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.

Oil change

Try a socket wrench on the drain plug – might be easier to get the leverage-pipe on it.

The tractor takes just over 2 gallons of oil, so a 2.5 gallon jug isn’t enough to do both the oil change and the hydraulic filter.  Three jugs will do both tractors and have a little to spare for topping up the hydraulic fluid reservoirs.  10W-40 or 15W-40 will work.  I’ve taken to using synthetic oil.  YMMV

Work out a gizmo to route the old oil out of the engine to the hole in the bottom of the tractor — it needs high walls around a fairly large catch basin that’s then routed to the exit via a wide path.  Goal is to avoid overflowing into the engine compartment.  Aluminum foil is going to be my material of choice for the next attempt.

Use the small funnel with the long flexible neck to snake into the filler — a single pour is a two-person job (one person holding the funnel, the other pouring).

Pay attention to where the handle on the dipstick winds up on the newer tractor — it has a curved rotating handle.  Make sure it’s rotated out of the path of the hood as it comes down.

Use grass-clippings/sand/gravel to clean up floor spills.

Hydraulic filter change

Use the breaker bar and pipe extender to break the filter loose — it’ll take about an eighth of a turn before it releases and it’s very hard to turn.  Thus it’s essential to know which way to rotate.  Figure out upside-down righty-tighty lefty-loosey in advance.

Prepare for a few ounces of oil spilling out as the seal breaks — relieving hydraulic pressure doesn’t seem to quite clear the pressure to the filter.  A couple rags per filter – one to catch the initial burst, another to clean and hold the outgoing and inbound filter.

Note that the path of the filter out and back in is a little twisty.  Down first, then out.

Use clean oil to fill the new filter.  Not quite all the way to the top, so’s to make it easier to navigate it into place and get the threads started without spilling.

Purge the air out of the system after installing the new filter using the longer one-ended hose so it can reach the reservoir under the driver’s seat.  Use short bursts of crank/run on the tractor where the deadman switch is disabled.

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 →

Here’s a scratchpad on how Jacktrip Hub Mode does audio routing as of early September 2020.

Starting the server in Hub Mode (capital-S instead of lower-case S) with the “-p” option offers four ways to configure the server.  Here’s an example launch string that would fire up a server in Mode 2:

jacktrip -S -p2

Mode – 0 (the default – my machine hears everybody and everybody hears the mix that I send them)

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Here’s a video and a recipe for musicians who want to display something other than a web-cam of themselves when performing in an ensemble.  Maybe graphics, or animation.  Especially interesting is to insert a Syphon stream into the mix.   Here’s one way to do that.  Sorry — I only cover Mac software here. Continue reading →

We here at Prairie Haven live on Little Waumandee Creek in Buffalo County, Wisconsin.  We’ve always wondered about where the word “Waumandee” comes from and what it means.

Listen to these blackbirds and see if you hear them saying “waumandee!” the way I do.  Maybe that’s where the word comes from?

This is a scratchpad post about the battery power-storage system. Another in the “Prairie Haven Operator’s Manual” series of posts.

Right now there are just a series of documentation diagrams that I made — I’ll add explanations as time permits.

Just for fun — here’s a picture of the Submarine Control Room Command Console that shows off the three inverters at the heart of the system. Continue reading →

This is a scratchpad post to remind myself how to decontaminate our well the next time it tests positive for bacteria.  I bet we have to do this every time we get flood runoff, but I’m willing to be proven wrong.  Related post: Winterize the RV

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