Good evening! Damp and kind of cloudy but not too wet, around 42 degrees in Westerlo, NY. ☔ Breezy, 16 mph breeze from the west-northwest 🌬 . Kind of cold and nasty this evening at my parents house. The skies will clear tomorrow around 8 pm. It wouldn’t have been a bad afternoon for fishing but I got working on cleaning and various projects around the man-cave at home. 🧹 🍽 Tub was getting kind of clogged up with mildew, so that needed a good scrub.

Tonight will rain showers likely before 5am, then rain and snow showers likely. Cloudy ☔ , with a low of 38 degrees at 4am. Four degrees below normal. West wind around 13 mph. Chance of precipitation is 60%. New snow accumulation of less than a half inch possible. Too warm to stick on the roads. After all, only two days to May. In 2017, we had cloudy skies, clearing in the early hours of the next day. It got down to 42 degrees. The record low of 25 occurred back in 1874.

The sun will set at 7:53 pm with dusk around 8:24 pm, which is one minute and 8 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At sunset, look for rain ☁ and 44 degrees. There will be a west-northwest breeze at 14 mph. Today will have 14 hours and 2 minutes of daytime, an increase of 2 minutes and 32 seconds over yesterday.

Tomorrow will rain and snow showers likely before 7am, then a chance of rain showers. Cloudy ☔ , with a high of 52 degrees at 3pm. 12 degrees below normal. Northwest wind around 11 mph. Chance of precipitation is 60%. New snow accumulation of less than a half inch possible. A year ago, we had cloudy skies. The high last year was 53 degrees. The record high of 86 was set in 1903. There was a dusting of snow in 2008.❄

Yesterday was the Save the Pine Bush hike. It was a nice hike, after which we went over to Yonder Farms for lunch and their wonderful cookies🍪 (me the health nut should emphasize), and then I went for another longer hike in the Albany Pine Bush by myself. Got kind of sticky by mid-afternoon🌲 — while the dew point was low, the air was kind of stagnant and I was over-dressed as we had a first blast of summer weather. Well, at least spring weather. Nice but there was a lot of people on the trails,👪 which was less nice for the hiking alone part.

Spent too much time last night soldering together wires and modules to build a big, 3 foot long by 2 inch high display using MAX7219 display modules. 💻It’s nice, now I know the time from bed. Along with many quotes and savings. Fun stuff. Still working out some of the bugs in the code and adjusting things, but things are getting there. I had to add some capacitors (two 480 picofarad ones) to smooth the voltage and use a bigger USB power supply, as with 6 of the MAX7219 4-1 modules chained together (a total of 24 modules or 35-40 character display easily read across the room), they use upwards of 0.7 amp at 5 volts. Which isn’t a big deal with most cellphone chargers,⚡ but the one I tried it out initially was a cheapily one that started to drop voltage at as little as 1/2 amp.

Over all, it uses about 3-4 watts of power at maximum brightness, although in the evening it drops down to 2 watts when dimmer and less then a watt at night when it shut off. Maybe uses a kilowatt hour a month. 🔌But I like it and I think I can afford an extra 2 cents a day to operate it. I will certainly unplug the unit when I’m gone on trips and traveling for work. I plan eventually to build a second version of this large display sign, so I can use it for other projects. Maybe not in my bedroom but it might be fun at work, especially when I’m out in the field for directing people to sign in, etc. I can draw any message I want on it, although I have to be careful how many of the 1,536 LEDs I light at once, because the amperage can really add up with lots of things lit up.🔦 I really like the larger version of the sign.

Updating to Quantum GIS 3.02 fixed a bug that is allowing me to export KML and make some interactive maps.👾 For a while a lot of my shapefiles were putting out invalid geometery errors which kept me from simplifying the shapefiles to convert them into KML/Google Maps format. 🗺But hopefully now I’ll be able to make up more interesting Google Maps for your enjoyment.

Yesterday I was going to go down to the library📚 and upload a bunch of stuff on the blog, but that did not happen because it started to rain and thunder,⛈ and I ended up working on a lot of soldering and writing code last night for the big version of my sign. I haven’t been to the library in a few weeks, although I might end up going down there if we have another cold night — but at this point — I’ll probably just walk down to the park when I need to use the internet.🍥

As previously noted, there are 2 weeks until Mothers Day 👩‍ when the sun will be setting at 8:09 pm with dusk at 8:41 pm. On that day in 2017, we had rain, mist, cloudy skies and temperatures between 55 and 47 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 69 degrees. We hit a record high of 86 back in 2004.