August 5, 2024

Yesteryear
One year ago today: August 5, 2023, free, for $10.
Five years ago today: August 5, 2019, at the Ritz.
Nine years ago today: August 5, 2015, their typical attitude.
Random years ago today: August 5, 2005, my old printer server.

           It’s a 3D printer in the box. And it looks brand new. And I don’t know how to use it or have a place for it. Tomorrow, we work the silo, it has a few large shelves. That has to become many more smaller shelves and a spot for this printer. We stand where we left this device some ten years go—without a method to create new precise designs without time-exhausting manipulation of graphics files. I’ll give it a test run but don’t expect it to print a toothpick holder this year.

           News from England. The government is using a few disorganized riots in London to impose terrible sanctions. It’s easy to forget the English are the birthplace of modern freedoms because they overthrew impossible odds before. Too bad they’ve never learned to quit replacing one tyrant with the next. As Diderot put it: “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

           I visited the Thrift this morning for a low temperature heat gun, a.k.a. a hairdryer. My secondary goal is to spot what they have by way of electronics that I can resell. I buy lots of it there, only to date for reverse-engineering. Today I got a super realistic dummy security cam for $6 and a remote doorbell for $2 (I want only the radio transmitter part. Not so fast with this doorbell, it plays 30 tunes. Many classics including “Fur Elise” and speaks greetings in Siamese. Let’s get the imagination working on this one. Nothing else looked promising but I need something else to sell. Let’s take a s still a relative lot of work for me. If all there was to it was taping the box and slapping a label, it would just make the grade—but there’s plenty more to it. What’s saving it is the consideration of what else I could have closer look at that.
           My cut of the tubes sold today is $38.46, not bad. Shipping idone to net that much money today while sitting around in a rainstorm and drinking coffee without a shirt on. What was nice this morning was a sale of four tubes in one order. The database would excel (ha-ha) and putting orders like this together almost instantly (all the flat-file fields are normalized). Although I would like orders to accumulate for a week and get it done in one swoop, I would not at all mind making an extra $30 per day. That amount somehow seems “right” for a retirement supplement.

           Iran is persisting with the threats. My guess is they will attack from Lebanon with Katyusha missile barrages. You may recall the review in this blog on the suicide drone called “”Witness”, which we priced out at around $4,000 back on February 3, 2024. They have had time to build these by the thousands. All financed by the gasoline we put in our SUVs.
           The drones are launched by attaching a simple release bracket on the deck of a Toyota half-ton and mounting the drone on top of this assembly. A helper pulls the ripcord to start the motor. Using any straight segment of highway, the driver guns it up to launch speed, around 95 mph and signals the helper, who pulls a release lever. There is no reason they could not launch thousands of these each hour.
           When? Tomorrow. That when the Muslim that that prohibits violence ends. It will trash southern Lebanon. The Lebanese don’t have the weapons or economy to attack, they have essentially given up the southern borderlands to the fanatics. The so-called Israeli occupation was to push the rockets back beyond range. Drones can reach hundreds of miles. They are not that accurate and have a 100 pound payload. They fly at just over 100 mph and can be brought down with well-aimed shotgun fire. Meaning they are best suited for a swarm attack.

Picture of the day.
Air India Economy Class
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           I took some measurements in the shed, I will have to spend a couple hours moving things around, and there is a vermin problem there as well. It can only be fixes by completely drywalling the interior which I lack both the money and the gumption. I’ll build, I think, a secure cupboard and hope that keeps not the tubes, but the paper cartons. Rats and such like to chew them for nesting material. Mrs. Rat was caught overnight, like I said, by following King Rat’s scent right into the trap. She got a trip to the library, which is where your blog pictures are getting uploaded these days.

           Helping myself to a free copy of the New Yorker, I’m surprised anybody reads such leftist garbage, but it is wise to know and study the enemy. That, and because I am a writer, I’m also a reader and that magazine is mostly prose. I knew they’d have an anti-Trump article, so let’s find it. Here we go, comparing Trump’s ear to van Gogh. They took objection to Trump saying the bullet pierced his ear, saying they prefer the term “grazed”. he ear does not, at least in Trump’s case, merit euphemisms and besides, van Gogh used a big bandage. Trump’s was, they say, more like a panty liner. Nope, the ear does not count, says the New Yorker. They claim this photo of Trump’s fully-healed ear proves everything is fake.

           The warm weather staves of my old injuries but dang, it was cold today. In the 70s, I mean. Not chilly cold, but enough to trigger some mild aches, which in turn gave me a reason to take the rest of the day off. I read another page on site reduction (navigation) tables—for me this is difficult and slow material. It’s beginning to melt, how when computers arrived, it became possible to map the entire surface of the world by 1° increments that would fit into a single 600 page book. It does not help that they are called assigned points (AP) and are similar in use and concept to assumed points (AP). Because these points cover the entire surface of the planet between 70°N and S, there is always one of them within 30nm (nautical miles) of where you happen to be. Even if you don’t know where you are.

           So while I still struggle with the tables, I finally see the concept. If you can find out the information about the nearest one of these points, most of the calculations are done for you. Does that make sense? If I know everything about a position within 30 miles of where I am, then sextant reading, even a poor one, will make a darn good approximation of my distance from that point. Because you are taking sextant readings from points so far away, of then thousands of miles, you have to be really incompetent to not do a reasonable job. That may not be plain at first, but to change even a tenth of a minute, you’d have to move many miles.

           Next, I wanted for some time to watch the movie “Decoration Day” with James Garner, even if he always plays the same sort of character, in this case a retired judge. He goes to bat for a childhood friend who refuses a Medal of Honor, and I’m about to find out why. Curious, I took a peek at satellite views of northern Scotland. It’s a moonscape, denuded of trees, and no human presence other than roads, some clearings where there are trees, and lines of small dark objects.

Last Laugh