Cool, overcast, damp, but not actually raining… except the forecast says possible rain. I hope for some more clear time to move stuff around.
I did some of that yesterday. Picked up stuff, and moved stuff. Back was sore last night, and is sore again today. I’ve been wearing some lightweight tactical boots and they have both good support and good cushioning. It seems to be making a difference in how bad I feel after lifting and toting.
D2 has a function for her school club this morning. Mom is going to take her. I hope to sleep in a bit. Not too much, I’ve got too much to do.
And some of it will get done. Some of it will not.
I didn’t get to Costco on Friday, and I’m loathe to go on the weekend but needs must, if I can find the time.
I can use the extra stacks. It’s feeling like that sort of a decade.
Stack something this weekend. Or go all Scrooge McDuck on your piles, and check them over. But do something.
nick
More searching on the MacBook and I found a setting that affects the scroll bars and changes the behavior. That may take care of the issue of getting scroll bars which requires two fingers on the mouse or track pad. I still have not figured out a way to reverse the scrolling action on the mouse, which is the opposite of the way a mouse works in Windows.
I checked some more reviews and apparently MacOS works quite nicely with only 8 gig of memory. Unless one does something that requires extreme amounts of memory. Nothing I will be doing qualifies.
I do like the way programs are uninstalled. Just drag the file to the trash. Quickly done. Finding the application took some looking in "Finder".
In the next big release of MacOS and IOS the capability to drag and drop between the MacBook and iPad will exist. Place the machines close, left or right, and just drag the MacBook mouse off the left or right of the screen. The mouse and keyboard will now work on the iPad as will dragging files between the devices. Quite a neat feature.
I did install the latest MacOS and it took almost 25 minutes after the download was completed. I have never had a Windows update take that long even going from W10 to W11.
Quicken for the Mac was downloaded, installed and the software converted my Windows file. Apparently the conversion is one way. Windows can convert to Mac, but Mac cannot convert to Windows. So that is an issue that will require me to take my Surface laptop on the trip.
The Mac will also travel on the upcoming Texas trip as I have movies loaded, a USB-C to HDMI converter, and a HDMI cable so we can watch movies in the hotel.
And speaking of Texas, when the trip was planned gas was much cheaper. Now I am figuring on $1,200.00 to $1,400.00 in gas for the entire trip. Perhaps more. If the price goes up much higher I am looking at some significant chunks of change to make the trip. At current levels a fillup of the Cowboy Cadillac will cost over $100.00. Yikes.
Two years ago, the death projection *from* Covid was two million, which caused Trump to lose his nerve and order the destruction of the economy.
Please. America never listened to Deming.
The Apple Silicon is very tightly integrated/efficient, much more so than the equivalent Intel MacBook architecture. The big down side now is that memory and storage are non upgradeable, making the machines disposable.
For about $1000, the MacBook Air and 13" MacBook Pro are very impressive pieces of technology for which the price can be justified. Getting into the mid- to high- end Apple Silicon laptops, however, the costs will be harder to rationalize unless you do something specific that takes full advantage of the hardware.
@Ray – Look into the Time Machine capability of OS X. For me, that was the "killer app" that started me down the path of Apple tweny years ago. I've never lost a picture or managed with OS X and iPhoto, and all of my email for my personal account goes through Mail.
Talk to the nice people at FedEx Office, formerly Kinko's.
The banner will cost you, but the result will be professional looking.
The local FedEx Office stores get all the Dell business which can be a giant pain in the a** at the beginning of a quarter. In grad school, I usually needed a report bound like a real book at the end of every semester for one prof, and I would have to go to Georgetown or beyond to get it even with 24 hour notice.
I have looked into Time Machine. I know others who have used the application and are pleased. On my W11 machine I am using Acronis and have been for years. Never an issue.
One of my favorite backup programs when I was working is Backup for Workgroups. Backs up multiple machines, generation support, no duplicated files even from different machines, just works.
On my Apple products I store stuff in iCloud. Both of our iPads, both of our iPhones, and probably will use some of that on this Mac.
I am still exploring some of the quirks of this Mac. It's just different, not better or worse than Windows. Some stuff is really easy, other stuff leads to some head scratching and Google Kung Fu.
One of my tasks on the upcoming trip while bored in the hotel room in the evenings will be to try and learn more about the applications Numbers and Pages. I will use existing known spreadsheets to explore, then try and create some on my own, simple ones that will allow me to explore the interface.
And then there are moments when I say to myself, "self I says", why am I doing this? I will never use most of this as I am no longer gainfully employed and have no need. But then I remind myself that learning is never ending and the challenge is the goal.
Besides: "He who dies with the most toys, wins".
As far as I know, you can't change it. "That is the way."
That works, but many programs leave behind trash files. I use CleanMyMac to get them all.
Like you've said many times, Mr. Ray: "Use what works for you."
I install LibreOffice on the Intel Macs at our house. I don't know if LibreOffice exists compiled for Apple Silicon.
I went heavy into LibreOffice for grad school and it just stuck in my head. The bare bones default template of the PowerPoint equivalent really suits my style of putting together slides — about 10 for a half hour talk, mostly URLs or graphs to illustrate a point.
OS X has an interesting past dating back to Jobs and NeXT, all originally financed by Ross Perot. The development tools enabled a lot of mischief on Wall Street in the 90s since putting together a GUI on top of C/C++ business logic was ridiculously easy. The tools also enabled early Web/HTTP development at CERN.
Sadly, Apple abandoned the "Yellow Box" technology which would have allowed the OS X Intel binaries to run under Windows as was previously done with NeXTStep. That was probably done at Gates request in return for the money Jobs used to keep Apple afloat in 1996.
If you ever get curious about the development process, the books from The Big Nerd Ranch/Aaron Hillegass are a good place to start.
OS X/NeXT is a very important piece of tech history.
I found a way actually. There is a setting for the mouse in the settings app that changes the direction. The way I don't like was checked as "natural". Yeh, natural to whom?
Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are at no charge, so good enough. Work the same on the iPad and Mac. Never have used any of them for anything other than a casual look.
Yes, I have Sgt. Schultz. But sometimes I feel like "I know nothing".
I may take a gander at the Swift language from Apple. Something else to explore. Have to keep the old brain cells active as some days I can detect them failing at an alarming rate (or so my wife states).
Not good. Hopefully there isn’t scheming behind the scenes by our congress critters to get us directly involved.
On Pages, Numbers, Keynote: Most of our work is done with MS Office. The Mac programs will open MS stuff as long as they don't have some kind macros. The Mac version of MS Office also does not support MS macros, but we don't use them. Apple Scripts and Automator will be replaced with Shortcuts (already on iOS and iPadOS). Then there will be a whole new crop of YouTubers showing us how to use it and templates for sale. I hope Shortcuts on Mac will be robust for use in PNK.
73 and 86%RH this morning with the sun poking thru.
Coffee is hot and in a mug, soon to be in my belly.
Back hurts, but it's not crippling yet, so that's good.
n
@ray
I remind myself that learning is never ending and the challenge is the goal.
Yes. This +1,000
I’m taking a bagpiping seminar by Zoom this afternoon, and am busily accumulating my CEUs for the 3 year renewal of a dog training certification.
He who dies with the most brain cells wins?
Day three of a migraine, early to bed last night and awake at 4 am from the migraine. Meds wore off. Can’t take another dose yet, working on alternative relief.
The ceremonial start of the Iditarod is this morning. Always a good time, though may be too raucous for me this particular morning.
Rabbits are doing well. We’ve had several days above freezing and I’ve been able to air out their enclosure by opening the fabric end panel. They appreciate it based off their relaxed stretched out postures. Two does are expecting, I still can’t palpate worth a darn so don’t know if they’re actually pregnant. I’ll know in another week or so. The two cages for kindling need the nest box warmers and bedding today. Pretty easy. Waste management for the rabbits has been easier in the warmer temps. No need for straw bedding and the waste is much smaller in quantity. Dirty straw is bulky and annoying to manage. It needs to be composted before use or you get entertaining invasive weeds in your garden (composting heat kills the bad seeds). In contrast to rabbit poop which is a cold manure and may be laid directly in the garden.
Our all in one Triangle tube furnace is end of life. I’d like to replace it sooner rather than later. I expect it’ll be a $12k-$15k job. Alaska premium – shipping and labor are more expensive. We had a Navien all in one at last house which I found acceptable. It had some annoying quirks. So we’re looking at Navien again, as well as another brand, whose name escapes me, my husband found.
plus we need to tackle the demolition / rebuild on the downstairs bath. It’ll be a ‘to the studs’ job for most of the room. 5’x10’ so not as bad as it could be, though tight quarters are fun.
Tackling a problem at work that looks like it may need a recursive query to solve. Look up a piece of information, if null, look at the parent, keep going. I haven’t sorted out what my most logical terminator is yet. There are fewer than 5000 records, about 10 percent will need to look at the parent, and several will need to look a few layers deep. It runs once a weekend, generates a dataset we send elsewhere. Not a critical piece of our environment. Used to keep a third party up to date in their records. MS SQL, not Oracle.
If my brain clears up I’ll poke at it this weekend with test tables and fake data on my own system. I don’t think it’s complex, I haven’t done many recursive queries, primarily in MySQL for finding tail sires / tail dams in a pedigree database. I recognize what a mess you can create with a poorly crafted one.
Pondering.
Hey Jenny, with all the rabbits at freezer camp, how many times a week/month do you eat rabbit? What are the family's favorite meals?
n
Objective C isn't as hideous as it used to be before Automatic Reference Counting smoothed over the requirement to learn the details of memory management and autorelease pools.
Plus Apple has had extremely good C++11 support since before the ink was dry on that standard, far better support for much longer than Microsoft, which makes me suspect Apple itself uses C++ a lot.
If you're used to Unix, the command shell in OS X should be very familiar. Anything missing can be easily installed using Homebrew.
My one gripe as a developer is Apple deprecating Tcl.
I grew up just north of Dunedin, FL, and the town takes the heritage of that name seriously, complete with Scottish games and … yes … bagpipes.
Take it easy on the neighbors when you graduate from practice chanter to full set.
Say no more, say no more. No, really, say no more.
Strongly agree, and kudos to you.
Jenny, re your recursive DB query, before struggling with getting a recursive query working, look at how many levels of parent you need to climb. If it's only two or three levels then you might be better off handling the issue with basically if/else logic. Maybe define a CTE and then bring the CTE into the main query, then again with different join arguments for the parent and bring it in a third time for grandparent. Blow up noisily if the 'grandparent' call isn't enough.
I got the Jackery 2000 back yesterday. It's a new unit, no repair or refurbished. So, Yay!, Jackery.
I connected the solar panels this AM and I'm already getting 150W out of 800W potential on a slightly overcast mid-morning.
My next solar dabble will be building my own system around Battle Born batteries and rigid panels hung on the fence. I'll bury the cables in PVC and bring them into the house.
I'm no computer genniasss, but with only 5000 records, couldn't you just look at each one in series, drilling down thru it?
There was a problem I had where we needed to find the intersecting area under three sloped lines, and it was much easier to just compare each of the 1000 possible points. Brute force.
n
SQLite is worth picking up down the road for your knowledge toolbox to use in science experiments. I've scaled SQL table creation and queries from SQLite to MySQL to Oracle without a lot of effort.
I was able to poke around the Ford dealer's lot this morning without any salesman interference. I found a half dozen of the $20k Mavericks ($21k delivered) in the fleet/demo area, all painted white and really bare bones/unappealing looking.
Of course, that is the point. Don't want to sell those retail.
The trucks had visibly seen some "demo" use with customers. The hybrid system would make sense for a utility district or cable company.
Even the base model had the knob shifter. Another electronic toy to break. Still, minimal gadgetry beyond the obligatory touch screen.
I'll bet that, down in Mexico, the same vehicles are sold with normally aspirated 2.5 L 4 cylinder engines and standard transmissions. Of course, even if Ford could get away with that under CAFE in the US, the buyers here would demand a lot more gadgetry and performance.
The auto shills in the media already gripe about cruise control going missing.
Even though everyone pays lip service to wanting one now, the early 2000s Frontiers and Tacomas with features like standard transmissions and *gasp* crank windows disappeared from the market for a reason.
I didn’t spend too much time looking. Like everyone else in Texas, car dealers have been swimming naked in a figurative sense (don’t want to know if it is literal), and being in denial about growth and crime in the area has resulted in a rash of catalytic converter thefts *from fully lit dealer lots* around Austin in the last few months.
I was dressed like I was ready to crawl under a car. I didn’t want an early morning cavity search today so I skipped pictures.
@nick
Prior to the buck turning dud and the chaos of moving, a couple times a month. I lost six months of production, the current six week olds are my first meat rabbits since last August. The litter last August had high mortality due to a poor mother (she killed 3/4 of the litter). Assuming the rabbits cooperate (hah!) I can produce enough to cook rabbit once a week. One rabbit can provide two – three meals for our small family, or one shared meal. I butcher around 6 pounds live weight, yield is around half. If it’s a nice hide it gets tanned, the dogs eat most of the offal.
Recipes – I don’t really cook by recipe anymore. Dead protein, hot place, herbs, garlic, onion, celery is my go to. I use the leftovers for soup / stew. We eat the liver if we cook it within a couple hours of slaughter, otherwise it goes into the stock pot for broth. The hearts are claimed by my daughter though sometimes she will share. Eaten day of slaughter, sautéed in butter and garlic, yum.
@greg
Its a horrible instrument. Truly. And irresistible. Fortunately for my neighbors I have no endurance so their torture is limited. I play the practice chanter, or my digital Blair chanter, more often though not often enough to get past the rudiments. Time and consistently practicing are hard. So is most anything worth doing.
@SteveF
As is so often the case, I find myself agreeing with your sage advice. Say no more.
Recursive vs if statement. That was part of my pondering. Beyond a couple levels, even if the data is present, I suspect it becomes meaningless. I need to -gasp- discuss with the customer. Just because you -can- solve the problem recursively doesn’t mean you -should-
@nick
I’m building off someone else’s work who had 20+ years experience on me as a dba. Plus they were scary smart. They set up a cte that dumps to a table that gets queried to build a csv. The data sources changed between his departure and my arrival, causing his method to yield bad data (undetected naturally). Good news is the data change means I have two numeric fields I can perform a join on, whereas the data he had required parsing and comparing inconsistent text fields. Credit to him that it worked. My immediate solution was to join table back to itself to grab the parent data. That was slick and worked well without burdening the server. But, because of missing data, this simple method doesn’t handle all of my records. I’m going to poke at it this weekend and talk to the customer. It may be that if the parent data is missing they want to handle it in a different way.
@MrAtoz
Your solar posts are interesting and I enjoy them. I’m reluctant to make a foray into solar up here, when the available daylight varies so much season to season, and with the adverse temperatures. That being said, husband picked up the solar kits for a couple of our Wyze cams. Won’t work in the rabbitry but could help with the outdoor cams over the driveway. On my to do list.
@greg
SQLLite has been on my ‘todo’ list for awhile…
Computer science hates brute force. 'n' steps, where n is the number of data points, to find an answer is better than n^2 or, God help you, n^3, but log(n) is preferred.
At the previous previous job, we used to ask applicants to write a C program to find a "lucky" price for a store window sign in a range of possibilities from min to max, with "lucky" being defined as the highest one with the most 9s possible at the end.
"Senior" developers were expected to do the task without brute force, but that standard slipped after Covid when we had people with extensive resumes applying who couldn't even manage a brute force answer.
Legend is that one applicant provided an answer in a single line of Python. Unfortunately, the requirement was C.
I saved $200 this morning because they don’t ship to Alaska.
I really don’t need this. Want. Not need.
https://www.positivegrid.com/spark-mini
Throw 'jq' in there too. Not a database per se, but very useful for making queries or reformatting a big mess of JSON.
I learned about 'jq' near the end of my last job.
The big downside to JSON as an data transfer format is that all of the conversion libraries are painfully slow, even those available in C/C++.
Snowing. Huge flakes. Pretty stuff.
Downtown Anchorage webcam, refreshes every 10-30 seconds.
dogs will start running 10 am Ak time, another team every so often (minute? 2 minutes? Don’t recall)
https://www.borealisbroadband.net/cams/fourthanddcam/
My grandfather used to laugh about being in Europe in WWII and watching a couple of guys from the neighboring Scottish artillery regiment playing the bagpipes to scare the h*ll out of any German farmboy soldiers who might have been in the vicinity.
Evidently, the technique was effective. The Scottish soldiers had a reputation for being mean. My grandfather’s story immediately sprung to mind the first time I saw this monologue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScA4s92G_0U
Fun flick, but yes, you do see the scalpings. It is Tarantino.
I wrote about it here previously, but when I volunteered to help with snacks at the memorial for the group of Houston firefighters that were killed, one of the visiting honor guards lit up the bagpipes in the early morning mist and it was AWESOME in the literal and original meaning of the word.
n
huh, can’t find the post or comment
I am smart enough to parse and compare free format text fields. I have, after all, written a compiler as a student.
I am also experienced enough to tell the user/customer/consumer "No Freaking Way".
Ok, I softened that message quite a bit. I told the consumer I would cheerfully write his report. And I would deliver it with a ton of disclaimers about false positives and false negatives. Since this was for follow-up screening for marginal breast X-rays, they decided to continue their manual reviews.
As an aside, and insight into the state of medical data, note that oncologists, OB/GYN, and family practice don't officially read breast X-rays. That's done separately by radiologists, and they return their results in written reports. Those are the reports I was supposed to look at.
Radiologists have a scoring number. IIRC, it was between 1 and 5, where 1 was perfect, and 5 was order a biopsy RFN. (or vice versa; it's been a while, but you get the gist).
But this was not recorded as a discrete data element. No, it was somewhere within the notes, and was spelled out as "Score: 1". Or "TLA: 5" or slightly expanded TLA. Maybe without the colon. Maybe instead of "1" it was "One". Maybe they mistyped "Three" as "Thee".
Most programming languages are what's known as a Context Free Grammar.
Sadly, most CS programs do not offer Compilers on a regular basis anymore, which is a shame because it is the one class at the undergraduate level that ties together everything a student is supposed to have learned in four years in the US.
I made a point of taking the class at the grad level. It was the only time I’ve ever applied the knowledge gleaned from three semesters through the Sipser textbook across two grad programs.
A lot of radiology work is done overseas anymore, Subcontinent being a favorite destination of big hospital chains.
As a med student post doc, my friend's brother helped develop the file format for sending MRI data over long distances for interpretation with all of the layer information intact … and then found himself staring down offers of $70k for run-of-the-mill radiology work in the Boston area after completion of his research year in the mid 90s.
He now does interventional radiology in Seattle.
Posting this link on food prepping and how I approach it before I head out on some errands.
https://www.ttgnet.com/journal/2016/07/11/lets-try-out-this-guest-post-thing/
A quick scan shows most of it is still what I'm doing. I'll take another look later.
n
I know it is about as far as you can get from Alaska and still be in the US, but if you are ever near Tampa in April …
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/54th-annual-dunedin-highland-games-tickets-243721145507
It is a *very* serious event. Hardcore. Tampa in April can mean 90s and everyone participating is out there in wool.
“Food Court featuring not only delicious Scottish food but also some regular and unusual options.”
Haggis, anyone?
Not a problem. I don't even open MS stuff with macros using MS software. Even from known sources because I have no idea if the clod sending the stuff has been corrupted.
OK, Mr. Wizard, you are already over my head. I need to be talking about ENVIRONMENT DIVISION, WORKING-STORAGE SECTION, PERFORM, GO TO, and the one I really mastered, STOP RUN.
But seriously, I have some knowledge of C++, object-oriented languages, and how it all works. But that knowledge is really low on the totem pole of coding. I find it getting worse over the years as I have lost practice. I look back at some of the stuff I wrote years ago and ask myself, "How the hell did I figure that out", as I have trouble making sense of how I did the task.
All the police that die in this area are accompanied to their graves by bagpipers playing as they march and wearing traditional outfits.
My paternal grandfather immigrated legally from Scotland. He did not crawl through a hole in a Ellis Island fence.
Tcl is far more obscure and uncommon than COBOL at this point.
My question for the braintrust today:
Is straight RoundUp no longer on the market?
Or is “RoundUp: Weed and Grass Killer” the same old cancer-causing formula?
The previous owner of our house left us with a big jug of the old school formula. At first, I viewed it as a disposal problem, but then I started using it surgically on some of the weeds that popped up in our flower bed. Now I’m a fan.
Unfortunately, the jug is empty.
If you're not a Forth programmer, you're wrong!
Seen on line:
Ukraine Lessons Learned:
————————–
1. Don't trust the Russians.
2. Don't trust the EU.
3. Don't trust America.
4. Never Give Up Your Nuclear Weapons.
Looks like the 21st Century will be a reprise of the 20th.
As I recall investigations found that it didn’t actually cause cancer. Just another big “green”/ media lie.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/02/04/keep-fraudulent-science-out-of-our-courtrooms/
Maybe NaN-ook of the North can way in.
Forth was part of the proprietary version of the product at the previous job, which the company developed for several years before abandoning it in favor of layering our IP on top of an open source project doing something similar while providing Hot Skillz for some in the group.
With Forth, the interpreted program and the data under analysis could be packed in a discrete package which could fit in a CPU's L1 D cache with the x86_64 code running the interpreter resident in the L1 I cache. This made throughput extremely fast and scaled well as core counts increased. Essentially, only the data/analysis moved in and out of the cache.
About a year ago, however, with the product lacking any new customers along with a change in political winds in Congress, management got nervous and pulled the plug. I went from working on bleeding edge performance code to playing with Selenium from Python, essentially test engineer, and being caddy for the DevOps guy turned architect.
"Pence Pops Off – Says “No Room in this Party for Apologists for Putin” at GOP Fundraiser in New Orleans"
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/pence-pops-off-says-no-room-apologists-russia-gop-fundraiser-new-orleans/
I do know this, no money or votes for Pence from me. Even in the final election in 2024.
The Gateway Pundit – an unbiased source if I have ever seen one. Not credible, IMHO.
Their site reminds me of "Don't bother me with the facts, my mind is made up!"
I have a pellet stove. It's had a rattle since forever. One of those "never was and gradually What's that noise?" things.
It came from Northern, sold as a Second. All I could find was a small paint run on the back. But that's enough to reduce the price by almost a third.
The noise is the exhaust blower and a popsicle stick shoved in one of the access panel holes to press against the motor stops the noise. Mostly.
So I checked bolt tightness and found a few that were not exactly tight. A eighth turn loose. Loosen all and re-tighten. That mostly worked. Didn't need two popsicle sticks. But I still had a noise.
Here, the replacement part. They seem rather proud of it.
https://heatredefined.com/collections/pdvc/products/pu-076002b
The motor attaches to the mounting plate with three nuts. The mounting plate attaches to the blower housing with six nuts. It's all sort of like the a/c blower in a Dodge truck but with gaskets.
I don't see why I can't buy just the blower without the rest of the assembly. Or just the motor.
I had the great idea that since the motor still has some wiggle room on the pot metal colored part, I'd pull the motor out, all six nuts, and then tighten the loose screws I can't see. Well there are no screws. It's all crimped together. No taking the motor apart to oil the bearings.
I worked around the seam between the motor and the mounting bracket with a single edge razor blade. Jam and wiggle the blade into a gap and snap it off. Repeat many times. It's all tight now. Solder might have worked.
A bit of Elmer's glue to hold the flimsy fiberglass gasket on, all six pieces because it broke at every cutout for a mounting stud, and I'm done.
And speaking of Texas, when the trip was planned gas was much cheaper. Now I am figuring on $1,200.00 to $1,400.00 in gas for the entire trip. Perhaps more. If the price goes up much higher I am looking at some significant chunks of change to make the trip. At current levels a fillup of the Cowboy Cadillac will cost over $100.00. Yikes.
Better have a second credit card or some cash at those fillups. Most credit cards will not allow you to charge more than $75 at a gas station due to those are the number one places of credit card fraud.
I think my 2019 F-150 4×4 gets slightly better mileage than yours. I have the third generation biturbo V6 and the ten speed automatic. 17 mpg around town, 22 mpg at 60 mph, 20 mpg at 70 mph, and 18 mpg at 80 mph.
Been there, heard that…
Replaced the auger bearing on my ancient (1992?) Whitfield Advantage-2 last week, a huge improvement.
In the last few years I’ve replaced the room blower, the exhaust blower, the auger motor, and now the auger bearing. There are no more moving parts to replace so I assume next year it will be sensors and hoses. Or the firebrick.
That said, for 30yo it works well.
Currently it is running on low and keeping the house at a comfortable 69F, with the outside air temperature at 45F and the wind speed constant at 25 mph gusting to 30 mph. Not bad.
p.s. One rattle was the loose fitting window (deliberate to allow a stream of room air in to keep it clear). A small permanent magnet helped there, but let the window still breathe.
My Nissan Frontier has the 4 liter v-six. It's a Pro 4X, so, who knows? It likes to chirp the tires from a stop.
I reset the trip computer. All and both. Yes, it's weird to me. The truck has no "current MPG" which takes the fun out of coasting down a hill and showing 95 MPG like a certain 1981 Imperial I know. The blue 2002 Dodge truck would show 85 MPG. But, truck. My 1996 Stratus was just a bit on the stripper side to have the display.
Anyway, I zeroed the trip meters out and the display currently shows 15.6 MPG. Other than a trip to Fort Worth running into a 30 MPH head wind, it's all 70+ MPH highway to Marble Falls and then along Mormon Mill Road about 30 MPH back to the house.
It's a truck. The numbers might get better. I've all of 800 miles on it since August.
@Jenny
"Just because you -can- solve the problem recursively doesn’t mean you -should-."
Slightly modifying the framework
Just because you -can- solve the problem with _______ doesn’t mean you -should-.
can produce other advice such as
Just because you -can- solve the problem with a hammer doesn’t mean you -should-.
Although the latter can be satisfying in the extreme.
We have a cool spell coming Tuesday, maybe Wednesday. Cool enough to run the stove out of pellets.
I have an extra bag by the stove just in case.
Pellet stove, Trager grill, same same.
The Video Of The Fired Diane Feinstein Staffer Dancing In Her Office On Psychedelic Mushrooms While Smoking A Joint Is Must-See TV.
The best and the brightest!
Apropos: “When all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail. When all you have is a welder, everything is WHATEVER you want it to be.”
On balance, Pence was what you would want from a Republican Vice President and I give him credit for the Comey-Barrett nomination, the only real movement in The Court under Trump.
Jan 6 was crazytown. Imagine being Pence looking across the chamber at Raphael friggin' Warnock who was in the room because, just a day before, 300,000 Republicans in Georgia decided that their vote didn't matter anymore essentially because they believed revolution was coming.
If the Republicans hadn't stayed home and Warnock still won, even African Americans in Georgia would have told you something was wrong.
That's not to say that Pence doesn't have some 'splainin' to do. Instead, he's acted like Jeb!
Ironically, the Jeb! wing of the party does not like Pence or that he was on the ticket in 2016.
@Greg
"Is straight RoundUp no longer on the market?
Or is “RoundUp: Weed and Grass Killer” the same old cancer-causing formula?"
Not an easy yes-or-no question.
When available, the original Roundup is labeled "Roundup Original".
The original formula was produced as a concentrate for agricultural use, with 41% glyphosate as the isopropylamine salt and 59% "other ingredients". The latter included a surfactant derived from animal tallow (fats). It is the combination that makes Roundup effective.
Numerous formulations of Roundup have been produced. Some are simply less concentrated (about 15%) and ready-to-use. Others have variations in the glyphosate salt (diammonium, etc.) and variations in the surfactant.
Glyphosate went off-patent in the U.S. in 1991, with Monsanto retaining patent protection on the isopropylamine salt version until 2000. Since then many manufacturers formulations have been marketed. Reading and comparing label ingredients requires a fair amount of chemistry.
Hundreds of studies have been done with none finding glyphosate to be carcinogenic in humans. Animal studies have found more mixed results. The WHO's IARC process that resulted in the conclusion that glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen was directly contradicted by conclusions of U.S. and European authorities. IMHO, that result was likely corrupted by the organizations biases against agribusiness and the eagerness of trial lawyers around the world to hop on the litigation bandwagon. Would not be the first time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate#Reviews_of_the_EFSA_and_IARC_reports
The importance of glyphosate herbicides in maintaining the world food supply cannot be overstated. If they were removed from the market the short-term outlook would be a significant reduction in world food supplies followed by the starvation and death of millions.
If you use any chemicals, read the safety warnings, use the recommended PPE, don't spread it around, change your clothes and wash up after.
"At the End of the Journey (9) (Black Tide Rising)" by Charles E. Gannon
https://www.amazon.com/End-Journey-Black-Tide-Rising/dp/1982125977?tag=ttgnet-20/
Book number ten of an eleven book zombie apocalypse series by John Ringo and friends. I read the well printed and well bound MMPB published by Baen in 2022.
Six teenagers have been taking a motor sailor cruise south of the equator for the summer when the zombie apocalypse breaks out across the world and spreads everywhere rapidly. The captain of the ship dies leaving them to crew and captain the ship in a world gone crazy. They decide to start clearing some of the smaller islands from the zombies for the supplies.
Then the teenagers find out that the GPS satellite system was due for an update with a new satellite when the crash happened. If the update is not performed then the GPS system will degrade over time and they will have to navigate the ships using the old way with sextants and such that nobody knows how to use. But the GPS satellite uplink station is on an island overrun with thousands of zombies, nothing like the smaller islands that they have been clearing.
Publication Order of Black Tide Rising Books by John Ringo, Charles Gannon, Mike Massa, and Gary Poole:
https://www.bookseriesinorder.com/black-tide-rising/
My rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars (608 reviews)
My next solar dabble will be building my own system around Battle Born batteries and rigid panels hung on the fence. I'll bury the cables in PVC and bring them into the house.
Please give us a full blow by blow status on your project !
I have been thinking about adding some solar to our house just for grins. I put in the $25,000 whole house natural gas generator system instead of the $65,000 solar system but I am still interested in solar. BTW, Generac now has their own version of the Tesla Powerwall system.
https://www.generac.com/all-products/clean-energy/pwrcell
Talk to the nice people at FedEx Office, formerly Kinko's.
The banner will cost you, but the result will be professional looking.
The local FedEx Office stores get all the Dell business which can be a giant pain in the a** at the beginning of a quarter. In grad school, I usually needed a report bound like a real book at the end of every semester for one prof, and I would have to go to Georgetown or beyond to get it even with 24 hour notice.
I am thinking about trying GIMP to produce my banner PDF or PNG file.
https://www.gimp.org/
Our 2003 Dodge Dakota has consistently and persistently gotten 19 to 20 MPG with "regular" gas, the kind with ethanol in it, and 22 to 23 MPG with real tea-total gasoline. That's mostly highway at 75, with maybe a quarter of the driving in town. Hilly country, and there's always wind.
Suddenly, within the past 2 weeks, we are only getting 15 to 16 MPG with the 10% ethanol stuff, on the highway.
I mentioned this to my brother, saying I needed to get the truck in to the shop because something is obviously wrong with it, and he said that his mileage has also taken a sudden nosedive.
We are curious if "something" has changed in the production of consumer fuel… some new green addition or deletion? The posted notices at the pumps still say up to 10% ethanol, so if they've moved up to 15% they aren't telling anyone yet.
GIMP is a raster drawing program like Paint. You may want to look at Inkscape instead, the popular open source vector drawing program.
Think MacDraw vs. MacPaint back in the day.
Scribus is the big source desktop publishing package and may also be of interest.
It got awful quiet around here the past 4-5 hours….
If you're not a Forth programmer, you're wrong!
No, no, no. Forth is just wrong. I converted a Smalltalk interpreter written in Forth from Win16 to Win32. Never got it to work, the stack was perpetually corrupted. Something to do with the garbage collector mark and replace in the middle of the push.
We were all talking about you behind your back.
So … you did a programming task and it didn't work … so the programming language is at fault. Hmm …
Sadly, that's not the first time I've heard that line of reasoning.
Seen on line:
Ukraine Lessons Learned:
————————–
1. Don't trust the Russians.
2. Don't trust the EU.
3. Don't trust America.
4. Never Give Up Your Nuclear Weapons.
Looks like the 21st Century will be a reprise of the 20th.
The Ukrainian mafia was trying to sell the nuclear weapons to just about anyone on the planet with a megabuck so the nuclear weapons would have been gone anyway.
GIMP is a raster drawing program like Paint. You may want to look at Inkscape instead, the popular open source vector drawing program.
Think MacDraw vs. MacPaint back in the day.
I created a new file in GIMP at 18 inches by 60 inches at 300 dpi. The file was 1 GB in size.
So … you did a programming task and it didn't work … so the programming language is at fault. Hmm …
Sadly, that's not the first time I've heard that line of reasoning.
I forgot to mention that the Smalltalk interpreter written in 16 bit Forth had been hand translated into assembly language for speed. Somewhere in all that assembly language, I screwed up an offset when I converted the assembly language to 32 bit. I gave up at that point and converted the Smalltalk code to C++ using a converter I wrote. That worked. My 250,000 lines of Smalltalk jumped to 350,000 lines of C++ though (IIIRC).
@lynn, I use inkscape to produce the drawings I use with my vinyl cutter. It is pretty straightforward to use.
Haggis, anyone?
— love haggis. Don't know how everyone else eats it, but I've had it sliced and browned as sausage with my breakfast eggs. Had it here in the can (not real haggis as some ingredient is missing) and at the hotel in Aberdeen Scotland.
— went by my collection and jewelry oriented auctioneer. The ring I found in the bins at Goodwill is more than 6 grams of 24K gold. Paid about a nickel. Whooo hoooo. Some other things I found there might be worth more in total though, they are vintage souvenirs of Mexico that are birds on black cardstock rendered with real feathers. VERY striking. I have a bunch and they are pristine.
— went by the fun store. He's been busy. Local folks, including first time gub owners are arming up, citing an increase in violence and crime. He had a couple dozen pistols and couple dozen long guns in the displays. Mostly consignment, and reasonably priced by the standards of the day.
n
GIMP is a raster drawing program like Paint. You may want to look at Inkscape instead, the popular open source vector drawing program.
Think MacDraw vs. MacPaint back in the day.
Hey, Inkscape is totally cool. And its default format is SVG, cool ! I was able to copy and paste my banner from Word straight into Inkscape.
And I have never used a Mac in my life. That single button mouse creeps me out.
I managed to make it all the way through "Scott Pilgrim vs The World" on IMDB. Lame.
Wow, like 500 people were involved with the movie. I figured about ten people with a couple of handicams.
— love haggis. Don't know how everyone else eats it, but I've had it sliced and browned as sausage with my breakfast eggs. Had it here in the can (not real haggis as some ingredient is missing) and at the hotel in Aberdeen Scotland.
I've had haggis in Scotland. It is ok if you are starving.
What really got my stomach rolling was some blood sausage in Germany. That was nasty. Mine was served rare in a translucent skin.
https://www.tasteatlas.com/blutwurst
No wonder why all my German male relatives die young.
>> SQLite is worth picking up down the road for your knowledge toolbox to use in science experiments.
Worked on an app that pulled large sets of data from an Oracle operational database and then applied user-specified complex SQL against the data. Using SQLite as an in-memory database was ideal. Very useful tool.
>> Our 2003 Dodge Dakota has consistently and persistently gotten 19 to 20 MPG with "regular" gas, the kind with ethanol in it, and 22 to 23 MPG with real tea-total gasoline. That's mostly highway at 75, with maybe a quarter of the driving in town. Hilly country, and there's always wind.
Suddenly, within the past 2 weeks, we are only getting 15 to 16 MPG with the 10% ethanol stuff, on the highway.
I mentioned this to my brother, saying I needed to get the truck in to the shop because something is obviously wrong with it, and he said that his mileage has also taken a sudden nosedive.
We are curious if "something" has changed in the production of consumer fuel… some new green addition or deletion? The posted notices at the pumps still say up to 10% ethanol, so if they've moved up to 15% they aren't telling anyone yet.
Who knew we had an Energy Information Administration…
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=27&t=10
and an Alternative Fuels Data Center…
https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/ethanol_e15.html
If they're selling E15 gas it has to be labeled as such at the pump:
An EPA-approved E15 label must be affixed to the dispenser.
I noticed my mileage dropped but my tires were very underinflated. The lower temps had something to do with the tire pressure,but also I just hadn't checked them in a while.
I also carry a lot of shirt in the back of the truck. Factory mileage numbers are for an empty vehicle.
n
Coincidence, much?
I like Haggis, the Chieftain o'the puddin-race. The local Irish! butcher shop carries it, so we have Haggis with whisky sauce, neeps and tatties for Burns night.
When in Scotland, I'll have it too. The George hotel in Inverarary does a fantastic Scottish breakfast, including Haggis from Gillespie's butcher shop next door.
https://www.thegeorgehotel.co.uk