Hot and the forecast has all of Texas in a potential thunderstorm area. It sprinkled several times yesterday, once in the morning at the house, once while I was driving the 40 miles to the Lowes store. Since I’m doing dirtwork with red clay, even a tiny bit of rain is a mess.
That said, I did get a lot done. I dug out the drainage ditch at the edge of my lot. I needed to practice with the miniex. The mailbox will probably go back into place… the ditch was silted up with the crushed gravel road base, so it needed some digging.
Despite my misadventure with the water line, I feel pretty good about what I got done. Operating the machines is coming back to me as muscle memory, once I changed the control paradigm for the mini excavator. There are at least 2 schemes in common use, and many more from various manufacturers over the years, and the ISO standard one doesn’t work for me. Fortunately, it’s a simple lever to move on the hydraulic mixer to select the scheme that seems natural to me.
At the end of the day, when I didn’t have enough light to see the detail I needed for my project, I did some scraping and compacting on the boat ramp. There has been significant erosion with all the rain we’ve had up here and one of my goals was to see about fixing some of it. I could work fast and loose in the fading light, and made some improvement. More practice for me with the skid steer too. The main cost for the HOA is maintaining the gravel roads and several of the guys will do touchup with their tractors or other equipment. For me it is part of being a valuable member of this community we joined. Meatspace baby!
Today I’ll do what I can to get the walkway area ready for the crushed slag. If it’s raining I will look at doing something else that isn’t as fussy or right next to the house. There’s a list.
Always be working… and stack up some goodwill if you can.
nick
Wish I had it here. Almost finished with the latest dry-stone wall. I’m using it, among other things, to even out the soil level near the veggie garden. Next, I need dirt to fill in the low spots. I have some, but likely not enough.
Our lawn has also settled weirdly over the years. The area near the house was completely dug out during construction, and then filled back in. I suppose some settling was inevitable, and it’s getting to the point that we need to do something. Rather that try to do it myself, I may just get a bid from a landscaping company.
@Paul: No dumb questions. It seems unlikely to be your battery, but I suppose you never know.
Have someone else try with their phone. Make sure they use the same provider that you do. I had a similar problem, back when we first moved in here. Turned out that our provider’s antenna was failing. After a few months, and presumably complaints from various people, they fixed it.
I get a letter about every two years saying I haven’t used the card. I buy lunch for about $20 with the card and put it back in the desk drawer. I am not too concerned if the cards do get closed. It will not impact my score much as all it will do is lower my total credit limit. The card I really want to keep is Discover as I have had that card for 37 years, the longest issued card. Losing that will lower my score. My score now is 820+ according to the card sites so dropping 20 or 30 points is not a big deal. I don’t have any loans, don’t intend to apply for any, so the only thing the score is good for is insurance rates.
The case will make a difference. If you have case, remove the case and see if that helps. My wife and I both have iPhones, hers is older. She gets three bars, I get two. We have the same provider. The only difference is she has a different case than I have on my phone.
The Season 17 “finale” episode “The Arizona” with Christopher Lloyd guest starring is the last “NCIS” epsiode filmed before Covid shut down production and Hollywood lost its mind over DEI and the Orange Man.
As they say, YMMV with the remainder of the series. The “family” feeling of the production with the much of the same crew working together continuously for almost 30 years was lost, and we’ve only watched sporadically since then.
You might see where Weigel is at with their schedule of nightly broadcasts on H&I before paying for Paramount Plus.
In Texas, it is all about getting them jerbs, son.
Jerbs come first … even though the data centers don’t generate that many and the bulk of the hardware used is made outside the US.
Central Texas was already swimming naked with regard to water before the AI data centers showed up.
Better is relative to whether you think the AI “features” in Windows 11 enabled by the hardware are worth paying the premium to use.
I’m not buying a Windows 11 laptop until after the cutoff for Windows 10 support.
Ah coffee. Bacon and eggs with toast… mini donuts warmed in the microwave to restore ‘freshness’. Living like a king!
Looks like the overcast might be burning off. 74F is now 75F in less than an hour. That’s still downright cool.
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I can’t ever remember to use my “backup” cards so they get paused. I can call and they’ll work again, they don’t cancel them, but they won’t work either. My AMEX is my longest card and I have 5 of them. With gold, the extra cards don’t cost anything and they have slightly different names on them. I use them to categorize things. One for reimbursable work expenses, one for internet stuff, one for the wife. They are broken out on the bill separately too. It was more of an issue before I quit working for someone else.
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Sun is definitely poking thru.
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I should get dressed and start my day. Don’t want to start the machines before 8am anyway, the backup alarms are crazy annoying and I’m sure there are some groggy people with headaches here on a Sunday morning.
n
My new battery is a dud. Defective and DOA. The phone sees it and says 0% charge. But it doesn’t charge. I have an external charger and it doesn’t see the new battery at all.
Maybe they will replace it. Maybe I just eat the $20.
My phone case isn’t much. It’s enough of a case the phone doesn’t fall out of my short’s pocket when getting in or out of the truck. It adds a lip so the screen doesn’t touch the table top.
I put a new Milwaukee tool battery on the charger yesterday and it was bad. The lithium batteries are a mystery and when they fail, they are DONE.
Time to make some noise and move some dirt.
n
AI data centers and water? I assume it’s cooling water? There no reason it should go to waste – most of it is just being released, relatively little evaporates.
For that matter, the data centers could recycle the water with little effort, just by sending it out to a cooling pond. Add a couple of pretty fountains to speed cooling, and done.
“I fell in to a burning right of torrents…”
On good shows on Prime: I watched “War of the Worlds” starring, checks notes, Ice Cube. It looked like a good story, but is a stinkeroo. Let’s just say Ice Cube and Eva Longoria can’t act. Throw in Clark Gregg as the heavy, no real back story, perspective from the computer interface, and you have a bomb. 2.5 stars on Prime. I’m sure the writers thought they had a clever idea.
On USAA credit card: I’ve had one for decades and they email me when it needs to be used or closed. It has a high limit so I keep it on hand for emergencies.
Lunch break. Steak sandwich.
I managed to shear off a hose bib, but each one has a valve so it wasn’t a tragedy. The replacement will be a b!tch.
I spent some more time on the boat launch ramp. I’ll work on my stuff until dark today.
I think I’m going to make the walk wider. Having it less than the width of the skid steer makes all kinds of problems. I think it will be 2 more yards of material, but I have to do the math long hand to be sure.
n
Top 7 Things I Learned Printing Gridfinity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPt5_V2pAH8
28-inch drawers, 125 squares, 61 printing hours.
George Harrison – What is Life (HD/Lyrics)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP2uwZUCUV4
Now substitute “time” for “love”.
There are YouTube videos showing how to resuscitate dead lithium on batteries for the Ryobi.
Apparently the charging circuit normally will identify a completely dead battery as dysfunctional, but diassembly and manually charging the battery with reverse polarity for 10 or 15 seconds will give it enough charge that the charging circuit will start doing its job.
Apparently this is one of the reasons they tell you not to keep on trying to use a nearly dead battery, you don’t want it to get into a state where the charger won’t charge it.
Eva Longoria makes the film an automatic ‘no’ at our house.
Prime stil has to burn off all of the cr*p approved back when Plugs’ reelection seemed likely.
I got up at 3 AM for old man reasons last night, but went outside afterwards and tried to take a quick peek at the stars, but there were none.
Probably a layer of smoke up high, though we do have some high-level cirrus around this morning between the streamers of smoke to the east.
Today’s weather should be a repeat of yesterday.
“Perry Rhodan 79: The Sleepers” by William Voltz
https://www.amazon.com/Perry-Rhodan-79-William-Voltz/dp/B001NEVE4S?tag=ttgnet-20/
Book number seventy-nine of a series of one hundred and thirty-six space opera books in English. The original German books, actually pamphlets, number in the thousands with several spinoffs. The English books started with two translated German stories per book translated by Wendayne Ackerman and transitioned to one story per book with the sixth book. And then they transition back to two stories in book #109/110. The Ace publisher dropped out at #118, so Forrest and Wendayne Ackerman published books #119 to #136 in pamphlets before stopping in 1978. The German books were written from 1961 to present time, having sold two billion copies and even recently been rebooted again. I read the well printed and well bound book published by Ace in 1975 that I had to be very careful with due to age. I bought an almost complete box of Perry Rhodans a decade or two ago on ebay that I am finally getting to since I lost my original Perry Rhodans in The Great Flood of 1989. In fact, I now own book #1 to book #106, plus the Atlan books, and some of the Lemuria books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Rhodan
BTW, this is actually book number 87 of the German pamphlets written in 1963. There is a very good explanation of the plot in German on the Perrypedia German website of all of the PR books. There is automatic Google translation available for English, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, French, and Portuguese.
https://www.perrypedia.de/wiki/Die_Schl%C3%A4fer_der_ISC
There is alternate synopsis site at:
https://www.perryrhodan.us/summaries/87#
In this alternate universe, USSF Major Perry Rhodan and his three fellow astronauts blasted off in a three stage rocket to the Moon in their 1971. The first stage of the rocket was chemical, the second and third stages were nuclear. After crashing on the Moon due to a strange radio interference, they discover a massive crashed alien spaceship with an aged male scientist (Khrest), a female commander (Thora), and a crew of 500. It has been over seventy years since then and the Solar Empire has flourished with tens of millions of people and many spaceships headquartered in the Gobi desert, the city of Terrania. Perry Rhodan has been elected by the people of Earth to be the World Administrator and keep them from being taken over by the robot administrator of Arkon.
Maurice Dunbee is going to sleep the next 300 hundred years away. His life is a failure according to himself. But his wife hires a private investigator to find him and the shady organization that is going to maintain his body for him for 300 years.
Two observations:
1. Forrest Ackerman should have put two or three of the translated stories in each book. Having two stories in the first five books worked out well. Just having one story in the book is too short and would never allow the translated books to catch up to the German originals.
2. Anyone liking Perry Rhodan and wanting a more up to date story should read the totally awesome “Mutineer’s Moon” Dahak series of three books by David Weber.
https://www.amazon.com/Mutineers-Moon-Dahak-David-Weber/dp/0671720856?tag=ttgnet-20/
My rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 5 out of 5 stars (1 reviews)
Lynn
As I mentioned, I got a PCIe SSD drive at a good price. So, of course, my motherboard’s PCIe slot is a different slot. I noted that the board supported PCIe 3, and the drive was PCIe 4, but these are cross-compatible, so I thought I was OK. Turns out, the physical and the software versions are not the same thing. Nevermind, I found an old SSD I had that wasn’t in use. So I just need to install Windows from the CD and then the updates and applications from the hard drive. Cool. I only have 2 available power and data cables so I will be doing some switching around until everything is in. I think I will not be using the CD/DVD reader in the future, so no problem. I hope.
AI data centers and water? I assume it’s cooling water? There no reason it should go to waste – most of it is just being released, relatively little evaporates.
For that matter, the data centers could recycle the water with little effort, just by sending it out to a cooling pond. Add a couple of pretty fountains to speed cooling, and done.
The cooling towers evaporate an amazing amount of water. The servers generate an amazing amount of heat, especially the eight or ten GP100 boards in each server. And the cooling water has to be blown down at 1% or so due to continuous solids collection from the piping, etc.
BTW, the wooden cooling towers burn down with amazingly hot fires at the strangest times. I recommend concrete cooling towers. Especially the five hundred foot tall structures that use natural draft for air circulation. Of course, those wear channels in the concrete due to the high water volume rates and tend to fall down also.
Eight H100/B200 (Nvidia) or MI3xx (AMD) GPU boards per server. Plus CPUs, memory, and storage. 3kW idle. 10 kW at load.
What you see in the pictures of the vaunted “AI Factory” which have been all over the Interwebs for the last year are rack systems built from eight of the servers with network switches, power, and cooling built into the cabinets. Figure about 100 kW for each one of those you see in the pic in the article.
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/98907/dell-is-building-an-ai-factory-with-nvidia-gpus-to-train-grok-for-xai-and-elon-musk/index.html
America First, Big Pharma Last: Trump Orders Drug Prices Slashed to Lowest Global Rate
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2025/08/03/trump-promises-lower-drug-prices-n2661337
Needs to pare the trial lawyers down to the lowest global rate, too.
I sent a message to the battery seller. They replied with a return shipping label and they will do a refund when they receive it. I just happen to have a used padded envelope so the battery is packed and ready to take to the PO tomorrow.
I tried to buy another. “The seller isn’t accepting bids or offers from you.” Well, ok then . There are other folks selling what I need. Shrug.
Now, in 2025, the United States may well be on track to see the first year of negative net migration in half a century.
https://redstate.com/wardclark/2025/08/03/huge-us-may-be-seeing-first-negative-net-migration-in-50-years-n2192402
It’s a start.
So, funny story. At least, I’m gonna laugh. In the process of installing Windows on the SSD drive, I had the case open and the SSD and CD/DVD connected. No spinning rust connected. Cue the same noise that’s been aggravating me, for no apparent reason. Except now I can pin the noise down to a more specific place than ‘somewhere in the case’ and ‘when the HD is busy’. It’s the fan. The frackin’ fan on the power supply. I pulled it out, checked it and there’s a tight spot when I turn it. So throw in another power supply for now, and try to stress test the I/O. The hard drive is really busy, but not a sound.
I need to go through Basic Troubleshooting again, it’s been a minute. I forgot rule one: Don’t assume what the problem is and do a full diagnosis.
The Next Democratic Presidency Means Payback
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-next-democratic-presidency-means-payback/ar-AA1JIIVw
Delusional. Trump 2.0 is the result of 12 years of Obama, Clinton, Holder, Biden, Harris, Garland rampant lawlessness. They and their minions are going to be doing perp walks first, then time.
No one even remembers Attorney General Stedman Graham.
LOL! Stop talking about MrsAtoz’s BFF.
“Jasmine Crockett Panics Over Losing Seat in Texas Redistricting Shake-Up [WATCH]”
https://www.lifezette.com/2025/08/jasmine-crockett-panics-over-losing-seat-in-texas-redistricting-shake-up-watch/
“U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) testified Friday in Austin that she may lose her seat in Congress if the Texas Legislature finalizes a new congressional map that significantly alters several Democratic-leaning districts.”
Oh hell yes !
Hat tip to:
https://thelibertydaily.com/
“SpaceX: Don’t Worry About Cutting Down Trees to Get a Starlink Signal Anymore”
https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-dont-worry-about-cutting-down-trees-to-get-a-starlink-signal-anymore
“The company says its ‘beam switching’ tech can ensure Starlink dishes remain connected, even when some obstructions, like tree cover, are present.”
Sounds like Star Trek.
VERY nice. Starlink is my “backup” broadband, behind Spectrum, and I have 40+ trees in my one-acre yard. Starlink REGULARLY complains about obstructions, and I am so far unable to move the antenna to a better spot. But it still works….
So… some ball room at the Whitehouse is getting a change of undies. Bigger and roomier with support for brass dangling parts. Maybe. Suppose to be like 200 thousand bucks. That must be some awesome wallpaper and flooring, just saying. That sounds like a lot of money but it’s the Gov and only the best, right?
God Emperor Trump is working for free? Right? His pay would be about 475 grand a year?
The man works for free and all some folks can do is scream about some remodel job at the Whitehouse. Because of? What? Racist?
Time for bedtime potty walk.
The redistricting stunt will backfire on the “Republicans”.
The special session was originally supposed to be about closing the loopholes in the law regarding the THC products.
>>Needs to pare the trial lawyers down to the lowest global rate, too.
Why not zero out the count? Ohh yeah, eventually we’ll need some ‘legals’ to pick the lettuce.
Ya know, counting trees has never crossed my mind for something to do. And I’m the weirdo that measured the driveway from cattle guard to front door with a stake every 100 feet.
I put my Starlink on the EDC building. It has a clear view out there. The Nanobeams connect the EDC to the House. Wireless Ethernet. It works.
The local wISP seems to have gone tits up or something.. Well, I had no service a couple of weeks ago. The neighbor has no service and her neighbor, repeat. She’s called. No response. She didn’t know at all about going on-line to submit a trouble ticket. I got sidetracked today. Tomorrow’s plan is to reboot and connect the wISP to see if it works at all and then submit a trouble ticket.
But I have a plan. Ubiquiti radios have a reset button on the power supply. I’ll reset my radio and take control. Aim it towards the neighbor’s house. Reset and take control of her radio. Put them into bridge mode. Super Nanobeams, sorta, right? Plug that into my router. That puts her on my LAN complete with pi-hole for DNS.
It’s a plan.
The neighbor’s neighbor is on her own. We’re all civil but not friends. I have no intention of supplying internet to all of the neighbors.
Panning for YT short gems…
Found one:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wathMXqw1-0
Maybe not.
Having the TX Dems hive off to Illinois to be guests of Pritzer the Hut in Land of Lincoln and second most gerrymandered state in the Union makes great news. And since Texas allegedly has no limit on the number of special sessions the governor can call, it becomes a matter of how many they can miss before their seats can be declared vacant.
Did the Dems take the gummies with them?
Gummies are legal in Illinois.
My son works for a company that legally sells them. His first job at that company was in the kitchen, making them.
“We can follow those trackers even in heavy cover” is what I’m hearing.
I am staying awake just so my dinner can digest. I’m headed for bed soon though. No dock tonight.
I have friction burns on my elbows and knees from where they touch the machines as I am controlling them. I didn’t get them last time until I’d been on the machines several days.
n
BC: Faster Communication
https://www.gocomics.com/bc/2025/08/03
Sometimes faster is not better.