One year ago today: September 1, 2023, the avocado died.
Five years ago today: September 1, 2019, a named photograph.
Nine years ago today: September 1, 2015, barely surrendering.
Random years ago today: September 1, 2004 lemondade.
Let’s begin the month with a tale from the trailer court. I have no desktop microphone. That may have to do with no room left on my desk. Last week at Skycraft, I mentioned spending $41, but actually I spent $71. Have I mixed up my story? Nope, if you read, I mentioned a budget of $65 for the trip. A while back I mentioned wanting to get a headset to work with voice recognition. This is a separate budget item. While at Skycraft, I spotted one of the old USB Koss headsets which have a fine reputation. I picked it up for $30 because I was there and comparison shopping on-line can be risky business. (They lie a lot.) Talk about a score!
For it’s intended purpose this is not a problem. I am sincerely impressed by the quality of sound and how the microphone itself seems to ignore background noise—I’m in a room with three fans and an A/C. Flipping the page on my calendar, I see we have an upcoming anniversary. If everything is included, such as piano recitals and choirs, on this Wednesday, I’ve spent 60 years on the stage, playing music in one form or another. Sixty years, friends.
Made me think of my first piano recital. Nobody told me when I started that I would have to play a recital. Nerve-wracking. That’s what it was. I don’t recall what I played, but it was at a large storage room in the old hospital where all the nuns, and my mother, worked. At the time I was so young girls were still yucky, but I remember two years later, in a different town, making enemies with Monica’s people. She was a babe and either her or her cousin always played last—the prize recital spot. It was a historical first that a boy played at all in the second half of that small town recital, much less playing last. It meant you were the best. Monica was one of the few gals in that town I never scored with. (Her mother refused to allow us to practice a duet, Monica got married the week after high-school graduation, and I don’t do married.) Speaking of pieces, the recital tune I played that June was “Minuet in G”.
The computer disk drive installation a is no further along, it now returns a message I am unfamiliar with. It shows the SATA initialization, but then ”NO LTHDR” and locks the system. Back at the old shop, we avoided Dell computers because of this. Their Windows isn’t real but some sort of licensed affair that could be cured by installing SP3 (service pack three). This next photo shows the Kerara amp, useless for bass, but destined for audiobooks. An interesting toy, it has an overdrive setting and a phono size headphone jack. Didn’t they quit making those headphones back in the late 1900s?
I had to resolder the battery leads, took a half-hour they were so short and tiny. Here’s a montage of the process, not complete yet. Yes, I have a pair of those clunker headphones, which I hardly ever use. Like when there is a really hard to hear bass line. I like to be aware of my surroundings. The DVDs that won’t play, well, it is not the DVDs, they check out. It was must coincidence that the disk I had in the slot previously would play, when it now looks like the DVD unit is bad. Has someone cast a spell on me?
You’ve read about my thoughts on careers with a long “incubation period”. The Arts are the primo example. It’s rarely the most talented people who have the long years to travel and poke about (research) and compose until something connects. I don’t know the author of “1421” but I know real people can’t drop everything and head off to the Mexican coast for a few months because they got an e-mail saying somebody thinks their uncle’s neighbor saw a sort-of-Chinese-looking tree growing in the jungle last year.
The usual giveaway is these authors never discuss what things cost or (heaven forbid) where they got the money. Some will mention if they scored a grant, but university is the ultimate incubator and playground of the idle rich. Face it, you cannot expect such privileged offspring to be concerned with mundane topics like the price tag. Good heavens, fellows, it’s all about humanity, not m-o-n-e-y. (Spell it, don’t say the dirty word.)
Compare to my writing. I tell you exactly what the trip cost, minus the gas, and I got the money from investments I made starting when I was 28, from my private pension, and partially from my social security. That is, not a penny from connections. It was a half a tank of gas, but I’m not sure what a gallon costs these days because my 2024 budget is for $3.55 per gallon and I’m a bit ahead on that.
Which means if I wanted to, I could take another short day trip, but y’know, I think I park it right here today and work on small projects. It is now 9:55AM and the family of red cardinals has been munching out since before dawn. I’ll start with a batch of pancakes and I’ve a mind to build a voltage divider. Years ago I wrote they were useless becasue the moment you connected any load to the circuit, as that changes the resistance and I thought the apparatus was to supply voltage, not vary it. There was nobody about to inform me this factor could be useful for something. It is used to control the signal to a transistor base.
I should build a voltage divider today and see if I can get it to wink an LED. Instead of biasing the voltage to match the Q of a transistor base, see if I can get it to vary at the macro level of an LED or a wag needle. I have the formula to bias the circuit, which means to use resistors to vary the signal only within the range of a transistor where it will amplify, not switch completely on or off.
Slums in Copnhagen.
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First, all that sawing. I triple stack the piece and it still took a lot of time to get enough for this small start. The next is the amount of lumber it takes. Lots. It is tiresome labor, especially getting the lower rows started. I quickly learned to level the back straps and just line the pieces up to keep it level. What you see here took up nearly half of the lumber from the coop. A significant loss is the tail end pieces that are too short. The pieces shown here are 11” with a 1-1/4” overlap each course.
I’ll know tomorrow morning if this is too much work for me. (I think so.) I have to be sparing with my coffee breaks after three hours, since any stop means I may not start again. One crew working tirelessly is these wasps or hornets in my lean-to. They have to go. That spot is right along the walk-path to the main shed. Experience says the hornet bomb is the only thing that’s going to work, but where did I place it? It’s not with the garden supplies, so these guys get to work non-stop. But not for long, found the spray, the deed is done. The label says wait 24 hours before removing the nest. I can do that.
Back to my hobby. How did that voltage divider technology ever get past me? For starters, none of the teaching material mentioned what it was used for. I never imagined it beyond recognizing the voltage would vary depending on what was connected. Back inside under the AC with coffee brewing, I guessed at the components and build my first divider. The output was an LED. I connected it to the CD player and whaddaya know. It was very faint, but the flicker matched the music. That’s a big success for me.
Some details are I chose 6 volts as the test as this is commonly available. Then two 1,000 resistors, as that means the midpoint will be 3 volts at the midpoint, which is enough to power the LED fairly bright. Then at the midpoint I connected a 4.7F capacitor as that is the smallest can I’ve got. Then applied to this capacitor is the varying signal from the CD player, which varies the voltage at the midpoint although there is no direct connection (through the capacitor). And it worked well enough to see results
. I had to mickey mouse the connections, so give me some time to rig up something better. Then I will try both larger and smaller capacitors to see which works the best. The next step is to replace the LED with a transistor and bias the input. I never thought I’d understand things even this far, but now I’ll be very surprised if I don’t build a working amplifier soon.
No day trip, I stayed home sorting tubes, an adventure that is coming to a close. The tubes are just too difficult to move by eBay and I don’t see any other way. I’ll run some numbers, but I think I will suggest we find a wholesaler who will take the lot. Hopefully a higher price because the database saves him a couple hundred hours of sorting. The radio news, other than going on about the number of people traveling on Labor Day weekend, golly what a surprise every year, is on about how close the race is between Harris & Trump. Not even close, but a signal they are going to try to old ballot dump trick again. But, as the MAGA people say, this one is too big to rig. Polls show Trump supporters, as distinct from Republicans, are going to turn out in record numbers. This could be the event of the decade, possibly the century. It will determine how America exists for all time to come. If Trump does not win, I predict secession at the least; civil war at most.
It is people with IRA investments that should worry the most. Corruption costs a lot of money and the Democrats see two places to steal it—as long as they wait until after the election. They are real estate and IRAs. Property owners are now forced to vote if they hope to survive, as the Democrats are planning on taxing non-realized capital gains. That means if your house goes up in value, say $50,000, you owe tax on that. Even though you did not sell. One thing this will do is put a cap on surging house prices. Now the IRAs, that is sacred territory. The Democrats will face massive opposition, but that opposition is disorganized rabble.
TMOR (to my overseas readers), the situation with IRAs is they are money tucked away by workers over their working careers, for which they received a tax deduction at the time. The plan was after they retired, they would then begin to withdraw that money and pay tax on it at the rates that apply in the future. What could go wrong? Two things. One, people are living way past the predicted 65 years. Two, many are so successful they never withdraw all the money and leave it to their survivors. The government has already gnawed away at this by requiring withdrawals after age 71 and through inheritance taxes. But this time they are going after the paper gains again. Very unpopular, indeed.
It won’t affect me much, as I have no IRAs. All were wiped out in 2003-2005 medical bills. I never had that much in IRAs anyway, as I saw this one coming.
ADDENDUM
Now we know how the Chinese found longitude. They had their own Greenwich meridian, which passed through, where else but Peking. There are four events in a lunar eclipse, which they timed. To prove I’ve done my homework, they are the moment the Moon enters the umbral shadow, totality, as it leaves the shadow, and when it leaves the umbra. The observer would find his meridian, that imaginary line that runs over your head from the North to South Poles. Using their very accurate star charts, they would record which star was passing the meridian at each moment.
When the observers got back (apparently most did not), they would compare their timing with when the same stars crossed the Peking meridian. Clever. To get around, they knew about lodestones and magnetic declination. There are referrals to Chapter 6, which I have not read yet, so stand by. Later, I read the material and it contributes little of what I want. It points out curiosities, such as when Magellan sailed through the straits north of Australia, he took the identical path that the Chinese had marked on maps to the spice islands hundreds of years earlier.
There are also Chinese maps showing the Great Barrier Reef and exit channels. Those are curious because you don’t know them unless you’ve sailed them. Once between the reef and the mainland, most sailing ships are trapped by the currents, unable to get through gaps in the coral. Sadly for me, this reading was done at the expense of a fitful night’s sleep, something I rarely experience. For me, this is off balance and my spider sense says this time it is more than a warning. So, peeps, if this blog suddenly stops, I’m likely a goner.
