One year ago today: September 21, 2014, aw, my first Almanac . . .
Five years ago today: September 21, 2010, people smarter than me.
Six years ago today: September 21, 2009, a record 21 minute wait.
(The record still stands.)
MORNING
The foreign cinema is on a mountain climbing kick. They need to do a special on the 200 bodies reputed to be on Mt. Everest. Next, I read up on the walls in Israel. They seem to be doing a fine job, so I was listening for any valid argument from people who are against the wall. Because the opposition does not seem to stop once the walls are built. That’s where the arguments get silly. One thing is certain, those who don’t like the wall are two major groups. The uneducated and the over-educated who just want something to moan about.
As for the actual utility of the walls, they work fine. No bombings, no midnight raids, it seems to have put a complete stop to the terror. The crossing point shows that there is no way the wall is apartheid, you can clearly see people crossing the border all the time. They just can’t do it anonymously in the middle of the night. Hence I don’t have any problem with a good fence between neighbors. I’m not the first man to notice that the greatest enemies of curtains and locks are generally also the most greedy types. They know how hard it is to covet things they don’t know about.
Curtains are the greedy man’s nightmare.
Look no further for proof, the wall also stops them from seeing what is going on with the other guy, and that factor seems to be all too large a chunk of their objection. Waaaaa, how can he demand "equality" unless he knows you have more than he does? My stand on that is that every nation has the right to defend its borders, except according to Liberals, America, Israel, Germany, and Hungary, or, you might say, except white people. Only white people can be racially prejudiced.
Yet, humanity has existed since long before the nation-state. Ergo, every nation that ever existed must have “stolen” their land from somebody. It is time, I suggest, to start regarding that as the normal course of events. Business as usual, national Darwinism, the backward savages had it comin’.
NOON
If you are reading this on Sunday or Monday, I’ve successfully tapped the Dixie Motel service again. And have noticed it is better than the link I am paying for through the office. Of course, the office is run by the worst Jew in town. Hey, I’m like most people, when the guy is polite and doing right, he’s another regular dude. But the minute he goes ass-hole, then we notice his religion. Why he won’t go down to K-mart and get a router that works for a hundred bucks is just unexplainable, since he uses the same service for the office. Maybe he really is that dumb?
I see the idea of a suicide drone interceptor is popular, but folks, I don’t own any factories or resources to build them. In fact, I don’t even know, now hold on, let me stop and think. Yes, I do know where you could see the cutting edge of research. Israel. I deduce this because of my belief that copying technology is 30 times faster than developing it. Hence, within the year, the Palestinians should launch the first quadcopter strikes. Kind of a mini-9/11.
A flying bomb right up the Kismet. Since I know this, we can assume that Israel knows this. Hence, they must be developing very small interceptors. We know they have bigger models already. The drones are fragile and don’t possess the quality of flight stability, I think there is a term for that. If one prop goes, it cannot fly on the others. Yet. They can be stopped with chicken wire. So the bad guys launch one to explode a hole in the wire and the rest is easy once you understand they do not want peace.
I’m saying they will need something standoff, something that goes out there after the drones. All the parts you need are available on eBay. I was just proposing a consumer model.
AFTERNOON
From too much rain to too hot to handle, that’s summertime near the Everglades. I thought over the difficulties of the PNP transistors and decided to rig up a test bed. The available literature is too vague and evidently written by people with highly channelized mindsets. They seem oblivious to the facts that some of our daddy’s did not hand us everything we needed. It is also clear they do not really know that much more about PNP than I do. The simple question, “If a PNP will conduct a voltage, will it also conduct a ground?” meets with a stupified stare.
What’s more, I can now easily tell when the author is all talk. One of the tip-offs is the lack of commentary on development and costs. Not one has mentioned the way to connect a PNP transistor to a common anode circuit. In other words, they talk the talk. Here is a photo from today of the family of 7-segment displays I’ve had to construct so far. These are working models, and still they do not begin to convey the hours of research and pages of notes involved.
There are 14 LEDs and hundreds of wire connections. You’d have a hard time telling me somebody went through this and failed to mention it or take any pictures. There is just too much work involved and these do not come with instruction booklets. Left to right are:
The prototype common anode LED, with battery pack and separate PNP switch.*
The pilot flashing model, see the Arduino? It flashes the digits one by one on two 7’s.
The first working unit, counts to 999 by itself, see Arduino? Three separate digits.
The super-heather, with seven 7s, WIP, see Arduino? This is the current project.
(Lower right is the memory board, a separate endeavor, but being made compatible.)
* this is the only manually switched part of the development. The PNP transistor is on the little white protoboard resting atop the battery pack. If you notice there are two 7-segment displays, good for you. The reason is to assure compatibility testing of a common anode and common cathode, the common cathode 7-segment is upside down to make the connections easier for me to fathom.
On the baseplate, I have glued spare pieces of protoboard, as there is no agreement between manufacturers on board size, only pinhole spacings. The larger 7-segs span is so big it covers at least one set of pinholes needed to connect the Arduino. It is the failure of others to even mention this type of pitfall that tips me off they are not doing their homework.
If you duplicate my search for such a venture, don’t stop at reading the titles and saying, oh look, there are lots of these displays. Read the articles and you will see the titles are, to a one, misleading. If you look at my pilot model, it does what they did. But it is not a counter. It does not get to 9, then carry a digit and begin the next tier at 10 to 99 and so on. Read the content, don’t be fooled by purposely misleading titles.
I know if you do read and come back, you will take a second hard look at those glued parts. I don’t know if I’m the first to do this, but I do know unless you encounter plenty of home-made jigs like this, you have been finding the same articles and authors that I had to reject and move on.
Let me put a value on the research. This is skilled labor, so I’ll rate it at half price, $40 per hour. What you see here is 320 hours, or, if you had to pay for it, around $12,800. But, only around $130 in equipment because a major portion of my goal is to cut down on parts cost by using code rather than components. Consider me a pioneer in this, since there is no way any of the Internet boys did all this and never said a word. A hipster will take supreme credit if the little prick can get a light to blink.
For the record, I found out my secret nickname, what people call me behind my back. No, no, Ken, the people who are in an intellectual position to understand more than crude, grunt motivations. I am known as “The Engineer”. Quite a compliment, actually.
How do you like that snappy blue blackground on these recent photos? Me, too, but it has to go. That is undercoat drying from the new cPod panels and too expensive to use as a photo prop. Also, it is unusual for a photo of this type to make it past the censors. My argument this morning is that the real secrets of these gadgets is in the code, and that is invisible. However, the photo may not make the final draft. We have too much experience with copy cats on this blog already.
The reason the photos are on the no-print list is not because they are complicated, but because they are simple. This tips off the competition that the code must be structured a certain way. But you know, I'll be long gone ahead by the time they figure it out.
Correction, last day I said Popular Mechanics. That's wrong, it was Mechanics Illustrated, but blog rules says I cannot change it unless somebody ELSE brings it up. Rules like that are why some blogs endure while others don't get all that far from the launch pad.
ADDENDUM
Not that I have any love for the English and their empire, which by the way is likely the primary cause for all the trouble the world is in today. But there is something I found ironic. The first major rebellion in India was incited by the false rumor that the bullets for the new army rifle was greased with pig and cow fat. Well, there is a little more. Not many know that India was not conquered by a British army, rather employed mercenaries of the East India company.
So here is more information than you need, but if you want the irony, keep reading. Some of the East Indian envoys for the company traveled to England and saw that the average family there did not live in a mansion full of servants. Their stories that the British could be defeated fed the plots that resulted in the bullet rumor. The ensuing revolt was led by East Indian army officers who knew, or thought they knew, how the British military worked. (Any resemblance to the way they think today they know how capitalism works is pure coincidence.)
Well, the Company had hired some Scotsmen and ex-soldiers as security. These, they marched down the road to quell the uprising. They were outnumbered five to one when the rebels charged them from both sides. The Scotsmen stopped, looked, and simply starting picking them off in droves from 650 yards away. Three reincarnations per soldier each every minute, rarely missing, known colloquially as "Samsara target practice". You see, the Scots had the new rifles and guess which bullets they were using?
Now is that funny or what? If you say it isn’t, then you don’t know what happened to the women and children the East Indians rebels captured. And stuffed down a well. That culture regards rape as the woman's doing, which we over here know that is false at least half the time. That rifle was the Pattern 1853 Enfield. If they had this rifle 60 years earlier, there would have been no American revolution as we know it. Here's a picture, you may recognize it as the Civil War “Rebel Rifle”, arming 75% of the Confederates.
What, you want more irony? Okay, it seems to me that the British Empire was nothing more than a nation with a declining home economy trying to dominate the resources of the entire planet. Since their population was small compared to the countries they dominated, technology was used to make up the deficit by creating a massive navy. Things generally went their own way until the moment they tried to impose their morals and political system on the foreigners. And today England is just another has-been flushing itself down the sewer pipes of political correctness. We are so lucky that could never happen here, after all, we conquered the world with credit, not with battleships.
Well, sort of. And holding onto that world is the tricky part they never told us about. Some of these people over there just don’t know what is good for them. MicroSoft could tell you about that attitude.
Last Laugh
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