchet, who play Poirot, does a fabulous job, truly “wearing” the role. A fastidious Belgian, who speaks with a heavy French accent, and is marvelously alien in the setting of pre-war England.

    Photo: “David Suchet” by Phil Chambers from Hamburg, Germany – Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Commons –

  • Stepping stones towards a weather station

    Continuing on the thread of projects, my ultimate goal is to build a two station weather station that has in interior display of inside and outside temperature, and outside humidity/temperature readings, ultimately logging it to one of my websites, and then displaying it in graphical form.

    This weekend, I got a little bit closer. I learnt how to hook up an LCD display to an Arduino system, how to display formatted data, and then connected two different sensors to gather the data.

    The first test was to hook up a Sensiron humidity and temperature sensor to the arduino. Fortunately, Adafruit makes a handy breakout board for this device, and some libraries to use it. As an i2c device, it has a lot of support, and connecting it was a snap. Supply 5V, and connect the SDA/SCL and you are good to go.

    The Sensiron sensor is what we use in the chamber of our 7500 series AFM, so I know it is accurate and reliable.

    The sketch is pretty simple, you load the libraries for the SHT series, and instantiate an instance of the device, and it just works. You ask for a reading, and BAM it is there for the using.

    The second part was connecting the 2×16 character LCD display. This has a little backpack decoder, and the Arduino IDE has built in support for it. Piece of cake to get it going.

    It is of course a little trickier than the serial console, as the print/println aren’t part of the methods, but a little character counting, and voila, it was displaying the RH and Temperature every 10 seconds.

    To test this, I programmed, it, and then unplugged it, taking it into the kitchen, plugging it into a USB charger, and it worked. I am almost impressed!

    This is a pretty big hurdle, but the next hurdle is a lot taller. Ultimately, I want to have it log data to a file, then send it to a small raspberry pi system to display, and to upload to the internet.

    My next step will be to build a simple data logger, and begin to finalize the sensors I will use for the remote system. Fortunately, there is built in support for SD cards (although I will need a breakout board to connect), and I have both a DHT22 sensor for raw humidity and temperature readings, and a Bosch BMP180 breakout board for barometric pressure and temperature reading.

    Exciting, and rewarding.

    But the progress is ongoing, and my shopping cart is filling up with goodies to buy…

  • Where did all those people come from?

    Where did all those people come from?

    This morning, I had a meeting with someone who was interested in collaborating on a project. We picked a small boutique coffee shop near my office (that I selfishly could walk to) and a time that seemed to be between the morning rush, and their noontime bump.

    Fortunately, the person I was meeting got there plenty early to grab a table. Holy shit, that place was packed at 9:45. People talking, kibitzing, working on their novel, doing character development.

    The flippin’ line at the counter was 10 deep when I got there, it took 5 minutes to order, and then it took 10 more minutes for them to make my Cafe Latte.

    I mean, don’t these people have, uh jobs? Are that many people working off shift?

    What a pain in the arse.

    For the record though, Chromatic Coffee does make a fine cup, and is a bit more appealing than Starbucks.

  • Apple Mail – Revisited

    Apple Mail – Revisited

    As a long time Apple person, and a dedicated Mac user, starting with Mavericks, I had stopped using Apple’s built in mail client.

    I stopped using it for a variety of reasons, but essentially, the integration with Google mail really became, uh, shitty. Really weird, unreliable connections to the Gmail IMAP server, and finally I just gave up.

    I also subscribe to a mailing list of some really cool Mac OS-X users, and around that time there was tons of traffic about how shitty Apple mail was.

    I ended up first using Thunderbird (meh), and finally bought licenses to Postbox as it worked pretty well, and their support for Google’s mail services was quite good.

    Finally, with a recent upgrade to El Capitan (OS-X 10.11.2) the experts allowed that Apple finally un-borked their mail client. It even handles two factor authentication properly. Kudos!

    So, I am giving it a second try. And you know what? It isn’t bad. It is better than Postbox.

    Finally.

  • What I’m Reading – Lew Archer Novels

    As a voracious reader, who primarily focuses on Science Fiction, I do branch out. One genre that I enjoy is the detective thriller. This penchant can be traced to my love of the Doc Savage stories of my youth, and has jumped into some more or less serious threads of what I read. From the flippant Stephanie Plum novels (a guilty, fun pleasure) to the work by J.A. Jance, I have enjoyed many a cliff hanger stories.

    However, lately, I have become hooked on the Lew Archer novels by Ross Macdonald (pen name of Kevin Millar). Set in Southern California, and beginning shortly after the war, they stretch for 20ish years, and are lively depictions of the changes that the boom years brought to that part of California.

    The principal character, Lew Archer, is a private investigator, a lone gun, whose marriage failed, and who hung out his shingle after being an LA Cop. Unlike the friction you find between many TV private eye’s and the police, you get the impression that the local constabulary appreciate, and respect Archer.

    The stories often start with a missing person, or someone desperate for help, and the first person narrative draws you in, and holds your attention for 250 or so pages, almost always with a surprising twist at the end that keeps you guessing.

    One thing that I enjoy about these stories is that they don’t telegraph the antagonist. You often are truly surprised in the outcome, or that the obvious villain isn’t the culprit, yet, the obvious villain is rarely unbloodied at the end.

    One of the books that I just finished, The Wycherly Woman, was a classic example, where you thought you had it figured out, and then WHAM, it was a total surprise at the end. Additionally, this one was set in the San Francisco Bay Area, and having grown up there, it was a pleasant read about places I know well.

    Millar’s writing style is crisp, his vocabulary is deep, and he does a fantastic job of engaging the reader in these page turners.

    You could get wrapped up in a far worse series of novels. I have been through 10 or 11 of these, and have thoroughly enjoyed each one of them. Highly recommended.

  • More tinkering fun

    Back to the real world. I have re-immersed myself in the learning required to build a little automated, web connected weather station.

    I have been learning a lot about working with the Arduino (proto boards built around the Atmel ATMega 328 microcontroller), and have added some goodies around connecting sensors, working first with a 1 wire humidity and temperature sensor, and soon to come some more sophisticated modules that will be more flexible.

    However, while it is possible to do almost all of the work I want with the arduino based system, ultimately, I am going to want to drive a little display for review here in the house, and to log it to one of my internet servers, so I can be a geek and see the readings at home wherever I happen to be.

    This weekend, I dove into the Raspberry Pi, as that is a suitable central control, data logging station, and a vehicle to push the readings to the internet. However, it was a wee bit more complicated to get working than the Arduino. (more…)

  • Sad Days

    As anyone who knows me in real life knows, I have rescued Greyhounds. I have donated a lot of time and money to the southern Arizona Greyhound Adoption org, and ran their website for a few years.

    Last Tuesday, we had to put one of our greys to sleep. He had long suffered from seizures, big, scary grand-mal epileptic seizures that had been increasing in both frequency, and in numbers (clustering).

    While we knew the end would come, and that the decision was inevitable, it still hurts to lose one of your fur kids.

    I am not as sad as when we lost his predecessor, Oliver, whose osteosarcoma was sudden, and aggressive. We have known for a long time that with Tate, our job was to weigh quality of life versus, the horrors of seizures.

    I am using my other blog, Greytbros, to write a series of posts to remember the good times, and the joy that he brought us.

    Having a seizure dog is a difficult course, and we are glad we could make his 5 years with us as enjoyable as possible. In the end, he passed peacefully, and while there is a huge Tate sized hole in my heart, I take comfort in remembering the good times.

  • A rekindled affair – Guitar

    A rekindled affair – Guitar

    Enough with the complaining about hosting, while I am sure I will again blog about the sad state of affairs in that realm, today I want to talk about something fun.

    I have been a guitar player since 1983 or so. I got a late start, in my last year of high school, so I wasn’t a child prodigy or anything, but I had long wanted to play, and guitar was the cool thing.

    Many stepping stones, lessons learnt, and gear came and went, but one thing I always wanted, but never really pulled the trigger on was recording gear. I remember the wonder of working with my guitar instructor who had borrowed one to record a demo for his band, and just how cool it was. A standard cassette tape, two sided, each side had a stereo recording, so by the magic of electronics, if you had the right gear, you could record 4 distinct tracks separately on a single, commodity cassette tape. (more…)

  • More web hosting thoughts

    I learnt early on that you get what you pay for, and web hosting is no different than any other good or service. There was a time when $3 – $6 a month got you a pretty good deal as the explosion in hosting services was happening, but as with all services that are shared, the only way the economics work out is to over subscribe.

    The same happens with internet service (if everybody downloads at full speed at the same time, the “promised” throughput will fail miserably) and with hosting.

    Usually, you either suck it up and deal with glacial response from massively shared mysql servers, or someone destroying the IOPS on the SAN, or you move to a provider that isn’t a dirtbag, and you pay more for that service.

    Of course, if you have done that, and you get long downtimes and poor support, well, you moved once.

    Last week and a half were trouble for my web properties. The hosting I used, a VPS on A Small Orange was part of a lengthy and poorly handled downtime. Staring around X-mas eve, and continuing through to the 3rd of January, their VPS services were hosed. Hosed bad. Like can’t ping, no network route, and the brief flashes where I could ping, the storage was offline, so that my websites were down.

    Down hard. (more…)

  • Web Hosting Blues

    Why is it so hard to find a decent web host?

    Way back in 2009, I began blogging on wordpress.com, and by the end of 2009, I was hooked. I took the plunge, and signed up with MediaTemple hosting, a pretty slick operation that had a quite good product offering, with their “gridservers”. That worked well, and apart from some shared Mysql server bog downs, it was a pain free time. The few support issues I had (mostly around my ignorance) were handled cleanly and quickly.

    In 2012, at the formation of Southern Arizona Greyhound Adoption, I was drafted/volunteered to create and run their website. They had selected GoDaddy for their domain registration, and hosting. I had heard lots of bad things, but for the basic linux hosting we did, running a Joomla site, and handling a bunch of forwarded emails, it worked well. But what I hated about it was the constant hard sell. “Upgrade to xxxx“, “Buy more yyyy“, “DOn’t you need an SSL certificate?“. As a marketer, I was completely alienated by their hard sell at every interaction. Hell, when I called tech support, they even tried to sell something to me. They were worse than Comcast! (more…)