Category: Uncategorized

I could rock Imagemagick from the command line to add bleeds, remove a background and add a solid fill behind everything that’s left. I think.

I was asked to look into a way to automate an image being traced and then all sorts of other things. I realized that we don’t need to trace. This is to remind me of what I thought about the other night after the work week was over.

Licensing (because I can’t remember the license it’s under) and approval of IT are probably going to be the biggest hurdles.

Of course I would still need to bang together a set of parameters. No big deal.

A patch on a work shirt that says downright gregarious. Maybe think of an air and Greg Arious for the name. Meta.

There was another one while I was walking up the hill from downtown, but it’s escaped me now.

Now I remember. Do signs fir the whole “It can wait” deal, but have a in reference of Seen Greens character from Can’t Hardly Wait.

Last night I plugged the pi directly into the router so I could assign static IP addresses, but I couldn’t find it. Not to say it wasn’t there, and not to say it was ever there, just saying I couldn’t find what I remembered being there. It’s no big worry, as I need to get a new router anyway, and that’s something that needs to be added to the list. After that I tried remoting in, blind and getting the address, and got nowhere.

Tonight:

• Load another card with Raspbian and get the second install going.
• Boot up the first card, keeping track of how long it takes. Once it’s fully booted, make sure I can log in.
• Look at nmap? It’s not installed, in the Windows Linux Subsystem, and I’m not sure if I’m blocking it anyway. I think that’s something I should be blocking, maybe?

I know enough to know what I don’t know, but sometimes what I don’t know includes me not knowing the words that describe what I don’t know, at least in enough detail to find the knows I don’t know.

Basically, for the last three days I’ve been half-ass, as opportune, looking at being able to ssh into the pi, so I can work on it as untethered as possible. The problem being that allowing remote logins to your average “thing” is how you end up being another bot farm. Do I obviously need to lock it down as much as reasonable. There’s lots of good tutorials, but their written for people that probably know what their doing. I at least some that’s the case. After looking a a lot of tutorials, man pages, and error messages, I finally saw that I need to be the same user on both systems.

I should write my own tutorial.

It looks like I need to be thinking something like 2500mAh for the power for Nigel v1. The current option I have showing up hits that, but for anything else, I’ll be still be looking at separate battery options or more circuitry. Also, bigger batteries. All told, I need to power the Pi, camera, ir imaging, whatever other sensors, and however many motors. The motors I have lying around have a stall current of 1500mAh at 3v. So that might be an issue with what I’m thinking.

This has been an ongoing thing, of course.

I need to move files, as they’re uploaded to an ftp, to a remote Mac server location.

Easy. I’ll do that with… Nope. Security.

At this point I’m left to either doing a two-step dance, or doing it on the Mac itself. Unfortunately, the built in ftp client for OSX is about to become OSGone. There are workarounds, but I’d rather do one stop shopping, so I’m looking at methods that require no other interventions. I’m thinking perl. Another thing I’ve never used.

Nope. I’m such a party animal. I totes installed the Ubuntu in a Windows thing. Installed a matching version of python to what comes stock on or Mac’s. Using the stock ftplib, everything is working as intended.

Beast.

Assuming that everything works in practice in the am. I should also add some size checking.

Today (tomorrow):

I added the ‘on the ftp server’ size checking to leave behind files that are in the process of uploading. Added logging to give some hints of what breaks down where. I added a bit to mount a network resource for saving the file to. I kinda want to have it verify the file is file downloaded, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do that today.

I finally got around to installing Raspbian on one of the Pi’s. So that’s a start. I then started looking at how I was going to power up motors and everything, and realized I never went beyond using a cellphone charging wall wart. That will be rectified soon, in that I Amazon’d a random wall wart. While I’m waiting for that to arrive I should plan at getting some imaging going. I still have a PiNoIR, capitalization may be jacked, and the thermal camera thing unit.

Once I get those working, and throw on some power from the wall, that’s when it gets annoying. I need to finally get around to putting together a battery pack. Next, replace the battery with a rechargable battery. Then add a built-in charger. Then make it autonomous built-in charging. Maybe I should make it all happen from the get go. I should think about this.

Imaging first.

I have parts coming on the (19th?) or something. Two beers is plenty. By those parts come in, let’s have a chassis built for a mustache bot, the sweeper if you want to be uncouth. Basic chassis from whatever, and whatever definitely includes cardboard, with a Raspberry Pi passing some servos. Then I just need to add the motor boards, distance sensors, openCV, complex log… chassis. Let’s build a chassis. We can make it big and tall. Or maybe not so tall. Let’s build a chassis. That’s why people tolerate my drinking. I’m a friendly drinker.

I need a bristle holder, two motor mounts, two wheel wells and whatever else is needed to take care of business.

I should at a minimum spin up a couple servos and a distance sensor with an Arduino. Do I want to keep an Arduino in there to act as the low end and keep the Pi to the high end? I think I know the answer which is minimizing the laziness. I need to do it all off a Pi. Distance, and two motors. Or servo motors. Whichever. I have a stack, and they need to all go into a home.

I was waiting for the bus / am now on the bus this fine morning, and I had a spatter of thoughts.

• An app called Busd. You would say what bus and stop you want, and it would allow you to see if anyone would trade a seat for not a seat, or something similar for a “tip”. Probably add bus ratings, warnings of really terrible dill holes, and “bus buddies” as other features. I’m pretty sure it’s totally a violation of the policies on my local bus system. This is not a serious idea.
• I want to give another look at my previous idea for light beer or whatever I was calling it when I was going to add lights to beer bottles. I never got back to it because it turns out that hot melt sticks terribly to beer bottles. I might get back to the original idea some day, this was like two years ago that I found out about the hot melt issue, but I think it’ll take grinding, cutting, or drilling glass and I just don’t want to deal with that most days. Especially for something that’s basically an incredibly over designed, sized and hyped night lite. So for light beer ii, the second pour I’m gonna switch up the original idea. I got a wicked looking four-pack last night of cans, yes I’m both italicizing and calling out the italicizing of a single word. But yeah, the cans are wicked and I don’t want to just pitch them. I’m thinking as I can-by-can extract their delicious bounty that I’ll clean them out. Once they’re clean and dry, I’ll look at least destructive ways to carve off the bottom. I have other cans I can work with also for practice. Now with bottomless beer cans it’ll be time to mount something up through the bottom to hold whatever light source, with wiring and mount points coming out the pour hole. I’m thinking posable work lights. I might try to turn one into a cantenna.
• I need to look at a way to extract all these posts as raw markup or whatever. I’m still thinking of migrating away from WordPress, but I have something like 800 posts of random gibberish, but it’s my gibberish. I’ve burned a website in a pique of annoyance before, and I miss whatever stupid things will never be seen again. I know there are probably tools for what I want, but it’s interesting to roll your own. I wonder if I can just dump the entire SQL table as a csv. That’d make things easy.

Out.

The one cat is being stalked by the other cat more and more. I’m sure the heat is making them testy. The obvious solution is giving them access controls, but to what and how? The original plan, that the Wif wasn’t against, until it turned into a more direct “are you cool with this?” was to cut a whole through the door into the den, and slap an RFID unlocked gate in it. Well that was a different day, so back to a how. The Wif likes the idea, just not the cutty holey doory bit.

I think I should start with a simple furniture tower, another set of cubes that is, with external faces made of different materials going all the way up, blocking access to our other miscreants. The older cat can’t vertical jump more than three feet, so that would be my first not-gated entrance on that end. I’ll draw up some plans soon™.

While I was thinking of this at the bus stop, and trying to ignore whatever scents we’re lurking everywhere, I realized I had a different starter position. If I can’t put a hole in a door, maybe I should put a hole on a door. If I build a doorway extender at a bit of an angle, so that the door closes into it rather than the actual jam, I can put a hole in the doorway extender. This will be another one where I need some sketches.