The Secret BatcaveIn May, there was some space weather. If you had any friends in the northern hemisphere your feed would have been awash with purple and green.
Well, its my turn to talk about, and show you what I did that night.
At work, they have been pissing about with Large Language Models (word generators). Mostly to do fancy research by making ML models pretend to understand the world around them.
Now, a lot of LLM and Generative ML models are there to put artists out of work. However, I have taken a different approach. I am here to prove a point. That point is Atlantis isn’t fucking real.
“But SecretBatcave, how can you be so sure, there loads of evidence to suggest [..]”. No. Atlantis is a rhetorical device mentioned in Plato’s earlier podcast episode: Timaeus. It’s an allegory about what goes wrong when a society relies too much on technology and the decadence that it inevitable leads to. The argument is basically democracy and technology are an affront to nature, and will be punished. Get back to the natural order of things: oligarchy.
Or if you will, something to do with the Hobbit’s shire, or some shit. I never read Lord of the rings.
I wanted to plot all the places that dipshits think Atlantis is. However that’s a difficult parsing challenge, because I’d need to figure out how to extract the purported location of Atlantis, and remove the other location names. After that feed it into a geocoding service to get a lat:lon.
This is one of the only places where LLMs are useful. They are about 45% better at creating structured data from scraped internet shit than my hand coded parsing system. sure, they are slow as shit, but I’m not doing this at scale, so fuck you.
Anyway, the result is this: The map of all the places where Atlantis isn’t you’ll notice that the interactive map is somewhat dodgy. This is because I also got the LLM to place where it thought the location was on the map. Its slightly better than a guess, but not much.
A while back, I made a rocket dovecot. In fact, I think I started it just under 10 years ago. Whilst it was fun, it was never really practical. The roof was unreliable, and the rocket carriage failed pretty quickly.
I did make a nice software stack to control it all through a web interface though. Now, I am a better engineer, so I should be able to make it better by now? Perhaps
As you can see, I have made some design choices that make it much more simple to build and move. Gone are the cool but fickle shutter roofs, and the stupid rocket lifter. The rockets stay in place now, making it much more simple.
More update to follow.
I really like the look of large “school” escapement models. Typically they are plate sized models of working escapements, allowing key features to be demonstrated. You can see a very nice collection here. (Along with some history, pricing and other bits of information.)
So I decided to make a simple “electric” escapement, because I don’t have the patients or the maths to work out and make a hair spring.
This is the essential style of the device. However this version failed because the wheel wasnt actually symmetrical.
After remaking the wheel manually, rather than using the cnc, we get a much better result. However I only have four magnets on the wheel, which isn’t enough to start spinning under its own power.
I need to add many more magnets, and a third coil of I want it to be self starting. I also need to master quadrature motor driving too.
As you might be aware, I have already made a hal9000 replica. Looking up the dates, it’s just about ten years since I made it.
Anyway, a while back I wanted to make an improved one, after seeing a bunch of kickstarters. So I decided to make a parametric CAD model, because I couldn’t source the right lens anymore.
Much time has passed, but I’ve finally managed to cut, assemble and test with a 720×720 screen and lens.
There are many things that are wrong:
Most importantly, I’ve not installed these sexy bicoloured switches.
However, what *is* right is using a screen to render the lens glow. Whilst it’s not quite as realistic as a real glowing lens, it looks better than my previous version.
I can now animate the “eye”, replace it with text, and generally get much more flexibility.
Everyone loves a good bumble bee
This week, I found a bumblebee nest in an old compost bin. I had my suspicions that there might be a solitary bee living in there, as I had seen some activity recently.
But, I was more than surprised to find a no-fooling nest. This is possibly the coolest thing in my entire garden. Its a shame I can’t look closer, as that’ll piss them off.
Assuming that they move on in the spring, I’ll preserve the nest, because I suspect it looks really cool.
This year the newts have returned to my ponds. This is despite having to do a “flying” pond liner change. Something ate hundreds of holes in the liner around the water level.
Anyway, that’s fixed in 2/3rd of the ponds, so we are mostly happy now.
In this time of strife and suffering, I think its important to produce art that nourishes and uplifts the soul. So I present my motivational tablet:
I have long been a fan of b3ta. Recently they have resurrected the newsletter. Sadly gone are the days of the flash sound board. My favorite sound board was the Brian Sewell one.
Alas Jobs has killed flash, but I have ported it to HTML 5.
Click ye here and marvel in His Master’s Voice.
Once again many months have past since I last confessed. Today I have some internet of things for you.
I have made a calendar controlled thermostat. Powered by relays and a raspberry pi
https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/house/raspberry-pi-powered-thermostat/
