A-Frame

This weekend I finished up an A-frame trellis for this year’s garden that I’m hoping will make it easier to grow tomatoes up a string and some pole beans or peas on a mesh on the outside. Last year’s better boys that I’d clipped along a piece of twine were by far the lowest maintenance tomatoes ever, so doubling down on that.

I rigorously planned this trellis as you can see from the blueprint. Still, I made some last minute changes, like anchoring it to rebar with zip-ties instead of driving the posts in directly — since I used the cheapest 1x2s ever made, it was highly likely that tapping them with a hammer would’ve resulted in catastrophic failure. Zip ties will likely be upgraded to a more permanent clamp at some point.

Cold frame

I “built” a cold frame this weekend to start hardening off the several gai lan plants I have under grow lights in the basement. I knew I was saving all of those furnace filters for a reason.

Transcription: St. Thomas

My current jazz odyssey involves transcribing some tunes. So I played around with lilypond/lilyjazz for the first time while transcribing Sonny Rollins’ solos on St. Thomas.

Lilyjazz is quite nice – the output really looks like the page was ripped out of the Real Book and much more readable than anything I have ever written out by hand.

I admit to not knowing the rules about how best to spell notes or rhythms so a few things probably look weird, and I glossed over some of the fast parts. Still, it’s not terrible for a first try.

As for this solo, what caught my ear initially was how well one measure leads into the next, and there are plenty of examples of nice voice leading in here. But after writing it out, the quarter notes in bars 41-42 and 76 stand out to me — just great examples of tension and release. I also missed on first hearing how Rollins returns to the opening motif at various points like bar 31, giving it a nice thematic completeness.

Anyway, lilypond source and the second page are in my github. Corrections welcome.

Note: I transcribed it in C for piano / guitar; lilypond can transpose automatically for other instruments. On guitar, I find 5th position is the most comfortable spot to play it. Although 8th position is a typical place for C major, I find the notes sound too muddy on the 5th and 6th strings.

It’s 2022.

2021 is in the books. Enough said here.

The family is doing fine, but understandably bored. We are fully vaxxed to the extent possible but maintaining caution under the current Omicron wave. Holding pattern continues unabated.

Normally I would have spent the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s doing something computer-y outside of my day-to-day work, but this year I was just too tired to hack. So instead I started working my way through a jazz theory book and analyzed a few tunes from a real book. Last year, I discovered JJazzLab, which has been a fun tool for practicing improvisation on Linux. I play OK diatonically, but I still need a lot of work on playing outside and in melodic minor modes. It might be interesting to work up a half dozen tunes in 2022, recording them on both piano and guitar to track progress. We shall see if I can find time for that.

Last year, I wanted to improve on my crossword solving times. I completed every 2021 NYT puzzle, improving my average times by 15-20% — except on Fridays, where the average went up by a minute. Max streak was 95 days, lowest time was 4:30 (11-08-2021).

Snow blankets the ground right now, prompting wistful thoughts of this year’s garden. I’ll order some seeds in the next few weeks. For now, I have a couple of overwintering habaneros wanting only longer, warmer days.

Just like the rest of us.

Another garden dead and buried

The garden was pretty successful this year – everything I planted produced in some way. We dined on a copiousness of kale, a pallet of peas, a torrent of tomatoes, a heap of habaneros, a barrage of beans, an overabundance of aubergines (an expanse of eggplants?), and more. Pumpkins were a fun addition but they used so much space (one entire bed, and still spilled onto the sidewalk) that I’ll give it a miss next year. At least the resident vole enjoyed snacking on them.

Although I only got a couple of fruits from its container, the black krims were by far my favorite tomato variety, so next year they will get the top spot in the garden.

I canned a few jars of salsa and a batch of habanero jam to keep us warm during the winter.

What I’m growing this year

I’m nicely keeping to my two-post-a-year cadence with one of them being about gardening. Here’s the gardening one.

This year I got bored and built a bunch of bespoke structures out of 1x2s for trellising and to have an excuse to use my drill. Some of my tomatoes are thus growing in wood boxes and connected via clips to twine, while the others are using the more traditional tied-to-a-single-stake method. Have to say I prefer the former arrangement since it is super-easy to adjust as they get larger.

It also provided a nice place to mount a camera to catch various wildlife attacking the food, so I did.

Here is a skunk(?) from when the camera was mounted at ground level (volume up):

Here is a rabbit from the bird’s eye view:

And one from when he was feeling a bit more bold:

New this year: peas and beans, kale, pumpkins, watermelon, Thai basil, cilantro, eggplant
New but not thriving due to leaf miners: Swiss chard & beets
Returning favorites: peppers (4), potatoes (12), tomatoes (9)

Sub five

I am mostly keeping up my daily ritual of doing the NYT crossword and generally getting faster, with most of my solves now below my historical average, but it’s getting harder to set a personal best. Every once in a while a puzzle comes along that is abnormally easy for the day-of-the-week, so that my best times are fairly far from the mean. It would be interesting to see the whole distribution over time, but as far as I know that data is not available.

Anyhow, determined to meet my entirely arbitrary goal of a sub-5 minute NYT crossword solve, I sat down today and did eleven Monday puzzles in a row. The eleventh (April 13, 2020) clocked in at 4:48. Success! When you do them back-to-back like this, it’s comical how frequently the same answer will appear from one to the next. Not just well-worn friends like ASEA, but slightly further out words: for example OKRA came up in almost the same grid location between this one and May 11, 2020. The other interesting thing about speed solving is how infrequently I’ll even notice the theme. I only just now went back to see the theme on this puzzle. DROPS/OCEAN were a nice touch.

I put some letters in squares

This weekend I burnished my geek CRED (clued as such in some puzzle) by participating in the virtualized 2021 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. This year, they used Not-My-Software, which is a good thing because I would hate to be on tech support the year everyone that had to do virtual crosswording for the first time. I solved 6/8 puzzles cleanly which is enough to land just above the bottom 20% of the entrants! Of the misses, puzzle 5 was a beast, while puzzle 7 was pretty nice, but I didn’t get the theme quickly enough and lost five or ten minutes feeding the youngster breakfast during the solve. My fastest time was 6:58 on the (unscored) final which is no great shakes compared to the field but pretty good for me.

In other news, github thinks that I helped make the Mars helicopter fly. I’ve no delusions that my meager contributions to Linux are even compiled into whatever image that drone is actually running, but all the same, very cool!

House of Zephyrus

The one task I hate when gardening is hardening off plants. I tend to rush it and my poor seedlings pay the price. Usually, I am pretty good about limiting sun exposure but not so good about setting up wind breaks.

This year I decided to try introducing wind to my plants while they are still in the grow room. Sure, I could go plonk down $50 and get something bespoke here, but this is a perfect opportunity to use some of the extra PC case fans I have sitting around. It took all of two minutes to prototype a working “plant fan” by connecting a 9V battery across the fan terminals and cable tying the fan near my bell pepper plants.

That worked, until the battery gave out a few hours later. Also there was just one speed, “On,” and I might want to baby some plants or give them the occasional break. A good reason to dig through my parts box and pull out the trusty old Arduino.

There is basically nothing to fan speed control: just send a PWM signal on pin 4 and the rest is same as before. The microcontroller can send PWM signals for you so you just need to set the level. I put a pot between +5V and GND as a speed knob and wrote a quick sketch, and bam! Code here.

Power to the Arduino is on the same power strip as my grow lights, plugged into a smart power switch. The wind and sun get turned off according to the clock, or Alexa.

I don’t lack for Linux capable SBCs around here but there is something refreshing about the simplicity of Arduino.