Old Becomes New Again

July 9, 2025

Foreword

I wrote this post just a few hours after waking up from surgery. Forgive me if it reads a bit giddy in a sober eye. I was probably still high on the anesthesia medicine.

The article sat on the desktop corner for a few days. Should I re-write it or not post it at all? This being a diary, I decided to upload it as-written because it shows how I felt that day.

Days later, the drugs worn off, friends still notice a new spring in my step: less worried; more optimistic.

I have already, and rather easily, completed some code-related projects that were tying my head in knots during the months we waited for the insurance company to approve a longer life for me. Perhaps those projects may become the subjects of future posts.

Today my second life ended. And the third one began.

They replaced the pacemaker that kept me alive the past ten years. Its battery voltage dwindled down to a fearfully final few weeks. The new one promises enough juice to carry me onward across the hazey hills of Time and far away.

Life Two began in 2015, in the emergency department of a heart hospital, when the battery my mother gave me at birth abruptly shorted out. A heart hospital is a good place to be when your heart stops beating unexpectedly.

Life looks different after they put a fresh battery in and start your motor going again. They told me it would last about ten years. It did, and I devoted those years to disengaging from every ambition I once strained to achieve, directing my attention instead to where I loved.

Bride of Diarist tops the list. I feel grateful that she did not mind receiving more of my attention.

Music slipped me a silk-shouldered, come hither look. Seductive. I launched a complicated relationship with the bass guitar. Only recently did I distinguish the desire to play it well from the ambition to win favor with strangers that way. Goodbye ambition; hello playing privately at home, if only for my own amazement.

The cameras in my closet went onto the shelf when I thought I had already taken every picture I could hope to see. New flowers can help with that problem. Recently planted daffodils and daylilies re-opened my eyes this year.

This Diary is about Code. How does Code figure into this memo?

The gizmos give the answer. Most of my code I write for microcontrollers, including not only Arduinos, of course, but also going beyond to embrace BBC micro:bits and the inventions of my friend Roger Wagner such as his remarkably complete MakerPort.

In addition I accumulated boxes full of bare controller chips selected from Microchip Corp’s AVR lineup, ranging from the itsy-bitsy ATtiny85 all the way up to the mighty MegaAVR4809 and the recent AVR64DD28. The latter packs more memory and speed than my original Apple ][ almost half a century ago.

Also, do not forget the Raspberry Pis. I collected the whole set, from the original Pi 1 to the latest Pi 5. They afforded my first real foray into the Linux operating system. These days I run Linux on my laptop and desktop computers. This disclosure will not surprise anyone who knows me. <grin>

As I busily turned the pages of Life Two, the world filled up with increasingly impressive-looking alternatives to my old stuff. Faster processing speeds. More memory. Yadda yadda yadda. I did not buy the new things because I already had so many old ones. Yet, I allowed the fun to fade and the old stuff to gather dust.

Even I myself started looking old and dusty in my eyes, with the battery running low and the end of Life Two looming on a stark horizon. Worse, I felt the weight of those aging gizmos and cameras as a kind of shroud I could not shake off. Dreary!

How did all that old become new again?

It began when Bride of Diarist answered my grumbling this way, Something about every one of those things made you happy when you bought it. Why not still? Why not now?

It bloomed in my mind like a daffodil out of a late spring snow. I do enjoy those things. I have barely scratched their many surfaces. What I enjoy most is learning. Learn some more. Dive deeper in. Find the fun again.

And so. There is an Arduino driving a new Soil Moisture Meter to help me decide when to irrigate the flower beds. I shall write an article proposing a way to acquaint students with the grunt-work side of Science by means of a similar device built with a MakerPort and using the MicroBlocks graphical programming language.

I am configuring an ATtiny85 to dim and brighten a string of super-bright, 12-volt LED lights. They, in turn, are teaching me more about soldering and about heat sinks. Somewhere, somehow, some day, surely I shall find a practical use for such know-how.

A Raspberry Pi 4 recently went to work serving up a file storage resource on our household network. A Pi 2 got updated to become a MariaDB database server, motivated in part by a desire to organize some hefty lists. True, a database server is probably the most difficult way to approach such a project. My attitude is: where’s the fun in doing things the easy way when the difficult way will work just as well?

I look forward to learning how to program AVR controllers directly through the GPIO pins on a Raspberry Pi, just for the heck of it. Exuberantly geeky. You begin to get the picture.

Oh, yeah, and I resumed sending to friends and family new postcards made with pictures of this year’s flowers. And I enlisted a good teacher to guide the bass and me through learning our first jazz standard. Why jazz? I do not know. Do I have to know? No.

These initiatives undertaken in recent weeks illuminate the hopeful mood in which my eyes opened after the implant procedure this morning. As Life Three begins, I see so much in it that I can choose to enjoy. Yes, every bit of it is old, including me. Yet all of it shone in this morning’s light like new.