What's going on
I'm on hiatus from the Big Move. At my boyfriend's, a few hours away from home. Or, my soon to be not-home. I'm using up Kanopy credits, watching short films {Friend of Dorothy & now the donkey astronomers in Perfectly A Strangeness}. Yesterday I barely moved at all, today I'll shower* & go out. *For the first time in a long while, the showers don't work at my apartment so I sponge bathe there 🙃

I texted my realtor with an update & was reminded that less contact is best.

I document my life feelings, for past & future me if for no one else. I desire to make changes that no one I know has made. So how can I relate to others? That continues to be my hardest task. I don't know what is possible but the potential exists that I achieve a life I like from the radical change that I am pursuing. For now it's one moment at a time, with vague future ideas. I protect myself & my dreams by limiting my intake. Arrogance or no, I trust my future to inner me & not to others. No matter what at least it's mine.

The hope is that I can get to a place where I feel comfortable breathing deeply. From there I want to produce work that extends beyond this current moment of stress. All I have to say currently concerns pain & moving & alienation. I look forward to sharing wonder & joy & love again. There will continue to be pragmatic & bureaucratic obstacles for years to come if not forever, but I know that the good of breathing freely vastly outweighs the minor hassles (at least so far & hopefully for good).

I have been living as a loner but I also have hope that my transformative journey will open new opportunities for caring relationships. New place = new attitude & a change of culture. Finally, I'm an artist. By choosing that title I declare my priorities. Artists before me have chosen similar paths that I take some comfort in. What I'm doing makes sense.

#moverR  #Romex

Every day I reserve some time for dreaming of a new life. Today I'm very happy to have found a site that lists numerous special events & festivals throughout Mexico, by month:

https://www.zonaturistica.com/eventos/2026/mayo

@Romex

#mexico #romex

Using Homebrew Coils to Measure Mains Current, and Taking the Circuit Breaker Challenge

Like many hackers, [Matthias Wandel] has a penchant for measuring the world around him, and quantifying the goings-on in his home is a bit of a hobby. And so when it came time to sense the current flowing in the wires of his house, he did what any of us would do: he built his own current sensing system.

What's that you say? Any sane hacker would buy something like a Kill-a-Watt meter, or even perhaps use commercially available current transformers? Perhaps, but then one wouldn't exactly be hacking, would one? [Matthias] opted to roll his own sensors for quite practical reasons: commercial meters don't quite have the response time to catch the start-up spikes he was interested in seeing, and clamp-on current transformers require splitting the jacket on the nonmetallic cabling used in most residential wiring -- doing so tends to run afoul of building codes. So his sensors were simply coils of wire shaped to fit the outside of the NM cable, with a bit of filtering to provide a cleaner signal in the high-noise environment of a lot of switch-mode power supplies.

Fed through an ADC board into a Raspberry Pi, [Matthias]' sensor system did a surprisingly good job of catching the start-up surge of some tools around the shop. That led to the entertaining "Circuit Breaker Challenge" part of the video below, wherein we learn just what it really takes to pop the breaker on a 15-Amp branch circuit. Spoiler alert: it's a lot.

Speaking of staying safe with mains current, we've covered a little bit about how circuit protection works before. If you need a deeper dive into circuit breakers, we've got that too.

Thanks to tip-line stalwart [Baldpower] for the tip.

#mischacks #circuitbreaker #coil #current #induction #mains #nonmetallic #residential #romex #transformer #winding #wiring