So much has changed since I’ve written.
Old house, sold.
New house – not telling where…
Work Camping in Wyoming – also not telling where, except near Yellowstone NP.
I’m on my fifth or sixth AI project.
And a surgery, seems successful, no two surgeries.
New freshwater system for our RV
Is that enough?
Wow, my last blog post was December 2024. Yikes. We were in Arizona for the winter. Then back home to Illinois to downsize more junk out of the house. Then to Texas, Hill Country to camp host for the winter. It was different. Not a lot to do on our free time besides the National Museum of the Pacific War. All the land there looks the same – scrub, hills, creeks, rivers (that flood!). They seriously flooded the year before (Kerrville) and they flooded this year too.
We spent the summer at D and W RV campground near Champaign, while we worked as hard as we could getting our old house ready to sell. 70+ years of life, nearly 50 years of marriage, collecting “stuff”. By stuff I mean, knickknacks, hobby leftovers, business residue (I deleted easily a million photographs left over from out photography business), old equipment we couldn’t sell for any meaningful amount..
And we never completely finished what we intended to do. But the house is sold (to our son), so we at least, get to store some of our stuff there until we have another house to move it to.
We had planned to leave after the closing and head to Wyoming to help camp host at a campground our daughter and son in law were managing. But then the “wouldn’t it be nice to have a home?” bug began to bite and before we knew it, were deep into house hunting mode. But aren’t you leaving town? You say? Yes. Our first offer and a place was rejected and we missed out. Then we found a different condo, which frankly was a bit more than we needed, but checked all our boxes and provides some flexibility for the future. We had to navigate a remote closing, but with all our team pitching in, at the end of July, we closed on our new home.
In the midst of it all, we each had a surgery and multi-week recovery – that somewhat delayed our heading out to Wyoming. My surgery required almost zero lifting afterward, so lugging those 5 gallon fresh water jugs out of the store and into the RV wasn’t possible. We temporarily switched to 1-gallon jugs, which prompted me to think about our freshwater situation. I found a compact, three cartridge filter that would fit in my water bay and found a 12 gallon per minute UV whole house sanitizer. That’s a bit overkill for an RV where we are talking 2-3 gallons per minute flow maximum. But we are a bit paranoid when it comes to our drinking water. And it gets worse. I conceived of a way of connecting everything so I could flip some valves and run the water coming from the pedestal through the filter and UV on the way to the freshwater tank, then flip the valves back and filter again as water is pumped from the freshwater tank to the various RV uses. More details will follow at some point – I want to make a few hose connection changes before publishing pictures. In the meantime, it works, we are happy with our water and no lugging huge water bottles to and from grocery stores. No storing two 5-gallon jugs in the way in the RV. Not bringing 10 gallons a week into the RV changes our use model a bit. We don’t go as many days between fill-ups, but then we don’t boondock much either.
While we were in Texas, we switched from the old model 2 Starlink to the new Mini. The old one was mounted on the original stand, stuck to the roof with magnets bonded to the fiberglass RV roof. It had to be taken down on travel days. For the new one, I designed and manufactured a mount that could either lay flat or angle up. It also rotates to match Starlink’s preferred direction. So, on travel days, I set it flat, but when we stop for a period of time, I pop it up and rotate it in the correct direction. Oh, and I incorporated a hail proof cover for it at the same time. No more raising and lowering a heavy Starlink pus stand and no trips up to the roof on travel days..
AI is everything, right? I started using various AI tools for research. Then quickly moved to Claude Code for developing applications. I have to say, the results are amazing. Not only can it write code amazingly fast, but it can also do the research required to implement protocols that would take me literally days, if not weeks. I’m two web sites and 5 projects into development and I’m building(we are building) apps I could never dream of doing alone.
One of my projects was a panorama program for my Seestar S50 telescope. A long, long time ago I built two different panorama cameras. One just used 8 cameras to simultaneously shoot images that could stitch into a 360 degree image. The other one used a microprocessor and some servos to shoot a multi-row set of images that could be stitched together. Both were pretty crude. Eventually I purchased a Gigapan unit and created a number of very high resolution, very high pixel count images. So, I got the idea – why can’t I do this with my telescope? It has all the mechanics, just not the software. I wrote Seestar and asked if they were going to implement it. Nope. Dwarf implemented it on their scope. I didn’t want to stitch on the telescope; I just wanted to take the pictures and stitch them on my computer.
So, Claude Code and I sat down, brain-stormed and developed a Mac application that could control the scope. There were a few Gotcha moments, but Claude found work arounds. When I was able to shoot my first test panorama, it stitched fine, or so I thought. My second test had some blue sky and I could see vertical lines. After consulting with the panorama software company, he realized that each image out of the scope had 5% or so of the left edge slightly brightened. No way to fix that in the scope, so in 30 minutes, Claude Code and I built a separate App that simply trimmed off that edge and then stitching worked fine. That panorama software seriously would have taken days for me to do it by hand. AI is coming, no it’s here. Learn to use it in whatever capacity you can or be left behind.
Ok, I’ll try not to wait so long next time.