With Christians, a poetical view of things is a duty. We are bid to color all things with hues of faith, to see a divine meaning in every event.
— St. John Henry Newman
More adventures with Claude: I set it to work on some Arduino code I use to drive WS2811 LEDs. As it is, they just cycle through a set of a half-dozen different patterns. I’ve got ten strands of 50 LEDs apiece and need to inject power every so many strands, so in addition to a large-ish ugly length of LED bulbs, I have 5 separate power leads coming back to a 5V PSU. In short, it’s something of a pain to set up but once we cover all the ugliness up with ornaments, the effect is quite nice.
Anyway I wanted to have some more control over it, so I had the AI iterate over some wifi-enabled options but I think my wifi hat is flaky as it tends to drop its connection randomly (which I noticed awhile back when using it for some DIY weather station experiments). I dug around in the Arduino starter kit and came up with an IR sensor and remote and had Claude write code to, first, record the various codes sent by the remote and, second, add the control functions to the code. It took a little tweaking, but the end result works great and I have 2 strands wrapped around a lamp in my office running the patterns just for fun. It even showed me how to make the simple breadboard connections required to link it all together. I have to say it’s been great fun using it chase down various “hey, what if…” tech scenarios that pop into my head. It feels a bit like the first time I used the 3-D printer to make a custom part for something which otherwise would not have existed: from brain to Tinkercad to tangible object. A little magical if I’m being honest. I start looking around thinking “what else can I use this for?”
The snow days have been nice. Everyone was home yesterday and everything was cancelled today so we’ve spent Saturday lazing, reading and tinkering. Tonight: more Factorio. It’s looking like things will generally be normal on Monday; the kids who’ve gone out and about report that the streets are fine, though I guess concerns about buses on secondaries might keep the county home one more day. We’ll just have to see.
Thoroughly enjoying Little, Big. I like it’s generally cozy pacing and the writing is just gorgeous, particularly descriptions of warm outdoor spring and summer days!
They closed schools tomorrow so…
Currently reading: Little, Big by John Crowley 📚
So I just had Claude.ai iterate a few times over a custom extension for publishing to microblog directly from vscode, which is nice. This is the second bit of useful code that I’ve been able to generate from AI; the first was a dumb little ncurses app for displaying ‘live’ data from my weather station. I used ChatGPT for that, but had Claude add a few refinements. If you have an Ambient Weather Station and want to take a look at it, it’s in my github repo.
Pretty nice. I am, at best, a decent shell and perl scripter. I know enough python to hurt myself badly, and that’s about it. Either of these would have taken more time than I would have wanted to spend and I actually learned a little bit about vscode extensions in the process. Here’s the brave new world and all that.
In other news, the snow is looking more and more like a sure thing for this weekend. I’d be very surprised if they didn’t close schools in advance of Friday. Since we usually do our grocery shopping on the weekend, we got ahead of it and stocked up last night. Oh and I pulled the trigger on the Factorio expansion. Bring on the weather I say.
Edit: I also put the vscode extension into github. If you run into any problems and need help troubleshooting…uh…ask Claude!
On games
For the last few years, my go-to game for wintertime has been Factorio. It scratches a very deep itch for me, and I am very careful not to start playing until the decks are completely clear of work or other responsibilities. This happens most often in the winter when yardwork is on hold. Since complex mechanics seem to be a thing for me, I decided to give Dwarf Fortress another try, this time via Steam. So far…it’s ok. I’m slowly - very slowly - getting a sense of how deep it goes in terms of complexity, but it hasn’t quite gotten ahold of my nerd-nerve like Factorio’s optimization problems did. Plus, you know, there are rail networks to automate.
I’ve managed to keep my first Dwarf Fortress alive for a year of in-game time, which I know is barely scratching the surface. The population has grown a bit, and I can sort of see the farming, hunting, crafting, and defense management cycles forming. To be fair, I’m starting on a nerfed world with low-aggression monsters and whatnot. I’m nowhere close to kicking it to the curb, but I may restart it again on normal settings across the board and see how it runs without the training wheels. But I also just applied the 2.x update to Factorio and am eyeballing the Space Age expansion. The weather this weekend is looking grody, and we may be sort of locked in for a day or two. Pity.
Anyway, PTO is over, so the daily routines are more or less back in place. Paradoxically, with the holidays behind us, things feel a little more relaxed. I got a lot done and am in good shape to resume classwork towards the end of the month as we enter the homestretch. Some business travel is coming up, but I’ve got plenty of reading, so we’re good to go.
Currently reading: The Religion of the Day by University of Mary 📚
Currently reading: The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa 📚
Last day of PTO, and I spent it doing all of those fiddly things that I never have time for during the rest of the year: rearranging and cleaning a bit of the office, planting seeds I want to germinate outdoors, running stuff to the dump, that sort of thing. All the other to-do stuff got to-done. The only thing I didn’t get to was the garage, which can wait. Still enjoying Absolution and we are having a lot of fun with Bad Monkey. Lots of weird/gonzo Florida in the air around here in the dead of winter, which seems about right.
A low-key NYE for us: served at the vigil mass, lots of tacos, and a colossal bonfire which has become a tradition. A toast at midnight, then off to sleep. Puttering around with house cleaning today and catching up on the horrible news out of New Orleans. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis