I finished the hay shed Sunday, 24-Sep-23 20:59:27 CEST

Bluetongue Sunday, 08-Oct-23 19:47:36 CEST

Sunday, 01-Oct-23 17:52:40 CEST

Finished the outdoor decluttering project

This week, I finished the outdoor decluttering project for this time. We bought an indoor vacuum cleaning robot, and I got the microphone program working.

Monday 25 September

Today, I worked from home, and DW went to the office. DD was at home as well. Now, it would have been nice if DD knew what she wanted. She hesitated if she were going home in the afternoon and when. In the end, she decided to stay the evening, but at that time, the bus transfer was spoiled for DW, so I went to the station to pick up DW.

In the evening, I worked on last week's blog.

Tuesday 26 September

This was my first time working at the office on a Tuesday in the new hybrid homework regime. Up until now, I worked from the office on Mondays. There were plenty of people in the office, and this was good. It felt good to be at the office with plenty of people. DW worked from home. She only has one steady office day, which will remain on Mondays. I brought DD to the train station in the morning, so I was on time at work. That meant I could go home well on time.

Because I went home from work on time, I could work on the microphone project. I had installed a new Windows update, and now the microphone was not working anymore. I figured it was the faulty setting that was reset again. This time, I noted how to enable the microphone, see photo.

It is so strange that it is turned off like this. I have no idea what this is about.

When the microphone was working again, I concluded that the fast Fourier algorithm I ported last time was working as bad as the original. So now I can try to find the error. By then, it was time to go to bed.

I noticed one thing: I had a stack overflow involving the timer event this time. This got me curious. I have to look into that further. But as I said, I had to go to bed.

Wednesday 27 September

I worked half a day from home and then had the rest of the day off. The work went very well, and I felt hyped about the project. That feeling stayed with me the rest of the day. It is so lovely to be involved in a project at work that feels great.

After lunch, I filled the small trailer with garbage from behind the sea container. In the trunk, I placed the mattress of the bed I discarded on Sunday. This is great; it is progress on the decluttering project! It was hot, though. It was not okay that it was this hot; we must get used to it.

We continued to the second-hand shop, hoping to find a food dryer machine I spotted the last time. It had been sold.

I had decided to write on the blog. I sat down on the couch. It did not go like that. Instead, we decided to buy a brand new Roomba vacuum cleaner robot! Roomba S9+. We will see when it arrives.

After that, I went and checked out what to harvest. I found that the rest of the corn has been consumed by rodents. It is about time to get going on the harvest. I picked the pumpkins. It is not as many as last year.

Thursday 28 September

Today, we both went to the office.

In the evening, I worked on the microphone program. I could solve the problems with the Fourier transformation! It turned out to be the timer that caused all the problems. The microphone library is using functions running in separate threads. The microphone data event is spawned from a separate thread. All sample programs I found about reading microphone data use a timer event to process the microphone data. The idea is that the timer event is running from the UI thread, making it safe to update the plot. But it is far from safe; it barely works. The plot works for a short while. Then, it is as if data is stuck in the calculations within the Fast Fourier transformation library.

I decided to make a delegate for updating the plot. When the microphone data is processed, and the plot is updated, it is updated with the help of a delegate via an invoke command. From my experience, this is the best way to update the UI from threads. It always works the best. This time, it was no exception. I had not thought it would be of such impact since every sample program I found used a timer.

Friday 29 September

Today, DW worked from home, and I went to the office. It was good she worked from home because the s9+ arrived.

When I came home, I unpacked it!

It was loud!

The first task of the machine was to make a discovery tour, mapping our ground floor. This is what it made:

It does not understand that the windows extend past the hallway and that the wall stays the same along the hall. I suppose this does not matter too much. What does matter is all the clutter we have standing, lying everywhere. It got stuck in the carpets, so I removed them. It had trouble getting dining table chairs. We must coexist with this new creature and give in to some of our habits.

Saturday 30 September

This morning, we went to the farmers market. Before we went there, we started a vacuum cleaning job for the s9+. That way, we could avoid the loud sound of the robot.

At the market, we bought cheese, eggs, and fruit. We met up with a colleague of DW and the colleague's husband. It was excellent; we had coffee at the market and chatted about various things. The husband knows a lot about farming, what the machines were used for, and what they were called.

When we were just about to say goodbye to our friends, the vacuum robot reported it had run into problems. There was not much we could do about it.

At home, I discovered it consumed a cat toy I had created myself. I had hung a rod in rubber bands from the roof. At one end, I had a weight, and at the other, a string. It was possible to change the balance of the string so that I could adjust it precisely to create the perfect cat attention. The robot had got hold of the string and was spinning on the thread so that the drums had got damaged. I will order new drums at some point. The machine can keep running, although the drums are damaged.

I finished the outdoor decluttering project! The last rubble is loaded into the small trailer. I will bring it away at some point.

Today, I moved the sheep to a slightly different area. The neighbor wanted to cut the high-growing weed with a brush cutter. We removed the net so that he could do what he wanted. I returned the net when he was done, although at a slightly new area with new fresh grass.

In the evening, I worked on the microphone project. Not that much programming, though, because I had decided to publish the project on GitHub. It has the name FFTMonitor. I created the account around 2016 but never did anything with it. Now, that is going to change. The reason for this is that I spent so much time getting this thing working, and if anyone would like to get started, I would like them to get a better start than I had.

Sunday 1 October

This morning, we had a slow start. I changed the readme of the FFTMonitor project and sent an email to the author of the original project. I will see if he appreciates the email.

Today, we decided to take a bike tour of the neighborhood, especially the countryside.

	We found a curled parsley field.
	From close, it looked like a rainforest.
	Here is the view of a canal. Here is a panorama.
	Here is the entrance to the area.
	Found a butterfly resting.

It was a lovely bike tour. We biked 18 km. DW suggested we head home halfway; that was good because my bottom was pretty tender when we came home. It was such lovely weather!

In the afternoon, we went to friends who had got their new chickens. They also set up a new chicken coop. We brought them a couple of roof tiles. It was not entirely clear what the purpose of the roof tiles was, but it was intended for the chicken. Now, we have a couple of fewer roof tiles, which are also suitable for decluttering.

The rest of the Sunday, we relaxed. It was a lovely weekend! This week's main achievement must be that I finished the outdoor decluttering project. We got ourselves a vacuum cleaning robot. I had a breakthrough regarding my microphone project, which was nice.