Webby

  • More work on refactoring The Floating Head of Ayn Rand so it’s in modern, standards-compliant HTML. Coming along nicely!

  • More work on the UMich/Coursera Web Design for Everybody course. Continues to be excellent.

  • Tried getting habit working under mod_wsgi in Apache on my home server. Man, this was surprisingly hard: the documentation isn’t great, I couldn’t figure out to adjust URLs properly (serve under /habit rather than just /), and also I suspect I’m doing things sub-optimally. Called it quits after a while, and continued running the Flask development server on my local network (no, not exposed to the Internet); this is good enough for now.

Hardware hacking

  • Tried out using an inexpensive flow meter as an alternative design to measure precipitation. It turns out this sort of works. Precision is good – about four pulses per mL of water – but it takes a fair amount of water column height to get the meter to turn. I was able to accomplish that by using a funnel, and maybe 18" of 1/4" vinyl tubing…but if I didn’t hold it just right, the water would just flow through the meter without actually turning the internal vane.

    On top of that, the original tipping bucket meter seems to be behaving a lot better now that I have tightened up the screws holding the wires that connect the meter and the rest of the equipment.

    I may try this design at home, but for now I’m setting it aside.