What Happened in November 2021

Climate emergency:

• This month, I actually got to meet with Jennifer Whiteside, my MLA and BC’s Minister of Education, about natural gas fracking in BC. I was there with two other folks from New Westminster, and I think it went fairly well. She agreed to meet with us again in a few months.

• Lots of letters.

Hardware hacking:

• First graph for the birbcam! We’re posting data to InfluxDB, so I get to play with it in Grafana (see below). Lots more to do, but this is a good start.

• Ordered a couple wifi endoscopes for the next project: a birdhouse camera.

• The tipping bucket precipitation meter that’s part of the weather station will sometimes record a lot of tips in a very short time…like, a ridiculous number. I’ve tried various things to filter out spurious signals, but we still see them from time to time. This time, I tried setting a threshold in the graph – exclude measurements with more than 5 tips in a 30 second period. This brings things down to a sane level. Thing is, after experimentation it is possible to have about a tip per second or so – but that requires literally pouring water into the funnel constantly to keep it full, and even in the midst of this I don’t think we were getting that much rain.

Machine learning/data science:

• Worked on the Kaggle Time Series course. Left some feedback. Still not done.

• Worked on visualizing data for Russet, a project I’ve let languish for a while. The goal was to take pictures out my office window, which faces a lot of trees (mix of deciduous & conifers), and try to see if I could track changes in the average colour over time. The result – just a first pass – is a half-hour animated bar chart. It’s definitely interesting to see the change over the course of hours, days and months. But it is also a half hour bar chart. Lots of room for improvement.

Natural History

• Observations & IDs for iNaturalist, observations for Nature’s Notebook. I’m still managing to find new things to look at.