Cool and wet. It was less than 60F when I went to bed, after hitting high 70sF during the day. When the rain and the front moved in, the temperature dropped like a bad habit. I think we’ll start back up from there too. Supposed to be rain today and tomorrow, but we’ll see.
Had a busy day Saturday. Started by dropping the kid at school for a thing (she had two in a row, and was there until noon.) After that, I had my non-prepping hobby meeting, which ran long because committees suck the dead bunnies.
Three quick stops are estate sales in my neighborhood, a torrential downpour, and a couple of hours at the shop followed that. Some internet and auction stuff before bed… and that brings us to today.
When I intend to sleep in and get caught up at least a little bit. They say that technically you can’t “catch up” but they are idiots. If you sleep ’til you are not tired anymore, you’ve caught up.
Then depending on the weather, I’ll do stuff. Probably stuff inside as it is supposed to be raining. And probably stuff at home, because I’ve been slack. Possibly stuff at the shop.
Stuff will happen though, I’m pretty sure about that.
And of course, stacking. That’ll happen too.
nick
Once again, here we are, with no Denis and other cheaters. Is it too much to hope that he’s in jail? Is being a time zone cheater even a crime? If not, there’s a problem with deutsches Rechtssystem.
One man with a scoped rifle can close down an American airport.
If he’s halfway competent and careful, he can do it repeatedly and not be caught, despite pervasive surveillance. Airport control towers and airliners at a terminal are large, stationary targets and a single bullet hole will bring everything to a halt for hours.
(Remember, to be trained as a counter-terrorist, you have to be trained to think like a terrorist.)
Exactly. In some parts of the US, there is no excess capacity and in fact the grid is running at above designed capacity. Or at least that was the case a few years ago, the last time I looked into it. And the NIMBYs and the Karens aren’t any less screechy now than they were in previous decades, so I doubt that enough 300kV lines and substations are being built to handle the increased requirements.
Exactly. In some parts of the US, there is no excess capacity and in fact the grid is running at above designed capacity. Or at least that was the case a few years ago, the last time I looked into it. And the NIMBYs and the Karens aren’t any less screechy now than they were in previous decades, so I doubt that enough 300kV lines and substations are being built to handle the increased requirements.
Texas is having about a hundred new gas turbines, mostly 48 MW GE 6000s, installed every year (SWAG). The limit is that GE is sold out for at least 3 years but I am hearing 2030 is the current year they are quoting with big fat down payments required. The production limit is the ceramic labs growing combustion pots and power turbine blades to run at 2,600 F at 35% simple cycle efficiency.
Plus another 5,000 MW of solar and wind turbines (SWAG) per year. Could be 10,000 MW since the solar guys are really pushing hard for the last of the government subsidies.
Oncor wants to build a 765 KV three phase transmission line from Odessa to Dallas for $30 billion to capture the low cost wind power. I am against it but my opinion does not matter. Most of the cost is probably land acqusition.
52 F and totally overcast. We are going to get more rain, yah !
We went to Gringos last night with friends. Their fish tacos were awesome and I think I ate 2 lbs of chips and salsa. The green salsa and red salsa that I love, both with lots of sugar and salt.
We got rain in Bryan last night, very cool this morning, breakfast at Taco Cabana.
The problem with the BIL is really bad. Much worse than I thought. He sees people that he thinks are trying to steal his stuff. His kids are here this weekend getting rid of a life time of tools and accumulations from his carpentry career. It is really tough on the BIL.
The goal is to eliminate as much of his stuff as possible so that he has nothing left to steal and the imaginary people will no longer exist in his mind. He has gotten up each night we have been here thinking people are in the house. No one is entering the house. His wife sleeps in a recliner to help when he gets up at night.
I have learned that he sleeps in a chair, or on the floor, in a locked room full of his stuff in his house. He barricades the door using boards to secure the door so no one can enter the room. He wants to keep six 2×4’s to build a brace to further enforce the door. He has installed corrugated metal sheets on the walls of the room to keep the imaginary people from stealing stuff WiFi signals from his computers.
To the BIL the people he sees are very real. He has called the police many times and the police are aware of the problem. The police will call his wife back and if she says everything is OK, the police do not respond. Last night there were two phone calls that I am aware.
The BIL’s oldest son is trying hard to explain why they are doing the things they are doing is to help the BIL. The BIL made the comment “I spent my life collecting tools to build things and help people and now it is all going away”. He was almost in tears and was showing some signs of anger.
His son is trying to explain that if the BIL has a medical emergency in that room, at night, barricaded, that he will die as medical people would not be able to get to him in time. The BIL responded that he wants the people arrested that are entering his house or shed and stealing his stuff. The BIL mentally sees these people and to him they are very much real people.
The BIL’s problems are the result of one of the many forms of dementia, as diagnosed by a specialist. It is sad to see what is happening.
Oh, and the surprise telling about the money went over much better than I thought. The wife was happy there were funds to help with her husband’s care. She was not angry with us for keeping the funds a secret. In September a check will be sent to the oldest son, with written instructions and the MIL’s wishes for the money. I will be out of the loop which pleases me a lot. The BIL was not happy the money was being sent to his son instead of him, but we explained that was the best option. The BIL reluctantly accepted the inevitable.
I don’t know about the Texas grid in particular, but in general the problem is not the generation of power but the transmission of it from where it’s produced to where it’s needed. Substations and other transformers, too. While transformers are made in the US, it’s not even enough to replace what wears out every year. The US electrical grid is dependent on foreign suppliers, an intolerable situation.
FIFY
Today is the anniversary of the “hot” beginning of the American Revolution. The proximate action was violent rebellion against gun control:
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/April-19/the-american-revolution-begins?cmpid=email-hist-tdih-2026-0419-04192026&om_rid=
By 1775, tensions between the American colonies and the British government approached the breaking point, especially in Massachusetts, where Patriot leaders formed a shadow revolutionary government and trained militias to prepare for armed conflict with the British troops occupying Boston. In the spring of 1775, General Thomas Gage, the British governor of Massachusetts, received instructions from England to seize all stores of weapons and gunpowder accessible to the American insurgents. On April 18, he ordered British troops to march against the Patriot arsenal at Concord and capture Patriot leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock, known to be hiding at Lexington.
The Boston Patriots had been preparing for such military action by the British for some time, and upon learning of the British plan, Patriots Paul Revere and William Dawes were ordered to set out to rouse the militiamen and warn Adams and Hancock. When the British troops arrived at Lexington, a group of militiamen was waiting. The Patriots were routed within minutes, but warfare had begun, leading to calls to arms across the Massachusetts countryside.
When the British troops reached Concord at about 7 a.m., they found themselves encircled by hundreds of armed Patriots. They managed to destroy the military supplies the Americans had collected but were soon advanced against by a gang of minutemen, who inflicted numerous casualties. Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith, the overall commander of the British force, ordered his men to return to Boston without directly engaging the Americans. As the British retraced their 16-mile journey, their lines were constantly beset by Patriot marksmen firing at them from behind trees, rocks, and stone walls. At Lexington, Captain Parker’s militia had its revenge, killing several British soldiers as the Red Coats hastily marched through his town. By the time the British finally reached the safety of Boston, nearly 300 British soldiers had been killed, wounded or were missing in action. The Patriots suffered fewer than 100 casualties.
Also the less celebrated gun control anniversaries of the Waco resolution and Oklahoma City bombing.
Once again I was “lucky” in doing an appliance repair. I replaced the failed component* and noticed that an electrical connector was also about to go bad. So I went to the garage to get my box of appropriate connector and took care of it, adding just a few minutes to the duration of the repair job.
I was “lucky” that I had the parts on hand. The skill to recognize and fix the problem was not mentioned today.
If anyone wonders why I despise the vast majority of people, the answer is: people. We should rename the species to homo not-so-sapiens.
* The heater element for defrosting the freezer, part of the planned obsolescence of almost all modern household refrigerator/freezers.
The incineration of a number of children in the Branch Dividian compound under orders of Johnny Reno is a “resolution”?
Interesting.
This week also marks an anniversary for the Elian Gonzalez kidnapping on behalf of Fidel Castro, another Reno brain fart.
Of course, absent the raid on the uncle’s house, Reno may have had enough credibility to win the primary and challenge Jeb! for the Florida Governor’s Mansion in 2002.
Fools, drunks, and the United States, including the State of Florida.
The raid is also one of those pieces that fit that I mentioned the other day which put Barbara Lagoa on Trump’s short list of Supreme Court candidates. Lagoa was one of the pro bono lawyers representing the uncle in 2000.
Let the Dems filibuster Lagoa for a while. The party is already done in Florida for a generation. Maybe they want to make it two.
Now that we are headed home, I’m breaking Opsec to say that we were in Florida for the last 10 days.
Gas was consistently $4.39/gallon, in Tampa, Orlando, and Eisney World, except for a station less than a mile from the Orlando Airport. $5.99/gallon.
I only bought three gallons, enough to make sure we got back to our hotel from where we had dinner.
When Primate Politics Turn Deadly:‘Civil War’ Shattering Uganda’s Ngogo Chimpshttps://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/04/18/when-primate-politics-turn-deadly-civil-war-shattering-ugandas-ngogo-chimps/
I edited the headline because there is nothing in this summary article that supports “politics”.
And in fact, the summary article is crap and is only useful in that it contains links to the BBC Science Focus article:
https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/a-massive-once-in-500-years-chimpanzee-civil-war-has-broken-out
and the ABC Australia article:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-10/chimpanzees-wage-civil-war-in-uganda-research-reveals/106543254
A recent article (didn’t save the link) estimated that 90% of sociological research is leftist drivel. This research may be in the remaining 10%, and remind us that there is something worthwhile to be gained.
* The heater element for defrosting the freezer, part of the planned obsolescence of almost all modern household refrigerator/freezers.
Been true for at last 60 years. Mom and Dad had a GE refrigerator with a slide-out basket bottom freezer–a design our family favored because everyone was on the tall side. Over the course of 20+ years the freezer defrost heater element was replaced at least three times, until finally the whole unit aged out. Bottom freezers had fallen out of fashion long since, and Mom suffered through a couple of other designs until fashion changed again and a bottom freezer unit was more readily available.
getting rid of a life time of tools and accumulations from his carpentry career
– face facts Ray, you ARE stealing his stuff. Every time he finds something missing or moved from where his damaged mind thinks it should be, he’ll be upset. Soon, he’ll probably forget that it was you guys stealing his tools, and only comprehend that they are gone. I do not think the strategy of stealing all the stuff so he can relax because all his stuff has ALREADY been stolen, and there’s nothing left to steal, is going to work. Did the Dr suggest that? I’m not trying to be a dick, just to reframe how you look at it. We dealt with a smaller version of this with my grandmother.
We don’t know how to fix broken minds but I hope you can find a way to ease his discomfort. (also, review any meds he’s on, and side effects can be a bitch and can cause the symptoms of dementia.
———–
Overcast and cooler here today, but not raining. I got up to pee and had a donut before returning to bed, but still had a low blood sugar alarm later that finally got me out of bed. A solid two days of being low. Data collection continues.
———-
Time for some food and caffeine.
n
Yes, he did. The doctor’s solution to the visions of seeing people stealing his stuff, was to get rid of the stuff that people would be stealing. Remove what is causing the problem. He will probably still see the people, but not stealing his stuff.
The BIL was in agreement with the arrangement and actually helped some in going through the stuff and placing what his kids did not want in front of the house for the scrappers, with the rest to be picked up by the city. Apparently the city here will pick up large construction debris using a truck with a picking arm.
Scrappers did come by and pick up some metal pieces, shelfs, pipes and other stuff the scrappers thought had value.
A few times the BIL got uncomfortable with what was happening and had to come into the house.
The next problem is to get him out of that room he uses for sleeping. It is dangerous in case of health issues. He has had 5 stents placed and his father died, alone, of a massive heart attack. If there was a fire there would be no escape.
And that is a big problem. I have been through this dementia crap with my aunt. It ain’t fun. My advice, or experience, to his wife and kids is just general as everyone is different and the effects on the mind are different. I told them to not get upset at the problems, perhaps expect anger and wrath against others. The person affected by dementia becomes someone else entirely at some point in the progression of the disease. My aunt told me she hated my guts and wished she had never let me in her house in some very graphic words I had never heard her use.
He is under the care of a doctor that is well versed in dealing with dementia cases. He is the doctor that finally made the diagnosis of the issues of seeing people and some of the other strange behavior.
The wife and I will become mostly out of the loop in the progression of the disease. This visit, largely unplanned, may be the one where the wife says goodbye to her brother, at least the brother she knew. My wife recognizes that fact and the trip was her idea.
Out involvement moving forward will mostly be status updates.
Hmm. Maybe I have my geography wrong, but wouldn’t Abilene be somewhere on a straight line between Odessa and Dallas?
Abilene, where Crusoe Energy has a large AI data center under construction?
And Odessa, where the company has a lot of generation capacity from oil well flares but local opposition to building data centers?
It is a big club, and you aren’t in it.
“Dallas” is the stalking horse.
Son, it is all about the jerbs. Ya foller me?
@Nick
I’m concerned about your blood sugar measurement regimen.
I am a great believer in measurements. As the old saying goes, if you can’t measure it, it ain’t engineering. (Not to be confused with Brene Brown’s misstatement* of that.)
At the same time, prior to 2019, it was a firm tenet of medicine that a lab test is not the same thing as a diagnosis. And generally speaking, you don’t do the lab test without some specific reason. To be fair, that was being undercut by Big Pharma for decades, because of the dollars available in statin drugs. Covid blew that understanding out of the water. A single PCR test in a completely asymptomatic patient was still a “case” of Covid infection.
Your low blood sugar readings, if accurate, should be concerning. It sounds like close to insulin shock. It sounds like it’s life-threatening. It sounds like your midnight snacks are saving your life.
I’m concerned that these readings may be false. Or amplified, which could be inducing dietary changes and psychological trauma, and maybe psychosomatic effects to boot.
If it were me, I’d be stepping back and asking “What do I know for sure?”. And I’d be referencing the CGM against a calibrated meter.
* Brene Brown is a very perceptive and empathetic person, who believes in her heart that her musings on psychology are “science”. So she said “Scientists believe if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.” Balderdash of purest ray serene; also slander. This is her argument to put down traditional science in order to legitimize her “science”. True scientists realize there are phenomena that can’t be measured yet, if ever, and so there are domains outside of science, at least for the time being. Not the same thing as “doesn’t exist”; just not measurable, thus not relevant.
This. Somewhat. “Hey, where is / don’t we have ”a thing?” And I’m like “let me go get it”. From out in the barn or boat shed or feed shed or just in the kitchen. “How do you do that?”
No idea, I just know. I think it’s part of the part of my brain that handles “if I take it apart I can put it back together”.
It’s the part of my brain that when I worked at U-Tote-M and Circle K and HEB where is someone came to the Business Center and asked if and where we had something. Oh yeah. aisle 3 about three sections of shelf down call it 12 feet, right side, middle of the shelf at waist high.
So yeah. DO NOT rearrange the feed shed.
I think I grok what BIL is dealing with. Ok, not the strangers wandering around the house. Not yet.
Rick, just do a quick google search. That IS you standard reply to everyone else…
Maybe my hands are sorta of cool. It’s 73f in this room.
My little fanless PC that ran W11 and now runs Mint? It does not feel as warm. Just guessing about 15 to 20 degrees cooler.
Never thought to measure temps before the OS change.. But the Pihole is blocking much much less from this PC.
One tanker sinking in the straits would be an ecological nightmare.
The US Navy turns the ships around at this point, probably threatening boarding if the crew did not comply.
I’m concerned that these readings may be false
– yeah me too. They are out of ‘character’ from the previous readings. AND the sensor is on my left arm, which I sleep on top of. I have suspected from the beginning that nighttime readings from my left arm are low, as I suspect my sleeping position cuts off blood flow to my arm. I used to wake with numb or tingling arms regularly. The tempur-pedic mattress solved that and most of my back pain.
I’m treating the low blood sugar alarms as if they were meaningful because the treatment is very simple – eat something. Wife acts as a second opinion asking me “well how do you feel?” when it’s low. Sometimes I don’t feel any different, but occasionally, like the late dinner at the mexican place, I feel wrung out and hollow, and I think it’s legit.
For years I’ve been eating something a couple of hours before bed, because I observed that if I don’t, I don’t have the energy to get up in the morning. That overnight period can be 12 hours or more between meals, and I’m typically only sleeping for the last 5-6 hours of that, and often less. That’s a long time to go between meals when you are up and active.
My doctor gets all the data I get, and has some additional software tools to look at it. I have an appointment with him in the first week of May, and we’ll go over all this. FWIW, spot checked against the finger stick tester, the sensor is usually a bit lower (iirc). I have a tester somewhere in my stacks, I should dig it out and get some strips for it.
I do like the sensor and the feedback. IF I can trust that it’s consistent, it gives me a way to quantify the “feelings” I’ve been having for years. It’s already helped me identify that my 2pm energy crash is not related to blood sugar levels, so is most likely due to caffeine intake. I kept blaming my lunch for the crash. I’m trying things to mitigate the caffeine crash, and they seem to work, so that’s already one thing the sensors have helped with.
FWIW, the sensor shows that most of the things I eat as ‘normal’ food that do cause my blood sugar to increase still leave me inside the “GOOD” range on the device. Seeing the relative differences in both rate and magnitude of rise and fall has been interesting. The MASSIVE (for me) spike from the poptarts was a huge surprise, but still only took me outside of the good range by 20 or 30 points. I’m talking with other people who’s monitors show them over 100 points above my “normal” lower level (100 mg/dL) all the time. Or my auction guy with 330 after lunch.
—-
I’d sorta forgotten about my feeling that nighttime readings on my left arm were suspect, so thanks for that reminder. The low level alarms started the first time I wore the monitor on my left arm, and were at night, so now I’ve got some data and some correlation.
I suspect that people with heart monitor functions in their watches pay attention when they first start monitoring too.
The experiment of living my life continues, now with better data gathering….
n
One tanker sinking in the straits would be an ecological nightmare.
– ok, but frankly at this point, who cares? is the strait a food producing area? and for who? Remember the “Fires of Kuwait”? After seeing that movie I expected the Gulf to be a nightmare swamp of oil and petroleum compounds when I was in Abu Dhabi, but it was clear as glass and warm as bathwater. Tasted clean but salty of course. (Ok, I’ve got a weird habit of tasting the water when I get to a new large body. Norway had water that was so clear the ocean floor was magnified, and tasted crisp and ice cold. Once I could have touched the Pacific and Atlantic in the same day but getting to the water in NYC was too hard. And I’d have been reluctant to put a finger in that mess…)
The market for oil is only global if you can physically deliver the oil to the buyer. The current pricing assumes that but shouldn’t.
n
The Child and I moved the chicken coop back to the yard a couple days ago, when a fairly rare dry day coincided with a fairly rare child visit. As expected, the chickens enjoyed their hour of freedom. As expected, they were vastly confused when I tried to get them to go into the yard run rather than the patio enclosure. Got them closed up eventually.
Today the stupid wind blew the chicken run enough that a gap was opened up which birds could escape through. Half of them couldn’t resist running out despite the rain. I discovered this when I saw them derping around the patio, where they spent the past five months, soaked and looking wretched and confused. They were glad enough to be led back to the “new” run, even without a treat.
A couple hours later, they all were delighted with a dish of treats: eggshells, diced pork trimmed from a pork loin (they usually have only a little fat but the fat on this one was probably 20% of the total weight; I’ll have to see if it happens again or was just a glitch), and apple peels. We still have a kitchen compost bin, but I don’t think any of it has gone to the compost pile in a couple years. In practice the compost bin is a chicken treats bin, with the forest animals getting anything the chickens didn’t want.
The BP spill was small in relative terms, but the media had a field day scaring people about the long term consequences for the Florida coast and impossibility of sealing the well.
We were on the beach on Captiva last Saturday night, nary a drop of oil in sight.
One tanker sinking in the straits would be an ecological nightmare.
There are 200+ tankers sitting at bottom of the Persian Gulf from the Iran Iraq 1980s war. Both sides were sinking tankers regularly.
There are massive oil seeps at the bottom of every ocean and gulf. Oil on the shores is nothing new.
In the current media environment, one would be enough.
When do the Ellisons take control of CNN and the newsroom at Techwood?
The electric bills arrived the other day. House is down 45 kWh. EDC is up about the same. I’ve run the heat in the house. The heater in the EDC was unplugged in February.
EDC has a window unit for a/c. It actually saves money to run an a/c versus opening windows. Does not compute but I’ve run the test. The freezers and fridge use less at 80f compared to 95f…. consider that about the fridge in your garage.
Average temp is up one degree from this month last year. I don’t recall having a few nights of 34f and 26f and then 36f last year. So. Generally a warm month.
The heat pump in the house has not run on Frenzy after having the floor spray foamed. The drop in kWh used is for just three weeks.
Time will tell. Three weeks isn’t enough to estimate “six year to break even” like I did after a few months with the windows. I’m cool with a 10 year breakeven.
.
On that side of the planet. Y’all ever watch Greater Tuna ? “Nuclear Holocaust is affecting 17 states, Texas not included, and now for the weather report.”
I’m to the place, good or bad, that if I eat much of anything three hours before going to bed I get the acid burps.
A few bites is ok. A full meal? Not good.
I cooked a bit on the grill today. A package of pre-seasoned fajitas. I made marinade for some boneless chicken thighs. And a package of what looked like Sept 21 pork loin chops. Oh, and a baggie of “looks like meat”, chicken or pork, no idea. The dogs won’t care.
The chicken, the piece that is now gone was cooked just about perfect. Good flavor and texture. The dogs totally agree.
There’s a piece of chicken, boneless thighs, right? That looks like a boneless leg quarter.
Ok, now to slice and pack into Ziploc containers.
In the current media environment, one would be enough.
Not an oil tanker but a container ship:
“US Navy Blows Hole in Engine Room, Seizes Iranian Cargo Ship Attempting to Breach Blockade”
https://discernreport.com/us-navy-blows-hole-in-engine-room-seizes-iranian-cargo-ship-attempting-to-breach-blockade/
“The ship in question, the Iranian-flagged TOUSKA, stretches nearly 900 feet and displaces a mass comparable to an aircraft carrier. Trump detailed the confrontation in his announcement: “Today, an Iranian-flagged cargo ship named TOUSKA, nearly 900 feet long and weighing almost as much as an aircraft carrier, tried to get past our naval blockade, and it did not go well for them.””
Hat tip to:
https://thelibertydaily.com/
Boarded, but not sunk.
https://nypost.com/2026/04/19/world-news/us-navy-destroyer-blows-a-hole-through-iranian-cargo-ship-that-tried-to-break-hormuz-blockade-trump-says/
I’m going to have to go to the Verizon store in Marble Falls. I get 2, maybe 3 bars signal in the house, and 3 to 5 outside. Seems like half the time folks can’t hear me.
This has been going on for a while. Like even on the phone I dropped last summer and broke the screen. Not the phone.
I’ve tried to enable wi-fi calling. No joy. Not really wanting to have wi-fi on all of the time. But with 2 bars in the house and can’t make a call, well.
Might be time for a new phone and a new provider. T-Mobile has some old fart plans that are about $20 a month. Not sure about coverage here at the house.
I gave the dogs enough samples and then enough in their food pots that they both wandered away with about a third of their food remaining.
Plenty of snoring right now.
Yeah. I’m easily amused.
How old is your wireless router?
Basic WiFi 6 routers without the 6 GHz band are cheap.
AT&T has microcells, but I don’t know how well one of those would work on Starlink.
The future is 5G cell service. 3G is already deprecated. I wouldn’t be surprised if LTE was shut down in the near future as well.
My Big River $1,400 Dell has gone away. The $1,500 Dell with 32 GB ram and 2 TB M.2 drive are left.
https://www.amazon.com/Dell-Plus-Computers-Business-DisplayPorts/dp/B0GJDT6HF1?tag=ttgnet-20/
The Dell $1,050 budget tower looks better by the day. I guess that I can buy an external DVDRW drive.
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktop-computers/dell-tower-desktop/spd/dell-ect1250-desktop/useect1250pbtshmqb#product-tab
I am agonizing over this way too much. Shows that I do not want to do anything.
Ok, Dell is promising that I will get the new PC as soon as March 25. I am ordering.
The new Dell budget mini tower is real fast. And not expandable in the slightest. There are zero 2.5, 3.5, or 5.25 inch drive slots. There is one SATA plug in on the motherboard but zero power plugs for anything else. I guess that I could get a power plug splitter.
I guess that I should have paid the $450 more to get expandability if it was that important to me. I did expect the mini tower to have a couple of drive expansion cage in it though. Oh well.
I have a Dell USB CDrom drive for $40 and I have already ripped a few more audio CDs using FreeRip.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00VWVZ0V0?tag=ttgnet-20
I have a Sabrent SATA Dock USB 3.0 and I put my 4 TiB backup drive into it. I am running a backup right now.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LS5NFQ2?tag=ttgnet-20
Paul, I can’t say a thing about local conditions. But I’ve been on T-Mobile for about 10 years now, and their support people have NEVER left me hanging. If you have terrible connections in your house, you might ask them about a micro-cell; a gadget that plugs into your ethernet network and provides cellular service via your own internet connection. I’ve never had a problem with mine.
On my son’s first birthday, some friends came over and we grilled lots of burgers, hot dogs, sausages, and what-not.
We dropped lots of burgers, hot dogs, sausages, and what-not, getting them from where they were cooked to where they were eaten.
Alcohol might have been involved. I was brewing a lot of beer around then and I had probably four cases set out, six or eight varieties. All had to be sampled, of course.
So anyway, at least five pounds of meat had hit the ground and no one really wanted to eat it.
Luckily, I had a 110-pound rottweiler who was happy to take them off our hands. Until she gave up and just plopped down in the shade. A while later I tossed her another hot dog. With great effort, she lifted her head to look at it, then moaned and let her head drop. Before that day, I never would have thought that she wouldn’t or couldn’t eat an infinite amount of people food. No problem. Put it in a dish and it makes good treats for the next couple days.
Snicker. Not with T-Mobile. Been there, done that. Taxes, fees, because we can fees, all added on to the bill will be more like $60.00 a month.
The cheapest plan I see on T-Mobile is $45.00 a month for seniors. That is for new customers. After the customer is no longer new, generally a year, the price will go up. Is it worth it to have good signal and a working phone, probably. You get what you pay for.
Visbile and Mint are good MVNO which piggy-back on other carrier networks are good providers. It all depends on the underlying carrier. Using AT&T as the carrier may get better coverage in your area as opposed to Verizon. The opposite may be true 25 miles away.
Consumer Cellular gets good reviews, English speaking customer service. The cost depends on the amount of data you need and starts at $20.00 a month ($8.00 added for taxes and fees). Before I had unlimited data on Xfinity, I was using less than 1GB a month but I watched my usage. Xfinity morphed to unlimited data for the same price and I no longer watch my data.
I have the geezer plan with T-Mobile and never had a problem. Then I changed from a new user to an old user. Then I added my watch. Then, a data plan for iPads. Now I get a $87/mo bill. I must be connected AT ALL TIMES, WITH EVERY DEVICE! I make up for it on the high seas.
MrsAtoz and the Twins are still on Mint for $30+/month and have great coverage. I need to check if they upped to Watch and data plans. You can always hotspot on Mint, but I need a DEDICATED DATA PLAN FOR MY IPAD, DAMMIT!
I’ve been on Visible for a few years now, and the $25/month fee hasn’t gone up, and there are no fees. They allow tethering/hotspot, limited to one attached device at a time.
I think it’s Verizon. I’ve never had a problem, which is good because as far as I know, there’s no way to connect to a human being for any kind of support.
I have changed phones 3 times with no issues. I use trailing-edge technology, so my phones age out. But if I drop or lose one, there is very little cost or pain.
A Clash Between the Pope and Trump Was Inevitable
https://hotair.com/headlines/2026/04/19/a-clash-between-the-pope-and-trump-was-inevitable-n3814054
Whenever the U.S. is deporting an illegal immigrant that is refused by their country of origin, Trump should publicly ask Pope Leo is he will accept the criminal and demonstrate his commitment to open borders.
Ask, shmask. Air-drop the “refugees” on the Vatican. Parachutes are an unnecessary expense but we can spring for large plastic trash bags which they can use to try to slow their fall. And which they can be stuffed into when it doesn’t do any good.
hmmm…
Calculating the thickness of trash bag needed to contain “rejectugee” reaching terminal velocity before impact.
Need a new Hefty “Graphene”
Drunk on Power: FEC Shows Swalwell Alcohol Spending
Now can we get the complete rundown on the other 534? Plus chewables?
@lynn, my costco dell was like that. Had to buy a splitter for power and sata. I zip tied the second drive into an open space under the drive cage. They have to make up the discount somehow.
n
Well, that’s exciting.
Major car accident about 3 blocks from my house. Road rage. Overturned car. Bullet holes in one of the cars. Probable exchange of gunfire between the cars.
When I say 3 blocks, I mean the next major intersection down the road. On my daily walking path.
You know, I keep hearing that crime is down, way down. I’m beginning to have my doubts.
In other news, the black man who killed 8 kids turns out to be a black man who killed his own 7 kids, plus one other. This story will disappear from the news in 3, 2, 1…
Crime reporting might be down. And the FBI aggregate stats get released, but they don’t even get numbers from many of the worst run cities in the US. And most of the numbers are very suspect.
n
The future is 5G cell service. 3G is already deprecated. I wouldn’t be surprised if LTE was shut down in the near future as well.
That push to talk service that Sean Hannity hawks has 600,000+ LTE phones. Is that enough to keep LTE running ?
https://rapidradios.com/
@lynn, my costco dell was like that. Had to buy a splitter for power and sata. I zip tied the second drive into an open space under the drive cage. They have to make up the discount somehow.
There is no drive cage in my mini tower. The cpu fan has a enclosure pushing its air outside the case, saving a case fan. There is a single nvme socket and a single nvme drive. There are two ram sockets and one of them has a 32 GB ram card. There is an incredible amount of free space inside the case.
“The Great Energy World War” by Matt Bracken
https://steelcutter.substack.com/p/the-great-energy-world-war
“The sea power projection paradigm that allowed small European nations (and then the USA) to dominate and colonize the world is coming to an end. The world will never be the same, and the birth pains of the emerging next world order will be agonizing.”
I really really really hope that Bracken is wrong. But, he may be right.
BC: Parasailing
https://www.gocomics.com/bc/2026/04/19
Well, that is a unique motive of propulsion. Looks fairly powerful.