June 19, 2023

Yesteryear
One year ago today: June 19, 2022, 103°F.
Five years ago today: June 19, 2018, am I poor?
Nine years ago today: June 19, 2014, fruit soup.
Random years ago today: June 19, 2011, the ubiquitous 555.

           Let’s get that copper pipe installed. My $75 compressor and my $120 pipes. Add another $90 for valves, unions, fittings, and air couplers. The rainstorm dumped 2.05” of rain on my yard and the latest round in squirrel wars went to the rodents. I’m going to try hanging a weight on the feeder as the squirrels have learned how to hang lightly enough to leave the feed ports open. It’s dismaying to see the Genxyzers try to build an economy based on handbags to hold the cover that holds the case that holds the liner that holds the liner that holds the protective shell that shields the glass that encases their smart phone.

          Custom mufflers are available to make your car sound like a Ferrari and the latest Tracki Mini makes sure you have zero privacy left. It’s a few solder joints, then I need more down time. Last week, when added up, was more than 24 hour work time. Those who know me are aware that’s pushing my limit. Bryne e-mails from Texas, he’s one of the 160,000 who won’t get water, electric, & Internet until Friday. He’s living on that 2,000 acre farm and reports all nine lakes are tainted with “Brahma dung”. He’ll do fine, did you know he survived the British military, including the infamous Aldershot barracks.
           Do we have a new term entering the vernacular? The “Streisand Effect”, where trying to suppress news results in increased exposure. She tried to block an aerial view of her mansion and wound up drawing 450,000 views, pulling ahead of this blog. Have you seen the new format of JimmyRuska? I find it amusing because I looked at HTML back in the 90s. Many stupid people never learned how to change the factory settings so most web pages came out looking the same. How do you create compound stupidity? By embracing that clone look as a standard. Stupid people and computers are a dangerous combination. (Did you know at one time the nuclear launch code was 00000000 so idiots would not forget it?)

           Time to have a talk with the hillbilly. Before I left for Tennessee, I bought a coil of wire. The books for these sunk costs are not a priority. Today I went to record the transaction and the receipt if missing. It was not on the clipboard. That means both the material and the receipt are missing, essentially impossible by accident around here. If the receipt was left in the bag, entirely possible if I get home in the rain, they get dropped in the shed. And that’s all you need to return them for cash. I’ve noticed other small missing items which I wrote off to my lousy filing system. Now this.
           Here’s those hardy morning glory flowers that won’t grow where I want. Peeking out from behind the agave cactus, this is the view from my doorstep. It required four hours today to solder four of the copper tubing joints, one of which has a small leak. (Nothing for me.) Let me tally, those four joints required 14 solder operations. And I ran out of those expensive adaptors for the air nozzles. I’ll have to rig something up unless I find a nest of them. You will never convince me these shortages are random.

           Before I started on the air compressor lines, I repaired some electric cables, including my hand-held planer. Shown here, these are also a soldering operation. This is the military recommended method of splicing wire. The ends are twined and twisted together, then soldered, covered with shrink, then tape-wrapped to the old insulation diameter, then a larger piece of heat shrink. This is why I’ve never had a repaired power cable go bad on me.

           Terabyte hard drives. Other than porno collectors, most people have no real excuse for that kind of memory. I may have a use for one. Out in the shed I have a box of some 18 hard drives. Over the centuries, I’ve kept the hard drives out of all my old computers since my first unit back in 1983. (The 1981 Apple ][e had no hard drive.)
           While I kept them “just in case”, they may very well contain many of the first files ever created by anyone in my category. I don’t know how many of the drives have survived, since I was living in Point Roberts back then. But, as yard work and renovations catch up (slowly), I have time slots to possibly collect these volumes onto one large drive. If only to see what is there. I remember when the maximum number of files on a disk was 108 or when the disk got full. I have hundreds of those disks.

Picture of the day.
Robots on patrol, Singapore.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           Here’s squirrel 1 of 4 in the Hav-a-hart™. He’s out by the van, waiting for his free ride to the Civil War bone orchard. By coincidence, I’m reading a few chapters on the military leadership of that war. The North had a bunch of nincompoops and finally won by attrition, which involved turning matters over to grim, friendless men who could command but not lead. Even then, they had to be supplied with a whole new generation of the most expensive weapons. The South seemed better but they were well-supplied by quarrelsome, disobedient, but gifted division commanders. I say division because if they got promoted above that, they started losing, acting borderline insane, or getting picked off at extreme range.

           This is it for excitement today. I’m out of everything including money unless I drive downtown today. It’s not that bad, I have coffee, oatmeal, and muffins. But for the most part for the last few days I’ve been living off that second chicken and corn Texas pie I put in the freezer last month. So delicious out of the microwave that I can’t be bothered to even go buy other groceries. (All the veggies you want are here, but I think if you eat too much cucumber, you begin to think like one.)

           Here’s something to chew on. Remember Craigslist? I do, from the days when it was both new and innovative. It has it’s merits and one of them is that people use it who can’t find things any other way. For example, I advertise under activities for anyone who owns a 3D printer. (I’ve met several people who have them but don’t know how to use them.) Anyway, the activity listing has been largely taken over by sex ads since the page canceled the category. For some reason, these weirdos take exception to ads that are not geared to their level. And they’ve been flagging my ads within a day of posting.
In another demo of America’s declining position, try to find some brass adapters for copper line.            Recall how I had bought all the 1/4” fittings to be found. Still requiring two more ports, I bought 3/8” thinking, why I’ll just find an adapter. I know since childhood these pieces are everywhere. Not no more. I finally had to get an adapter to the adapter, using up the last of my precious small unions and wiping out any savings from buying all the other parts on sale. Pictures probably tomorrow, as we’ve got one of those storms happening that, if there was wind, would be classified as a hurricane.

ADDENDUM
           Trivia. Balsa wood prices have soared, and you know why? Turns out it is one of the primary construction materials of wind turbine blades. I was unaware the Wright Brothers had purchased a rubber band powered model airplane, which were a new invention at the time. The easiest lesson at the robot club is to pay attention when something does not work as expected. Years ago we had antennas that would not work. I have a potential explanation. Watch this video from last night.

           I won’t detail the circuit, but you notice how every second time I release the switch, the LED does not quite go out instantly. I hope you notice, it took a lot to time the camcorder. Now see the big coil? It should store enough magnetic current to make the bulb fade slowly. Every other time, the bulb goes out instantly. The “error” here was this coil was normally tested with a filament bulb, which lights whether the coil is charging or discharging. When that happens, the current changes direction. So this is the first time this was tested with a diode, which only lights in one direction. This circuit is rectified and should light and fade in both circumstances.

           It was too close to midnight for me to follow up, but something is wrong and I suspect in the coil, there could be an intermittent short. This would cause the coil to act as a straight wire which does not induct. This coil is intended to be part of a tank or oscillating circuit. If there is no induction at times, that might be an explanation why the antennas kept failing. If this is the case, it took fourteen years on the shelf to figure this out. That coil was built by Agt. M back in 2009.
           If you got this far, you are interested in science, I take it. Have you ever wondered about the process of growing human tissue? It’s called regenerative medicine. When someone gets a “pig’s heart”, what has actually happened is all the pig cells have been removed so only the inert “scaffolding” remains. Then a culture containing the patient’s heart cells is introduced, which repopulates the structure. Yes, it is complicated, but I found an excellent video that spells out the process. It has the weird title of “A Leaf Made of… Meat??”. (None of the four mistakes in that title are mine.) I recommend it as an excellent tutorial for the curious.
           If that one has your attention, did you know every Rubik’s cube can be solved in 20 moves? Here’s a link to an explanation, called “The Algorithmic Trick” Before anyone concludes I build failed circuits, return tomorrow to see one that works. It’s a simple six-element circuit that makes a light fade on and off as opposed to instantly. I’ll add the description of a new “switch” I independently derived.

Last Laugh