Friday, July 1, 2022

RAIN! Glorious RAIN!! And Happy Independance Day!

 

 


 Ahhhhh....so nice to smell it coming in, feel the temperature drop and the wind pick up.....and then it comes. Gently at first, and then it turns into the first really good downpour of the year. By the time it turned back into a nice, steady drizzle to when it stopped (for now?) was almost an hour. I'd give you a reading from my weather station, but it hasn't recorded any rainfall! The rain measurement consists of two modes, individual increments, and a "Storm Mode", which sees it raining, decides "Oh, this is a storm", and records the rainfall for a "Storm Event", which means it doesn't end that mode until it hasn't detected any rain for a (user adjustable) time. Since they're stored in separate registers, I'm thinking my software is only reading the "Storm Event" register, and reporting it. Something I have to look into when I rebuild the little server PC and install a fresh load of the latest release of Kubuntu, a Debian-based distribution of "The Linux Operating System". The little server has been chugging along for 272 days without a reboot or update. I can't update it because I picked a version of Kubuntu that did not have Long term Support, and I missed the window to upgrade it to a newer version. It could be updated, but it would be far too much work. I'll grab all the weather data off it before I wipe it.

Tomorrow (Saturday) is the city's fireworks display, so The Kids and both Little Guys will be over, as we have an "open space" area in this neighborhood that provides a very good view. He's been getting do good at driving my little R/C truck, that I went out and got another one so we could chase each other around the backyard.

Not quite the "International Race of Champions", but I was getting tired of him waxing my tail when he had the truck, and I had one of his other "Radio Controlled" (barely) toys. Hey, equal equipment for all! These are excellent beginner's R/C models as they have full proportional steering and throttle, compared to the "Bang-Bang" controllers his other vehicles have.

And we'll be flying the flag this weekend in remembrance of a day long ago, in a country far, far away...


UPDATE.......

The rain collection bucket had some trash in it, blocking the entrance to the tipper bucket inside the housing. It had a whole lotta water in it, and after I cleared the hole, it indicated .35" of rain, so yep, we got some rain!


12 comments:

  1. Happy 4th!

    Our monsoons have been getting us a little rainfall over the past few days, so we're getting a nice little soak. Still arid here, but better with the storms.

    We had an electrical glitch which took out the inverter in the RV but we had our RV mobile service come over and fix it, so all is OK for now.

    Forecast is for dry over the weekend and holiday, so we will be NOT lighting off any fireworks.

    Hope the "Li'l Guys" have fun.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. With all the thunderstorms and lightning we've been getting, I've had the antennas disconnected a lot lately. Gotta get those ground rods installed! Sure is good to get the rain!

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  2. The best part of this summer is seeing water clouds instead of smoke from forest and range fires.

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    Replies
    1. Hadn't thought about that, but you are 100% correct! I keep hearing the various fire departments running around chasing smoke reports, and lightning strike reports. Had a few small fires they stomped out very quickly, but nothing big so far, Thank God!

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  3. Just got some decent rain here after a couple of weeks of hot and dry. My garden will perk up nicely.

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  4. I've never tried Kubuntu, but I have used Linux Mint for years. Bleep Bill Gates.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I started with Red Hat back in 1995, and then went with SuSE for many years. Tried all the BSD variants and Gentoo, and then went with Kubuntu after we moved here. I couldn't get OpenSUSE to run on any of my PC's, so just chucked it.

      Delete
  5. We're hot, dry, and in a burn ban... sigh

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  6. I refer to July 4th as Independence Day and as "Bugger off, King George III Day". I was married to a British subject a few decades ago and it was a joke between us.

    I run Ubuntu on my ham shack computer and Mint 19.02 (32 bit) on a 15 year old Dell. I run my blog on my ham shack computer as an experiment plus some Windows amateur radio programs with WINE.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Debian Ham is also recommended, The only thing I run with WINE is the "Antenna Scope" program for my Rig Expert AA-600 analyzer.

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Keep it civil, please....

Gloomy, Gritty, Grey Day

 At 1700 local it's as described in the headline; 30*F, 88% RH, completely overcast, snowing like crazy (small flakes, but lots of them)...