Good morning! What day is it? Hump Day, of course. Four weeks to Boxing Day 🥊. Cloudy and damp, around 36 degrees in Colonie. There is a west-northwest breeze at 14 mph. 🍃 with gusts up to 24 mph 💨💨💨. Pretty much snow free except for some piles around. Temperatures will drop below freezing at tomorrow around 9 pm. ☃️

Big Red has been dropped off for his state inspection. It sure is easy to drop him off in Colonie and take the bus downtown from there. Hopefully he will pass with flying colors and I won’t have to worry about it for another year. I don’t plan to drive much this winter and it’s rare that I see an inspection check as I drive so little and mostly in remote country but it’s good to have things looked over. 🚗Parking and driving at Denooyer is the biggest pain of them all though but getting there isn’t too bad although there was a bit of traffic on Interstate 90 heading west bound.

Today will be scattered rain and snow showers before 11am, then scattered rain showers between 11am and 1pm, then a slight chance of rain and snow showers after 1pm. Cloudy 🌧, with a high of 38 degrees at 12pm. Five degrees below normal, which is similiar to a typical day around December 8th. West wind 14 to 17 mph, with gusts as high as 31 mph. Chance of precipitation is 40%. Total daytime snow accumulation of less than a half inch possible. A year ago, we had mostly cloudy skies. The high last year was 45 degrees. The record high of 68 was set in 1990. 6 inches of snow fell back in 1985.❄

The sun will set at 4:23 pm with dusk around 4:55 pm, which is 26 seconds earlier than yesterday. 🌇 At sunset, look for rain 🌧 and snow 🌨 and temperatures around 37 degrees. Breezy, 17 mph breeze ⛅ from the west-northwest with gusts up to 31mph. Today will have 9 hours and 20 minutes of daytime, a decrease of one minute and 32 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will have a slight chance of rain and snow showers before 9pm. Mostly cloudy 🌧, with a low of 32 degrees at 3am. Four degrees above normal, which is similiar to a typical night around November 16th. Northwest wind 14 to 16 mph, with gusts as high as 29 mph. Chance of precipitation is 20%. In 2017, we had mostly cloudy skies. It got down to 28 degrees. The record low of 3 occurred back in 1875.

Heading downtown I was noticing how trashy Colonie along Central Avenue has gotten lately. I guess for a long time it’s been pretty ghettoized but with the gray skies on this winter morning it looked particularly decrepit. I guess that’s to be expected in our throw away society – buildings and neighborhoods are built cheaply than are left to rot.

Assuming the inspection goes well, I am thinking of stopping at Staples and picking up their 7 port USB 3.0 powered hub. I have an unpowered four port hub at home but it is not enough for the number of USB things I have and I worry about burning out the power supply on my computer power like I think I might have done with my last laptop.

The Bluetooth controlled dimmer over my bed works well, now I want to work on building a better software app on my phone for it. 💻It would be cool if it turned on automatically as soon as my phone paired with it and off when it lost connection. Maybe I’d also like to tie it in with the alarm clock app on my phone. 📱One concern I have with it is that I did notice the Arduino is running a bit warm from the linear voltage regulator stepping down the 12 volts to 5 VDC but I’m not going to build an external regulator or voltage divider until I have actual problems. The indicator power light on the arduino is a bit annoying too, I’m going to see if I can turn it off in software, short it out, or paint or marker over it.

Looking ahead, there are 4 weeks until Boxing Day 🥊 when the sun will be setting at 4:28 pm with dusk at 5:00 pm. On that day in 2017, we had snow, partly cloudy skies and temperatures between 22 and 8 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 33 degrees. We hit a record high of 59 back in 1895.