Tuesday, 3 June 2014

08:06 – One of the minor annoyances with Netflix streaming has been that titles disappear with little notice. In the past, Netflix has provided as little as three or four days’ notice. That’s fine for a movie, but not very helpful for a series. Every time I’ve spoken to Netflix tech support about another issue, I’ve asked them to please make the end date available for each title, or at least give more notice. Yesterday, I noticed that they’ve started doing that. Three of the items in our streaming queue are marked as expiring on 1 July, including one series that we just started watching: Outrageous Fortune, a pretty good series from New Zealand. We won’t have time to finish it. There are 107 episodes, so we’ll just bag it for now and wait until Netflix gets it back, as they probably will.

In the first six seasons of Heartland, Amber Marshall’s character Amy didn’t drink alcohol, other than one incident where a bad guy spiked her drinks with vodka at a party. Even during holidays, birthdays, etc. when all the adults were having wine with dinner, Amy had a glass of water. But during an episode we watched the other night, Amy had a glass of wine with dinner. Apparently, she’s turned 21 and is now allowed wine. So I mentioned this to Kim yesterday because Jasmine turns 21 on June 21st. I mentioned jokingly that Jas would now be allowed to drink. I was flabbergasted when Kim said that Jas has already mentioned this and said that she expects to have wine with her birthday dinner. I thought Jas was an alcohol-shall-never-pass-my-lips kind of girl. For example, she refuses to go out with college boys who (gasp) drink beer. I may have to reconsider my opinion of Jas. She’s not as prissy as I thought she was. She does, however, have an unhealthy tendency to obey laws.


10:06 – I’m in the midst of making up 137 30 mL bottles of iodine solution, which is included in most of our kits. That’s as many bottles as I could fill with the ~4.25 liters of solution I had on hand. I’ll make up another 6+ liters of iodine solution today, but I can’t fill another batch of bottles because I’m down to only half a dozen of the special phenolic cone caps we use on those bottles to keep the iodine from outgassing.

I spent some time yesterday afternoon getting one of the new laptop systems configured for Barbara to use as her main system. It should have been easy to transfer her Thunderbird email data and Firefox browser data over from her Linux system, but it just didn’t work. I copied the contents of the .thunderbird and .firefox profile directories from her Linux system and pasted those files into her new default profile directories under appdata on the Windows 8.1 system, but neither Thunderbird nor Firefox used those data. Fortunately, Barbara doesn’t have much that she cares about having transferred. She said not to worry about it. She’ll recreate her addressbook manually and send herself any emails that she cares about keeping. What really matters are her documents and spreadsheet data, which I copied over directly.

I also got power management set up for an always-plugged-in desktop configuration. Apparently, even though the charger is connected at all times, the system ignores the charger and allows the battery to run down to 50% before it actually charges it. Supposedly, that’ll make the battery last a lot longer.

I connected a standard mouse to one of the USB ports because Barbara doesn’t particularly like touchpads. She’s happy with the keyboard and display, though, so I won’t bother connecting a USB keyboard and full-size display. I also didn’t bother to connect her Ethernet cable. She’s happy using WiFi instead.

46 Comments and discussion on "Tuesday, 3 June 2014"

  1. Jim B says:

    Since you (still?) Have excellent UPSs, why not remove that notebook’s battery. I store mine at 40F, and only use it once or twice a year when I need portability. Last I checked, it had nearly new capacity, and it is 8 years old.

  2. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    Good idea, but Barbara wants portability on a moment’s notice, for example to carry the notebook out to the den and work on something.

  3. bgrigg says:

    I wonder why they had Amber Marshall’s character wait until she was 21? The legal limit in Alberta is a much more reasonable 18. In my own experience the average teen tries alcohol at age 13 or 14. Most Canadians experiment with alcohol at an early age, and somehow we don’t suffer any greater harm for it, than our American neighbors.

    I’ve always thought it more than passing strange that America has stuck with 21 for the legal age limit on alcohol, when you can go and kill people in faraway countries at 18.

  4. pcb_duffer says:

    I’m not familiar with Win8, but I recently found a real annoyance with Win7. On my Win7Pro machine, T-bird keeps its data in Users\Andy\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\{gibberish} . On my late sister’s machine, running Win7 Home Premium, T-bird keeps its data in Users\Lynda\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\{gibberish} . A tip of the hat to the nice folks at Microsoft for making it easy to do a complete system backup. Obviously, if I were supporting a bunch of Win boxes I would already have known that, and really I should have known better anyway. But it was still a real PITA. Maybe that’s why I run Linux on my primary machine and my laptop.
    But I’ve also found one oddity (bug?) in trying to synch T-bird across different operating systems. The information in the calendar won’t just copy over in the directory calendar-data , I have to export my calendar under Linux and then import it while running the Windows version.

  5. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    Oh, I suspect there’s not much difference between Canada and the US in terms of average age when kids first try alcohol.

    I did think it was a bit strange that Amy didn’t have wine at special occasions during the first six seasons, even when the group was toasting something. She was 15-going-on-16 at the start of the series. (Amber was actually 18 playing 15.) That seems old enough to have wine at home with her family. In fact, I think any age is fine to have wine at home with the family.

    Oddly, North Carolina makes it illegal to drink before one reaches 21. That includes drinking at home with one’s family. I don’t know that anyone has actually been charged with violating that law, but it’s on the books.

  6. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    Incidentally, I think I was about four the first time I tasted hard liquor. My dad and uncle (neither of whom drank much) had a bottle of whiskey or brandy out for some sort of celebration. I was watching them and they realized I wanted some. So they gave me some. I drank it and never again touched alcohol until I was in college.

  7. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    The information in the calendar won’t just copy over in the directory calendar-data , I have to export my calendar under Linux and then import it while running the Windows version.

    Silly me. When I spotted the directory called appdata, I just assumed that that’s where the data was stored. Obviously not, as copying the Firefox/Thunderbird data there doesn’t cause the apps to see it. I’ll see what I can figure out.

  8. Chad says:

    I did see an article about new movies available on Netflix and Amazon Prime in June:
    http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/30/showbiz/netflix-amazon-streaming-movies-june/index.html

  9. Miles_Teg says:

    “I was watching them and they realized I wanted some. So they gave me some. I drank it and never again touched alcohol until I was in college.”

    Heh, something like that happened to my mum. She was staying with an uncle on his farm, aged 14, when the uncle gave her a sip of beer. She hated it, and immediately ran outside and spat it out. Her father was furious when he found out, but mum said he should have been grateful as it put her off alcohol for life. (My father and I managed to persuade her to have a glass of wine when she was in her seventies.)

  10. Lynn McGuire says:

    The procedure to copy Thunderbird data to a new PC is:
    1. install TB on the new PC
    2. start TB and then close it
    3. start My Computer and go to the c:/users/”username”/AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird/Profiles directory
    4. move into the new gibberish profile directory
    5. copy the user’s old profile to the new gibberish profile directory
    6. start Thunderbird – all old contacts and email should be there

    My current Thunderbird directory is:
    C:/Users/lmc/AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird/Profiles/j1z3nylv.default

    I have done this many times without any problems.

  11. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    Yep, that’s exactly what I did. It didn’t work.

  12. MrAtoz says:

    The Bergdahl mess gets weirder by the minute. Dumbocrats are spinning like crazy. It’s weirder than the first woman captured in Iraq. She was made out as a hero also (proved later she did nothing except pass out). Now he might get a POW Medal (all Obummer has to do is declare he was a POW, even though this is not a declared war). Note he supposedly left said he renounced his citizenship. That had to be know by Obummer.

    Let’s see OdumbO spin his way out of this one.

  13. Ray Thompson says:

    Another sad day.

    Said goodbye to our exchange student today as she flies back home to Norway. Always tough to say goodbye as they become like your own children. We are planning on traveling to Rena Norway on December 26th of this year for a visit. We have been to Rena (and Oslo) in the spring. Now it is time to experience the snow, short days and perhaps the Northern lights.

  14. Chad says:

    We are planning on traveling to Rena Norway on December 26th of this year for a visit. We have been to Rena (and Oslo) in the spring. Now it is time to experience the snow, short days and perhaps the Northern lights.

    I was in Bodø and Evenes in January of 1996 supporting arctic training for some grunts. Had an awesome night in Bodø . Great hotel (even had heated towel racks and floors), great food (had reindeer for the first time), and good beer (Mack-øl). First time above the Arctic Circle too. Nicest people I ever encountered in my travels.

  15. medium wave says:

    Now that Barack’s rescued Bergdahl, maybe he can negotiate for this guy:

    http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/30/us/mexico-us-marine-detained/

    Naw, I’m not holding my breath either.

  16. OFD says:

    If it’s a declared turncoat/deserter who voluntarily goes to live with the Taliban and give them who knows what intel on his fellow soldiers, a number of whom were wounded or killed looking for him out there, and whose family is yelling out praise for Allah with Barry, then why not promote him a couple of times, give him medals and call him a hero.

    If it’s a regular jarhead who got jammed up down in Mexico somehow, why, let him rot there.

    Nothing new here, this isn’t just Barack Hussein pulling this chit; it’s a fine and venerated old American tradition; we reward our enemies and betray and punish our friends. One quick example; in just the past century alone, we had terrible, diabolical enemies to fight with Germany and Japan and North Vietnam and while guys were still POWs and MIA and bodies unburied, we rushed like maniacs to normalize relations and get those commercial connections humming and buzzing again. So Germany and Japan became international economic powerhouses who have left us in the dust in several respects over the decades and life is just peachy again with the heirs of Ho Chi Minh and General Giap.

    I can personally attest, from my own experience and from that of others who’ve served in these wars, that there is a serious psychological and emotional disconnect involved here; memories of self and buddies humping through the shit and leaving guys dead on the field and coming back messed up are as clear as yesterday afternoon, and so when we see the top dawgs all buddied up a coupla years later, it rankles just a bit. I knew older Good War vets who absolutely refused to buy any Japanese products and of course this is put down to racism, but after their trials in the Pacific islands? Tough shit. Racism worked both ways there.

    It must bother the CEOs and CFOs no end that they haven’t been able to crack the North Korean markets. And that has been made up in part by their greedy little paws beavering away in Red China. A regime that eclipsed even Koba the Dread in mass body count of their own people, and that’s saying something. Dolphie was just a piker.

  17. Ray Thompson says:

    great food (had reindeer for the first time)

    Our trip was in May of 2013. I also had reindeer for the first time and it was quite good. Along four different kinds of caviar, kippers for an appetizer, lots of wine. One of our hosts got a bottle of wine from his cellar that was 10 years old when he got it and had been in his cellar for 10 years. He was a wine expert. Insisted on hand washed wine glasses as he could taste the soap from a dishwasher washed glasses.

    He was also, along with his partner, the sole distributor for Pilot pens and pencils in Norway. Gave me a several writing instruments with several of them costing $80. Told me if I ever needed a pen or pencil from Pilot to send him an email and he would personally have the president of Pilot Pens in the US send whatever I requested.

    The planned trip in December, if it all works out, will be to fly into Oslo again. But instead of being driven to Rena we will take the train. That will avoid some congested construction along the way and will give us a chance to see the scenery. Plus it avoids our exchange students family from having to make a four hour round trip, plus parking, etc. Much easier to take the train.

    When we were in Rena in May it got light at 4:30 AM and did not get dark until about 10:00 PM. Odd indeed. I expect it will be the opposite in December with the days being less than 6 hours long.

    I may hate it. The cold, the dark. But if I don’t do it I will never know. With no kids, low pressure job, no debt it is time to do some more traveling before I get like OFD and the bones start creaking too much.

  18. brad says:

    There are new reports of extremist Islamic groups from Iraq operating in Syria. The US did such a great job helping in Iraq.

    So now Obama is sending troops to Eastern Europe to “help”. Gee, I can hardly wait to see what kind of mess the US makes there…

  19. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    My dad flew combat in B-17’s over Germany, and for 30 years after the war ended he refused to buy any product made in Germany or Japan. I guess he eventually mellowed, because he finally did buy a 1975 VW Rabbit, albeit one that was made in the USA.

  20. Lynn McGuire says:

    I guess he eventually mellowed, because he finally did buy a 1975 VW Rabbit, albeit one that was made in the USA.

    I had one of those also, a 1982 VW rabbit diesel with a 5 speed manual. Used to get 45 to 50 mpg all the time. It was so gutless that if you saw a hill, you downshifted to fourth. Then when you got on the hill, you downshifted to third. And turned off the A/C. It would go 78 mph in fifth or 83 mph in fourth (it needed a turbocharger real bad). That was back when diesel was cheaper than regular gasoline. The diesel engine was rock solid but the body and hardware sucked.

  21. Lynn McGuire says:

    Obama is certainly making the case to be the worst USA President of all time. And, he is making the bar very high for his successors to be even worse.

  22. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    Well, Obama is worse than George II, who was worse than Clinton, who was worse than George I, who was worse than Reagan, who was worse better than Carter. Hmmm.

  23. ech says:

    When we were in Rena in May it got light at 4:30 AM and did not get dark until about 10:00 PM.

    I am in London after being in Kirkwall, Orkney, Scotland for a week. Sundown was after 10 PM and sunrise was just after 4 AM.

    Had some great beers there, and a tour of the local Scotch distiller. I’ve never been a Scotch drinker, but the 15 year old Highland Park, a single malt, was amazing. The 12 was good and the 18 was better, the wife and I both liked the 15 the best.

  24. OFD says:

    It matters not a whit whichever sock puppet is in the WH. They do what they’re told and have for a very long time in this country. Only now they have tremendous firepower; the Great Eliminator must be salivating with envy in Hell. It’s so cool when you can push a button and get somebody whacked 10,000 miles away and hey, if some of your guys get whacked in the process, well hell, they signed up, didn’t they?

    Boil it down to its essence and nothing has changed since the wars between Sparta and Athens, other than the technologies. Or in modern times among the tribal massacres in Africa. Except that in the latter two cases you may have a shot at there being adequate military leadership.

  25. Lynn McGuire says:

    And Carter was worse than Nixon. But Nixon was better than Johnson.

  26. Lynn McGuire says:

    I connected a standard mouse to one of the USB ports because Barbara doesn’t particularly like touchpads.

    Me too!

  27. OFD says:

    They all sucked. Gotta go back as far as Grover Cleveland to find a decent one.

    I also hate touchpads and can barely abide it on the Kindle. I’ve been trying a wireless mouse for the first time and it probably operates OK 95% of the time but hiccups occasionally, and that is, as they say, Good Enough. One less wire. Of course now I’ll see on the tech nooz that hackers are cracking wireless mice and keyboards. One thing that has continued to bug me is the continued failures of USB ports on the desktops and sometimes the optical drives, which I don’t remember being a problem before. My USB ports get regular use and one or more on each machine are apparently dead. Also, the extension cables and various suchlike cable devices don’t work half the time, either.

    Just had a drenching downpour over several hours with a thunderstorm and whiteout on the bay; couldn’t see the encircling shores at all. Boy did we ever need this rain. Now I’m mowing the yard every other day. I think we’ll be expanding raised beds and other garden areas and that should cut down significantly on the mowing but increase the weeding and so on.

    We lost one blueberry bush over the wintuh and have just planted a bunch of flowers and some tomatoes, the yellow cherry ones, which grow like gangbusters here. I’d really like to try the hot peppers but I’m told it’s a hard row to hoe in this climate. So more kale, beets, carrots, spuds, lettuce, turnips, parsnips, etc. Good supplemental storage for the canned and bulk products.

  28. MrAtoz says:

    I’ve been involved in enough AR 15-6 and 32 investigations to call Bergdahl toast. If the note he left is in his own handwriting, he’s dishonorably discharged if not incarcerated. If Obummer lets him skate, there will be an uproar in the Army. I don’t see what else OdumbO can do now that he and his hacks are trumpeting this all over the airwaves. We already know he doesn’t support the military (read his West Point commencement). I believe his ratings will plummet to the lowest ever for him. Only low info voters will not know he is a weak leader, indecisive and a fool.

    If he skates, I may throw my medals over the WH fence like Lurch. Naw, that would be pathetic just like Lurch.

  29. Chuck W says:

    Had another round of VERY long telephone go-rounds with AT&T today. What a TOTALLY incompetent organization! Learned something today. Don’t ever say it is okay for AT&T to talk about their own products to solve your problem. That turns on a high-pressure sales job that is nearly impossible to shut off without hanging up. Just say no in the first place. I told the first gal that I do not own a television set, and will never for the rest of my life have a landline phone, but she kept giving me the third degree about why it was important to have both.

    I am on the phone and on hold for so long with AT&T, that I had to increase my landline cell minutes a couple months ago. Over 2 hours today, and the problem was not really solved. When I moved to Uverse, which is really DSL2, not fiber in my area, the person setting it up misspelled my name. Several account details are wrong, including how I get email and messages from them and my supposed AT&T email box (that I did not even know I had), which apparently they are cutting out. Now mind you, I knew NOTHING — absolutely ZERO — about an email address or a way to access my account info online. Yesterday, I got a letter in the USPS mail that somebody changed one of my contact numbers for the online account access — which I knew nothing about.

    After 2 hours and 4, count ’em — FOUR — calls in 2 hours to AT&T, the upshot is that the account cannot be corrected to my actual name.

    I really like the local tech guys I have had to deal with, and feel sorry for them. They are sincere, I’m sure, when they say they appreciate my business. Not so with the incompetents I dealt with in the big city call centers. Finally got hold of a guy in a small northern Michigan call center, who did his best, and at least got the misspelling of my name out of their system, even if he could not change it to the account name it should have been.

    Nice local small town people aside, I am going to move to the local fiber carrier when I get back in 2 weeks. It surely cannot be as awful as my repeatedly bad experiences with AT&T. What a far cry AT&T is from when local Tiny Town boy Robert Allen was running it (his parents ran the Tiny Town kiddie shoe store when I was a tyke). Where in the hell is Judge Green when you need him?

  30. medium wave says:

    “If I’ve lost Mad, I’ve lost Middle America. “:

    http://althouse.blogspot.com/2014/06/trading-private-bergdahl.html

  31. Jim B says:

    “I connected a standard mouse to one of the USB ports because Barbara doesn’t particularly like touchpads.”

    I still have a Cirque Cat (TM) touchpad, probably the original version, from around the year 2000. I used it with a desktop computer just so I could experience a touchpad without the extra expense of owning a notebook computer. After a couple months of using it, I decided that it wasn’t for me, although I do use a touchpad on notebooks, and resist carrying extra baggage (a mouse.)

    I have always wanted to try alternative input devices, and probably have tried them all at one time or another. My favorite is still the lowly keyboard, although I do prefer mice or graphics tablets for drawing. No surprise there, but simply entering commands seems easier to remember and faster using a keyboard. So do the cursor keys for navigating around text. Beyond that, the common optical mice with a scroll wheel is my second fav. Until someone figires out how to use thoughts… Touch screens are a mixed bag, but necessary for really small devices.

    I do lay claim to having a wireless, batteryless mouse. Of course, it only works on my Wacom tablet. Never liked it much, but only because it had a rather sticky feel. Similar for a battery powered cordless mouse, but only because I don’t like batteries unless they are really necessary. My wife wore out the cord on her mouse, so I naturally tried a cordless one, which she liked… until the battery decided to fail prematurely and without warning, but WITH some rather strange effects. I can’t remember, but it didn’t seem that the battery was bad until I swapped it as a last resort. After a while, I put in a new corded mouse, and she likes that just as well. We humans are a picky lot 🙂

    I could go on, but that’s about enough. Until, of course someone starts a discussion about keyboards!

  32. Jim B says:

    Chuck W,

    You have my sympathy over your AT&T fun. My Verizon DSL has been slow for a couple of weeks, although it does work. I dread calling their support manglers. Our landline has been noisy, with mostly a lot of hum for longer than that; related, I’m sure. I DO want a landline, but may eventually go to cellular as primary if I can get a better Internet solution. Meanwhile, I don’t have a better choice than the DSL. We have a local PTP wireless provider, but he is slower than the DSL. He is trying to improve his backhaul, but that might not happen. Oh, the joy of living in a remote area! At least we have great weather!!

  33. OFD says:

    “If he skates, I may throw my medals over the WH fence like Lurch. Naw, that would be pathetic just like Lurch.”

    Except Lurch, a.k.a. “Liveshot,” a.k.a. “the Ketchup Heir,” didn’t throw his own medals over that fence; he borrowed some from a fellow deluded comsymp vet. But the public perception has held ever since, that they were his. And his appearance at that Senate hearing, wearing an OD shirt and long hair, with the made-for-tee-vee script, something about the last American to die in that war, etc. I forget the exact wording and am too lazy to look it up. ‘how do you ask a guy to be the last guy to die for his country’ or sumthin.

    I have the same gut reaction; if this asshole skates, what is the point of any of us having served or serving now or in future? And they, like always, have been handing out Bronze and Silver and MOH’s like it was going outta style for their “owned” wars. Judging by the criteria they’ve evidently been using for those decorations, I should have a lot more, and so should a whole bunch of other guys. But we saw officers giving each other the good stuff back then. Haven’t seen many ex-officers at the VA hospitals, either.

    Knowing this regime like we do, I am gonna put money on the bet that they will find a way to let this punk-ass hadji wannabe skate. No matter the uproar in the Army and among other elements of DOD. The latter are going to be pulled again by their nose rings and told how it is now. And this will continue until things get so bad here that a general or generals will end up stepping in, finally. And people will fucking cheer and be glad.

  34. Chuck W says:

    I don’t know a single vet who isn’t really incensed about this Bergdahl caper. This CIC is not going to get away with this if they have anything to do with it.

  35. Chuck W says:

    My whole recent Internet episode started when the broadband began slowing over a couple days, then failed totally with a red “Broadband” light on the modem over the recent holiday weekend. Beyond that, I use instant messenger from here to family and one work contact, and it frequently gets disconnected (all 3 accounts on different servers) and notifies me — usually several times a day. Very annoying. Of course, by the time tech support gets around to investigating, they cannot find anything wrong, and apparently have no logs to reference what went wrong.

    Never had problem one with SBC when they were the phone company here. Reliable, fast service that never went down. And I mean never. Now, it seems as if the damned thing goes down when I need it most. People waiting on me to send something, and I cannot do it with broadband down completely and no one knowing what is wrong — let alone when service will be restored.

    My tech contact at the cell phone company has told me how I can connect with the cell phone (he does it when on the road). It’s slow, he says, but at least I will be able to communicate and get work files out of the house when AT&T is down.

    I successfully got my main email account moved from POP to IMAP+ today. That was really the last hurdle to using the Linux notebook as my main computer, where Evolution is performing flawlessly. Going to wipe and reinstall the older laptop, which — at 8 years — has been my main machine longer than any computer I have ever used. Will probably decommission her, even though she has a fantastic internal sound system that has been used at the radio project almost daily for years. Hope the newer netbook can perform as well as the older laptop has.

  36. SteveF says:

    I don’t know a single vet who isn’t really incensed about this Bergdahl caper.

    I’m not really incensed. I’m very displeased, to be sure, but this sort of “caper” is nothing more than I’d expect of the non-American, America-hating, American-military-hating goat buggerer infesting the White House.

  37. OFD says:

    They got away with the shit in Benghazi, didn’t they? And putting boots on the ground in various places with not many the wiser, let alone any kind of Congressional authorization. But we’re losing focus a bit here; it’s all on this kid now; who exactly were the five hadji commanders that we let back into the world? Why were they picked? Is there any follow-up as to their whereabouts and activities? Did this kid give up any intel at all, say, on his own unit? On anything else he may have known or had access to?

    They let Qaddafi get caught and murdered, and good riddance, I guess, but the guy had complied with everything and quit being a dick, why whack him now? The situation there has gotten infinitely worse. I want heads to roll for the Benghazi caper and also a full investigation as to our support of the so-called moderate Syrian rebels, and our State Department’s machinations in Ukraine to set that country on fire.

    But of course this takes the heat off the VA hospital scandals, which are not big news to many of us out here anyway. It was clearly really bothering the WH krew, though, and I guess they thought this caper would fly. Either that or it’s deliberately designed to cow the military chiefs and tell them that they’re gonna do whatever they’re told, period. No matter how rotten.

  38. Jack Smith says:

    Re bookmarks with Firefox … beginning a release or two ago, Firefox added a bookmark synchronization feature. I have one Linux machine and two Windows 7 machines with Firefox and had no problem synchronizing all the bookmarks with the new feature.

    It’s called Firefox Synch and uses an internet link to transfer the files. Much easier to use than the former synchronization feature.

    You can access Firefox Synch from the fly out menu activated by the 3 horizontal bar button at the top right of Firefox. As usual with Firefox, it’s not all that well documented but it works well.

  39. MrAtoz says:

    This article by Ralph Peters says it all about Obummer and Bergdahl:

    Both President Obama and Ms. Rice seem to think that the crime of desertion in wartime is kind of like skipping class. They have no idea of how great a sin desertion in the face of the enemy is to those in our military. The only worse sin is to side actively with the enemy and kill your brothers in arms. This is not sleeping in on Monday morning and ducking Gender Studies 101.

  40. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    I haven’t been following the story, but if in fact this guy deserted and aided/consorted with the islamics, it seems to me that only one minor change in what happened would have made this right: they send us the head of the guy and we send them the heads of their five guys. What could be more fair?

  41. MrAtoz says:

    I ran across the waterBOB on Amazon. I don’t remember if we posted this with the survival stuff. It seems like a good idea for non-bugging out situations.

  42. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    Frankly, I’m not sure what use it is. If you have a bathtub and safe tap water, simply scrub out the tub, rinse it well with bleach, and fill it. I think I’d rather trust water stored that way than in some Chinese-made blivet.

    Incidentally, the LifeStraw is in fact rated for 1,000 liters rather than 2,000, but the reality is that its capacity varies a lot with how much gubbage is in the source water, whether you filter it first with a crude filter, how often and how well you blow out the LifeStraw, and so on. Also, they used to rate the shelf life of the LifeStraw at 5 years, but they’ve changed that to unlimited.

    I put one LifeStraw in each of our car kits. For something as important as water, $20 per unit is not excessive. And you can literally suck up raw sewage safely with the LifeStraw, so ordinary questionable water shouldn’t be a problem. Of course, if at all possible, I’d still boil the water in preference to filtering it (if not both).

  43. Lynn McGuire says:

    Will the LifeStraw filter viruses like Cholera out?

  44. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    Cholera is actually a bacterium rather than a virus. Yes, LifeStraw filters it. IIRC, LifeStraw specs say it provides a log6 reduction in bacteria, a log5 reduction in viruses, and a log3 reduction in protozoan cysts (giardia, cryptosporidium, etc.).

    But I’d still boil if possible.

  45. For a filter to have a lower rating for protozoan cysts than for viruses and bacteria is pretty strange, since cysts are larger. Any idea what might be going on there?

  46. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    Yeah, I thought the same thing. I have no idea. That’s why I suggest boiling if at all possible, which quickly kills giardia and cryptosporidium, not to mention other microorganisms.

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