Gee Whiz

Time flies and I just realized I had not written in any blogs for quite a while.  I have been quite active since my last tax comments.

A friend and real estate agent wanted an instrument that was much smaller than the one I made for him a few years ago:  It is a device that displays whatever pictures or video’s that are in two folders up on a TV via HDMI.  The Raspberry Pi 3 project is pretty much done and I am watching the video and several pictures rotate merrily along for the last couple of days. It went blank when it should last night and came on this morning. Yea.  I was a bit worried because the Raspberry Pi does not have a real time clock and it relies on the nptd daemon to go out on the internet and retrieve the time.  So far that is working but if the internet connection goes off so will the time.  I suppose with a little more effort I could add a RTC but since this is essentially Pro Bono I guess I will not.

On second thought, I wonder if I could sell some of these?  Then it might be worth it to spend more time making it more bullet proof.  Of course it is an order of magnitude smaller than the ultra small form factor computer I used before.  Should last forever but if it does fail someone even slightly informed of tools of the trade could fix it.  So that was my big project of the week.  Now, on to the next one.

Last night was the Gideons Pastor Appreciation Banquet.  The whole deal went smoothly and it was the best one I have attended.  This year we had a buffet table instead of the usual served meal and it went much faster and was more predictable.  After that were a few songs and 4 short quick speeches lasting about a half hour.  There was a shameless plug for the Gideon Card program.  I use this often but basically you go online, select a card, fill in the recipient name and the address where you want the card to go.  Then you select the number of bibles you want the Gideon’s to hand out in your name.  The final phase is the payment for the bibles at $5 each.  This can be done via normal credit.debit cards and I think they have added Paypal this year.

I listened to the Little Red Barn Net this morning on 3820 SSB LSB and made a few comments.  I have been trying to get in all week but the Ionosphere has not been cooperating.  Anyway, I got in today and spoke long enough for the whole week in one session. The LRBN is in honor of Bob Sievers who worked at radio station WOWO 1190AM.  Almost anyone in the USA could get WOWO at some point in the day or night.  The power output was a whopping 50,000 watts.  Anyway, that is enough for tody and I have lots to do.  Moore later, Cheers.