One year ago today: July 27, 2022, on treasure hunting.
Five years ago today: July 27, 2018, a broken thermometer.
Nine years ago today: July 27, 2014, Florida’s last budget holiday.
Random years ago today: July 27, 1999, Ingresso.
For those who so greatly enjoy sharing my yard work vicariously, today won’t be fun. You get some tech material simply because by the time I decided to quit reading the material, it was mid-afternoon. The decision is handed down, I am going to learn checksums as they apply to GPS. Why GPS? It is the only transmission source I have since the robot club disbanded. As usual, if you follow along, you’ll get the easy explanation or practical side, two items missing in every source I’ve ever found.
This is the work on the blue fan from Tennessee. I have waited a year to stumble across a good replacement motor. Nothing. Plus, I don’t understand the speed control, so one speed is going to have to do until I figure that out. This picture is tricky, on the left I’m pointing to the motor out of that carpet sweeper, and on the left s the metal fan still in the housing. The entire metal parts are so well-constructed, I intend to paint and polish this up quite a lot. An on-line source identifies the red-tinged bird as the common House finch. I thought finches were smaller.
Odds: 1 in 35. That’s the chances of someone who got the jab “showing signs” of heart trouble. The Internet continues to drift further from its roots. I go to a variety of Crayola sites to get accurate color codes. Not no more. Sites I know that are free and in some cases drafted to look like private blogs now won’t let me in. The only difference is my anti-spyware. The computers at the library let me right. Again, my protest is not so much the surveillance, but how they take pains to keep it a secret. It has become so cheap and insidious that now crayon companies are spying on you. For that reason alone, you should take precautions.
What luck, a slight breeze and it began clouding over, just enough to diffuse the killer rays. But not enough to work outside. Instead, I worked in the shed, putting together another tool box, this on for my brad nailer. It’s a slap together, but I’ve learned to make those sturdy enough, and I have templates now for cutting the groves and dados and rabbets and that kind of stuff. What I don’t have it the patience to make every box a beauty. Papayas. This picture shows the crop. You’d think it’s easy to count them. Try it. I say there are 17, the hillbilly says from up the ladder there are 23. At least if they’d ripen, I could make smoothies or something but like the last crop, these are staying green just forever.
As the sun came up, I was reading for the 20th(?) time a chapter on serial data. I kept nodding off, for I understand the concept but keep forgetting it. This, I opine, has two causes. One is like Morse, if there is nobody to lean with, you don’t use it. Two, bad educational timing. In my graduate years, we all knew about checksums, but the school demanded we learn parity, the protocol used on old phone modems. The common type was 9600 bps, which does not work on cell phones. Parity had other downsides and nobody really liked it. Every bit gobbled 12.5% of your time and space for that bit and it did not work if there were an even number of errors. Some classmates said the problem was worst during weather extremes.
All that parity consists of is each bit of a transmitted byte is examined by a gate, and arrangement of electrical switches that reacts according to a truth table. The gate is usually an XOR (exclusive OR) in my experience. This determines if the final bit of the byte is a 0 or a 1. GPS uses a checksum, which I’ll explain in a moment. This was barely touched on in my graduate year and once you graduate at that stage there is very little written material to continue learning—right, you had just graduated from the leading edge tech school and the Internet in those days consisted of AOL, a portal site that linked you to only crap they approved of.
This is where my grasp of checksums stalled. I read it, get it, but then never use it. Poof, it is gone. Not this time. The advantage of checksums is you send a string of bytes, then a number that corresponds to the data. The single example we studied was every so often, or at the end of the transmission, there was a sum of the number of 1s in the original. I’ll presume GPS is more sophisticated than that.
Another abandoned temple.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
By 3:30PM the shadows were just enough to let me dig out the far end of the new electric conduit, the sides had caved a bit. It’s now glued up and buried. That was heavy work with the shovel if you ask me. I wound up putting in five hours, including some raking and moving materials into place. The silo needs an outside light and I’m iffy on doing all that wiring, the way it would sit. The electric conduit, shown here with a PVC elbow, is the best kind of pipe. Because the best type is free and this is the last of the material from Tennessee.
The walkway on the north side is now cleared and I’ll be stacking the plywood for the new kitchen floor soon. Soon as I connect that electric to the water heater, half the floor can be finished. That’s renovating. Half at a time. Make this cabin good for another forty years, should they invent something that lets me stick around that long. Here, admire the box I built. It does not have the lock miter joints as I’m finding that to be as tricky as people told me. The bits work best along the grain, the opposite of what I need for the style I build.
Boost has shafted me again. I mentioned how they update your due date when you pay even a day late. But they leave your service on the old cycle. So although I’m paid up to the 10th of August, they block my email and searches on the 27th, my old cycle from February or so. Be careful in America, computers have allowed scam artists to do this everywhere. Boost Mobile will try to steal even $5 from you if they can get away with it.
How about those blacks in Chicago complaining about the illegals? “They disprespect us, rob us, harass us. We’re gonna take over. Nobody is going to be able to stop us from what we’re gonna do to them.”
Or how Hunter Biden’s lawyers tried for a plea deal but tried to bury a clause he would have immunity going back five years. But a sharp-eyed Judge spotted it. The Democrats are now going after gas water heaters under the guise of environment protection. Or the man who was wrongly imprisoned for 17 years being told if he seeks compensation, he will be charged for room and board. Congress, which as far as most are concerned are on the take, have now resorted to talking space aliens to distract the public from the Biden crimes. Trump soars to twice the popularity of all others combined.
ADDENDUM
My worst blog month for readership was March 2011. Let me re-phrase that, I mean blog n this current form. While I’ve never had a zero day, some of the older “calendar” posts are viewed mainly by people using the Yesteryear links. I’m referring to the period where this blog took on its current “storyboard” format and pictures became standard. I would distinguish that I take pictures to complement what I write, not like other blogs that write about what pictures they took. In that month, I had just 501 views.
Reviewing the blog shows it contains a good variety of topics and events that I honestly believe make for a more interesting life than otherwise. Yet on average less than 17 people per day have looked. This is from my own records, as Google, in their logic, only records back 13 years. They call that “all time”, which could be sincere for such short-sighted and short-minded people as they turned out to be.
On the flip side, that means while in the entire blog-o-verse, only 17 people had any interest in what I had to say that month, I’m going stay cheery suppose that is at least 12 people more than others. Which seems fair.
Did you know student’s who join the military have their loans paid by the taxpayer while serving? I suppose it’s okay, since it is similar to a job benefit. The problem emerges when not enough student’s sign up. Military funding is based on successful recruitment, and guess what? Nobody, even the soi-bois are enlisting. As funding drops, one of the first perks to go is those student loan dollars. Tough luck. I know too many who go military to escape debt.
Speaking of rats, have you heard of mixing corn meal with baking soda. Rats stomachs are highly acidic and here’s some trivia. Rats cannot burb or fart. The plan is to mix in baking soda, which reacts to acid with gas. The rat gets extremely bloated and crawls to its nest, Hopefully that nest is outdoors.
