Tengo calor hoy… and humidity too. It was a bit cooler yesterday with the overcast there most of the day, but it still got to the mid 90sF in the afternoon. It was a slow sleepy day for me.
I did one pickup on the west side of town. Ran by the shop and unloaded some stuff. Hit the reStore in NW Houston since I was fairly close. I’m still looking for upper cabinets for the laundry area at the BOL. No luck though.
Someone new is in charge of pricing and stock is piling up. WAY too high. There were other people walking around looking, but no one was buying. This is typical of thrift type stores. FFS, you get the product for free. Yes, you need to pay the bills, but you start out with the advantage of people bringing you the product to sell. You really don’t have to squeeze it for every penny. Only greed and envy would prompt you to say “if the resellers can buy it, we need to raise prices and get some of that money we’re leaving on the table.”
Then too much stuff accumulates because it is a never ending river of stuff, and it’s not selling fast enough, so they lower prices back down. Then it moves.
Something similar happens in the auctions. New money enters the game, they don’t know what stuff usually sells for, so they bid higher than the regulars. They still get a good deal, but not as good as usual. ‘Sold’ prices go up. If the new money is trying to become a reseller, they fail soon because they’ve paid too much for their inventory. Then prices fall back to normal. I’ll admit, seeing the flood, and the usual prices, has really warped my sense of what stuff should cost. I rarely shop in stores anymore, except for food, unless it’s something I need right away. I know if I wait, it’s almost guaranteed to eventually come up in the secondary market.
Today I’ll maybe do one more pickup, and if the weather is obliging, I might close out another storage unit. They are bleeding me and I need to make a change. Plus, I need to turn inventory into cash, so I can stack that, and the things it buys.
Stack what you need.
nick
I recall that our late host was very much against paracetamol / acetaminophen, on the basis that the lethal dose and the therapeutic dose are almost the same.
Happened to us again on the train. Apparently we were sitting in reserved seats. We had to move to seats that are reserved from Hannover to Berlin. We get off before Hannover. About 10 minutes into the journey, the people whose seats we had apparently occupied, moved to other seats. Germans. You will follow the rules.
The list includes:
Taco Bell, Mattel, Starbucks, Sprinkle Cupcakes, Godiva, Coach, J. Crew, and Macy’s
https://investor.crackerbarrel.com/management/julie-felss-masino
BA Communications from Miami-Ohio, a “good” school.
Go to the C-suite of any public company in the US dominated by Blackrock and Vanguard, and you will find women just like that in charge, whether or not they’re qualified.
Brinker (Chili’s), also nearly 100% owned by the same institutions, pulled off a turnaround over the last few years, with a CEO of similar age/background.
Can you spot the difference?
https://investors.brinker.com/management/kevin-hochman
I still work at unwinding my involvement with Vanguard, pulling a big chunk of money out this week.
I had an experiment in short term bond money at Vanguard which was probably being used to finance the changes at Cracker Barrel. Not anymore.
We have a Sprinkle Cupcakes here in Austin, complete with the touted cupcake “vending machine”.
I see the store every time we have to visit the Geniuses at Apple across the street.
The “vending machine” always has a sign indicating that it is “out of order”.
My wife says that the machine worked when the store was first open.
Except if you are an illegal immigrant from the Middle East or Africa.
Ze Kampfs await for Ze Skippy vit ze Vaccine Hesitancy und mask refusal, Ja.
But not for members of “The Religion of Peace”. They’re “refugees”.
79F under mostly cloudy skies. (Funny how that is plural unless it’s “the sky” or “a sky”.)
Some rumbling in the distance. IDK if I’ll be moving that storage unit after all.
Kids are out the door, tea is about gone. I’m feeling less tired than yesterday but still sleepy.
I do have one auction pickup scheduled, but there is an item that can’t really get wet, and only fits in the back of the Ranger, so I hope the rain stays away.
Oh well, stuff to do…
n
DB was late into Bielefeld forcing us to take another train. All just coach seats and the train was crowded. We had to sit on the jump seats in the doorway. Apparently young German youth will not relinquish a seat for an older person. I saw a very pregnant woman at one platform, obviously uncomfortable, while some young turd-head looked at her and continued occupying two seats as he was sprawled out.
We have two nights in Hövelhof before departing Friday. We are supposed to meet another former exchange student but she does not answer her texts. We may just skip that and head to our next destination. On Monday we will arrive in Munich for the two week babysitting adventure. That is a long time to be guests, although the apartment is large with at least two full bathrooms.
German bathrooms seem strange. Two flush settings, one for liquid, the other for solids. I guess to conserve water. Showers are strange with strange controls. Maybe not strange, but certainly different.
I have learned that having a German power strip is a really good idea with all the devices we have to charge. At our last stop our host gave us one of his. I can use it at home with my US to German adapter for our former exchange students when they visit. I can now plug in everything I need to charge without hunting for additional outlets.
The whole German plug seems safer than U.S. as the prongs are never exposed. It does make the plugs bulkier by a significant amount, especially over the folder U.S. plugs for device power supplies. With the German 220V system such a safety measure is probably really necessary as that 220V can easily kill.
Domestic use of 220v does allow use of smaller gauge wire as premise wire, which was probably important post wars…
It’s funny that at least in the UK, people are scared to have gas in the house, while they think nothing of plugging lamps into 220v, while in the US, gas is preferred, and 220v is scary and reserved for large appliances. Might have something to do with an apartment block blowing up…
n
Yes. I saw a computer controlled lighting system for the house. All the lights are controlled by an app on the phone. The wiring to the lights, and outlets with lights, seemed to be 18 gauge wire, maybe smaller. Things such as toaster, ovens, and such do heat up much faster.
So, a bridge in WA state (near my sister in Buckley) was taken out of commission by a “semi-like vehicle”. Sounds like it could be months to repair.
https://youtu.be/vsN_gX8ZSUA
This was on the 18th. Oddly there are no media photos of the vehicle that did the damage, no photos of the driver, no identification for the driver, and no mention of an arrest or charging.
My liberal blue state relatives are scratching their heads, puzzled.
When there’s a news blackout there is usually a PLT reason.
“I recall that our late host was very much against paracetamol / acetaminophen, on the basis that the lethal dose and the therapeutic dose are almost the same.”
A small multiple, made smaller by alcohol.
I met the family of a young college student in the ICU waiting rooms some years ago. He came home on. Weekend night and thought he would get ahead of his hangover. Hospital was frantically looking for a donor liver—his was dead.
UPDATE ON SITE ISSUES
Hey all, the hosting company says we are getting 10K requests from google cloud IPs and at the same time, getting hammered by some bots.
I’ve blocked some of them in robots.txt and htaccess so response times should be getting better.
Dunno what changed out there, no mention of a denial of service attack.
n
MORE UPDATE
I’ve blocked google cloud services IPs that were hammering at us. 10s of thousands of requests using up all the WordPress resources.
I’ve been able to reload pages now, a couple of times.
I’ll revisit the issue later tonight, but for now, it seems to be ok.
n
I suppose figuring a way to have Google cloud swamp the server is more fun than simply making rude comments and down voting posts.
USAA seems to think I need another CC. Theirs. If I read correctly, no interest until Dec ’26. 11.5% interest after that. 5% fee for balance transfers and cash advances. No annual fee.
5% for cash advances. So much for getting a chunk from them and buying a t-bill. (Currently paying abit over 4%.)
The heck with that. I don’t carry balances. Now…. ya wanna offer something like 5% cashback and no annual fee, I’ll think about it.
Could be, or it could be someone using google services just did something stupid.
n
Malice or stupidity, the end result is the same. Now, if they shift IPs and start again, then I’ll ascribe it to malice.
@Gavin
In your case we would waive the remedial English requirement.
Bill Gates Distancing Himself From Dems?
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2025/08/27/bill-gates-distancing-himself-from-dems-n3806195
Too, late, Bug Boy.
And ’nuff said about your PLT ex.
New: Alleged Minnesota Gunman ID’d, With Disturbing Videos Linked to Him
https://redstate.com/smoosieq/2025/08/27/new-minnesota-gunman-idd-n2193279
Two children dead, 15 wounded, and the shooter dead of suicide.
Another deeply disturbed male>female trans shooter targeting children. Anti-semite and Trump-hater to boot? WTF?
Latest I read was the shooter had not been identified. That speaks volumes about what I suspect the nationality, ethnic background, skin color, facial hair, turban, etc. is involved. For certain the shooter was not a white male.
She is part of the problem.
Thanks for all the hard work Nick.
I hate dealing with that sort of stuff.
Well, it gives me the opportunity to learn stuff. Stuff I really didn’t want to learn, and didn’t have time to learn, but still. Can’t fossilize the brain.
n
Air Force returns M18 pistols to service after inspections across nuclear force
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/air-force-m18-return/
A falsehood very likely inspired by persistent reports of problems with the Sig Sauer P365.
The DM calls the now-dead- tranny, a “transgender woman”, for PLT/DEI cred. Freakazoid. It couldn’t handle tRump as President, so “I’ll go kill some kids…”. Rot in Hell boy-child.
I just bought a new iPad Air M3 to replace the old 11 inch M! model. I just needed a little more real estate so that I could run a larger font without getting crowded.
Mostly everything seems fine, with a bit of twiddling that really shouldn’t have been necessary with migration from one idevice to another.
One strange issue is the keyboard, the new virtual keyboard is four rows with the standard special characters above the numbers on the top row. For the former 11″ iPad there were only three rows and the special characters were greyed out uppercase above the qwerty letters, accessible by swipes.
Annoyingly there is no option to switch between the two, apparently keyboard layout follows the hardware and not the software.
I will either have to retrain my muscle memory or buy a new virtual keyboard from the App Store, if there’s one that I like available.
Expected reaction from Peppermint Patty, the ghoul:
Jen Psaki Slithers Under the Lowest Bar With Repugnant Posts About MN Catholic School Shooting
These people are sick. I hope we are watching the waning days of the Dumbo/PLT/woke/DEI crowd. Mid-term crushing is in order to finish them off.
CNN heading to the dust bin:
‘Despicable’: CNN Analyst Talks About Guns and Again Proves Why These ‘Experts’ Should Be Ignored
CNN Correspondent: Semi-automatic rifles “shoot dozens of bullets in just one trigger pull.”
Where can I get one?
I asked the AI assistant in DDG how to replace the four row keyboard with three rows.
(Typed on the new four row kb, by the way.)
It’s answer:
I have no idea what “18 gauge” means (other than it is perhaps an odd medium shotgun calibre), banana for scale is lacking…
Standard 240V domestic copper wiring over here is 1.5 square mm cross-section for lighting-only circuits (max. 5A, iirc) and 2.5 square mm for circuits including power sockets (probably 13A).
Where can I get one?
Put me down for a few of those, too, please. I might also need a shoulder thing that goes up.
I need some advice.
Win10 running on a Dell Optiplex.
I have lost the ability to print from Firefox. Cannot print a webpage, cannot print an address label from USPS.com, etc.
From Opera, printing a webpage or printing a label from USPS works normally.
Word, Excel, etc.
The only problem is Firefox. It has persisted across several updates. Closing Firefox and restarting has no effect; shutting down and restarting the computer has no effect.
Changing the printer selection has no effect. If I select “MS Print to PDF” the print preview disappears without the normal popup to select the file name and location.
Any ideas what I am missing?
Just home from some fine dining. Miracles do happen. I ordered a ribeye “blue”, and that is how I actually got it. Hurray.
The secret?
A Belgian chef!
LOL Dumbo mayor of Minneapolis says mass shooting with two dead kids by whack-job tranny is no excuse for trannyphobia. How many does it take? I’m sure he thinks those disgusting Catholic Christians deserved it.
drwilliams, use alt tab to cycle thru open windows to be sure you don’t have a dialog box open behind something..
——-
18 gauge – that’s AWG or American Wire Gauge which is how conductors are sold here. Typical circuit with outlets would be 14 gauge, rated for 20A at 120v. We don’t have pure lighting only circuits in residential, there is almost always an outlet or two on the same circuit. Except in bathrooms where that is prohibited.
https://www.simkab.com/l/size-standards-on-wire-harness-manufacturing/
(small but more complete chart of conversions)
18 gauge can also be called “lamp cord” and isn’t big enough for circuits in a house. 16 ga can also be called lamp cord and is often found in cheap extension cords. 14ga is the smallest you’ll find in a house, with 12 ga used for specifically 20A circuits or long wire runs. You find 10 and 6 for single outlet appliance circuits (stove, heater, clothes dryer, etc.) and 4 or 2 as supply conductors.
Then it skips to the ‘oughts’. 2/0 and 4/0 or 00 and 0000 ie “two ought” and “four ought” are used for supply, especially in temporary power as they are good for 200A and 400A respectively (on a typical 120/240v single phase distro or 120/208/277v three phase distro.) 277v is usually only used for lighting circuits in commercial spaces.
You’ll notice that for numbers, the physical size increases with a decrease in AWG, until you cross 0.
Cat cables usually have 22 or 24 ga conductors, which is the smallest gauge most people will use.
This link has a ton of info I didn’t know.
https://boathowto.com/electrics/conductor-sizing/
n
Mozilla has gone terminally woke; maintaining useable software is way down on their list of priorities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgwk4_FQdio
Find yourself another browser. Me, I switched to Brave.
Cue Don Meredith?
We will find out tomorrow.
https://www.investopedia.com/nvidia-earnings-q2-fy2026-11798581
The shooter was white, male, and trans, trying to be female. Normally, I expect trans shooters to be female pretending to be male. All the testosterone she gets to become a man, will drive most women insane. We men had 8-10 years to become accustomed to testosterone and learn to manage the aggression.
I’ve never had a problem pressing ctrl-p to print. Maybe a Firefox add-on is breaking printing for you.
And from all the reports, deeply troubled. But the guns were legally purchased. Failed background checks?
The old house in Austin used 12 gauge romex for everything. Well, maybe not the electric dryer outlet, I had a gas dryer.
This house uses 12 gauge for wall outlets and then 14 gauge for lights from wall switch to ceiling fixture. 12 gauge is rated to 20 amps at 120 volts. 14 gauge for less, 15 amps?.
The a/c and electric stove use heavier wire. 8 gauge romex without going to look. The water heater is on a 30 amp breaker and uses what looks like 12 gauge romex but in that case the 12 gauge wire is rated for 40 amps at 240 volts.
When I ran a ditch with wire from the EDC to the feed shed, I under-rated it all. I think I ran 8 gauge, Maybe 6, I’ll have to see if I have a scrap in the shed. 3 strands. In conduit as opposed to stringing wire open air on a few poles from building to building. 240 volts. Conduit holds in the heat and that lowers the max load a little Distance lowers the max load, too, because of voltage drop.
From memory I could go with 100 amps for the distance with a 2% voltage drop. I used a 50 amp breaker because it’s what the store had. It’s been plenty. I later ran wire from the feed shed to the boat shed. Same size wire but just a 40 amp breaker at 240. More than enough for an RV with a rooftop a/c to connect to a 30 amp outlet and some extra lighting.
I did something right, I have 120 volts in the boat shed. None of the breakers I’ve installed have ever tripped.
I have a book: Wiring Simplified. 37th Edition. I bought it from the magazine rack at Furrows. Maybe at Stripling Blake. I forget. It’s a good book and explains everything clearly.
Fun stuff.
Most residential and light commercial electric comes down to rules of thumb and SOP. You are supposed to do the calcs every time, but IDK if anyone does. I’ve done voltage drop calcs and got what I’d have done anyway, which is ‘go up one gauge’.
I’d bet that even seasoned guys have to look up three way and four way switches, and motor start ratings.
n
Time for the fog’s bedtime walk. It’s 7:25 and my watch says sunset is 8:02.
I’ll get that done, take a shower and stay up long enough for my hair to mostly dry. Then take Buddy out for a “just to make sure” pee walk.
It’s a routine we have.
Routine is good. Routine is comforting. And dogs REALLY need routine.
———
I guess since we haven’t had the performance issue return, blocking those IPs was a correct response. I will wait until tomorrow before unblocking them though. Hopefully whatever changed that was making them go nuts on us will have been dealt with. I’m hesitant to leave all of the 34.174.x.x range blocked, although most of those addys should be google.
The tech support guy said
Does anyone here subscribe to a feed from the site? Unless it’s something that is happening with magic, I’m not even sure we are doing a feed, or where I’d look.
n
Regarding this site’s 503 problem…..and the solution recommended by the hosting techs.
Blocking the IP’s only affects the result of the HTTP request. A blocked IP (via htaccess) just returns an unavailable code (a ‘403 Forbidden’), which the server has to send back to the requestor. So, a blocked IP will result in this sequence:
That WP request queries the WordPress database. Since the database is quite large (because of all of the comments, which are stored in a table in the database, the database results returned are the filtered request (which, because of the WP database size, takes some time to process the filter). (“Filter” = ‘give me some of the data from the database, based on these requirements’). The results of the query are processed by WordPress (the theme), which then builds and returns the actual HTML code of the page. That page data is sent back to the requestor, and displayed or processed.
So blocking an IP address in htaccess doesn’t reduce the load on the web server, but does result in the database server (a separate server) not having to do the query.
If there are a lot of HTTP requests (tons of requests) all at the same time, and they all are trying to access a WordPress page (and therefore causes WP database queries and responses), the data query results might take longer than the server will accept, so the server will return a 503 (unavailable) error. (Each page request results in a separate database query.)
And that (database taking too long to respond due to a high number of requests in a short time) is why there were lots of 503 errors happening – every single request was ‘hitting’ the database server (via the web server; again, remember that those two servers are separate virtual machines). And the database server couldn’t keep up with all of the requests.
Add to this the fact that this site is on shared hosting. So there are other web servers (and probably other database servers) that are handing traffic. If one of those servers is being overloaded, then that will affect the response time of this site (and any other site which is a virtual server on the same physical server). Although the tech said that they were seeing a lot of requests in the server logs (assuming that he/she were looking at the requests (‘traffic’) on this site.
So the possibilities for the 503 errors stopping because of blocking certain IP ranges could be
Blocking IP addresses only reduces the traffic from web server to database server; and the load on the database server (because a blocked IP doesn’t result in a database query). The web server still has to respond to the request from a blocked IP.
Because of all of that, I am not convinced that blocking IPs was the solution. I think it was elsewhere. But I can’t prove it without access to the server. I can confirm that the above is all true, at least to my understanding of the HTTP request/response process, and the understanding of how WordPress accesses data (content).
Which may all be more than you wanted to know. But perhaps interesting to know.
Add another reason for ‘So the possibilities for the 503 errors stopping because of blocking certain IP ranges could be’
Minneapolis shooter’s mother previously worked as a secretary at the targeted school:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/jeff-charles/2025/08/27/minneapolis-church-shooter-was-employed-at-school-n2662430
I would have to study this but can’t you redirect the pesky IP addresses to 0.0.0.0 in htaccess? To catch what ignores robots.txt?
Wait, I’m mixing htaccess with hosts.
May be an answer here: https://htaccessbook.com/block-ip-address/
Maybe you can redirect the blocked addresses to 0.0.0.0 and then they get nothing. Black hole them.
Well, yes, you can. But remember that the IP address blocking does not reduce the load on the web server. You can only reduce that load if you block the IP addresses before the request gets to the web server. At a firewall, for example.(Which is the better way to block a Denial of Service attack, since the request never gets to the web server.)
On a WP system, with separate virtual (shared with other virtual servers; a typical configuration in a shared environment at hosting places) servers, blocking an IP address only reduces the load (requests) to the database server. Which, in most shared hosting environments, is on a separate physical machine (probably) dedicated to the SQL server processes (each in a separate virtual SQL server).
all of those excess requests from those IP addresses have stopped.
– that’s what I’m hoping, which I’ll test by unblocking them tomorrow. The only other thing I did was block the bots the tech support guy listed. However, I blocked the bots and the 503s continued, whereas when I blocked the IP range, the site responsiveness returned to normal within 30 seconds or a minute.
That was a very clear explanation of what is happening behind the scenes.
n
Does anyone have a recommendation for a free Cad program.
I used to use Visio but the system it is on is lost among my old systems.
However, I blocked the bots and the 503s continued, whereas when I blocked the IP range, the site responsiveness returned to normal within 30 seconds or a minute.
Although the standard is that a bot is supposed to ‘pay attention’ to the robots.txt file (which the web server accesses on each request), mis-behaving bots can ignore the directives in the robots.txt file.
As one possibility – consider that a rouge bot can access site files without paying attention to the directives in the robots.txt file. Maybe they change the ‘signature’ of their request (the ‘user agent’). Since it is not good practice to block all possible user agents (destroys SEO for the site), you’d have to know which user agents are making the excess requests. Which you can determine from the access logs.
But blocking requests with specific user agents values is another ‘whack-a-mole’ situation. And probably why the changes to the robots.txt file directives didn’t have an effect.
@bob, the kids are all using TinkerCAD which is an online thing.
I use and old version of Sketchup. I think there is still a free version. Or I can send you an old version of visio if you want…
n
(more geeky web server stuff)
I was not entirely correct in ‘who’ processes the robots.txt file. The sequence is
Request for robots.txtCrawler requests the robots.txt file from the server.Fetching the FileServer serves the robots.txt file if it exists.Reading the DirectivesCrawler reads the rules specified in the file.Compliance with DirectivesCrawler follows the rules to determine which pages to crawl.Caching the DirectivesSearch engines cache the file to reduce requests.Crawling the WebsiteCrawler indexes pages based on the permissions granted.
So the ‘crawler’ is supposed to look at the robots.txt file whenever it makes a request to the web server for a file that it wants to index. If you have a robots.txt file that has a user -agent value specified in the robots.txt file, then the crawler is supposed to follow the rule (directive) specified for that user agents.
But, a nefarious crawler could ignore the user-agent rule, and access the web page that it should have ignored because of the directives. That’s why the changes to the robots.txt file did not seem to make a difference.
The htaccess file directives, however, cannot be bypassed by the crawler’s request, since the web server makes that decision, taking away the possibility that the crawler can ignore any restrictions.Unless the crawler changes it’s IP address.
If it was a Denial of Service attack (for instance, a nefarious web crawler), only the htaccess IP address restrictions would cancel the request. But that request still has to be processed by the web server. But that will reduce the number of web server requests to the database server, which would reduce the possibility of the database server overload causing the 503’s.
It’s all a bit complicated. Which is why Nick is getting the big bucks to fix this <grin>.
I know a guy who recommends Inkscape. He uses it to make front panels for various kits and custom electronics he builds. It’s more of an illustrator than CAD, though.
He also uses Inkscape to produce SVG designs which he imports into FreeCAD for 3d printing.
None of which I currently do, so this is a second-hand recommendation.
Lookup Kevin Loughin on YT if you want to follow up on that.
Cult of Mac had a deal on Visio 2019 for about $18.00. Full version, lifetime license. I think the deal was at Stack Overflow.
The movers came and got mom’s stuff today for the assisted living place. We had it ready for them. It took them about two hours to pack it up in their u-haul truck. However, mom is not ready to move in yet. She wants to finish sorting the stuff in her house. Even if it takes several years (which it will).
I left for home. I managed to leave my home / office keys at mom’s house and one of my sandals (I was wearing my work boots). I am really getting absent minded. And tired.
This house uses 12 gauge for wall outlets and then 14 gauge for lights from wall switch to ceiling fixture. 12 gauge is rated to 20 amps at 120 volts. 14 gauge for less, 15 amps?.
Yup, 12 gauge for 20 amps, 14 gauge for 15 amps.
I had an e-mail from Ask Woody this morning. “For quite some time, the AskWoody website has been under a heavy distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.” They have had to start using Cloudflare. She thinks it’s probably AI bots.
https://www.askwoody.com/newsletter/bots-attack/