One year ago today: February 5, 2023, bird visitor day?
Five years ago today: February 5, 2019, only with me.
Nine years ago today: February 5, 2015, gears, photos, drones.
Random years ago today: February 5, 2010, early Arduino code.
Before I talk music, here’s a freaky coincidence. I had written an email early this morning and as I hit the enter key, the whole world went dark and quiet. OMG, I’ve short-circuited the universe flashed in my head, then I realized that can’t be and I never did any acid back in the 80s. Turns out at 6:00AM on the button, the electric company decided to change the power pole across the way. I noticed the guy scanning the brand on the wood and he said they inventory the poles, this one was 101 years old. He noticed my look like what sort of neighborhood is this, but explained they get the poles from Georgia. On good years they stockpile up to a thirty year supply, so this pole might not have been planted until 1950-ish.
Missing that paying gig got me designing some advertising and I see my old methods don’t work. Gave me a headache trying. Normally, I don’t give direct email to anyone but the inner circle. Instead, I use private accounts whose only function is to forward emails to a place of my choosing. And I choose one of the truly anonymous accounts set up way back in the 1990s. The problem is, I’m running low on them. Now there is a further complication. MicroSoft has spotted the circular chain of references.
Worse, this same thing has now happened over at Protonmail. They will not longer allow using a different proton account as verification. I’ve not kept up on the reasoning of all this but it stinks of government regulation. I’ll get something, I just have to dig far enough back into my files. But some of my really old accounts make enter the password three times, then log you out saying that’s too many attempts. No, I did not type it wrong, this is a deliberate action from hotmail. I do have a couple of gmail dead ends but I’m loathe to use those.
I thought of the option of using the Prez, but he is not only completely security-illiterate, he is openly against it. I’m like, wow, don’t go there. I know people at the phone place like that, their lives were an open shambles with the world laughing at them. So they figured nobody else should have any right to privacy either. Pretty amazing bunch. Now the Prez, his approach is heavily influenced by having teenagers at home. We are similar in age but he’s rolling down a different set of tracks. I could not trust him to forward the emails since he would not recognize any security breaches during the process. He may even think there are no breaches, or that the provider has some legal right to your information. I’ll come up with something, Windows XP works well because the latest millennialware does not work well on the system. It’s not perfect and has to be constantly tweaked, but it burns throught a lot of the bullshit and is much easier to maintain, even if you don’t know what’s going on.
Somewhere in Albania.
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For electronics buffs, I took a closer look at home-made electromagnets. For most people, they are not going to work like the diagrams shown on-line unless you follow the directions very, very closely. Because none of them give you the complete information. For openers, most do not explain why you should be using a C or D battery cell. Try it with something else and you get something between a very hot wire to burn your fingers or a dead short. I needed something more elaborate than a nail and some wire, so the winding becomes important. I’ve discovered I don’t have any proper winding equipment. A good assembly requires many turns of wire, the thick wire by hand takes forever, the thin wire loves to break half-way through the wind. In fact, I have a picture of that, let me find it.
Downtown, I grabbed a coffee and the crosswords. Got stumped on one square but nothing’s gone right today. When I got home, the power was back on but I left the house in complete silence, just taking it all in. City living desensitizes background interference and dead silence has a mysterious “sound” of its own. To have something to show for the day, I attempted to install some of my gallery of known good apps, free off all millennialware. What a chore, it’s as if they feel they have a right to make you do things their way. I got some installed, others demanded various on-line connections that were not there before, the most annoying being this MicroSoft Secure app in various forms. Could not turn it off or bypass it.
Next, I figured I’d look for a free version of the 2019 movie “Yesterday” which everybody around me has seen. About this Hindu who wakes up in a world where nobody has heard of The Beatles. I knew they would eventually make pirating difficult, in fact I’m shocked it took them twenty years. I could not hack my way through, but then, I have not tried everything yet. When I record with Audacity, the get dead spots but that could be this cheap-ass computer. The thing is, the command to remove dead space automatically won’t work now. I eventually did it by accident. That is usually not popular around here. Later, I see it worked only on some spots, but how did I do it? There is the option of sampling silence and using the find and trim command but it is cumbersome and inaccurate.
I once more looked for ways to monetize this blog without memberships or advertising. I keep hoping somebody will invent a want to charge fractional cents per view that actually works. That was part of the original plan, back when Paypal promised they would be as anonymous as cash. Blogging, far from being dead as some predicted, has established itself as a very enduring part of the net. Think of the things that came and went, but that presents other challenges. This blog breaks many of the cardinal rules. This blog is not confined to one narrow topic (niche), and it is not about my audience.
My little blog has created its own style, which admittedly does not work that well with Adobe and I rarely exceed the statistical on-line word count of 2,450 per day. But at the going rate of $100 for 500 words, I’d be worth millions. I’m still looking at the avatar version, but as usual, that will happen when I make it happen.
Here’s a bit more reading, becauce I took a closer look at the 595 chip, the one that takes serial data and sends it out a parallel. My old Arduino text glosses over a few points I’d like to be clear. These are more about how the clock works, the clock that doesn’t tell time. And how does the circuit know when it has received 8 bits? There is no counter. Last, I need to memorize hex numbers all over again. I learn it and forget it quite regularly. The Arduino works on both if you tell it and the tradeoff is your time. Send it hex nibbles 2 at a time, or actually type in the binary ones and zero. It takes more time, but you can kind of see the pattern you want.
There is now a considerable amount of tutorials for the Arduino, more than I could catch up with. The quality is also spotty. What do I dislike most? The people who make them. Some are not photogenic enough and they should know that. It’s like talking about sex with some fat lady, even if she’s right, you don’t really want to hear it from her. Then there’s the people who try to act like me but they are no good at it, those ones really irk me. You know who you are. I also dislike forums, a monumental waste of time because most participants have not done their homework.
ADDENDUM
In global news, let’s see what we got. China is getting all sorts of mleage on the standoff in Texas, with reports circulating that it is a new Civil War. The Chinese have been known to exaggerate these things. Advertising revenue for the Super Bowl continues to drop. Biden is accusing grocery stores of overcharging, so as to blame others for his inflation. American food stores operated on paper-thin margins. The movie “Jaws” came out 49 years ago.
