It was slightly cooler today – the high temperature was only 109.22°F, compared to yesterday’s 109.94°F.

The cooler weather didn’t help much when we saw our trainer today – because of the holiday, the JCC opened an hour later than usual, and we could feel the difference (and the air wasn’t so great, either). Next week, we’ll be back to our usual schedule.

I decided to see if I could improve the stability of my current SDR.COM dongle by putting a heat sink on it. Many people have done that by opening the case and adding a thermal pad, or even by 3D-printing a cooler block for the unit – I went with a lower-tech solution.

It’s not perfect, but I’ve only missed about 15 readings since I put it on at 11am (I get a reading every minute if all goes well); I was missing about half of the readings overnight, and got no data for the three hours we were out of the house this morning with the A/C turned off. Not too bad for a few cents’ worth of aluminum foil!

I finished integrating the outside thermometer (we have the Ambient Weather WS-04-2 package) into Indigo, and I set things up on the Raspberry Pi to automatically start the code that publishes readings to MQTT. I’m not doing anything with the data yet, but I’ll have it when I want to use it.

At least that’s what I thought until I noticed some significant gaps in the log; I saw 10-minute or longer gaps quite frequently. I could see the temperature being updated on the inside display even during the gap, so the thermometer wasn’t the problem. And when I did some research, it appears that older RTL-SDR.COM dongles (mine is a version 2 from 2016) have problems staying on frequency when they get warm. So I ordered a version 3 dongle with an improved heatsink in the hope that it works better.

I continued working on photos; one thing that’s been driving me nuts is that some photos have the wrong date when I import them into Lightroom; for some reason, the export process lost the DateCreated info, even though Apple Photos knows it. I think I’ve figured out a way to get the info out of Photos and into a format that exiftool can use – that’ll be a project for tomorrow. I’m already halfway through 2009’s photos!

And all of this kept me inside, off the streets, and out of the heat today, so it’s all good. The highest temperature logged by my thermometer was 109.94°F, and it was over 100 from 12:11 to 6:27 (it’s down to 85 as I type this at 9:20pm). I’m pretty sure this is the hottest day we’ve experienced since we moved here in 1984.