I should have known better. My recording schedule is thrown away because of a card reader. The Boss uses this obsolete memory card and the only available reader is an outrageous $35 that claims to read 20 other cards. These design bureaus know many ways to skin a cat, making the reader cost more than the card. There should be a law that all first designs have to be the largest, and all future versions can be smaller, but must include an adaptor to fit the same slot. Otherwise, it’s legal thievery.
I’m reading “The Life of Pi”, which so far is well-written. Something is wrong when these paperbacks are priced at $16, but this one was on sale. So the independently wealthy can afford to read them, I suppose. Written by a Canadian (East Indian) who studied zoology and religion, he bases his characters on it. The imagery is great but a little artificial and stilted unnaturally toward theology. Long passages where it is unclear what the author is getting at or where he's going with this. I talking dozens of pages at a time.The most interesting passage so far is how animals are not “imprisoned” in a zoo. The author explains how in the wild, the animal would seek the very smallest territory that fulfilled basic needs. If food, shelter, and water are supplied, the animal will keep returning to the zoo. No free will needed. The real world is full of predators and parasites. The zoo has "room service" and a vet, so why leave?
Okay, enough of you asked. I’m going tell you how to turn off those moronic idiotic pale yellow help bubbles that appear when you hover your mouse over something in your browser. The only thing they do is block your view. The catch is I’m only going to tell you how to do it in Opera. If anyone is still using Internet Explorer, I doubt there is anything going to help them.
Open Opera, click on the small Opera tab on the top left corner of the toolbar. On the drop menu, go to Settings, then Preferences and open the Advanced tab. Find Browsing in the left-hand navigation column and click on it. Uncheck Show Tooltips. Click on Okay. You’re done. (While you have the Advanced tab open, you might want to check the Storage button to see who’s been spying on you. Opera should be ashamed they know about this and still allow it. What does the India Times need to watch me about?)
Craigslist is still sore at me, I see. I’m the one who cracked their original source code, but [did so] only to identify the chronic flaggers. Old Craig didn’t like that and had to revamp his entire system to hide his scripts. I’m the guy who caused that. I may be the closest anyone came to bankrupting his little empire. All because of his stubborn insistence on giving veto power to the anonymous. He’s rich, true, but his site has become the washroom wall of the Internet. Think of where he’d be today if he’d followed my advice.
I’m the guy who created most of the tactics now commonly used against Craigslist. I devised the first bank of multiple accounts that continually tested how many flags were needed to kill a post. Today, it takes extremely wasteful group efforts to flag what I used to do in a minute. I was expert at identifying the flaggers. All of this I did while killing time at my computer store after morning coffee.
As for the Craigslist security system, it is primitive. That’s where you have to supply a phone number and their robot calls you back with a code. There is a workaround but I ain’t telling. I will give a strong hint. It involves an intentional spelling mistake to bypass the callback scripting branch. You force a string to evaluate to false and then back to true when Craigslist prompts you to correct the “error”. QED. And I’m even better at logic gates.
And now a grammar error from last day I must set right. I wrote that each working day involved “at least a trip to the library” in my career days. That sounds like I dropped in to the library every day. That’s not what I meant. It should have said that I did at least one thing every day that others did not appear to, one example of which was visiting the library. I’m in the library at most twice a week over the past thirty years.
ADDENDUM
Electronics, my hobby. Beware of sources that tell you electronics is easy. I’ll bet you whoever said that is referring to one single aspect of electronics that happens to be his specialty. I’ve been through agony, a lot of it due to faulty directions. There have been enough surprises, overall, to keep me happy. If you are curious about what is out there, take a look at Electronic Goldmine. Sites like this will show you most of the parts and projects I know anything about.
What to look for? I can sure divvy up some advice on that. First, notice the complete lack of anything really new. Peek at the section for kits, say, the category “New”. Ignore the ones that say robot, there are no robot kits of any use in there. But all these projects are the same things you saw in the Radio Shack or Heathkit catalog half a lifetime ago. Blinkers, flashing arrows, cricket chirpers. Pretty tedious, actually.
I’d expect to be flooded by a mass of new and innovative items, but you’ll find only said tedium. Look at the subcategory “counters” and you’ll the binary and decimal kits (rather expensive) that resemble one of my first self-designed amateur circuits. That’s where I tried to use ICs to display the 947 million pulses per second and ran out of enough parts. But I’d necessarily covered the design to have gotten that far.
In another turn of fate, I may have gotten into transistors at a time they are falling out of favor. Even in the last year, it has become necessary to order the cheapest transistors (for beginners, the NPN 2222) in bulk, I’m placing an order for a thousand soon. Avoid anything in that says SMD or SMT, you can’t solder surface mount no matter how easy they’ll tell you it is. Transistors will always be available in our time frame, but there is a preference for MOSFETS, a type of transistor that works with voltage rather than current. That alone confuses me—varying the voltage would wreck some of my circuits.
But it’s all been done [meaning there have been no breakthroughs or new ideas in years]. Where, one might ask, is all the new stuff, should it exist? Maybe on Mars. I don’t know. Everything I see seems to be a variation on a few basic ideas. Lights, switching, sound. The only one that intrigues me is the switching and I’m at the logic gate and relay stage at best. The good part is my no kit policy. I places me in n a situation where I can’t build a thing unless I understand the relationship between every component. That’s why I say there are too many specialists calling themselves experts.
What’s more, there are no “middle level” projects or kits. It is either your simple crystal radio or satellite design. Nothing in between, which is precisely where I wanted to go. I wanted to create useful things (robots) and be on a team to construct them. But the teams that do this seem to be in laboratories with military funding. Maybe the articles I’ve read about the extinction of the solo tinkerer-inventor are true. But compared to other difficult courses I’ve taken, I intend to continue with these wires and batteries.
Why pursue something that can be maddeningly tough? The mental exercise I always like. It helps to know I’m still advancing slowly over a broad front where others necessarily picked a specialty by now. Maybe I like looking at the Curiosity rover and understanding what’s going on. While I complain about not getting help until after I don’t need it any more, I find delight the creation process. [Time after time] I’ll conceive a circuit, cannot find it, build it the hard way, then find examples all over the place. I’m learning to watch for when that doesn’t happen. Because that means I’ve invented something.
One example is the ultrasonic sensors. I have in my head this fanciful plan that they could be used for something more than measuring distance. I’ve looked closer than you’d think at the scans (sound images) of the chip on my shoulder. There are 300 disk images and they can be rippled fast enough to give apparent motion. Ergo, they can be unrippled to give stills, tell me if I’m wrong. It seems to me an array of these “sonar” sensors should be able to recognize familiar objects without the expense of laser halography. And folks, I first programmed an array at age 18.
The Hacktonics site has returned. I don’t really know if it was the site or their Internet that was down, but they’ve got a smaller selection and higher prices. My contact is still not responding. I’ve got some unspent cash they probably want. I really hope they are flush over there.
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