One year ago today: January 22, 2023, failed anti-squirrel attempt.
Five years ago today: January 22, 2019, Africa’s screwed-up.
Nine years ago today: January 22, 2015, remember Dan Lewis?
Random years ago today: January 22, 2010, dang, no Shakespeare.
Two British warships collided in the Red Sea. How many times we gotta tell you, fire those coders and hire real programmers. While you still can. Poon (Nikki) is pushing for a law that would require people to post their real names when they go on-line. Now there is a measure of tyranny most sheeple don’t even suspect. I’m the other side, I don’t think you can get an honest opinion out of a man who has to show ID first. How about the latest MicroSoft “Service Agreement”. To use their software, you must allow them to comb through every electronic aspect of you life, including e-mails, posts, searches, and links. That’s your Skype, Xbox, chats, and every social site, video history, cloud file, correspondence, and 100+ other sources they get their mitts on. Rumor is a team of contract experts could not unravel the wording in the lastest “terms of service”
[Author's note: in the year 2525 when this blog is recognized as the definitive record of life in these times, there may be confusion about these boxes. I've referred one as the fastest, but once I made some repairs it wasn't. Just bear in mind these are journal entries, not meant for meaningless accuracy. This shows the panel style, which I took zero training, I came up with the entire process myself. Although I did see it before, not how it was done. Thus, I call these "JeePee boxes", this is the one that needed repair. But that brings up another point, last year I could not have repaired a box like this, return tomorrow for an explanation.]
So, I crawled back in the sack and slept past noon, here I am. I eventually made it out to the shed and worked on boxes. The one I had hopes for, cut on the repaired table saw, has issues. I’ll have to modify it because, even with my best measurements and cuts, there are still things to go wrong from inexperience. For example, I still have trouble cutting boards exactly square. Except by luck, neither of my best saws can get it exactly right. That means I cannot cut floating panels quite to spec just not quite there. This rears up with smaller boxes like this time. Everything hand fits, but when I go to permanently fasten the joints, something bends, cracks, won’t fit, or misaligns.
> Yet, I’m proud to have gotten far enough to have these woes. Medium size boxes, at least 10” in any one dimension, I can rattle off any time. Here’s the box I build in 15 minutes for my heat guns—without the lid and hardware, but stil. To home my skills with wood, I look to the tiny rigs and plates I have built for electronics projects. Two different skill sets but I say it confirms I can work with tiny pieces—but how to combine these? One idea is to find a material that does not behave like wood. I may have found it. PVC. There are plenty of ways to make PVC into a flat workable piece.
How about the NY flight that got grounded at the last moment when a passenger notice a string of bolts missing out of a wing panel. Yep, diversity hires, for sure. Glad I quit airline travel in 2003. We are entering the era of bring-your-own-parachute and passenger-oriented quality control. Boeing has only just now admitted that one of its airplanes caught fire in the air and somehow you just know that Boeing making alterations to parts and software after it was certified isn’t just isolated goings-on.
Here is the rotor for the “reed motor”. Once again I discover I don’t have the equipment for really fine cuts. I’ve been getting away with, shown here, cutting pieces a tiny bit over and sanding them down to fit. This ring is destined to have four or six tiny permanent magnets spaced around the outer perimeter. Unlike wood, PVC cannot be easily fixed for small errors. You can’t see the ring (rotor) well in this photo, but chances are you will come to know this well soon. It’s the white piece of PVC, you may be able to see a tiny hole drilled on the outside face.
Inuvik-Tuktoyaktut highway.
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Rain or cold means indoors, it also means neat little projects. For years, I’ve wanted to build a real “memory” circuit. ROM was easy, I want RAM. That’s a life-size working circuit that can be configured, in this case, to display any pattern suppllied by a binary input. Unlike the ROM circuit some of you may remember, this would have to employ a microcontroller instead of keys. With ROM the output stayed on as long as you held the key down. RAM has to use multiplexing in the form of POV, for “persistence of vision”. That is, the pattern flashes on and off so fast your brain sees the results. I’ve got the theory worked out in my head, rows of power wire and colums of ground wire, with a transistor at each junction. Thus a 10x10 display will require 100 transistors.
There’s a big do about cancer and parasites like it was some new discover. I once read an article on the connection that was published in 1903. Myself, I think the agent is mitochondria, but that’s the point the literature got too complicated for me to follow. But at least I tried. Can we say the same for the sudden big rush to go back to the Moon? I read a tech article that 100 missions are planned before 2030, and ongoing speculation about “resources” on the Moon. I don’t know if that will help a generation who will have to re-learn 1960s technology but can’t punctuate a sentence or add numbers without a calculator. I’m with the bunch who say sure, there are lots of goodies up there, but it will be a long time before they become cheaper than flying them from here. How strange that long after man has been to the Moon they are still flying tiny probes and landers there, and not doing such a great job of it.
There is one exception, called Helium 3. This was only theoretical when I took my last physics course, but it is abundant in Moon soil. Other than hydrogen, Helium 3 is the only stable isotope that has more protons than electrons, meaning it can undergo fusion reactions without producing radioactive waste. But no successful reactor of a usable scale has every been built for Helium 3 and the technology may be decades away. Last I read, such reactors must use magnetic or intertial confinement so you won’t find me standing next to any Homer who thinks he can operate one. But if somebody pulls it off, there is energy for the next 10,000 years for the asking. Yep, what would the world be like if, 40 years ago, I’d had the money to finish school?
Having time to read all my science feeds I see the police have been combining DNA samples with A.I. to create a “face” of the suspect. None of this technology is proven, but the problem was the police have been running these drawing through facial recognition software, which is banned in the USA. The threat is not the tecnology, but the history of the authorities abusing every power that was ever given to them. Let them use facial recognition and it won’t be long before your kids start getting arrested because some chink millennial thinks all white men look alike. That reminds me of a great comeback to a Chinese who complains that to White men, all Chinese look alike. Ask him if he can tell an Irishman from an Englishman from a German from a Swede.
ADDENDUM
The Mars-copter disappeared two days ago. But contact was re-established by a pre-emptive tactic. After a period of no activity, the copter starts up and flies up around 40 feet (it’s designed maximim) and gives a handshake—but that is bare minimum contact, and only tells the Rover it’s alive, nothing else. The NASA crew did get the asteroid can open, revealing it is full of ordinary space dust. They took three months to get the lid off, since running it under hot water didn’t work. Japan’s “sniper” probe is shut down, hoping a change of Moon seasons will repower the batteries. Named for a claimed ability to land on exact target spots, the lander soon exhibited a behavior to be associated once again with coders.
That is, the explicit opposite of what it was supposed to do. Coding versus programming, they were warned. It landed facing the wrong way from the Sun to charge the batteries, and it was designed in a way it cannot turn around. Why do I say a coding error? Because that is how binary mistakes happen when people who cannot read binary used binary code. Got that? There is not half-wrong or partial failure as would happen with an analog or properly programmed error. With code it is all or nothing. Still more incriminating, is that somehow the code tests out on Earth, but fails on the Moon. It means binary values have been shifted after the fact. Real programmers know to watch for that.
NASA still suffers from its insane diversity intiative. Flying non-Americans and non-pilots into space is far more risky than equipment failure. It’s another dastardly problem I associate 100% with the insane Space Shuttle fiasco in 1980. They began flying so-called payload specialists instead of astronauts. People with no loyalty to the American people, no obligation to follow orders, and no training on how the spacecraft operated. An article in this month’s ARStechica reminded us of the “person of Chinese ethnicity” who refused to return because his experiement failed. He openly admits he cared nothing for the crew, only his “Asian culture” and disappointing his family.
At the time, I recommended the addition of pods with a 24 hour oxygen supply and no communication gear for anyone who endangers the rest of the crew. Launch them into orbit with zero chance of changing their minds. To this day, NASA remains hyper-secretive about the exchange and upon return, the chink went into hiding. The shuttle crews did not trust civilians and ever since that flight, it is well known that NASA put padlocks on the hatches. (They were designed to open outwards with the turn of a single lever.)
