Hot, humid, and hot. It was so miserable yesterday that when the sun went behind a cloud we cheered. It got hot. Over 100F in the shade, hot. And it was very humid. The only thing that saved us at the swimmeet was a stiff breeze. When that occasionally died, we broiled.
I spent the day running the kids around town. When I wasn’t doing that, I was watching youtube vids to learn about running the skid steer and the mini-excavator. I’m looking forward to that. Still don’t have a confirmed date and time for the dumpster delivery. I’ve asked now three days in a row, but heard nothing back. Stuff like that is why I have to rent gear and do the work myself.
Finished the day with our last swimmeet of the year. It was drippy wet and hot. I brought a chair, and a sun umbrella to shade me while working. Both of the cables I built worked. It makes a huge difference in operator comfort to be able to sit with the controller in your lap. Our team lost the meet but it was a closer match than the last team (which we beat handily). And this team was actually the one we swam on last year. Lots of familiar faces.
Today I’ve got to do some quick auction pickups then head out to my client’s place to hang some cameras. And install a new WAP. And maybe do some network configuration. All while trying not to injure myself in the heat. I’ll manage somehow.
Did I mention that the new gate controller shows up on the network as a Raspberry Pi board? Interesting that a major access controls manufacturer would use either commodity boards or a development board or possibly a home grown clone? on a shipping product. I’ve seen ads for ruggedized RazPi compatible ‘computer in a box’ systems, so I suppose it could be one of them, but my money is on cheap commodity hardware.
D1 has X1 over since last night, and they want to go to the mall today. I’m working so I’m not doing it… but they may get there anyway. Malls are not my favorite thing, but I am not winning this argument. There may even be boys involved. Aye carumba!
Meatspace. Joy.
Stack something today.
nick
First post, again.
On the ICE from Bielefeld to Berlin. Train is late again. DB APP says the train is exceptionally crowded but 1st class is quite empty. Good seats, but facing backwards. Oh well.
Seems to be a newer car based on the interior. Lights on the seats instead of overhead, actual luggage storage racks rather than hoisting overhead. Cup tray between the seats so a smaller tray table. Also seems to be quieter which is perceptive after being on the local train with a couple hundred pre-teens scrambling to be heard.
Currently traveling 124 MPH on the train. Smooth, quiet.
Third post!
Tell them to make sure that the meat stays away from the eggs.
My policy on such things is that if The Child is going to have sex, I’d rather it be in her own bed than in the back of a car or on an abandoned couch behind a building, and I’ve told her that since she was a preteen. Her mother is not on board with this. “No sex until you’ve graduated college!” Right, because kids never go nutso when they’re finally away from over-controlling parents.
This is where dead-end Generals end up:
Space Force general gives blistering speech at Pentagon Pride event slamming more than 400 anti-LGBTQ state-level bills she claims are forcing her to hire ‘less qualified’ candidates
The Space Farce! “We Be Woke” Apparently, all the “good” recruits are QWERTY. Game over, man, game over.
Probably a Pi Zero or a clone. The development tools and schematics for the hardware are readily available.
A Pi 4 would probably mean that they are futzing with containers. That’s overkill for an embedded environment like that application, but I imagine that not having a lot of hands on Docker/Kubernetes on the resume is a fast way to get your developer resume tossed out by the HR droids these days so anyone under 30 needs to get hip to the Hot Skillz.
The immutable container-based OS is coming, even in Microsoft and embedded environments.
Once you cross the 40 number, your days of being allowed to learn on the job are over, no matter how quickly you can come up to speed, especially if you are male and White/Asian. I speak from experience.
The irony of my current gig is that the hottest tech on the planet this year depends on my ability to manipulate a 25 year-old library which I’ve only used sporadically for ~ five years.
Unfortunate since the Space Force arguably has the most important mission for the long term security of the US in establishing reliable military access to low Earth orbit for the price of fuel and routine maintenance on the hardware.
I believe that’s the real point of the Boeing Goldfinger mini Shuttle, more so than any payload it carries into orbit.
Listening to Mandy on the ICE. Can it get any better?
Coffee is brewing.
Got a call back from the dumpster rental. ~$1000. Yikes. No wonder most people find somewhere to dump the material.
87F in the shade. Sunny. Gonna be hot.
n
Do you have your own copy of “Foul Play”?
Manilow owns that entire movie soundtrack, including his jingles if you get the cut which played on HBO when I was a kid, which I assume was used for the home video versions.
I just passed along the recommendation for the flick to a young’n who was “Community” and Chevy Chase obsessed.
Chevy Chase before he was “Chevy Chase”.
Dunno, was there ever a German cover of “Honey”, or maybe “He Stopped Loving Her Today”?
I occasionally used to get a station out of the Central Valley that did 70’s and 80’s mellow rock “Gold” covers, in Spanish. Very strange.
@SteveF
look up Frank Sinatra’s advice to daughter Nancy re sex and drinking.
Interesting. my neighbors gate controller failed after 30 years, and I once volunteered to set up a Pi as the controller.
He doesn’t seem to be in a hurry, you couldn’t get them for a while, and was more worried about the safety features involved in a home rolled system.
@edh,
if you think about it, the pi has a network stack, camera, SIP phone, contact closures to activate the gate, etc… it makes sense, I just don’t know if the hardware is robust enough.
WRT safety, most of that is on the control board in the motor housing. The access control just activates a contact closure to trigger the gate open sequence. The limit switches, and force feedback safety stuff are on the motor board.
n
The Germans also seem to have a fascination with John Denver, particularly “Country Roads” as a party song.
The song played prominently over the PA system last year after the conclusion of the Yucs game in Germany, something I found hilarious because the tune is also big at UWVa games, where Jimbo Fisher seemed destined to move that weekend as TAMU continued to sink to irrelevance in the bowl game picture.
To say Jimbo has a warm seat this year is an understatement. The Manning family will visit College Station in 2024 as will Florida.
Delightful here yesterday. Had to go out, and the car thermometer read in the low 80s. Wednesday evening, we had a short rain, too low to measure – called a trace. We are still recovering from our heavier than usual late winter rains, with noticeable ground moisture.
Last night we had a band of clouds about 30 miles to our north. There was lightning in them, but no visible bolts or thunder to be heard. More entertaining than TV. We seldom see lightning, and then it is usually distant.
Been a slightly cool spring here, with small amounts of rainfall and higher humidity from the wet mountains. Still some mountain snow visible a few days ago. We usually hit 100 by the end of May, but we only got close. The residual moisture is causing some cumulus clouds, which are a sure sign of higher than normal humidity. Our normal RH at the high temperature of the day is about 10%, but it has been running 20%. I don’t know of many places where the humidity can be double or triple normal, certainly not the humid South.
I had to relocate my old reliable wired thermometer for some exterior renovation, and my new location is higher temperature than free air. Worse, the new deck will probably trap more heat, making that time tested old location unsuitable. I guess I will have to break down and make or get one of those Stevenson screens:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen
also called an instrument shelter. I used a wireless thermometer to scout new locations, and everywhere I tried has some sun exposure or traps heat.
Jerry was fond of saying, if you wanted to take the earth’s temperature, where would you stick the thermometer? I’ll leave the jokes to SteveF and Ray. Getting a good read is harder than it might seem.
Their software is generally very good value for the money. Didn’t realize they’d integrated CHAT AI
– pretty cool if it works. How long before AIs intentionally include typos, mis-used homonyms, etc to keep from sounding like an AI? Like the high end Chinese restaurant that intentionally has typos on their menu because people associate awkward translations and typos with “genuine” chinese food??
n
A high end Chinese restaurant will have a separate menu available upon request written in Chinese listing the “genuine” food the chef will prepare appropriate for the region – Hunan, Schezwan, etc.
Most Americans would find the dishes to be … lets say “an acquired taste”.
Personally, I find the flavors revolting so I would always be “ugly American” on the outings with my father-in-law and his friends back in the day, when the old man was trying to get laid that night so he let the Asians do the ordering.
I always got a typical Chinese-American dish … which, interestingly, would be what everyone at the table ended up eating from instead of the “genuine” food, even the Asians.
@JimB
Build your own Stevenson screen. The old Boy Scouts meteorology merit badge pamphlet had the plans. One of the key things is the proper paint. Anything other than the original spec has a different solar absorbance/emission spectrum.
Visit wattsupwiththat.com/surface stations (check the URL) for discussion on siting.
Massive data hacks of Oregon and Lousiana DMV records (links to news reports). From CNN report:
From the Oregon report:
Time to freeze your credit reports, perhaps. At very least, watch out for fraud on your accounts.
Hah, yeah.
Happened to me a couple of times. Massive amounts of fat, or the occasional tentacle….
But, you know, those are the meals we talk and laugh about years later with friends, long after the well-cooked steak and potatoes meal is forgotten. So there’s that.
>> By the way, UPS can’t ship cremated remains if you accurately tell them what’s in the package. Let’s see, “building materials samples” should work. Same for FedEx if you’re shipping, umm, *machine parts*. You have to use USPS and you have to use registered priority mail. A bit of news I hope you don’t ever need to use.
F I F Y
>> or the occasional tentacle
That’s why the Italians heavily bread and deep fry certain things.
https://abc13.com/texas-politics-bill-banning-paper-plates-hb-718-laws/13379154/
Bummer for Carvana.
>> Summarize text: A text is intelligently shortened to its core statements.
Am I missing something or isn’t all this output based on the quality of the input data and the associated machine learning rules? If so, then GIGO??
Or testicle.
The “geninue” Chinese meals were not events with our friends but rather my father-in-law’s circle of Asian … benefactors? I’m not sure what to call it.
He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the AT&T billing system which he leveraged at work for sexual favors from the females in this group and, regularly, loans to keep him out of Bankruptcy. Later on, the loans became critical to keeping him on the heart transplant list.
The Asian women all saw themselves as gourmets.
“Making Sense of SSD SMART Stats”
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/making-sense-of-ssd-smart-stats/
“Both hard drives and SSDs populate SMART attributes, but given how different these drive types are, the information produced is quite different as well. For example, hard drives have sectors, while SSDs have pages and blocks. Let’s take a look at the common attributes of hard drives and SSDs, and then we’ll dig into the SSD SMART attributes we’ve found useful, interesting, or just weird.”
“You can get a share of Google’s $23 million dollar settlement. Here’s how”
https://www.zdnet.com/article/you-can-get-a-share-of-googles-23-million-dollar-settlement-heres-how/
“After being accused of sharing users’ searches with third-party websites, Google agrees to pay up, despite denying culpability. You may be able to cash in.”
“If your claim is approved, you can make approximately $7.70. Although this number may seem underwhelming, you could get yourself a coffee on Google’s dime. When put that way, it doesn’t sound as bad of a deal. ”
Don’t spend your $7.70 all in one place.
“Google Is Not Deleting Old YouTube Videos”
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/05/google-is-not-deleting-old-youtube-videos.html
I had no idea that Google was going to delete old youtube videos. That means that they will do that in the future sometime.
@Nick: BTW, What was the mystery swimming event job you got signed up for a few weeks back?
Sounds like you are running some sort of tech stack for them.
Ed, sssh! Nick was fixing the results. Big money in gambling on junior high school swim meets, you know.
Paid out in Girl Scout Cookies.
Until the boys show up to compete in the girls’ events wearing the latest “tuck” swimsuits from Target.
>> “If your claim is approved, you can make approximately $7.70.
Hmm, so they’re expecting only 3M claims…
>> Paid out in Girl Scout Cookies.
Well…if it were these…
https://www.kcci.com/article/girl-scouts-raspberry-rally-cookies-what-happened/43428393#
>> https://www.ft.com/content/2353be6d-7573-4b24-bf76-e77f4039f957
It’s just a drill, right??
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DziarrcMwbc
… Biden
strangelysays…F I F Them
Beaglebone Black offers more GPIO ports and a TI chip, but Raspberry Pi has the name recognition.
Hot Skillz!
>> Paid out in Girl Scout Cookies.
Well…if it were these…
https://www.kcci.com/article/girl-scouts-raspberry-rally-cookies-what-happened/43428393
Thin mints all the way dude.
>> https://www.ft.com/content/2353be6d-7573-4b24-bf76-e77f4039f957
It’s just a drill, right??
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/belarus-has-started-taking-delivery-russian-tactical-nuclear-weapons-president-2023-06-14/
Hey, I remember doing the crawl under your desk drill in the 1960s in Oklahoma. Of course, those old cinder block buildings would probably have melted immediately.
The National Park Service is recommending that people hike in the national parks.
The bears note that they appreciate the variety.
Home from my client’s house.
Got most of what I needed to get done finished.
It was HOT. Still 89F here at 10pm.
Took a while to get the cameras all recognized because of poor user interface design, unhelpful error messages, and automagic that could use a few more rabbits.
Client is happy and asked for more cams now that he’s seen the difference in resolution. When he sees the night vision he’ll plotz.
Getting the NVR app to work took changing the IP to the same subnet like it was supposed to be in the first place. Then scan a QR with their app, and just like that, live video appeared.
Getting the new ubiquiti WAP configured took far too long and too many resets, but it eventually got there. It’s a floodlight, set your hair on fire… should have used all LR versions from the start.
Bought the wrong replacement switch for my bad one at the gate. Mis-read the spec- it doesn’t actually SERVE out PoE. So that will be done later.
I think I stayed hydrated this time, I peed before I left. 6 cans of sparkling water? 8?? lots in any case. Wore the cool vest too. Stayed out of the attic so I’ll have to do some additional cams later when I can pull the cable without dying.
Still soaking wet.
n
Our swim team uses a computerized timing system. There is a PA on a stick, with a strobe and a noise maker to signal the start. The ‘end race’ and ‘reset to zero’ handheld control was on a 24″ cable. That is too short to sit down, you have to stand with your hands slightly above waist level for the whole night, stopping the clock and resetting after every race.
There is a laptop running the roster and recording times, and lane timers with wireless handheld things to stop each lane time.
I made simple cable extensions, one 6ft and one 30ft so that you could do the stop/reset while seated, or so it could be on the timer’s table if they were short staff.
Because someone broke the PA function, it was too quiet to use. The race announcer/starter had a handheld bullhorn and a whistle. I used the pendent to also START each race this time. ~200 starts and stops over 4-5 hours. It’s tedious, but you have to pay close attention. And you don’t get a break as they keep all the timing staff thru the meet, so it’s consistent. So we used the timing function, but not the starter noise or strobe. Worked out and I had the same error rate as the first time, 1 in 100.
n
Chilled two DeadFriendBeers tonight.
Working on the second, an outstanding coffee stout whose recipe is forever lost.
Absent friends.
Left us too soon by the machinations of the lying noface Chicom …
And Fauci and Friends, any of whom I hope to meet and spend quality time with…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs-yzJeZoRg
“The National Park Service is recommending that people hike in the national parks.”
Only a matter of time before the lack of diversity becomes an issue…
The National Park Service is recommending that people hike in the national parks.
The bears note that they appreciate the variety.
The National Park Service is recommending that people hike in groups in the national parks.
The bears note that they appreciate the variety.
I left out the words “groups in” the first sentence. Sigh.
Is TikTok making people dumber, or is it that dumb people flock to TikTok?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-12199945/From-CVS-GEICO-REAL-names-popular-brands-use-acronyms-revealed.html
n
It can be both. It probably is both.
Each successive wave of media:
radio>television>internet
has resulted in the stupidification of the populace.
We are approaching peak stupidification, at which point the elite’s kill off the excess proles.
Long-suppressed treatise on the proper breeding of slaves ca, 1840 American South are the handbook of the future.
It took less than 100 years to progress from people willing to learn to read in defiance of laws setting death as the penalty to people working 10-12 hour days and spending evenings reading to better themselves to a broken culture that spurns learning.
The archaeologists of the future will study the present time and feel so morally superior. and there i a 99% chance that they will get suckered into the next cycle.
We are approaching peak stupidification, at which point the elite’s kill off the excess proles.
After which, the remaining proles kill off the elites. Guillotine are cheap. Unfortunately, sharp guillotine are expensive. Pray for a sharp guillotine.
Barbed wire is cheap and crows volunteer.
Kinda matter of fact article for something we were told was only a conspiracy theory and probably racist only a year or so ago…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12203675/MATT-PALUMBO-George-Soros-heir-takes-25B-empire-heres-mainstream-media-wont-say.html
n
Deep introspective rock question for the weekend:
Best Hollies song?
Nominate, then play “the ultimate”, and reaffirm–if you can.
>> It can be both. It probably is both.
So that would be what they call a ‘circle jerk’? Or perhaps a jerk circle?
Up early in Berlin. Our hosts apartment is on the 4th floor of a large apartment building. The top floor which is considered a prime location.
No A/C so the windows are left open. A lot of street noise as my sleeping location has a window that faces the street.
I am not impressed with Berlin. Crowded, a feeling of dirty, graffiti everywhere there is a vertical surface. The smaller towns in Germany don’t suffer from graffiti and present a much more pleasant experience. Frankfurt, Berlin, Munich all suffer the same fate. Much like the larger cities in the US. The graffiti does seem much more prevalent here. Although I avoid large cities in the U.S.
Not much planned for the day. I will go with the host father and we will fly a drone. He showed me a lot of stuff about the drone, a DJI Mini 3 Pro. Impressive technology with excellent images, much intelligence in the drone and controller. It will be interesting.
There is also a tour with old German East/West era vehicles that one can drive. Delivery time for people in the East was 18 years, yes, years. Cars were ordered when children were born so they would arrive on their 18th birthday.
Cheap cars, poorly built, small, no amenities, I think about a 10 HP engine that is loud and noisy. Might be fun, might not.
@ray, it can always be fun with the right attitude. Learning new stuff is fun in itself, right??
I LIKE central A/C. I really like it. A lot.
n
Don’t forget the role of genetics in the enstupidiation of the populace. Look up breeding rates over the past century, by intelligence stratum. Note especially the role of public policy on these numbers.
I’m not a eugenicist, quite, but I’m definitely an anti-disgenecist.
Best Hollies song?
Either Bus Stop or Long Cool Woman In a Red Dress.
Mom and I are watching the Formosa plant across the bay. They are flaring a lot of ethylene tonight out of both flares. Ethylene burns real bright then dark. Almost as bright as sodium.
Not to mention: forbidding things is pretty much an incentive for a teen…
Jeezum. I hope that includes any and all disposal fees…
The are just tools. The next step up from spelling and grammar checkers. The AIs generally produce grammatically correct text, and the AI-detectors seems to rely on that. Which means that relying on those detectors would endanger your best students, i.e., those who actually do a good job.
The school administration was showing signs of panic, issuing frankly stupid directives to the students. Myself and at least one other professor made our opinions known. Seems like we may have calmed them down a wee bit.