Embedded - 439: Ditches and Psychology

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

Chris and Elecia talk about house maintenance, blinking LEDs, paper engineering and more.  Cutting Mobius Strips Video: Tadashi Tokieda cuts various combinations of loops and Mobius loops - with surprising results. festi.info/boxes.py generates boxes for laser cutting (or other SVG consuming device). Boxes.py is a python module that lets you programmatically generate the SVGs. (Github repo) Amanda Ghassaei’s Sugarcube is a MIDI instrument using this SparkFun button pad. We also talked about the Mikroe 8800 Retro Click. Elecia is taking Paper Engineering with Kelli Anderson. Chris is taking songwriting courses from School of Song. Transcript

Hello, and welcome to Embedded. It's just us this week. Well, I mean, it's been a few weeks. It is. Happy New Year. Happy New Year, and everything that came before New Year. Yes, happy winter. Please let the light come back. I don't care about the light so much. I don't like the moist.

Yeah, you've been having fun playing in the mud? Yes, yes. I'm the mud man now. The thing that they don't tell you about buying a house is that it's a lot like getting a part-time job that nobody pays you for. In fact, you have to pay a lot to do it. Yeah, yeah, there's that.

And it's also a constant battle against the disintegration of your house through various forces that you weren't aware of before you owned a house. And then, I know I'm complaining about owning a house, which is... This is so, yes. But you never know if something that's wrong is actually wrong or if you just don't know anything. So like, is some moisture under the house okay when you have a big crawl space and you're built into a hillside? I don't know.

Nobody's ever explained that to me. I've asked people and I don't remember the answer. How much erosion is too much erosion? So I don't know like how much work should I be doing on this drainage problems. Yeah, these are not real problems yes but uh so yeah it's you don't want your place of shelter to fall down the hill and you know become a boat particularly not as the storm of storms is coming but yes i've been messing with sump pumps which are as fun as the word sump pump sounds. Yes, and you discovered that we have a heated water source.

Yes, temporarily. That's kind of what started it. Yeah, so I went down there before the latest storm, but after the first storm to check on the sump pumps. We have three sump pumps which take water that accumulates in our crawl space and moves it somewhere else, hopefullyulates in our crawl space and moves it somewhere else, hopefully not in our crawl space. And it's moderately successful at that.

The design of the sump pump system was done by somebody who didn't know what they were doing. So I'm inheriting what is mostly an amateur project. But I went down there and checked on, we have three sump pumps, and one of them was obviously not running because the catch basin was full of water and overflowing and also steaming,

which was a new experience to see a pool of water in my basement crawlspace steaming. Briefly, I thought, oh my God, we have some new geothermal event happening under our house. And not, oh wow, a motor is seized and now we're just using it to transfer electricity to warm. So that pump had seized completely and I don't know how long it had been down there doing that, but it was bad. So yes, my project for the week, in addition to trying to get back to work after taking time off, is to replace that sump pump, which I am not doing well at.

What did you do with your time off? A lot of nothing, which is something I haven't done in a while, not intentionally. So that was kind of nice. You got me some things for Christmas that I played around with, which were kind of fun technology stuff, which I have to say I haven't been that excited about doing little tech projects, but after several days of not doing work and not interacting with the tech community, I was like, oh, I have these boards.

Let's see what I can do with these. So it was actually kind of fun. And I didn't have too much ambition about it. So I'm still playing with them fun and I didn't, uh, you know, I didn't, uh, have too much ambition about it. So I'm still playing with them and I have ideas for, for them, but. You used CircuitPython for one of them. Yeah. So the boards you got me, um, the only one I played with so far, you got me this thing

from, from Micro, M-I-K-R-O-E, which I'd never heard of before. They make these little, they have a whole ecosystem. And they have a lot of sensors and a lot of... Tons, hundreds. Just, I mean, so many. These little boards, it's like the feather system or the Arduino shields or Raspberry Pi hats. We have these little boards that all interconnect with a common connector. And they have various sensors. But these people have hundreds and boards that all interconnect with a common connector, and they have various sensors.

But these people have hundreds and hundreds that they make. They have CPU carrier boards, so you can put like two or three microcontrollers on a board and then plug these modules in. So there's a whole module system. It's really kind of fascinating. I'd never heard of them. They have a compiler and other stuff.

So they have the whole embedded deal. Never heard of them. M-I-K-R-O-E. Never heard of them they have a compiler and other stuff so they have a whole the whole embedded deal never heard of them m-i-k-r-o-e never heard of them so the board you got me is this little micro 8800 board which they take the name from the altair 8800 but what it is it's uh an eight by eight array of red leds and a four by four array of micro buttons. And so it's really small. It's about the size of a Raspberry Pi Pico. Maybe a little smaller. Oh, and is it a little bigger? It's a little bigger in one dimension, but smaller in another.

Okay. And it has an LED and button controller chip on it from somebody, AMS1115 or something. And that's the I squared C. So you talk to that, and you can make all the buttons light up and stuff. Make all the LEDs light up and receive all the things. Right, right. You can make the LEDs light up, and you can easily read the buttons.

And so I'll play with that with the Raspberry Pi Picos I have lying around because I haven't tried those. And so I was hemming and hawing. I was like, well, I've got the Picos, so I'm going to install the SDK and do Visual Studio Code and do all this stuff. And I was looking at it, and I was like, well, I've got the Pico, so I'm going to install the SDK and do Visual Studio Code and do all this stuff. And I was looking at it and I was like, well, there's a Docker for that. Maybe that's the simplest thing to do so I don't screw up my

Mac's existing install. And then finally I said, why don't I try CircuitPython? And I did. It was really fun and it's super easy. And you didn't have to install anything. You just edit the file and it does its thing. I opened it in VS Code as if it was its own project folder,

which is probably not what you're supposed to do because a lot of touching. I write to Flash a lot. And edited it right there and it was super easy. And I think the newer CircuitPython even has a web server. So you don't even need anything installed on your computer. This is the Pico W with wireless. So if you have that, I think you can connect to it

and edit the code on it using its own web server. I have to try that still, but when I had a brand new install of it and I connected to it, it's like, oh, click here to edit your code. So I want to give that a shot. But it was very relaxing to use CircuitPython. It was weird.

I mean, like, I still had problems and bugs and things I didn't understand. But it was like, oh, this is, I don't know. It was comfortable. It was comfortable, yeah. And there was no driver for the LED chip that was on this board, so I had to look up the data sheet and some other stuff and use the base I squared C calls to write to it. But you did all that in Python. You didn't go and recompile CircuitPython.

All of that was in CircuitPython. And I found some example code for that. So I worked with that, and I put Conway's Game of Life on it and made it flash things. And I had a web server, so youway's Game of Life on it and made it flash things. And I had a web server so you could reset Game of Life, you know, using your browser. So I play around with that. And then I was so inspired, I tried to make a little box for it, a 3D printer box for it, which I'm still kind of not very good at. And you did SCAD for that?

No, Onshape is what I've been using and it's a free if you're not selling it's free-ish so um it's nor yeah you normally have to pay for it but if you if you're just a hobbyist and you allow they have their own cloud storage of everything so if you allow all your designs to be public, then it's totally free. And I don't care. People can look at my crappy boxes if they want. So yeah, I had been using Fusion 360 for some work stuff. And it's just, it's so expensive. And they keep changing the subscription. And I like it. It's the UI is better than on shapes. I understand it. The UI is better than Onshape's. I understand it better, but I'm still bad at it. But I've just kind of decided I'm going to use Onshape.

It works on my iPad, works in a browser. There's no software for Onshape, so it just works in a browser. But it's the same idea as Fusion 360, where you do sketches and extrusions and all that kind of stuff. It's funny, you've been down on technology for a while, just completely, I don't want to do this. And a couple weeks off, and I mean, you got really into it. You were lost programming for like three days.

I read somebody say something. Oh, no, I saw a study a couple weeks ago that said that the Internet, having access to the Internet and social media and all this information, these little bite-sized information, means that people don't reach a profound state of boredom. And that you have to reach a profound state of boredom to go do creative, to be like, okay, I'm going to go work on something creative. I think there's a little bit of truth to that at least for me so i think this week i might have achieved close to a profound state of boredom at one point it's like oh i've got these boards i'll sit down i think i didn't want to do the thing that is hard for me with projects is i don't want to be tied to a desk i guess when you're at your desk you're working working. Yeah, so I don't want to be down here

at my desk with a whole bunch of boards and a JTAG and all the stuff in this workspace. And with CircuitPython, I was like, I'm going to go sit on the couch. I'll have a coffee. All I need is the board and a USB cable. And

that was nice. Which with wireless, you might even have the board on the coffee table. I didn't even need the USB cable. And that was nice. Which with wireless you might even have the board on the back of your head. I didn't even need the USB cable. I just need the board and a battery or power. So it was kind of different. It's making me reevaluate my connection to technology. Some of it's just, if it feels like work, it's work. I don't want to do it. Yeah.

Making the lights blink was kind of fun. It is. I mean, I get run down at work with work. And I'm not even working very hard lately. I've been working much harder on origami than I have with work, which is kind of embarrassing. But you just, you need a break sometimes. And then you realize that you do like what you do. You just don't like what you do every day. Yeah. Well, it's the same thing with like, people telling you, oh, you're so good at this. Why don't you turn this into a business or sell your stuff? And it's like, yeah, but once I do that, then it's work, and then I won't like it anymore. I went to the doctor, just normal, physical, and I folded an origami jellyfish while I was there, because it's gotten to where I just fold things if I'm nervous.

And I gave it to the doctor at the end. And she was really impressed. And she said, where did I get the pattern? And I said, well, this is one I made up. And she said, well, you should put it in a book. And my thought was like, no, no, that would be awful. And they really probably should document the pattern because it's not bad. But yeah, I know that that looks like work.

It's a nice compliment. It's a wonderful compliment. Yeah. So what else do I do other things? I tried to do some music stuff. I finished up a project for someone else for music. Yes, you were working with someone else for a while. I did a small amount of session work, bass guitar.

So that will come out someday and I will let people know. It's a genre of music that I'm pretty unfamiliar with. So it was kind of a big challenge. It was very experimental, synth, kind of synth heavy stuff and 10 minute, 11 minute long song. It was very experimental, synth, kind of synth-heavy stuff, and 10-minute, 11-minute long song. Are you looking for another session? I don't think so for the next month or two,

because I have some classes that I'm taking. Right. One of the things you got me for holidays was a paper engineering class that costs a little bit more than my making embedded systems engineering, making embedded systems class costs. So it was pretty expensive. So what's that all about? Okay, so paper engineering.

What does that mean? There's some origami. The person who teaches it has written several pop-up books with mechanisms in them. One, you put an LED under it and it puts stars on the ceiling. And there's a pop-up that is a camera, which we're going to build in class. I'm excited about that.

A film camera? I don't know. Okay. I mean, as far as i'm concerned can't you just like make a little tiny hole and call it a camera i i don't know sort of what it's gonna be all right um and the first couple classes have been the first class was about mobius strips which i i was like okay yeah we'll just count that as a no op. But it turns out there was a lot of good stuff there. If you have a Mobius strip and you cut it in half, you get two.

Cut it in half, not to disconnect it. So like you cut it along the curve path. You cut it along the center line. Okay. Well, actually, you get a Mobius strip that has two rotations in it. Okay. If you have two Mobius strips and you put them together, and you do it the right way with the right chirality and everything's going the right direction, when you cut them in half along the lengthwise, you can get two heart shapes. Huh.

And there's this mathematician who has this really great lecture about how all that works, which I should put into the show notes. And that wasn't really what we talked about. We didn't talk about the math at all. But she showed all these different things that were additional on top of Mobius strips. And the second class was about tessellations. I do tessellations a lot. I find them relaxing.

So this isn't drawing tessellations. This is folding tessellations. Folding tessellations. People may have seen the water bomb tessellation that kind of moves and looks like a sheep. And so we did that in class. I think I was done doing it before she was done explaining what it was. But we also talked about different rigid foldable things like they use on space stuff, like the Miura or E-folds, that will compress down to a small size.

And then you only have hinges, the folds, and flat sides. And so you can get to a very small area and then expand up to a huge area. The example there was the solar shield, which is the size of a baseball diamond if it's fully extended. They haven't launched that one. But it was... And I know that the James Webb

Space Telescope has what's called a flasher-style origami as part of it. So we talked a little bit about those. And then today, today I don't quite understand what happened. There was something with boxes and jitterbugs and like that clacky, clacky toy that it runs down the loop and then you pick it up at the bottom and it runs down again. Something happened like that with paper.

Okay. And I don't quite understand. And there was this, so I almost never cut things myself because I'm like a five-year-old with scissors. I have the Cricut, which cuts things out for me. So we cut it out during class and I couldn't cheat with my robot. And yeah, so mine worked, but it looked like a five-year-old made it.

So what's the goal with the class to learn these techniques? Is there like, oh, you have to do a final project where you build the James Webb Space Telescope? There's going to be little projects like we've been doing, but there's going to be one big project, not huge. As a class, we got to decide whether we wanted to have everything go towards one big project or if we wanted little ones

and then a larger one at the end. I think most of our past classes have done pop-up books. We haven't gotten to pop-ups yet. I'm not quite sure when that is, but we're going to spend some time talking about flexagons, which are really fun, and flashers, which also are fun.

But those are both origami stuff, things I'm familiar with. But we also talk about the mechanisms of how things can make other things move with paper. So we talked to Professor Oh about paper mech. Paper mecha?

Yeah. That you could make gears out of paper. So, we're doing some things like that. It's been a fun class so far. As with many things, I spend some time in class wondering what I'm doing there. You're concerned

not second-guessing yourself? And trying not to be the person who interrupts, which today I actually did interrupt because she was looking at the origami simulator, but clearly she did not know how many extra features she could have. And she said, you know, you can load your own if you get the colors right. And I'm like, yeah,

I use that all the time. It's super cool. But I'm, you know, I'm trying not to be too noisy. Speaking of the origami simulator, you got me something else electronics related that was sort of inspired by the person who did the origami simulator. Yeah, Amanda. Amanda Gassay.

I hope I'm pronouncing that right she has i'm gonna go with amanda g because fine i know that she has how to pronounce her name and i'm still not sure uh anyway uh it was from a project she did in 2014 called sugar cube which is a little midi instrument with these nice buttons from uh spark fun spark fun. So you got me the buttons and the LEDs to do something like that. So they're very nice white, kind of partially translucent buttons that you can put LEDs,

they sit on top of an LED matrix, and so you can turn them on and off and stuff. So I think I'll make some sort of MIDI thing out of that, and I'll probably do it in CircuitPython again. Did you realize that the two were connected? The little one was the stocking stuffer. There's essentially the same thing as the big one. Yeah, I know. I got that.

Okay, okay. Just wanted to make sure. And the big one, the buttons and the LEDs are in the same place, but in the little one, they're separated. I got it. Just wanted to make sure. So, yeah, either could be... I mean, it's all RPi Pipico and either could do MIDI stuff. So I don't know what I'll do.

But yeah, a little tiny drum machine would be funny too. Very tiny. The little micro one. I really like that you're excited about that. Well, I think part of it is, I don't know what part of it is i don't know what part of it is i i think i'm i think i got to the point where i can be a little less precious about technology does that make any sense like with those projects you don't have to be professional about it that's it since i. Since I am a professional,

so-called professional, I feel like I have to do everything the way I would do it if I was making a product and use bare metal boards and make my own board or Visual Studio Code and C and C++ or I should learn

Rust or blah blah blah. I just want to play around with these gadgety things and make things blink and do some MIDI stuff, and CircuitPython is right there. Or if there was something easier than CircuitPython, I would probably use that now. You know, drag and drop some blocks, use Scratch. But, you know, I just want to build something and have it be fun.

So the hardest thing I'm doing is the stupid CAD stuff, and there's no way around that as far as I can tell. Ah, actually there is. That was hardest thing I'm doing is the stupid CAD stuff, and there's no way around that as far as I can tell. Ah, actually there is. That was another thing I was going to mention. I came across, and I don't remember the source of this. It's somewhere on Mastodon I saw this. It is a website called boxes.py. And the whole website is festi.info.

And what it has is a whole bunch of box designs that you can click on, and they're parameterized. So you click on one, and then it opens up a parameterization that you can set the sizes. And if you've got shelves and stuff, and then it gives you the code you need to do laser cutting out of wood. So they're kind of like those dinosaurs that you piece together that have wood edges. So it makes boxes like that. So you can make project boxes super, super easy if you have a laser cutter. You know I can do that in the Cricut, right? I mean, I can't do super thick wood, but I can do... Well, then I'm

much more interested in this. But, yeah, so boxes.py is an open-source box generator written in Python. It features both parameterized generators as well as a Python API for writing your own. It can make finger, flat, dovetail joints, flex cuts,

holes and slot for screws, hinges, gears, pulleys, and more. So it's really kind of cool. And the things I'm making are super, super small, so it would probably be hard to make out of wood. But for larger projects, these are really, really neat. I want more stuff like this, where it's like, I want Star Trek replicators. And the thing about Star Trek replicators is you didn't say, here's my CAD drawing.

You didn't say, I want Earl Grey with 25% aged Assam and 75% newer Assam and 2% Bergamot. And make sure the water is 1% deuterium. And I want it to start out at a temperature of 180 and steep for four minutes in a 70 degree room. I mean, you don't have to write all of these things. You just say Earl Grey hot and that's it. And that even puts it in a cup for you, which I would have forgotten to put it to my program and I would have just ended up with a puddle.

Yeah. So I'm discovering, maybe trying to discover my relationship with the word I hate, maker stuff, where if it's easy and I'm relaxed doing it, then I'm more likely to do it. So trying to apply that to more things. Music, there's no hope for that. Music is hard. You can't make music easy. Well, you can make music easy, but then you're limited in what you can do. That sounds like technology. That kind of made me think about something I have totally forgotten now.

Wow, that was fast. Was it music? Was it? Oh, you said about having to make it look professional because you are a professional. Well, not look professional. Be professional. Use the professional tools and workflow. Right.

Yeah. And you're not even, I mean, if you post this, it will be in video form. You're probably not doing a tutorial on it. That sounds like a lot of work. I'm probably just using it for myself. Yeah. I mean, you might put it on Mastodon with a video. Yeah.

If it's a wireless thing, maybe I'll just put it up here and have it make a face at me when the weather changes or something. You said you wanted to try Pomodoro. It could stick its tongue out at you when it was time for you to switch tasks. But one of the things that has come about with talking to people about burnout is questioning why you do the things you do and your values and all of that stuff. I never meant to live my life so much in public. Like we've talked to people and we've said, like, I don't remember somebody, I think maybe I said, what do you want to be when you grow up

or something like that? Hopefully not that condescending. And they said something about wanting to be an inspiration. I have never wanted to be an inspiration. Like, make your own mistakes, folks. I've made plenty, but they're mine. I was thinking about this a couple of days ago, coincidentally, and we haven't talked about this.

With artistic pursuits, specifically music, I would like people to enjoy what I do and listen to it. And I would like to hear that people enjoy it. But I don't need them to know who I am. Okay. So I kind of would like to do great things and be left alone. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd like to be recognized and ignored, if that makes any sense.

And I don't know what that means exactly. I would like my output, my achievements to be recognized. But in the meantime, don't look at me. I'm much more comfortable hearing, that's a great song, which I don't hear very often. Not trolling for compliments, but I'd rather hear that's a great song than you're a great player. Because the song I feel like is its own thing. And I'm happy for the song.

I'm glad people like it. If somebody says, I'm great, then I don't feel comfortable about that. Because I don't know how to process that. Because it's probably, yeah, anyway. Is this just an esteem thing? I don't know how to process that because it's probably yeah anyway is this just an esteem thing i don't know what it is but i was just kind of thinking what do i want with with music or artistic output well i would like to know that people enjoy this but it can be at a remove i don't need to be i don't want to be famous and that's not going to happen but you know i think we were watching something where, you know, somebody had some fame or something and it was like, yeah, that doesn't,

that's not, doesn't seem great. You know, Obscurity seems like a lot more fun. Like if I was a woodworker, I'd love people to enjoy this desk, but I don't need to be, you know, on social media as somebody who's a famous woodworker. Yeah. I think social media is part of it i mean we've been switching over to mastodon from twitter and i switched i don't even have an account on twitter anymore i mean embedded still has an account yeah well um

and it's not really politics it's just twitter kept changing their rules and i don't want to deal with that. There's also politics for me. But I've been posting a lot less than I did. And it's not for any reason. I guess part of it is because I don't check as often because I haven't found people to follow that I'm really happy with.

Not that they aren't there, just that I haven't found them yet. And I have been very much in the leave me alone, don't look at me mode. And yet, I mean, I posted the origami wave, which I'm super happy with. And I want people to see it. I want people to enjoy it. And I want them to like it and to say that they like it. But I don't really need them to say that I did a good job. Yeah.

Very strange. Very strange. But yeah, it's... Welcome to Ditches in Psychology. So I don't know why we do things. A new podcast about some pumps and motivation. Ditches in Psychology. Yeah, so

I don't know why we do things. I mean, I think at a fundamental level, we do things for our own enjoyment. And if we're not enjoying them, then we shouldn't be doing them. Let's work aside because you need to

work in order to enjoy food. Shelter from the mud. Being able to buy one or two sump pumps a week until you find one that actually works. Gotta be just the right size. God, I cannot stand it.

And then, after I bought the sump pump at Home Depot Monday, of course, I tried to look for a different one. This, the one that I got is not working well. So I needed a different one. And they're not cheap. But I looked at Home Depot again. There are no sump pumps to be had in the Santa Cruz County region.

Probably not in the whole Bay Area. I mean, that storm has everybody looking at like what is underneath their house and how much water is okay to have. Got one from Amazon. But sorry, sorry. What were we talking about? Ditches in psychology? Yeah, ditches in psychology. Oh, I mentioned I was not going to do session work.

Not that I have any in the queue, because I'm taking some courses, and then we talked about your courses. Oh, right, right. We were going to talk about your courses. It's nothing to talk about yet, because I haven't started, but I'm taking some courses, and then we talked about your courses. Oh, right, right. We were going to talk about your courses. It's nothing to talk about yet, because I haven't started. But I'm taking two songwriting workshops, or maybe one and canceling the second one and doing a different course. So these four or five week long things, they're remote.

And you work with a semi-known musician who's running the class I write a lot of songs and learn some stuff about songwriting. So I'm kind of excited, kind of nervous because I need to pick and, yeah. I'm not a great guitar player, so that's probably what I'm going to use for playing though. And I definitely am not a good singer or lyric writer. So it'll be experience. You're really worried that they're going to make you write lyrics, aren't you? Oh, I guarantee they're going to make me write lyrics.

It's a songwriting course. It's not a... Music writing. Yeah. So it'll be fun. Cool. But they were pretty inexpensive. So I could just take one of these constantly, basically.

It was like $120 for five weeks. That's much cheaper. And that gives you Zoom classes with the instructor. And then songwriting workshops with the other students and then stuff. Cause you don't interact with the instructor much. So it's not, you know, it's not a full,

you know, fully interactive thing, but it's should be some, I don't know. So that'll be interesting. Uh, and I'm desperately trying to reduce my workload in work land this year. We'll see how that goes.

Today I booked a near record amount of hours, so it's not going well so far. Near record for the year. It's a total record for the year. Well, yes. We're pretty early in the year yet. No, I just, I did a full day today. I didn't. I did a couple hours and then I had my paper class.

Your class, which is like three hours long. See, I can tell you feel bad about that somehow. Well, I feel like that should be not during work hours, but... The class? What's work hours? All of them. It's not like they're paying any the clients pay attention to when you do stuff no and actually the client i was working on this morning kind of told me not to work until they they finished their budget um see that was my mistake

i gave my client a budget and then i was thinking he's never going to approve this he's like that's all fine. I was like, oh, damn, damn it. Damn it. Should have added some multiples in there. So speaking of all that, what are your plans? I know this is, you know, New Year's garbage, but what are you planning for 2023? How are you looking at this new block of time which has been delineated by the Romans since 70 AD? Arbitrarily delineated. So I made this resolution bingo card

which has things for health and mental health and nature and going out and origami. And I decided I didn't really need a bingo card about work. That would happen whether I wanted to it or not. I have some plans and goals there, but I am still open to them changing. So I figured I should do, I should make resolutions about the things that I really want to do, but I can't make myself do. And then I did the bingo chart because you always break resolutions. So what if all I had to do was connect five of them.

I mean, a few of them are really easy, and a few of them, like, go to the dentist, I can't just pop in today. That takes a little bit of planning, and some of them were exercised a certain amount of time for a whole month. But they amused me, and I'll print that out and keep it maybe one day I'll shout bingo in the middle of the day

you can just post it randomly nobody will understand what it was that's probably what will happen but you still have clients and I still have client I have I guess I do have two clients

one of which should finish really soon one of which should finish really soon. Both of which should finish really soon. Yeah. And then I think maybe I'll take a month and think about doing that second edition O'Reilly once. Maybe. Maybe. I'm really nervous about reading my book. Oh.

See, it's been long enough. I know. It doesn't really feel like mine anymore. Yeah. Okay. Like I said, I'm going to try to do a little bit less. But I still have one client that, like I said, has approved a bunch of work for the next couple of months. So I'll have to do that.

And a lot of it involves electronics, which I don't know if you know this, but I'm a software engineer. Do you think we should hire a mech-electronic person? Well, I mean, yeah. So I gotta do some power management stuff for a UAV that we're gonna mount a

small computer onto, and the computer needs power. So I gotta get power from the power distribution system of the UAV and so i gotta get power from the power distribution system of the uav and then i gotta get it the right voltage and uh power draw capabilities to the computer and i gotta make sure that's filtered enough that the computer doesn't freak out you know when the drone spins up and stuff and then i gotta mount the computer to the drone which is gonna require some cad stuff um all of these are things I do not know how to do very well. So I've bought a bunch of parts from Amazon

for the power stuff. Hopefully that'll be straightforward. I mean, one of the great things about our clients is they want us to learn things. They know we're not experts in some areas and they're willing to pay us to learn, which is, I mean, it's one of the great things about the clients we have.

Yeah, this is the same client that, as part of a different project, I have to hack into a Subaru at some point. That was kind of fun, having Subaru around. Let's see what you think next time we have to disassemble the entire thing to get access to the CAN bus we need. I'm looking forward to disassembling for the wiring harness. This is perfect.

Well, you can do that. I don't mind. I like taking things apart. As long as you're willing to put it back together. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I hate putting things back together. No, I don't mind putting them back together. Not if I hire somebody to put them back together.

Yeah, so. What else you got? Do we have any listener things we got to talk about? No. I mean, I think our listeners have been pretty quiet. It's been holidays and I don't have anything. I don't have anything in the queue. Oh.

All right. Well, very short show. I can read extra Winnie the Pooh. I think it's appropriate to have an extra short show with the whole introspection due to burnout. I don't understand.

You say, I've been really tired, and they say, okay, now think about why you've been tired while you do all the things that have made you tired. And it's like, really? One more thing? And now at this point, it's like five more things. Is that what they're telling you to do? Well, no, the first thing she told me to do is do less so that I would have more time to navel gaze. But it is helping. It is helping. It's just, there are some hurdles first. But one of them is that right now the podcast isn't doing all I want it to do.

What do you want it to do? Leave me alone. Oh, well, that's easy. We just stopped. I'm not ready to do that either. There's still people I want to talk to. But I do kind of want to put on the notice that we may be light on shows for the next six months. We'll play repeats as we can. But it's not that we're going to go away. I think we'll do at least... I think we should have a regular schedule, even if it's less often.

Well, I don't know if we're going to play old ones every week or and then have a new one once or twice a month or if we're going to just go to once or twice a month we're recording three in the next 10 days so oh my goodness yes see but even recording three in the next 10 days isn't going to really help me get ahead. No. Unless we post them late. Exactly. Bread them out.

Anyway, so we're not leaving. We're just trying to get the space to figure out what we want to do. And we'll be around. And I really do like doing the show, but I need to get back to the point where I'm excited about doing the show instead of realizing on Wednesday that we're supposed to record on Friday and I don't know how or what or when we're going to talk to. I actually don't know who we're talking to.

I really should have done some research. All these things do not make for good shows. So maybe a little extra time will help me. Weekly has been tough. And we've been doing it for 500 years. Yes, 500 years. Well, I think it's only like 438 years or something. But it's been a lot.

It's a pretty grueling schedule. Before we drop a show, the week before we've recorded it the week before that i have given the guest an outline and done a little bit of research about them and then the week after we do promotion and transcripts which we have help for now which is very helpful thank you patreon subscribers for helping us do those things, pay for those things to be done. But every week, you know, I'm finding people for a future show, preparing for next week's show, recording this week's show,

and promoting last week's show. And it is a lot. It's a lot. And I have been falling down. Like I said, I am not prepared for the show coming up. We didn't have a show last week, so I didn't do any promotion. And there were no notes for this show. And there were no notes for this show.

So I have been not doing it, and I'm still kind of tired. Well, there's many options. We can go a reduced pace for a while. We can take a longer break and call 439 episodes season one. That'd be pretty funny. You know, so, but yeah, we'll do what we need to do. The show is, like the other things we were discussing, the show is because we enjoy doing it. And if we don't enjoy doing it, then we should figure out how to get back to that point.

Yes, because I think the root of talking to people and hearing about what they're doing and hearing about what they're excited about is still something I want to do. I just need to frame it in a way that's workable. And this isn't our job. We do not make a profit doing this show. We so don't make a profit. It sort of breaks even. Maybe. Sometimes.

So, yeah. So this is not our job. This is something that we do because we enjoy it. And so when things become less enjoyable, we need to figure out why. Especially as we aren't fame seekers. Yeah, no. I mean, I like talking to people, but that's different.

Yeah. And I like talking to one person at a time and having a podcast is a good way to con them into letting me do that. I like the Slack we've built. Yes, the Slack community is really nice. It's fun to watch them talk to each other more than anything. Yeah.

So, yeah. So there might be some changes in store for the show. They may not be permanent. They may not be big deals, but... Yeah, you probably won't even notice. Just be like, these are the same lightning round questions for the three times in a row. What are they doing? It's the same show. They keep posting the same show. do really appreciate that you listen to the show and that you email us sometimes and tell us we're doing good things or bad things or should have somebody else on.

We do like hearing from you and we like that you're out there and hope that you get something out of the show. Yes, I agree. Sorry. I was actually looking at an email about an upcoming show.

Okay. So are you ready for Winnie the Pooh? Yeah. Winnie the Pooh and Piglet are trying to catch a heffalump with honey. And they thought they might need some string, but heffalumps come when you whistle. So now having set their trap, they are going to go to bed. Some hours later, just as the night was beginning to steal away,

Pooh woke up suddenly with a sinking feeling. He had had that sinking feeling before and he knew what it meant. He was hungry. So he went to the larder and he stood up on a chair and reached up to the top shelf and found nothing. That's funny. He thought, I know I had a jar of honey there. A full jar. A jar of honey right there on the top and it had H-U-N-n-y written on it so that i should know that it was honey that's very funny and then he began to wander up and down wondering where it was and murmuring a murmur to himself like this it's very very funny because i know i had some

honey because it had a label on it saying honey. A globetish full of pot too. And I don't know where it's got to. No, I don't know where it's gone. Well, it's funny. What? Do you want me to do it again? I'm not sure I followed that one. Okay.

He was murmuring a murmur to himself that sounded like this. Okay. It's very funny, because that Noah had some honey, because it had a label on saying honey. A galopsious full-up pot too, and I don't know where it's got to. No, I don't know where it's gone. Well, it's funny. A galopsious full-up pot too.

That's what it says. He had murmured this to himself three times in a singing sort of way, when suddenly he remembered he had put it in the cunning trap to catch the half-alump. Bother, said Pooh. It all comes out of trying to be kind to half-alumps. And he got back into bed. But he couldn't sleep. The more he tried to sleep bed. But he couldn't sleep. The more he tried to sleep,

the more he couldn't. He tried counting sheep, which is sometimes a good way of getting to sleep. And as that was no good, he tried counting heffalumps. And that was worse because every heffalump he counted was making straight for a pot of Pooh's honey and eating it all. For some minutes he lay there miserably, but when 587th heffalump was licking its jaw and saying to itself, very good honey, I don't know when I've tasted better, Pooh could bear it no longer. He jumped out of bed. He ran out of the house and ran straight into the six pine trees. The sun was still in bed, but there was a lightness in the sky over the hundred-acre wood, which seemed to show that it was waking up and would soon be kicking off its clothes. In the half-light, the pine trees looked cold and lonely, and the very deep pit

seemed deeper than it was, and Pooh's jar of honey at the bottom was something mysterious, a shape no more. But as he got nearer to it, his nose told him that it was indeed honey, and his tongue came out and began to polish up his mouth ready for it. Bother, said Pooh, as he got his nose inside the jar. A half a lump has been eating it. And then he thought a little and said, Uh-oh, no, I did, I forgot. Indeed, he'd eaten most of it, but there was a little left at the bottom.

And he pushed his head right in and began to lick.