I am writing this on Sunday, 9/7. There are no pics.
My bike book is done! It is available on all major E-book outlets, and is also available in paperback from Amazon and a few other outlets. Don’t worry about trying to find it. You will all be receiving a paperback copy when my order comes in. It’s my way of celebrating the completion of the project.
I had a nice experience with the book cover. They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but that’s exactly what everybody does. I have no artistic talent. But it turns out there are a large number of people who make book covers available through the web. Most self-published books are E-books, and most E-books are junk fiction. By far the largest category is romance novels for the ladies, followed by fantasy for the teens, and then junk guy stories (Samurai / Private Detective / Soldier of Fortune stuff). All the artists have sample work on their sites, but it’s hard to judge how they would do on a bike book from the samples. I picked a lady who had reasonable prices and seemed to have a good attitude. It worked out very well. I ended up getting it for a 3-year old laptop with a broken cooling fan plus 47 cents, thanks to E-bay. I simply sold the computer, left the proceeds in my Pay Pal account, then used the Pay Pal account to pay the artist. Very slick.
Last week we finally got our typical summer weather — 90 degrees and 90% RH. Not only was it hot during the day, it didn’t cool down much at night. We ran the AC all week. But we had a nice cool front come through late yesterday. We enjoyed a dramatic thunderstorm from the shelter of our under-deck porch. It was the first really good thunderstorm we had since the deck was re-done, and we enjoyed watching the storm very much. (We had a heavy rain day, which I wrote about earlier, but there was no thunder or lightening.) Today the AC is off and the windows are open. The weather is so nice today, we went out to play a round of mini-golf at the Columbia Sports Center.
I was out on my bike Wednesday for a short ride when all of a sudden, I couldn’t change gears. I had noticed a part was a little loose. I couldn’t tighten it, but I figured it would hold out until winter. I was wrong. I’ve ordered a replacement part, but I’m not sure when it will be in. I have my old backup bike, but I haven’t taken very good care of it. The cables are corroded, and I don’t want to ride it too far from home, in case a critical cable breaks and I have to walk it home.
In addition to the bike, my method of making the rabbits go someplace else didn’t work. I’ve put 4 bags of gravel in the ground, sprayed copious quantities of rabbit repellent, and dumped over a can of “Critter Ridder” peppers on the ground. They just keep on digging more holes to get to their warren. We’re coming up on another breading season (they have 3 or 4 a year), so I want to do something pretty quickly. Ferrets can be quite effective, but I rejected that option because I have no use for the ferrets once the rabbits are gone. Also, the ferrets only get the rabbits out of the ground. You still have to get rid of them. Cats like to hunt rabbits, but our neighborhood would not appreciate the type of feral barn cats that like to hunt. It’s supposed to be easy and cheap to trap them, but we have plenty of rabbits all over Columbia. There’s no place to relocate them. So I decided to call professionals in and ask them for the “final solution”. We’ll see what they say.
My most recent project is a Raspberry Pi computer. This is a little (2.5″ x 3.5″) circuit board computer that costs about $35. (You can find pictures very easily of you search for “Raspberry Pi” on the web.) The computer is amazingly capable, and there’s a very large DIY (Do It Yourself) community doing all kinds of things with it. They have a way to play videos on it. You connect it to the Internet, then plug it into your TV. Voila, you can play videos from the World Wide Web. I worked on this for a surprisingly long time, but I finally got it working. I was surprised that it does an excellent job of playing web site videos such as You-Tube. Unfortunately, I also found that video content doesn’t include Amazon streaming movies or CBS.com streaming TV shows. At least, not legally. I wasn’t surprised at the limitation.
The other thing I want to try with my tiny computer board is wireless remote control. There are a wide range of home automation and home security products. I am interested in devices using the Z-Wave protocol. They have a plug-in board that lets the Raspberry Pi talk to Z-Wave devices. Because the devices are mostly available for people buying very expensive systems, it’s hard to find the simple (and inexpensive) kinds of devices I am interested in. But after spending an entire day, I found a reasonably priced device that lets me detect a push-button switch. The add-on board and the switch device should be in Tuesday. Then I’ll start playing around with Z-Wave stacks, javascript, python, and endless other strangely named geek stuff that I don’t already know how to do. It should keep me busy for a good long time.
That’s a lot of news for just one week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.