Mind's Forge : News Archive

01/26/2024

First update for the new year! To begin, I feel like I should write what I haven't been working on. I haven't done anything with the Demon Core project, still wondering if I should just design a PCB that makes use of the DP3T switch to break the connection to the components preventing in circuit flashing. I haven't been working on the in house media delivery setup. What I've got so far seems to be working for the Bible readings (Varnish and Caddy servers) with a script that does a static site generation and upload. I need to make something for my music now too, since I've been doing "Jamuary" (making a song per day) this year. For now I have been uploading to an Odysee playlist. I did end up getting a line array + sub PA unit, might keep an eye out for another one so I can run full stereo, but a singular one sounds really good and gets very loud in the wide open desert.

Finished the "Writings from the Philokalia: On Prayer of the Heart" book yesterday and have been reading the daily Orthodox scripture and some Lives of the Saints for the daily reading/recording this year. I plan on digging into "Christ the Eternal Tao" book for additional reading next.

I've been checking on a new social media app, Maven, that is (co)founded by Kenneth O. Stanley, I highly recommend his "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned" book and was intrigued by the idea behind Maven (connecting people based on interests without having outrage being a big part of "the algorithm").

Not really much else to write about so far this year. Good luck and God bless!

12/22/2023

This will probably be the last update for the year 2023. Looking through my entries from this year and it looks like these are the highlights:

Bible reading

Finishing 2 Chronicles, Zechariah and Malachi at the end of the month will have brought me through the complete Bible. I'm not sure what I'll be doing next year for reading, but I plan on continuing recording, it's a good habit and the M'Cheyne plan is decent but I think I'll be switching it up by reading along with a family group text and maybe the Orthodox daily reading as well. I have some more "extracurricular" books I need to finish like Christ the Eternal Tao as well. I might even mix in some "basic" science books because I see a disturbing trend of misplaced faith in extremely naive empiricism, I won't list the "meme" theories as to not draw the ire of these fanatics, but I hope that by reading and discussing "The Nature of Solids" along with scripture and spiritual writing we can synthesize and make sense of the interpenetration of eternity and this temporal world of senses and "matter".

Making Music

Acquiring and setting up music gear along with recording has been a fun hobby to get back into. I will probably try and do the 2024 "Jamuary" where I'll record something every day for January. I recorded and arranged what I would consider my first "Space Music" song about a month ago: Space Music One. I've been slowly getting used to the Reaper DAW and the physical equipment. I still have to get used to MIDI routing, that's always been a pain. I'm also getting closer to being ready to play music out in the desert under the stars (researching PA systems).

PCB design

It's been good to get back into PCB design again, along with coding on the ATTiny10. I have the IR version of the "Demon Core" sitting here and have had trouble flashing it in circuit (the LED/Phototransistor seems to break the flashing process, so I'll have to cut that trace and solder a couple wires to make a simple switch for prototyping). The Demon Core project feels like I've put WAY too much time and effort into it, I guess it's become a sort of pet project that I can't help but keep re-engineering. Maybe I'll do some work on that today since it's just been sitting off to the side. I decided the IR method for the mail detector device wasn't reliable enough, so I redesigned everything to just use a magnetic reed switch which seems to work fine, I just need to get and enclosure printed for it. The 12 volt reset converter board works, I had to redo the footprints for the jacks because of a datasheet misread, I just need to list them on eBay now. Looking forward to doing more designs next year!

Software stuff

I'm a "computer guy", so I spend a lot of time here, setting things up, trying new things out, etc. Playing with generative AI this year was new, Stable Diffusion, LLMs and I'd like to have a server setup eventually to run an LLM, a multi-modal would be ideal where it can take images and produce descriptive text. I have a couple ideas for that. I think I setup Nextcloud this year, started using LineageOS, and more recently started working on the infrastructure to host my own media files (the front end is still absolutely bare bones though, if there at all). Next year I will continue working on making a better front end for media and maybe even switch from using PMWiki to Zola for everything, but that really hasn't been a priority. I'm even thinking of moving away from Void linux, but it's tough to justify the effort when everything else needs to get done. Jellyfin has been a great Plex replacement, ZFS has been working fine and I'm working on moving my main storage over to a ZFS mirror setup. Just have to keep shoring things up, making things tighter and better!

I think those are the main things taking up my time. I do spend too much time looking at charts, trading and have recently got back into playing low stakes poker online. I did an actual hike for the first time in what feels like forever yesterday:

Until next year, peace

11/22/2023

The daily Bible readings are being uploaded here now. The Varnish setup seems to work so far and I've uploaded all my old YouTube videos to the ServaRICA storage server. I still need to generate pages for videos, music and upload things I've put on Odysee too. It's still very basic, it would be nice to scrape all the descriptions and thumbnails from Odysee for the readings, I'm still uploading there for now.

Here's the new diagram of how things are actually setup at the moment

I have ordered some more PCBs:

Demon Core: A new experimental design using an IR LED and phototransistor to detect the reflector hemisphere position. The idea is that as the gap increases less IR will be reflected back into the phototransistor. I've also changed back to using a physical switch to turn the power off, and am going to experiment with a 3 position to allow for OFF, ON (pulse) and ON (simulation). The nice thing with this design (if it works) is that there is no need for all the opamp circuitry and steel bit for the magnetic sensor. The Hall sensor itself is relatively expensive too.
Mail Detector: This design uses a reed switch instead of the IR reflector. Funny how one design is going away from IR and another is trying it. It's more of a tamper switch now that flashes an LED if something is opened for a few seconds and can be reset with a tactile button. The enclosure that I designed for the previous iteration should work fine.
HVSP Adapter: I opened up the drill size for the through hole jacks/plugs. Removed most of the ground plane on the side where I ran the data lines and shrunk the board down slightly. Hopefully this will be the final design and I can list it on eBay. I could probably move the optoisolator to the other side or just make a "dangerous" version without it altogether, which would make the board smaller. I could also probably make a version that turns the boost circuitry off when RST isn't being used.

Outside of "project land" I've gone out to a couple things: A local hamfest that was in walking distance, didn't end up buying anything, but had a couple good conversations and was inspired to do a WSPR project (still waiting on some parts from China). I also went to a bluegrass festival which was a fun little diversion. I still think about doing a "space music" under the stars event and invite people to bring their own chairs or buy a ticket that includes a lawn chair. Then just play some space music and do a live set and maybe eventually bring on other ambient artists. It's cool how you can still see the milky way out here.

That's about it

10/24/2023

Hello again, with the fall of LBRY inc. and YouTube twisting the arm of ad block users, I decided it was prime time to work on my own video hosting again. I ran a PeerTube instance in the past, but I deleted it. Too much software for what it was IMHO. I've come up with this architecture (so far):

I should be able to add more backends or a loadbalancer if needed (I probably won't need to). ServaRICA is priced the same as it was when I picked up the plan a couple years ago ($48/yr). Hopefully by next month I'll have a front end setup and all my videos and recordings uploaded to the polar storage. In the future I hope to have some sort of IPFS pinning in the architecture as well, maybe even a way to link to others hosting their content on IPFS.

The PCBs for the High Voltage Serial Programmer arrived and the circuit worked:

I only messed up by not making the holes big enough for one of the two jacks, so I had to use female jacks on both sides. There was inconsistent code flashing too. I thought maybe there could be noise from the voltage boost circuit getting into the data lines or maybe there was connection issues between all the adapters. These days it seems to work pretty consistently (who knows what changed), but the early behavior makes me hesitant to try and sell them like I originally wanted to.

The Stapelia Gigantea produced a lot of flowers this year, maybe it was the extra hot summer that triggered that?

I've been reading the Philokalia along with the daily Bible reading, some really deep spiritual things along with very pragmatic advice like:

I also finally got the code working as expected with the Demon Core project and made a half hour video going over everything: https://odysee.com/@MindsForge:9/demoncore-explainer:3

The code for the mail detector is also working. I'm no longer exploring wireless links and it's become a simple light flashing project. It has a single button that either calibrates (long press) or turns off the blinker for out going mail (short press). It wakes every second, checks an IR distance sensor and then blinks if something more than the calibrated "empty" value is detected. I'll have to make a video about that, but first I need to design the housing. Until next time, peace

09/21/2023

First an update on where we are with the "Demon Core" desk toy project. We're on revision 3 of the PCB, revision 2 worked as expected! I decided to replace the potentiometer with a simple chip resistor and the power switch with a couple solder pads that will be shorted out when the screwdriver is stored in the side of the base.

The "flux rings" I had laser cut from SendCutSend arrived today and now all we're waiting for is a PCB (and components) for a high voltage TPI adapter for the USBASP. It turns out that if you want to use the ATtiny10's reset pin as an I/O you have to disable it, and then use 12 volts on the RST pin during programming. I thought I could get away with using it without disabling the reset. If the adapter ends up working it might be a nice little product to sell since I didn't see anyone else selling them, but ran into a few similar projects.

I like my design the best so far (if it works!), because it simply plugs into the USBASP and changes the RST signal from "low" to +12v, that's it, no switches, no BS. The 4 blank PCB pads are for an optocoupler.

And MORE electronics stuff... yesterday I put together an IR "mail detector" sensor and made a short video about it. Once I figure out the 433mhz chips I plan on using for this project it should give me a head start on another project I've wanted to do since being a caregiver. I want to make a call button and fall/motion detector built into a pair of comfortable silicone bracelets, one for the caregiver that has a alerts (vibration, beep, light). I used a wireless motion detector to set off a bell when my dad got up in the middle of the night and a wireless door bell for a call button.

Starting to plan a road trip to DFW Texas next year for the total solar eclipse in April. Might try and camp a night or two at Chaco canyon in NM too, not sure yet.

Dealing with some house stuff (a gopher has shown up). I have a culture of isopods (fast sow bugs) that's doing pretty well. My ostracods are barely holding on, I have a bird bath that has some and some falcon test tubes with some, the hardest part is keeping mosquitos away, so I end up dumping a culture when larvae show up.

That's about all I can think of right now. Hope next update we'll have a complete demon core toy and some good progress on the next projects.

08/22/2023

First (failed) version of the demon core PCB. I screwed up the footprint of the opamp (U4 in the pic) when moving from the simulation schematic to the physical design. I fixed the issue, rerouted the board and sent off for another set of PCBs which just shipped out from OSHPark today. I've been working on other parts of the design, like the CAD model for 3D printing and realized that the switch would be buried too deep for how large the battery holder is to keep the lower hemisphere looking good and the switch usable. So I started wracking my head to try and figure out a solution which lead to a spiral of (over?)engineering.

The third revision of the board will probably have two less "expensive" components (the switch and the variable resistor). The resistors I'm using are 1% tolerance and should be able to ballpark the sensors output without the trimmer and then I can set and map the PWM range in software (hopefully). The switch will also be replaced with software if I don't run into any problems. I think I should be able to use the ATTiny's watchdog timer to have it wake up every second or so, check if a pin is shorted to ground and turn on the system if it's open. On Stackoverflow there was a clever solution for single pin polling by charging a capacitor and checking to see if it's still charged after a millisecond. I'll be testing that solution out today, I just hope that it doesn't drain too much of the battery, that's the nice thing with just disconnecting everything, you know there isn't any current being used. I plan on just having a couple pads on the PCB that will be tinned with solder and have a slot in the design to hold the screwdriver (which will short those pads out when pressed in), so you can see how the screwdriver will act as the conductor in the "switch". I had messed with the ATTiny's INT0 interrupt, but ran into limitations (like the necessity of having a CPU clock running to obtain rising/falling edge to trigger the interrupt). One simple solution could be to just get a tactile NC switch that when depressed by the screwdriver breaks the connection of the battery to the system... so many ways to skin this cat.

Got a pile of miniature screwdrivers to go with the final product, and I picked up a toaster over from Goodwill yesterday to convert into a reflow oven... I wonder if I'll even have to build a run by hand or if I'll just do a crowdfunding thing that will have enough volume to just have a PCB house pick-n-place and solder everything for me. I'm afraid the reflow oven conversion will become it's own project because a lot of the solutions on tindie.com don't look very good.

In trading I've finally got my TradeStation back to trading for a few days now. A few more NFT orders went through, seems like some volume is coming back to those markets, or at least prices are moving into areas where I'm willing to take the other side. Still feels like that stuff is relatively back burner. I have been listing and shipping stuff on eBay. It's funny that the post office is next door to a Goodwill so every time I ship some stuff I'll look for deals at Goodwill to flip. I've also found some good books there, surprisingly found Vol. 1 of the Philokalia, I guess it's not that rare of a book, just unexpected, I found an icon there as well, so maybe I shouldn't have been too surprised. I also picked up a pile of C.S. Lewis books, I've been reading one, "Mere Christianity" as the additional reading on the Harblinger Odysee channel.

The Reticulum/NomadNet experiments have been back-burnered as well. I played a little bit with other LoRa mesh technologies though, like disaster.radio and Meshtastic, but I haven't done any range tests or multinode setups yet. I did get a text message to send with a LILYGO board, that was neat:

but I really haven't done anything with that either besides a test, though I did make a note page about that.

I also went out for a bit, spent a few days at a casino and played 3 poker tournaments, ended up final tabling one and cashing. During that I also went to Game On Expo, mainly to get my Fishtank poster signed by the winner, spruce it up!

And a video of ton of ostracods (that I ended up killing 90% by letting the plate dry up, seems like I was able to revive a few) https://odysee.com/@MindsForge:9/ostracod-farm:0

Peace

07/17/2023

Reticulum and NomadNet

I started seeing "Reticulum" pop up on my fediverse feed so I finally dug around and started experimenting. Check out my notes here as I continue to experiment.

That's a screenshot of the included NomadNet integrated text browser connected to my node's index page. I like the balance between low level protocol and higher level application design in the project, as well as it trying to be physical layer agnostic (the NomadNet client even has commands for using paper messages). I like how fun it is to just jump in and start experimenting, feels like Geocities (I wasn't around for the BBS days). I plan to keep messing around and have some ideas sketched out on my Node page (off screen), track down PanzerNet and see for yourself! Or connect via LoRa if you find yourself nearby, I'll be messing with more RNodes after my LILYGO order arrives.

Jaspers Equipment Rack (and music)

I finally built some holders, the price comes out to be around $10/pair, (plus labor) not bad! I have an idea to make something that is 2 tiered so I can have two TD-3 synths almost vertical, but locked in... we'll see if that works out.

In the last picture, the TD3 and the keyboard are using the DIY holders, while the 2600 and RD9 are using the ones that came with the stand. Getting closer to having a decent setup for producing. I finally produced a song using the Reaper DAW, recording multi-track and editing. It was pretty fun! Have a listen: Worm go eeouh. It was just the 2600 and RD-9 with almost every effect pedal I have being used. I didn't do too much in the DAW except notch out some digital noise around 3KHz, mix/arrange tracks, and compression (but the compression didn't turn out as well as I wanted... still have to figure that out, seems overall "quiet"). Expect more!

Demon Core Toy

The electronics/programming is taking a bit longer than I expected. I did receive the ATtiny10 micros and got PWM and ADC code running on them, I'm able to see the LED brightness change with change in magnetic field... BUT, I need more resolution so I'm working on an OpAmp circuit between the sensor and the uC. I just ordered 100 LM321LV rail to rail chips after figuring out a spice simulation that seems to indicate they would probably do the trick:

The small sine wave is representing voltage from the Hall effect sensor, which goes either above or below 1/2 Vcc depending on magnet polarity. Tomorrow I'll work on adjusting the voltage divider so the output voltage goes between 0-Vcc when the input is above (or below) 1/2 Vcc giving the ADC full resolution for one way magnetic strength. At least that's the plan, I might be missing something, or the simulator might die, I noticed it had trouble simulating when running the opamp into the rails too long...

Oh, and I got the accurate blue LED!

Other

I'm doing other stuff too, still doing Bible/spiritual reading. Currently finishing Matthew and the explanation by Bl. Theophylact, I recommend the explanation series for the Gospels if you have any interest in diving deeper, for most everything that seems confusing there is a spiritual meaning. I found his explanations regarding the names of the towns and how Jesus traveled among them really stood out to me this read through. Also in the middle of reading "The Orthodox Church: It's Faith, Worship and Life" by Rev. Antonios Alevisopoulos. The first few chapters lays out spiritual structures very succinctly and with clear language (he used the term "ontological chasm" a couple times, try and understand what that means).

I'm still doing solar cooking, did a few rounds of stuffed zucchini. And I plan on cooking some frozen fried fish in it tomorrow, maybe some french fries too.

Haven't been doing much active trading the past few months, been holding some NFT bags (finally got a sale yesterday though! Maybe it's a sign of things to come?) Also have had trouble with a futures broker for what seems like months, hopefully I'll be able to iron out whatever issues I have this week and maybe I'll do a video series on how to do the opposite of retail selling volatility with some skin in the game examples of workflow using readily available tools.

I've also been mixing up my own energy drink again. It's tempting to revisit the idea of getting it formulated and distributed. I wish they didn't make caffeine powder illegal, it's annoying cracking open 30+ capsules for a months supply of concentrate! I stayed up much later than expected writing this out. Until next month, keep an eye on my notes until then.

06/23/2023

Instead of designing a "folding equipment rack" from scratch I ended up discovering Jaspers equipment racks which seemed to fit the bill. They had a lot of options, but I eventually settled on this 5 tier keyboard stand:

You can see the 2600 in the upper left (Gray Meanie), the RD-9 (Behringer's TR-909 clone) and the Zoom LiveTrak on the bottom tier. I just stuck the power strip on a rack for the moment, but it's pretty useful there, so I'll probably just integrate it into the pedal board that will occupy that level. I haven't even really begun planning the pedal board yet, will probably just get a bit of 1/4" plywood and just wing it from there. The main thing I'm working on now is finalizing some bootleg DIY Jaspers compatible holders (the official ones are pushing $40 for each pair):

I'm using 3/4" extruded aluminum because it's hard to find 20mm square channel in the USA (Jaspers is a German company), but that's 19.05mm so really not a big difference. I am using the same sort of nuts and bolts and will post up a project page with STLs and instructions once I get everything figured out. Once I fabricate some more holders I'll be able to jam out on a bunch of equipment at once! Looking forward to it. I haven't even tried connecting the LiveTrak to a DAW yet, besides audacity to do my Bible reading recordings and it does seem to work as expected, exposing 14 tracks.

I also watched the Getting to Blinky KiCad course which did a great job of exposing newbies to KiCad and giving examples of schematic, PCB footprint and PCB layout. I've been wanting to learn KiCad for years, but never was able to stick with it until this tutorial. This got me to remember all the projects I've had floating around my head the past few years. One of them being a Demon Core game. I ended up spending some time making a miniature model in FreeCAD to prototype the idea. After 3D printing the parts and sticking a 3mm LED in the "core" I took some pics:

That's a tiny eyeglass screwdriver. The pics were a hit on fedi and I considered just making a model/toy of this size. I ordered some tiny blue LEDs for accuracy, along with some 3503 Hall effect sensors to start prototyping the circuit to try and simulate the increased radiation from lowering the top hemisphere. I'm considering adding a tiny speaker too for radiation clicks, like a Geiger counter. I was considering using a 7555 timer chip to control the LED brightness (and the Hall effect sensor controlling the PWM coming out of the chip), but I also remembered that microcontrollers can be cheaper than 555 chips surprisingly... At qty 1 the cheapest 7555 is just under a dollar, while a ATiny10, with ADC (to read the sensor) and PWM peripheral is around 44 cents at qty 1. I considered using the 555 a bit longer because I wasn't too concerned with saving $ and wanted to just have fun making a little project, but I realized that it would be be way easier to just use the ADC to read the sensor and adjust the PWM, with the 555 I'd have to come up with circuitry with potentiometers to adjust brightness where with the micro I could just put it into "init mode" and have it read the sensor with the lid off and fully closed.

There's a lot of other stuff I want to make too, but I chose the thing that seemed the simplest. Other things include toy robotics/solar robotics, tactile TENS matrix computer interface, music modulated TENS, a marble run, some micro modular synth stuff that could plug inline with patch cables and modifying this Big Mouth Billy Bass to play custom stuff -- I might use a WiFi Raspberry Pi for that, it would be funny to have one hanging on the wall and then just send stuff to it with a mobile app or something. But I'll take this mini demon core thing to completion first, I plan to do a run of ~50 units and go from there.

Also experimented with AI generated stuff, nothing too exciting (because it's already saturated with excitement I guess), but it felt good to get models running and producing output locally. I feel like many are not prepared for what's coming, I mean this in a very worldly sense, but spiritually even more so.

05/21/2023

Music stuff is still going, haven't produced many tracks, or uploads lately though. I'll be mostly posting to NEET NEET on Odysee. I did pick up an Behringer RD-9 and upgraded the Mackie mixer to a Zoom Livetrak recorder+mixer so I can actually do multitrack. Hopefully will start making some more actual tracks to release along with my more raw experimental stuff soon. I'll probably be doing preliminary sketches for a folding equipment rack because hunching over a card table for extended jam sessions isn't the most comfortable, and it would be nice to have multiple tiers to have access to more gear at once. The BARP2600 isn't even pictured!

The garden is coming along, not sure if it'll produce anything, I tried to start earlier, but I think having the shade up prevented early germination. If I try again next year I'll leave the shade down when I plant in Jan/Feb. The beans are looking nice though.

I really don't get out much, part of me thinks it's sort of sad, now that I have the opportunity to "go out" I've lost my desire to. There's a Deadmau5 concert in Phoenix that was tempting, but I've been to enough concerts by myself (and with 'friends') that I feel like I know what that's like already. Maybe I really am destined towards monasticism, who knows. I did go to an interesting place, St. Joseph's Shrine. It was a nice day trip and close to where I live, read all the plaques, prayed and enjoyed the relatively quiet visit and sculptures.

I've also switched my FreeBSD installs over to Void Linux. I had FreeBSD on my mini server that I was mostly using for Plex (which has been changed to Jellyfin now) and also had FreeBSD on my T480 Thinkpad. Void is nice and the more I get used to it, the nicer it is.

I'll wrap things up here for now. Until next time~

04/13/2023

Hello again, just finished reading my entry from January of this year and I feel like patting that self on the head and saying, don't worry little buddy. It turns out the NFT project I was working on was canned (through ghosting after guy saw the ~$100+ gas price required to deploy on the main Ethereum network), don't blame him, I still haven't committed to deploying a project on the Ethereum network, and honestly I'm not really in any hurry to do so, the proof of stake blockchain just doesn't sit right with me. I did deploy a project on the Ubiq blockchain, Bubbles, which was a moderate success. I should have made it an edition of 100, but at the same time I wanted enough "space" to allow for interesting samples from the random generation to occur... and maybe someday Ubiq will go viral and people will be scrambling for NFT projects to invest in and I'll have Bubbles there as a chalice of good fortune.

I've been drawn back into more serious music production. I saw a photograph posted on the fediverse of a synthesizer shop and spotted a Behringer RD-9. In the back of my mind I knew Behringer had been working on some clones, but it hadn't really struck me that they were out now. So I started thinking about what was necessary to setup a small recording studio again, I had a Behringer mixer in the past, but I ended up selling it along with a handful of other instruments like a Korg ES-1, microkorg, Dave Smith Instruments Evolver and maybe some others. So I knew I'd need a mixer and audio interface, I picked up a Mackie ProFX 12 channel mixer, which acts as a USB interface as well, but I'm thinking I might need something actually multi-track, but this will do for now. I pulled the x0xb0x, Kaoss Pad 2 and ER-1 out of storage and picked up power supplies for those that were missing. I also got some studio monitors and headphones, nothing super fancy, but nothing super cheap either, Adam Audio T5Vs and Sony MDR-7506. I was thinking of getting the Sennheiser HD25 because they're classics, but decided on the Sony's for half the price after reading reviews saying they weren't worth the premium. After I began jamming with the ER-1 and x0xb0x I wished for a MIDI sync delay effect and discovered that Line6 recently released the mark II of the iconic DL4 looper/delay pedal. Years ago I was eyeing that pedal for other reasons, but never pulled the trigger, instead I settled on the much cheaper Boss RC-1... I decided to pull this trigger on a eBay deal, very pleased with it so far as it also has a bunch of creative reverb effects as well as MIDI sync delays. You can hear a jam using those 3 devices here in An Acid Jam Rises made right before Easter. It sounds good on the monitors here, but in the car the synth tends to get lost in the kick bass... hope it sounds good on your system. I'm also expecting a shipment with the Behringer TD-3-MO and their ARP 2600 clone, looking to make some sweet space music and maybe do some live performance sometime. A performance of space music under the desert stars is a dream that I'm working towards.

The Bible reading group has seemed to have shattered, I'm still going though. It reminds me of when my friends and I joined ROTC in high school and they gave up in a week and I stuck with it for a few years. I've been adding additional reading to the recordings as well (I was streaming, but switched to just doing recordings and uploading them). I re-read the book Beginning to Pray by Anthony Bloom, which I highly recommend. I also finished up the Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives book, another great one, but I've only read through it once. I've been starting to read part of The Arena by St. Ignatius in the past few recordings, from where I had left off a year or two ago.

I planted a garden this year too, I planted twice because nothing germinated in mid-February, I ended up having to take down the shade screen to get enough warmth to cause germination... I'll have to remember that for next year. I have a feeling this is going to be another fail, but maybe the shade will help as the sun turns up the heat.

That's all I can think of for now. Good luck, God bless.

01/15/2023

New year, new me, months without updates! I guess the main thing that was distracting me was focusing on building body mass, muscle in particular. I watched (and really enjoyed) Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, especially the first season and was inspired. I put on about 25 pounds bulking (almost "dirty bulking", but I wasn't eating ~as much as I could~ just way more than I normally do). I'm currently about 4 weeks into a cut/recomposition cycle... again not doing as much cardio/fasting as a pure cut, but I've already dropped about 5-10 pounds. I'm experimenting, figuring things out. I've been using 3 of Fraser Wilson's videos on YouTube pretty regularly, abs, arms and chest/shoulder. Speaking of shoulders I tried rollerblading before all this and ended up taking a pretty bad fall to my right shoulder, it's still giving me some issues, but seems to be slowly getting better. I haven't been back out rollerblading yet.

So far this year I've been following the M'Cheyne Bible Reading Plan, through Twitter I was connected to a Bible study group chat and have been doing streams (mainly to just record the VOD) of the daily readings. It's been nice seeing people really alight with fire as well as re-reading favorite books (like Genesis and Matthew) as well as finally taking bites out of books I hadn't got around to before slacking off. Hope I stay with it!

Dealt with a roof leak, looks like I was able to fix it with some sealant and expanding foam. I ran the irrigation system before the rain to see if the leak I thought I saw last year appeared again... but there was no sign. I'll plant the corn and squash tomorrow! Maybe even throw some poppy seeds along the back wall, the ones I have are getting pretty old and it would be good to get another generation.

I also just finished my very first NFT project today, from smart contract solidity code to front end minting site. It's not deployed on the main Ethereum network yet (I have a test setup on Ubiq right now), but will probably do that tomorrow. I also have some plans for some Ubiq exclusive projects now that I have some experience with this minimum viable project. I would say more about it, but it's someone else's idea. Another twitter connection, someone was fishing for a dev and I said I wished I could help, but I was in the middle of learning... turned out it was the simplest project imaginable, exactly what I needed to learn in a hands on way!

The year has got off to a good start, markets, activities, and vibe shifts. Just remembered I had a schizo rant published in a zine too (page 7). I feel like I need to write a synthesis of some ideas, but it seems like people are either destined to understand or not. It's like there's an inhibitory mechanism that prevents breaking out of naive empiricism (even as a thought experiment), and now that more and more people are accessing psychedelic drugs they are carrying that empiricism into a place where evolution *has not* honed their faculties, exposing them to hard lessons that can end up in extra-temporal (or eternal) traps, not to mention lesser problems of what would be best described as demonic phenomena. Oh well, like I said, there's a sort of hubris that's acting as a seed for a downfall of what seems to be the majority of people subscribing to secular relative morality... for all the positivity I'm seeing personally, it is saddening to see this ontology continue to dig deeper into the masses. However, if I can get through to *one* person with an earnest (non-schizo) synthesis, then maybe it'll be worth it.

10/21/2022

Quick test update, on the new server running updated software, but it looks like pictures aren't loading, so I'm trying a new upload. (edit: I just had to install php8.1-gd, success!)

Here's a cryptster that I acquired because it looked like a less grey Taleb. It was exciting being part of the mint for the "first pfp NFT project on Ubiq". I think with a bit more focus on things like cryptsters they'll get the traction they need to get to the moon (and hopefully take me along!). I have some ideas for a digital real estate project using minetest, but that's a while off. The first thing I'd like to do is make a mod that allows people to hang pictures of their NFTs up in game. Then the next obvious things would be skins and "real estate" plots.

Also check out the Extreme Toaster minetest server, cj_clippy is doing a lot of work on it!

This was supposed to be just a test post!

10/19/2022

This will be the last update on this server before I move over to a new one. I grabbed a deal from RackNerd, if you're ever in the need for VPS stuff check out LowEndBox and LET for cheapo promotions. You might have to deal with subpar service from new dealers/resellers though, so be careful. RackNerd has done me well in the past and seem very established.

I guess the big wrench in the works this past month has been getting some food poisoning that triggered a cluster headache volley. Now, I want to be clear, my experience isn't as bad as it's described there, but the repetition, the sinus/eye pain, every couple days and the threat of a full blown "migraine" type headache aura was there. So, maybe it wouldn't be categorized as a full cluster type situation, but whatever it was, was cured by finally taking some of the "research directions" after basically having my life on hold in fear of what I knew was around the corner if it were allowed to bloom. I dealt with these same headaches in my youth too and was only able to finally break free after my experience with the noted "research directions" in the wikipedia article there. Anyway, enough mulling over that mystery.

I've also been getting into Urbit and learning a bit of Hoon, the Urbit system programming language. I've been aware of the system for a few years, but hadn't pulled the trigger on getting a full planet until recently, if anyone wants to connect I'm ~daldel-talbyt, feel free to DM me there. The identity system uses the Ethereum network to prove ownership of a particular address (the name daldel-talbyt is just an encoding for a number similar to an IP address, if you'd like to read more to make sense of the next few sentences, see this Urbit blog post on address space). This lead me into the world of trading Urbit 'stars' which got me into studying things like automated market making and liquidity providing on places like Uniswap, you could say I have skin in the Urbit game now. I unfortunately decided to load the boat with ETH pre-PoS which was yet another hit. Trades and investments have been pretty rough, so I guess I've joined everyone else who's had to deal with a 60/40 allocation, but I lost it in much more creative ways. We'll see what the future holds, I really don't know what the best use of my time is at the moment, I still need to setup my security camera system here and maybe after I do that I'll travel around a bit. I don't know if I need to leave the country or not, but it might be a good idea to start seriously considering it.

I haven't done any sort of "science experiments", I haven't even done a microscope stream in about a month. I did go and visit an Orthodox church about an hour away which was nice to experience again. I've bought a few things off eBay to repair, a clock replica of the facade of the Chicago Board of Trade that I replaced the quartz movement, and a pewter replica of the CBOT building which needs a replacement Ceres statue, maybe I'll finish the design of that today and get it sent off to Shapeways. I think the Ceres design would be nice as earrings or a charm too.

Oohh! I've also installed Void linux and have been using it as my daily driver for a couple weeks now. As a glutton for punishment I also decided to attempt a new window manager (sway) and try Wayland. I've been having trouble getting OBS working, so that's another reason for the lack of Odysee streams. You can check out the extensive notes on the install here.

Thanks for reading, that's all I can think of right now, but I'm sure there's more I'm forgetting. Like NFT minting, trading, UBQ, oil, GBP futures, blah blah blah.

Peace.

09/01/2022

The first of September! Feels like I hit it just on time. Maybe I'll get into the groove of writing an update every first of the month. It's funny the first thing I think of is this unidentified zooplankton I've been watching for a few weeks now. I made a macro video with some funny editing of the plankton in a Falcon tube and posted it on Odysee and it ended up getting over 200 views! I didn't expect that, but made me curious about seeing what they were now that I had a crowd wondering as well.

I did a stream looking at the zooplankton and some other specimens, like a worm. I've still been making food in the solar evacuated tube cooker. The garden has been fully cleared besides 3 verdolagas plants I started from seed. They're supposed to be a variety that likes to grow vertically. Been thinking about ways to stay involved in the finance world without trading the size I was earlier this year, I was considering doing a show with trading a live smaller account. With the CME's new smaller contracts and a lot of new traders curious about possibilities, I thought it might be fun.

I've also ordered some parts from electronic goldmine to make some solar robot/BEAM/sculptures -- I'm not exactly sure, but they were running a deal on components that should be able to be used to make solar engines. A voltage supervisor (that triggers at 2.9v), small 3v motors and these little solar sensors/panels that could be arranged like flower pedals (8 of them to make >3v). Also going to experiment with tritium capsules, so hopefully I'll have some cool pictures of that for next time.

07/25/2022

Another late one, 3 months. I wish I had great news on the trading front, but I don't. I just added everything up last night and either there was a something being mismarked or this last week has (total) brought me down to the lowest draw down of the year. It's hard to face it, let alone write about, the Ostrich Effect is real. I felt like leaning into more speculative trades, and still do honestly, but when the market goes against larger speculative (I should say directional, since vol trading alone could be considered some form of speculation)... anyway, it's sort of rough, but I'm used to it, there is a tolerance that can be built for the variance.

What else, the garden has basically given up the ghost, all the beans and squash are looking dead to dim. One of the corn plants put out some seed stalk looking things, but I don't think it's looking like it'll flesh out into actual corn cobs. The monsoons are here and should be dropping a bunch of rain, which should help make wild amaranth pop up again this year, we may have had enough rain to get them going already. I was learning about the local flora last year trying to find out what's edible/herbal around here and was curious about the amaranth, it was only after they were all eaten by the local grazers that I learned it's possible to make micro popcorn with the seeds from Cahlen's channel on Odysee so I will definitely have to go try and collect some of the dry seed this year and try that! This was the only harvest from the garden this year:

I also popped onto Cahlen's interview show "Modern Day Wizards" and talked a bit about crypto, doom, economics and what not. It was fun to chat since I've been following him living outdoors in the high NM desert for a few months now, inspirational.

I was also inspired by another home-free (123HomeFree) individual who's been "guerilla grazing" for years. He showed off his GoSun solar oven and I was impressed enough to pick up a "sport" model during GoSun's 4th of July sale, and it worked pretty good the few times I've cooked with it. I've made bratwurts and chile rellenos, roasting fresh poblano chilis in the solar tube, next time I'm going to try canned whole chiles. Mixing the batter in a protein shaker also helps make clean up easier (easy for cooking in the field too).

I also experimented with making Jerusalem artichoke (sunchoke) chips:

I've started diving deeper into BSD operating systems. I've installed OpenBSD on my IBM T42 thinkpad and made a funny script to take the accelerometer data and move the active window (video). And I've installed FreeBSD on a couple computers, an ITX computer I'm hoping to turn into the media/CCTV server and a refurbed T480 I picked up when I thought the T42 had HW issues -- it may have hardware issues, but I was able to get OpenBSD running finally even after memtest reported a ton of errors. I should also mention I've been experimenting a lot with PKT announcement mining too and thinking about bandwidth, servers, colocation and all that... we'll see where that goes.

Replaced some bathroom sinks, still have a 3rd one to do. I've got a ton of CAT6 cable for PoE camera setup, but I haven't completely decided on what to do, originally I was going to house the PoE switch on the roof and just have ethernet run on the (flat) roof and through/over the stucco to the cameras (I haven't even picked the cameras out besides one to watch the front).

Things aren't bad, riding the wave

04/26/2022

Where to start, it's been 2 months since the last update. I've been working on the garden:

Spent time converting a sprinkler system to drip, designed the layout in librecad, I've been making changes to suit reality, like adding more emitters to water between the rows. It turned out the red spot drippers didn't spread the water far enough into the center.

The market making project was on hold for a couple long weeks, I rearchitected the system to use something like a game clock and got stuck trying to figure out how I was going to update the charts. I was reacting to every update being sent by the exchange, but now it's limited to once every .3 seconds, which really helps the CPU and actually makes the system snappier. I'm right at the brink of getting the charts working with the new architecture with the next step being showing where I have outstanding orders on the charts. After that I'll port the old trading system to the new paradigm and start tweaking things live, it's just how I roll.

Besides the garden, I've been (re)-learning a trading platform, Interactive Brokers Trader Workstation. It's alright, but I think I'll try and make an interface to trade there too. I won't do it yet... but a part of me wants to immediately start that project since I feel like it wouldn't take more than a day or two. Especially to just start it and get something simple and useful for my manual trading working. I might write that rant out in the next Wren's Warble. I haven't updated over there in a while and I've got a backlog of interesting finance things to write about.

Might as well make a mention of the current trading strategy that's been working the past few months using some big words to sound smart, or obfuscate the strategy... or maybe it's revealing, a sort of qabbalah of Moloch... sorry, that's terrible. The most concise way to describe it is: Dynamically delta hedged long volatility in futures options, buying full sized contracts of vol, while hedging with micros/mini futures. I also add/remove/roll the options themselves to neutralize after gaining deltas. Oil, natural gas, ES(S&P500), ZB, JPY... all over the place right now, but it seems to be the place with the best rate of success. I feel like retail has the most level playing field on CME/NYMEX etc... CBOE, NYSE Arca, not so much.

Crazy how long it's taken me to "learn that" or really it's a gem hidden by fear mongering. Yes, you can take on extremely leveraged positions... but these days so can Robinhood users w/that dirty (pfof) equity vol.

I guess that's about it. Just made a stir fry, so I'll sign off until next update, good luck and God bless in these seemingly apocalyptic times!

02/28/2022

It's the last day of February and I don't want to miss writing an update here this month. Node-RED has been a great tool to use. I've got to the point where I can place orders, but have decided I need to create another subsystem to maintain orderbook depth locally (where the standing limit orders are, I was just using the 'top of the book', the best bid and ask at the time). I was able to fit the IV curve in both the strike and expiration dimensions, but want to add the ability to manually weight expirations to try and get more sane theoretical prices. I am glad that I've been able to make progress after almost giving up again. I have been a bit tired of working on the project though and haven't made much progress there the past few days. I have been trying to keep up on other things, like selling my 'old' laptop, setting up my new one (another open box deal from Best Buy). Also had to deal with a leak from the water lines going into the washing machine, I guess the town water pressure has gone up... one of my poor neighbors had a line burst erroding quite a bit of dirt, glad that didn't happen here (yet), so I should get on the phone with a plumber and get a regulator installed before tragedy strikes.

Attach:peeking-gopher.mp4

Check out that gopher I spotted while wandering around the local baseball field. Never seen a live one before, didn't know they popped in and out like that, I can see the inspiration for the wack-a-mole game now.

Also did some video art using some footage from the microscope, made a Green Sun.

Until next time, peace

01/19/2022

A new year, in a new town, playing with new tools. After fixing up the old volatility plotting software a bit, I felt like trying to integrate any sort of live trading logic would be beyond my skill level, or the codebase was just not clean enough to make it worthwhile (I would end up pulling my hair out). I looked for visual programming frameworks to make editing algorithms and data flows easy, and checked out Ryven before settling on Node-RED to re-write the IV plotting software. Most recently I've been figuring out the easiest/best way to fit a curve to the IV data from the market prices and ran across this paper Curve-Fitting Method for Implied Volatility which exposed me to methods beyond splines and I think I've found something good using LOESS. In my initial implementation I fit a curve to each expiration, but discovered I really need to fit an entire surface (both across the strikes and expirations) due to the wide spreads, plus it's just the right way to do it. Here's a screenshot of the new charts with the per-expiry fitted curve in black:

I also added a Mind's Forge channel to my Odysee account (sign up for an account there to follow, plenty of other good channels are there including Louis Rossmann, EEVBlog, ElectroBOOM, and more). I've been streaming work on the IV plotting -> automated trading software as well as some microscopy, finally picked up a compound microscope and was able to see an amoeba when doing a test stream.

I've got some interesting experiments in mind involving the x-ray mutagenesis setup and the microscope. One is to irradiate samples of the stagnant water (control sample, then increase the time exposed to other samples), another is to germinate some control Wisconsin Fast Plant seeds and some from the mutant line and check the cellular morphology. It's been a while since doing any experiments, I was struggling with a lot (spiritually and dealing with the worldly) in 2019 -> 2020 and 2021 was busy with cleaning my dad's old house out to sell and moving out of the city. If you pray, please pray for me, I'm sure the kinds of works I do are spiritually dangerous. Thanks, until next time, peace!

12/17/2021

I took about a week long road trip through California up to the Redwoods and back, visiting family and checking a few things off the bucket list. I visited the Orthodox monastery in Platina, the ocean and the Forestiere Underground Gardens in Fresno. Before leaving I "finished" (it's still a WIP-backburner) the NFT redeemer. I also did some work on the implied volatility chart software after getting back, mostly bug fixes and updating the README to include what Redis wanted in order for it to be eligible for inclusion in their Redis Launchpad. I've still been trading, selling XSP and MRUT index options, occasional delta hedging and dispersion into long individual stock vol. Realized vol picked up for a bit (along with an IV spike, VIX hit around 30) which was a bit stressful. Trading other CME futures/options too, like oil and lumber -- only currently open position on CME is 10yr treasury futures options.

I'm feeling an urge to start experimenting/building away from the screen again. I really feel like screens can impede the human imagination (especially visual). It would be interesting to do a study with fMRI where you take people with high daily screen time vs. people with less and see how their brain lights up when asked to visualize something.

I also spent a day with family helping make tamales and remembered how much real work it is! I hope everyone reading this has a blessed holiday, staying healthy both spiritually and physically. God bless.

11/04/2021

The UFO watch party was sort of neat, didn't see any flying saucers, but I did see a bright light appear then fade out in the middle of the sky all within about 5 seconds, also met the guy who owned the ghost town where the convention was being held. Ended up he worked with Emanuel Derman at Goldman Sachs (I'm a big fan of Derman), pretty cool connection to make. I've also been working on making an app to allow people to easily redeem NFTs for things like stickers:

They turned out pretty nice. The app is almost in it's most basic usable form and I'm excited to finally show it off, even though I'm not sure if anyone will actually use it. There is another artist on token.gallery that's made redeemable NFTs, but he requires the purchaser to return the NFT and send an email. My app will allow the NFT holder to just sign a message declaring the NFT they wish to redeem, along with other information like shipping address, and then the system verifies they are the owners of the NFT and passes the information along to the creator. Eventually the status of NFTs as being redeemed or not will be "on chain", but for now I think just having the message/signature verification -> notification system will be good enough to see if anyone is interested in using it.

I've also done a couple trips out to the wash to metal detect. Nothing besides cans, rusty nails, ferrous rocks, bits of barbed wire... that kind of stuff. I thought this might be a meteorite:

Expand then "right click and open in new tab" to see full resolution picture of the suspect rock/slag

.... but I'm pretty sure it's a meteorWRONG, maybe some slag? I ground a bit away with a diamond wheel and had some hope when I saw the yellowish specks, but there's too many indicators that it's not anything extraterrestrial.

Selling vol without delta hedging has been brutal (what a surprise) as we've torn to new all time highs. Maybe I'll take a position in SPY to hedge deltas, or just sell the put side until portfolio delta neutralizes.

Logged back into Veloren recently, it's really becoming a great game. I'm looking forward to exploring the new things they've added.

I've got some ideas of what to write about for the next Wren's Warble, but have just been dealing with other things (and the NFT redeemer project). Slowly, but surely, things will come together.

10/09/2021

This is the latest NFT art that I made for the EGGs collection, I also used that design as the basis for a physical holographic sticker, excited to see how they turn out. I was also interviewed about NFT stuff by another apostle I met from the Great I Am movie, we almost died from being eaten alive by mosquitos.

I participated in Ludum Dare 49 with a game I called "Snow Dash", it was the first game I made with Godot (besides the 2D tutorial game). The theme was "unstable" so I ended up making a game mechanic using a see-saw and trying to balance it.

I've started selling volatility daily using the mini-SPX index options (XSP). I think I'll try and automate this strategy. I also want to figure out the best way of sprinkling in long vol with positions in S&P500 companies, a lot of it right now is just mechanical selling and throwing a dart at elevated IV companies (only one so far), but there's probably a better (quanty) way. I've stopped playing the ClubGG poker games after I heard about the WSOP requiring vaccine papers. I've been enjoying watching the Triton Million as they release episodes though.

I also finally had a print of Salvador Dali's Corpus Hypercubus (Crucifixion) framed and it's hung up as the centerpiece of my non-Orthodox "prayer corner".

Tomorrow I'll be going to a paranormal convention, there's going to be a UFO watching event in the evening too. Next update I'll hopefully be talking about metal detecting adventures too. Until next time, peace.

09/01/2021

I'll start this update by saying that the Redis Hackathon project was able to get a bronze cash prize ($500), even with it's subpar video and documentation! I haven't touched the LedgerX options software since then, so I haven't been scraping up vol dislocations or anything. I've been busy doing the move, estate sale, getting things donated, dumped, sold, etc. It's been a chore and a half, but I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The old place will more than likely be sold in the next couple weeks. I've also slacked on making updates to the Wren's Warble (and I still haven't made a proper landing page for cactuswren.capital), but I haven't forgot about it. I still give different answers as to "what I do" to different people because I don't really know myself. I got a gig as an (non-speaking) actor for a film adaptation of the gospel of John that's being filmed in the new town, I've only done one day so far and it's been a great experience and has got me to look at movies and shows a lot differently.

I've also been making NFT art, some cool internet dudes have built token.gallery, an NFT marketplace that uses the Ubiq blockchain to allow minting/selling/trading NFTs. I want to experiment with writing my own solidity contract someday, it seems much more accessible these days (and using UBQ instead of ETH makes it more affordable too).

I recently binged the British show "Utopia" (it's on archive.org), I recommend it. I enjoyed it more than the American reboot.

I've also been grinding WSOP Main event sattelite tournaments on the ClubGG poker platform. For $50/mo they run a 3 stage tournament structure where you have to win the top 20% of stage 1 to get a stage 2 ticket which then gets you into a 9-90max sit-n-go tournament that pays out (1/9) the final stage ticket for the Sunday standard MTT (starting stack 200BB, 10 min blind levels) which are paying out 5 WSOP Main event tickets (worth $10,000) to the top 5 finishers... I've played 4 finals so far and more people are playing every week. The first week there were only 132 players, last week there was over 500.

Here's a couple pictures of my new stomping grounds:

06/04/2021

I love it, every month feels like a year (in a good way). Makes it feel like I'm evolving at an accelerated pace. First off, I'm moving to a town outside Phoenix to downsize, this house used to be home to both my dad his dog too, but it has been just me for just under a year now. I've had suggestions to rent the place out, get a roommate, etc. but I feel like that would end up being a full-time job in itself and that's just not the kind of logistics I'd be good at dealing with. Second, I've been inspired to put the pedal to the metal when it comes to forming an entity to do my financial content production and trading from (I might have to officially seperate the two, but since I'm only working with my own capital and publishing content to everyone and keeping it general, there shouldn't be any problem from what I've read).

Participated in the Redis Hackathon and submitted an entry 5 minutes before the deadline. Felt good to get it done, but was a stressful week because I was dealing with a new tax accountant that didn't keep me in the loop and the deadline for that was that coming Monday. I was also starting the house search and was dealing with a realator that seemed to have a buyer she was trying to get a "steal" of a house for. They were more interested in getting me to let go of my house instead of finding me a new one.

I was lucky to be reminded we have a real estate agent in the family, so I've been working with her and am in the process of buying the property the previous agent said was already sold for half the listed value... what a world!

On the religious front, I pray daily, but not as structured as I used to be at the beginning of the year. The new place is surrounded by different kinds of churches, but no Orthodox ones nearby, the closest to that would be a Roman Catholic church. I'll probably visit them all someday, but I've been visualizing a "Prayer Garden" or "Peace Garden" in the desert as a place of worship and community. Maybe it'll be part of a non-profit someday. Just a faint vision for now, I feel like I need to "settle down", but honestly I'm not sure that's how life works.

The fruit trees are producing sweet fruit this year: apples, apricots, peaches... I made a couple peach-apricot cobblers and some apricot preserves (that didn't gel properly). The quail were put back together for a few days and seperated again, this time I put the male in their starter crate. I've been having issues with wild birds trespassing into their enclosures too. It doesn't look like the HOA would be too happy with quail, I might be able to get away with my ham radio antenna, but not sure if I want to even push it. I might just do something that would be in the backyard with the mobile antenna just to see what kind of range I can get, and maybe they need an APRS station out there!

I mean to post a link to my guitaring that I recorded earlier this year. Just as I've slacked with religious activities, I haven't been playing guitar as much. I've had a handful of "musician" or DJ names in the past: NAK, Semaphore, Murdoch (w/my Roomate... which reminds me of Bards of Yore? Not sure, but I did some rap beats and an example rap but no one else really did anything), Transistorized...I thought that was just an album name, but I think that was a whole project. I had to pick a new name for my cellphone recorded late night guitar/vocal sessions: Vagabond Trader - Odd's 'n Ends, I'm not pretending it's great or anything, just throwing something up and out there after a long time of not putting much out. It's taken me months to even get around to posting it here! With all the changes I feel like putting feelers out into the world is the right thing to be doing.

Speaking of which, I've just started this Substack newsletter/blog: The Wren's Warble. Seems interesting and I could see it as a way to capitalize on quantitative research. Have a free weekly publication with a paid subscription with more in depth articles about specific techniques and implementations. We'll see. For now I'll just focus on writing instead of charging for it! I need to see if what I write is worth even LOOKING at let alone paying for. I might end up leaving the platform though, they charge 10% for their infrastructure and if I start charging hedgies for my newsletter I don't think I could afford to lose 10% of that so easily.

I'm sure I'm leaving things out, but I've had this edit window open all day long and have been sitting down adding to this post sporadically throughout the day while sorting, cleaning and getting things ready to sell or give away. Subscribe to the Wren's Warble so I can feel good about my subscriber count going up!

Until next time, peace!

05/01/2021

Been working on options trading stuff still, finally getting around to logging some data using RedisTimeSeries. Planning to periodically downsample/flush data to the disk for archiving but still need to work out all the details. Found a good deal for a storage VPS (no referal link or anything, just was such a good deal I had to share.), might even switch this server over to them since I'm paying more for less with my current VPS provider.

Used Bokeh to plot the numbers you see in that animation above. It shows the volatility smile of some bitcoin option expiration (showing the bid and ask IV as seperate glyphs) -- the line is the spline interpolating the mid price implied volatilities. So to boil it down when the line is out of wack you buy/sell in order to "un-kink" the volatility surface (while market making strategically to hedge portfolio delta).

It's 3 systems: Option Pricing Model -> Portfolio Delta Hedging -> Order placement/filling A couple years ago I tried naive market making on Poloniex -- inventory risk is real, so that's one reason things have become this way... another reason is back before options became popular there was a fellow on reddit that talked about his firm's strategy and potential for retail traders making profit and it looked something like this (but in cboe index/cme futures options markets). Should be interesting to see what happens this round, fingers crossed we'll see something.

I had to seperate the quail, the 2 girls were attacking the boy and ripping his feathers out so they've been seperated and are taking their time to heal. Been cleaning up, getting rid of junk. Chief among sinners, praying for mercy.

04/06/2021

I think these Japanese family crests were the last thing I printed. I still have fantasies of making a marble machine, or other interesting kinetic structure. I'll get around to it!

I haven't played with APRS any more really. I do sort of want to setup something that beacons the network with a "messages welcome" message and have somethign setup to buzz my phone when someone calls my sign. I suspect that'll be moved to a back burner.

Finally visited this Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative (RADVAC) website which is interesting:

The ultimate goal of the RaDVaC project is to create a modular vaccine platform for extremely rapid deployment at the beginning of a serious outbreak of a pathogen for which no good vaccine exists. The founding philosophy of RaDVaC is that the best way to accomplish this goal is to share freely and openly information on vaccines and testing throughout a global network of researchers engaged in agile R&D. For many, this will include highly localized vaccine production. While the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been the catalyst for initiation of the project, it will not be the last serious outbreak; the establishment of a solid scientific and technical foundation for rapid vaccine deployment is a long-term endeavor that will not end as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic winds down.

I suspect this push for mRNA vaccines is just a way to get the general population comfortable with the technology before deploying it on every bothersome virus, the question we should be asking is if this is okay for cv19, why wasn't it okay for the other deadlier viruses. I believe it boils down to the relaxation of regulation which gave a perfect opening for a trillion dollar market to be born. Maybe next post I'll be talking about sourcing vaccine ingredients.

Quail are still doing well, 3 are hanging out and I'm getting about 2 eggs a day. Starting a new project, going to try and do some market making on a bitcoin options market, the spreads are very wide so there's room for small time traders to come in and try and automate some market making.

03/04/2021

The month of March is here! What do we have in store for this update? We've got that APRS setup working that I was talking about last time. It's using a Raspberry Pi 3 running Dire Wolf, I've got a 555 timer circuit setup so the PTT doesn't stick open in case of a software failure and the pin remains high, a resistor divider + capacitor between the speaker out and the microphone input on the Pi's USB soundcard. The Pi's line out went straight into the radio and worked without any adjustment (a bit unexpected, but I read somewhere that the radio's (ICOM 2100) mic has a pre-amp in it). I connect to Dire Wolf with XASTIR on my main laptop, screenshot below shows what appears after listening for a few hours. Now that I have an idea of how this 1200bps network is setup, it's got me thinking about making a BBS. There's an i-gate close to me so there's probably no need for any more digipeaters or igates.

Trading stuff update is boring, last time I said I was going to try again, I did and it didn't work. These automated trading experiments are just a small part of my "total trading", but I really don't update that stuff here, I have a pseudo-anonymous account on stocktwits that I keep updated with other ideas and trades.

Quail are doing alright, got them some new sand yesterday.

Haven't done anymore mad science (x-ray, bacteriophage) yet, still not sure about my experiments I started back in 2019.

Thinking about business possibilities a bit here and there too. Made an inquiry about formulating that energy drink that I've been working on for mass production, within the realm of possibility but I need to do a deep dive on distribution possibilities (call up places locally, see the process to get a product on a shelf or a minifridge in a store would be). Also thinking about electronics kits (like the APRS interface circuit), or maybe I should just take a stab at playing live poker for a month!

That's it for now, love 'n peace

02/10/2021

Second month of the new year and I've been slacking on site updates (and more). Lately my focus has shifted back towards automated trading. I've been using the Tradier API to take a stab at trading the CBOE index option market, TD Ameritrade has finally exposed their API to small time traders too (although it took their support team over a month to get back to me about a question, Tradier is much quicker to respond). My first attempts weren't successful, ironing out bugs, slippage from entering and exiting positions because of software issues was painful and sort of took the wind out of my sails for a few weeks now, but I think it's about time to try, try again. I've also considered that doing some educational work in this space would be useful to traders, there's not enough love for XSP (an option series that trades at 1/10 the size of SPX) and next month MRUT is going to start trading, a mini Russell 2000 series that is 1/10 the size of RUT. I don't have a good feeling that it will remain trading for long though, the RUT has only 2.4% of the volume that the SPX has, and the mini-SPX is a fraction of that even, so I can imagine the volume on MRUT will be VERY tiny... if only smaller investors could figure out the value of using these products: 60/40 long term, short term capital gain split for tax purposes (1256 contracts), cash settled (no assignment risk, European style options) and then the ability to build specific risk profiles, trade volatility (instead of direction) and asymmetric risk/payoff.

Enough with market stuff, and I didn't even mention cryptocurrency bitcoin hoopla or the GME short squeeze! Look at these eggs:

I thought I only had male quails, seems like I have at least 1 female, and from the number of eggs I'm getting I may actually have 2 (or even all 3 girls?!) I did lose another quail for some reason, I don't know what happened, didn't seem like a cat or anything got to it, RIP. Other than that they seem to be doing well.

Also picked up a PRUSA Mini+, I ordered it back in October and it arrived in December, they've been in constant backorder mode since the release. I haven't used it too much, but I've experimented with using it to make two color prints, as well as the large prosphora stamp. I recently did a print of a cross to hang from my rear-view mirror with it using the filament swap to get different colors:

I also did some work to make a print of a Japanese family crest (I didn't get a picture of the final product, I used the 2 color technique to make a gift for a friend that paid for half of the printer, if you're reading this Dick, thanks!) I still need to make another one for his other side of the family, shouldn't be too difficult since it's much less ornate.

Last month I almost got around to dipping my toe into packet radio again, except I was nervous about building an interface to my radio. There's software these days that lets you control your radio using a relatively cheap Raspberry Pi computer which would allow me to build an APRS gateway for cheap, monitor local traffic and route it to the net and back out from the net locally (at least that's how I imagine it to work). Funny that recently I was sort of reaching outside my current Orthodox path for spiritual insight and grabbed a book I picked up from when I first was "initiated" into living under God's guidance and found this notecard being used as a bookmarker:

My grandpa helped repair my radio (a gift from him as well) when I first tried to interface to it and found that this diode or resistor acted like a fuse when I had the pinout reversed and apparently shorted "Pin 1 to ground" burning it up. Was fun running into it again after being nervous about trying to do the same thing again 15 years later, as well as my "re-introduction" to that stream of grace, that I feel like I'm slacking on my side of things, journaling daily with a focus on grace would probably be the most beneficial at this point in time.

12/04/2020

Still feeling a bit timorous pushing forward with any of my mutagenesis stuff. It's been a while since growing more from the mutant brassica rapa line, and I don't think the log page for that project is up to date. I have a seed in a bag here from that last entry on 5/13/20, and I think that was the only one that looked viable. So, if I am able to get it to flower I'll have to back cross it. I'm suprised that so many of the original different mutations were carried down this line.

I also have the cactus going still, although there are quite a few dead grafts, I've been fighting scale bugs, and a mouse ate one too I'm sure. I have a bunch replanted in pots on the back porch too. And the "non research" plants are doing alright, I feel like I'm not making full use of the grow light area though.

It's been a whirlwind, but I guess that's how life is. I'm considering selling all the stuff I collected last year to do bacteriophage work. Maybe renting a storage unit would be reasonable, but at the same time I don't want to fall into the trap of clinging to things of this world. Liquidation in order to live more of a "van life" is what I'm feeling at the moment, but I do have a desire to have a lab again and I'm not sure where that impulse of will arises from, the higher will of God or my little mortal will of dust. Honestly it's that relationship, a divine love to get closer and "know" more, to do well by the army of heaven. There's a passage in "The Pilgrim Continues his Way" that says: "Pray and do what you want" -- because if you keep that line of connection to the persons of heaven it's sort of living life with bowling bumpers on. Turning away and saying that you can do it all on your own is an option too of course, but gutter balls are eternal. And it's not saying playing with bumpers is "easy", a strike may consist of brutal physical torture and death here on earth, look to the lives of the saints for plenty examples.

11/12/2020

Things are moving right along. I haven't posted about my isopod culture, but I started a culture this February 2020 from eBay. They're listed as Porcellionides pruinosus powder orange. I ended up collecting some isopods from the wild and keeping them too, what ended up happening was some orange escaped to the wild container and ended up cross breeding. There were some incidences where I let things get dry, so there were some Malthusian catastrophes, but was able to get the culture to revive. The genetics have seemed to have balanced out between the two containers, you can tell there's a bit of the "blue" genes floating around, but it's mainly orange.

The quail have grown up, but I've read they stop/slow down laying in the winter. You can fix that by using a light on a timer, but I haven't decided to do that. I ended up with more males than I thought before too, I'm guessing it's 4 males and 2 females, which isn't the best and I should look into selling some.

I was recently introduced to a book: Beginning to Pray by Anthony Bloom, and it's very good. After reading the introduction I ended up ordering a few more copies to lend out /give away.

That paragraph is from the introduction. It's a short book, just over 100 pages, dense with the spirit. I'm only about halfway through and am putting those tape markers throughout it in order to reference particular pearls of wisdom that are strung through the reading.

Alright, so still on the path, still juggling worldly duties and aiming for love and light.

10/14/2020

Realized that it's been a little over a year since switching over to using PmWiki for the site, I think I'll keep it!

The quail have grown up quite a bit, I have moved them in with the remaining adult quail (I lost my egg laying hen to a neighborhood cat)... The rabbit hutch thing was just a little too wide and a cat was able to get it's claws through and the quail weren't smart enough to stay away. This pic is from 10/2 around midnight, was moving them because of flood irrigation:

I also finally designed and printed off a kitchen knife handle for my friend, I guess the original shattered:

I didn't expect to print so many templates, but the screw hole alignment offset was a tricky problem to suss out. I also just shipped out a commission for these cool mushroom earcuffs, based off Mycena genus mushrooms:

One of the xray pollen Daturas bloomed:

I guess that'll be it for now, lots of "stuff" to do. Poor dog is fighting back a swollen paw, starting to pick up speed on cleaning things up around the house to move along the path to "lighter" realms. I could write a bit more on some other fun projects, but that'll just have to wait!

09/18/2020

Posted this project: 3D printed prosphora seals, prosphora is the bread that is used in the Orthodox Eucharist.

I also recorded a video that's over an hour long just talking about my experiences over the last 15 years or so leading up to where I'm at now as a catechumen. I started to edit it down and add title annotations, but it got late and I got self conscious. Might continue it sometime if I feel it?

I incubated 7 quail eggs with 5 hatching (9/4/20), I had to help one out with some forceps and dental pick (and I could've probably helped another one out, but I wasn't sure it needed help) only one was empty when I candled them at day 15. Maybe I should make a "project" page for quail? Here's some pics of the babies:

They're much larger now and I'm hoping to get a outdoor rabbit hutch thing delivered today. I'll probably move the adults to that and the new generation into the old crate I made out of 2x4's and let them grow up another week or so. I also experimented with pickling the extra quail eggs, they're turning out good!

I guess that's it besides just plodding through worldly "duties", adjustments and the normal housekeeping chores. I've also been more "scholarly" lately, doing a lot of reading and note taking that I haven't had the energy to do the past few years.

08/28/2020

A lot has changed in my life since my last update.

I've continued looking into the Orthodox church since, although I won't be posting anymore Peterson videos (whew!), I may have to make my own video on this obsession sometime. The quail have started laying (the female of course, 1/day) and I caught them humping once, so I started incubating a set of 7 eggs, lower temperature and higher humidity (95F and 62% at 11 days in, 4 more days until "lock down"). It seems like they're alive, the surface temp measured ~100-102F when I waved the IR thermometer over them.

I've also made a couple more batches of "energy drink" concentrate, without any sweeteners, and it's been pretty good! I ordered some hibiscus extract along with yerba mate extract from a new supplier, so we'll have to see how that turns out.

I logged into Twitter when my sister was over and ended up reading this long Ribbon Farm article on Weaponized Sacredness aloud to her, the two main things that stood out to me were the ideas of widespread preference falsification being "fragile" and has a domino effect sort of collapse when someone with a high enough charisma score calls it out (and can in turn create a whole new set of preference falsifications), as well as the idea of thinking of groups of ideological peoples as egregores that have their own evolutionary histories that have either kept the ideas alive through the generations, or have become footnotes in history books (also interesting in regards to my attraction to Orthodoxy).

I haven't done anymore with the bacteriophage or x-ray mutation stuff. I do have the datura growing in pots out back, but it's been a pretty rough season with extreme temperatures, even for these desert plants. One of them died back and is growing a second set of leaves after I put it in a more hospitable location.

I've been mostly focusing on post-caregiving duties, keeping up with all the extra attention from everyone has been sort of tiring on top of all the mental and spiritual adjustments. I wrote a little rant about 4 days before his passing, I'll post it here: I Wont Be Here Forever.

I can't think of anything else at the moment, maybe I'll post more of my theological writings here too (and I want to continue to threaten to clean everything up, but that's the nice thing about this wiki, I can just throw things up and just keep moving forward, no need to get stuck on anything). As always, feel free to email me, don't get caught up in this world, it's not permanent.

07/07/2020

Hello again, I don't really check the nginx logs for my website viewership stats. I used to be really into that, back when I had a Geocities page and I'd watch the counter go up I'd imagine who was out there in the real world who had visited my site. Then of course just running your own domain on some sort of shared hosting setup, good old days. These days I just look at the RAM usage chart of the VPS to get an idea. I hate to admit that I used the Google analytics setup at one point.

The point is, I don't know who's reading this if anyone. But this is what I do. I've hired help around the house here so I can write stuff like this on my site. Updates!

Cast your gaze upon these pretty plants, I've been fighting a scale bug infestation with them most of the grafts seem to be doing okay (besides those scale bugs), they need water!

I bought a slide whistle so I could make this silent movie better: Attach:slidewhistle.webm

3 quail hatched! One was a runt and died though. So I've got two Coturnix quail in the backyard. They spent their first night outside and seemed to do well. I also 3D printed a new watering setup last night and just set that up outside.

The first pic is just the first bits of 2x4 that I cut and started attaching to one another using screws. I used a nail for the first corner, and drilled pilot holes for long wood screws. Then I attached the plastic hardware cloth to the frame to create the floor. Then attached another set of 4 2x4 peices to make the sides (I should've made the top frame before wrapping it with the hardware cloth). Then just set a piece of leftover aluminium grating on top of the structure, I actually built around the dimensions of that grating.

I'm still philosophizing again, but using the philosophy to "rise above" philosophy. It's a strange feeling, like I'm doing an equal and opposite move towards "light" that I did towards "darkness" that I was playing with back 10 years ago or so. I remember feeling a distinct feeling in my heart recently where a burst of joy and a burst of sorrow happened almost instantaneously with one another. I was struggling with bursts of sorrow for quite a long time, but recently started having the opposite, but then combined. I hope I'm not going off the rails again though. I'm getting weekly counselings, but I'm not sure if it's good enough? Maybe I really have enough experience with this kind of stuff, the breaking down and re-organization of fundamental psychological structures that can drive people mad without guidance. I'll just keep going and trying to be more confident in the direction(s) I'm going. Have faith in other words, even in darkness there was still only the light, just different words.

I haven't played with bacteriophage isolation recently, although I do have a minifridge running here for that purpose, so I do want to start again with that. If only I had more time! What a project to start before things hit the fan, but it sort of made sense to me... to know how to create solutions of phages that might be able to beat terrible infections? Sounds useful if you can do it without a huge expensive lab!

Isopod cultures are doing well, I have 3 and it seems like the genetics have migrated between the different cultures since I had some wild caught ones along with the eBay "powder orange". I should start selling them!

I've setup a "Ringo Ranger" 2M antenna, part of my staying positive in the apocalypse along with the quail. I haven't been able to transmit with it though, so I'm wondering what's going on with that, either there's a connection issue with the antenna (and there's some overload protection, because it seems like it tries to transmit every so often, then quickly stops.) or there's an issue with the actual radio. Receiving seems to work fine, so I don't know yet, the quail were in the way of that project and they were just moved out yesterday so we'll see what we can find out in the next few days.

I want to sell more things on eBay since sales have slowed down a bit and only have a few items actually left up for sale, the trade imbalance must be fixed!

I've been also playing around on the fediverse more. I want to learn LISP still, which this extra hired help should give me a bit more time to do if these other projects and studies don't take priority. The more I learn about theology and the history of Judeo-Christian religion the more interesting it becomes, it's always been interesting, like I've recently pulled Elaine Pagels book off the shelf and have looked up some of her recent talks. I like her approach to the study. My heart is joyous in Christ and sorrowful of this world! To risk seeming nu-fedora, I'll post this discussion with the (in)famous Jordan Peterson about Orthodox Christianity, seems very well thought out and he realizes how complicated, paradoxical and convoluted the explanation is. It's like trying to talk about one of those illusions that look like both a rabbit and a duck as if it were both things and the ink on a page, or the pixels on the screen and the force of the creator who came up and drew the darn thing.

That's it for the monthly update. Time to water the plants!

06/08/2020

It's the same old same old. Watching plants grow, and die, trying to get things to thrive and testing the limits of others resilience. It's just like the good book in a lot of ways, current events unfolding the way they are, history repeating itself over and over again, same patterns, echos of the structure of the holy prototype itself. Some things are going parabolic though, so expecting lots of volatility in coming months and years, but I'm predisposed to that sort of thinking if my self-reflections are worth anything.

Lots of cactus seedlings and grafts seem to be doing well, my Huerina Zebrina got root rot due to the store bought cactus soil not draining. I have a bunch of arms that I separated drying off, so maybe some will start to root. Also been experimenting with incubating quail eggs, I'm sitting next to a smelly incubator right now (purchased more for microbiology experiments, but should work)... I have a feeling the post really man-handled the eggs, we've got about 2 more days before I really give up on this first batch. I have another 20 eggs going from another seller that I started last week too. They were shipped in much better packaging and seemed to be more consistently large. I have a better gut feeling about this second batch of eggs.

Still formulating an energy drink, the recipe really hasn't changed much the past couple months. Also formulating (reverse engineering) sugar free mints for dry mouth, also good success there, but haven't written about it at all (until now!). Working on theological philosophy, increasing synchronicity. Hopefully update some pages soon!

05/09/2020

It's been a little while and the plants have been taking off, even the cat's claw started growing after I potted it and brought it in under the LED grow light. I've become pretty comfortable with how cactus grow and graft, so I should be doing some actual x-ray exposure on a few of those seeds soon. I uploaded this video exposing the scam UV-C "corncob LED" bulbs that have showed up on eBay yesterday, where we incubate a couple petri dishes, one exposed to the light, one control and find out it's a big ol' lie. I have collected and dried some good looking seeds from the F1 generation of x-ray Wisconsin Fast plants, and we're basically ready to go to plant the F2 series of seeds. I'll be updating the x-ray plant pages after publishing this news edit!

04/19/2020

Just installed an instance of PeerTube here at video.mindsforge.com. I made a video last night (testing a head mounted GoPro setup) and was upset about YouTube being so "owned" these days and want to stop feeding that system. I have some other videos too, like the one I just test uploaded of the cactus graft. I also received the adjustable pipettes in the mail yesterday so I should be able to work on making up the sterile phage buffer solutions soon.

04/14/2020

It's just past midnight and I just finished writing these notes out regarding the bacteriophage project. Still haven't settled on an architecture for the wiki, haven't even felt like I've had the time or energy to do that. Maybe I should go to bed instead of doing this and I would have more energy!

03/12/2020

I should mention the corona virus going around the world of course. Other than that I'm working on too many things at once, trying to distract myself from the terrible secret of space. I've begun working on a protocol for finding and purifying a bacteriophage to attack an infection. Lots of plants things are coming along, I've made some mistakes (which is to be expected). Lots of rain here. Thinking of re-organizing the wiki, there's notes of this scattered around here as they come to mind. Definitely need to re-organize a lot of stuff.

01/19/2020

I've been trying to get a phosphor scintillation screen to light up with the x-ray setup to no avail. I bought a surplus screen off eBay removed from one of those x-ray backscatter machines that lets the TSA look under your clothes. I figured that would've worked, but I got no luminescence at all while my geiger counter was peaking. I'm doing these experiments with the exposed tube while wearing a 0.5mm equivalent apron and protective gloves bought 2nd hand on eBay as well. I've also been selling a lot of my stuff off, anything that I'm not currently using is heading out basically.

12/24/2019

Merry Christmas! Just recently split up the mutagenesis page into multiple pages to follow each species that I'm working with as well as keep a page specifically for the mutagen chamber. I've been reading the Bible lately, but have slowed down, it's been good and fun to get a "whole picture" view instead of just hearing about a myth here, story there, words of wisdom without any context... Just as a quick example, Jesus refers back to the prophecy of Isaiah multiple times (in Matthew at least), it's fun especially after studying Kabbalistic things beforehand. There are a lot of "puns" in the Old Testament names that also hold information. Well, have a happy new year!

10/6/2019

Current focus is caregiving first and foremost, then I play with things, like using X-rays to mutate plants. I also try and find time to design for 3D Printing stuff. That's about all I have the time and energy for at the moment, besides reading and art.