Posts

Some vegetable seeds, particularly many exotic chilli pepper varieties and some Asian eggplants are tricky to germinate. After trying the obvious things - cold-induced forced dormancy (cold stratification), abundant moisture, high humidity, and temperatures over 80F, I’ve found that some seeds simply do not germinate with much success at all. But having read a number of articles on this problem, we decided to try an intensive chemical process to see if we could achieve better results. And it looks successful.

The Atmel AVR 8-bit microcontrollers have always been a favourite for tinkering; and the massive popularity of the Arduino based on the ATmega 168 and 328 MCUs introduced a lot of hobbyists to this series. The companion ATtiny series from Atmel were the poor stepchildren of the ATmega controllers to an extent - useful for small projects but often quite limited. However, the acquisition of Atmel by Microchip Technology in 2016 ushered in a new series of MCUs bearing the same moniker of ATtiny, but much more capable and innovative. They have been around for a while now, but many hobbyists are just beginning to poke around with these new capable MCUs.

Although FreeRTOS¹ is an indispensible tool for working on anything more than the simplest application on ESP32, there are some difficulties to master, such as multitasking. Multitasking using FreeRTOS is accomplished by creating tasks with xTaskCreate() or xTaskCreatePinnedToCore(). In both of these calls, one of the parameters is uxStackDepth which is the allocated stack size for the task. The FreeRTOS documentation on the subject is clear about the units for uxStackDepth:

Several people have asked me how we manage a very productive vegetable garden; so I’ve written this post as a brief description of one aspect our our approach - vermiculture.

One of our overarching family goals is sustainable living. It’s basically about leaving a small footprint. A practical component of this philosophical stance is dealing with food waste. We deal with kitchen waste with a combination of bokashi composting and vermicomposting (also known as vermiculture) It’s not for the faint-of-heart and some are horrified to learn that I keep thousands - possibly hundreds of thousands - of worms in our basement. But some have asked me to describe our process; so this article is meant just to document it. There is a lot of art and science to vermiculture and this is not meant to be a definitive guide to vermiculture.

“How do you get to Carnegie Hall” goes the old joke. “Practice, practice, practice.” But of course there’s no other way. If the science of talent development has taught us anything over the last fifty years, it’s that there is no substitute for strategic practice. Some even argue that innate musical abilities don’t exist. Whether it’s nature, nurture, or both, show me a top-notch musician and I’ll show you a person who has learned to practice well. Here we’ll take a dive into a set of practice techniques that I’ve developed, along with tools to realize them in the practice room.

Hazel is a centrepiece of my automation suite on macOS. I rely on it to watch directories and take complex actions on files contained within them. Recently I discovered an issue with files that are locked in the Finder. If files that otherwise match all the rules are locked, then Hazel will attempt to execute the rules. But the locked status may preclude execution. For example, I began seeing frequent Hazel notifications popups such as:

While Apple is slowly coming around to recognizing that some of its users listen to classical music, there is one quirk in the Music app on macOS that betrays its deep bias toward pop music. It’s this: when you create a new playlist, the application defaults to displaying the tracks in its “Playlist” view, which as far as I can tell serves no other function than to consume real-estate in the UI by displaying a thumbnail of the album art.

Obsidian is pretty reckless with file creation dates. If you modify a note in Obsidian, it updates the file creation date. This renders Dataview queries that rely on it useless. For an introduction to this issue, see this lengthy thread on the Obsidian forums.

Workarounds

There are a several solutions to this problem.

1. YAML-based dates

One can include a cdate (or similar) field in the note’s front matter and just direct the Dataview query against that, e.g. LIST FROM "" WHERE startswith(cdate,"2023-05-29") SORT file.ctime asc. This works, but of course it requires you to always place that field ahead of your note content. Some people like that; others not so much.

If you modify a file in-place using sed with the -i option, you will get a file that has a new file creation date. On macOS 13.3.1, this is absolutely 100% true, although you will read claims otherwise. I ran into this problem while implementing a Hazel rule that updates YAML automatically in my Obsidian notes.

Background

I have use YAML frontmatter in my Obsidian notes. It looks like:

---
uid:     20221120152124
aliases: [20221120152124, AllAboutShell]
cdate:   2022-11-20 15:21
mdate:   2023-05-18 05:14
type:    zettel
---

My goal is to update the mdate field whenever the file changes. Hazel is the perfect tool for this, so I set about writing a rule that covers this case. The heart of the rule is a shell script action that writes the modification date:

Some airports in X-Plane have terrain issues that can be quite entertaining.

This Delta 737-800 got lost in the maze of cargo ramps at PANC and was trying to taxi back to the terminal when it encountered a steep icy taxiway. It required 65% N1 just to get up the slope.

Clearly a fix is required. It turns out to be quite simple. In the global airports file apt.dat, find the offending airport. In this case, it’s PANC where its entry looks like:

Posts

Improving vegetable seed germination with chemical pretreatment

A quick word on ATtiny 1-series interrupts

FreeRTOS stack size on ESP32 - words or bytes?

Our vermiculture process: A sustainable contribution

An approach to interleaved and variable musical practice: Tools and techniques

Telling Hazel not to match locked files

Quickly change playlist view options on macOS

Obsidian file creation date debacle and a solution

Workarounds

1. YAML-based dates

Changing the file creation date on macOS

Background

Flatten airports in X-Plane