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.
Hardware hacking:
- More playing with ESP32. Try making an open-window detector with
the built-in Hall effect sensor, and sending a Grafana annotation
when it’s open.
Programming:
- Refactor my .emacs files to use a
lisp directory, and switch to
use-package rather than Cask. This is easily the longest-running
project I’ve been working on:
commit 85b1d148afdc135d725498c0384d58e7baa0866d
Author: Hugh Brown <hugh@chibi-laptop-01.(none)>
Date: Tue Mar 3 21:13:57 2009 -0800
New repo.
…and that commit came after declaring bankruptcy in the last one.
Data science:
No ML/DS work this month. But I am beginning to get interested in
microscopy, so…
Hardware hacking
-
Does it count as hardware hacking if it’s all software? A question
for the ages. Anyhow: set up motion on the Raspberry Pi running
the birdhouse camera. Set up a cron job on the Pi to copy the
captured movies back to my home machine. Set up a cron job on my
home machine to make a gallery out of it using PiGallery 2,
which is just what the doctor ordered.
-
The weather station had been saying for a while that my in-laws'
place was getting 14m of rain per day, which seemed excessive. Took
a look at that, and broke readings from the anemometer as
well. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ Dug more and discovered that the connector
between those two pieces of equipment and the Cat5 cable (ask your
parents, kids) had rusted. Soldered up a replacement and we were
back in business.
-
A friend of mine (hi Matt!) gave me an OBD bluetooth dongle to try
on the car. I spent a truly stupid amount of time trying to query
it with Python, which led me into Bluetooth Hell. I love Linux but
OMG sometimes it’s the worst.
-
Set up an MQ135 to try and read CO2 levels at home. Getting mixed
results, which seems to be par for the course. A collection of
links in no particular order:
I turned 50 in February. Two months later, I’m still confused by
this. Was still recovering from COVID.
Hardware hacking
- Started work on a birdhouse camera with my father-in-law. He built
the birdhouse in December; this month we finally started working on
putting together the camera part. There are two in here: an
infrared camera and an endoscope for visual light. I put together a
little circuit board with 6 500mW IR LEDs to act as illumination.
Home sysadmin
- My little home machine is a Zotac ZBOX CI320 nano purchased
in 2015. It’s great – small, unobtrusive, passively cooled and
enough for everything I need…except that the 4GB of memory it has,
which felt so decadent, is starting to be a constraint. I blame
InfluxDB. Anyhow, ordered some more RAM only to realize I’d ordered
the wrong size. Made up for it by adding a swap file. Ask your
parents, kids.
Climate emergency
- Met with my MLA, Judy Darcy, again about climate change; she got us
some time with MLA George Heyman, BC’s Minister of the Environment
as well. I’m grateful to both for their time.
Welp…this took a long time to write up. In my defense, I got COVID
in January and that sort of threw me off for a couple months. But
it’s also just taken me a while to get back to it. Anyhow, onward!
Machine learning/data science
-
I submitted my entry to the Data Driven Cloud Cover
Competition! Aaaaand…my score was terrible. However, I got a
lot of practice out of this, and it was valuable for that. I
intended to go back and figure out exactly why my scores were so
abysmal, but got derailed (see first paragraph). But I think that
for whatever reason, my GAN was just not working at all. I need
to get more practice with this technique.
-
Some volunteer work for a local environmental society to demonstrate
how to use Pandas for graphing.
Climate emergency
- More letters to politicians. Did not make every week, but I’m
cutting myself some slack here.
What happened in 2021? Time to look back.
-
We got an EV! It’s a Kia Soul, and I love it.
-
Started writing in here semi-regularly. 💪
-
Expanded the weather station: precipitation meter, anemometer, soil
temp, particulate matter sensors.
-
Recorded a talk for PyCascades!
-
Much work on machine learning and data science: the dishwasher
loading critic, some Kaggle courses, mapping New Westminster trees.
-
A lot of work on Polaris: telemetry analyses, supervising our
third co-op student, and a proposal to run code on an ESA satellite
(sadly, denied).
-
Radio took a bit of a backseat by the end of the year.
-
I was asked to be an advisor for ALEASAT, and that was
wonderful.
-
The heat wave scared me, and I turned that into a focus on
climate activism. Small steps, but I’m taking them. Met with my
MLA in November to discuss climate change. I think of this as being
the start of about 30 years of work.
-
Total distance walked since getting my latest phone in January 2018:
8,664 km. Daily average distance in 2021 was 7.2 km, up from last
year (6.4 km).
-
Got more into birdwatching, phenology and natural history. Lots of
data taking, which I enjoy.
-
Bird feeder camera with ML to recognize the birds. Does a fairly
crappy job of picking out species but a good job of detecting birds.
-
Entered a couple of ML contests – no wins, but that’s expected;
it’s the practice I’m after.
-
At work: joined a new team which has a definite data science focus.
Learning a lot.
I’m leaving out all the incredibly important time with my family; this
isn’t the venue I choose to record that in.
