Well, the BMP180 modules showed up!Looking intact and ready to rock! I had attempted to contact the seller, because I had received no confirmation or tracking number or anything, and it was at the later end of the expected delivery time. All I had was the Paypal confirmation of payment, which is of little reassurance. I suppose if they show up it’s not all that important to communicate…. Anyways, 2 BMP180 modules!

Cailyn also went and picked up the rest of the stuff that hadn’t shipped to the house.

• 2 – 8GB Class 10 SD cards @ 11.90$ each
• 1 Value pack of 1uF – 470UF capacitors @ 11.90$
• 1 Raspberry Pi case @ 16.99$
• 1 Multi pack of diffused LED with resistors @ 8.99$
• 1 12-pack of 6x6x6mm tactile switches @ 8.99$

A week and a half out from the course start date, good to have everything in order and ready to go. My brother gave us an old desk of his that we’ll likely turn into our electronics work table, so we’ll have some space dedicated to stuff like this. Definitely excited to see it all start.

The hard drive I keep all of my media on has started to show signs of nearing it’s end of life. Read/write speeds dropping, sounds that are not “whiiiiiiiiirrrrrrr” coming from it, all the standard stuff. That means I have to back it all up. That means a new hard drive, which I’m okay with because they’re relatively cheap these days. Wound up with a 3TB Seagate Expansion Drive, which seems to fit the bill quite handily. The thing I’m not so okay with is file systems. Full disclosure – I don’t really know much about them, and I don’t really care to, but if I were to sum up my opinion it would be this: they suck. I don’t really understand why they’re such a pain. Using various distributions of Linux, OSX, and Windows 7 and 8.1, you would think there was an easy solution. As I list those though, I can see that maybe it’s not ridiculous that there isn’t something trivial, but still. NTFS, FAT32, exFAT… Everything is a bit of a pain. FAT32 certainly has OS support behind it, of course if you have any HD movies or disk images and it’s 4GB file size limit removes it from the equation pretty quickly. The internet seems to be chock full of people who have gotten NTFS disks reading and writing away to/from OSX with relative ease, and for them it seems to be an easy solution. For myself, it just doesn’t quite work. Sometimes it does, sometimes its finicky, and sometimes it doesn’t. Likely I’m just doing it wrong, but there’s something that rubs me the wrong way of having to coerce the machine to write to an NTFS drive that it just read from, so it’s difficult to make a sincere effort when it doesn’t work immediately.

I ended up going with exFAT, using fuse-exfat in Ubuntu, and it works out of the box in OSX and on Windows systems. The fact that Microsoft *owns* it is a bit discouraging, as is the fact that it’s apparently not finalized, but I don’t know the ramifications of that and I don’t really know of a usable alternative. Can’t win. Of course it doesn’t help that shortly after removing all of the files from my failing hard drive, I removed the new drive from the computer without properly ejecting it. I’ve done this hundreds of times with various forms of media and various computers, but this time it did not go so well. I have a cursory understanding of write-caching and processes I’m not aware of interacting with the drive, but once again it seems like the software should be sophisticated enough to not die. From some quick reading it looks like Windows disables write caching on drives it deems “removable”, although that’s not a well defined term in the Windows context, but OSX does not. With no understanding of file systems, it *seems* like the files being accessed would be corrupted, and perhaps the space allocated for them, but one would think the system as a whole would be able to handle this. OSX certainly could not, and deemed the drive irreparable, read-only, and on it’s way down.

At least I got some good practice backing up content? I see a NAS in my not too distant future…

In the previous post, I discovered a reasonable way to obtain aerial imagery, but it wasn’t supremely useful for sizing up properties (literally and figuratively). Houses would often list the parcel size (mostly a ballpark), but it was not at all apparent what shape that parcel was. Parcelling property also seems to be a relatively arbitrary process when it comes to the geography, prioritizing ease of surveying and recording over usefulness. For example, we looked at this property:

The listing said it was a certain size, I believe somewhere in the 4 acre range. Our experience was if you showed enough interest, you might be able to get a copy of the survey, or sometimes just a picture of a copy of the survey. Sometimes it was easier to just guess.

I’m not sure why you can’t make shapes on Google Maps directly, but we used DaftLogic’s area tool to try and find a ballpark. Unfortunately you’re left with a different image to play with, but you can still get a rough idea. Being optimists, we had hoped the property would looks something like this – it made sense and it was the right size:

Right? Underneath the very clear line of active agriculture, aligned with the trees to the North, almost exactly the right area. Surely it must be in the ballpark.

Only later, when introduced to GeoOttawa did we find out the actual parcel. Turns out GeoOttawa has an awesome overlay feature. One of those overlays is property parcels, which could not be more perfect. It also revealed the unfortunate truth:

So this property went from pretty compelling to pretty awful. The back section is cut off by a municipal drain, apparently the farmer to the North is using part of the property, and there is a ditch cutting the property in two – generally not a great parcel. Lesson being, going in armed with the actual property parcel can quickly eliminate duds.

Long story short, we were able to get the actual property parcel for our land!