Copasetic Flow

 Using my camera as a camera and my computer as a computer just works better. The video files from POTA and SOTA outings on the new camera weigh in on the order of GBs of data. That makes for some pretty great videos, but also for slowish transfer speeds, especially from the camera's USB port out to the desktop computer at home. The camera, a Panasonic Lumic DC G100D was clocking 15 MB/s downloading data to the computer. Switching to a Thunderbolt USB-C cable moved things to 16 MB/s. When I tried to move video files from the computer back into the camera's SD card, that data rate was even slower at aout 5 MB/s. Fortunately, 12 year-old Mota, (internet alias), got a GameBoy knockoff for his sib for Christmas. The little gadgete uses a micro-SD card, and so yesterday Tawnse asked if we could get an SD reader so we could  move games on and off the machine. I ordered one. This morning, when I tried to use the SD port on said reader to move files from the camera's SD card, they...

  A few weeks ago, the 13, 11, and 9 year-old gang and I were out on our yearly camping trip, hanging out near Great Basin National Park above Baker, NV, when KO6BTY and I got to participate in a Ham Radio Workbench episode! It was a lot of fun! (It was also one of the latest nights up we had during the trip.) If you're landing here from there, we talked about a lot of things including: Project TouCans ( page ) ( and in general ) POTA / SOTA How early versions of TouCans were inspired by the OHIS Camping KO6BTY and my writing projects regarding one Michael Gladych ( page ) ( general gladych ) ( general history of physics ) unschooling / homeschooling / parenting in general and we got to talk to Thomas K4SWL about qrp rigs We just made it back from our camping trip yesterday, so I hope to have a lot of updates over the next few days, and maybe some pretty pictures as well like this one of Mt. Wheeler and, of course, Project TouCans.

 This is a story from back in February. I wanted to share a cool moment in time that Mota, Tawnse, and I had on Monday. Daize had gone off to attend College Algebra, and I was working from the house. I walked into the kitchen and it looked like a portion of the recent bomb cyclone had landed in there. I had 25 minutes to kill, so I called Motaand Tawnse. When they arrived, I was already taking the recycling bag out to the garage. I asked them to empty the dishwasher and they got to work. When I returned, I moved everything off the stove into one sink. I asked them to load the dishwasher back up. While they were doing that, I got to work on scrubbing pans. As I did, I looked around the kitchen. I noticed a few dishes they’d missed, pointed it out, and they plopped those in as well. I asked them to check the rest of the house for dishes. While they were checking, I finished the pans, and got to work on cleaning the stove top. When they returned, I asked the two of them to get all the...

One of the many, many benies of self-led weaning was.... No High Chairs!!! Given, this trick isn't for everyone. Some people want a little alone time with their meal. Some people, perhaps, take care of kids that don't hate being restrained. Siggghhhh, not so much here. That's what led me to discover what I later found out was called self-led-weaning . The kid, (each of the kids in turn), would sit in my lap during meals. They'd also sample my food, (that's the self-led-weaining) part. We never used the high chair. Here's the other cool part though. The kids got tired of siting in my lap when they could toddle, crawled out, and learned how to climb into their own chairs, so no high chairs at restaurants either. (Of course, my lap was also available there, so again, this trick might not be for you.) And then!!!! Becuase we were grad students and the kids came with us to grad student happy hours they also learned very quickly how to safely perch themsevles on bar s...

Eight year-old Tawnse made beer bread a few days back, and through a mishap, we wound up with a smoother, easier to cut version of the bread we take on camping trips. Here's the recipe: Ingredients 3 C  Self Rising Flour which can be made with: 1 cup all-purpose flour + 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder + 1/4 teaspoon fine salt 3 Tbsp  Sugar 1 Warm Beer Steps Mix Grease loaf pan Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour It's really, really simple to make, and it comes out as a pretty rugged loaf of bread that you can wrap in foil and throw in your backpack. Usually—for us—it comes out pretty tough with a craggy crust, and that's ok because it travels well, and it's for camping. On Friday though, the Tawnse—the eight year old's alias here—picked up my beer which I'd taken a few sips from and poured it in. So, we didnt' have enough beer in the bread. I opened the bread intended for the beer, and poured in what seemed like enough to make up the difference. We wound up with ...

 I’m really enjoying WA4EFS’ website . The projects look like they were a ton of work, but the author melds all the various topics, analog, digital, and RF together so seamlessly, it’s easy to believe that they should be effortless works of love. In one of his videos he looks at the quality of the output radio wave from one of his transmitter project. It inspired me to do the same for the Rockmite.  I set up a dummy load: for the transmitter: two 1 Watt 100 ohm resistors. The pair, in parallel, gave me a total resistive load of 50 ohms, (=nominally speaking; (49.2 ohms once all the tolerances came into play).: I attached the dummy load to the Rockmite, then attached the scope probe across the resistors. I realized I might have an issue since I could only cause transmit by sending either a dot or dash with the keyer. I used the dash speed control to slow down dashes as much as I could, and tried the first experiment: sending a dash. The scope captured the waveform, and held it ...

 Here's how it all starte.d This morning, I trudged out to the park with the little RockMite radio (a single frequency ham radio transciever that oerpates at 14.0577 MHz, we'll get to how I can be that certain soon), and started plunking out Morse code in hopes of reaching someone else on the same band. The view was gorgeous, and before too, too long, I made the second contact I'm made in over a decade with  WKJ7LVZ in Moab, UT! All of that was great! Also, the scenery over the antenna was pretty gorgeous. And here's where the unschooling interests start. First, the kids help me setup the antenna sometimes. They're aware that it's a half-wavelength dipole They've worked with waves both in Physics and electronics because of my partner and I. At the moment, they're learning Morse code. So, they're getting all the peripheral stuff you might expect from ham radio. Guess what else though?They're fascinated by the distances to the stations Icontact, a...

 It's gorgeous outside over the Bay this morning, and? We're baking! Recipe! Ingredients 1/2 cup warm water   2 (1/4 ounce) packages active dry yeast   1 1/2 cups milk , lukewarm  1/2 cup sugar   2 teaspoons salt   2 eggs   1/2 cup shortening   7-7 1/2 cups flour   Directions Mix water and yeast in large mixing bowl.  Stir until dissolved.  Add milk, sugar salt, eggs, shortening and 1/2 of the flour.  Mix until smooth and pour out onto floured surface. Knead while adding the additional flour. Knead until smooth and elastic( about 5 minutes).  Round up in greased bowl with greased side up. Cover with damp cloth.  Let rise in warm place until double (about 1&1/2 hours).  Punch down; let rise again until almost double.  Dough is ready to to make into cinnamon rolls or dinner rolls now.

 I have, in the past, used this blog as a lab notebook. I'm not sure how intersting it all is to others, but it works out really well for me. So..... Yesterday, I changed out the keyer on the boxed Rockmite, (a single frequency radio kit available from qrpme . I'd used a set of switches I broke out of a junked TV for years, but they finally gave out.  Oh! I also built a new power cord for the rig. Here's the steps: The new power cord has a 9 volt battery connector on one side, but that's not what it's for. It attaches to these 12 volt AA battery holders we use. We: (Me and the 11, 10, and 9 year old gang.) With that accomplished, I set in on the key revamp. I removed the old keys. I'd forgotten that part of the reason I'd been so happy to have them was that they had screw nuts already built-in, making them easier to attach to the box: I remembered to take a picture of the color coded wires, from left to right at this angle, they are 'di', 'da...

 I bought a (for me) fancy pair of hiking boots this year. And, as usual, the first thing I trashed out was the laces. I don't know how I manage to do this? The kids? Sure, I figure they trash out their laces free-climging buildings, and in their other activities around town, I mean, uh, never mind. But me? Anyway, the laces are decaying quickly, and since these are (for me) fancy boots, I though it might be fun to spring for the $10 for the replacement shoe laces from the manufacturer. You know, original equipment and all that. But??? They're out of shoe laces! We now have shoe lace shortages... Oh well.

 Fatherhood is hard! Wait, no it isn’t: I’m literally drafting this missive while quaffing a beer in downtown San Francisco (the Mission actually), waiting for the kid to finish up a class. *Thinks back* Wait. maybe fatherhood is hard? So, “What the hell am I even talking about,” you ask? Here’s an example. It starts with car seats. Car seats are a nightmare! They especially were for one of the kids. I’d plop her in the car seat and she’d start to scream. She hated it! She’d continue to scream until we reached our destination. So, ok, that was hard. Here’s the thing though. In the middle of that we moved to a city with phenomenal public transit, and I quit driving. After that, I just had to hop on the bus with the kid in a wrap. She loved it! I loved it! Except… Some bus rides are forty-five minutes long. And, sometimes? Sometimes the kid wanted to be bounced through the entire ride. That was hard. But other times? On the same ride. The kid abided. The kid snuggled into her wrap up...

 Daize, the 11 year-old, swam from the beach to the end of a pier in the San Francisco Bay today! She can now officially swim in the ocean, and since she was not the one kid that got to take swimming lessons pre-pandemic, that also means that she can officially swim at all! The whole swimming thing has been a very incremental, very unschooling sort of process. Before the pandemic struck, we were able to cycle one kid through swimming class, the now nine year-old Mota. Meanwhile, because of the one adult per kid requirement, the other two kids, Daize and Tawnse, had to wait—and then pandemic. And that meant, thanks to my lungs, we quit going inside swimming pools. But, all was not lost. Now imagine you're a kid whose dad developed pulmonary embolisms after catching something that looked a lot like SARS-CoV1, then, years later, lost two feet of his intestine because clotting; who also has a grandmother and aunt who had/have Type 1 diabetes. https://t.co/gUoSOqcJ6A — antigrav_kids (@...

 Daize and Tawnse made apple pie! It was delicious! But wait! When they started, they didn’t have flour or sugar. Did they come to me to ask if they had the requisite materials, and could I get them? Nope.  The first I caught any wind of this pie business at all was this morning when Tawnse appeared in the doorway to ask where one might find shortening. I replied that rather than looking for shortening one should simply use butter. As she walked away, I heard Tawnse holler to Daise—across the house—”Daize! Can you use butter?” Later, as my partner and I were planning what to do about various things in jobs, with kids, and for dinner, Daize, Tawnse, and Mota appeared again stating that they’d planned their day. I commented that kids-plan-adventure-day was actually scheduled for Thursday mornings.  They stared at me blankly—I haven’t told them about that part of our new schedule yet, but the blank stare gave me the moment I needed to collect my thoughts, realize that my par...

In her most recent blog post Evelyn Krieger asked if readers were trying new things, and it reminded me, that yeah, the kids and I are in the midst of that! We've taken up an unfamiliar sport—Bay swimming in San Francisco—wrapped in a familiar one from when I wa a kid—competitive lap swimming in a pool. It was one of the kids here, the seven year-old aka Tawnse who got me back into the water. On a trip to a beach at one of our coves, she fell into the water. She did what we’d talked about a dozen or so times before, and she’d practiced once or twice before—she stood back up—and all was well. Right after that though, she declared that she wanted to learn to swim at that beach. And, since we unschool, that’s exactly what we’ve been doing! It’s been kinda cold—the water temperature this month has hovered around 65 degrees —but it’s been a lot of fun! The learning’s been small on some days, and immense on others. In general, everything is moving along rather swimmingly, ( yeah … I wen...

 Read this article by the author of Timeless Learning  a book about changing traditional schools in ways that look remarkably reminiscent of unschooling. The author uses baseball as a metaphor, but... It's all about how we percieve tasks, how we learn, what our expectations might be, and how those expectations might have come to enter our psyches. It's about... well, you'll see.   As an unschooing parent, I frequently don't think about how schools can/should work because the two systems (traditional schooling and unschooling) are portrayed as different, ofthen orthogonal activities. However, two things lay at the base of each of these systems: relationships with kids and learning.  In unschooling there's still material to be presented, even if it's just strewing and/or talking with the kids to mine their own intrests. There are still expectations--even though unschooling tacitly eliminates them--because we're sill human and many of us, including me, grew up ...

Watching the behavior towards COVID and monkeypox of some of the folks that live in my home town of San Francisco, as well as our federally appointed health officials, I’m left swimming in the deep end of the pool searching for explanations. I’d rather come up with a reason that’s compassionate, something that doesn’t make my fellow American a bigotted, uncaring murderer, and frankly, lately, it’s been kind of tough to do that. We lost all our COVID mitigations months ago, masking is gone; indoor everything is back regardless of case counts, hospitalizations, deaths, or any other metric that might be tracked; institutions paid lip service to ventilation, and then mostly did nothing; and finally, they’re playing the AIDs game with Monkepox, asking us to believe that it’s only a problem for men who have sex with other men, never mind that kids and women are catching it as well. With all this input, in trying to come up with a compassionate solution regarding my peers’ complete and utter ...

Telling kids what they ‘can do' is way more freeing than asking them what they’d ‘like to do’. tldr; if you’re not comfortable with the kids in your house running off’t, don’t read this. A few days ago, at home, my partner mentioned to the kids that in 20 minutes or so they should meet up because they needed to go to the market at the bottom of the hill. 40 minutes later, she got a text from them, "Where are you?" "In the house, where are you?" "At the market!" — antigrav_kids (@thord_ee_r) July 22, 2022 Just thought of this: is 'running off’t' a contraction for “running off withouT me/us”? This is a brief, brief post, and frankly maybe I should do more of these, but anyway. We have insanely yummy dumpling bakeries down the hill from us in three directions here in San Francisco. They are firggin’ delightful! They’re locally owned. Some of them only take cash. (Fuck the Man.) And—excuse the religious platitude—God they sell crazy good, ch...

 We got back to transit this week! We were out of town for a month hanging out in Montana. The state’s pretty awesome, but in the small towns we were around, transit wasn’t really a thing, and  we missed it! If nothing else, just getting to zone out while someone else drives is a huge privilege . There’s not much to this post, but transit makes me smile, and I’m smiling again writing about it, so here goes. On Tuesday, I had to turn in our rental car, so I made a quick jaunt to the airport. My mood improved as soon as the car keys were out of my hands. No more worrying about someone else’s incredibly expensive property and the huge load of regulations surrounding all things driving. Even more happily, a leisurely stroll through the airport put me in front of the SFO museum’s (there are several mini-museums in SFO) new exhibit about Victorian wallpaper! All cultured up, I headed for the BART platform. The ride was simplicity itself, dumping me back close enough to the house to ...

What it is A number of campsites sprinkled along Pass Creek as it winds through Blue Jay Canyon paralleled by National Forest Road 122 off of US 93, with an occasional pit toilet restroom. Pass Creek is accessible from each of the campsites. Tall canyon walls shatter the ground, rising above the creek on either side of the road. Last Visited:   June of 2022. Last Reviewed: June of 2022 Getting there: As you travel along US 93, turn north onto National Forest Road 122 aka Pass Creek Rd. Drive about six and a half miles to reach the canyon itself, although you’ll find campsites dispersed along the road beginning as soon as you enter Salmon Challis National Forest . Review: The campsites sit along Pass Creek as it winds through the canyon. One of the campsites we passed was across the road from a pit toilet. The other six or so campsites which were a few tenths of a mile away from each other would require a walk back along the graveled road to reach the facilities, (or you coul...

 Happy June! I got to hang out in a new place with the gang and my parnter yesterday: a beautiful place full of flowers, a place with access to a mountain stream that ultimately cascades into a reservoir, and a place I had absolutely nothing to do with discovering. A few days back, while headed out to fish at a reservoir we've been to dozens of times, my partner suggested that the 11, 9, and 7 year old gang of kids should take our two dogs on a hike back into the forest above the lake. The gang heartily agreed. We dropped them off at the inlet to the lake with the understanding they'd explore upstream before meeting me back at the spot in an hour and a half. I dropped my partner off in a meadow next to the stream that flows away from the lake. I went to fish on the lake (and I didn't catch a thing.) An hour and a half later, I went to pick up the gang. Then, lots of things happened: As I pulled down the road to travel the two miles to the inlet of the lake, I ran into the g...