17 January 2015
Arduino boards have come down in price, but you can make your own for about $10. It’s pretty simple, and it’s a good way to learn how an Arduino board works.
archive
1 November 2020
Even so late in the season, Currahee Mountain still has flowers, although most of the fall within a single genus of asters, Symphyotrichum. Many of the flowers are smaller, and there are fewer of them, so they aren’t as noticeable as the explosions of color in May and September. Even so, a few patches of blue asters are quite striking.
11 October 2020
On our walk this morning, Tish noticed a particularly unappetizing mushroom, and we both commented that it looked like entrails. It’s one of the Milkcaps, called the Silver-Blue Milky, or Lactarius paradoxus.
From CocoaPods to the Swift Package Manager
4 October 2020
For several of my iOS apps that needed Dropbox capabilities, I’ve used CocoaPods to let me use the SwiftyDropbox framework. CocoaPods offered a great way to incorporate external frameworks, but I wasn’t a big fan. Updates were done by the command-line, and every new Swift release made the whole thing seem fragile. When I saw that SwiftyDropbox was now available in the Swift Package Manager, I knew it was time to switch.
27 September 2020
Just as in Athens, the trail up Currahee Mountain is covered with yellow flowers. What surprised me, though, was the amazing diversity, as well as the number of less obvious flowers that are not white.
20 September 2020
September is the month of tall plants covered with yellow flowers. There’s also a few that are less common, less obvious, and take a little searching. These are the flowers of September.
13 September 2020
Brown Snakes (Storeria dekayi) are a very common snake in this part of Georgia, but often go unnoticed because they spend much of their time under the leaf litter. I saw this one on our street one morning in late May.
12 September 2020
Why yes, it is the middle of September. What better time to tell you what flowers you were looking at a month ago, in August? Both the diversity and especially the abundance of flowers was way down in August, maybe because it had been so dry. Here are the new flowers of August.
Swift and Raspberry Pi — an update
7 September 2020
Several years ago, I wrote a series of posts on running Swift on a Raspberry Pi and using it to interact with sensors. Several changes have been made to Swift and it’s time to bring that work up to date.
30 August 2020
After a rainy week following a hot and dry summer, fungi have exploded in our forests. On a hike in the UGA Botanical Gardens this week, I’ve never seen so many or so many types before. Here are some photographs of those, plus some from our yard, and some from Currahee Mountain.
29 August 2020
Timber Rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus) are widespread and common in the eastern United States, but I’ve rarely seen one (maybe twice before in 50 years). Seeing one is a real treat, especially when it as beautiful and large as this one from Currahee Mountain.
1 August 2020
Summer brings its own flowers, many who have been greening up since winter. A few earlier bloomers are still going as well, including Mock Strawberry, Cat’s Ear, White Clover, Carolina Horsenettle, Smooth Spiderwort, and Rough Daisy Fleabane. Here are the new flowers of July.
31 July 2020
Some hiking in the UGA Botanical Gardens a couple of weeks ago revealed several new fungi, a few of which I cannot identify.
28 June 2020
Learning fungi seems daunting, but even so, it’s hard not to notice some of the more obvious ones. Here are a few from this spring. Some are from our neighborhood, and many are from the UGA Botanical Gardens. Luckily, Mary Woehrel and William Light have written a great book specifically on the fungi of the area, Mushrooms of the Georgia Piedmont & Southern Appalachians.
23 June 2020
Even though the abundance and diversity of flowers have really tailed off from April and May, some new flowers have appeared. These are the flowers of June in Athens.
21 June 2020
I returned to Currahee Mountain yesterday to figure out yellow flowers. I also found a few new ones.
13 June 2020
A hike to the top of Currahee Mountain last Sunday surprised me with an extraordinary diversity of flowers. The flowers showed well the relationship between soils developed on felsic versus mafic rock, as well as the difference in flowers between forests and more sunlit areas.
7 June 2020
My adventures today started and ended with unusual dragonflies: a Fawn Darner and a Gray Petaltail.
6 June 2020
All spring, I’ve noticed brown lumpy spheres about the size of a golfball, and figured they were a puffball, a type of fungus. They’re not; they’re much more interesting.
28 May 2020
We have several types of shrubs, both native and introduced. This list is likely to grow, as I am certain I have only scratched the surface of what is around.
Trees of Athens: Simple Toothed Leaves
27 May 2020
We have at least ten common local trees with simple toothed leaves, and they can be difficult to tell apart. For many of these, the bark is often the best clue for identification.
Trees of Athens: Simple Entire Leaves
26 May 2020
We have five common local trees with simple, non-palmate leaves that have smooth (non-toothed) margins: Black Tupelo, Flowering Dogwood, Osage Orange, Southern Magnolia, plus the non-native and highly invasive Chinese Privet. All of their leaves are distinctive.
Trees of Athens: Palmate Leaves
25 May 2020
The leaves of all of these trees have veins that radiate from the base of the leaf. In the Athens area, these include four maples (Red, Florida, Chalk, and Boxelder), the Sweetgum, American Sycamore, Tuliptree, Sassafras, Eastern Redbud, and the non-native Royal Paulownia.
24 May 2020
Oaks are abundant and diverse in our neighborhood. Although they are generally divided into two broad groups, the white-oak group and the red-oak group, I divide them here into oaks that have leaves with rounded lobes and those with pointed lobes.
Trees of Athens: Compound Leaves
23 May 2020
All of these trees have compound leaves—multiple leaflets as part of a single leaf. There are those that have relatively few leaflets, the hickories and the ashes, and then there are the hypercompound trees that have zillions of leaflets. There’s also the Winged Sumac, which can’t decide if it is a shrub or a tree.
22 May 2020
April’s flowers have given way to a largely different set of flowers. Rural roadsides in Georgia are spectacular this time of year.
17 May 2020
This little guy showed up in our lawn while I was mowing today. It’s a hatchling Box Turtle.
16 May 2020
We have four common native species of conifers in the Athens area. Three are pines (Loblolly, Shortleaf, and Virginia), plus the Eastern Redcedar, all of which are evergreen.
9 May 2020
Last summer, I started to learn the trees of our neighborhood and Athens in general. I’m now able to start writing my notes on how I learned to identify them.
5 May 2020
Copperheads are common snakes in the southeastern United States, but it is not often you get a good of a view as this one.
2 May 2020
Ferns are common in our neighborhood, but not very diverse. Of the five species, only one is particularly common and widespread.
26 April 2020
Bright blue skies and comfy temperatures make it a perfect time for a paddle down the North Oconee.
20 April 2020
With spending more of my walking time in the neighborhood, I’ve noticed how many spring wildflowers we have nearby.
19 April 2020
Odd-looking wooden spikes began showing up on our sidewalk. The mystery was soon solved.
18 April 2020
Although late summer and fall is usually the bonanza time for caterpillars here in the Piedmont, I’ve seen many caterpillars the past two weeks. Both are species of tent caterpillars.
17 April 2020
After over twenty years in this house, I am still finding new animals. Today it was a Little Brown Skink (Scincella lateralis).
2 April 2020
There’s deleting Zoom, and then there’s really deleting Zoom. Here’s how to really scrub away all traces of it.
27 March 2020
The day after the rains was a great one for flowers, including a couple of new ones.
26 March 2020
Many of the recent articles on COVID-19 talk about the doubling time of the number of cases, but I wanted to think about it in terms of order of magnitude. The conversion is straightforward.
25 March 2020
A rainy-day hike in the UGA State Botanical Garden showed that most of the flowers were closed up, but there was one nice new one: a trillium.
21 March 2020
On a recent CoreData app I was building, I subclassed my NSManagedObject, but ran into a couple of snags. Here’s what happened, how I fixed it, and how I could have avoided them to begin with.
20 March 2020
A hike in the UGA State Botanical Gardens showed sure signs of springs: lots of wildflowers, and a surprise.
19 March 2020
Right now, it can seem like the wheels are flying off the cart. But one of my favorite teachers of our children, Maggie Hunter at Athens Montessori School, offers the best advice I’ve seen.
22 December 2017
Completion closures in Swift are incredibly useful: they let you execute some code after some computationally long task is completed, often a task that takes an indeterminate amount of time to complete.
Installing an iOS archive from Xcode 9
12 October 2017
Sometimes, you need to install an older version of an iOS app you’ve developed so that you can test that migration is handled properly when a user updates your app. Apple makes this an easy two-step process in Xcode 9.
22 August 2017
Yesterday’s total solar eclipse was spectacular, especially along the line of maximum totality near Clemson, South Carolina, where we watched it. I used my Arduino temperature and light logger to record the progression of the eclipse.
Adding light to the temperature logger
20 August 2017
During tomorrow’s eclipse, air temperature is supposed to drop, so what’s a scientist supposed to do? Get some data, of course! I’ll modify my Arduino temperature logger so that I can log the light level and the temperature simultaneously.
Taking the unmanned aircraft general exam
31 July 2017
I recently took the FAA’s Unmanned Aircraft General exam so that I could get my Remote Pilot Certificate. The FAA gives good guidance on what to study for the exam, but it’s a large chunk of material. The material is not difficult, but it helps to approach it with a plan, and that’s what I’ll describe.
Becoming a developer and being a student
17 June 2017
About nine years ago, I formed Hunt Mountain Software and started to become a software developer, not just a programmer. One of the surprises of doing this is that it has helped me to better understand the graduate students that I advise in my day job as a professor of geology, and what they face.
14 May 2017
I’ve birded for many years, and one of my goals this summer is to learn to bird by ear. After starting the Cornell Lab of Ornithology course on How to Identify Bird Songs, I’ve become sold on sonograms, pictorial representations of bird songs that show the frequency of the song through time. They’re easy to make with a cell phone and R, and that’s what I’ll show here.
Swift and the Internet of Things
11 May 2017
This week, I presented a talk at CocoaHeads Atlanta on Swift and the Internet of Things. It’s based on my explorations of Swift and Raspberry Pi this past month.
Swift Package Manager on Raspberry Pi
5 May 2017
The Swift Package Manager offers an easy way to add packages to your Raspberry Pi Swift projects. In this post, I’ll use it to flash an LED.
Taking the temperature with Swift and Raspberry Pi
28 April 2017
I’ve used Swift to blink an LED on the Raspberry Pi, now it is time to do something new with the Pi’s GPIO pins. Today, I take the temperature.
SSH into a Headless Raspberry Pi
21 April 2017
In my latest explorations of the Raspberry Pi, my goal is to use its GPIO pins as a sensor and report the results on a web page, combining the capabilities of the Pi’s. In this post, I set up my Pi to run headless, that is, without a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. To do that, I’ll need to access it through secure shell.
16 April 2017
Since being open-sourced by Apple, Swift has been ported to a a variety of platforms, which is good news not only for code reuse and writing in a consistent language, but also because Swift has many good features. I like writing in Swift, in part because it forces me to think critically about what each method returns.
16 January 2017
Years ago, many scientists I knew used three Mac apps to plot their data, CricketGraph, KaleidaGraph, and DeltaGraph. Although some of these are still available, some after checkered histories of availability, most scientists I know have moved on to other options, especially R. These apps had proprietary binary data formats for storing the data, the scientist’s data. You were locked in...
24 July 2016
While building a new Arduino project on OS X El Capitan (10.11), I wasn’t able to connect using a serial port. Getting the serial port as an option was possible with some temporary changes to Apple’s System Integrity Protection.
24 April 2016
I have one observation about Dave that I’d to share with you. We don’t become rich by doing paleontology; we do it because it fascinates us. Because of that, …
7 September 2015
The end of summer has brought a profusion of caterpillars to our yard, and many of them look like something out of Dr. Seuss.
8 August 2015
I went out for a short hike this morning with my 11-year-old son. One of our favorite nearby hikes is the orange trail at the State Botanical Gardens here in Athens. One of the reasons it’s a favorite is the stream and the chance to explore for critters.
22 February 2015
Like Hepburn and Bogart, Arduino and R are made for each other. The only trick is getting the two to talk. I came across a recent post on Mages’ blog with that trick. With it, I made R read temperature data from the Arduino and plot it in real time.
17 January 2015
Arduino boards have come down in price, but you can make your own for about $10. It’s pretty simple, and it’s a good way to learn how an Arduino board works.
11 January 2015
What I’ve always admired about Apple is their emphasis on creativity. Inspired by their post Start Something New a couple of weeks ago, I’ve started exploring with my camera.
31 December 2014
Dave Verwer’s most recent issue of iOS Dev Weekly got me thinking about the tools I use in development. Like Dave, I thought this would be a good time to review which are the most helpful to me.
6 September 2014
In updating one of my apps (Coordinates) to using storyboards instead of .xib files, I took the opportunity to rethink how the app worked as a whole..
Arduino: taking the weather monitor online
13 January 2013
The weather monitor I made has been useful for keeping an eye on conditions in our basement, which can feel a bit damp at times. It would be more useful to see this data from anywhere. Luckily, its easy to turn an Arduino into a web server. As a side benefit, I can also have the Arduino log the data.
2 November 2012
I’ve graduated from temperature to other environmental data: humidity and pressure. For this installment, I’ll show a slightly more involved circuit using two excellent sensors from. I’ll also use a two-line LCD display to show the current readings.
16 September 2012
After building the Arduino temperature logger, I can get to the real question: how can I keep my coffee warmer for longer? After a good bit of experimentation, the answer was intuitive and simple: put a lid on your mug.
9 September 2012
This weekend’s fun is a temperature logger. What I am curious about is how quickly my coffee cools off and what I can do to slow that down. More on that next time; for now, I need to build something that can measure temperature in liquids and that can record that temperature so I can plot it.
Arduino: motion-triggered camera
1 September 2012
For a few months now, I’ve been learning some electronics through, the open-source microcontroller. I have a few older projects that I’ll post soon, but this one is my latest: using Arduino to trigger my Nikon D80 with passive infrared motion-detection sensor.
21 April 2012
This little fellow has been hanging out near our garage the past few days. To get an idea of just how little he is, that’s my eight-year-old son’s finger next to it.
7 April 2012
On the last episode (#71) of Build and Analyze, Marco Arment and Dan Benjamin discussed whether college was necessary. Marco fielded a listener’s question about whether the choice of a college mattered for a career, and he went on to the larger question of whether one should go to college at all, especially for someone interested in programming and development. I agree with most of what Marco and Dan said, but there is another way to think about the whole question.
Academia and App Store Reviews
19 March 2011
I’d been thinking about how App Store reviews follow an academic approach for several months, and a pair of tweets by Daniel Jalkut yesterday spurred me to finish it.
A Simpler Approach to Subversion and Xcode
24 February 2011
I’m no expert on Subversion, but I have learned over time how to at least not wrestle with it quite as much.
10 May 2010
I’ve had my 3G iPad for about a week now, and it’s becoming clear to me how I’ll use this device.
Scientists and User Interfaces
16 October 2009
Scientists are by nature do-it-yourselfers. Whether in the field or the lab, they solve problems for which there is often no ready-made fix. They build new equipment, develop novel algorithms, and find fresh solutions.
22 August 2009
There is a great set of tools for development on OS X and the iPhone. Many of my favorites are by small developers. I want to give all of these tools a shout-out for making things so much easier.
17 June 2009
Over the years, various friends have made short pithy comments that have stuck with me. Here’s some of their wisdom, including one of my own nuggets.
16 February 2009
It seems like every day raises new reasons to be concerned about Facebook and the security of your personal information. Just two weeks ago, I was about to send out my reply to “25 things you may not know about me”. Fortunately, I had the good sense to balk. My list contained 25 personal facts, but certainly no deep, dark secrets. Even so, they were 25 things I wouldn’t mind sharing with good friends and family, but with long-distant acquaintances and former students? I don’t think so.
10 February 2009
Although ssh is far more secure than telnet, it is also subject to exploits. Even so, it can be made more secure than it is in it’s default distribution. Here’s what I do to make ssh for Mac OS X less subject to being hacked. Much of this is based on an article originally published at oreilly.com. The instructions are involved, but you’ll just need to set this up once and then you’ll be running secured.
3 December 2008
I released Diversity for beta testing today. This is huge for me - this was the first big application I planned after the Cocoa Bootcamp at the Big Nerd Ranch. I had nothing but praise for Aaron Hillegass’ course after I took it, and the more I program in Cocoa, the more I think Aaron is an extraordinarily gifted teacher.
1 December 2008
Most of the programs I distribute at the UGA Stratigraphy Lab are simple tools for doing some calculation that cannot be done easily in a spreadsheet. All of the programs are tools that I developed for my own research problems and that I thought might be useful for a larger audience. Some turned about to be more useful than others (and some I’m sure have never been used by anyone but me!). What’s common to all of them is that they’re tools, not applications. The data is assumed to be in some text file, in some specific format, often in some specific location with some specific file name. The program reads that file, does some calculations, and churns out another text file with the results, with some specific ... you get the picture. If the input file isn’t in the right place, or doesn’t have the right name, or doesn’t have the right format, the program fails. Usually, the user has no idea what happened and they have to email me.
20 November 2008
About a year ago, I realized it was time for new challenges. I’m a professor in geology and I study the effects of climate and sea-level change on ancient marine ecosystems (but that’s a different story). As part of my research, I’ve written programs for scientific analyses and have distributed some of them on my university website. I’ve programmed for over twenty years, writing some BASIC, FORTRAN, Hypercard, and then I switched to C about 15 years ago. The software I released was written for Mac OS 7-9, and I made the switch to Carbon once it came out. Although I made a couple of half-hearted attempts at learning Cocoa, it seemed that the demands on my time never allowed me to really take it on. I’d read about Aaron Hillegass’ highly regarded Cocoa Bootcamp, but finances always seemed a barrier.