Clear and nice today. It was simply gorgeous yesterday. What a nice surprise. We got several inches of rain Friday night, but it was gone and done before I got up. Several inches of water in the back of the truck proved that we got a lot of rain. Hopefully today is nice too. National forecast says we’re in the clear.
Did my pickup in the late morning. Took a bit to get started. Still sore. Had a bit of free time so I hit the estate auction from Friday, and I found more stuff to buy. Good sale, lots of good things.
Got home and did a few domestic bliss things. Then I fell asleep in the chair. Wife and D2 got home, D2 went to bed and crashed. So the evening ended up being sleepy time and not work time.
I didn’t get as much done as I wanted, but I’m happy enough.
Today I’ll be doing a bit more home stuff. I’ve got indoor and outdoor stuff piled up.
Stacks of stuff. Still, there are things to get and stack. Figure out which are which.
nick
IIRC, that system was a Sam’s or Costco purchase with twitchy I/O.
The contrast between the appliance and electronics departments at Nebraska Furniture Mart yesterday and the Best Buy near work I walked into on Friday afternoon was pretty stark.
At a certain point, I have to wonder if Buffett retired because any potential acquisition target is likely to be staffed with management who are bored with running their particular business and long term growth would be limited by the imaginations (or lack thereof) staffing the operations.
The Oxy CEO was in the press over the last week begging for a BRK acquisition.
The Robber Baron’s ‘Lewis Point’ maybe?
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”― C. S. Lewis
Yup, but I’ll quantify that with “any tire replaced”. I’ve had a repair and put it back on my Outback. That was at a tire shop. The Subie dealer might squawk about just a repair to upsell new tires.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/nuclear-emp-attack-moves-big-screen-author-reflects-invisible-lifeline
The book “One Second After” is being made into a movie. I really like the book. Let’s hope the movie can live up to the source material. JMS is writing, so it has potential if he can stick to the story.
I watched the first two episodes of “The Last Of Us” last night on HBO on the parents directv. It is another zombie show using a fungus that takes over people’s brains. I may sneak a subscription of HBO at home so I can watch the rest of the episodes. My wife is unhappy about Fubo at $100/month, she will go sky high about HBO.
HBO series eventually make their way onto DVDs which end up in clearance bins at Walmart and Tarjay.
Or, at least they did before Warner headed for Bankruptcy.
Still, Stuntman #12 -er- Pedro Pascal has a lot of social media followers hanging on the stupidity which flows from his mouth so there may be physical media of the latest season.
It has been a long time since Straczynski did anything significant outside of comics.
Currently 69F and sunny! Yea global cooling!
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IIRC, that system was a Sam’s or Costco purchase with twitchy I/O.
–nope this system was direct from dell, small to medium business sales channel. Those machines are rock solid, with upgrades possible. The psu failed most recently, but one came up in an auction the same week. I still have that machine in the attic as my replacement for this if something else fails.
The sketchy costco machine is the linux mint based NVR machine. Adding the second HD needed splitter cables, etc. As an NVR with an OS I don’t touch, running software that once stable I haven’t changed, it’s been good. It’s encoding 13 streams of video and saving to disk every ten minutes without issues.
n
I saw an preview last night for the Murderbot Diaries on Apple TV, later this month I guess.
It’s hard to tell how good it might be from a couple minutes of video, but at least the lead character isn’t changed to a woman of color or anything.
Thermostats. Why hasn’t Moore’s law kicked in for them?
I don’t want much. A simple programmable interface with multiple day-of-week and hour-of-day settings. Maybe wifi or bluetooth. Not connected to the cloud. No spyware. Not one where you have to stand in the hallway with the manual in one hand, a flashlight in the other, and use the other hand to press buttons in arcane sequences.
Oh, and handles daylight savings time correctly, too.
Seems like it should be a doable arduino project.. Why charge $300 and include a microphone you can’t disable, and program through a proprietary cloud? With an unnecessary subscription to boot?
Dad and I went to see “The Accountant^2” last Friday. Pretty good 2+ hour movie. Lots of shooting and action heros. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon wrote this movie too.
HBO series eventually make their way onto DVDs which end up in clearance bins at Walmart and Tarjay.
I don’t want to buy any more DVDs. I have too many of them now.
But there was a horrible distraction of this goofy guy in the lower right corner doing sign language. I looked for a way to turn it off but could not find one.
I wish I could say the same for the upcoming Fantastic Four movie. Female Silver Surfer, ugh. I was digging the retro vide of the trailers, but grrrl power is creeping in. Plus, Stuntman #12 shooting his mouth off. Who cares if his sister is trans. He is also over-exposed on the screens. FF is my favorite childhood comic book with The Thing my all time hero. Now PUDro is messing with it. Sigh.
Ecobee is fairly good. Still connected to the cloud, but easily programmable with the app. No need to use the screen. It does require a 5 or 7 wire connection to the unit.
A Raspberry Pi solution, with Homekit:
https://opensource.com/article/21/3/thermostat-raspberry-pi
And?: UN Could Run Out of Cash Within Months
https://hotair.com/headlines/2025/05/04/and-un-could-run-out-of-cash-within-months-n3802412
Don’t forget to flush on your way out.
Good! The UN is just about the most anti-American organization except Red China. We need to get the US out of the UN, and the UN out of the US. Let them move to Nairobi or Cape Town.
Antarctica has plenty of space and is flagless.
Nope, nope, nope. Too much propeller head stuff and only works with a hot water system.
Too many treaties that keep the place neutral.
I think Enewetak would be a better choice. No one knows where it is, or cares.
Good choice, Ray! And nice beaches, too. Just don’t spend TOO much time on the sand.
Well, I weed whacked the back yard. Broke down some more scrap and loaded the truck. Blew leaves out of the piles against the house. Did a side project for one of my hobbies, just to see if I needed to continue doing something else. Moved some stuff.
Put the trolling motor battery on an old school charger to try and get enough into it for my sexy computer driven charger to work on it. I will run the “recondition” cycle if I can get the charge high enough.
Of course that was a fractal task as I needed a multimeter, and so I needed to change a battery in one, and then figure out why it wasn’t working. Turned out that two different leads were bad. Oh, and I needed to get out extension cords and run them to power the charger. Discovered in the process that I have a dead GFCI outlet on the patio. Add that to the list.
It’s such a beautiful day I pretty much have to work outside…
n
I made baked chicken legs for dinner. I mixed the flavor packet that I use for stewed chicken in the crock pot with flour and used that to bread the chicken. Basted once with butter after half an hour in the oven. Delicious. The herb flavor came through nicely.
Boxed au gratin potatoes, since I was running the oven anyway. One year past best by and still fine.
As a data point, Knoor noodles with Alfredo sauce 3 years past best by and they tasted “off”. There was a very faint ammonia smell too. 3 years is too long.
I should have made a baked dessert with the oven hot, but I skipped it.
n
The sales channel means zip these days. Nothing sells at the big players except AI.
I wouldn’t want to depend on hobbyist hardware and software for my physical and/or financial safety.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2025/05/04/mexican-president-snubs-trumps-push-for-us-military-in-mexicos-cartel-fight-n2656502
Totally clueless.
80,000 U.S. citizens die every year from Mexican/Chinese fentanyl.
Put an 80% tax on remittances and make monthly decreases based on 1% for every 1,000 annualized fentanyl death reduction, or twice that as an increase if the numbers climb.
And, gee, not that I expect blue shiiteholes to try to game the numbers or anything, but we might need some requirements and stiff penalties for failure to test and failure to truthfully report tox results for anything that looks like a drug overdose.
BC: Dinosaur Zoomies
https://www.gocomics.com/bc/2025/05/02
Dinosaurs get the zoomies ? I vote that we do not resurrect the dinosaurs after the Woolly Mammoths.
Pearls Before Swine: Names
https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2025/05/04
I know my neighbor’s houses by their dog’s names.
“Holding Their Own VIII: The Directives” by Joe Nobody
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0692258248?tag=ttgnet-20/
The eighth book in a series of nineteen alternate history books about the economic collapse of the USA in 2015 and onward. I reread the well printed and well bound POD (print on demand) trade paperback self published by the author in 2014 that I bought new on Amazon in 2014. I own the first eleven books in the series and am rereading the first ten before my first read of the eleventh book.
Um, this series was published in 2011 just as the shale oil and gas boom was really getting cranked up. The book has crude oil at $350/barrel and gasoline at $6/gallon in 2015. Not gonna happen due to oil well fracking in the USA so the major driver of economic collapse in the USA is invalid for the book. That said, the book is a good story about the collapse and failure of the federal government in the USA. The book is centered in Texas which makes it very interesting to me since I am a Texas resident.
The $6 gasoline was just the start. The unemployment rises to 40% over a couple of years and then there is a terrorist chemical attack in Chicago that kills 50,000 people. The current President of the USA nukes Iran with EMP airbursts as the sponsor of the terrorist attack. And the President of the USA also declares martial law and shuts down the interstates to stop the terrorists from moving about. That shuts down food and fuel movement causing starvation and lack of energy across the nation.
The accumulations of these serious problems cause widespread panics and shutdowns of basic services like electricity and water for large cities. The electricity grids fail due to employees not showing up to work at the plants. Then the refineries shutdown due to the lack of electricity.
It has been a year since the collapse and about half of the population in the USA is dead due to violence or starvation. The USA government has abandoned Texas in order to restart the Mississippi heartland. The West Texas Alliance is reaching out to other communities in Texas to strengthen itself.
The author has a website at:
https://www.joenobodybooks.com/
My rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars (569 reviews)
Lynn