Potentiometers
Switching Golf Grips
I’ve been using the interlock grip to hold golf clubs for as long as I can remember. About a month ago I noticed my right pinky finger was swollen at the knuckle, which happens to be one of the two fingers involved in the interlock. It feels like I have a constantly jammed finger.
It seemed to be slowly getting worse after each round of golf and got to the point where I couldn’t fully bend it. After doing some Googling, it seems to be a common problem, even though I’ve never had it happen to me. I’m not sure what I’ve been doing different, but it’s not comfortable. Time for a change.
Even though I’ve used the interlock for chipping, pitching, and full swings, I’ve used a reverse overlap grip (left pointer overlapping right pinky) for putting because I’ve always liked the feel of it. I’m pretty sure I first learned about it when reading Tiger’s book “How I Play Golf.” So I set out to try the Vardon Overlap Grip, as it’s also known, for every club in the bag.
Yesterday was the first round trying it out. It was uncomfortable and I “topped” quite a few shots. I didn’t realize I was using opposite overlaps for putting and everything else until the 10th hole. From there on out I overlapped like I do for putting on every shot. It was much more comfortable and I started hitting better shots.
Last night I looked around online. I learned that the overlapping grip tends to be better for players who have large hands, like me, while the interlock is usually better for players with small hands. It turns out Jordan Spieth uses this reverse overlap grip.
It’s going to be a work in progress because every time I gripped the club my instinct was to interlock. It’s hard to change something you’ve been doing for more than a decade. At least for now, my swollen pinky acts as a mental trigger to switch it up when I go for the interlocking grip.
Helveticards
This deck of cards was in the back of my office closet.
That’s Not Michigan!
Sense8
When I was told Sense8 wasn’t coming back for a 3rd season, I debated if I’d watch season 2. The show is set in multiple locations around the world, which made it one of the most expensive shows to produce. I enjoyed the first season, so I decided I’d go for it. Fans of the show made their disappointment heard and somehow it worked; Netflix announced they’d come back next year for a special 2 hour finale. Can you imagine ABC, CBS, or NBC doing that?
It was another good season and it had a lot of great music. The ending sucked because it sets up a 3rd season, which won’t happen now. Hopefully they can wrap everything up in 2 hours.
If you haven’t watched the show, give it a chance. It’s a very diverse show, which crosses a lot of cultures, uniting people. We need more of this in today’s world with some of the things going on.
The creator, cast, and crew put together this video talking about the improbability of the show coming back like this to thank all of the fans.
Updates to Home Assistant Projects
My garage temp sensor, running home-assistant-temperature-monitor stopped working several months ago. I didn’t have time to figure it out and then summer hit, when it’s not important since I don’t heat up the garage before I workout. This weekend I finally got around to troubleshooting the problem.
Turned out I needed to install Adafruit_Python_GPIO. I must have updated my code at some point without fully testing, otherwise I’m not sure how any of it worked before. I didn’t investigate that though; I was more concerned with fixing it and doing some improvements. I updated the OS and everything on the Raspberry Pi since it hadn’t been turned on in quite some time.
Earlier this year, another Pi on my network, the one running Home Assistant and Pi-hole, ran out of disk space without warning. I’ve wanted to put in a notification system so it never happens again, so I updated home-assistant-pi to report the disk use % to HA. I added an automation to notify me whenever it’s above 90% for one of my Pis. I also reworked all of the automations in home-assistant-pi to make it easier to configure each time I get a new Pi.
That all took much longer than I expected. Most of the trouble was trying to understand the Jinja template system used in HA and where it can be applied to configurations. I think I’m finally getting the hang of it.
While writing this post, I found an old draft with some other updates to home-assistant-pi I never published. Maybe I never finished and that’s why everything stopped working! Here’s a list of some previous updates:
- Fixed errors causing program to crash.
- It wasn’t reconnecting very well, especially if Home Assistant went away (ex. for a restart after an upgrade). Rewrote how the MQTT connection works.
- Switch from PushBullet to iOS notifications.
- Changed show/hide Home Assistant group automations.
Now that this stuff is running again and I have a better understanding of the Home Assistant automation capabilities, I need to continue the series of posts I planned on home automation. It’s been five and a half months since I published Part 1!
All My Days
YI 4K Action Camera – Screen Replaced
The replacement came in for my shattered YI 4K Action Camera touchscreen. I was surprised it only took 10 days to get here from Shenzhen, China.
I followed this YouTube video, even though mine isn’t the newer 4K+ version of the camera. The only difference I noticed was the type of connector for the shutter.
I made one mistake, as you can see below, cracking the front cover above the lens. It won’t affect the performance, so not a big deal.
I wasn’t nearly as fast as the guy in the video, but I did it in less than an hour. Easy peasy compared to replacing the screen on an iPhone, which I will never attempt again.
Country Confession
I’ve been listening to country music again after over 20 years.
Manhunt: Unabomber
Discovery has aired 3 episodes of their original series Manhunt: Unabomber so far. I highly recommend it.
Hard to believe it’s been 20 years since the Unabomber was caught. I was in high school at the time and I guess I didn’t remember any of the details because I was originally thinking of the Oklahoma City bombing, which was Timothy McVeigh in 1995. I certainly didn’t remember that it took over 16 years to catch Ted Kaczynski.
