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I write, therefore I am

With this variation on a famous statement by the philosopher Descartes, I would like to express that the act of writing about what happens in my life is important to me.

Thursday, May 19, 2022

Arnhem

Conny and I went to Arnhem. We first went to Museum Arnhem. From the exhibition consume by I found the following works interesting: From the exhibition from left to right, I liked the following works: From the exhibition open, I liked the following works: From the sculpture exhibition in the park of the museu, I liked the following works:

After the visit to the museum we walked along the Roemondsplein (square) were the environmental artwork De Blause Golven (The Blue Waves) by Peter Struycken can still be seen in its original state. At the border of the square there is a large sign about the reorganization of the square. This will also involve changing the art work by changing the ratio between the width of the blue and white stripes.

We spend some time in the bookshop De Colofon. At 14:54, I bought the book heo van Doesburg: oeuvre catalogus written by Theo van Doesburg, Els Hoek, Marleen Blokhuis, Centraal Museum, and Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, edited by Els Hoek, illustrations by Theo van Doesburg, written in Dutch and published by Centraal Museum in 2000, ISBN:9789068682557, for € 28.50.

Shortly after three, we arrived at St Eusebius' Church. We walked around the mostly empty church before we were allowed to go up into the tower. The tower was closed due to some bad weather conditions. (Later we discovered that damage caused by thunderstorms in some eastern parts of the country including Enschede were we live.) We dared to walk onto the two glass observation balconies at a height of 59 and 62 meters and took some pictures from it. There was also an audio tour about the Operation Market Garden and the distrucion of the church.

After our visit to the church, we walked around a bit, and around five arrived at the Indonesian restaurant Rasasari. We both a big rames dish where you can make a selection of ingredients to be used. Conny selected rendang beef, tumis beans, gado gado with yellow rice. I selected ayam semoor chicken, atjar, orah areh with fried rice. The dishes also came with a boiled egg, tempeh, fried coconut and crispy potato. We both liked the typical Indonesian dishes.

Wednesday, May 18, 2022

Fort Pannerden

Conny and I visited Fort Pannerden, a disused military fort. We learned something about the history of the area and the fort. The audio tour was quite interesting. It took us about two hours to walk through the fort and listen to all the stories. Next we walked to the end of the dam where the Bijlands Kanaal splits into Pannerdens Kanaal and the river Waal.

Tuesday, May 17, 2022

Nijmegen

This afternoon, Conny and I went to city of Nijmegen. We first visited the Valkhof Museum where we spend most of out time at the Moving Stories, the riches of the Limes exhibition. It is a mixture of archaeological artifacts and modern art. I liked the following items from the exhibition: From another exhibition about Nijmegen, I would like to mention the following works: From the exhibition Space: Moonshot part two, I would like to mention the following works: (At home, I read that Berend Hendriks and Peter Struycken nitiated the Arnhem school of environmental art. I do see some similarities in the drawings that were exhibited and the Wetmatige bewegingen works by Peter Struycken.

After the visit to the museum, we visited Antiquariaat Van Hoorn (at Houtstraat 35), a bookshop with second hand books. We also paid a short visit to an underground bike shop where the remains of an old defense tower are revealed. It is called the lost tower, because there was no record of a tower at that location. The tower was part of a second ring of stone walls and towers around the city that was believed to have been build but for which never any evidence was found.

We had a dinner at Thibea, were we ordered the following dishes:

Afterwards, we walked through the city to look at the remains of old middle eval and roman walls on the river side of the town. I walked the labyrith at the river side from the inside to the center. While standing at the center, I heard my own voice bouching of the round walls of the labyrith. I cheated on the way back.

Monday, May 16, 2022

Lunar eclipse

Conny and I woke up around a quarter tpt four and went outside to see the lunar eclipse. The weather prediction stated that it would be cloudy, but the sky looked clear. However, when the eclipse increased and the moon went down, it became clear there were clouds at the horizon. Due to the sun getting up at our location, the sky became to light to see the part part of the moon and see the redening that is typical for a blood moon. Below a crop of one of the last good pictures Conny took from the moon. After this, we turned around our chairs to watch the sun rise. Below one of the pictures Conny took from the red sky before the sunrise. We also watched the first trips of the ferry going from the otherside to our side and back. We were surprised by the number of cars on those trips guessing that there must be a number or regulars taking these first two trips.

Emmerich, Schenkenschanz, and Kleve

This afternoon, Conny and I made a trip through Germany. We first visted Emmerich am Rhein where we walked along the Rhein front and visited two Roman Catholic churces. Next we travel to the Spyk hamlet on the south front of the Rhine were at 13:35 we found the border poles 660 (D). One of them was a little closer to the river in an area that we could not visit. We saw some dark clouds and heard some thunder. We continued to the remote village Schenkenschanz and waited some time in the car for the rain to stop before we walked through the village. At the location of the village there used to be a fortress at the location where the Rhein would split into the Waal and the Nederrijn. Through several efforts to canal the river, that location has now changed close to Pannerden. The last place we visited was Kleve were we only visited the Klever Schlosspark. Just across the road there is a long pond going into the direction of the church at Hochelten. This only become visible from the lookout point higher up the hill. Around the pond there is a pathway named after the German artist Joseph Beuys.

Sunday, May 15, 2022

Tolkamer and Hochelten

In the morning, Conny and I, went to the village Tolkamer. The name is Dutch for Toll room. It is on the riverbank of The Rhine with Germany on the other bank. For about 7.8Km the border the Netherlands and Germany is in the middle of the Rhein. Actually, the west half is the Bijlandskanaal. In the afternoon, we visited the village Hochelten, which is part of Elten. It is just across the border in Germany. Through the ages it has either belonged to the Netherlands and Geramny. The last period it belonged to the Netherlands was between April 23, 1949 and August 1, 1963. Even now it is surrounded by the Netherlands from three sides. There is a mixed population of Dutch and Germans living in the village. We met with at least one German person there who spoke perfect Dutch. Hochelten is on a hill that is about 82m above sea level. On the top of the hill, there is the church St, Vitus. The first church was build in 967 on this spot. We visited the church. Before we came to the church, we saw Der Stein Tor (German for The Stone Door) sculpture by Christoph Wilmsen-Wiegemann. Near the church there was also a stone chair from which you could see some dent in far away hills that could be seen between the 'door'. We wondered if on that far away hills there would be a similar sculture. In the evening, we discovered that dent is near the Klever Schlosspark. The church belonged to a Damenstift, which was also on top of the hill. We also visited the Brususbron, a 57 deep well on the top of the hill, which was probable dug to provide water for the damenstift. The name refers to Nero Claudius Drusus, who although he did campaigns in the area, is not believed to have visited the hill nor commanded to dug the well.

We also visited a number of border poles in the morning and afternoon. These are:

Saturday, May 14, 2022

Pannerden

Today, Conny and I arrived in the village Pannerden where we are actually staying outside the village near the ferry crossing the Pannerdens Kanaal to Doornenburg. The ferry is one of eleven motor supported reaction ferries in the Netherlands. There are three small boats up stream through which the ferry is connected with a cable to the anker point in the middle of the canal. After we arrived, we sat outside and watched the sunset. We will stay here for about a week and make trips to surrounding areas and cities.

Monday, May 9, 2022

Link

Sunday, May 8, 2022

Spruce Street, Berkeley

I have started reading the book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I was reading Chapter 2, where it mentioned Grotto Rock. After some map searching, it seems that they lived at 876 Spruce Street, Berkeley. The book also mentions the author walking down Marin Street, but that must be Marin Ave. Although Cragmont Elementary School is just across the street, in the book it says that they send Toph to Black Pine Circle. On page 59, there is a mentioning of a nude beach. This could either be Gray Whale Cove State Beach or a smaller one closer to Montara that is now closed.

Addition: On Monday, I discovered that Cragmont Elementary School was closed between 1990 and 1999.

Thursday, May 5, 2022

De vijfde lijn

I finished reading the book De vijfde lijn (Dutch for The fifth line) which is based on a number of talks between Steven Aalders (a Dutch abstract artist) and Robert van Altena (a Dutch art critic). I started reading the book on February 23. I bought it on January 26. Just like with Peter Struycken, colour plays a central role in his works. He makes use of simple shapes, mostly rectangles. Compared to Struycken, it seems to me that his approach towards colours is more intuitive (based on emotions) whereas that of Struycken seems to be more rational. On page 36 of the book Struycken is mentioned along with Jerry Zeniuk (a German artist) and Daniel Buren. On page 237 Aalders makes a remark how Rembrandt in his painting Self-Portrait with Two Circles made use of the four colours from the Greek antiques: Whites, blacks, ochres and reds. Struycken has studied the use of these four colours from the Greek antiques through history. On page 192 the book references Sentences on Conceptual Art by Sol LeWitt.

Wednesday, May 4, 2022

Uploading bitstream to FPGA

Yesterday evening at TkkrLab, I talked about helping out with developing the firmware for the MCH2022 Badge. I am going to look into uploading bitstreams to the FPGA through the USB connector. The first idea is to add a menu option to the main menu which listens to the USB connector for a bitstream to be uploaded to the badge and which when the bitstream is received, uploads it to the FPGA. There is already code available to upload a bitstream from an SD-card. I will also have to develop a program for sending a bitstream from a file to the USB. I had a look at the code of iceprog, the program to upload bitstreams to, for example, the UPDuino. This program talks to a flash-chip. So, it is not really applicable. This evening, I spend cloned the firmware repo and build it, running the Install Prerequisites for ESP-IDF and next using the following commands: 
git clone https://github.com/badgeteam/mch2022-firmware-esp32.git
cd mch2022-firmware-esp32/
git submodule init
git submodule update
esp-idf/install.sh
. esp-idf/export.sh
./build.sh

I only found the BADGE.TEAM > ESP32: firmware development > Getting started page after I did this. I do not know whether this is still up-to-date. I spend some time studying the code in the 'main' folder and from there also some files in some other folders.

Tuesday, May 3, 2022

Links

Monday, May 2, 2022

Link

Sunday, May 1, 2022

Irregular grids

In the past weeks, I wrestled a lot with finding a correct algorithm for the generation of irregular grids of squares and equilateral triangles. For a long time, I worked on an algorith that would generate all possible strings of 'pieces' (the triangles and squares at the various orientations) from a give string of pieces. But it was only after I decided to look at the five possible slopes of the lines on the top and bottom of the strings of pieces and generate all possible strings of slopes from a given string of slopes, that I succeeded in implementing the working program irst.cpp this evening. It also groups all strings of slopes into groups that can reach each other the program finds a total of 455 groups. Many of these groups have just one or a few elements. There are also groups that have strings of slopes that have not been investigated (marked with the text 'FAIL'). This is because the strings of slopes are generated by searching all strings of pieces up to and include a length of twelve that return to the first element of the string.

Link

Saturday, April 30, 2022

The Nemesis Machine

Yesterday evening, I wanted to see the opening of the The Nemesis Machine by Dr Stanza at the Museum of the Future. The announcement of the opening on Facebook said that it would start at 19:30, but when I arrived there, I heard that the real opening started at 20:00. Because I wanted to be home before 20:30, I decided to go home. Today, I bought a free ticket, which stated 14:00. I arrived shortly before 14:00, but a little after 14:00, I discovered a sign saying the museum only opens at 15:00. I walked around the city and visted the exhibition Ateliers '93 op bezoek at Concordia. It has works by seven artist from the artist collective Ateliers'93 from Hengelo. Quite interesting. I liked the What are you looking for works by Jose Maria Verstappen and also the collage by Gertie van Neunen with the last three lines of the poem On A Distant Prospect of Eton College by Thomas Gray:
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more;—where ignorance is bliss,
   'Tis folly to be wise.

Around 15:08, I arrived at the Museum of the Future again only to be told that the room with The Nemesis Machine was not open yet and that it might still take an hour for it to open. I decided to pay a short visit to TkkrLab. At 17:33, I returned and saw The Nemesis Machine. I was not very impressed. It was basically old PCBs decorated with some LEDs that blink in a seemingly random pattern, based on signals from IoT sensors in Portugal according to the description on the wall. Random patterns, even if based on an external source (which might be interesting in itself), are not interesting as they contain no information just like a boring constant signal. Signals only become interesting when they have a pattern.

Link

Friday, April 29, 2022

Book

At 17:28:20, I bought the book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius written by Dave Eggers in English and published by Vintage Books in 2001, ISBN:9780375725784, from charity shop Het Goed for € 1.30.

Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Border poles

This afternoon, Conny and I continued our search for border poles. We first made a stop to search for trigonometric point 259308 which is located at X-RD 265003.7806 Y-RD 473066.1554 552° 14' 04.79124" North, 6° 59' 51.38138" East. At 14:54, we found it close to the red circle we found on January 30 when we first searched for it. We did not find any markings to identified it as we did at some of the others. We found the following border poles: We did not find pole 52-II. We walked back through Bergvennen, a fenland nature area. On the way home, we did see border poles 48 from a large distance. At home, I found that there was also a marke stone, Steen bij de Voelendijk, near border pole 51, possible because it disappeared below the soil.

Sunday, April 24, 2022

Connecting LCD screen

This afternoon, I attempted to connect an ILI9341 LCD screen to my UPDuino with the connector that I made last Tuesday. This how I intended to connect the wires from the UPDuino to the pins of the FPC-40P connector (using the UPduino v3.0 pin connection scheme): 
      (Pin 1-4 not connected)
GND:  White wire on pins 5, 13, 16-24, 37, 39, and 40
3.3V: Red wire on pins 5, 7, 12, and 38
25:   White (silver) wire on pin 8
28:   Orange wire on pin 9
11:   White (copper) wire on pin 10
23:   blue wire on pin 11
36:   Orange wire on pin 15
26:   Orange wire on pin 25
27:   Orange wire on pin 26
31:   Orange wire on pin 27
32:   Orange wire on pin 28
34:   Orange wire on pin 29
37:   Orange wire on pin 30
38:   Orange wire on pin 31
42:   Orange wire on pin 32
3.3V: Red wire on pin 33 (through 50Ω resistor)
GND:  Blue wire on pins 34-36
This is how it looked:

It did not work, except for the backlight of LCD. I was not really surprised that it did not work, as I knew that one small mistake would be enough. I also might have made an error in the LCD mode selection.

Wednesday, April 20, 2022

Links

Tuesday, April 19, 2022

FPC-40P connector

I spend the evening soldering wires to a FPC-40P connector at TkkrLab in order to connect an IL19341 LCD display (attacted to a Z240IT008) with my UPDuino. For this I looked at the ILI9341 datasheet to figure out which wires I should connect. I checked if the backlight was working. This is next step in trying to write some software for the FPGA on the MCH2022 Badge.

Monday, April 18, 2022

FemtoRV

I read that Matthias Koch is trying to implement FemtoRV32, a minimalistic RISC-V CPU developed by Bruno Lévy, on the FPGA of the MCH2022 badge. He is going to implement the driver for the LCD screen and the serially attached external RAM.

Sunday, April 17, 2022

Easter bonfire

In the evening, Conny and I went walking because along the Helweg there was a pile of pruning waste about five to six meters high. When we walked along it, there were no signs that it was going to be lit as a Easter bonfire. We walked to the end of the Helweg (Hell road) and returned on our steps. We noticed that more people had gathered. We waited on some bench along the road and around 20:22 was saw some flames. We walked a little closer and saw the sun set behind the pile, while it was getting on fire. Below, one of the pictures we took. On the left of the base of the pile, the silhouette of two adults can be seen.

Saturday, April 16, 2022

CyberSaturday: LED Strips by Mitch Altman

I went to the CyberSaturday LED Strips by Mitch Altman event held at TkkrLab. I already know how to program LED strips. I went there to see Mitch Altman to give the workshop. I liked his presentation. He explained everything very well, demonstrating many things. See here for the presentation and materials. I bought an Arduino kit + LED strip for € 13.37, which also include a small breadboard, some wires, resistors, LED's and some buttons, that were not used during the workshop.

Thursday, April 14, 2022

Reopening Het Goed

Today, charity shop Het Goed reopened their shop in Enschede at a new location, closer to the city center. Last Monday, I visited the previous shop, which was along a road that I take when biking to work, for a last time. It was very busy in the shop. I only had a look at the books section. I felt that it was a little smaller than in the previous shop. At 13:15, I bought the book Aldo Van Eyck, Humanist Rebel: Inbetweening in a Post-war World written by Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis in English and published by 010 Publishers in 1999, ISBN:9789064503917, for € 6.80.

Wednesday, April 13, 2022

Even more irregular grids

I have found another method to generate even more irregular grids with squares and equilateral triangles. I have invented a method to encode these, but have not yet written a program that could generate these kind of encodings. I still have to figure out the rules. The grid below is made from the text from the text area below. The letters 'a', 'b', 'B', 'c', 'd', and 'D' generate triangles in all possible orientations. The 'B' and 'D' are in the same orientation as 'b' and 'd' except that 'B' and 'D' are above the line. The letters 'e', 'f', and 'g' generate squares in all possible orientations. The letter '-' stands for a horizontal move without any thing being drawn.
This text is displayed if your browser does not support HTML5 Canvas.

Link

Tuesday, April 12, 2022

New flowers

Below a picture of one of the new flowers that have opened on our magnolia. It seems that not yet all flowers had opened when the temperatures suddenly dropped on April 3. In the right corner the remains of a flower that has turned brown.

ESP-PSRAM64h

On the MCH2022 badge there is a ESP-PSRAM64h memory chip connected to the FPGA. It would be nice, if there would be some example Verilog code to communicate with this chip. It can contain 64Mbit (equivalent to 8Mbyte) of data. You communicate with through a Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI). It also supports the Quad SPI Type 1 interface (also called QPI), which uses four data lines for addresses and sent/receive data. The Hackaday Sypercon 2019 Badge has an FPGA which is connected to two ESP-PSTAM64h chips. Verilog code to implement cached memory is available in qpi-cache folder of the code repository.

Sunday, April 10, 2022

Planting herbs

This afternoon, I dug and leveled the flowerbed on the right side of the path to the front door of our house, to sow some herbs that we bought in Elburg last year. I first sowed Garden marigold (Calendula officinalis) on the border with the neighbors. We wanted to sow the rest with poppy (Papaver somniferum). I noticed that the seed resembled those that are found on the Dutch 'Maanzaad' roll. I tried to sow them neatly, but didn't pay enough attention and before I knew it the bag was empty. Then we decided to sow the rest with milk thistle (Silybum marianum). I had too many of those, so I planted a few elsewhere in the front yard as well. It wasn't until I got in that I realized the poppy seeds looked like the seeds on 'Maanzaad' rolls because these are poppy seed rolls.

Saturday, April 9, 2022

Introduction

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