One year ago today: May 3, 2023, the English church.
Five years ago today: May 3, 019, pie.
Nine years ago today: May 3, 2015, the castle challenge.
Random years ago today: May 3, 2006, craigslist in its heyday.
Muggy summer days don’t bring out my best. I opted for some indoor time and some computer research. I quit following the Cheyenne, a supercomputer used to model weather patterns. It was slated to last five years, ending in late 2021 and that is the reason I quit looking. They went on this massive “climate change” kick and supported every phony government announcement on the far Left. There was no supply chain disruption due to COVID, for example. If you lived here, you knew it was due to deliberate government interference. It’s finally for sale for a $2,500 starting bid. The auction ends today.
This photo is the Tascam so-called “PortaStudio”. The fact is, it’ts a one-channel recorder. You may hear more of this unit shortly.
The quiet battle behind the scenes over facial recognition rages on, but not with your interests in mind. The contention is that police get to use it but civilians don’t, and MicroSoft does not like that. There are some other issues, but tiny by comparison. The patterns, by the way, come mainly from your driver’s license, and I warned you about that fifty years ago. The police to no need to conduct in-the-wild background checks to hand you a speeding ticket. The problem is trick to understand—if they pull you over for a ticket, legally that is all they can do. The instant they turn it into something else, you have lost a valuable freedom.
Yet another A.I. app has turned on its creators, the sub-class of society who demand equality instead of earning it. The Google product, like it’s predecessors, has gone racist despite methodical hard-coded “safeguards”. Once allowed to feed on fact, the A.I. outcome so far has been 100% against what the liberals spend their days decrying. And something is funny about the version we’re fed about the police tearing down the tent city in Dublin. They are not shunting the illegals back across the border into North Ireland. They are mostly Rwandans who say they are afraid England will deport them back to Rwanda. I say not Ireland’s problem. It’s like Canadians letting things go for a shit and then demanding help. It’s how they do things.
Things have sure gone downhill out there. I got another response from the purchasing agent at Harmonix, following my request that I was able to collaborate with any of their technicians, that is, to give him first pick of what I’ve got. A mild breeze all afternoon let me sort most of the remaining tubes so I know what’s there. A lot of work, that’s what, hence my impetus to find which tubes will move the fastest. This purchasing agent is a deadbeat, I don’t think he knows what collaborate even means.
In other news, my oldest tools are wearing out. This week alone, two of my electric drills have jammed bits into the chuck and cannot be released. The small router with a similar malfunction almost splits the casing rather than release that bit, so I priced a replacement y’day in Winter Haven. No thanks, $119.
Banaba Island, 2.49 sq. mi.
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Friday, a day off means boxes and rice and blogs and bass. May your own retirment be as quietly full. Often things that don’t make the blog tell a story of how to keep life interesting. Such as today I also read about The Who, navigation, bad historical decisions, I sorted some vacuum tubes, filled the birdfeeders, and made up enough rice for a few days. A nice surprise was a discovery about Golden Ratio boxes, as depicted here. As long as the thickness of the lumber is equal to a difference in dimention, the boxes will nest inside each other.
In my drawers full of gear, I do not have an ordinary stereo recorder, a portable unit for recording right off the PA system. I have a small handheld but they are not suitable. No input controls, guages, and they tend to turn themselves off when you are up on the stage. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve lost great gig recordings over this. My last good unit was a cassette deck, now long gone. I have that Tascam PortaStudio but that title is most misleading. You cannot record eight tracks. You record them one at a time, them play them back as a mix. I want a recorder that plugs into my PA RCA jacks.
Over the years I’ve got plenty of equipment I’ve only used a few times but none of it is a recorder. I wish they still make the old SONY Walkmans, which make excellent tapes. Cassettes are so easy to use they’ve made a small comeback, but all the portable recording gear is crap. My decision is to try two methods. One, I will use a jack adapter to see if the old GE recorder does the job. Some of this old equipment has amazing fidelity. Then, I will use the digital Tascam, although I’m already put off by the seven step procedure to get it recording.
The latest in my box tech learning is magnetic latches. I finally made one today, this is the result. Poor pictures but I blame the camera. You got your metal strike plate, note it is set flush in a cut-out. On the lid is the tiny magnet, the most powerful I have. It will get replaced, but the concept works. The problem is the latch is not strong enough to pick the box up with the handle. The boxes reflect another aspect of my work—I don’t like flimsy boxes. My units are not intended solely as containers, they are meant to function as storage and transportation as well. The result are boxes for paper clips that are ¾” thick. Almost armor plated, but I’m never suffered damage or deterioration to anything ever placed in my boxes.
ADDENDUM
Much later in the evening, we have a partial solution to the recording issue. Build another box. If the Tascam won’t record more than one track, we dig out the old Behringer 502, the fake “five channel” mixer that is really 2-1/2 channels. It has five inputs and I can work with that. Ah, here it is, marked 2014, ten years old What do I have slated for tomorrow. Nothing, but we do have a tank of gas and $93.11 left in the travel budget since March. Let’s combine the two for the weekend. A box that fits the recording gear, cables, and power supplies. I remember the transformer for that mixer weighs more than the mixer.
Where do we begin? How about we go through all the old cameras looking for the largest SD card. Ah, here we go, the Blackweb backup camera, 32 gigs. Will Tascam handle that capacity. Hmmm, apparently not, or is it a bad disk? Isn’t in wonderful how progress since 1990 really consists of substituting one annoyance for another. No easy way to tell what part of the process is the screwup.
