Batteries Depleted

Switching to emergency power. Beep beep beep  beep   bee….

No really. Just kinda tired. First two days of work this week put me at something like 25 hours. Add in commute and everything and now I’m getting run down and everything. I went to bed early last night and it totally didn’t help.
My big box from Sparkfun can in and I started taking a look at my treasures. Tonight I should clean off my work table, so I can get working. The only thing is the Den of Inequity is quickly becoming saturated with stuff again. I need to get on that. Maybe my goal every night is to do something with a cubic foot of stuff everyday. That sounds doable.

Productive

I had a pretty strong showing this weekend. I worked around four hours on Saturday. After that I picked up the Wif and liked at cats at Catapalooza (Humane Society event), but no kitties picked us. We than went to the Wif’s favorite pizza that’s even farther from our house. On the way home we went to Fry’s and I got flux and solder and an aforementioned cable. I picked the wrong cable, because I conflated multiple needs. The staff there was also so depressed I might have to really question before I go there again.
Sunday, after walking to get an afternoon coffee and treat, we slotted out to Petco and got an aquarium. The Wif, who never had an aquarium, was concerned about the size and everything. For this reason we got one of the one and done Aquafarm kits that we could put up in the living room and she could see the relative ease of aquarium management. This also gives me an extra buffer of time between me getting my great tomorrow and going live with a built aquaponic system.
I think tonight is beer bottling night. I lifted the carboy onto my work table, and it’s well past time to get that done.

Plans for the weekend

I got a weekend coming up; I got stuffs to do.
Electronics stuff is here Tuesday. I’m getting an aquarium this weekend. That means I need to get my beer bottled to start making room. I need to throw more stiff away or at least decompose it a bit; I’m looking at you last cheap inkjet printer. I need a place for my aquarium, a place for my sewing machine, a place for building stuff. I think it’s time I start to start looking at undesking my computer. I keep thinking of mounting my screen into one of my bookcase cubes.
I need to look at some Amazoning, mainly a DisplayPort (should that be capitalized and smooshed?), solder and flux. Oh, I also need vermiculite or whatever it is I’m supposed to use as planting material.
Speaking of planting material, I need to sprout me some peppers or tomatoes. Whichever one I’m gonna grow aquaponic like needs to be ready to plant. This reminds me I need soil for the raised bed. I’ll get radishes in there and hope for the best.
I have nails now, which means I need to build my moisture probes, and get that dialed in.
I’m tired after another long work week,

I’ve been grumpy lately

I’ve been working a lot. I’ve been doing things with the Wif a lot. The downtime I’m taking has been die rather unrewarding gaming. It has nothing to do with the games. It’s me.
A while back, I realized the best way for me to be a happier person consisted of thinking of other stuff. Not the thinking of kittens or a warm beach, but the shallow project thinking I do.
Totes getting my aquarium on this weekend.
I’m doing this.

Got a coupon

…in my email from Sparkfun. There also is an overflow sale happening. These two things mean I’m ordering all sorts of small things to help full out my project supplies.
I think it might be time for me to build stuff. I think I’m gonna get my aquaponic system going soon.
Notes to self:
Thermistors
Flux
Solder
(Maybe a pump)
Probably drop the transceivers

Researching JDFs again

Someday I need to actually learn this stuff right, so I know how to implement it right. I’m penalty going back to my original idea of pulling in data from sources and creating tickets in Processing. At least this time I’d be looking at some of the incoming data being relatively clean and the files being relatively static.
I also had maggots all over the garbage can last night. Sprayed the lurking menace with a 30% bleach mixture. Garbage gets picked up tomorrow. Tomorrow night they get to enjoy boiling water. My skin is crawling again.

A little bit about me

At work, my new fellow employees are finding out a little of my logic. Only a little, as there is little logic. Somedays I find something that is entirely unwinnable. In a no win situation, I change the situation.

Had Gathering Fingers by Stolen Babies stuck in my head.

Process

In my new focusing I’ve been doing pretty well. All of the pants ate being watered a minimum of every other day, unless rainfall made that excessive. I think I should clean up the garden a bit tonight and start prepping the soil for my garden box. Next planting will be radishes probably, though I did get seeds for some peppers.
Last night, while watching True Detective, I began reverse engineering a pair of trousers. I have a hard time understanding the placement of the seams. While these were corduroy, they are an incredibly light cord. I might try to finish the deconstruction tonight.
Speaking of tonight, I should finally bottle my beer. Tonight will just be making room and lifting the fermenter onto my work table. I think I’ll let it settle for a day or two, and then on the actual bottling day, transfer to my bucket which has a valve. Thereby, when it gets time to do the detail work, I just open a valve and let it fill.
This is all tentative plans though.

Farmer Pete

I have a townhouse with a pit style “yard”. It’s a tiny thing. For the small space, I’m trying to get a decent amount of growing going on. There are challenges though.
(As an aside, there’s is a crap contraction. Worthless.)
Light:
I don’t get a lot, on the fence is some but squat for room. Thinking I might get some tomatoes rocking a planter box on the inside south end, but otherwise, based on our current luck, I need to switch to low light plants. The Wif wants hops so I’m looking into that. Maybe cabbage seeing as how that’s a winter veggie.
Security: what little veggies we did have grow successfully involved them being eaten by not us. Nothing says disheartened like a half eaten half grown tomato; potatos also. I’m starting to get all broken crockery on the local mouse runs, but no real plan after that. I believe in discouraging rather than murder. If nothing else, I should do a motion activated camera to figure out who’s doing the deed. I wonder if a paste with cayenne could be successfully painted on like apple wax. That’s an idea.
Water:
I suck at watering gardens. I just planted a rose, a hydrangea and something else. I hope any of them survives a year. Doing good so far, but a better solution would be better. This involves irrigation. Automatic irrigation.
This is where I’m researching the most right now.
Step one: I need to start logging data. Temperature, soil moisture, light exposure. The works. Seen a couple write-ups on moisture so that’ll be easy. Temperature and light are relatively cheap off the shelf. Now I need to look at powering the device and transmitting/storing data.