Holiday activities

We celebrated several holidays over the past week: Festivus, Christmas, and Chanukah. We neglected Solstice this year (most years we make solstice cookies).

For Festivus, we put up a Festivus pole and ate meatloaf on iceberg lettuce (well, vegetarian meatloaf, since my son is a vegetarian).  We skipped the airing of grievances, though.

On Christmas Eve, we went out to eat, but almost all the restaurants downtown were closed (even the Chinese restaurant that we had considered as a backup), so we ended up at the Korean restaurant Sesame.  My wife and I enjoy the food there, but there is not a lot for our vegetarian son—he was ok with the japchae, but I could tell he was a little sad that both Saturn and Monster Hotpot were closed.

For Christmas we had a live Christmas tree (the same one as last year, but it is now 22 inches tall—plus a 12 inch pot), which my wife decorated with a small fraction of our Christmas ornaments. This tree has many years before it is the size of the live trees we used to use, but we can carry it into the house with needing a hand truck. (The big one that we gave away a couple of years ago was getting to be too heavy to haul up the 3 steps to the porch.)

We also opened presents from each other Christmas morning.  Most of the presents were books or consumables—we’re all hard to shop for as we don’t want much, and when we do want something, we generally just buy it for ourselves.

For Chanukah we lit the candles on the menorah each night and had homemade applesauce and latkes one night.

Over the winter break, I’ve been getting several things done:

• I got the syllabus rewritten for my electronics course, got the assignments all entered into Canvas (which always takes forever—filling out the same form over and over is incredibly tedious), and hired my group tutors and graders.  Creating the Canvas entries for the due dates for the 12 homeworks, 6 prelabs, and 5 labs took a couple of hours, and I still have to enter the quizzes (which I’ll do after I’ve created and graded each quiz, as each will have a different number of points).
• The cat fountain I created failed, and I spent some time trying to diagnose the problem.  The controller board is fine, but the pump won’t run.  The resistance of the pump is now about 100kΩ, which indicates that something in it failed.  I’m not sure of the reason for the failure, but most likely the impeller was jammed by a build-up of algae.  The cats were less interested in the fountain than I hoped, and keeping the cat fountain clean was more trouble than I expected (algae growth was fast, and clearing the hose with a pipe cleaner was a pain), so I decided to scrap the fountain, rather than buying another pump.
• The mesh seat that I sewed for my recumbent bicycle five years ago had the stitching fail on one strap. I tried resewing it with my wife’s sewing machine, but it just jammed, so I ended up resewing the strap by hand.  I expect that some of the other stitching will fail in the next year, and that I’ll be doing more resewing, but there is enough redundancy in the straps that I can ride home even with one of the straps broken.
• My son visited Monday–Friday, so we spent a couple of days installing the new range hood that I had promised my wife six months ago.  I bought a 2-part range hood (https://www.amazon.com/Awoco-Stainless-Cabinet-Speeds-800CFM/dp/B076XBQSMK) with the blower unit to be installed in the attic, even though this is more expensive than one-piece units.  There were two reasons: to make the range hood itself lighter and so easier to install, and to reduce the noise of the blower in the kitchen.  Holding up even the motor-less range hood while we got the screws in place was tiring (for my son), but installing the blower in the attic was also somewhat difficult, so that was pretty much a wash.  The new range hood is much quieter than the old one, but I think it moves as much air.  At any rate, my wife is pleased with the new range hood, which is all that really matters.

Mostly, though I’ve been reading and sleeping—things I’ll have much less time for once the quarter starts. I do still have to write the quiz for the first week of class, but I still have a week to do that.

Macos 10.15 Catalina vs PteroDAQ

I had a serious scare today.

First, I found out that the software for my Analog Discovery 2 was crashing on the MacBook Air that I will be using for lectures and lab next quarter.  It behaved normally at first and then crashed for no discernible reason after a couple of minutes.  I figured that the problem was probably related to the macos “upgrades” I had done recently, so I checked the Digilent website, and they had just posted a new version of the software last week, addressing the changes that Apple had made to their USB stack (which broke almost all 3rd-party software and a fair amount of Apple’s own software).  I downloaded the new version of Waveforms from the Digilent site and everything worked again.

But any changes to the USB stack are likely to break the code that PteroDAQ uses for finding what devices are connected, so I checked PteroDAQ with my usual setup.  The GUI for PteroDAQ did not list the Teensy board as it used to do, and PteroDAQ couldn’t run!  I spent a long time with ioreg trying to figure out how to modify macgetports.py to find the device again.  The Teensy board was visible as an AppleUSBDevice and AppleUSBInterface, but not as an IOSerialBSDClient as it used to be.  I could not figure out how to open it as a serial port!

Now my usual setup involves going through a USB 2.0 hub (in the Cerebrus cable), so I dug around in my drawer of parts until I found a plain USB-micro data cable.  Hooking up the Teensy board directly with that cable did show an IOSerialBSDClient interface, and PteroDAQ worked fine.  So the problem is just that connections through the USB 2.0 hub are not made the same way they used to be—the serial connection no longer is visible the way it used to be.

I’ll enter an issue for this on the PteroDAQ GitHub, but I won’t try to fix it unless it turns out that modern USB C-USB 3 docks exhibit the same problem.

Landline discontinued

As I mentioned in First cellphone, I have finally bought a cell phone.  Today I got the landline number transferred to that cellphone, so that I can now discontinue landline service.  That could be a minor nuisance during the next major power outage (during the last big power outage, landline service continued uninterrupted, but several cellphone towers went offline, so cell service was disrupted).

I have one more task to do in setting up the phone, and that is to transfer my wife’s phone (which was associated with my e-mail address) to be associated with my wife’s email address.  I don’t know how difficult that will be, but I anticipate a few hours dealing with Google Fi technical support, as their web pages do not provide any way to do this yourself.  It is particularly difficult in this case, as the billing was associated with that phone, and my new phone was an extra on the account, while I want to make my new phone be the primary on the account (so that I can continue billing to the same card).

Santa Cruz Shakespeare 2020 season

Santa Cruz Shakespeare announced their 2020 season to the “Producer’s Circle”—people who donate $1000 or more—last night. They have chosen the 3 main plays and their directors, but have not yet chosen the Fringe play for the interns, nor the staged readings.

Their non-Shakespeare play will be “A Flea in Her Ear” by  Georges Feydeau adapted by David Ives.  SCS has had good success with David Ives’s plays lately including “The Liar” and “Venus in Fur”.  Having a sex farce as the main non-Shakespeare play should be a box-office success.  I don’t remember who will be director for this play—someone who will be new to SCS, if I remember correctly.

The Shakespeare plays have a shipwreck theme: “Twelfth Night” and “The Tempest”.

“Twelfth Night” will be directed by Paul Mullins, who has directed for SCS several times before.  The instances that stand out for me were “Hamlet” in 2016 (the best production of “Hamlet” that I’ve seen), “The 39 Steps” in 2017, and “Pride and Prejudice” 2019.  I look forward to his interpretation of “Twelfth Night” and I hope he includes a lot of the music that is referred to in the text.  (One of the best performances I’ve seen of “Twelfth Night” was by Berkeley Rep about 40 years ago, with Oak, Ash, and Thorn singing all the songs.)

“The Tempest” will be directed by Mike Ryan, who will be directing for the first time.  I hope he does a good job—I’m always a little nervous when an Artistic Director assigns himself a major task (a plum role, selecting his own play, or selecting himself as director).  I have a lot of respect for Mike and I think that it is likely he’ll do a good job, but I worry a little about the wisdom of choosing himself as director.

The event last night shared some information about the successful 2019 season (record attendance, very successful matinee program for students in the county, lots of first-time attendees—particularly at the pay-what-you-want previews) and kicked off a new capital campaign to raise money for a multi-purpose building at the theater (offices, stage shop, and dressing rooms) and for permanent restrooms to replace the rented trailers.

There should be a more public announcement of the 2020 season and the new capital campaign sometime in January.

Book Done!

I’ve posted the latest version of the book—the first version I think of as really completed, so I’m calling it Edition 1.0.

The book is available at https://leanpub.com/applied_analog_electronics/ now, but I won’t raise the price until Tuesday, as I announced last week.  I’ve already sent the students registered for the course coupons for a free book, and they have started picking it up.

The new book takes up 28.7MB and has

651 pages
335 figures
13 tables
509 index entries
155 references

The chapter on Design Report Guidelines is available free at https://leanpub.com/design_report_guidelines. If your students need some advice on writing from an engineering professor, this document may be of more use to them than many longer texts.