Cabinets of curiosities served not only as collections to reflect the particular curiosities of their curators but as social devices to establish and uphold rank in society. There are said to be two main types of cabinets. As R. J. W. Evans notes, there could be "the princely cabinet, serving a largely representational function, and dominated by aesthetic concerns and a marked predilection for the exotic," or the less grandiose, "the more modest collection of the humanist scholar or virtuoso, which served more practical and scientific purposes." Evans goes on to explain that "no clear distinction existed between the two categories: all collecting was marked by curiosity, shading into credulity, and by some sort of universal underlying design" (Wikipedia, "Cabinet of curiosities" (quoting Impey, MacGregor, Oliver, Arthur. The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe. Oxford University Press. p. 737))
writing
I won a few writing contests in high school and that convinced me that I should be a writer. As is the way of things, however, my path diverged in the yellow wood and I took the one that lead to a regular paycheck. I still like to write, however.
photography
I've always liked taking pictures. Like other things in this collection, this interest began as a teenager. It wasn't until the innovation of digial photography that I returned to taking pictures. Flickr's demise into a pay-to-play service did stop my sharing broadly, though.
gadgets & gizmos
I bought my first computer in 1980. I wrote programs for it in BASIC. Even earlier, I had a 150 in 1 Electronics Project Kit and want it back. Even earlier than that, I had walkie talkies. I want them back too.
Compartments
A sampler
blog
I mostly write poems these days for the blog I've been keeping since 2000.
Leading artists, writers, thinkers discuss the ideas shaping our lives & links between past & present and new academic research. Broadcast as Free Thinking Tues – Thurs 10pm on BBC Radio 3 + Proms Plus events
Update (11/12/2021): SDR stick arrived! Let the fun begin!
Update: November 21, 2021: Found that I was on the wrong frequency for the LaCrosse data. Tuned in to 955Mhz and BAM there it was (along with a ton of other sensors like the gas meter and various home security devices.). Raw data is dumping to the Sandbox (along with the HealthKit data). Going to pipe the output into MySQL so that I can more easily access it. It is currently in CSV. I have no idea why the JSON output won't read the same way the HealthKit data does.
Update 11/24/2021: thinking about using an MQTT broker via Mosquitto to push the RTL telemetry to MySQL.
Update (11/12/2021) : I have successfully connected the Apple Health Kit data with Chickadee through the app "Health Auto Export" and some fancy dancing in PHP and MySQL. Next steps will be parsing the JSON data!
Update November 21, 2021: See above update on Weather Station Project. But I did manage to get a complex array parser working. So much data. It is stored in native format in JSON in MySQL.
Poem-o-Matic
(Something for work: a device that prints out a poem on thermal paper.)
I started this project a while back. Here is the actual website it will run from: https://www.slccswc.org/poem-o-matic/poemomatic.php . We have an old thermal receipt printer that will print out a poem when the user hits the PRESS ME button on the touch screen monitor that a Raspberry Pi Zero W is attached to.
But, I'm running into issues with our Eduroam network, thus need to see if one of these solutions will work for us:
I already tried one using an SSL certificate, so I am not enthusiastic that any of these solutions will work. If not, I will download the whole SQL db to the Pi an take it from there.
Update (12/3/2021): I managed to get the Pi to connect over my phone for wireless, but still cannot get it to even see the College's wireless. I also can't get the thermal printer to recognize the Pi's chip architecture.
Update (12/16/2021): I realized I was being an idiot about the wireless after spending way too much time trying to figure out the EDUROAM blockades. I did, however, have it momentarily working, but blockades just kept cropping up, so I turned on Internet sharing from the iMac on my desk. Bam. Once I had stable access, it was no problem getting CUPS to work; I did have to kludge the install script (setup_v1.2.3.sh) that couldn't recognize the Pi Zero's architecture (but claimed it would work with the 32 bit version.). It did. Here is a video of the Pi in action:
https://youtu.be/w9f88gh_0iM
Speed the Plow
It is massive slow, so I have to ask myself, do I want to expend more funds on a zippier 4 or 8 GB Raspberry Pi. Of course I do, but yeah.
Sandbox
Check out the Sandbox for progress on the personal projects.
Currently Reading or Recently Read
Jackie Higgens
Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses
2022-04-07
Mantel, Hillary
The Mirror and the Light
2021-04-14
Graeber, David and David Wengrow
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
2021-11-16
Atsitty, Tacey
Rain Scald
2021-11-09
2021-11-16
Federici, Silvia
Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle
I am going to do some more fiddling to get more gizmos working on this server. I particularly want to parse the data from a weather station I acquired in the pandemic, and might look into pushing out some data from the Apple Health app (if that is even possible.) I need to find a solution for screen capturing the server, as it seems to hang under the current method.
