Silicon Valley Redneck

Busy day

Busy, busy, busy.  Multiple errands, with considerable sitting-around-waiting time involved.

An encounter with a circular case of "Wait, I thought the other department had done that already."

And... still need to resolve ToasterCo's latest issue.  Which takes precedence over the previous plan for tomorrow, which involved an eye exam and then spending the rest of the day all blurry.  At least I just got a fresh Clue, so this evening and/or tomorrow morning I should be able to tinker in a better fix before, most likely, spending the afternoon in their lab.  Which is air conditioned, yay!

An upcoming challenge

While I was planting the flag at the future HQ, I replaced the smoke detectors.  All nine of them.

So now there are nine old (as in rapidly approaching their official retirement dates, so replacing them was in order) ionization-type smoke detectors.  Apparently they don't fit in any of the normal disposal categories, but the county has a number to call for instructions.

Which surely will involve recruiting eight companions to assist me in my quest: to bear the old detectors to Oak Ridge, there to cast them into the core of the reactor where the americium was produced.

I hope this doesn't involve giant spiders.  I don't care for spiders of ordinary size, let alone giant ones.

Economics: how does it work?

Spotted here: quoth a politician,

“I don’t believe our current economic system actually works. Um, capitalism by design is extractive and in order to generate profit in a capitalist system, something has to be exploited, that’s land, labor or resources,” CdeBaca alleged.

Er.  So, we need to replace it with a system under which nothing is extracted, exploited... or produced?  All means of production are left idle, no wealth is created, and everyone fights over the scraps?

How utopian.

Internet newsiness

So I randomly followed some clickbait about a South Carolina woman who was arrested for public drunkenness while driving an electric kiddie car...

One of the links led here.  "UK Daily" it calls itself.  As in, one supposes, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.  But the wording of the article...!

South Carolina military charged a woman with open intoxication after anticipating her cruising down a road in a child’s motorized toy truck, according to reports.

The detain of Megan Holman, 25, on a assign of handling a china Power Wheels lorry underneath a change of a analgesic happened Monday in Walhalla, S.C., not distant from her home.

Police pronounced she avoided a DUI assign since her mode of ride was a toy, not a vehicle, Buzz Feed News reported.

That was... not written by any English-speaking human, no matter how drunk or otherwise analgesic'ed-up.  Looks more like the output of a Chinese clickbait-bot (like so much "financial news").  Well, not necessarily Chinese, but definitely unfamiliar with English vocabulary, grammar, and idiom.  Looks like it was translated into some furrin tongue (which I doubt was Gaelic) and then back to whatever-that-is.

Or maybe the article was adapted, to evade the copyright bots, by an infinite number of monkeys.

Situation cloudy....

So here I am pondering various aspects of IT infrastructure for the new-real-soon-now galactic HQ.

I'm thinking that the critical stuff (local server, modem, WiFi access point(s)) ought to be on a UPS with at least a couple of hours worth of run time.  Also thinking that this stuff, modulo the actual access points, goes in a particular corner of the basement, and that I'll probably weld up a custom rack to organize it and hold everything above inundation level in the event of a water-heater failure.

If reliability of the electrical supply starts looking like a serious issue, I expect we'll get a backup generator, but we're holding off on that for now.

So I take a quick look at largish UPSes on Amazon... and, as always, they're not characterized by Watt-hours available for keeping the computer running.  The peak power rating is there in large type, but battery capacity is well hidden.

That's an old problem.  Something new?  Well!  Seems that the latest Feature in UPSes is Cloud Connectivity.

Oh, great.

Well, maybe they still also have a local connection via USB or something, and maybe that's compatible with Linux.  I ought to be able to find an old-school model that's somewhat well behaved.  Or maybe Eric Raymond's open-source UPS is progressing?  Gotta check on that.  [Update:  Not much progress.  Maybe that's something I could contribute to... after getting all settled in.  Which is, obviously, after I want to have the UPS in the basement.]

Cloud connectivity.  Feh.

Party stupidity

Once again, various Republicans are proposing to amend the Constitution to forbid flag desecration.

Really, guys?

But it does point up an important difference between the parties.  Republicans occasionally try to amend the Constitution for frivolous reasons; Democrats prefer simply to ignore or re-interpret it when it's inconvenient.  (Anyone heard from Amendment X lately?  Or those pesky clauses relating to equal protection and due process?)

Hmmmmm.

Noted in passing, here:

The typical emotional problem associated with trauma is not the suppression of memory or experience but the inability to cease thinking about the trauma and move on.

But... but... "I've only just remembered that I was sexually assaulted thirty-some years ago!  I can't remember exactly which year, nor where it happened, nor who was there with me, nor how I got home afterward... but it's totally messed up my life ever since, without my ever realizing it!"  (Are we blasé about the fnords yet?)

The rest of the article is worth a read, too; Williamson writes good, and makes several important points.  Much of public discourse is indeed grounded in various sorts of pseudoscience.

(Yeah, yeah... Discordianism is also from a work of fiction.  So are the Drazi (see previous post).  So are Roddy Piper's special sunglasses.  So, for that matter, is nearly everything in the syndicated "news"; your local coverage may vary.)

We've seen this one before, haven't we?

So... the 20-howevermany candidates in the Democrats' Presidential primary have been divided up, for debate purposes, into two color-coded groups.

This should be fun.

But they got one of the colors wrong.  Come on, what Democrat, in this of all election cycles, wants to be part of Team Orange?

Still pondering that not-Prius

As previously noted, we're pretty well set for daily drivers, with a mismatched pair of older Prii, but a third vehicle will be in order once we relocate, and the current Smart Fortwo ain't it.

A suitably-configured F-150 seems an obvious choice.  I note that Consumer Reports likes it... but they're looking at a $52,535 pickup truck with a turbocharged 2.7 liter engine... wut?  Way too much money, way too little engine, and I don't want any dagnab turbocharger on my haulin' vehicle!  But it has Features that appeal to Yonkers liberals, I guess.

It is possible to get a more appropriate F-150 for around $40K.  With a real engine, a back seat, no turbocharger, etc.

But then I look at configurations and prices on Tundræ and Tacomæ, and those look favorable.  Or maybe a Furriner, for the SUV-with-towing-ability category.

Or something old enough that it's cheap enough that I just don't care about long-term reliability, or shininess, or any of that stuff.  Or... currently on Craigslist, a moderately aged Furriner with a V8, which ought to have plenty of towing capability (somehow, I suspect that'll sell within the next month, but perhaps when I'm there and shopping something comparable will be on the market).

Then I encounter this, leading to this and also this, and think: maybe I do want to stick with Toyota.  Toyotas are boring.  I like boring.

All depends on many variables, notably what the budget looks like after an upcoming flurry of expenses and what's on the market when the time comes.  I do want something that's rated to tow at least a 5000 pound trailer (I suppose if I need to transport anything heavier than that I can either rent a bigger truck for a few hours or hire somebody to do it... the latter option perhaps being a better idea).

And, on the ever-lengthening list of stuff to learn: how to back up with a trailer.  Kinda hard to get out of that one when you're trying to launch a boat, or to put the boat back in the machine shed.

More brokenness from Google

So here I am using Chrome....

I'm pondering putting up a post, with a passing reference to a YouTube vid I saw yesterday.  Or, more to the point, to somebody-or-other's blog post where I encountered said video.

I can't seem to find the blog post.  Well, no worries: I should be able to examine my browsing history, find the vid, and see what I was looking at just before that.

Nope.

I call up the full page of History, and scroll down to get a couple of days displayed.  Then Control-F, and... oops, that gets me the "Search history" function of the History page, not the "Find within page" function of the browser.  It gets me a list of items that match, but there's no frickin' way to get the context displayed.

So then I try the Find... item from the browser menu, to avoid having Control-F redirected to the history-search thing.  This search shows one match (there should be half a dozen), and it won't actually go there.

Argh.

Well, an eyeball search through the voluminous history of yesterday did eventually turn up... ah, 'twas Instapundit.

So now maybe I'll write that post I'd set out to write, before I got distracted by Chrome's broken searchiness.

Another use for deepfake technology!

Never mind the fake video, just do fake voice.

Want to update the voice on your satnav unit?  No need for your favorite celebrity to be cooperative, nor indeed alive.

You could have directions spoken by Grover Cleveland, or sung by Lauritz Melchior or perchance Florence Foster Jenkins!  Or maybe you'd prefer directions by Harpo Marx?

Photo albums: how do they work?

So I tried three approaches to creating a photo album with a few dozen pics from the recent adventure....

First try is Typepad, creating a page, rather than a post.  Uses the same editor.

Uploading multiple photos in one go results in them all being given the same description, that being the name of the first file.  Argh.  And... I think it also led to Issues with adding captions.  Anyway, I ended up laboriously adding them one at a time, and adding captions, then inserting text in front and in between some of them.  Commentary, y'know.  Not too bad, until I looked at the as-published view, and it has the captions centered on the page width, while the mini preview images are aligned left.  C'mon, cant you center the captions on the images instead of the page?  Anyway, it basically does what I want, but is awkward and the final formatting is not at all good.

Then I try creating a Google album, using the in-browser thingy.  It... kind of works.  Lets me upload all the photos at once, and they come out in order (whether lexical or chronological, they're properly sorted).  And there's a not-too-intuitive way to add captions.  Adding between-photos text gets strange; it's like no one ever heard of putting text in specific places before, among, and after photos.  And... yeah.  The photos are geotagged; I didn't strip the metadata before uploading.  There's no option I can find for "please don't share my ICBM address with any rando who gets here via a published link."

Is there an Amazon option?  There is indeed!  And... no way I can find to add captions nor text of any sort.  It's just a collection of photos, in order.  (And there's a desktop app, but no Linux version.  Boooooo!)  Oh, the Android app seems to have some way of superimposing text on images, but it's not clear how that's supposed to work, and I hate trying to edit things on my phone.  The in-browser editor doesn't have the text option.  Oh, and signing on to the Amazon photo app on my phone signs me on to all of the Amazon apps on my phone, which I really don't want; for one thing, the phone is an inherently insecure device, so I don't want any e-commerce passwords on it, and for another, I don't want Amazon tracking me.

And of course both Google and Amazon think it's vitally important to provide extra services, like using AI to try to identify people, places, and pets in your photos.  Who do they think they are, Facebook?  ("If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer, you're the product.")

I think, once upon a time, I had a gallery-display thing written in PHP, that had some way of associating commentary with photos and spat out a reasonably presentable page.  Took me maybe a couple of hours to write.  That would have been back in the late 1990s.  Probably needs a rewrite for the latest version of PHP and its libraries.  Didn't have AI for finding social connections and marketing hooks, though.

This shouldn't be difficult, but right now I just want something that works; I'm not looking to spend a few hours writing my own gallery-generator.

... "Still we let our business slide—as we dropped the half-dressed hide—to show a fellow-savage how to work."

Also, "There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, and yours is wrong!"

Update:  Most likely way I would do this sort of thing?  Keep the master photos in local (well, local fileserver) storage.  Maintain an index with sundry metadata (such as captions and extended text) in a PostgreSQL database, which could also hold gallery-building data (blocks of text, and lists of the order in which to assemble photos and text, plus selections for how to format galleries in general and this gallery in particular).  Have some sort of local GUI (maybe in Ruby, or maybe running in a browser) for maintaining this.  Hit "Publish", and the required photos get pushed to the web server via rsync, and the HTML for the gallery gets emitted and pushed to the server.  Hm.  If the GUI is browser-based (and I seem to recall that there are some JavaScript libraries to facilitate just that sort of thing), the whole thing could live on a remote server somewhere.

Er.  I'm almost certain that there used to be application/service combinations that did just this sort of thing, and did it well.  I guess they all got bought out by Google/Facebook/etc. and ruined.

It'll be worse than you think

Those Who Are Paying Attention will of course be familiar with the notorious 60 Minutes editing process (As Seen On TV!), whereby interviews are chopped up and questions and responses re-arranged (in some cases, with interviewers recording new questions after the fact) to give a completely false impression of what the interviewee actually meant.

Won't be long before that's obsolete; it appears that deepfake technology is progressing to the point that the responses can be entirely falsified.  There's talk of "verification techniques" presumably to tell if some random on the Internet has modified a clip after it was released by The Press... but how do you tell if it was modified by The Press before it was released?

Remember, kids: if you're ever in any way a controversial figure, and you just have to talk to The Press, be sure to bring your own film crew along to record the entire interview dead straight from beginning to end.

(And would The Authorities ever tamper with evidence in such a manner?  Current evidence suggests yes.)

More expensive than I'd thought

So the old (not yet upgraded to vintage) Prius is in the shop today, for routine maintenance, replacement of the little (but unique and expensive) 12V auxiliary battery, its first-ever brake job, and a replacement for the signature cracked windshield (without which it'll look just like any other '02 Prius).

The brake job turns out to be a major expense.  Seems that, while the pads are still not technically worn out, all the time (17 years, 258K miles) the pads were gradually wearing, so were the drums and rotors.  So now those need replacing too.

The old Jeep usually needed new drums and rotors, but that was because it needed a brake job about every 40K miles or something and I often let it go a little too long, leading to damage.

Oh, well.  I should get quite a bit more use out of it, so catching up on maintenance is worth the occasional expense.

Bleah.

Another stinkin' hot day.

Cats are lazing around being useless.  I'm lazing around being useless.  (Doesn't help that my west-of-the-Mississippi allergies have returned.)

Oh, well.  I may have solved a small problem for ToasterCo this morning (waiting to hear back from a guy who gets to work in an air-conditioned lab).  And I've been learning a bit about the ESP32, which appears to be the solution to a problem I had a couple of years ago, back when the ESP8266 (with its firmware as it stood at the time) just wouldn't cut it.

Looks like the ESP32 probably is the solution to the open-source video-doorbell problem, and thus to various related problems.  Also, it should come in handy for various other things, depending on its power consumption and range (which I'll need to examine).  The modules are plenty cheap, and look suitably versatile.

Fun note: the range of WiFi and similar seems to be awfully short in Silicon Valley.  Maybe because the density of access points and suchlike is so high.  I recall the first time (back in the mid-90s) I hooked an antenna to a spectrum analyzer, and saw the noise level in the 902-to-928 MHz band being something like 20dB above what theory said it should be; much of the (greatly increased) clutter subsequently moved to the 2.4 GHz band and above.  Range of cheap WiFi modules is probably a lot better in rural areas (duh).