2006-06-02-1458Z


A week or so ago, clowning around, I jumped off my neighbor's deck, about 6 feet above the ground -- my feet went out from under me when I landed, and I hit the ground hard on my tailbone. The pain seems to be getting worse day by day instead of better. I don't think I broke it though.

I tried building a biquad antenna yesterday, and though I didn't bend the wire quite right, I was just about done when I tried brazing the N-connector to the piece of steel tubing I was using. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Of course the plastic core of the connector melted and I ruined it. Now I have to buy another N-connector and find a better way of mounting it.

My wireless network is behaving really well lately, minimal packet loss. And it reaches some of the farthest points in City of the Sun. One neighbor bought a new WRT54G, though, version 6, and I can't find a WDS option in the setup and can't get WhiteRussian RC4 to load. I'll probably try RC5 today.

We're looking into alternatives for our sewage lagoon before the EPA shuts us down a year or so from now. Although I and most of my immediate neighbors compost their own shit, there are too many residents depending on flush toilets, so this is a problem we need to solve. Lordsburg, NM has a nice system using no chemicals, just aerators in the lagoons and 3 ponds stocked with fish and surrounded by grasses. It's a beautiful wetlands area with an amazing variety of bird life. Doesn't look like we'll be able to do that here though; Lordsburg gets over 200,000 gallons of waste a day due to their proximity to I-10, whereas we don't likely get 1% of that.

This morning, annoyed with the constant screaming, I opened up my Black and Decker 400W inverter and removed the goddamned piezo buzzer. It's a BX-1209y. If I can find out what its current-handling capacity is, I'd like to try some experiments with a pest-control buzzer, driven by my computer, playing Bach or Mozart at several octaves above normal, out of human hearing range. That way I can hopefully drive out the termites while still having a pleasant "sound" in case my ears pick any of it up.

Back to blog or home page

last updated 2013-01-10 20:46:21. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com