One year ago today: May 24, 2023, mentioned here in 1990.
Five years ago today: May 24, 2019, 1984 and 2003.
Nine years ago today: May 24, 2015, west of Deland.
Random years ago today: May 24, 2014, yet another guitar player.
Eleven birdie visitors, four couples and three singles. Some will now share the big feeder. The absence of squirrels is such a treat. It was 80°F by 9:00AM so I’ll leave the mister and fountain on all day. The Prez e-mails he can sing “Family Tradition” in G, so there’s a reason to stay inside by the air conditioner. It’s got a weak bass line but I know exactly how to ramp that up. The Prez never minds when you give anything a bluegrass tinge. His vehicle is the same age as mine, 13 years. The average in the US is now 12.9 years, mostly due to outrageous prices. I will never buy a new car again.
[Author's note: This photo gets top billing because it is totally unique, something you've never seen before, and from a distance it looks like a salad bar.]
What sort of volume are we ready to ship? The small GE tube count in 305 units. The RCA tubes are around 253. A few operators are dumpng tubes for as little as $3 on eBay but the floor price seems to hover around $5 each plus costs. These two brands are the bulk of the inventory and most of it is not priced yet, I’m more looking for the odd rare or high-priced units. I’ve found roughly only fifteen so far. This is not a business to get rich in, but once the data base is complete, it’s a breeze.
I took two short breaks, both for study. The topics today were more on universal plotting sheets and PWM, pulse width modulation. I needed info on some of the finer points, I noticed a lack of curiosity on what’s published and posted. Nobody mentioned that the size of the sheets is largely determined by one day’s sailing distance. The chart represents 240 square miles and most passages would be a straight line. As with other aspects of this study, I’m mostly learning the northern and western hemispheres. I would have to sell a lot of tubes before needing this skill on my yacht off the Australian west coast.
The other topic was PWM, which I was looking at wrongly. Ah, that’s because I did not build a working model, or I would have caught myself. I viewed the pulse duration as a power source, albeit a very weak one. It is actually only a signal and that means connecting it to different poser source if you want it to do much more than dim an LED or click a small buzzer. I would want something that demos the modulation, it brings back that model train I saw in Colorado back when it was a nice place. I knew it was a microcontroller making the movement so realistic but at the time did not know any of the theory.
Work with me here, what is something I could rig up so that some nearby condition produces a signal I can use PWM to do something novel or fancy? It the only condition is it must use components that are alread
y on hand. That has been so for many years, so don’t worry about it. Just come up with the idea. Usually on-line you can find some sharp dude who has built something clever out of any electronics, but not PWM. I’ll give you the quick explanation. DC current cannot be varied, but you can fake it by switching the juice of and on very rapidly. The circuit will behave as if the average voltage is there all the time.
What’s that noise? Ah, a much needed deep rain. I used the time to search on eBay, It’s like searching for real estate, their mentality does not match the way real people do their searches. For example, it is impossible to sort out just the tubes that sell for $15 or more. Instead, you get boxes of tubes instead of singles. Wow, it is really coming down out there, but it has been hot for several consecutive days and that’s how much the air over the Gulf soaks it up.
Old jail, Tharmogindah.
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What a great lazy day. Looking out at the heat, although I was out there around a half hour. Yep, in the shade looking at the heat, that’s how I remember Venzuela. I wonder if I would ever go back there? My godson would be nearly 30 years old now. But both flying and travel in general have become too dangerous. Because of diversity hire, I don’t know of anyone who flies any more unless there is no choice.
Nonsense, there is a stop-at-nothing demand for decent wives for men over 30. It’s a case of supply and demand gone wrong. All singles over a certain age have to put up with the snarky comments about looking in the wrong places, trying the church, and the perpetual standby that your standards are too high.
Is it true some lady chugged a $200 bottle of cognac rather than give it up to airport security? I hope so, this whole customs thing is out of hand and those agents need a comeuppance. I mean, who really cares if somebody buys a new watch or pair of shoes overseas? A massive explosion at the SpaceX test station in Texas just in. The full-scale test was slated for this month, I was beginning to wonder.
So you know, the Mars spaceship used 33 of these rocket motors in the first stage. This is only possible by massive computer control. Called the Raptor, this engine is supposed to be mass-produced and is reusable. The goal is to fly a million people to Mars. It is my one real regret about dying is that I will not see the discovery of life on another planet. I’m certain it is there in some form. But the politicians wasted forty years.
Speaking of 40 years, did you know that goldfish can live that lon? How about those people who tire of pets and flush them down the toilet. Now the Great Lakes has a problem is nine-pound specimens crowding out the native species.
No, I am not going to use ExpressVPN. It’s too expensive, and I question any system that requires your name and bank account to then says you are anonymous. I felt VPN should have been built into every computer from the word go. I’ll use VPN when somebody invents a product I can buy for cash and install without registering a thing.
ADDENDUM
Apple, that computer company that used to have a good reputation, is trying to make out that it was a software bug which allowed the recovery of deleted photos. Sure. And once again we hear of labor shortages, this time truck drivers. That’s like saying there is a shortage of ditch diggers. Ticketmaster is under the scope some fifty years after this blog warned it was a Mafia operation. SpaceX may be going public, valued at $200 billion. I dunno, do I have any money left to invest in rocket ships? Do I wait for another explosion?
Later, I kept looking for a PWM project. It turned out the same as looking for a good wife. You keep blaming yourself, thinking it’s there but you can’t find it. Then, much wasted time later you realize the facts. I did find a kit sold by JameCo that converts a varying DC signal into a pulse. This was intended to be coupled with a sensor, most of which operate 0 to 5V. The kit has 40 parts that cost $23, so when you add it all up, you might as well just use a $30 Arduino.
