Jennifer's 365 Project

It's getting cold outside so instead of strolling around downtown on the sidewalk I opted for the Skywalk. walking through it I was able to view all of the newly installed Christmas decorations.

You can't make them out too well in this photo, but trust me, there's garland around some lamposts and a Santa light installed on the outside of that parking structure dead ahead.

I don't remember them putting up decorations quite this early last year, but I may not have walked by this particular part of downtown this early in November last year. I'll have to see if they have the tree up near Rosa Parks Circle as well.

Awhile back I ordered two more cheap tiny routers (TP-Link 703N) off of eBay. They're very cheap (about $21) and compact, which is appealing when you're working on smaller projects involving an Arduino or the Raspberry Pi.

The routers arrived on Friday so today I flashed OpenWRT onto one of the new router. To my surprise, the latest version of OpenWRT now comes with the web interface (LuCI), which means no installing it from the command line. That's really convenient if I ever want to configure something that way.

Once flashed, the router needed to be configured as a wireless client. That means connecting to the wifi in the house and passing that connection through to the ethernet port. Luckily, thanks to an awesome Instructables page, I already have one of these routers connected to the Snail Mail Notifier so the setup was pretty easy. I just grabbed the config files from the existing router, changed a few static IP addresses, and I was up and running in a matter of minutes. I can't tell you how much easier that was the second time around.

So we now have a Raspberry Pi on the wifi. The setup may not be as pretty as this miniature wifi dongle, but I'm happy with it.

I've wanted the Adafruit Raspberry Pi clear case for awhile so when it was back in stock earlier this week I ordered two immediately (one for each Pi we have). They arrived today which meant I had to drop everything immediately and play with them.

The cases shipped unassembled so we each put one together. They were very easy to snap together and the case holds the Pi nicely. The board shifts every so slightly in the case, but not enough to misalign any holes for the various ports on the board.
Since it's clear, that means you get to see everything inside, which is something I like. When I was younger and teaching myself how to build computers in the 90's, I really wanted a clear computer case. This clear case for the Raspberry Pi satisfies that want.

Maybe I can stick some blue LEDs in there or a water cooling system.

I'm just kidding!

Ambient light via the arduino and a PC is something I've wanted to do for awhile but didn't have all the parts until earlier this week.

First I wanted to make sure the LED strip actually worked and I had everything wired properly. It was pretty easy to do following the ladyada RGB LED tutorial.

Everything worked perfectly but when I tried to transfer things to an ambient lighting project I'd found, I couldn't get one component to work properly. Since I'm not well versed with Processing (which is a component that runs on the computer to determine what color to tell the arduino to display), I didn't see an immediately solution and I didn't have the time for in-depth troubleshooting.

I'll have to spend a little more time with it on a weekend when I have more time to devote but for now, I have a fancy LED strip. That's a whole lot more fun than just a single red, single blue, and single green LED.

It's that magical time of year where the time change combined with shortening daylight hours make for a 20 minute (give or take) blinding session every morning for the next few weeks.

Here's hoping for cloudy days the next few weeks.

We left early in the morning to go vote. We arrived a little before 7am and were out about 40 minutes later. Not bad. The new polling place by our house is a church, just like the last place. I've voted in public schools while living in Grand Rapids, but never while living in the suburbs of Grand Rapids. I don't know if that means they have more churches than public schools or what, but it's always a little off-putting, especially when you think about separation of church and state.
The evening was filled with, as you can imagine, a lot of news on the TV. Chris spent a fair amount of the evening listening to various pundits who offered little in the way of substance.

Meanwhile I spent a chunk of the night working on getting a DVR set up on the Raspberry Pi. I'm trying to get a popular piece of software, TVheadend, running on the Pi. I had encountered a compiling error yesterday, but fixed it today and away I went. Software was loaded onto the Pi!

Now to just wait for the mpeg-2 license I ordered so I can actually stream video. And of course, tweak any settings once that's up and running. There's always that. Still - progress! These little $35 computers are kind of awesome.

There are quite a few ballot proposals this year, so I thought it would be best to come equipped with a handy cheat sheet of my selections. In all the years past there have been so few that I could remember which way I wanted to vote without writing anything down, but this year I figured why take any chances?

Thanks League of Women Voters!
You may remember me discussing political ads received in the mail a month or so ago. At that time we'd only received two pieces of mail.

As you can see, we received quite a bit more since then.
Unlike the rest of the household, Leki appreciates the mailers. They make for a crinkly bed.

Today we spent more time raking. not as much as yesterday, but still quite a bit. We had all of the leaves in the front of the house who were just hanging out in piles from yesterday, plus some more leaves Chris wanted to mulch.

It may not look like it, but that pile of leaves off in the distance is about to my shoulders, not five feet, but more than four.

We have a lot of leaves to mulch.

I love living in an area with so many trees. Except when it comes time to do any raking...

It's been several years since I've had to rake any leaves. I guess that's the byproduct of living in an apartment for so long. So I wasn't looking forward to doing any raking. Especially in our back yard.
The front yard wasn't too bad, but the back is sloped and has three levels to it. Those bricks, as you can see, really like to hold onto leaves.

We spent several hours raking and we're still not quite done. This city doesn't offer leaf pickup in the street, like the city I grew up in. It also doesn't offer a trash service, so yard waste collection is slim pickings. In fact, they only pick up leaves, bagged, once. In the whole year. Just once.

So our alternative is to pay for a private company to pick up the leaves, rent a trailer from the city/dump the leaves somewhere, or attempt to mulch them like crazy.

So we're trying to mulch as many as we can and we'll likely have to bag the rest.

I see more mulching in my future.

I couldn't get the Raspberry Pi working yesterday, but I found a nice Fedora ARM Installer that lets you choose your own image to install on your SD card. That seemed to do the trick.

On my way to a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian.

It's been awhile since Iv'e used the triple-boot hackintosh (which boots linux, OS X (snow leopard), and Windows 7) but I've been having some difficulty getting a Debian port onto the Raspberry Pi.

Of course, part of my issue might actually be the SD cards I'm using. They're all kind of small.

Still, it's nice to pull out the old netbook and see that everything works fine on it. Having a mac or linux OS at my disposal can be useful.