One year ago today: December 24, 2024, who’s further ahead.
Five years ago today: December 24, 2020, $81, organic.
Nine years ago today: December 24, 2016, classic Rebel adventure.
Random years ago today: December 24, 2013, Santa in 2013.
Another perfect day partly wasted, as I had trouble getting underway. I fell back asleep until one of the pleasures of Florida living woke me. A bit of deadfall strikes the roof and rolls off the edge, sounding exactly like a small animal on the run. Freaks out newcomers the way it can stop and start again. Festus is reslated for 5:00PM today, so be sure to get the latest on that. I’ve never minded Xmas Eve alone, it’s kind of an acquired preference watching others pretend to have fun. And I still have not spent y’day’s tube money.
This is the pallet wood from last week, now upgraded and matched to thickness for each pair of opposite sides. It took two slats of similar dimension for each box, and the long sides represent the best of the pieces. Each is built from five pieces of wood, these are grooved to accept a 1/8th inch hardwood panel for a bottom. They are not meant to box heavy items, but nails are okay, that’s where these are destined—screw bins. The knobs are from a big bag of drawer pulls I picked up for next to nothing. They do give the appearance a bit of a nice boost, don’t you think?
The panel bottom has proven the easiest style to make around here and they (the bottom panels) are purchased from the cull cart. The pallet lumber is often dry to the point of brittle so some skill is needed to work the chop saw for the upgrade. It has to lack visible cracks and felt for invisible cracks because you see the construction tends to flatten any cupped boards, which get a good whack from the pneumatic stapler during assembly. The boxes are not corner-squared, it turns out they are within parameters just tapped into place using a carpenter’s square as a guide.
Why, they even look a little bit “official” once the laser-etched labels are applied. One of the boxes was 70% finished last day, but here is today’s run. Did I get much accomplished today? I dunno, compared to what? Compared to whom?
Another look at the recent test of a rail gun by Japan. Just by looking, you can see they have scaled back the size. Makes sense, the US model was vast overkill and the value of direct fire hitting targets way out of visual or sensor range is questionable. Same with a projectile punching through ten steel plates. What for? The propellant is a plasma that is rumored to chew away at the rails after just a few shots. So a slower, lighter, less capable system might be the better idea. Something that can punch holes through ships from just out of gun range.
Then I viewed some footage of the Russian tanks being knocked out in the Ukraine. There are no T-90s but I saw plenty of T-62s. Some of these machines are nearly as old as me. Ukraine claims 2,000 tank kills which does not surprise me since electronics has changed the rules. There is a connection here with my Arduino studies caused by my condition. I had hoped the study of Arduino would teach me about how the sensors worked. It does not, instead Arduino is only concerned with the coding needed to act on the sensor output. I hope to look at sensors independently because they are not doing something right.
The first people I’d blame is the coders. That is why Waymo (Google self-driving taxis) keep running over pet cats and driving past school busses. I heard one drove through a police shoot-out or something. What I want to understand is the principle some of these sensors use.
Lake Michigan formations.
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It was a great Festus show, even if all he did was walk in one door. It was about Newly who meets up with a fake priest bank robber, but this episode had more drama than the last three put together. No really pretty gal this time and of course the money was hidden behind a stone in the fireplace. Great coffee, even if I do bring it with me. I’ve had hours to catch up on my reading, and that terrible last audiobook had me look again at Algeria.
That had to be one of the most useless revolutions in history. As mentioned few of the tribes living there under French occupation were natives, but arrivals from the east when the place was governed by the Ottomans. I had also read about the special indoctrination given to Algerian officers captured at Dien Bien Phu. What I look at the chain of events after they returned home, the pattern emerges. Suddenly the “natives” are protesting for things they had no traditional concepts of, such as nationalism, voting rights, and self-determination. They did not know what these things were, much less miss them until they were told they did.
Yes, there was the same undercurrent of tribal unrest under colonialism as everywhere else in the world, but Algeria is where you had a large contingent of battle-trained officers who were also ex-POWs. Thus, I am talking not about what was the same in Algeria, but what was different.
The war was nasty, as some of the French families had lived there long enough to have real claims to their positions It was the Algeria after independence that is the laugh. The French left, but shortly thereafter so did the telephones, the street cars, the postal system, safe drinking water, and most of the electricity. There was instant Civil War between the Arabs and they had to keep some French units to stop greedy neighboring countries from invading.
The natives then proceeded to muck things up so badly that the Western oil companies were invited back. There is oil in Algeria, but not enough to mask the big economic problems of no educated workforce, no real alternative economy, and no meaningful export trade. Just oil, which is best left to foreigners. With nobody left to blame, the Algerians are now, less than two generations later, trying to sue France for “reparations” just to stay afloat a while more. But with 30% unemployed youths wandering the streets, the whole country is like Detroit. No amount of free money is going to teach them a damn thing about responsible living.
Here is a completely wooden box from last year that I cannot recall why I built it. That’s top story. I wanted to avoid magnetism for something or other, but only got around to finishing it today. It’s quite a nice box, really. I got to wondering if other amateur box-makers get such animated, adrenalizing moments?
JZ called and sure enough, he’s up against an on-line form neither he nor all the geniuses can get it. This I got to see, because these folks still don’t believe I know anything about computers even though I owned an Internet café twenty years ago. I said I’d look when I get there, which is good because it means they’ve all given it their best shot. I like that scenario. Fair warning, I told him how easily I get tired. Now that he’s had that stroke, he believes me. He can go visiting his relatives, I get the sofa that I’ve crashed on a hundred times before.
He’s late at the game but wants to invest, which he says is my influence. I suppose, but these days I’m more interested in trying new things on-line. His zero computer skills is a barrier because even the classical things he’d want have at least some parts accessible only via the web. I’ll try, just remember I never said my way was right, just that if you do it my way fewer things will go wrong.
ADDENDUM
Here’s a report a rover on Mars found sulfur. This is different than the common sulfates, where sulfur has been dissolved in water and then dried out. Turns out the Curiosity rover, which weighs more than a VW Beetle, ran over a rock that cracked open. Pure sulfur means it’s from volcanic activity and it is preferred by all life forms to sulfates. At least that’s what I read. Some Arduino research. I did not like libraries for the same reasons I don’t trust C code. They are written by unknown people of unknown caliber, and there is no easy way to discover the strange new commands they require.
In Arduino, these are called keywords and once again there are no standards. If you search to find directions, all you get is page after page on how to used them. I needed a plan, so I chose one library that I knew what it had to do, and worked backwards from there. The small 16x2 LCD display was my target.
Don’t be poking around in your Windows directory unless you know what you are doing, but if you find the Arduino folder, you will also find the subdirectory of the libraries that come with the Arduino IDE. You must navigate to the file folder, you can’t do this (view the code) from the IDE. You are looking for a folder that contains 4 files, of which 2 have the .h and .cpp suffixes. The trick is to open these files without running them. Good old Notepad to the rescue. It would appear these keywords are called to subroutines.
For those who follow such things, Arduino was recently bought by a cell phone company. They have released a new version of the Uno (the one I use) called Uno Q. It has a built in LED display and an operating system on a chip. Linux, I believe. But I will stick with my Uno for one good reason. The Uno Q must use a cloud IDE. And that would represent a level of trust in the Internet that has never existed around here. That’s all for now.
