Ongoing Project status updates 2025 June 10th
Counter Productive (Button project)
It has reached 1000 button presses after running for 71 days.
There are two “keepers of the buttons” that come by daily and press the button. A neighborhood child with an oversized blue back pack, presses it every day after school at ~3:40ish. And a someone I have not been able to catch that comes by at ~2:30am every day.
Almost every day there is a new rapid button presser, who presses it 5-10 times within 30 seconds.
Total overall rapid button presses (gap < 30 seconds): 644 (63.26%)
When you collate the data with the weather, rain keeps people away. If we have two days of rain the button gets within hours of dying. I suspect that rain is what will kill this project. Its mostly young children (<10 years old) that are pressing the button. I am not sure why.
Almost no one scans the QR code to see the project stats or project details. So far it has not been vandalized, and the strata hasn’t asked me to take it down.
I have hooked up the button to the speakers in my house. So when someone presses the button. I get a sound effect playing. Its Mario from Super Mario brothers “yahoo” sound effects. It really makes me smile every time I hear it.
Sky Pixles (Time lapse of the sky from around the world)
Included are three pictures of white rock beach after 30 days. (May 2nd - May 9th) to see what 30 days of data looks like.
Of the ~150 web cams I started with only 58 of them are remaining. The Youtube streams change their URLs every week or so and all of them have gone offline. The government traffic camas change physical orientation more then I would have guessed. A lot of the remaining ones are personal streams that people put up and have been running for years.
The green strips are when the system goes down for some reason. I have not migrated this system off of my personal desktop onto my docker-ized NAS yet. So A windows update will shut down the WSL system and the cron job will fail. I am planning on filling these missing sections in with previous days data.
I am going to tweak the design of these over the next few days to find more visually appealing designs. Then the next step is to get a few of these printed out on to large sheets and do a test painting session (I have a cabin trip coming up ) with just 30 days of data. If it looks good with 10,000 points (30 days of day). then the project continues for the rest of the year and we will do 120,000 point year long version next May 2026.
The Medallion Hunt
The logistics side and coding side is mostly done. I am working on sectioning locations and corresponding animals for each of the 50 medallions. I hope to have the dry run up and running soon, so I can do a beta test and get feedback. The beta test will be with paper posters instead of metal medallions. If it works well. I will iterate and do a case study.
There are a lot of floating ideas and great aspirations associated with this project. I want to do the MVP to see if its fun before adding all the extra effort into the reach goals.
If this does have staying power, I am going to make an attempt to see if I can get the CoV and the Arts counsel of BC on board for next year 2026. In the mean time I will run the renegade version to collect more data and iterate on.
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