So we got a respite from the rain, and now it’s back. Cool morning with rain throughout the day, or so I’m led to believe. It was grey, with occasionally sunny spots, most of Friday. It got so dark at 330pm that I thought my watch was wrong… but the rain held off. Just a sprinkle before the kid’s school musical.
Did a big loop of pickups yesterday. Got stuff for the BOL, and stuff for my solar experiment, as well as a couple of tools and some supplies. There are future projects percolating in my brain that I’m already accumulating stuff for.
Ran into a couple of the other dads at the school play. One is our friend that got us into the BOL. He’s an auction buyer too (on my recommendation) and it turns out we actually bid against each other on the solar panels. It would be nice to avoid that, but it’s possible you could consider it to be illegal collusion… certainly the auctioneers wouldn’t like it. I’m going to try to keep in better touch to avoid it if possible.
Today’s activities will depend on the weather. I’ve got one local pickup to make, and can do it in the rain if needed. I’ve got a ton of other stuff to do around the house, garage, and for auction stuff, so there won’t be any shortage of projects. We’re all at home this weekend so maybe we’ll sneak in a family movie or game night too.
Gotta stack memories as well as goods.
But stack the goods, for sure, so you can make good memories later.
nick
What are y’all’s TEOTWAWKI plans outside of the usual?
If there’s a 99% die-off, so long as the power remains on and the internet stays up, I’m going to edit Wikipedia pages to tell the truths that the wikimafia doesn’t allow and continually reverts.
Avoid the shivs of prepper types who think they have some claim on my wife’s skills in the post apocalyptic future simply because they have a stash of ammo. “If that Skippy was dead …”
I’m not kidding. They exist. I’ve already outlived at least one. It isn’t civilization if nothing from “the before times” matters on a personal level.
Literallly, Mesothelioma did him in, just like you see in the law firm ads on late night TV.
(BTW, Morgan and Morgan are big Dem benefactors in Florida. It looks like they’re going national.)
Maybe I’ll have time to work on my Stratum 1 time server along with other projects.
Why waste a bullet on Skippy? Bullets is like the ‘Ben Franklin’ of the post apocalyptic future.
Shiv Skippy Jr. too – otherwise he’ll seek revenge one day.
Seriously, I don’t think the offspring will care, but you never know.
Anything dependent on SCADA will be the first to go.
Too many employees at entities utilizing SCADA have compromised their network’s security trying to “work” from home over the last five years even if organization policy explicity forbids the practice.
I know, “Ssssh, dude, the kids have soccer at 2 and there’s day trading to do.”
TeamViewer seems to be the common factor in a lot of utility security breaches as of late, particularly water/sewer infrastructure.
SCADA was never intended for someone “working” from home running the systems.
“Morgan and Morgan”
If their shill ad for Camp Lejune is representative, they have some major deficiencies.
“The water at Camp Lejune was infected and contaminated with chloride.”
It’s been running for months. Maybe I should offer to consult?
Morgan and Morgan are driving weed legalization efforts in Florida. Make of that what you will.
Even before weed gummies destroyed a friend’s marriage, I never trusted anyone I knew who imbibed.
@Alan
Use the bags without the vacuum. Pulling a vacuum could compromise the seal on a new package of adhesive that contained any volatile components. Packaging is not designed for much internal pressure. An O2 absorber will remove the oxygen and decrease the volume of the trapped air, but not affect the pressure inside the package.
@Nick
Almost anything that cures by reacting with moisture out of the air will fail–most packaging is not intended for long-term storage. Two-part epoxies should be fine if the parts are securely packaged separately. Consumer dual syringe packs might not last, but commercial-grade packaging should be fine. I have stored partially used EPX-type adhesive cartridges (¼-turn attachment static mixer, dispensing gun with replaceable plungers) for years by removing the mixer, then cleaning up the exit and resealing the exit holes.
Modern spray cans with isopropane or CO2 propellant have a short life if not in temperature-controlled storage. It’s possible to repressurize them, but in most cases more work than it’s worth. WD-40 products have a real problem–better to buy it by the gallon and get one of their spray bottle. I keep disposable polyethylene pipets around for better pinpoint control of dispensing solvents and lubricants, and have some products in pinpoint dispensers. There are spray can replacements that you fill and pressurize with air, but probably far down on the prep list.
@EdH
That’s the general rule of chemical reaction kinetics: Drop the temp 10°C and the reaction time doubles, or increase the temp 10°C and the reaction time is cut in half.
That’s why varnish takes a long time to dry in a cold garage. It also explains what happens with exothermic reactions like epoxies: thin coats lose heat to the environment, but leave some in a container and it heats itself, the reaction rate increase, the heat goes up, and you end up with a misshapen blob in a melted bucket.
@brad
5-minute epoxies use a variety of chemistries for the hardener side, and some components can be fugitive if the package is compromised. If the epoxy took an extended time to cure then it’s likely that the end properties of the bond are not up to standard.
@JimB
Hot melt has a long storage life and comes in a variety of formulas for different jobs. Changing products is inconvenient, so for the most part it’s best to have one dispensing gun per formula.
Moisture cure urethanes are great adhesives. Unopened shelf-life is seldom more than a year, and once opened they need to be used up.
Some years ago a chemist acquaintance developed a premium polyurethane wood varnish that had excellent properties: easy to apply, high film hardness, etc. The manufacturer developed a 5-layer bottle similar to an oil bottle with a seal that was supposed to be effective. It hardened in the bottle on the shelf and had to be used up once opened, so it didn’t last long in the consumer market. I think it’s still being used by furniture manufacturers.
From the “Things That Make You Say ‘Hmmmm’…” desk:
Why does the Spectrum Cable app on my iPhone need 211 MB to store app code/resources alone?
iOS apps are compiled. The binary package shouldn’t be that large for the functionality involved.
>>If there’s a 99% die-off, so long as the power remains on and the internet stays up, I’m going to edit Wikipedia pages to tell the truths that the wikimafia doesn’t allow and continually reverts.
No internet and you’re gonna have a lot of cranky and bored teens pretty quickly. Especially those of the female persuasion.
>> iOS apps are compiled. The binary package shouldn’t be that large for the functionality involved.
Have you allowed for TLA agency ‘back door’ code??
It’s tempting to attribute to incompetence – eg, binaries with debug information still included – but in Present Year I think that the wise choice is to attribute to malice.
Early versions of apps made using Swift had to include everything because of ABI issues, but I thought that was all in the past.
Possibly because SwiftUI might be being used ( my impression is that it is pretty unstable still)?
well. Officially we got about 1.6 inches last night at the nearby creek monitoring station. Looking at the data, we got a chunk of that in 30 minutes after 1 am. Good thing the rate tapered off as the band blew thru.
Not raining at the moment. Coffee is settling in mah belly and so is breakfast. Time to see what I can get done today. I was wiped out last night and slept like the dead.
Two auctions closing today with useful but non-critical stuff, so I’m not sitting in front of the computer. My bids are in. I’ve still got one solar panel to pick up today.
I’m bidding on another of the chinese folding panels, 300w. The seller of the last one asked me what it was for. SMH. I told her ‘charging your phone when camping.’ That she could understand.
————-
As my wife checked the creek and bayou levels it occurred to me I could put together a dashboard for my lair that aggregated all the “monitoring” websites we periodically check.
All the water level sensor maps.
The inundation map.
Google earth installed locally.
Open sky for where the popo and lifeflight choppers are.
The marine position tracker too, as it covers a lot of inland as well.
Weather radar and info.
Power company reported outages.
Toll road and TxDOT street flooding maps.
Next level would be an offline copy of the City’s GIS portal, with stuff like sewers and power lines, crime reports and 311 service requests mapped in “real time” which is a one month delay before they package it for downloading.
What else would be useful for a ‘situation room’?
—————–
anyone know off hand if I can put a marine weather radar on my antenna tower?
n
ADDED – TxDOT and other traffic cams, although during any rain they are basically just blurred bright and dark spots.
Bob Wells is a big YouTube star, but he’s achieved minor mainstream celebrity status since “Nomadland” won best picture.
Wells’ channel covers topics like solar panels and backup battery “generators”.
Multiple people from the “work camping” scene appeared as themselves in the movie, including Wells. The challenge when watching the flick is determining who, besides Francis McDormand, is an actor and who actually lives that lifestyle.
“Nomadland” and “The Florida Project” need to be a double feature. Don’t watch either one by itself.
Much as I prefer precision speech, at some point we’ll have to drop the scare quotes from this. It is now the common usage, and while imprecise, it is a good shorthand, because the solar-panels-battery-charge-controller-invertor package fills the same niche as a real generator would. Just with different limitations.
Now, for the mRNA jabs, “vaccine” will always have the quotes.
“Much as I prefer precision speech, at some point we’ll have to drop the scare quotes from this. It is now the common usage, and while imprecise, it is a good shorthand, because the solar-panels-battery-charge-controller-invertor package fills the same niche as a real generator would. Just with different limitations.”
I disagree. A generator and a battery are two different things.
The first sentence of the wiki entry for “electric generator’:
The first sentence of the wiki entry for “electric battery”:
Solar energy is not fuel and electric generators do not have a storage component–the fuel is the energy storage medium.
The use of generator to describe a solar panel /battery combination is a purposefully deceptive marketing technique designed to deceive the technically unsophisticated. The FTC needs to step on it, before they start embellishing any further with terms like “perpetual”.
The manufacturers are additionally deceptive in that their performance claims are based on fully charging the battery off the conventional electric supply before using.
Advertisements of “100W” theoretical solar panels should be accompanied by some truth in advertising numbers based on actual performance.
Combine the two and tell potential buyers how long on average it takes to fully charge the battery, using, for example, some sunny days in Wichita around the Spring Equinox as a standard, and then how long they could run a standard load (refrigerator, freezer, lights and computer?).
At a guess, lazy or incompetent developers who used frameworks that had dependencies whose dependencies have dependencies.
Nothing to do with phones, but somewhere I read that Spring applications can easily tie in 1600 different dependencies. I imagine phone apps can be just as bad…
Living it. Off grid homesteader in Winter{
https://youtu.be/KWIlMFCQeeA
Harvested garden, split firewood, other preps and processed those items for the season. Obviously still dependent on liquid fuels but cruising comfortably through Winter.
iOS provides (or at least used to) C++1x support and SQLite along with the GUI framework and libraries to access the hardware capabilities of the phone. I’ve built and linked libcurl and a crypto support lib into an app just to see if it could be done, but that wasn’t 200+ Meg in the end even a dozen years ago when the compilers were less efficient.
I guess Spectrum could have a video clip in there somewhere — that’s the only explanation I can come up with to explain the bloat. That would still be a *lot* of video.
Spring. Anytime I get an email for a Spring job, I know the company is just going through the Kabuki to hire from the Subcontinent on an H1B visa.
“This Isn’t What I Expected”: Justice Sotomayor Is the Left’s Latest Retirement Target
https://jonathanturley.org/2024/02/02/this-isnt-what-i-expected-justice-sotomayor-is-the-lefts-latest-retirement-campaign-target/
Another Harvard professor. Wonders what his plagiarism score it?
The Liberals need another Justice who can write dissent.
Dad and I went to see “The Boys In The Boat” last night at the Twin Dolphins theatre in Port Lavaca. Really good feel good movie. The critics criticized director George Clooney for being too traditional. Recomended.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_boys_in_the_boat
Being able to write intelligibly is not a skill set that most liberals possess.
Hey, they can use AI.
Or plagiarize from somewhere.
“Or plagiarize from somewhere.”
I’d estimate a better than 50% chance that within the next six months someone will announce the discovery of recursive plagiarism, wherein a passage stolen by Plagiarist 1 is in turn stolen by Plagiarist 2 in a manner that makes it obvious that Plagiarist 2 did not steal from the original source.
Given that AI is prone to making stuff up, there’s not much difference there.
Being able to think logically isn’t evenly distributed either.
n
RIP Carl Weathers, 76
https://deadline.com/2024/02/carl-weathers-dead-1235812684/
https://redstate.com/beccalower/2024/02/03/watch-sylvester-stallone-nearly-breaks-down-while-praising-carl-weathers-for-success-of-rocky-n2169596
Scroll down for Stallone’s heartfelt tribute.
The first part of the “Dune” movie is back on iMAX screens this month ahead of the Part Two release on March 1st.
That movie should be seen as big as possible.
The death scene for Duncan Idaho was something David Lynch’s movie and the surprisingly decent Sci Fi miniseries avoided. Even Herbert only alluded to the event in a conversation between two characters in the book.
Teen ‘Serial Swatter’ Arrested
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2024/02/03/teen-serial-swatter-arrested-n609310
Arrested in California and extradited to Florida as an adult and charged with four felonies.
Bring additional charges in multiple states to ensure that he spends decades in prison. Make “no access to computers” part of the conditions.
I didn’t find a reference in this or other articles that mentioned his parents. If he lived at home the investigators should bring charges against the parents. Likewise any victims of swatting that can be conclusively proved should file civil suits. The best possible outcome would be bankrupting the parents so they lose their jobs, their home, and end up on the street. Then KTLA can do a doco on their slide into hopelessness, despair, and eventual suicide, and people all over the country can send young Alan neckties with suggestions…
The FBI has to find a few more of these to charge and convict.
Only after he targeted a mosque.
In Seminole County, where, Treyvon aside, violent incidents are not common.
Another question which needs to be asked – Why are these heroes so quick on the draw with the ‘Hut Hut Hut’ action. No one thought about sending a cruiser around to take a look first?
‘Hut Hut Hut’ is why “Swatting” as a harassment technique works.
The area in question consists of really wealthy suburbs.
Qualified immunity. Which is yet another field of law made by judges, or in this case justices. As is often the case, the original intent was good (to protect government employees from frivolous civil lawsuits) but before long it expanded all out of bounds. As is often the case.
Well, it used to be the ‘last resort of Kings’ * but now you can get your own kit to respond to governmental overreach…
https://palmettostatearmory.com/psa-16-m4-carbine-length-5-56-nato-1-7-nitride-freedom-rifle-kit-5076171.html
add your own lower, or
https://palmettostatearmory.com/psa-ar-15-m4-carbine-stripped-lower-receiver.html
remember folks, because of the crazy laws in violation of the clear intent of the 2A, only the lower is considered a “firearm”. you will have to have it shipped to an FFL near you. Or get jiggy with a 3D printed lower, or finish an 80% lower…
n
*everyone leaves off the second part– Short form for the metaphor “The Last Resort of Kings and Common Men” referring to the act of declaring war; Kinda like they shorten “A few bad apples” leaving out the “spoil the whole bunch.” part…
cisco# ntp orphan 1
How hard is that? ha!
Behold this disclaimer on Palmetto’s page:
Since when is lead a petroleum product?
Aside from the idiocy of “known to the State of California”. I realize what that means legally. That doesn’t reduce its idiocy.
That prop 13 warning is on everything, which makes its usefulness as a warning approach zero…
Cat5 cable has the warning.
n
There are plenty of youtube videos showing cops breaking in, killing the dog, handcuffing and arresting innocent people. Then they just walk away and claim qualified immunity and “officer safety”. You won’t be able to sleep for weeks and you need a new dog and a new front door.
“Force 10 From Navarone” with Weathers as a headliner was another one of those PG movies which ran endlessly in the afternoons on HBO when I was in high school.
Not a great movie, but it was huge for Harrison Ford in home video at a time before “Indiana Jones” when Lucas wouldn’t put “Star Wars” on cable. The irony is that Ford hates the film.
Residuals were decent enough that the studio fought lawsuits for the better part of three decades.
Classic 70s stunt casting: Weathers, Ford, Barbara Bach (Bond Girl and Mrs. Ringo Star), Richard Kiel (another Bond tie – Jaws), and Robert Shaw, who died not long afterwards.
Well, sooprise.
Cue Don Meridith. The month-long party is over for the press corps in Savannah.
No more Hypocrisy Blue Plates at The Lady and Sons.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-primary-elections/south-carolina-president-results
Now the real wheeling and dealing begins to nominate a replacement for Biden.
I’ve never configured one below 7, even on an isolated network.
The tolling company plate cameras wouldn’t accept 15, which is the default on most Linux distros.
I have all of the pieces for the server, but I have to solder breadboard pins onto the GPS module.
Right now, I do not have a soldering iron, another tool lost to two cross country moves in less than four years.
Prop 65. Prop 13 froze property taxes to the assessed value at the time of the last sale; an absolute godsend to me when I lived there, paying property taxes based on the $85K 1983 sale price when I bought the place, even though we sold it for $438K in 2020.
Pretty much, anything that contains any kind of plastic gets a Prop 65 warning because EVERY kind of plastic “could” cause cancer, along with most agricultural chemicals and anything that had ever TOUCHED an agricultural chemical.
Greg, no soldering iron? Tsk, tsk.
@greg, I can send you a nice weller, one of the auctions gets several every week and I always put in lowball bids. I’ve got about 5 now, going to take them to the hamfest…
n
>> Living it. Off grid homesteader in Winter{
https://youtu.be/KWIlMFCQeeA
Harvested garden, split firewood, other preps and processed those items for the season. Obviously still dependent on liquid fuels but cruising comfortably through Winter.
YouTube continues to be a time-sink…