More magic moments after
/en/2023/20230304-magic-crows.gmi
A few weeks ago a well announced storm front crossed the country. It hit the office building at $dayjob some time after lunch. The storm came in fast, rattling at the large office windows while spilling loads of water over them. For me this turned out to be a magic moment. I watched the rain drops, the bending trees, the lack of daylight, and more. It made me feel small, a small being protected from the outside by a sheet or two of glass. Of course, nature will get along just fine without me watching the show.
This is of course a "nerd" magic moment. I had to replace the battery on the wireless outside sensor (temperature and humidity). The sensor is a commercial El Cheapo device, which will guess and install a new sender address whenever power is restored. So I had to convince all receivers to accept the change. My homebrew receiver would need to be reprogrammed after finding out about the new senders address. This is kind of awkward, involved realizing that python2 is gone from my machine, the firmware sources were on a different machine and similar little surprises. A few iterations and "aha" moments later it did work in principle. But then I had to wait, until in some up to 10 minutes or so the new dot on the grafana screen would show up. Waiting minutes in such a situation is a major achievement. But then the long awaited dot appeared on the screen! Magic!
It is moments like this that make tinkerers go to great lengths spending their time tinkering.
Cheers,
~ew