But it’s probably not raining. It’s probably 100F and 90+% RH. Because that’s what yesterday was like. And tomorrow will probably be like that too.
I did my stuff Friday, and actually left the house at the time I needed to. That let me do a pickup on the way. Water skis, solar panels, EZGo parts, and a plate compactor. What a load. Took a while to get through traffic, and when I got here, the A/C wasn’t working. Got that fixed. Details in yesterday’s comments. Then it was still hot and humid so I stayed in my air-conditioned house and read.
Today I’ve got two main goals, and a minor goal. I have to compact the crushed slag walkway. I would like to continue pressure washing the roof. And I have to cut and remove a limb that broke and is partially resting on the roof. There are many other things I can do too, mostly involving putting away and organizing all the stuff I’ve been bringing up here. The major projects are too involved to start most of them on a weekend when it’s only me here (and the dog) or they involve work in the attic which isn’t advisable in this heat.
There is a lot of stacking to do. And a lot of improving. I’ll get to some of it. Stack something of your own.
nick
What that means is that Warner wrote off the Looney Tunes.
If you are fortunate enough to have a MeTV Toons channel within reception range, the old cartoons running there are uncensored as far as I can tell.
My big downstairs AC unit drain line has multiple right angles of 3/ 4″ pipe and tends to get clogged if I’m lax on arranging the annual service.
In Texas, like Florida, the annual service is absolutely necessary to have a professional keep an eye on the units as they corrode in the marine environment, which extends a lot further inland than a lot of people think.
If I get a clog outside of the annual service, I have a small shop vac I duct tape to the end of the line and let run on the blockage with the access cap removed at the top of the unit until water appears in the vacuum. YMMV, but this works for my situation.
Talk to your professional before trying the oft-cited Internet tip of pouring bleach or vinegar down the drain line. New units are really sensitive to corrosives being introduced in the wrong spot.
I have Verizon for my cell phone. Two, sometimes three bars signal inside. The house has a metal roof. Four and usually five bars outside. It’s been like this for a while and that’s with three different LG V20 phones and a Blackberry z10.
For the last few months I pick up the phone and once in a while it says No Service. Sometimes switching in and out of airplane mode clears it. Sometimes ignoring it fixes it. Maybe Verizon is getting overloaded here?
The neighbor has Verizon and has no problem. She was down here a couple of weeks ago and no problem while my phone did the No Service routine.
I guess, I don’t know, do SIM cards fail?
A wild guess is that the card is failing because if it was Verizon I think the phone would drain the battery looking for service. Battery life doing ok.
What kind of phone does the neighbor have?
My guess is that she has 5G capable hardware or a newer 4G modem.
The V20 is 4G/LTE while the Blackberry is LTE.
So maybe the same tower, but retired some of the older 4G transceivers and put in the newer 5G?
I think I mentioned replacing some of the Phifer 90% sun reflection screen (Suntex 90) with 65% in a west facing room.
To the eye there isn’t a huge difference looking out, you can see it but if you weren’t looking for a change in tinting you probably wouldn’t notice, even side-by-side.
And temperature wise there doesn’t seem to be any discernable impact.
However inside the room it’s definitely brighter, I am happy with a couple of screens changed and will probably stop there and leave the rest at 90%.
From outside they look identical so there isn’t any aesthetic impact to mixing them up.
Not every phone can receive all the potential frequencies assigned to a carrier, and they may have changed over time or at some point. Or your local tower might have an antenna issue. But. You are right that low signal strength usually kills the battery as the phone uses more power to hit the tower.
I have the issue all the time at the BOL with att. If the phone doesn’t see a tower for too long, it gives up, showing ‘no srv’ until I switch in and out of airplane mode.
You could call them. Your closest tower might have an issue. At home, when we first moved into our house, the tower down the street had an issue. When we looked at the house, we had 5 bars. When we bought, we had 2. I was freaked out, but it got fixed in a week.
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It’s not raining. 84F and sunny. Really nice day if not for all the work.
Breakfast is in my belly, coffee in the mug, and dog has been out to do his business.
Soon, the actual work will start.
n
5G offers new bandwidth and protocols.
5G can also utilize “unlicensed” spectrum in the WiFi Frequencies.
Yeah, if you have a streaming box, get Tubi. Great free streamer with ads.
Tubi also has things no one else will touch right now, including the recent “Chappaquiddick” movie starring an Australian actor as Uncle Ted and two comedy actors as the Kennedy family “fixers” who try to get the girl out of the overturned car.
The movie does not pull punches. The possibility that the girl suffocated in an air pocket rather than drowned is not dismissed but left up to the viewer to decide.
And I’ve mentioned here before that Tubi has “Capricorn One” – OJ’s first movie!
Tubi also produced the “Wynonna Earp” TV movie. It wasn’t that good, but I liked the series and Tubi aired it ad free the first week. Nice.
This was probably a CEREC machine which mills the crown out of a block of ceramic mounted on a titanium stem. I always get the “Blue” ceramic which is the hardest, I think.
I paid extra for the “good” ceramic.
From yesterday:
Does that include playing video? I’ve been using Firefox for a while, but it doesn’t seem to like playing videos from all websites. Sometimes it makes its displeasure known by crashing the system, and that usually involves deleting random cookies for some unknown reason. Including this site, just about every time it crashes.
I started using Brave to avoid YouTube commercials, and it worked nearly perfectly. After a while, I started using it for everything. Never had it crash or do anything wonky.
All privacy and ad blocking are built-in, so there are no extensions to manage. These features can be disabled for specific sites, but it is rarely needed. Since it is based on the Chrome code base, extensions can be used. For instance, I have used an ISP monitoring extension, and it works fine.
There is some sort of points system, but I ignore it. It stopped notifying me, so it might be gone.
Try it. When I try a new to me browser, I don’t make it my default browser, and I have always been able to uninstall with no issues.
BTW, not to ruffle any feathers, but I have used lot of browsers starting with Mosaic. Most were OK. Firefox was mediocre, but a little boring, and difficult to keep running well. That was on Linux. A friend suggested Chrome, but I had to use the open source version because I was on Linux. It was better. I tried the Android version, and it was still better. When I went back to Windows, Chrome was best of all, until I added Brave. I now use it on Windows and Android. I have wanted to try Vivaldi, but I ran out of round tuits a while back. Besides, Brave…
Changing browsers is much easier than changing word processors. Good luck.
What’s your opinion of Opera?
The team that originally wrote Opera were all Europeans. But about 7-8 years ago, China bought the Opera program and code, and the European programmers all quit. Opera is now ENTIRELY Chinese, so I wouldn’t use it on a bet.
Curiously, the Europeans who had resigned from Chinese Opera started a NEW browser, called Vivaldi. Vivaldi is great, and that’s my primary browser these days.
Never been to one, never will.
Alas, no such luck here. Following the link takes me to Tubi and “content unavailable”.
“Chappaquiddick” is unavailable as well.
There seems to be a lot of Spanish language material and very little (if any) French.
That flick was there when we went to Martha’s Vineyard last fall.
We went out to the Dike Road Bridge and peered into the abyss … or lack thereof … and I consumed background material that morning before heading out.
Never been, but I hear there are “thunderbolts and lightning, very, very, frightening”.
“Harbinger (Elfhome)” by Wen Spencer
https://www.amazon.com/Harbinger-5-Elfhome-Wen-Spencer/dp/1982192453?tag=ttgnet-20/
Book number six of a seven book science fiction fantasy series. Some people call this a paranormal romance series. I read the well printed and well bound MMPB published by Baen in 2023. I own book seven and plan on reading it soon.
Alexander Graham (Tinker) Bell, Elf domi of the Wind clan, has brothers and sisters that she never knew of. Two sisters have been born on Earth and others not born yet. Her sisters and unborn siblings made it to Elfhome from Earth just in time for a war between the four elf clans as their older sister destroyed the hyperphase gate connecting the Earth and Elfhome, stranding the entire city of Pittsburg on Elfhome.
The book really jumps around a lot between the major players. It was a little hard following the action.
My rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars (I want to rate this 5 stars !)
Amazon rating: 4.5 stars out of 5 stars (1,110 reviews)
Lynn
Answered by Ken. I didn’t know the Chinese story. I learn lots here. I thought Vivaldi was unrelated to Opera. I read good things about it. Maybe try some day.
I have a weird little problem that’s got me hooked, and I see a few paths to solving it. Divergent paths.
This is one of the things I miss about being in a development team full of near-geniuses. I could outline the paths and tools and we could brainstorm it. Maybe even do a little prototyping.
Here’s the gist of it. Imagine you want to make some preformatted content, and then print it out. The content is in mini-pages, printed with 8 or 16 on a single letter-sized piece of paper.
For examples, see PocketMod. Except I have 3 different variations of PocketMod and PocketFold beyond what is supported at that site.
I don’t have Microsoft Word, and using LibreOffice or Google Docs without programming can’t get me where I need to be.
So I need to do scripting, and that means learning one or the other toolset.
Definitely a first world problem, but I’m going to enjoy living in the first world while I still can.
Create a table, 2 columns by 4 rows, or whatever you need. Put the content in each table cell. It will work with most word processors.
My Lexmark printer allows multiple pages per sheet of paper. Up to 16 pages.
I don’t see the settings to do the same in Firefox’s PDF printer. Or MS’ XPS writer. Or 7-PDF. But I didn’t look real hard.
PocketMod looks cool.
LaTeX can do it and generate output without a GUI involved if the source pages are PDF.
I’ve only done 1:1 page, however, consolidating dozens of PDF files into one master document.
Most print drivers can put multiple pages on a sheet of paper.
I used to use a program called ‘FinePrint’, which is still available, but costs $100. I recall that it used to be shareware.
Some of the pages have to be rotated in such a way that the output can be cut and folded into a small book.
Ghostscript could do it, but the syntax would be more complicated than LaTeX.
OTOH, someone may have done this previously and posted online.
Yes, some rightside up and some upsidedown.
Also, the different outputs need pages printed in a particular order, which is not consecutive. Folding changes the order to then become consecutive. But each type of PocketMod or PocketFold has a different order, and that means a different page order.
LibreOffice comes so close. I can create frames, and flow them from one to another. But I can’t rotate a frame. I can create text boxes, and rotate them as I wish. But I can’t flow content from one text box to another. And I won’t feel satisifed until I can do both.
Post-processing the PDF would get me there, and make the choice of word processing tool largely irrelevant. Just produce a PDF with tiny pages, and assemble the pages in the right order and right orientation.
I’m going to write the PocketMod.com folks and see if they’ll let me know how they do it. No use reinventing the wheel.
Pitch dark at 8:40. It seems like a week ago there was still light at 9.
Sunrise is getting later. 7am tomorrow. I kind of liked it at quarter of 6.
A search for ‘booklet printing software'” gives several possibilities, including Adobe Express (online tool, free) and Booklet Creator (free, I think) that works with PDF documents to create booklets that you can print. Search results: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=booklet+printing+software&ia=web
There is also a review of “10 Best Free Booklet Creators” here https://fixthephoto.com/best-free-booklet-creator.html . I have not looked at any of those.
And DDG’s AI says “There are several software options for booklet printing, including Microsoft Word, which has a built-in feature for creating booklets by adjusting the layout to “Book fold.” Other options include Adobe Express for designing custom booklets and various online tools like BookletCreator that can reorder PDF pages for printing.”. with more info available about the choices (which includes the ones that I mentioned above).
I finally repotted the last two plants. A couple of the old broken plastic pots had good potting soil. I filled a large clay pot. Maybe I’ll get a hibiscus or some vinca. Something flowery after this coming winter.
Maybe.
I used to use something to make booklets but I can’t think of what it was called. I used to take our flight and hotels and daily itinerary and make a custom booklet for the crew on my tour. OLDGUY’s links should get you something that will work.
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I am calling my walkway project “done” at least for now. I did some additional leveling and a lot of passes with the plate compactor, alternating with watering it. There is a spot by the front door of the house that I also filled, and I might spend a bit more time on it, but the walk is done. I also compacted the 2ft strip I did along the RV pad. Spent the rest of the day powerwashing the roof. And cutting down the broken limb that was sitting on the roof. I’ve got some sunburn on my neck I think from not being careful…
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I really like the Elfhome books by Wen Spenser. You need to read all the short stories too. They fill in a lot of interesting detail, and make the last two books much more understandable. There is a lot about the secret assassin, and the video producer’s family as well as the Home and Garden show (which is one of my favorite parts of the stories.)
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I believe I will spend some time on the dock tonight. It’s already down to 81F and falling. I don’t think it got as hot today as past days. There was a thunderstorm that moved around us which dropped the temp a lot in the late morning. I tried to move from job to job to take advantage of the shade as the day went on too.
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Dinner was leftover stewed chicken legs and potatoes brought from home.
n
Something flowery
— night blooming jasmine. I loved that when I lived in San Diego, but IDK if it will grow in Texas.
n
I used (and sold, and implemented) a program called Nuance eCopy PDF Pro Office that worked very well to do that. I know there’s a newer version canned “Kofax Power PDF”, which may be what you need.
Nice night on the dock. Radio was poor, except 30M which had a bunch of religious broadcasters. It’s 81F but there was a nice gentle cooler breeze on the water.
Darkest sky in a while, but still a bit hazy. Time for bed.
n
Huh, sold one of the big ticket items I listed. Now to get it out of my buddy’s shop and on its way.
n
This morning:
Me: “Ah, the bubbling of the coffee dispensing, sweet elixir of life”.
Also Me: “Hey! Why is the dispenser carafe still in the sink?”
The problem with using coffee to wake up in the morning is that you have to make it while you’re still not awake.
Anyway, kudo’s to the Scott Paper Company for their contributions to modern life.
Hmmm.
SpaceX engineers seem to be struggling with the pressurization systems, they just announced that a bad pressurizaion header is what wrecked Ship 9 in flight.
A composite overwrapped tank for that system is what destroyed what would have been Ship 10 and the Massey test stand and put them months and billions of $$ behind.
There are no easy days for rocketship engineers.
But, you have to wonder if they had the B team working on the pressurization engineering.