Book Report: We

Before Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and before George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) Yevgeny Zamyatin envisioned his dystopian future in We (1920). He wrote it as the Russian revolution was failing to deliver on its promises of a better world. The Soviet censorship board banned it and it was smuggled out and first released in English and had to wait until 1952 to be published in Russian and until 1988 to be released in Russia. A truly epic book that I can’t believe I have not read until now thanks to my work book club!

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Refugio Network Weathermap

As foreshadowed in my post about automation at the refugio, “the most likely thing is every room in the house will end up with one” happened: I ended up getting a temperature and humidity sensor for every room and then setting up a set tools I used in the early 2000’s for network monitoring called RRDTool and PHP Network Weathermap to paint pretty pictures of the temperatures and humidity in every room. The tools allows you to quickly see trends as you can see in the image above that fall has finally arrived in Cercedilla with the outdoor temperature dropping from highs in the 20s to 10’s and lows from the 10’s to 5’s. You can consult it in realtime here.
Read on to see how container technology helped me to realize this dream and how AI can even help with things that are way older than it!

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Cercedilla Field Notes: Corta de Troncos

So one of the catalyst in our getting a small cabin in the sierras was the series (maybe soap opera is more appropriate name) Virgin River: watching the beautiful opening and then all the amazing backdrops really generated interest in connect more with nature. So it could not be more ironic that the first year we partook in the local Cercedilla September patron-saint fiestas one of the first activities was a log chopping competition, just like the Lumberjack games in the “Jack and Jill” episode. Well, it was not just like it, as you can see from the animated gif above they do things differently in Cercedilla than Virgin River!

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PhotoTagger

Yesterday I had a digital itch: I wanted to easily add tags to my pictures from the Windows Explorer.

Thanks to Claude, I scratched that itch and now have PhotoTagger, a tailor made software just for me.

Read on for how easy this was!

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