Mild. Damp. Chilly last night and chilly to start but generally getting all the way to ‘very nice’ by afternoon. Possibly some clouds.
I didn’t get much done yesterday despite my good intentions. Sometimes it be that way.
Today I’ll sleep in a bit, after waking early to be sure youngest is getting ready for her school thing today. She’s got a competition in a nearby city that will last all day. I’ll go back to sleep after that. Probably. Then it’s working on the list. W and D1 will be home to provide motivation.
I may load the truck and make a run to the BOL late in the day. I’d like to get that stuff out of my way here and re-stocked up there. Keeping two places and the backup offsite location even minimally stocked takes effort. To keep them properly stocked, with layers of fall back, is an undertaking.
Two things I’ve been neglecting is inspecting and organizing existing stock of medical supplies, and food here. Because my storage conditions suck, I’ve got a bunch of stuff that should be thrown out or retired to the “use it for practice” or “give it out so no one else wants more of that crap” pile.
I’ve also been neglecting the generators. I ran the one at the BOL, and had W start it several months ago, but it needs to be exercised again. The gennies here all need to be checked and most need further work/refinement. It’s a big list and it gets bigger.
Stacking is easy. Do some of that if you can’t do anything else.
nick
Hey, the new Australia! If it weren’t so expensive to send them there (and maybe Starship will make it cheaper), that could be an excellent solution.
I reckon the only problem would be IQ. A Mars colony is going to be highly technical, and criminals are unlikely to be smart or educated enough to manage it. Which in itself is no loss, but then we could just turn them into Soylent Green here.
I hesitate to ask, but: how is that more than just a board with a hole in it?
Nick, cook the pork loin on High from “when you think of it” in the afternoon until “when everyone’s ready to eat” in the early evening. I don’t think I’ve ever cooked it less than 3 hours or more than 5, starting from a cold crock pot, but I’ve never noticed a problem. Note that mine draws about 300W on High and that neither I nor The Child are picky eaters* **; YMMV.
* Nor were most of the friends of The Child who ate and sometimes slept and sometimes lived here. Most of them were grateful to get anything to eat which wasn’t just a poptart. Some of the families were really poor (legitimate working poor who couldn’t pay their bills, not working-the-system “poor” with plentiful welfare benefits), one mother was a strict vegetarian who fed her kids plenty but not “well”, some parents simply couldn’t cook, one girl was left home alone all afternoon and evening, at 8, because her parents were running a small business. One mother was insane, like detached from reality, and constantly threw away all of the food in the house because “the police” had poisoned it. (And yet she got custody, despite being a danger to the child and having been committed several times, when the father couldn’t take it anymore and filed for divorce. Hell of a family court system we got here.)
** The Child is a picky eater in that there are many foods she refuses to eat, but she doesn’t complain if something is slightly under- or over-cooked, if there’s too little or too much seasoning, etc. Is there a way to express that picky-but-not-really concept in a word rather than a lengthy sentence?
Criminals would be a bad idea, but things would have to be pretty grim on Earth to get people to sign up for a one way life sentence working for The Real Life Tony Stark.
Without going into details, I indirectly work for Tony now. It sucks, but I can and have threatened to walk away when management pushes things to far. It isn’t a question of not eating … or breathing.
Edgar Wright just remade “The Running Man”. Someone should update “Total Recall”.
I finished The Acolyte yesterday. A one second reveal towards the end does not justify a mediocre series. Trying to reinvent a universe instead of taking what is great and expanding on it is the path to the dark side.
Parasitizing something built by others instead of making something of their own.
See also: the vast majority of immigrants to the US, Canada, and Europe.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/amy-curtis/2025/11/15/anne-frank-musical-n2666409
Be a shame if the theater burned down with the writers, producer, cast and audience.
It would be a real shame if the financial backers weren’t in the theater when it burned.
Wasn’t there a JEP novel with a zeroth or first generation Mars transportee as protagonist?
—–
Still raining here in SoCal, finally a decent storm.
I wonder how many homeless people drowned in the river beds? I suspect it’s severely undercounted.
Good Lord you sat through all of it. My household stopped watching after the second episode.
Watching film of the CA storm down below: man, I’d hate to be in an EV driving in over hub-deep water.
Finally, I’m part of a control group. I’ve never watched it.
Palate cleanser for Mr. Ray:
Payday Blues: Workers Scrape By While EBT Queen Hoards $23K—Taxpayers, Grab Your Pitchforks
Tubby the Tuba. No rollovers. No forever EBT. Reboot the system.
Nothing NSFW at the link https://www.amazon.com/s?k=glory+hole+kit&crid=YTRSURQXAYXZ&tag=ttgnet-20
——–
WRT space exploitation, if you are only sending three people, they better be polymaths with decades of training. They are so expensive you can’t really even bear to use them.
If you are sending 300, or 3000, or 30000, then they can be skilled, knowledgeable, expert at on task, but not necessarily geniuses.
Since the environment is so hazardous, they have to be able to deal with conditions first, especially mentally, then the job at hand.
Much more like pipeline welders or rig operators than scientists.
Many people have written variations on this.
I lived a variation while I was working in ‘the field’. It was much easier to take someone who already learned how to live on the road, get themselves to the job and do it, without losing their way metaphorically or in actuality, and then train them to do the job. What rarely worked was taking an ordinary person who knew the technical aspects and getting good work out of them in the field.
Some people can’t handle the variation and lack of structure. Some can’t take being away from home. Some are hiding substance or mental problems. Some are just terrible with the kind of people they needed to work with.
Screening for that first, led to much greater success.
And once the town is there on the frontier, people WILL come. Pioneers and settlers are two different types though.
n
I need a course on networking.
I use Jump Desk to remote into my devices. The app doesn’t allow copy and paste between devices. I added Resilio to the devices and can now sync folders over the Tailscale network.
Enter Rustdesk (written in Rust). It is an open source Remote Desktop app. I’m trying it out and it works great for over the internet RD access. It can use Rustdesk servers or your own (like on a Pi connected to your network) to monitor/direct access. Or, lo and behold, it can just use the Tailscale network. All free. The Jump app for iPad is $15, but the desktop app is on the high seas. I think after some more testing, I’ll replace Jump with Rustdesk. There are instruction on how to run RD as a daemon on a remote machine so it is in the background and not have to “hide” or “minimize” it.
I need a course on networking to get knowledgeable on how this stuff works. The apps, Tailscale, Resilio, and Rustdesk, take care of all the arcane network stuff through a GUI.
Sounds like massively increasing your potential attack surface to me.
Do you need all that remote access?
n
Be really careful with Remote Desktop. The protocol isn’t encrypted, and use over the Internet needs a VPN connection or SSH tunnel.
TeamViewer is pretty much the standard for remote GUI use if you don’t have corporate IT resources.
Pre-pandemic, TeamViewer was a fringe thing that WallStreet guys used to have virtual sex with their mistress or dominatrix from the office at lunch time. Since the pandemic, it is the tool of choice for people wanting to “work” from home who are not allowed to do so for policy or security reasons.
TeamViewer is pretty much mainstream now. IIRC, they even sponsor an F1 team.
BTW, PPTP is not secure, and I have my doubts about Microsoft’s replacement, SSTP, after taking the protocol apart for a grad school project.
See if your router offers IPSec or OpenVPN if you are going to tunnel RDP back home.
Great observation.
88F on the sunny side of the house. Partly cloudy, some breeze. Nice day in other words.
n
The speed of advertising is beginning to rival the speed of gossip:
I was looking at small butane heaters on Amazon, for Emergency use for my sister in her all-electric apartment, and less than three hours later my YouTube advertising feed was full of them.
I wonder who was tattling: Apple, Amazon, DDG. Starlink? All of the above?
—
I really should use Brave more.
I like Rustdesk because I can use the Tailscale network to run over. Tailscale uses Wireguard encryption.
I mainly use remote since I still have stuff in SA. I’ve helped everyone in the family with a Mac. Primarily with Jump Desk, but my own stuff is switching to Rustdesk.
I still travel a lot and only take my iPad. I remote into my mini when crunching power is needed or a full app.
In house, Apple hasn’t released a native screen sharing on the iPad, so Rustdesk is easy to use sitting on the couch to fine tune my Apple TV Mac if it glitches or I want some new show.
Huh, since I’m a homebody, I don’t consider that much. I do use a VPN connection to remote into my client’s network to check stuff, and I want to set up a VPN between my BOL and home, but that is for future me.
Getting control of my network here, getting the kids off the network with my main pc and financial stuff, getting the cams on a separate net, and getting a pihole set up are all higher priorities.
Getting any real networking at the BOL, and especially cams, is a high priority too.
n
Apple is going to be very careful with regard to running a user application with root priviges in the walled garden. Hackers aren’t as much of a concern as Facecrack exploiting a hole.
A new MacBook with an A18 CPU is coming to fill the gap between the iPad and Air. Your ticket to Elysium renewal will no doubt require buying one.
As a curiosity I note that twice now I have seen manual clothes washing wringers in my returns auctions.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=wringer+washer&crid=2OJKETZ9AFYGD&tag=ttgnet-20
it looks like they aren’t cheap either.
Wonder what is driving that…
n
I have a Pi-hole so my results might vary. What ads I get have not changed since I started using Starlink.
I only look at an occasional video on Youtube so….. if the ads are for items on Amazon I’d say Amazon is your leak. DDG makes noises about privacy. Search results for anything have sucked for me the last couple of months.
I look for stuff on Amazon and I can’t say I’ve ever noticed (even before Pi-hole) something I looked for that popping up in an ad elsewhere.
That leaves Apple. Maybe…. I let some sites store cookies. Here, Amazon, eBay, my bank, and a few more. Every other cookie is deleted when I close Firefox.
In Privacy I choose “Custom” and I have all options enabled. “All cross-site cookies” seems to work for me. Firefox says it might break some websites but I haven’t noticed any problems.
Your mileage, etc etc.
The small van-life boondocking kind?
It got above 40F here, up from maybe 21f at dawn. Basically no wind. A nice day, after expectations have been seasonally adjusted. There may a sky somewhere up there, judging from the fact that the cloud cover is a lighter color in some places, but that’s just speculation.
The thermostat for the chicken coop is set to turn on at 32F and bring it up to 38F before turning off the heat light. That’s warmer than I’ll keep it over the Winter but the older hens’ down hasn’t fully grown back in. I don’t know if the light turned on overnight. Eight fat little butts might have kept the coop warm enough.
A couple people visited yesterday and checked my birds and the run. As often happens, they commented on the luxurious accommodations, how fat and healthy my chickens look, and how attentive they are to me. This was compared to their neighbors and other acquaintances who have a few chickens. And as for attentive, of course they are. I’m the one who brings treats and sometimes lets them out to run around. They’re very interested when I approach the run. Others, mainly my wife and daughter, have mentioned that the chickens aren’t nearly as interested when they walk by the run. They’ll look and they’ll eat any treats that are deposited, but they don’t jump up and flap to the wall of the run closest to the person and start hopping and awwwwking and jostling for position. It’s pretty funny to watch.
Maybe people are getting fed up with $800 washing machines which last two years before needing a $400 service call.
I may load the truck and make a run to the BOL late in the day. I’d like to get that stuff out of my way here and re-stocked up there. Keeping two places and the backup offsite location even minimally stocked takes effort. To keep them properly stocked, with layers of fall back, is an undertaking.
How funny. I drove my truck to the BOL last Monday and took 28 boxes / bags of stuff to Mom. Mom and I are meeting an Estate Sales guy there on Monday to talk about getting rid of the remaining Precious Stuff.
After we sell Mom’s place (the BOL for me), I will look at buying a BOL retirement place in north central Texas.
I was thinking (ouch) about blocking ‘net access by time of day. I was sure there was a setting my my router. I can’t find it today. Ok, maybe in the Pi-hole? Nothing obvious.
Well, it must be the Starlink router. But I’m too lazy to tote my phone out there and see.
And it’s all moot. The kids are on their phones and hello, Data Plans, they don’t need the local LAN. So even something as simple as putting the router on a time to kill the power isn’t going to work.
https://www.jammermfg.com/cell-phone-jammers.html
I’ve also been neglecting the generators. I ran the one at the BOL, and had W start it several months ago, but it needs to be exercised again. The gennies here all need to be checked and most need further work/refinement. It’s a big list and it gets bigger.
I did a full power off test of the gennie last night. She took 12 seconds to get going. One of the long range forecasts has a blue norther for Thanksgiving here on the Gulf Coast with ice.
Saturday bedtime. I am whacked.
I see a dental appointment in my near future. I was having afternoon tea, and had an unexpectedly crunchy morsel of almond plait. I thought I had found an overlooked almond shell, but the crunchiness turned out to be half a molar that had decided it wanted to be outside my mouth. Not good.
I’m a bit surprised, as it is not so long since I had the fangs cleaned, and the new dentist lady with the dainty hands pronounced all good. I will have to call her first thing on Monday.
The remainder of the broken tooth is sensitive to hot and cold, but not actually painful. However, I am pretty sure it can’t stay as-is, so the tooth doctor will have to take a look.
Goodnight, all. I wonder if I am too old for the Tooth Fairy. I might know in the morning…
Maybe people are getting fed up with $800 washing machines which last two years before needing a $400 service call.
My four year old Speed Queen washing machine is doing just fine running every other day even with our crappy unfiltered well water full of iron and caliche.
Oh wait, it was $1,500 IIRC. And that gearbox is a noisy whiner.
Hey, the new Australia! If it weren’t so expensive to send them there (and maybe Starship will make it cheaper), that could be an excellent solution.
I reckon the only problem would be IQ. A Mars colony is going to be highly technical, and criminals are unlikely to be smart or educated enough to manage it. Which in itself is no loss, but then we could just turn them into Soylent Green here
The prospect of continuous death conditions focuses the mind wonderfully. Reread “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress”.
“IEA: World oil and gas demand could grow until 2050”
https://www.hydrocarbonprocessing.com/news/2025/11/iea-world-oil-and-gas-demand-could-grow-until-2050/?oly_enc_id=8020E7639790J0C
Yeah, crude oil and natural gas are cheap worldwide but especially in the USA. The demand will go up as nobody has a need to economize.
I keep on telling people that we have been in a oil bust since 2008 but nobody believes me. Crude oil was $140/US bbl, it is now $59. Natural gas was $14/mmbtu, it is now $4.50. No other industry is so subject to these huge swings in commodity pricing. I had fourteen people working for me in 2008, I now have four. Over half of my customers have merged with another company, gone bankrupt, or just shut down since 2008.
Speed Queen
– same for me. And all the ladies who lunch and “if you just want reliable, fast, clean clothes and don’t care about the environment” recommended…
It’s what we bought when W finally admitted that her choice of High Efficiency front loader took too long, didn’t get things clean, and broke all the time. She consulted the oracle of FB, and the ladies on the wealthier side of the freeway all said “Speed Queen”.
The wash takes about 15 minutes. The dry, 30 and the “more dry/less dry” setting actually works.
HIGHLY recommended.
n
Interesting way to describe the bust of a popular streamer…
Some ADHD meds might include some form of amphetamine, but the opposite isn’t automatically true. It’s much more likely to be a street drug than prescribed given the streamer’s party lifestyle.
n
Yeah, knew a guy. He needed something and they were prescribed, but I don’t think they helped.
Senior guy, very very smart, engineering heir apparent to running a company division, became paranoid, ending up losing his job eventually.
I was searching for something and, among other links, got one to a Daynotes page in which I made a prediction:
I wish that I could lay claim to being the greatest seer since Nostradamus but let’s be honest, that prediction wasn’t exactly a challenge.
Not even that; more like a window blind. Put it in the doorway and roll it down. Very cheap, and even more tacky.
And maybe sticky.
My 10 – 0 TAMU Aggies pulled it out today and beat South Carolina 31 to 30 at home. My Aggies were down 30 to 3 at the half. The second half was amazing.
The second half was amazing.
– sounds like a good game to watch.
n
xkcd: Beam Dump
https://xkcd.com/3168/
Accelerator Physicists should only be used for Beam design, not water park design.
Explained at:
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/3168:_Beam_Dump
Strange.
Dark & rainy.
I just sat down to eat dinner when I saw some tail lights in my backyard.
When I went out with the hand light it looked like a Toyota sedan or something, on the dirt (mud) road to the RV shed, and they just made a circle and drove off slowly.
There is another mariaci band off in the distance tonight, maybe they thought this was that place (no signs or streetlights)?
Did the law change? I thought that jammers were illegal.
Ours is noisier than the Kenmore Elite it replaced, but the motor isn’t whiny.
We had a valve develop a leak within the last year, requiring warranty service.
The Kenmore had a chronic problem with leaking from the bleach dispenser, which required taking the washer apart and rinsing out the dispenser assembly about once a year.
If Texas loses tonight, the dime will drop in two weeks to put “Arch” in the playoffs.
A little while back someone, maybe EdH, asked for suggestions about meat grinders. My acquaintance who makes his own ground beef and sausage finally got back to me. (It appears to have been a “click save rather than send” issue, or possibly an “oversampling the homemade booze and passing out before finishing and sending the email” issue).
He uses a KitchenAid mixer with the grinder attachment (and the sausage-filling attachment). He and his wife haven’t had any notable trouble with this, even doing ten pounds of meat in a batch.
To add to that, I’ve had KitchenAid mixers, with a bunch of attachments, for about 30 years. I used the grinder some, not too much at a time. I found it to have too small a capacity to do more than a couple pounds at a time. It’s possible that I’m simply not patient enough. Note also that my wife and her mother burned out the motors of two KitchenAid mixers by overloading the meat grinder and then attempting to force the meat through by cranking the motor speed all the way up. (Yes, I was a bit peeved, especially after the second one.)
My advice on the subject is that the KitchenAid with grinder will work, if you’re careful about overloading and you’re either doing small batch or are patient.
My real advice, though, is that you should get a dedicated meat grinder if this is something you’ll be using more than occasionally. I don’t have a recommendation for brand, as I don’t remember what I’ve used, but if you’ll be using it regularly, don’t get a home model. Spend as much as you can justify on a low-end restaurant model because the more rigid frame, the beefier motor, and the better-quality steel cutter will work better and last longer.
Vodka martinis tonight. Finished off my bottle of potato vodka.
Probably won’t buy it again.
I thought all vodka used potatoes. Did something change?
I don’t keep up.
For decades, US law said it had to be grain neutral spirits. Potato vodka in the US is a fairly new thing.
Meh.
If Texas loses tonight, the dime will drop in two weeks to put “Arch” in the playoffs.
I don’t think that you understand the level of animosity between the two football programs. Texas leads the rivalry at 77 – 37 – 5.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas%E2%80%93Texas_A%26M_football_rivalry
“I thought all vodka used potatoes. Did something change?”
Vodka can be made out of about anything that ferments. Unlike other distilled liquors that contain water and ethanol, the impurities that give flavor are minimal.
“COP30 Dispute Erupts over the Legal Definition of a Woman”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/11/13/cop30-dispute-erupts-over-the-legal-definition-of-a-woman/
“Could this climate conference possibly get more absurd? Wouldn’t it be hilarious if the entire conference broke down over this issue?”
“I’ve no doubt if the UN parachuted millions of dollars into a poverty stricken disaster zone, only available to people who identify as a woman, pretty soon everyone would identify as a woman – at least while they were queuing up for the handout.”
This is truly ironic.
“Dilbert Reborn (11/15/2025): Scott Adams announces that, as of today, he will write Dilbert but his art director will take over drawing due to focal dystonia and semi-paralysis in his right and left hands”
Source: https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1989701895238381818
Full text of post:
the impurities that give flavor are minimal.
– and yet… one night in college we were at a local bar, ordering frozen Stoli. Now my buddy and I had a lot of practice with frozen Stoli, but because we’d already been drinking a while, the bar thought we wouldn’t notice when they sent us something cheaper, but charged for the premium. (late 80s, a lot of people drank frozen Stoli, you could get it most places. That and Sex on a Beach, and Long Island Ice Tea, and some flaming shots, and an Irish Car Bomb were all favorites…)
We immediately called the waitress over, and were not particularly quiet about the “mistake” that the bar made. The manager/maybe owner came over and asked “why would I risk my license doing something like that????” Well, you make more money, and thought we wouldn’t notice because we were college kids and had been drinking for a while…
He said “OK, I’ll make a bet. I’ll bring you two shots and if you can tell which one is Stoli, you all drink free the rest of the night.” We drank free the rest of the night. Stolichnaya vodka does have a unique taste .
————
D1 went to a high school party in the adjacent neighborhood tonight. She came back early. Why? “We got a bad feeling, so we left.” Good girl. Listen to the little voice. Learn to hear it, and don’t second guess. When it’s time to go, GO. Apparently some voices were raised when the host’s “ops” showed up. (“Ops” is more ghetto youth slang entering the vernacular. It’s short for ‘opponents’ meaning a rival group. It frames the interaction and the participants’ thinking as an us vs them and probably escalates things when all actions are viewed thru that lens. Not a great development from a societal standpoint.) It’s the second time she and her girlfriend have left a party early.
————-
I was sitting by the water feature reading with my tiny little fire, and stayed out to finish and read for a while even after she got home. It’s a bit chilly sitting still, but I didn’t run the heat tonight. I had one stray cat come by, and a possum waddled up to get a drink, not 3 feet from me. He didn’t even seem to notice me, but then I’m sitting still and reading in the dark. My little pond is a local watering hole…
————-
Time for shower and bed.
n
Kid just told me that after they left the cops came and shut down the party.
Good choices.
n
added– I mean, aside from going to the party in the first place.
@stevef, one of the things I find valuable (among many, including the fellowship) about this place is being able to go back in time and see what I was thinking, and what other people were saying, at a particular time. It’s easy to mis-remember or to get the timing wrong when remembering.
I’m pretty sure that Sarah Hoyt should be re-reading some of her posts from early 2020 to refresh her memory, based on some stuff she’s posted over the last year.
I know I don’t have perfect recall (not since I was a kid, and before the TBIs) and like the ability to check, even it it’s just what the weather was like.
n
Added- I never expected to become a diarist, having tried when I was a kid, but it’s very helpful.
n
Joy’s of age. I’ve had a couple of teeth where a piece just randomly broke off. The dentist tells me it’s just normal material fatigue. Usually happens where there’s a filling, but not always.
I can second this for just about any kitchen equipment. Our immortal vac-packer, our ice cream machine, our meat slicer, our dishwasher: all commercial models, all years old and problem free.
In the new kitchen, we put in a small private oven. Even though I have verified the temperature, everything takes longer to cook than it should. While we don’t have the space for a commercial oven, I sure do miss it.
Same for the coffee machine: we replaced our big commercial machine with a supposedly top-end private machine. It works, but it’s finicky compared to the old machine.
These days, a lot of “vodka” is made with the ethanol that is removed from alcohol-free beverages.
Joys indeed. Getting older is not for the faint of heart, but one supposes it’s better than not getting older.
Sunday morning. Time to get up…
Well done, D1. Many people never learn to heed the little voice… Glad she exited without drama.
No sign of the Tooth Fairy.
Maybe I need to turn on location services these days, or maybe SteveF just isn’t awake yet…
Slow start to the morning, as it will be over soon.
Made french toast for me and the wife. Bacon too. Kids are out shopping together.
Sunny, partly cloudy, 78F in the shade.
Slept well, but woke with some backache and stiffness. Also dreams in color, with dialog and plotlines. Like watching little movies.
n
Um, no sh!t sherlock…
n
quiet today – – – – too quiet….
n
Probably because you’re on yesterday, Nick.