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the king of thailand died today. for residents of cambridge, there's a special connection to the thai royalty since he was born at mt.auburn hospital in 1927, making him an honorary cantabrigian.

after delivering lunch to my grand uncle for the final time, i went to belmont to sand smooth the patched areas i fixed yesterday, put down some paper on the floor, and painted the first coat on the window frame. i had the television turned on to MSNBC, trump was giving a speech attacking the new reports from women who said trump had sexually assaulted them in the past. i also opened a few windows, as it was a cold 61° in the house but a warm 68° outside. i finished painting the window by 3pm, tidied up a bit, then returned home. hailey was alone in the house but my sister would come by and pick up her dog shortly afterwards.

the pi zero worked with the wifi dongle directly attached to the board, which is a pleasant surprise, but a complete mystery. why didn't it work all those other times i tried it? the only difference now is the acrylic case. could that have anything to do with it? or maybe it always worked, but i just needed to be patient, and give the pi zero some time to establish a wifi connection. but i could've sworn i tested for that, and it never used to work. that got me thinking about getting another pi zero, but when i checked the microcenter website, the boards were back to their retail price of $5 (still not a lot, but not $1 like before).

i also used port forwarding on my router to open a port to the pi zero and be able to access it anywhere outside of the local network. the pi zero currently still gets an ip number from DHCP, but i'll want to set up a manual static ip number at some point.

the pi zero didn't lose its wifi connection overnight, which is a good sign. and when the wifi dongle was attached directly to the raspberry board, it never lost the connection either, although the signal level was in the upper 80's (compared to when the dongle is attached to a powered hub, and then i get signal level close to 100). periodic nmap to the pi zero sometimes scanned in under 0.50 seconds, other times 2-3 seconds. i don't know why that is, maybe the wifi does lose signal periodically, but it's able to recover and that's what's important.

while doing some research on pillsbury dough tubes, i came across some tantalizing recipes that were easy enough to make that i wanted to try them tonight for dinner. i found a recipe for crescent calzones.