temperatures today reached the upper 70's. naturally when i arrived in belmont i went to the basement and moved out all the houseplants once again for another round of neem oil treatment. i also fertilized all the houseplants with miracle-gro soluble fertilizer: acid-loving fertilizer for the gardenia, all-purpose fertilizer for the jasmines. while i was at it, i also fed the backyard hydrangeas with acid-loving fertilizer.

for lunch i had some mantou with pork floss. my father and i figured out how to directly run some used case fans from a PC power supply unit (PSU). it's something we've done before, you first hotwire the PSU allowing it to run independently from a computer. we then connected the fans using wires directly to the 4-pin PWM connectors. initially our fan speeds were very slow and when we measured with a voltmeter it read 5V everywhere. turned out we were measuring the wrong wires - red to black gives 5V. yellow to black gives 12V. when w ran the fans from the yellow wires they were much faster, but i think for my grow closet a 5V speed fans is fast enough.

later in the afternoon i did some drone flying when i saw dramatic cumulous clouds dotting the sky. i flew around 700 huron where i started to lose RC signal, then across fresh pond golf course, a peek at the belmont farm, then to the high school. that's where i completely lost RC signal. even after i regained it, the app froze up and there were a few tense moments, not knowing if the drone was returning to home, or just hovering midair. like all the times my app has crashed, it still maintains connection to the controller. once i managed to get back into the app, i flew the drone home.

in the early evening my father and i barbecued some drumsticks, hot italian sausages, and jumbo shrimps. at one point we had to switch out the propane tank when the old one ran out. while we were manning the grill, i saw our opposite door neighbor playing around with a new drone. i couldn't see the brand or model, but the fact that he was flying it so low to the ground, allowed his daughter to chase it around, and had the drone crash land a few times makes me think it's one of the cheaper drones. if you spent $500-1600 on a DJI drone, you would not be casually crashing it. besides, the propeller blade speeds on these DJI drones can be scary, like flying razor blades, i wouldn't want to get hit with one.

my sister came back for dinner when she returned to pick up hailey. when it came time for me to get back to cambridge after dark, it was still warm enough that i just wore a t-shirt. i played the mauritanian for my father before i left.

i hooked up the PSU with the two case fans for my grow closet. there's surprisingly little information about how to use a PSU to power 12V fans for a simple grow closet. they make it overly complicated, like using a fan controller with knobs. depending on where you plug in the connecting wires, a standard 12V case fan can either run at 12V (full speed, yellow wire), 5V (red wire), or 3.3V (orange). maybe it's just not done because there are so many exposed wires, and it'd be easy to water your plants one moment, shorting out your PSU the next. i only had 2 fans, which was as far as i could extend the wires. the 3rd fan - on the 3rd shelf - i'm using a 2-wire fan that's directly spliced to a 12V power supply. the PSU with two fans don't use a lot of power - just 3W when turned on. i had the fans operate on 5V because that was more of a gentle breeze.

my E-type flash mounts arrived today, a pair for $12. i got them so i could use umbrellas with my remote controlled speedlights. besides the canon one, i have 3 more flashes i got when i was in china that i rarely use. now i just need to buy some umbrellas.

i'm all out of seltzer and it was too warm to drink anything hot. i ended up having the taiwanese mango beer i had in my fridge from two thanksgivings ago. there's only 2.8% alcohol but i was already a little tipsy after the first sip.