A couple of days ago, I broke down and bought a refurbished laptop for the bean sorting project. It surely seems to be a smoking good deal at $243.09 plus tax. I have been working to get the thing running on a Raspberry Pi and that works fine, but is way more hassle than we need during the development stage. It was necessary to hook up a keyboard, a mouse, a monitor, and the camera which, during the development stage, needs to be moved around a lot. It is just easier to do it on a laptop.
The other really big benefit is that, for the Raspberry Pi, I needed to do my development and testing on my home laptop, commit the code to a repository, switch the camera from the laptop to the Raspberry Pi and rebuild the code on the command on the RPi. That was a hassle. Now I will be able to put the entire development environment on the laptop and send it off to the mechanical designer (Gene). We can get all the lighting and controls developed with a full blown computer, then switch over to whatever cheap embedded computer we pick when everything is working. In the meantime, when I get some new code for Gene to consume, it will be way easier for him to build it and test it out with duplicate systems.
I got a book for Christian at Christmas time. While he was with us, I read the preface. I liked it so much, I bought for Kindle on my phone. The premise is that the business model represented by Google will be supplanted by a business model with block-chain money that is fundamentally more secure and monetarily stable. I love the way the author, George Gilder, writes and I believe he is write on this. This is not the first time he rightly called a sea change like this would represent.
I lost my wallet on my last trip to Boston and suffered through the pain of cancelling all my credit cards, then ordering new ones along with a replacement drivers license and a replacement Nexus card. When Christian lost his wallet, he did something about it that he recommended to Lorena and I. He bought a two 
Kelly sent this photo of her and Christian yesterday. They had a pretty good time in San Francisco over the New Year. More than anything, I think they are pretty tired. Lorena and I had a quiet day at home because I was still suffering from the residual of a cold. We DID have a big steak with a grilled onion, and a baked potato. Also, I spent most of the day working on the bean sorting project. Gene has made really big progress, so I need to get an application going so that he can have a way to see what the camera captures as the beans drop. That will allow him to develop the lighting. It is a little more complicated than just creating a capture application. We really need to find a way for me to upgrade is program (running on a Raspberry Pi) over the internet. I have done this before, so it will be great to get a little more experience at doing this sort of thing.
This picture of Kiwi being miffed that Lorena was trying to sit on her chair does not have a whole lot to do with what I want to write about today, but it was pretty fun. Every time Lorena sat down, Kiwi pushed her away and then sat back with a look of irritation. I needed a picture for the post, this was available, and I wanted to have an excuse to put it up.
I would like to say this is a birthday gift, but it is not. It is the new, extra-wide display I ordered for my work (on my birthday). Christian recommended this. One thing I did not expect was the width makes me change the way I use the different windows I keep open on the screen when I am programming. It is so wide that if you make something full screen, you often have to move your mouse a long, long way to get to the menu selection you need. All things considered, though, that is a minor quibble. I would definitely get this screen again if the occasion ever arises.
I have always quit my daily weigh-ins when I was traveling, but my weight loss war with has Jon has forced me to re-prioritize. To that end, I bought a Bluetooth scale that can sync with the Fitbit app on my Android phone. It measures more than just weight, but that is all I really want to track because I track food intake and other measures in other ways. The reality is that I don’t really need Bluetooth connectivity and it is a little bit of a pain because I have to keep the thing charged with a USB charger while most of these kinds of scales have (pretty much) lifetime batteries.
Our friend, Bonnie, picked up the computer that arrived at our house when we were off visiting in Boston and Tempe last week. Lorena met with her for lunch yesterday to pick it up. It is a beautiful, brand new, Dell 5491 14″ touchscreen, i7 laptop with all the requisite amounts of memory and drive space to work on the relatively large images with which I work in my job. I love the computer, but it is a hassle to switch all the work I have been doing on the personal computer I used while I waited for my work computer.
I had to drive down to Kelso to drop off some equipment from my old company, but I left my wallet on the counter in the kitchen when I left. Then the guy I was dropping the equipment off to called and said he would be an hour and a half late so I was stuck at a McDonald’s beside the freeway with no way to buy an Egg McMuffin. I decided to go ahead and try to add one of those telephone pay apps. it worked really really well and if I didn’t hate Google so much I might even keep it on my phone.
I ordered one of the Intel RealSense 3d cameras several months ago. It arrived yesterday. It is not like I need a brand new project, but I got one anyway and it is a good one. The reality is that I will not be in a place to start doing anything on this for a couple of months due to the start of a new job, vacation and a bunch of other commitments. It is great to finally get my hands on one of these and I am really looking forward to making it work.
The thing with which Lorena was most impressed with my Hotel here in the Boston area is the dispensers in the shower. Instead of little bars of soap and little bottles of hair conditioner and shampoo, the shower in the hotel had these dispensers. I have to admit, I was not wildly impressed, but am glad Lorena was.
Over the last couple of days, I had a couple of long and interesting talks with my old friend, Troy, with whom I worked on the GaugeCam project when we lived in North Carolina. Troy is an Assistant Professor at University of Nebraska right now with lots of interesting research going on. We discussed the idea of me reengaging on some of his research again when I started to approach retirement. Well, retirement is rapidly approaching and it looks like the stars might be starting to align. This is still just wishful thinking, but we have talked about a few specific ideas and I even called and talked to my old Masters degree professor, Carroll Johnson long retired from University of Texas at El Paso. We have hope we can make something happen. If this idea comes to fruition, I hope to be writing about it here on a semi-regular basis.
We are home from our trip to Casa Grande, AZ and Burnaby, B.C. We are grateful for our friend, Bonnie’s, help with Kiwi the surviving, twin cat sister. It was a trip for which to be thankful. We had the family all together for a few days, we spent some quality time with our friends, the Rizos, we got some new spiritual insights, we got new Pixel 2 XL cell phones, and when we got home, our new phone cases were waiting for us in the mailbox. Fortunately, neither of us dropped our phones hard enough to make them break (an unusual source of satisfaction) before we got them into the protective cases. Even more cool, the cases have the piece of metal in them that allows them to mount on the windshield fixture we have in our car. We are a little worn out, but plan to hit the hay early tonight and reengage at the salt mines in the morning.
The new Ubuntu operating system (Bionic Beaver 18.04 LTS) came out yesterday and I installed it today. So far it is great. I had been using Xubuntu up until now, but have decided I am going to try Ubuntu for awhile and then Linux Mint (Cinnamon) when it comes out for awhile before I decide on where to the settle for the next few years. I am really glad Ubuntu went back to Gnome and a way from Unity. That was the main reason I switched to Xubuntu in the first place–so I did not have to deal with Unity. My good buddy, Lyle W. has been raving about Mint for quite a few years now as have many others, so I think I need to give that a try.
This opt-output rack I bought from China cost less than $17. They used to cost an order of magnitude more than that. It is kind of sad we do not make them so much anymore in the US, but it is a very good thing they are available at so a low price and that we do not have to make them as low cost items with thin profit margins. This is the last piece of hardware I needed for hooking up the control to our coffee bean sorting project, but I have had two other projects take priority (involving clinical trials and compliance issues–that is a good thing because the trials and compliance issues would not be needed if the product did not work). So I am going to have to sit and just look at this fun new toy for a month or two before I can hook it up and make it do its thing.