I made a video version of this that you can watch here:

But I like this kinda thing as a blog post, so here is is.  Click on the pictures to embiggen them.

It starts out with the build (and takes a detour into revising the assembly the Vevor rake I bought to sit in my quick attach 3 point hitch setup).

The last part is a bunch of pictures before and after a day of raking the summer weeds out of the driveway.  I found this to be a LOT easier/better than using the land plane to do the job.  So from now on, I’ll use the land plane in the spring and the rake for the rest of the year.  Here’s a link to my post about the land plane.

The story begins with the 140 pound box crushing my little deliveries tub at the top of the driveway.  Awww.

We rassled it into the bucket and hauled it to the garage…

… and I started building it on the tractor.  Step 1 looked fine, the first piece dropped right into the quick-attach 3-point hitch.  But…

… which creates two puzzlers.  First, assembling according to the instructions made it too wide for quick-attach.  AND the top connection won’t work because they have you mount the diagonal bar right in the place where the top hook of the quick-attach wants to go.  More pictures about both of those in a minute…

Here’s the detour that shows how I got it to fit in my quick-attach.  First thing — there are lots of versions of these out there that are all slightly different.  The one I bought was the Vevor (which sits in the middle of this picture).

The tricky bit is that each of those assemble their 3-point slightly differently, so my scheme may not work for all of them.  For example the one in the upper left looks like the top hook will work — they’ve mounted the diagonal above the the bar that the top-hook wants to slide into.  But they still assemble the bottom so it looks like it will be too wide.  Best plan would be to get confirmation from your vendor that it’ll work with a 3-point before you buy it.  Second best would be to get detailed measurements and confirm for yourself.  Third best is cross your fingers and hope my scheme will work for you.

Here is how I handled the “too wide” problem.  I moved the two diagonal bars from the outside to the inside of that bottom piece.  That got me back to a width that fits in the bottom of the quick attach.

To make room for the top-hook of the quick attach, I assembled the top bolt with the diagonal bar on one side and then the two bushings next to each other, which made enough room for the top hook to come up and engage.

Here’s a string of happy pictures showing how it now fits in the quick attach.

This is one side of the bottom with a little bit of space…

This is the other side, snug but engaged.

This is a side shot showing that the top hook can now slide up past that moved-to-the-side diagonal piece.

Here’s the assembly.  Two bushings, THEN the diagonal brace.  Plenty of room for the top hook now.

Back to the build-out pictures…

My only minor complaint is that the rake can only be rotated in 45-degree increments.  I’d like less-aggressive angling options and may drill another hole or two at some point.  For now, I’ve found that swinging the 3-point hard to one side lines the (60″) rake up with the edge of the tractor tires and gives a little bit of pull-to-the-center angling.  Not too bad.

Putting tines on…

… gets pretty tedious and Marcie rescued me at the end by being a 3rd hand.

Done.

On to the before-after pictures.  I couldn’t find any good ones out on the ‘net.  So here’s the result of about six passes over the driveway — took about an hour each, so about a day to do about 3/4 mile of gravel driveway weed pulling.  Sure beats working.

A great project.  With a nice puzzler in the middle.

Got this in the mail today.  It turns out this is a tradition here in Wisconsin when there’s a tight election like the one for a critical Supreme Court justice.  Since the guy who publishes it is shy and doesn’t include any information about himself, here’s a link to help you out.  Summary: it’s fake.

Catholic leaders say Wisconsin Catholic Tribune is political mail not authorized by the church

And, since he doesn’t have any copyright notices in his propaganda, here’s the whole thing.  Thanks for all your help you jerk.

Here’s a summary of an analysis I did to understand the impact on me (as a grid-connected solar member) of a recent change in rates at the electric coop (Riverland Energy Cooperative) that I belong to.

My conclusion in a nutshell: I accept the new rates as they stand.  They seem fairer to coop members as a whole and I’m happy to carry the impact that my solar panels have on our shared infrastructure. 

I looked at three rate-change puzzlers: Demand Charge, Annual to Monthly True-Up and Rate of Return.  The rest of this post goes through them at a high level, and there’s an 18-minute video at the end that goes into more detail.

UPDATE: There is a new version of the spreadsheet and an additional video on how to use it at the very end of this post.

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A quick post about getting X/Y Pal connected between an iPhone 15 and an M1 Mac Ultra.

Connecting over the wire (USB in the documentation) didn’t work, but using a Network MIDI connection did — with the advantage of not having to be tethered to the Mac.  Here’s a 45 second video that shows the following steps:

Open Audio Midi Setup and show the MIDI Studio window

Click open the Configure Network Driver window (the little globe in the top menu bar)

Enter and enable a Session (which defaults to Session 1 on both the Mac and the phone — confusing — this is the Mac Session 1)

“Network Session 1” should now be available in ShowMIDI

Head over to X/Y Pal on the phone and select a preset — “mike’s demo” in my case

Edit each device so that it points to the phone’s “Network Session 1”  (confusing, sorry)

Go back to the MIDI Network Setup window, select the phone and click Connect

That’s what I did to get X/Y Pal to talk to my Mac over WiFi.

Here’s a 45 second video of all that.  Click the pop-out icon to put it in its own window or just go full screen to really embiggen it.

Document wish list:

• NTIA funding – both power increase and Bedford St. move
• CPB-qualification
• Bedford St. deal
• Board minutes from that period

Significant Events

• Applying FCC approval to change frequency and transition to vastly upgraded transmitter power and antenna facility on the west side of town.  Joan Rubel and Vinnie Curren worked on that, Steve Lewis and Ben Dawson assisted.
• Applying for and getting the NTIA grant.  We had NTIA funding for the power increase / move to WMTV’s tower and for the build-out of the new facility on Bedford Street.  Memories are currently vague about whether it was one grant or two, but funding was critical.
• Getting CPB qualified, with the Community Service Grant then rolling in to help subsidize operations.  Joan Rubel did all of that.
• Managing to buy the Bedford St building from STASH at a time when interest rates were 18%.  Joan Rubel and Mark Fuerst pulled that miracle off.

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Distractions led me to falling way behind on these two chores and I had to relearn a lot of stuff.  So here’s a list of notes to aid my failing memory. Continue reading →

Scratchpad — reminding myself of the steps needed to remove the pulley and key in order to drop the blade hub out of the mower.  Really boring, don’t read any further..

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This is really fast/early draft stuff.

The puzzler:  Building a 20-person mix-delete audio routing template in my Pretty Good Jacktrip Toolkit crashes (moderately-sized) Linode servers.  They seem to crash when automating large numbers of Jack-connection adds or deletes — issuing a delete-all with JMESS for example.

The hypothesis: Jack works OK, it’s the number of connections per endpoint that’s causing the trouble.

The idea to get around this (so far): split the mix-minus routing in two by putting players in sections.

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Clogged sandpaper leading to burns in the wood has always been a big problem with my PerformaX (JET) 16-32 drum sander.  I’m hopeful that this is the fix — replacing the cover to provide a connection for a 4″ dust collection hose (from the current model) rather than the original one which connected a 2.5″ hose.  Here are the pictures — which started just before COVID and end…  today, almost a year and a half later.

Starting point — March 1st, 2020 — the old cover

The new cover arrives – March 7 2020

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UPDATE: September 2023

This post is for a person using command-line connection to Jacktrip and Qjackctl to manage Jack (which is the way we did it back in March of 2021).  It creates a single virtual device to route audio to and from Jacktrip.  This makes Qjackctl a lot easier to manage by providing a single interface that can be used for both input and output.

These days JackTrip has a terrific graphic user interface (GUI) that can manage audio input and output devices directly through RT Audio (eliminating the need to use Qjackctl).  In that case I would suggest creating a separate Loopback devices for audio being sent to Jacktrip and audio being received from Jacktrip.  It’s much easier to keep things straight and just as flexible.

Here’s a step-by-step post about routing Jacktrip audio using Rogue Amoeba’s Loopback software.  Loopback is a for-money successor to Soundflower and similar to BlackHole.  I like it because it is more visual and does more stuff.

The goal of this post is to get a person with a 2×2 interface going with a setup that will let them join a Jacktrip session reliably, without having to “rewire” things each time.  It also covers things like routing audio into and out of other audio software like Logic Pro, Ableton Live, Max and Zoom.

Alas, this is for Mac folks only.  Windows audio puzzles me.  I don’t have a clue how to do this on a Windows machine.

There are links to short videos that “animate” each of these steps and examples.   Click on the pictures to embiggify and read them.

Step 0: Assumptions – Click here for video
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Here’s the rig that that Marcie uses to take pictures of things at microscope scale.  We took a long journey through a lot of attempts that were unsatisfactory — perhaps this post will save you some steps.

Here’s a picture of the whole setup (click on the photos to embiggen).

Here’s the recipe: Continue reading →

dear WORT.

happy 45th!

many thanks for the invitation to throw a few words into the virtual gathering.  here’s a collection of WORT memory-jogger photos, starting off with a few pages from early program guides, that tell a lot of the story of the early days.  clicking on the newsletter-page photos brings up bigger versions.

. . . .

here’s Numero Uno – volume 1 number 1.  my writing style in those days was a completely-hopeless attempt, by an illiterate geek,  to emulate my hero Lorenzo Milam.  Milam was guiding light for a gaggle of us who started stations all over the country — we lost him this year (2020), along with so many others.

a pretty good exposition about why most of us did all that work – it was fun, we made lots of good friends and we kinda took care of each other.  Jeff Lange did a lot of the graphics for the first-generation newsletters including everything on this page (i think). Continue reading →