Cold today! [36F with 80%RH at 6am]
Headed to the museum of natural history as a chaperone for my daughter’s gifted and talented class, I’ll be disarmed for several hours. Not liking that at all.
Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, they’re lighting people on fire….
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/man-set-fire-hong-kong-after-confronting-enemy-people-rioters
In Bolivia, the ruler stepped down.
Anyone still think this isn’t one of those periods when everything changes?
n
26F when I left the house at 0600 this morning in northern AL. I need to move, it’s way too cold here for me.
It was 46°F when I left for work this morning at 6:45am. The car thermometer read 36°F when I got to work 45 minutes later (32 miles). Very dense fog so there is a lot of moisture in the air. I expect rain turning to snow, which will melt because the ground is warm, then turning to ice as the temp continues to drop. The commutes tonight and tomorrow morning could be dangerous.
Freezing at the house, dusting of snow (1/2″) on the grassy areas. Roads are just wet. Will get to below 20 tonight. Exterior faucet drained, auxiliary heater in the garage, same as prior years. Truck goes in tomorrow to have the window replaced. Will be a cold trip.
Thursday leave for the kids house near Nashville. Need to insulate the pipes under his house. I hate crawling under houses.
20f and wind chill of 8f at 7am in the Bluff City.
We were lucky that the high winds last night dried off the roads so we don’t have a skating rink for the commute. Memphians have absolutely no idea how to drive in snow / ice.
The Hyundai complained that the two front tires were low pressure, because of the temp I suppose. So I got out the Harbor Freight $40 compressor and filled them up. Will have to keep an eye on these.
One of my van’s tires was very low this morning. Like you, I blame Global Warming.
4°F this morning in my northern Great Plains state. Thankfully, no breeze. Good times. I imagine the air pumps at all of the area gas stations were lined up this morning.
10 degrees this morning by the Great Lakes. Good day to wear the powerbank powered heated vest!
Remember, rear tires pick up flat-causing debris thrown up by the fronts. Nails usually cause no or very slow leaks, less than a psi per day. Screws, much more common in construction now, usually cause faster leaks, several psi per day. Unfortunately, a low tire can fail very suddenly, often with no warning unless detected while cornering. That’s why TPMS is such a good idea.
Don’t forget small leaks caused by valve stems. The rubber ones might not last as many years as the tire. Give ’em a wiggle now and then, but be prepared to replace if one breaks off. 😉 Many TPMS valves have gaskets that are supposed to be replaced with a “servuce kit” when getting new tires. Since I mount my own tires, not sure if shops do this.
If you have battery powered TPMS valves, they are supposed to last ten years. Replacing them at a tire store can be costly. The dealer can be even more. Some require reprogramming at a shop, or even the dealer. Check your owners manual. I have read that some shops reprogram and charge for cars that don’t need it. Buyer beware.
You can buy a pancake compressor on sale at Harbor Freight for $40. It has a 3 gallon tank that is good for topping up a few tires without even plugging it in. That’s good, because it is very noisy. It has a DC motor that only draws about 2.5 amps from 120 VAC, and is happy running on several hundred feet of wimpy extension cord. Also could run on a car battery and small inverter. A compressor with a half hp induction motor can’t do that. It is a bit slow, but not as slow as the tiny 12 VDC ones people carry in cars. Good prepper item.
Also good is an automotive (not bicycle) tire pump, but I lent mine to a friend forty years ago and don’t miss it.
Currently 59°F here on the Gruesome Coast. Predicted high of 70°F at 3 PM.
SCOTUS allows Sandy Hook people to sue Remington for AR rifle. Is there any way they can win? Obviously no defects with the weapon. Maybe the strategy after the jury awards damages is for SCOTUS to over rule.
SCOTUS allows Sandy Hook people to sue Remington for AR rifle. Is there any way they can win? Obviously no defects with the weapon. Maybe the strategy after the jury awards damages is for SCOTUS to over rule.
Who knows with Roberts.
And Sandy Hook tugs at heart strings. It is the same political mechanism at work as Frau Greta. “For the children” is our biggest weakness in this country and much of the rest of the Western world.
Lake Wobegon writ large. All the children are above average.
You know, I laughed when the salesperson told me about the electric seat warmers in my new 2019 F-150. Here on the coast, the largest hot tub on the the planet, we do not use heating that much. In the two weeks since I bought the new F-150, I have used the electric seat warmers 6 or 7 times now. They make my butt warm and comfy within a 1/4 mile. The occasional passenger has enjoyed them also.
SCOTUS allows Sandy Hook people to sue Remington for AR rifle. Is there any way they can win? Obviously no defects with the weapon. Maybe the strategy after the jury awards damages is for SCOTUS to over rule.
Ginsburg. Need I say more ?
https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/remington-arms-co-v-soto/
Ginsburg. Need I say more ?
The court decision allows the lawsuit to proceed in state court.
Remington definitely has a problem in the pre-Sandy Hook marketing. I clearly remember the front page of the Cabela’s WA State Black Friday ad the year before featuring a $399 AR-15 in all black.
The case could be made that the weren’t appealing to hunters. We all sat around the dinner table making jokes like the frequently quoted Dan Aykroyd line, “Bullets make great stocking stuffers.”
The Cabela family cashed out a few years ago, probably out of concern about what was coming. Even without the lawsuits, gun sales are down under Trump.
Indeed, and manufacturers are hurting, too. OTOH, last I checked, there were still over a million adjusted NCIS checks per month, implying at least a million gubs added to the already quite large stockpile.
My worry is that the controllers will focus on ammo instead of the firearm itself. Lots of mischief available there.
This is insane. Does anyone sue the knife manufacturer after a stabbing?
Ginsburg. Need I say more ?
The court decision allows the lawsuit to proceed in state court.
Remington definitely has a problem in the pre-Sandy Hook marketing. I clearly remember the front page of the Cabela’s WA State Black Friday ad the year before featuring a $399 AR-15 in all black.
The second amendment does not say that guns are allowed for hunting only. Remington does not have a problem.
ADD: Remington does not have a problem in a lawful and ethical society.
Seat warmers – I use them every morning on the drive in to work. the heat helps loosen up my back. I only refrain from using the heaters in the afternoon during the summer.
Now if you want to talk about heated steering wheels….that is something I would actively scoff at, right up until I got this car. Best.Invention.Ever. (In the winter, at least.)
“Ann Coulter Gives Up: DACA Kids Can Stay, Trump ‘Must Go’”
https://www.mediaite.com/politics/ann-coulter-gives-up-daca-kids-can-stay-trump-must-go/
Who are you going to support then, Ann ? Ain’t NOBODY else beating the illegal aliens drum other than Trump.
Hat tip to:
https://drudgereport.com/
Same. And seat warmers. I rediscovered both today, 36 in San Antonio.
The second amendment does not say that guns are allowed for hunting only. Remington does not have a problem.
The courts will decide. Civil is preponderance of evidence, not shadow of a doubt, and some of the marketing was questionable at times.
When I saw the Cabela’s ad, the first thing I thought of was “Thank You For Smoking”.
Sigh. Another pet peeve raises its head.
My iPhone image storage was getting filled, so I decided to download them. Lately all apps on the Mac and even the PC only see the last half dozen images, of over 400. Image Capture, for example, was working in August, but not now.
So I downloaded from the “cloud”…and it eventually worked, even over DSL. But every single image has had its creation and modification date reset to the download date and time.
I have been battling this “we’re going to redo your metadata for no reason and without permission” since before the turn of the century, across a dozen different computers, applications and three or four operating systems.
Man, this is crap. We have a half-ass implementation of Unicode in our Windows user interface using MFC and our custom dialog classes. I have been getting a weird error message from it for a while so am debugging the C++ code in Visual Studio 2015. I am discovering that I may have to throw the switch and push us all the way to Unicode (UTF-16) in order to fix this problem. Not good, not good. It all appears to bite us on the Windows nightmare of LPCTSTR.
Home from the museum. Fun day. Kids liked it and were engaged. I don’t know if there was any actual learning, other than “the museum is cool”. Had a good time chatting with the other mom chaperone. Nice to meet new people.
Need to do some ebay shipping, hooray.
Still cold and windy here. It was so windy for long enough that my water feature half emptied itself. The wind blew the waterfall back enough that it missed the pond. crazy.
wrt seat heaters, OH HELL YEAH. Especially if they have multiple settings, and will do back only….. even in Houston.
n
“Exclusive: Michael Savage Raw and Unfiltered on Trump, Beethoven, & the Future of America”
https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2019/11/11/exclusive-michael-savage-raw-and-unfiltered-on-trump-beethoven-and-the-future-of-america/
““No, I’m pessimistic,” Savage says bluntly. “I think Donald Trump, even if he wins a second term, it is the last gasp of America as we know it. I think we’re going to enter years and years, if not decades of darkness.””
““I see the mass of illegal immigrants, who are illiterate even in their own language. They have none of our shared values. They will never be Americans and embrace the values that built this country. They’ve been steeped in hatred for this nation by the media and the universities. And they have a very dim view of our nation, even though they love the benefits that have accrued from far better people than them,” he concludes.”
I wish that I saw a different future for the USA.
Hat tip to:
https://drudgereport.com/
The second amendment does not say that guns are allowed for hunting only. Remington does not have a problem.
The courts will decide. Civil is preponderance of evidence, not shadow of a doubt, and some of the marketing was questionable at times.
When I saw the Cabela’s ad, the first thing I thought of was “Thank You For Smoking”.
I hope not. To me, guns are for at least four items:
1. protect myself from the government
2. protect myself from the unstable people in our society
3. hunting
4. shooting at targets for fun and/or practice
OK, I am scared and annoyed. Google just sent me a list of 59 places that I have visited over the last four weeks and asked me to review them. The visits had the time and date that I visited them. My church was on the list. My parents church in Port Lavaca was on the list. All of the eating establishments were on the list. My business is on the list.
Wow, they are tracking me, probably through my cell phone. I guess that I am paranoid.
You can turn off the tracking, but I suspect it just turns off your ability to see the results.
The speed info on google maps come from your phone constantly updating them on your location and speed…. call it crowdsourcing, albeit unknowing and unwitting…
n
I love my Cabela shirts. Very heavy flannel with western, Indian designs. I use them in the winter.
“Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q3 2019”
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q3-2019/
“As of September 30, 2019, Backblaze had 115,151 spinning hard drives spread across four data centers on two continents. Of that number, there were 2,098 boot drives and 113,053 data drives.”
That is a lot of hard drives. No WD drives unless one counts the HGST drives as such.
As a general rule of thumb, I stay away from Seagate drives. Seagate drives appear to have gotten better but not as good as the HGST (WD ???).
Thursday leave for the kids house near Nashville. Need to insulate the pipes under his house. I hate crawling under houses.
Why are you crawling under the house ? You are not a young man.
ADD: at least the copperheads and rattlesnakes are hibernating now.
Because turning the house upside down is not an option. 🙂
It’s for the kid, wife volunteered me for the task. I did this at his prior house. Trashed a set of clothes with dirt, just threw them away. I now have a Tyvek suit to go over my clothes. Supposedly more room under his new house and is supposed to have been sealed with plastic.
I recently had to crawl under the stage at church. With numerous supports, cross braces, etc. it was a struggle.
I happened to look at the calendar on my phone. Just when did Black Friday become worthy of tagging like Veteran’s Day or Thanksgiving?
Err. I suspect part of Lynn’s comment is “why isn’t the kid crawling under HIS house” but maybe that’s just me.
Yeh, I got that part. He will be helping. It will not be a solo adventure. Much easier with two people.
I now have a Tyvek suit to go over my clothes. Supposedly more room under his new house and is supposed to have been sealed with plastic.
May I make the obvious suggestion? A layer of cardboard between you and the ground will go a long way towards lessening the effects of the cold and damp.
Second that about the cardboard.
I see the mass of illegal immigrants, who are illiterate even in their own language. They have none of our shared values. They will never be Americans and embrace the values that built this country. They’ve been steeped in hatred for this nation by the media and the universities. And they have a very dim view of our nation, even though they love the benefits that have accrued from far better people than them
well, Irish 1850s60s, German, Norwegians 1890s, Italian 1900s and so on, please give me a break
The late Jerry never as far I know from his readings bothered about where, he was afraid of the non existance of the melting pot
Wow, they are tracking me, probably through my cell phone. I guess that I am paranoid.
Android phone? No, you’re not paranoid.
I love my Cabela shirts. Very heavy flannel with western, Indian designs. I use them in the winter.
Cabela’s used to run clothing as a loss leader since they made money selling guns, but the quality of the private label has gone downhill since the family sold the operation to Bass Pro.
I used to hit the Bargain Cave in Buda frequently on my way to/from school, but the room disappeared at some point last Summer.
“Irish 1850s60s, German, Norwegians 1890s, Italian 1900s and so on, please give me a break”
Those were people who, by and large, accepted that they must become “Americans”. Many forbade their kids to speak in their original language. One of the things my grandmother (immigrated in 1903) disliked about the Displaced Persons after WWII is their constant complaints about how much better everything was in the “old country”. They were refugees and resettled, not intentional immigrants. They eventually got with the program, or at least their kids did.
We are already seeing that this is not the case with the children of this wave, they wish to travel for jihad (and do, Minneapolis St Paul of all places supplies more US jihadis than anywhere else in the country), or they become radicalized and attack here.
They wish to maintain their old way of life, just doing it here, hence the rise of Sharia law in many regions and halal food in public schools.
There are parts of Houston that are indistinguishable from every sh!thole south of the border, except the street signs are in english. The squalor, filth, piles of broken cars, makeshift fences and tar paper and shipping pallet construction, and the chickens roaming the yards and lots looks EXACTLY like the places they left.
Toothless men, drinking beer during the day, squatting along fences and sitting on curbs watching the schoolkids walk by, gangbangers on one side of the fence dealing to a group on the other side of the fence at the run down apartment buildings… and the sour faced old women glowering at life while walking to the store of waiting for the bus.
End remittances, or tax the hell out of them. Enforce e-Verify for every job, and make it available to normal people hiring casual labor (cleaning people, lawn services). Deport anyone found guilty of an offense, with a ban on reentry, and a permanent ban on anyone who is caught sneaking in while under ban. No public money to be spent on non-citizens. Kids (who might be ‘birthright’ citizens) leave with their parents. If they want to come back at 18, they can. Immediately repatriate anyone in our prison system. 87% of federal prisoners are foreign nationals.
We have been invaded. 10% or more of our current population are here illegally, don’t speak the language, have few skills and little education. In other words, they don’t bring any value to the table. There may be potential values, but little current value. They demand to be fed, housed, medicated, and educated in their own language. The night schools are NOT full of immigrants learning English, or studying for citizenship tests.
Build the wall. Encourage them to leave.
n
well, Irish 1850s60s, German, Norwegians 1890s, Italian 1900s and so on, please give me a break
The late Jerry never as far I know from his readings bothered about where, he was afraid of the non existance of the melting pot
My late great-grandfather brought his family here in 1910 or so from Belgium, right before the Kaiser drove an army through it. He spoke five languages fluently including his native Flemish. And English. Enough so that he was hired as an interpreter at a pump factory in Illinois. He did not like the weather and moved to Texas, becoming a sharecropper.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/91941433/paul-pyssen
My late grandmother, and her siblings, were not taught Flemish nor any other language other than English. When my great-grandfather brought his parents over after WWI, they did not learn English and taught my grandmother Flemish as a teenager. Many of my cousins can speak a few common phrases of Flemish but I cannot as my grandmother did not teach my mother Flemish. And my grandfather did not teach my mother German (which he spoke even though he was second / third generation as his mother was from Stuttgart).
My point is that the melting pot has ceased to melt. Entire neighborhoods in Texas do not speak enough English to get by as @nick noted. And these are third and fourth generations. It is tremendously damaging to their economic futures.
Me too. Even if you stick to one OS, there can be multiple file systems. For instance, you might copy a file from a hard drive to a USB stick, which uses FAT32, and strange things might happen.
My biggest peeve is with DST, which can change timestamps by an hour when copying files from one file system to another. Different cameras handle DST… differently. Another is the ext4 file system used in Linux, which seems to change some file timestamps to the date the file system was created on its media. There are many more peeves.
As for your photos, consider using the EXIF date, which is embedded in the file, and can be viewed by many photo viewers. EXIF data can also be deleted or edited with suitable tools. There are utilities which can operate in batch mode and copy the EXIF date to the file date (created, last modified, or last accessed.) Google for your OS of choice.
All this is an example of one of my favorite platitudes: The good thing about standards is that there are so many. (Variously attributed.) Or this, https://xkcd.com/927/ 🙂
Currently 47F and 41%RH. SpaceCityWeather says widespread freezing tonight for houston and surrounds. I was busy all afternoon, and didn’t get anything covered. I did pull in the two potted citrus trees, and the potted bougainvillea. That will have to be enough for tonight.
I’ve still got a lesson to write and some experiments to design. Topic is Forces, so I’m doing ‘gravity works the same on everything, light or heavy’ with the experiment being dropping objects inside big graduated cylinders and seeing that they fall at the same rate. I figure the cylinder will help control for airflow, and plan to use similar shape and sized objects of different mass. I’ll fill the cylinders with water and use metal cubes if I have to.
Then Momentum with acceleration due to gravity, using hot wheels cars and track to smack them together. I’ll add weight to one car, and use it as a hammer, and a nail. Let the kids observe how that energy gets transferred. I hope to be able to test whether the angle or the length of the ramp makes more difference.
Finally Inertia and friction. Cards on an incline. different cards (playing, index, sandpaper) and different weights (washers taped to the cards.) Lift the incline until they move, what moves first? Farthest? at which angle?
That should be more than enough for 40 minutes.
n
Then Momentum with acceleration due to gravity, using hot wheels cars and track to smack them together. I’ll add weight to one car, and use it as a hammer, and a nail. Let the kids observe how that energy gets transferred. I hope to be able to test whether the angle or the length of the ramp makes more difference.
Cool.
Finally Inertia and friction. Cards on an incline. different cards (playing, index, sandpaper) and different weights (washers taped to the cards.) Lift the incline until they move, what moves first? Farthest? at which angle?
I remember a “Car Talk” puzzler — Why do quartz watches “tick” and mechanical watches have a smooth movement?
The answer involved the cost of overcoming static friction vs. continuing movement against dynamic friction.
I have simplified my experiments a bit.
I’ll have them explore inertia by yanking a paper out from under cubes of different mass.
-does the mass matter?
-does the speed by which they yank?
Then they’ll put the masses on a playing card, and repeat. Then a piece of sand paper.
-does the friction make much difference?
If I have time I’ll have them slide the masses on cards down an incline, raising it until they overcome inertia and friction.
All of it will be subject to change after the first class…. with 4 more to go to refine it for next year.
The whole idea is to get them objects in their hands to manipulate and to have fun with the activity. They do all their normal science class with videos of stuff and handouts.
If I was a lego or domino guy, I’d probably come up with some good domino experiments. As it is, we’ll be crashing hot wheels into each other (if we get some) other wise it’ll be golf balls and ping pong balls. IF there is enough time….
n
(ppt is done, I’ve got rough ideas for the experiments, and I think we have all the supplies in the room. hope I get some volunteer helpers.)
Currently 47F and 47%RH, if my station can be trusted.
I really don’t want to freeze tonight.
And now I’m off to bed.
n
If I was a lego or domino guy, I’d probably come up with some good domino experiments. As it is, we’ll be crashing hot wheels into each other (if we get some) other wise it’ll be golf balls and ping pong balls. IF there is enough time….
Air hockey table. Commercial grade. Vital to the experiments.
Hmm. Not sure what you are doing, and don’t see the need for any apps. On Android, I just use my file manager to copy selected files to the file system on my Linux or Windows desktop computers over my LAN. There doesn’t seem to be any limit on how many files. I can log on to any directory I can see, and copy to it if I am granted write permission. You sure you have file sharing set up properly?
JimB: Even mounting it as a drive under windows 10 and looking under the /DCIM folder…still just the same few images. I’m guessing a bug in the file handler / listing portion of the last version of iOS 12.
I’ll probably get a new phone for Black Friday or Christmas, maybe under iOS 13 it will work again.