February and March got away from me…but fair enough, because I
started my new job at a 🌠SPACE🌠COMPANY 🛰📡🤯. I’m pretty excited.
Also, though, I got COVID and then a sinus infection in March, which
sapped my energy. I got over it, but man, that was not pleasant.
So what did I do?
Hardware hacking
- Continued to work on firmware for weather vane.
Climate letters
- Three sets, rather than the 8 that should have been. But COVID.
Work
-
So much Terraform work. I’ve got the luxury of setting up the
codebase from scratch, and so far (🤞) I think I’m doing a decent
job of it.
-
Travelled to Edmonton for an offsite, and actually met my team in
person for the first time. I talked to almost everyone in the
company. Such an amazing bunch of people. And hey, our first
satellite is due to launch real soon now…
First thing to mention, which doesn’t really have a category: I walked
from my home in New Westminster to UBC in one day; it was about 32km,
which is the longest walk I’ve done in one day. I am mulling the
possibility of walking across the US when I’m 60, and this is the kind
of daily distance I’d want to maintain. I got some good blisters and
was sore the next day, but not crippled; I think I could have done
that again. It’s a good sign.
Webby
Hardware hacking
-
More work on the weather vane; got it mounted on a peanut butter jar
lid. If that sounds silly, then in my defense it turns out to be
very handy to have a standalone mount for a project.
-
Made an HTML page to display readings from the weather vane, using
javascript to rotate an arrow graphic to reflect the direction it
was measuring. Surprisingly handy.
-
Bought an Ikea Vindriktning, aiming to read its measurements
directly with an ESP32. Took a while to figure out how to get
it working – turns out that a common ground between the ESP32 and
the sensor board was necessary to get the UART working – but I
think it’s coming along.
-
Took apart a coffee maker that died on us to figure out what was
wrong, and it turns out to be a thermal fuse that blew – apparently
this is quite common. Will be picking up a replacement and seeing
if I can get it going again.
ML/AI/Earth Observation
Space
- After nearly 5 years of searching, I have finally got a job in the
space industry: beginning January 9th 2023, I’ll be working for
Wyvern Space. They are building satellites to do
high-resolution hyperspectral imaging; my position is senior devops
software developer, helping to build and operate their image
processing pipeline. I couldn’t be more thrilled. 😁
Trying to get back to doing these things on a regular basis.
Hardware hacking
-
More work on an electronic weather vane, following these
instructions. Lots of figuring out what size of bearings I
should order.
-
Some soldering to make a battery holder for some ESP32 camera
modules I’ve got.
-
Weather station:
-
Try to get the tipping bucket rain meter working; there’s a loose
connection somewhere, and periodically I see that Burnaby had 5
metres of rain in the last 24 hours. I never realized just how
much you have to pay attention to loose wires.
-
Sketch out a new rain meter based on inexpensive flow meters, then
order some. We’ll see how this works.
Webby
-
Going through a number of online courses/resources:
-
Coursera UMich Web Design for Everybody course: excellent,
though aimed at people quite new to development of any sort. One
thing: I’m lucky enough to have my employer pay for this, but the
lecturer, Colleen van Lent, writes:
My motivation for creating this course content was to spread the
mission of free education to everyone. Unfortunately, many of
the platform changes has put the material behind paywells. I
highly encourage students to take the courses individually
(rather than as a specialization) to access them for free. Even
then, some of the assignments may be hidden. I am hoping to
launch a new more open version in Fall 2018.
-
Shay Howe’s HTML & CSS course; also excellent
-
Javascript.info: awesome walkthrough of JavaScript
-
Trying to get the basics down, then look into React or some other
front-end framework.
-
Gotta say, I’m really fascinated by the tie-in between JavaScript
and DOM manipulation, which I had not really grokked before.
-
Project-in-progress is a refactoring (not a redesign, as I want the
look to remain about the same) of The Floating Head of Ayn
Rand, which has been more or less untouched for HOLY CRAP
twenty-one years. (State of the art at the time was
table-based layout, which I adopted enthusiastically 😬).
-
Changed the CSS for this site to have the post titles be a bit more
prominent:
.posts-list-item-title {
font-size: xx-large;
}
Data
- But also web: begin taking up work on the New West Trees page
again.
- Newest feature: adding links to the Wikipedia page for a
tree species!
- Coming soon: adding common names for species (eg: English Oak
instead of Quercus robur)…which turns out to be surprisingly
tricky.
- Tried pytaxize, which was a yakshave to get an NCBI API
token, then gave me problems re: rate limiting
- Tried pygbif; better results, but still not great for
trees. Example: Quercus palustris is resolved to just “Oak”,
but Wikipedia clearly resolves it to “Pin Oak”.
- But this gave me the idea of trying wikidata or
wikispecies; this is up next.
Web development:
- I’ve become interested in web development recently, and have begun
working on a habit-tracking project called, unoriginally, Habit.
Currently it’s a good exercise for becoming familiar with Javascript,
Jquery, Bootstrap, Flask and SQLAlchemy.
Hardware hacking:
- I ordered a bunch of AI-Thinker ESP32 camera modules from
Universal Solder (Canadian vendor of Arduino, ESP32, electronic
components, etc; I’m a happy customer & recommend them thoroughly).
Started digging into how to make it into a timelapse camera.
Random:
- I signed up for a free account with [The SDF Public Access UNIX
System][3]. I’ve got a totes-real homepage at
[http://saintaardvark.unixcab.org][4], just like the old days.
[2]: The SDF Public Access UNIX System
[3]: http://sdf.org
[4]: http://saintaardvark.unixcab.org
Road trip to Ontario in an EV with my family to visit my parents.
Wonderful time.
