Cool and clear. Supposed to be clear for a couple of days at least. Yesterday stayed clear most of the day, but somewhat overcast at times.
I spent another day of down time, watching videos, and doing minor stuff around the house. I did pick up one item, a table that will get the kids’ 3D printers. D2 was supposed to help me assemble it, but she played video games all day instead.
Today I’ve got one pickup, with a bunch of stuff for resale. Very good scores should get my 2024 ebay off to a good start. I just hope prices on ebay hold up long enough to sell the stuff. There is always some risk.
One slightly odd observation… as I was driving to get my auction stuff today, I noticed a garage door opener laying in the road. People were just going around it. It wasn’t a busy road, but it is two lanes each way with a center median. 15 minutes later on my trip home, it was still there. No one had stopped to clear it. Ten foot long metal thing laying in the road. So I stopped and threw it in the truck. I’ll take it to the scrap yard on my next trip. It really bothers me that no one took the time to move it, even to pick it up and throw it to the side, off the roadway. A couple of semi trucks were stopped at the intersection, and then continued on. Used to be, someone would have cleared the road, especially in a working area where it was easy and safe to do so.
I’ll put that in the declining social cohesion column.
Keep your eyes open, and don’t count on things being the way they’ve always been. Things are changing.
And stack what you need. No one knows as well as you what is critical to you.
nick
The “super glue” used in surgery does not have the chemicals which accelerate the drying process when exposed to air and create that burning sensation.
I still haven’t figured out why my iPhone GPS failed in Bellevue back in July, but that part of Nashville seemed okay.
Publix moves when neighborhoods get sketchy, and any expansion only happens with cash after careful study of an area.
Not all is happy in the Orange Man campaign.
https://nypost.com/2023/12/26/news/donald-trump-jr-puts-his-dad-on-notice-over-buzz-of-haley-as-vp-pick/
Republicans, especially men, need to get over looking the other way on certain issues for the possibility of Nikki Haley or Tulsi Gabbard on the ticket.
Want the “wars” to continue? Nominate Nimarata, who sat on the board of Boeing for a year and facilitated what may ultimately be the complete relocation of the company out of WA State.
Ray, we had a dog that had arthritis in old age. Our vet suggested a specific dose of Ascriptin for long term use, and it worked very well. That was forty years ago. I just read about it, and it might not be available, or might require a prescription now. There are also warnings that determining the correct dose is difficult. Another suggestion is buffered aspirin, but I would only trust the advice of a good vet for that.
Our vet also gave us some medical grade DMSO for short term use. It worked dramatically well in less than 24 hours until the Ascriptin took over.
Our dog had symptoms similar to yours, and lived a couple more years pain free. Funny thing was that she would never take pills until the Ascriptin. She gulped them down immediately, probably because she knew they worked so well.
Cool and sunny, clear. A small breeze. Had some food, working on my coffee. Got stuff to do today.
n
Keep your weiners off the couch!
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoxJHQdnkmdqr6N0TJlM0S4Hcxm-lb7u1WeeAnVFveXLrEhrulpdyCZ3PxVhdLKJ2dYt2f6QATRMqse5_iTkLv7zuNPlGcxfdTNGlJ7WfwlvsBIVxt2NzsI2LeyGUAriqjV2mzWSkbADUirb7Wh0hyphenhyphenOP24ntgo-_guVSwXgi0VdTAB2qA2pcPtx8TFa57_/s773/tumblr_2ad546d1f2c759c70525e2d0d8491c55_22aad1af_1280.jpg
n
>> Used to be, someone would have cleared the road, especially in a working area where it was easy and safe to do so.
@nick, today you were that “someone.” Some good karma points for you. Stop and smell the donuts…
R.I.P. Tom Smothers.
>> The “super glue” used in surgery does not have the chemicals which accelerate the drying process when exposed to air and create that burning sensation.
I’ve used this for years…not super glue strength, but still handy:
https://www.nexcare.com/3M/en_US/p/d/cobblw014024/?utm_term=cbg-chcd-nexc-en_us-is-nexcare_liquid_bandage-cpc-google-na-wtb-na-jan21-na&utm_campaign=is_nexcare_liquid_bandage&utm_medium=cpc&utm_content=wtb_b&utm_source=google
I have used New-Skin Liquid Bandage for minor cuts and scrapes for at least fifty years. It keeps water and dirt out better than any bandage I have ever used, but does sting when applied. I see there are two new formulas. I copied the ingredients for those with chemical expertise. It seems the new ones share an ingredient with super glue. I might try them.
https://newskinproducts.com/products/new-skin-liquid-bandage
Active ingredient: Benzethonium chloride 0.2%
Purpose: Antiseptic (first aid to help prevent bacterial contamination in minor cuts and scrapes)
Inactive ingredients: Amyl acetate, camphor, ethyl acetate, ethyl alcohol, n-butyl acetate, nitrocellulose
https://newskinproducts.com/products/new-skin-liquid-bandage-sensitive-skin
Ingredients: water, polyvinyl acetate, AMP-acrylates/allyl methacrylate copolymer, xanthan gum, phenoxyethanol, ethylhexylglycerin
https://newskinproducts.com/products/new-skin-liquid-bandage-botanicals
Ingredients: water, polyvinyl acetate, AMP-acrylates/allyl methacrylate copolymer, xanthan gum, phenoxyethanol, ethylhexylglycerin, aloe barbadensis leaf juice, chamomilla recutita (matricaria) flower, glycerin, lavandula angustifolia (lavender) flower oil.
I get the best results by washing the wound with soap and water, then letting it dry and lightly scab. This takes an hour or two. I then apply two or more coats. On minor cuts, this can last as long as it takes for complete healing. On more major cuts, especially on areas subject to flexing, I might have to apply some daily until healing is complete.
I would not consider the spray, unless you need area coverage, such as before doing something that might cause a blister. Never tried that. The small bottle travels well, can fix many cuts, and does not seem to dry out. I have one glass bottle over thirty years old that is still usable. I hope the new bottle is glass, because some plastic bottles allow oxygen permeation and drying.
Alan, we cross posted. I tried this (or a house brand that looked similar) while on a trip. I hated the spray, which was really messy for a small cut. I tried spraying some on a scrap, and applied it with a small screwdriver (travelers have to improvise,) and got good application results. The stuff didn’t stay stuck very well, and I had to clean and apply more every few hours. Finally, I gave up and went back to my old standby, a plastic Band-Aid. Later, I thought the spray might have covered more area and promoted better adhesion. Old habits die hard. I still prefer the genuine New-Skin Liquid Bandage. You might give it a try.
I did try a house brand that looked a lot like the New-Skin once when also on a trip, and it did work well. I think I gave it to someone as a sample, and encouraged them to buy the genuine item if they liked the idea.
Oh, Alan, I hope you feel better.
IIRC, Steve Martin came out of that writers’ room as did Albert and Bob Einstein aka Albert Brooks and Super Dave Osborne, respectively.
I was checking the log files of my website. Thousands of requests within the space of 15 minutes for various URLs that don’t exist. Apparently someone is using an automated scanner looking for WordPress plugins and directories, PHP directories and functions. All from the same IP address. It is obvious that someone is looking for a flaw to gain access.
Yup, they test my websites hourly. It is crazy. This is why I have my webserver professionally managed.
My webserver load is 55% right now and was in the 70s yesterday. They are hitting me hard trying to figure out my webserver password.
I do need to update my webserver hardware. It is a dual core 3 Ghz Intel CPU with 16 GB of ram and two 128 GB SSD drives with constant mirroring.
I thought that your site used a monolithic C++ process serving HTTP requests instead of the PHP model. What are they probing for?
And FreeBSD instead of Linux.
We’ve had good success with the hemp+joint support chews from PetSmart for our old rescue girl (16 or 17 now). She seems to be doing much better. She still would rather jump on or off the bed than let me move her. I have no idea if she is high all the time, but she is definitely in less pain…
https://nypost.com/2023/12/26/news/donald-trump-jr-puts-his-dad-on-notice-over-buzz-of-haley-as-vp-pick/
Republicans, especially men, need to get over looking the other way on certain issues for the possibility of Nikki Haley or Tulsi Gabbard on the ticket.
As crazy as Nikki Haley is, Trump probably needs her for the VP position. Of course, she does give the RINOs some coverage so they can tell people they voted for her instead of Trump.
I thought that your site used a monolithic C++ process serving HTTP requests instead of the PHP model. What are they probing for?
Maybe it does, maybe it does not. I have many processes running all the time using my huge flatfile databases that I desperately need to segment to reduce the append process time. But there are passworded areas that they are desperately trying break into.
And yes on the FreeBSD. I have been running FreeBSD on my webserver since 2000. Before that, I ran a Linux server and Windows 98 server (yes, you can lock down a Windows 98 server).
“Guns, Crime, and Statistics”
https://areaocho.com/guns-crime-and-statistics/
“I get so tired of people moving the goal posts. Every time you talk to someone from a country which has banned guns, you always hear this argument (or a version of it):”
“But does that really pass the smell test? They always put the “gun” qualifier on the front of it. Taking away the guns from the equation doesn’t stop the violent criminals from being violent. It just makes the potential victims defenseless.”
“The violent crime rate in the UK is 9,360 per 100,000. The United States has a violent crime rate of 381 per 100,000. This means that you are nearly 25 times more likely to be a victim of a violent crime in England or Wales than you are to be one in the United States.”
Wow, I did not know that.
They fact they have a special word for this kind of attack is a bit sickening…
n
Gaston Glock, 7-19-1929 to 12-27-2023
Love them or hate them, Glocks changed the world.
n
– you’d have to be insane to trust you life to the chinese automakers.
n
Would anyone dare to apply a racial filter to the data? much of the UK is no longer British.
Uh. Hello. Anyone ever hear of Enoch Powell?
Yes, I’ve done it with 98Lite and ZoneLabs. The problem for server use is that Windows 98 has a socket connection limit.
More than a few processes precludes the use of SQLite. The problem is that MySQL can be a beast to secure.
We do bad things to SQLite and paid a price.
You don’t use an SSH public//private key pair to access the server command line and transfer files?
Clobber, an old Oz term.. 😀
clob•ber2 (klob′ər),
n. [Brit., Australian Slang.]
British Terms(used with a pl. v.) clothes.
1875–80; of obscure origin, originally; compare clobber3
https://www.workclobber.com.au/
Cheering For Mass Murder
In 1862, Dakota Indians went on a mass murder spree, butchering more than 600 innocent whites, mostly women and children. The Indians murdered babies, beating their brains out and nailing them to trees. They tortured children. They engaged in gang rape on a mass scale. Their rampage was enabled by the fact that many Minnesota men were away, fighting in the Civil War. That slaughter was the worst massacre by either whites or Indians from 1492 to the present. On a per capita basis, it was five times the carnage of September 11.
If that narrative sounds familiar, it should. What the Dakota did in 1862 was remarkably similar to what Gazans did on October 7. And the reaction, too, was similar. Surviving whites were righteously infuriated, just like today’s Israelis. A militia was quickly organized and sent to the Minnesota River valley, where the assault took place. The federal government, which was losing the Civil War at the time, sent such troops as it could spare. A brief war followed–the Indians did not fare as well against armed civilians and soldiers as they did against unsuspecting women and children–and the uprising was put down.
Several thousand Indians were captured and many were tried by a military court. Initially, several hundred were sentenced to death. If the local whites had their way, they all would have been hanged. But President Lincoln intervened. He ordered that the trial transcripts should be carefully reviewed, and only those against whom there was clear evidence of either murder (not killing in battle) or rape could be executed. The others must be let free. When the local military commander objected that if he freed the Indians the settlers would kill them, Lincoln replied that it was his job to keep the Indians safe.
In the end, there was clear enough evidence of murder or rape to convict 38 Dakota. No doubt many more deserved to hang. But there were no survivors left alive to testify after some attacks, while in other cases, the survivors were unable to identify individual perpetrators. Also, some of those who deserved to hang must have been killed in battle. But no doubt many murderers and rapists got off scot-free.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/12/cheering-for-mass-murder.php
Minnesota Governor Walz posted a pandering tweet about the hangings with no reference to the 600 murders that were committed. To call him a p.o.s. is an insult to honest feces.
John Hinderaker references his reply:
“I replied to that dungheap of ignorance:”
It’s not clear if the dungheap is the post or the guv or both. I vote for both.
It’s a little-know piece of U.S. history. Worth reading up a bit to refute someone trying the “poor peaceful Indian” schtick.
“Love them or hate them, Glocks changed the world.”
There is a lot of personal choice to firearm selection. That some people prefer alternatives does not diminish the unqualified success of the company or the extraordinary personal vision of the founder. I highly recommend Paul Barrett’s “Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun”.
Gah, I’ve been manually deleting files from my NVR, running on mint linux. The NVR generates thumbnail images from the video files. I’ve never looked at them, or wanted to, but manually deleting them is a pain. So I don’t.
Today after pruning the video files, I decided to delete the thumbnails that built up since the last time. Over a year’s worth, every 15 minutes, two files get created, for each of 9 cams… the directories have about 20K to 50K files each.
I have been deleting them all afternoon and evening. It takes the file manager in the GUI a REALLY long time to even select 57K file names, actually deleting them (shift+del) takes so long it looks like the pc just locked up.
Since the files are about 9 directories deep, and there isn’t an “open a terminal here” widget for the file manager, navigating in the terminal is a pain for me. I didn’t even think about doing the deletions from the command line until about an hour ago.
– and that little bit is in “code” format because otherwise the comment editor sees the * as a command to italicize .
My command line skills are very rusty. It’s done for a while anyway.
n
Nick, a simple task to create a batch file to safely delete files in Windows, but I never learned how to create a script file in Linux. It’s probably easy, but I ran out of round tuits.
Hint, I considered using batch files in Windows to perform operations on a Linux machine over the LAN, but by then I had forgotten the Samba password on the Linux machine. I couldn’t retrieve or change it. I could easily log onto the Windows machine from Linux, but that was the wrong direction.
Another hint, have you ever considered an alternate file manager, such as Total Commander on Linux? Some of these are really fast.
The best way might be to create a script file that uses a timer to automatically run once a day to keep the operation small.
I used to love creating DOS and Windows batch files. Some were quite involved. I still have a couple of books on the subject.
Just rambling. Now to sleep…
That doesn’t pass the smell test. One chance in 10 of being attacked? Finding comparable numbers turned out to be more difficult than I expected, but the UN has some stats. The murder rate in the US is about 6 times higher than the UK (6.4 per 100k population instead of 1.1). However, the rate of “serious assault” in the UK is about 8 times higher (925 per 100k, instead of 156). I think someone slipped a decimal on the UK crime rate quoted.
Anyway, I am still surprised that the rate of assault is so much higher in the UK than in the US. I wonder how much of that is real and how much is a matter of unreported crimes. For example, I doubt the urban gangs go to the police all that often…
There are rough pubs in every UK city. We lived above one of them for a year or so. When I was picking up two female friends who were visiting us, I used the pub as the landmark for the taxi driver. He immediately said “You dinna want to take the lassies there!”
On the other hand, it’s pretty easy to just not go to those places. There are plenty of pubs to choose from. My favorites were the ones that were family friendly, and served good pub food.
The amount of criminal energy expended on stuff like this is just crazy. When we used to have a commercial website, I blocked entire geographical ranges. All of Asia – that was the big one – plus some other countries. The US is also a big source of attacks, but we had a sister business in the US, so I couldn’t add that block.
Right now, we just have a personal website, plus a couple of ports forwarded to internal services. The discussion about website attacks got me curious, so I just had a look at the recent logs. I presume almost all international traffic is scanning or attacks of some sort. The top three are the US, Russia and China. A lot of the traffic comes from clouds services (AWS, Azure, etc.). One of the Swiss addresses is owned by an African ISP, so that’s probably also a foreign attack of some sort.
Still, we are in the range of a couple hundred attempts per month – nothing like what Ray and Lynn are seeing.
I think that the person putting tRump back on the Colorado ballot wants to be appointed to SCOTUS after tRump is elected.