And using the pickup truck so naturally there is possible rain in the forecast… along with heat and humidity. Although I have to say, much less heat than last week. We also got local light and heavy rain. At my storage unit I got soaked. At my barber, we didn’t get any rain at all, and they are less than a mile apart. Weird Houston weather.
Drove around and did pickups, then stopped at my barber for a cut before my show. It’s been a while, and I got used to cutting my own hair. I’ve been going to the same guy for about 18 years so we usually have a good chat. Over that time, his price for a clipper cut went from $12 to $15 to $20. As the neighborhood has gentrified, his rent has increased dramatically too.
Everyone I talked with yesterday had high prices and increased violent crime on their mind. One lady wants Trump to win re-election and do something about it, with the comment “our current president sure isn’t.” As a side note, almost all of the people I talked to were Hispanic, none were reactionary old white men.
Something else that I’ve been noticing and has been bugging me… the current world is DRAB, and becoming drabber. I think it’s a reflection of the zeitgeist. One whole parking lot, no brightly colored cars. Only black, silver, white, grey, the occasional older dark red, or champagne color. Driving on the expressway, ONE colored car, a blue Extera that was an obvious repaint. The pickup line for elementary school, not one bright color. The natural colored brick houses in my neighborhood are being painted white, grey, and black when they are flipped. There is a whole development across from my daughter’s old school that is black and dark green. Other new housing all over town is almost universally white, grey, black, or a combination. Once you see it, you see it everywhere. If the colors people are buying reflect the mood, we’re in a world of hurt.
Don’t get caught short. Stack it high.
nick
Wasn’t there an aphorism about the state of the economy being linked to the length of pretty girls’ miniskirts? We see mo be in a long-skirt phase…
According to my wife’s patients who work at the big IRS facility here in town, processing of the 2021 returns just started within the last couple of months. They’re seriously behind, and the vaccine mandates aren’t sitting well.
I interviewed with a third party pay phone manufacturer back in the day. Their engineering challenge was an embedded computer controlling the entire system which had a power budget of whatever they could get from that 48 VDC line while the phone was on-hook. Hardware miracle workers but totally clueless about software development.
We’re abandoning the traditional phone system in favor of having Baby Yoda on the go at a tremendous societal cost over the last few decades. Enjoy the show, everybody.
How long before we’re mining the copper out of the trenches and manholes?
—–
77F this am, and now 79F with plenty of damp.
Sunny though, and blue sky. So that’s nice.
n
More battlespace preparation…
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/end-abundance-macron-warns-major-tipping-point-and-great-upheaval-difficult-winter
n
The minimum resistive load is spec’d at 5 megohms. That means slightly less than 10 microamps or 500 microwatts. That would make a low powered CMOS processor possible with careful design.
Over the years, there have been many attempts to use the phone line to power devices. We used to call this flea-power. I never worked on phone line powered designs, but did work on things powered by even lower power. The humble unijunction transistor could do things with surprisingly low current.
One of my favorite tricks was to use a capacitor to drop 120 VAC line voltage to, say, 5 VDC. Low power factor, and very little real power.
I used to find software miracle workers who knew nothing about Ohm’s law. Someone skilled in both disciplines is rare.
One of my .mil trade magazines has an article about a new contract to provide weapons to Ukraine. It has earliest delivery set in 2025.
Give that a couple seconds thought.
n
Ukraine has been a boon to the military industrial complex.
Think about doing that in 1995 with the tech available back then.
The company was successful until the telecom deregulation in the mid 90s. Elcotel out of Sarasota, Florida. I see their phones on EBay from time to time.
The big problem faced by a lot of shops doing embedded systems development in the early-mid 90s was that a lot of the older guys couldn’t make the conceptual leap to structured programming as high level language compilers became affordable or even free.
I was essentially interviewed to be management’s “enforcer” for $26k/year – not terrible money at the time, but insufficient to deal with 50-something self taught engineers stuck in their ways with shotgun racks in the windows of the pickups parked out back.
I literally saw that leaving the interview. No thanks.
“We’re abandoning the traditional phone system in favor of having Baby Yoda on the go at a tremendous societal cost over the last few decades. Enjoy the show, everybody.”
Yup.
I was essentially interviewed to be management’s “enforcer” for $26k/year – not terrible money at the time, but insufficient to deal with 50-something self taught engineers stuck in their ways with shotgun racks in the windows of the pickups parked out back.
Note to self, remove shotgun and deer rifle from truck rear window rack. But leave the rack since it was so hard to install.
I was exposed to emitter coupled logic designs in the 1960s, but never designed with it. I started with TTL, and designed small logic circuits. CMOS became commercial in the late 1960s, and promised low power and high noise immunity. I never used it because I mainly worked with RF designs. Later did some power circuitry using -ahem- alloy junction semis, a euphemism for germanium. That was the only practical way to go above 100 amps in those days. Power MOSFETs were still a dream.
Anyway, 1995 tech was way far in the future when we were doing flea-power to kilowatt power in the 1960s. What is old is new to some people.
After I got out of design, I saw younger designers doing power circuitry in a fraction of the volume I once needed, and at high temperatures I only dreamed of.
I am proud of a two phase motor driver I designed that drove an inductive load with logic-generated square waves. Why square? That was what was needed to simulate the actual circuit. My design was for production testing, and space and environment were not considerations. I worked hard to make it trouble free, and the original unit did so for well over 20 years. Successors might still be in use. Oh, by then, silicon power transistors were available, but still needed lots of protective circuitry unnecessary with MOSFETS. We do what we must.
BTW, Bob Pease was one of my heroes. A consumate engineer tempered by practicality. Also a true greybeard. Look him up for some fun.
“Rains of Spiders and Women Birthing Snakes”
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2022/08/25/rains-of-spiders-and-women-birthing-snakes/
“Let’s hope Bismark was right and “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.””
“Because the alternative is very very ugly. And it might be needed. May G-d have mercy on our souls.”
Even if I hadn’t seen the rifle racks, the vibe that afternoon did not seem very favorable to my being there.
I had a repeat of the experience a couple of years ago when I talked to a place near the house and it was clear I was going to be hired as the enforcer for Git and Linux, moving the shop’s environment away from cross compiling on Windows under Cygwin with source control via sneakernet.
Here’s the crazy part – exactly one year to the day later, the offices were suddenly empty when I drove by heading to Home Depot one night after dinner. All the lights were on but nothing was in the space. Even the cubicles were gone.
Erased … from existence.
The group was a US operation of a Korean compay, and any mention of the US team and/or location was gone from the web site. They had a fairly successful product too.
“The Oceans between Stars (Chronicle of the Dark Star, 2)” by Kevin Emerson
https://www.amazon.com/Oceans-between-Stars-Chronicle-Dark/dp/0062306758?tag=ttgnet-20/
Book number two of a three book young teenage science fiction series. I read the well printed and well bound trade paperback published by Walden Pond Press in 2019 that I bought new on Amazon. I am now reading the third book of the series.
In the year 2223, mankind has abandoned Earth and the Solar system. The sun started converting into a red giant a hundred years ago, expanded rapidly, and exploded into a nova. Mankind had moved to Mars and rapidly built several 100 million passenger spaceships and is moving to another star system almost 15 light years away. The humans used stasis pods to make the 150 year dangerous journey, waking up every ten years or so. The first stop was a small planet in the void that was mostly ice so they could refuel the starliners.
Thirteen year olds Liam and Phoebe missed the last starliner leaving, the Scorpius, due to a cave-in in the old volcano where their parents were testing terraforming equipment for the new stellar system. But they managed to get their parents out into a small spaceship with a dozen stasis pods and acquired a larger rocket engine with a large reaction mass tank so they could boost up to the 30,000 km/sec speed to make the first light year leg of the journey. They have a high function humanoid robot named Jeff who can stand watch during the eleven year journey to Delphi. But they are attacked as they are leaving the Saturn’s orbit. And Phoebe has a secret.
My rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars (130 reviews)
>>Look him up for some fun.<<
https://www.edn.com/analog-engineering-legend-bob-pease-killed-in-car-crash/
Wow. Some guy!
My obituary will probably read something like, “He sure knew how to overcook a roast!”
A LOTR quote yesterday and a Back to the Future quote today. We need a Star Wars quote tomorrow…
How about
“Ordinary f#kcing people, I hate ’em.” – hint uttered by Harry Dean Stanton
“Shut up Archie, you’re nothing but a white suburban punk.” – hint uttered by Emilio Estevez
(Not Star Wars related, other than the aliens, but one of my favorites…)
n
“SpaceX Reduces Starlink Prices in Europe, Latin America”
https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-reduces-starlink-prices-in-europe-latin-america
“In Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, the monthly cost for Starlink is dropping by as much as 50%.”
Huh, I guess that they are having trouble getting customers down under the equator.
And looks like they are going after the data hogs.
“Data caps will kick in if someone uses more than 250GB of data, and if the Starlink network is congested, internet speeds will slow down. Customers will have to pay €10 to receive an additional 100GB in high-speed data.”
Bob Pease’s obituary reminded me of Highway 9. Is anyone here from the Bay Area? There are two routes from Los Gatos to Santa Cruz, Highway 17, and Highway 9. Both are fairly steep in parts but Highway 17 is dangerous and just the ugliest thing, whereas Highway 9 is the most beautifully banked curvy twisty road. Great driving fun. I’d forgotten about it until I read his obituary.
So if you’re ever in San Jose and have to get to Santa Cruz or Monterey, remember Highway 9. It’s a little longer but well worth it.
>> One of my .mil trade magazines has an article about a new contract to provide weapons to Ukraine. It has earliest delivery set in 2025.
And paid for by whom?
Highway 17 is the road past the old Borland campus, the location of the literal hijacking of development talent that Microsoft staged to build the core of .Net.
BillG sent a limo into the Borland parking lot one afternoon – no security gate at the time – and invited Anders Hejlsberg to lunch. Of course he could bring his friends.
It is debatable whether Philippe Kahn got the last laugh. He’s widely credited with having later invented the camera phone. Maybe you’ve heard of it
I’m not from the area, but when we went to Santa Cruz on one Valley trip, I made a point of driving back on 17 to see the location myself. Yup, still no security even then (Fall 2005).
The GTX 1650 with 4GB should be a $80 bargain bin item at this point in its lifecycle. This Christmas will be brutal on the card manufacturers since everyone knows where prices are headed after the holidays.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/nvidias-excess-inventory-means-the-gpu-shortage-is-officially-a-gpu-surplus/
“Who gets student loan forgiveness? Relief prompts joy, angst”
https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/education/article/who-gets-student-relief-17397419.php
$300 billion to forgive $10,000 of student loan debt for each student out there.
Where is the $300 billion coming from ?
Did Congress authorize this ?
Yep, in the HEROES Act.
Right after the part where the unvaccinated go to the stalags.
The presses in the basement of the Eccles Building. Where else?
Bob Pease is one of those columnists who was not replaceable. I learned a lot from him, even when I was not in complete agreement with him. His essays on high end speaker wire were very entertaining.
>”There are two routes from Los Gatos to Santa Cruz, Highway 17, and Highway 9. Both are fairly steep in parts but Highway 17 is dangerous and just the ugliest thing, whereas Highway 9 is the most beautifully banked curvy twisty road.”
Hwy 9 will take a good deal longer, similar to driving from Santa Cruz to San Luis Obispo via Hwy 1 instead of 101. I enjoy both 9 and 17 when they are empty. My guess is that Hwy 9 has a worse number of fatalities/serious injuries per passenger mile than 17.
Lynn says:
You and I.
No.
The HEORES Act did not pass the Senate and only authorized about “$191 billion for student loan relief and funding for higher education.”
xkcd: Physics Safety Tip
https://xkcd.com/2662/
Physicists tend to build things massing in tons. So, yes, when the physicists get excited, run away !
Explained at:
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2662:_Physics_Safety_Tip
“Federal judge says Texas can’t ban 18- to 20-year-olds from carrying handguns”
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/08/25/federal-court-texas-21-handguns/
Whoa ! Now that is a shocker. And will Texas file an appeal ?
Is it too late for me to get a federal student loan to get it forgiven ? I have been thinking about getting my MBA from HBU. I figure after running a small business for 27 years, I ought to learn how to do it.
Bob Pease is one of those columnists who was not replaceable. I learned a lot from him, even when I was not in complete agreement with him. His essays on high end speaker wire were very entertaining.
I use lamp power cords for my speaker wires. Is that a bad thing ?
We paid $200k in student loans the hard way at our house.
The total amount of student loans is $1.7 Trillion. $300 Billion makes a dent but doesn’t get into the paper issued which is now used to fund Obamacare under the student loan program nationalization in 2009.
Monetizing the Obamacare debt to forgive those student loans would require Congressional approval and possibly the kind of Supreme Court decision that the Old School Marm doesn’t like to make.
Of course there will still be court challenges to the $300 Billion. The text of the Executive Order should be interesting.
>>Hwy 9 will take a good deal longer, similar to driving from Santa Cruz to San Luis Obispo via Hwy 1 instead of 101. <<
Gee, it sure looks that way according to Google Maps. Takes about twice as long. Didn’t seem like that to me back in the day! Still it’s a pretty trip and a fun, fun road to drive if you’ve got a car which handles well.
******
>>I use lamp power cords for my speaker wires. Is that a bad thing ?<<
Oh noes! I can almost hear the debates beginning… 🙂
Interesting:
https://newatlas.com/transport/alstom-coradia-ilint-hydrogen-fuel-cell-trains-passenger-service/?
“They will each get daily top-ups at the Linde hydrogen filling station at Bremervörde, which is home to 64 high-pressure (500-bar) storage tanks, six compressors and two fuel pumps. Future plans call for hydrogen production on site via “electrolysis and regeneratively generated electricity.””
Wild!:
https://newatlas.com/science/earth-continents-galaxy-comets-impact-cycle/?
“The team says that when our neighborhood moves into one of the spiral arms, gravitational influences of the higher density of material can shake material loose from the Oort cloud, which surrounds the solar system. These objects can then migrate towards the inner solar system in the form of comets, increasing the chances of collisions with Earth.”
That’s a proposal from 2020. The relevant one, which is law, is from 2003.
Sorry, but no. From the very link you provided it says:
SEC. 6. <> TERMINATION OF AUTHORITY. The provisions of this Act shall cease to be effective at the close of September 30, 2005. Approved August 18, 2003.
Which is why they had to try and pass the one in 2020 that failed.
No, it was made permanent in 2007 by Public Law 110-93, which struck Section 6.
There was no need to do anything related to the 2003 HEROES Act in 2020, since it was made permanent in 2007.
The “Duck” people (the search engine DuckDuckGo.com) have come out with an email service that purports to strip away any tracking codes in your emails. They don’t store the email, just forward it to another email account that you control. Presumably without the tracking codes.
You can sign up for it here: https://duckduckgo.com/email/ . But you have to install a browser add-in to sign up. I haven’t looked deeply into what the add-in does. But you can’t sign up without it.
Because I have a mailing service site that I built, and it puts a tracking code in each outgoing mail, I was interested to see how their ‘beacon-blocker’ works. So I signed up (after adding the browser add-in in Chrome, which I rarely use).
I then set up a mailing with my mailing service site, after adding my new ‘duck.com’ email address to that mailing list. I then sent out a mailing from there.
The mail message was received by duck.com, and forwarded to my personal email account, as expected. The incoming mail had a graphic inserted that they did not detect any trackers (screenshot here).
Except the mail did have my tracking beacon in the forwarded email. I have a what I think is a unique method of putting trackers in emails from that mailing service. And my tracking beacon wasn’t blocked by their process.
Apple is supposed to be blocking trackers in emails also. I don’t have any testing proof, but I think my method will not be blocked there, either.
I’m not sure how duck.com’s beacon blocker works – what it looks for ; I haven’t found any technical details. But the beacons that my mailing service use are not blocked. (And it’s a proprietary method, but quite simple to implement. No, I won’t share. Unless there is some impressive financial incentive offered.)
People can thumbs-down all they want; I really don’t care. Facts are facts; laws are laws; misinformation is misinformation. Call your Congressman if you don’t like the laws being enacted.
Interesting:
https://newatlas.com/transport/alstom-coradia-ilint-hydrogen-fuel-cell-trains-passenger-service/?
“They will each get daily top-ups at the Linde hydrogen filling station at Bremervörde, which is home to 64 high-pressure (500-bar) storage tanks, six compressors and two fuel pumps. Future plans call for hydrogen production on site via “electrolysis and regeneratively generated electricity.””
Yeah, see the General Physics Safety tip that I mentioned earlier:
https://xkcd.com/2662/
Hydrogen wants to be free !
Of course not, but it might make the sound a little bright. : -)
I need to figger out this editor. Tried to put an emoji in that last post, but it disappeared, so used an old skool emoticon.
Back in the tube days, I had an amplifier that picked up amateur radio voice signals. My dad and I were both hams. Turned out it was the speaker line, because the class A amp picked its negative feedback signal from the secondary of the output transformer, which had a 20′ run of lamp cord to the speaker. The fix was to use shielded wire, with its shield tied to the grounded amp chassis. RF is magical, and a sorcerer’s apprenticeship is handy.
Is Casper the Unfriendly Ghost talking to Mr Ed, or haven’t I been paying attention?
@jimB, the editor does a lot of things. paren, tm close paren will get the TM symbol, as R will get the Registered symbol like so™ and so®. but spacing is important.
it will convert 1 / 2 to ½ if no spaces in between, and if followed by a space, ditto for ¾ , and for emojii, you have to leave out spaces. 🙂 and 🙂 and : – ) are three different things.
It also strips out blank lines, and messes with quotation marks, ellipsis, and emdash.
n
The emojiis don’t get replaced until you save the comment.
>> Something else that I’ve been noticing and has been bugging me… the current world is DRAB, and becoming drabber. I think it’s a reflection of the zeitgeist. One whole parking lot, no brightly colored cars. Only black, silver, white, grey, the occasional older dark red, or champagne color. Driving on the expressway, ONE colored car, a blue Extera that was an obvious repaint. The pickup line for elementary school, not one bright color. The natural colored brick houses in my neighborhood are being painted white, grey, and black when they are flipped. There is a whole development across from my daughter’s old school that is black and dark green. Other new housing all over town is almost universally white, grey, black, or a combination. Once you see it, you see it everywhere. If the colors people are buying reflect the mood, we’re in a world of hurt.
A decent number of non-drab looking cars here in the desert. Which of course means plenty of white (us included), but the Subaru CrossTrek is popular here and for 2022 I’ve seen both the blue pearl and the yellow. Also within the past few model years they’ve has orange and a green khaki. The other cars that I see a lot of in bright colors are the Dodge muscle cars (Charger and Challenger). I see less silver that I expect and more black that expected (maybe the dealers push harder to unload the black cars from their allotments here with our summer heat).
>> According to my wife’s patients who work at the big IRS facility here in town, processing of the 2021 returns just started within the last couple of months. They’re seriously behind, and the vaccine mandates aren’t sitting well.
Have to finish our 2021 returns, but have a carry-forward refund from 2020, so all should be good.
@alan, there is always some lag as the colors are picked years in advance for cars, and sports cars are about the only thing I see in any sort of color, but they’ve always been “hey, look at me!” cars.
I’ ve also noticed a bunch of manufacturers going back to enamel looking car finishes, vs metallic…
There are definitely fewer bright colors out there.
n
(speaking of cars, the cops are working street racers tonight, and they keep talking about rain and high water in different parts of town. Nothing here, and I hope it stays that way. I’ve got my truck loaded for my show, with just a tarp over it to keep the dew off.)
>> How long before we’re mining the copper out of the trenches and manholes?
A lot of effort to get at 24 gauge insulated wire and then burning(?) the insulation off. Sooner or later the ‘zombies’ will want the 14 or 12 gauge wiring inside your walls along with any copper piping you have. And they might not appreciate that you’ve replumbed with PEX.
This house is galvanized pipe, but the BOL is copper. I’m scrapping the copper myself, nothing left for the zombies.
The underground spaces in cities are jammed solid with copper. At some point it will make sense to recover it, at least in some places. I expect we’ll start mining old landfills for metals in my lifetime too. There are risks, because of the chemicals that I’m SURE ended up in the old dumps, but a lot of metal went into them before recycling became a “thing.” The overburden is certainly easier to clear than real mining.
n
>> Of course there will still be court challenges to the $300 Billion. The text of the Executive Order should be interesting.
Here’s the text of the opinion from the General Counsel (yeah, just a fancy way to try and hide that you’re a bottom-feeding lawyer) of the DOE to the SecEd.
Haven’t yet found the text of Joe’s EO.
Did find this about tax treatments:
>> Bob Pease is one of those columnists who was not replaceable. I learned a lot from him, even when I was not in complete agreement with him. His essays on high end speaker wire were very entertaining.
I use lamp power cords for my speaker wires. Is that a bad thing ?
Ask the Monster Cable people. Yeah, they’re still in business. They’re also trademark ‘monsters’.
This was a subject of huge debate back in the ‘vinyl days’ (circa Crazy Eddie, J&R, The Wiz, etc.). And it grew to cover all the cabling (primarily RCA to RCA plugs) in your stereo system.
Here’s one treatise on the subject from 2005.
Google will find you many more…
>> I use lamp power cords for my speaker wires. Is that a bad thing ?
Of course not, but it might make the sound a little bright. : -)
Well, to control the brightness, you could instead install a light-based interface built using FLASHLIGHTS.
Something else that I’ve been noticing and has been bugging me… the current world is DRAB, and becoming drabber. I think it’s a reflection of the zeitgeist. One whole parking lot, no brightly colored cars. Only black, silver, white, grey, the occasional older dark red, or champagne color. Driving on the expressway, ONE colored car, a blue Extera that was an obvious repaint. The pickup line for elementary school, not one bright color. The natural colored brick houses in my neighborhood are being painted white, grey, and black when they are flipped. There is a whole development across from my daughter’s old school that is black and dark green. Other new housing all over town is almost universally white, grey, black, or a combination. Once you see it, you see it everywhere. If the colors people are buying reflect the mood, we’re in a world of hurt.
Reputedly, 40% of the cars on the road are white. Both of our 2019 vehicles (F-150 and Highlander) are white since I bought them and I like white. The wife’s is metallic white though, very bright.
Tucker Carlson did his monolog on the recent discovery that Trump developed the vaccines, so the current administration should ban them. This should put an end to those pesky mandates.
OK, satire, but not funny.
In some countries, white is the color of a hearse, hence the term “funereal white.”
I have never liked all-white cars. Don’t like the look, and the upkeep to remove road splash stains. We do have a car that is white with very fine, widely dispersed gold flakes – almost invisible under a pearl layer. This is the most-repaired car I have ever owned, and I have lost count of all the panels with repaints. Same guy did all the work over 22 years, and it matches quite well. Final analysis: it is just a daily driver. Paint is just a layer of corrosion protection. It is kinda nice-looking, however.
Based on experience, I would not own a red or black car, nor any dark colors. Also, pearl and metallics are hard to repair. That still leaves lots of options.
Asians and Indians living here have a strong preference for white and that color will dominate tech areas.
I was able to get a better deal on my Camry since I chose the dark gray model which had been on the lot for a while. They didn’t push the warranty cr*p too hard either since I imagine the finance manager wanted to be rid of the paper.
I picked up something on the front of the car in TN which looks like tar but doesn’t come off with any of my goop removers. The dark gray hides whatever it is well.