Posts

From having these to this;

Thats it - no other words 😍

Finally some nice weather and I had chance to pick up the camera again whilst sat in the garden, only a short time but managed to get two photos I am very happy with;

I’m not a power user of orgmode yet it is a piece of software i use daily. My emacs diary.org file has around 100 sexp entries, plus events, appointments spanning 7yrs. The problem i had was sexp entries show up in the emacs diary but would not show up in any mobile client, as usual with org there are many ways to achieve the same thing. For example a sexp entry could look like %%(diary-cyclic 14 1 10 2025) Blue bin so is a reminder to put the right colour bin out every 2wks works great when in emacs but outside? this entry is better, simpler and achieves the same results;

I wrote quite a long post here about Light pollution & energy consumption which linked into my assertion that there’s not enough darkness in the world. The premise of it was, to turn out street lights and it is possibly coming to pass with councils starting to turn lights out. OK it is a cost cutting drive but that was also a major part of my posts and if done right, in the right areas its only going to be a benefit. This article posted on the BBC News website entitled “Why are English councils turning off street lights?” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0mzkgxr22po.amp seems to indicate that councils are either starting to switch off between specific hours or dimming both of which are good. I travel a lot and the number of roads I drive on across Europe which are dark compared to here is incredible. Our world is built on consumption of energy and short sightedly pushing people into electric cars is not the answer for either global warming, light pollution or energy consumption.

This post links in with Travel because again it refers to the sense of having no time, but also it shows what happens if you update software without keeping an eye on the changes … the theme I used no longer builds with the version hugo now installed hugo v0.136.5+extended darwin/arm64 BuildDate=2024-10-24T12:26:27Z VendorInfo=brew and there are so many errors and elements broken due to internal hugo changes I’m not even sure I could update it. So either I revert back to level of hugo which works or I try out something new - new it is.

Time is a commodity which seems to be scarce at the minute, need it to update my projects upon which some of the content of this website rely and of course my own education but due to various reasons and maybe a lack of drive on my part has meant nothing new has been written.

Plus work travel took a good chunk of time away with among many smaller trips to various locations, a long one of two months based in Silao. Long hours but an awesome set of people helped make the situation weirdly enjoyable despite the circumstances and we achieved a tremendous result given the timeframe.

A long time ago i setup & wrote my own home monitoring system using wireless temperature sensors and a current clamp across the incoming feed to the house for electricity monitoring (take a look at the projects section for flask socketio) Using it i was able to educate the step-son about taking 90 minute long showers without contributing to the bills¹ i then moved house leaving the current clamp hardware in place duh then what with getting the house sorted, travelling for work and subsequent long hours on my return i never set it up again besides the long shower taker had buggered off saving me loads of cash :-)

I’ve been lucky enough to see this guy a few times, always a fleeting flutter of feathers and trills and as the others tried to evade, successfully i might add. This time though one was not quick enough but i was with a lot of luck and accidental timing, because i was filling the kettle when the bush infront of the window moved and out flew this fellow;

He sat there for a whilst just seemingly comtemplating his next move before lanching back into the bush which came alive once more with noise and movement before silence …

Is it possible to use org without emacs?

For most people it would seem from various internet searches that what keeps them using emacs is orgmode. It is certainly true for me that 75% of my emacs usage is purely org based with the rest being python (yes i know its not good python), tramp and the odd text edit though i still find SublimeText an easier option for somethings. Though to answer the question posed at the start the answer was always no, yes we have the various mobile options such as orgzly, orgro, metanote, plainorg but some of these have limited functionality and personal opinion ahead … I would say are more an extension of the desktop org allowing you to view your data and capture basic info and for the desktop you needed emacs but

[2022-11-11 Fri] renamed this article because in my mind “parser” indicates something more than this is. This is just a way to read an org file and extract headings identifed with a specific tag and only the linked files for that heading/tag not all the files i have stored in the data directory.

I passed my bike test early ‘97 then later that very same year in a monumental moment of stupidity highsided, flying several car lengths down from one side of the road to the other. Needless to say I did not bounce, getting strapped to a spine board, moderately re-arranging my right shoulder sufficiently well that it was several inches lower than my left & damaging the nerves¹ Did it put me off? Well if it did this post would be a lot shorter and contain no images so no there is nothing like riding a bike - to bastardise old **Swiss Tony** … riding a bike is like making love to a beautiful woman you and the machine moving together leaning over together, feeling the environment, the heat, the noise … get it right and magic happens get it wrong and theres all sorts of squeals and pain. So on a bike we have all the sensations driving a car just does not bring, being part of the environment and the journey, shutting out all the mindless noise and drudgery making the commute to work a joy and not a chore.

Following on from my earlier post trying to use smoothiecharts with flask-socketio for realtime data i managed to get an alternative with a pillion onboardwith a pillion onboardworking this time using charts https://www.chartjs.org/ Using this i am now able to generate random data (in lieu of external input values) and have them graphed in realtime on a line chart created using the api. The main part of the flask-python element consists of the data creation routine

OK a long time ago i got gauges working with flask-socketio for a home monitoring project and that’s all documented here in a github repo: Gauges, flask-socketio

Fast forward to now and i have a use for realtime line graphs, searching i came across the smoothiecharts api, and it looked perfect for my needs. Initially i followed some leads and ended up with the python program launched using a bash wrapper and followed by commandline websocket ie

I’ve known for a while now that in the local area we have a flock of parakeets flying free, I’d seen them last year when walking the dog and again this year but this is the first time they’ve spent anytime actually around where i live. There is approximately 10 to 12 birds and you definitely know when they are around! Communicative squawky little fellows they are too.

This week they’ve been in the trees at the back of my garden and i was finally home and near the camera when one turned up today.

My workflow relies on orgmode, currently (may change ¹) all orgfiles for each project reside in a top level folder and then i create a subfolder for each project into which all data is stored (emails\images\project files etc) and the org file links to these eg;

~ top level folder

• project 1 orgfile
• project 2 orgfile
• project_1_data
  • email_1_for_project_1
  • image_for_project_1
• project_2_data
  • email_1_for_project_2
  • image_for_project_2

When it comes to image capture i either launch greenshot and save everything to a temporary capture folder or launch the windows snipping tool & then choose where to save the image the issue with this workflow is that its not smooth. After i have captured the image there is another or several steps to insert the image into the main org file and hence become usuable.

Everyday a family of starlings raucously visit the garden, searching for the meal worms i leave and taking baths. They often take upto five baths a day!! Fortunately one of the young ones decided to take a break and pose rather handsomely for a wee photo shoot.

[2021-09-03 Fri] update: as you’ll see here (reddit link) someone has ported the CircuitPytohn driver to MicroPython for some reason i never found it when i started this but his github driver can be found here: https://github.com/truckershitch/micropython-vl53l0x

I’ve had an idea for checking the height of a equipment during its movement for some time now and thought the small form factor of the pico + the VL53L1X sensor would be an ideal candidate. So after much searching and trial/error it seemed it wasnt possible until i stumbled across a few threads in the micro-python forum and the openmv github site and i now have a working setup;

I’ve been using GPG without any dotemacs configuration & without issue or concern on Win10 machines for a long time but recently i started to recieve “no usable configuration errors” now i know its not because i’ve made changes to the dotemacs file, altered key etc but on checking log files i have updated to version 3.1.15 of Gpg4win as well as switched emacs to 28.0.50 from 27.1 but that change hasnt created the issue (switch back and it still fails) so it looks like the Gpg4win upgrade has altered something on two separate systems with identical results. To get it working again i’ve had to modify the dotemacs in a similar fashion to how i run emacs on a locked machine which software installs are not allowed and that is by specifying directly the home and program directories;

Still trying to learn the new lense and manual focus (nearly always used autofocus) so with a turn in the weather it was nice to sit outside and watch/listen. Thats when i noticed the resident mouse decide to sit on his doorstep and watch me.

I’m quite pleased with these two photos, handheld at full zoom and manual focus.

This is taken from a previous website post but the problem still remains, my home monitoring system has 4 zone with a wireless temperature sensor in each. They all wake up individually on a periodic basis and each time one sensor outputs data the main program writes an entry into the SQL database for all zones so only the sensor currently transmitting has new data and the previous readings from the other sensors are stored with the new.