Silicon Valley Redneck

Vanishing hardware

Surprising what goes out of fashion, isn't it?

Like the once-common flat-head Philips wood screw.

They're included as bundled fasteners with all manner of hinges, latches, and so on... but should you need a different length, or find that one of the made-in-China provided screws is defective, good luck finding what you need at the corner hardware store, or the big home-improvement center.  Heck, good luck even finding the category.

The new hotness for fastening bits of wood together is the deck screw and variations thereof.  Which, indeed, is technically superior to the old-fashioned wood screw, but they're not made in small sizes, nor short lengths, besides which the head geometry is wrong for those hinges and such.

Ah, well.  Back to work.

Addendum:  What, you may ask, can be wrong with those made-in-China, included-with-product screws?  Well... sometimes the drive socket is clogged with stray metal.  Sometimes it seems to be designed for a metric Philips driver, somewhere between a #1 and a #2.  Very often, the driver cams out all too easily - perhaps a geometry problem.  And sometimes the steel(?) is outrageously soft, leading to stripped heads.  Mass-producing the humble wood screw in volume, with any sort of quality control, does require some degree of attention to detail.

Some people don't spend enough time around Wobblies.

Spotted here:

Would the FBI and DOJ do such a thing? Aren’t they “above” politics?

Above politics?  The FBI?  Really?

The FBI has been political since before it was the FBI.  Palmer Raids, anyone?

But it developed a mighty public-relations department, in partnership with Hollywood, and so its public image these many years has been well polished - despite any actual goings-on.

Start digging, and you'll most assuredly find a long trail of corruption.  (LBJ, trust, pecker, pocket: think maybe the Praetorian Guard had a role?)

Addendum:  Mark Meuser expands on this crumb thusly:

For 48 years, J. Edgar Hoover used the offices of the FBI to create political intelligence reports that were given to the president. It did not matter if you were a Republican or a Democrat; Hoover misused his power to benefit the president so that the president would ensure that the FBI expanded its scope, budget, and authority.

Which sounds right.  As long as the voters elect an Approved Candidate, i.e., one of whom the Praetorian Guard approves (and on whom the Guard presumably already has usable dirt wherewith to keep him in line), all's cozy.  If the voters get all uppity and elect a non-approved candidate, the whole system falls apart.

More good news for the ruling class!

Israeli researchers have reportedly developed a method of creating mouse embryos from stem cells.  (Also, they seem to have developed a rudimentary uterine replicator, making this a Bujold double-header in the works!)

House Bharaputra is ready to run with this, and to take it to humans, proposing to create, in effect, clone embryos to act as perfectly compatible organ donors.

Coming soon: full-body clone transplants, for the brains of the very wealthy and very well connected.

Book your trips to Jackson's Whole now!

Meanwhile, in opposite-land

Spotted here:

Summers said:

“Yes, wages did go up half a percent last month. But that’s about a 6% annual rate, and inflation has run at about 9% over the last year. I think our core problem, which is that we have an unsustainably overheated economy that’s leading to high inflation, which is cutting people’s paychecks, that, unfortunately, has not been addressed by the news in this report … So, I’m glad to see it, and it brings good news to a large number of families. But I’m afraid we’re still in the kind of unbalanced situation that you and I have been talking on — talking about on this show for quite a long time.”

Er... hello?

If the economy is overheated, shouldn't it be busily producing a lot of goods and services?  As opposed to there being increasing shortages of just about everything?

Apparently this is some new meaning of the term "overheated" which had previously escaped me.

Afterthought:  We've had two consecutive quarters of decline in the dollar-denominated GDP, despite inflation and all the print'n'spend.  This points to actual production being even worse.  Doesn't sound like an overheated economy to me, more like Carboniferous Monetary Theory at work:

But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: 'If you don't work you die.'

Only, of course, most of us don't have plenty of money.

Monday morning dose of stupid

Of oh so many to choose from....

Linkedin sent me an e-mail.  Looked like something to pay attention to.  I clicked on the link.

Oops!  Not logged in, on account of the browser screwup having tossed my cookies.  Look up the ancient password for that low-security site, and log in.

Oops!  That old password isn't long enough.  Can't log in with an existing password that doesn't meet the current standards!

I suppose I'll try to sort it out eventually.  Hey, guys?  The time for enforcing password standards is when the user is entering a new password.  Not when he's trying to log in with an old password.  Yeesh.

This is like the old "unable to open, rename, or delete that existing file because there's an invalid character in the file name" gotcha.

The hurrieder I go...

Oy.

Thursday through Saturday were largely non-productive days, as Joy had a nasty migraine, so I had to take over some of her routine stuff and couldn't really lock myself in my office nor spend much time outside the main living area of the house.

She's better today, so this is a catch-up day.  I've been doing more work on the dinosaur hut (now approaching completion); this involved a trip to Hazard Fraught for a few more C-clamps and, on impulse, several cute little mini bar clamps (all of which are in use at the moment).

This afternoon, Joy made a rather overdue grocery run.  She reports that food prices are wildly high, and that the shelves are looking sparse, especially with regard to products for people on variously restricted diets.

And, I'm extra sluggish just now because I'm overdue for a haircut; maybe we can squeeze that into the schedule for this evening or tomorrow.

Joy has set about baking a cake, on account of this being my father's birthday.  I guess I could head back out to the garage and work on that hut some more.  It'd be nice to have the remaining wall ready for painting this evening.  The critters do need to go outdoors, soon.

Ah, the silly things that turn up in my feed.

Seen here:

Unsure whether to get a miter or circular saw?

Both.  You need both.  They don't serve the same purpose.

Oh, sure, you can cut 2X4s to length with a circular saw, but getting the ends properly square is going to be a major pain.  Actually, just cutting them is going to be a pain.  A miter saw makes life easy... and can cut moderately thicker lumber, too, if you get a decent-sized one.  Doing specific angles?  Definitely want that miter saw.

On the other hand, there's no way you're gonna carve up a full sheet of plywood with a home-gamer miter saw.  A handheld circular saw is the weapon of choice.  Or a bloody huge CNC router, but the circular saw is both much cheaper and much easier to store when not in use.

As Insty says: embrace the healing power of both.

Brilliantly stupid idea of the morning!

Inspired by a Reno May short over on YouTube, wherein he observes that a lot of people use 3D printers for making things other than guns, and that those other things are basically cheezy bits of fantasy kitsch....

I had a sort of half-baked thought of "Actualize your NFTs!", but didn't include that in my comment regarding what I use my 3D printers for.

Then... hm.  Back when home FDM printers were a new thing, I had a notion that the purveyors of plastic model kits would eventually distribute print-your-own files, and that some form of DRM would be demanded.  I don't think this has happened yet.

And of course I think of Magic: The Addiction Gathering, and people who pay big bucks for NFTs, and how a few years back people were wandering around staring at their phones trying to collect all the digital hallucinations in Poke Mongo or whatever.

Idea!  Take the basic concept of Poke Mongo, maybe make it ever so much more playable if the user buys the special AR goggles, and make the digital hallucinations NFTs that can only be captured once, so the first player to catch it owns it.  And, if a player who's captured some NFTs springs for the special DRM-enabled 3D printer, he can print them out to display on his knickknack shelf!

This is of course an incredibly stupid idea, especially in such a time as this, but I suspect it's so over-the-top stupid that it might actually fly.

Alarming indications

Most of the garden not being very productive this year - any crops not large and aggressive got crowded out by weeds while I was tied up with sundry higher-priority responsibilities - it doesn't look like we'll be having a crop of, e.g., lentils.  Which ought to be stupid easy to grow, but if you don't keep the weeds under control, even the easy stuff doesn't happen.

So, maybe buy a couple bags of lentils.

Er.  Lentils have gotten scarce and expensive?  Is everybody else stocking up?

And it looks like a lot of other dry legumes are in short supply.  Wunnerful.

Well, the garden is spewing forth vast quantities of highly-perishable crops such as tomatoes and cantaloupes, and it looks like we'll get at least some meal corn and most likely some soybeans.  Maybe some other kinds of beans, too.  And maybe I'll manage to dehydrate some tomatoes and such.

Oh, crud.

Chrome has been complaining for a while that it's in need of an update.

It doesn't update through the normal process.

So, I download the latest, and attempt to install it.

It won't install, because libdrm2 is out of date.  But!  In the process of failing to install, it corrupted the previous version, which now won't launch at all.  (Hey, guys?  Why didn't the dependency check happen before making changes to the system?)

Argh.

Google won't let me download a down-rev version.

But!  I have a version downloaded in January of this year.  I can install that, and maybe try updating to the last version that was supported on this system?

Can install, yes.  Can update, no.  It points, apparently, to a repository with an invalid signature.

Oh, well.  So I run a half-year-out-of-date browser for a while; maybe next month I'll finally switch over to the new workstation.

The January version does indeed run, and comes up with the windows and tabs that I had open before the attempted update.  But....

Nothing will load, and I get a weird error message.

A little poking, and it demands that I sign back into my Google account.

After that, things more or less work.  But the tabs I had open aren't open, and won't open on a reload; I have to click on the location bar and hit ENTER to make the page open.

And, my saved passwords aren't showing up.  They're in Password Manager, but not in the browser.  Just to make life extra fun, the browser, despite being set to offer to save passwords, doesn't do so.  And all my cookies seem to have gotten tossed.  And using Password Manager is a royal pain nowadays, requiring repeated sign-ins and extra UI levels to get anywhere.

Growf.

Ah, the eternal strawmyth.

Current example:

Obama alumnus Andy Slavitt tweeted that sexual activity being the cause of monkeypox was a “myth.”

Er.  Surely exactly nobody is claiming sexual activity is the cause of monkeypox.

Current evidence points firmly to it being the dominant mode of human-to-human transmission, though.

Ah, tracking....

So, with the USPS packages that were supposed to have come yesterday, plus the ones originally scheduled for today, there were a half-dozen items, most too big for the mailbox.  I was worried we'd get a note in the mailbox, and I'd have to go fetch stuff.

Well, five out of six packages turned up on the doorstep late this afternoon.  The sixth still shows as out for delivery.  In fact, it shows:

So, according to this, it's been out for delivery since Monday morning, just a few hours after it was picked up in New Jersey.

I have just a sneaking suspicion there may be a software problem somewhere.

Update:  The package did in fact arrive, well past bedtime but in good order (modulo a missing fiddly plastic bit; not gonna mess with a return when I can get the part for a buck and a half plus postage - and I haven't carried out a detailed search of the packing materials in case the fiddly bit came loose in shipping and is caught somewhere amid the folded cardboard).

Decisions, decisions...

For the pier project (looks to be a September thing), it seems worth acquiring a basic gas-powered earth auger (no, not for geomancy; that'd involve an Earth augur - which, comes time for a well, we might be needing).

Hazard Fraught has one for pretty cheap.  But... the name-brandish thing they say it's so much cheaper than?  Home Despot has that for not much more.

Dither, dither... maybe it's better to go for the name brand, for better parts availability.  But then I look at the reviews, and the HF store brand doesn't have as many complaints of the quality having deteriorated.  (They are, after all, all made in China... and HF has been seriously working on upgrading quality, at least in some of its product lines, the past few years, while the established brands seem to have been slacking off.)

Hm.  By the time it's kitted out (6" and 8" bits, and an extension of some sort), eh, not all that much difference.  Maybe I'll go for the HF product.  Maybe I'll do a little more research between now and when it's needed.

In the meantime, I think I've identified the right intermediate-sized rototiller (too big to pick up with one hand; smaller than a tractor attachment).  Probably ought to order one of those.  Probably should have ordered one of those in early Spring.

Interesting condensation

E-mail title of Amazon suggestion:

MacWork Nose Locking Pliers

Wait, what?  Um....

Suggested product:

MacWork 9.5in. Long Nose Locking Pliers Chrome Vanadium Steel Head Nickel Plated Surface

So the algorithm looked at (MacWork) (9.5in.) (Long Nose) (Locking Pliers) (further description), parsed it instead as (MacWork) (9.5in. Long) (Nose Locking Pliers) (further description), and condensed it accordingly.

At least, I assume it was an algorithm.  If that was done by some human who thinks nose locking pliers are a thing...?  They aren't a thing, right?  Right?

Weather patterns are fickle.

We had somewhat characteristic weather last night:

Late afternoon, the weather radio warbled a severe thunderstorm alert/watch/warning/something.  The actual storm turned out to be hovering over Newport, and not headed this way.

Mid-evening, a couple more warbles.  I was busy and couldn't get to my computer, but Weatherbug reported lightning strikes within 10 miles, and we were certainly hearing thunder.

Getting on toward (belated) bedtime, Blitzortung showed much lightning in the area, mainly all around Knoxville but some a little to the east of us, and one strike within half a mile (which Weatherbug didn't know about).  Weather Underground showed a heck of a storm over Knoxville, drifting our way.

At bedtime, much lightning illuminating the windows.

This morning, the rain gauge still reads zero.  Seems all the rain bypassed us, as so often happens.  Not only does the high ground keep us safe from flooding, but the storms tend to go elsewhere - presumably something to do with the terrain upwind of here.