One year ago today: September 19, 2013, what's dobros?
Five years ago today: September 19, 2009.
Ten years ago today: September 19, 2004, billionaire class photo.
MORNING
What have we here? Don't you like it when you see new things for the first time? And the author has the consideration to explain it? This is your lucky day. The program used to produce this graphic contained no instructions whatsoever, so I reverted to my old standby of thinking like a tree stump. I learned that at the phone company, you use it to follow the supervisor's train of thought. Instead of attempting to explain how it works, I took some screen shots of start to finish.
There you go, you may recognize the little lady as she gets reduced to Stipple (see y'day's post). I did not choose the photo carefully and it is unsuitable for my robot arm to draw. The final product, on the right, has 2,000 dots. But many of them run together forming black patches. My arm cannot readily produce this.
No, I have not forgotten to show you the arm. I took pictures with my camera phone and Virgin Mobile decided to take away my send feature about the same time. Can't send myself my own photos. Those pictures will arrive in time, but the transition of the gal from and a JPEG to an SVG to a WAV file is a far prettier process than the software, believe me. Don't you think it is kind of neat how I cut and pasted these three photos to make it easier to follow? This was a lot of work.
Just stay curious and I promise all will become clearer toward the end. A photo is reduced to a computer file which is printed by a "robot" arm that I built on my kitchen table. The WAV file for this picture is 4:48 minutes or 288 seconds long. It plays properly, but there are calibration issues with the robot arm. Note, the arm is not controlled by an Arduino, but a sound file, which sounds like a low buzzing G# note.
Be patient, as with all projects that lack adequate documentation, the real troubles didn't appear until the final stages. No, that isn't Murphey's Law, it is a direct consequence of accumulated errors that replace the missing directions as you proceed. And for the record, Murphey's Law does not say that anything that can go wrong will. It says that everything that can possibly happen will happen. And if I get this thing to draw a picture, I'll believe it. And did I spell "Murphey" wrong? If so, there you go.
NOON
There's a mystery. DVD movies are read-only. So explain this to me. Many years ago, six I think, somebody gave me a movie which I played up to the end of chapter 9 on whatever computer I had in those days, probably XP. Today I popped the disk into my Win 8.1 using PowerDVD, a complete different system and application. How did it know to start again at chapter 10? This is the movie, the Musketeers with the bathtub scene.
NIGHT
So much for Win 8.1 being state of the art. It appears MicroSoft has degenerated to an idiot-freindly on-line spy service. And they are in cahoots with Java, Adobe, and Google. I won't go into detail, but you are a fool if you trust these people. Again I predict a day soon when Google says "Whoops, our whole system went down and we lost all your passwords. For your own personal safety, we cannot reconnect your account unless you show us two pieces of ID".
This won't bother some people, like I said, it's idiot-friendly. But at that point not only is personal privacy lost for most people, the system can simply exclude the minority who do not comply. The system has now twisted the Internet from a freedom-enhancing tool to a sucker's paradise. My latest beef is now with Radio Shack and MakerBot. The robot I built from their directions requires software downloads from the Internet which cannot be accomplished without also downloading tracking cookies you really don't want on your computer.
Author's note: Of course, if you see any progress with the DrawBot computer in the photos today and y'day, you'll know that I was able to bypass the system and run the applications independently. As far as I'm concerned the source of the code failed to tell me about the tracking cookies and they deserve to be hacked. Computers have now gone back to the Stone Ages, where it took longer to deal with ignoramuses than to figure out the dame code without any help.
And another aspect of computers is the reaching back in time. I told of my friend who was snagged on an outstanding speeding ticket in the Dakotas 26 years earlier. Now the City of Miami is going after unpaid parking fees. It is all too easy to think, well, people should have paid up. I agree, but old fees aren't the point. The danger is once those old fees are collected, the city will cook up new fees. And every blind trusting dunce out there is setting themselves up.
Of course, I will get around this by having a computer used for nothing but the downloads. Let them track that one. It will not be secure, however, as the software cannot be installed without an Internet connection. And the newest generation of applications cannot even be run locally without an Internet connection. But remember those Internet kill switches I built? I've still got lots of them. Don't expect some honest providers to start up, not after the government shut down that e-mail service that would not allow illegal searches. This is not the America I grew up in.
Due to popular response, this cartoon stays. If it's too small, just double-click on it to enlarge.
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