Built a dashboard to compare humidity and temperature in the closet beside our front door to another room. It also displays outside conditions and the status of the closet’s vent fan, providing the data needed to optimize its run times.
Category: Living
I tip well
A flock of scooters had completely taken over the racks outside Whole Foods. I shooed one away to make room for my old hoss, and it promptly succumbed to gravity.
The disappearing cake
It was time for more slices of the cake Dwight had baked for my birthday to disappear. Not just any cake, but a French dessert called gâteau invisible, so named because of the way layers of thinly sliced Granny Smith apples disappear into a vanilla-bean flavored batter. Here it’s served with a dollop of cream whipped with brown sugar and flecks of cinnamon.
Planning on a bunch more birthdays
Cycled over to the U for treatment and scans, taking care not to collide with half-awake students. On the way back, the students streaming out of lectures seemed more animated.
A “de-colonized” meal at Owamni
Walked over to Owamni by the Sioux Chef where Dwight had reserved this window table for an excellent “de-colonized” meal with ingredients restricted to those available to pre-colonial indigenous Americans. The chef has won several James Beard awards at this nationally recognized restaurant.
LEGO machine to align plates stud-side up
Lined up recently introduced large LEGO worm gears as a conveyer for 1×1 plates, much like an Archimedes (water) screw. An unexpected bonus was that the plates were consistently flipped stud-side up. This replaces all my work in recent weeks on pneumatic devices to flip 1×1 plates. Click through for a short video I made today.
A bunch of happy
Dwight brought dahlias home from the Farmers Market, signalling an early start to my birthday season.
Over-engineering a closet
Installed a super-quiet, low-speed fan to ventilate the closet by our front door. Next up: paint the grill to match the wall and design the perfect algorithm to control the fan. I’m considering factors like humidity and temperature inside the closet versus the rest of our home, and whether we’ve been outside, all using existing sensors, plus the weather and time of day. Or, I could just put it on a timer!
Stillwater via rail trails
It was glorious weather for a bike ride on part of the Gateway Trail then the Brown’s Creek Trail to Stillwater. Here we’re cycling back out of Stillwater after stopping for coffee and calories. On the left, the former railroad depot has unevenly morphed into a K-5 charter school. (Dwight took this photo of our friend and me.)
Table service at Lake Harriet
Cycled our favorite loop via Lake Harriet where we stopped for breakfast at Bread & Pickle. Here I’m delivering the always-fresh coffee while breakfast sandwiches were being cooked to order.