Month: August 2020

Faux Pho

Steven Guccione

Some instant packaged pho.  Didn’t doctor it up in any way, didn’t even follow the directions on the package.  Just threw it all in a pot of boiling water for three minutes.  Added leftover asparagus, beef, an egg and the last of my most recent batch of sauerkraut.  Made me miss going out for actual pho.  Ready for this pandemic to end.

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Sprinkler Project Power Supply

Steven Guccione

So I bought a 24V / 12V power supply (the silver box) to supply the 24V for the sprinkler valves and 12V for the relay board.  The relay board generates 5V for the Raspberry Pi Zero W board.  I learned last week that sprinkler valves use 24V AC, not DC.  You can get away with DC but it will take more power and is just not right.  This is ok, since I was never crazy about the big power supply.

So I bought this wall wart power supply to get the 24VAC and this neat little converter to get 12VDC from the 24VAC.  Hooked it all up and it works.  Oh, originally bought a Rasperry Pi Zero without the header soldered in.  Figured I could do it myself.  Didn’t have the right equipment and / or the skills and really botched the soldering job.  Bought another one with the header soldered in.  Good thing those Pi boards are so cheap.

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Cutting the Cable TV Cord

Steven Guccione

I have had a long running battle with Time Warner / Spectrum.  Our internet service has been very erratic over the years but alas, we only have one provider in this neighborhood.  Yesterday we decided to sign up for Sling Blue and dump TV channels.  Of course I can add capabilities on line very easily.  Removing them (and lowering my bill) required almost an hour on the phone.  45 minutes of wait and then a quarter of an hour talking to (or rather being interogated by) a sales rep.  I have to add this wasn’t the usual phone support person, but a pretty polished salesman.  I felt like I was buying a car.  In the end he offered me a special secret deal that wasn’t even on their web site.  $15 a month for 60 streaming channels.  He couldn’t even tell me what the channels were but said if I googled there were some 3rd parties discussing it.  I almost bit, since it was half of what I was paying for Sling.  But after my years of hassles with Time Warner / Spectrum, and an hour on the phone I declined.

Making Stuff

Steven Guccione

Filmmaker David Lynch has a YouTube series where he recently discussed making his own iPhone holder.  The purpose seems to be to use the iPhone as a camera and attach it to a tripod.  He admits at the end that you can buy similar devices and that they are probably “better” than the one he is making.  Yet he is persisting with making his own clunkey, wooden iPhone holder.

Of course David Lynch is an artist and can do whatever he wants with little of the sort of scrutiny the rest of us would receive.  I’m sure if I were making something like this and showed it to people they would politely mention that you can buy such things, and buy them cheaply.  But this is where it hits closer to home: I often buy and repair things in ways that might not appear to make sense.

First we need to ask what is “sensible”. Sometimes I do things for the experience.  I was going to use the word “joy”, but much of the time it isn’t joyful.  Sometimes you can save some money. I recently fixed a broken sprinkler pipe.  Had never done it before and it may have saved me $100, maybe more. On the balance my time and effort, depending on how you count it, was worth much more than what it would have cost to pay someone else to fix it.

So why do such things? I would say for reasons Mr Lynch omits, perhaps not accidentally.  Once you have built a thing you “own” it.  You understand exactly how it works.  You can make another one, or make a better one.  You can start to understand the pieces that attach to the thing, in this case the iPhone on one end and the tripod on the other.  Lastly, you can get exactly what you want.  I am dabbling with a home lawn sprinkler controller.  There are several available, but none that I really like.  I can build what I want to work exactly the way I want.  Even better, as my needs or wishes change, I can change my design, fix it up without having to trash the old product then replace it with the shiny new one., that might still not be exactly what I want. 

GPU Supercomputing

Steven Guccione

An interesting announcement from Nvidia.  Not long ago I was building such GPU clusters for the financial services industry.  Nvidia seems to be moving up the food chain from a graphics coprocessor developer to a full systems house.  Their rumored interest in ARM could make them a new version of the fully integrated systems houses of yore, like IBM and Sun.

AI of the Storm: How We Built the Most Powerful Industrial Computer in the U.S. in Three Weeks During a Pandemic

The making of Selene is a tale of systems expertise that’s bringing high performance computing to the data center.

 

The $7 Trillion Fed Market Prop

Steven Guccione

In case you weren’t paying attention, while the Congress argues over funding for the unemployed in this pandemic, the Federal Reserve has bought $7 Trillion (yes, trillion) in corporate debt in open market actions.  This may not even be legal.  What it does is prop up stock markets, sending vast sums to the already wealthy.  From Marketwatch.

Fed slows corporate debt purchases to trickle

Fed’s overall balance sheet at $6.9 trillion

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