Tuesday 7/19/22
Grant came down and we worked on getting the AC stronger. He also took off the trim from one of the doorways so that the Turkey Volcano table can now move through. Afterward I put up new curtains in some of the windows and used gaffer tape to black out many of the windows that were leaking light into the Eureka Room’s room and mildly lighting up the screen.
The black curtains with the gold geometric pattern lend more mystery to the outside. The gold is shiny, so shifts with the light and viewing angle, which gives it a magical quality, I think.
Wednesday 7/20/22
A frustrating day. I came in to find that the paper blind in the kitchen had fallen down and that loads of the gaffer tape I used behind the Room was just laying on the ground. This was some expensive tape, so I don’t know why it was such crap. It took me a couple hours of sweating on a ladder in a precarious position to put the tape up the first time, I’m not looking forward to putting it up again. I’m going to use duct tape this time around.
Also frustrating was the front window projector. I had to get the wireless mouse and keyboard situation worked out between the PC and the Raspberry Pi. And then the timer on the projector smart plug was not set right and the projector had basically been running 24 hours a day. Ugh. Then the video wouldn’t play on the pi, so I had to export a ton of formats and codecs. I also tried to get it to run straight from the projector, but I couldn’t get it to loop and it had a blue timeline under it that I could figure out how to remove and doubt that I can. VLC on the pi was showing the filename and had weird visual artifacts. I was able to fix those but VLC would still go out and back into full screen each end of loop. That’s probably the best option, though. If I make the video 10 minutes or so, it’ll only blip a bit every 10 minutes. I tested that yesterday and spied on it with the security care. Looks like the Pi went to sleep so stopped sending signal. Ugh. So I’ll look into that next.