Silicon Valley Redneck

Well. That was unexpected.

Out walkies this morning, I paused beneath an oak tree.

There was various screeching and carrying-on in the tree above, but then there usually is.

Suddenly, a rather large baby bird plummeted from the tree and fell with a thunk among the trail-side vegetation!

OK, so: what kind baby bird are you, and what are you doing out of the nest when you so clearly don't have your flight feathers yet?

Oh.

It's a baby squirrel.  Must be too young to fly; he doesn't have his helmet and goggles yet.

I don't see a squirrel nest anywhere near directly above where he fell.

Dropped by a clumsy raptor?  Launched from a great distance by a moose?  (A European moose, or an American one?)  Crawled out of nest nearer the center of the tree, made his way out to the edge, and then fell?

No, I didn't try to do something.  My education is sadly lacking in diagnosis and care of juvenile bushy-tailed tree rats.

Haven't I seen this before?

Spotted in this here story about the upcoming EuroCPU:

Power efficiencies are gained by moving out-of-order execution capability to software, Danilak said. “All the register rename, checkpointing, seeking, retiring, which is consuming majority of the power, is basically gone, replaced with simple hardware. All the smartness of out-of-order execution was put to compiler."

Fairchild Clipper, anyone?

Ongoing process is ongoing.

Still putting in time on the packing & sorting.  This afternoon, it was mostly dense stuff (there's rather a lot of that); sorting it into "put in sturdy plastic bins to take along" vs. "try to give it away, or failing that, leave it for the trash haulers."  I've filled up all the 5-gallon sturdy totes; got a pile more on order.  (I'm using the same totes for high-density stuff, such as large electric motors and stainless-steel odds & ends, and for various stuff that oughtn't to be packed in cardboard for one reason or another.  Oh, and most of the hand tools will need to go into those soon.  Maybe I should order some more.)

The cats are still getting settled in, sort of.  Huckleberry spends most of the day hiding under the sofa.  Top Hat often emerges from her safe hiding place to hang out where I am, and generally make a pest of herself.  Southmoon's investigating feet have taken her all around the house, which apparently makes the whole house hers, which perhaps is why Huckleberry is now the timid one.

So far, Southmoon is the only one who's ventured into the yard beyond a small area of the patio.  We're not really encouraging them to explore the great outdoors yet.

And!  After a week of no alarm light (with my circadian rhythm drifting a fair bit), I now have a new-edition interim alarm light set up here, using an LED strip for light, where the old setup used a smallish CFL (originally a 40W incandescent).

Afterthought:  Gotta make some tootsie guards for the power switches on the lab/office outlet strips.  Trouble with having the things lying on the floor, outlets-side-up, is that they're also switch-side-up, which can easily lead to unscheduled outages.  Especially when there are heavy-footed cats about.  Some bits of bent cardboard should suffice for the nonce.

A big pink cake with zero candles

Zero candles?  Yeah... we went to a baby shower yesterday, for Joy's impending second granddaughter, the early* Evangeline** Ashton.

'Twas a long drive.  And Saturday-noonish traffic around the Bay Area was heavy in all directions.  Oh, and we had to take two cars: my father and I were in his Prius, configured for maximum cargo space to carry food and various bulky gifts, and Joy was in her little car, carrying additional food.

Oh, well.  On the way back, we got to see the Great Pumpkin hanging unseasonably in the sky.  Or maybe it was a combination of the blood moon with smoke in the sky from that car file Carr Fire*** up by Redding.

 

* People who haven't been born yet are referred to as "the early", aren't they?

** Name is provisional, and subject to change if too many people mention the forest primeval.  Earlier, they'd been pondering some name that came across as "Arian", leaving me wondering about the Mormon position on Arianism (hey, don't look at me; I can't make heads nor tails of Christian theology) but apparently was supposed to be more like a French rocket, but spelled differently.

*** Wait, it actually started as a car fire?  Incidentally, I dare you to look at the photo at the top of this story without humming the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes theme.

More missing specs

I went off on another of my little tangents, and this morning it led me to checking out the availability of certain resistor arrays.

And, looky here: right off the shelf from Digi-Key, cheap, four isolated 10MΩ resistors in one 1206 surface-mount package.  Handy!

Thing is, though: tolerance is specified as ±2%.  Which, overall, may be good enough.  But for the application at hand, I don't really care what the value is, as long as it's "several meg."  What I care about is the matching among the four resistors in the one package.  About which, the datasheet offers no clue.  Must I assume that one resistor in the package could be at +2%, while another could be at -2%?  That's less than helpful, and I'd be better off (apart from assembly costs) just using four individual 1% resistors.

Update:  Hmmmm.  I think I've just come up with a legitimate situation in which not-low-side FET gates can be driven using capacitive coupling.  This'll take some thought, but if it works it'll save some money and probably board space.

Also, it turns out that CANbus isolators are a thing.

Worldview

Why are disposable plastic drinking straws so ubiquitous?

1. A cabal of plastics industry lobbyists and corrupt politicians forces people to use them.
2. They perform a function people want, and are cheap.

Seriously, guys.  This is a no-brainer.  Plastic straws are very well suited for their intended purpose (many variations thereof), and, given the minuscule amount of material used per straw and the simplicity of the manufacturing process, they cost next to nothing.

I recall, many years back, encountering an early plant-derived, biodegradable straw.  My girlfriend at the time was a coffee drinker.  Her attempt to drink hot coffee through such a straw (supplied, if memory serves, by a national-park concession stand) did not go well.

Thinking back still further... we used to have waxed paper straws.  I'm pretty sure those were quite a bit more expensive to manufacture than the extruded plastic ones, and suspect that the wax didn't biodegrade real well.  Also, they likely didn't get along well with hot drinks (not that I would have tried), nor with suction (thick milkshakes, bubble tea, and so on).  Not much chance of stabbing one through the seal of a juice box, either,

Shall we all carry around our own reusable straws?  Inconvenient.  And they have to be cleaned after use, which uses resources.  Not cleaning them eventually leads to increased use of other resources (those being of a medical nature).

Then, too, if we forbid disposable plastic straws, what next?  Disposable plastic utensils?  Disposable plates, bowls, and cups?

Will we all be carrying around our Boy Scout mess kits in case we stop at a fast-food joint?  And washing them in fountains, using little bottles of dish detergent that we'll also carry around?

And then there are the cats

Monday afternoon/evening: get the cats current on vaccinations and flea control, and bring all three at once to their interim new abode (they'd each visited individually on various occasions, and mostly hidden under the sofa).

Well...

They were all reasonably coöperative in the exam room, though Southmoon growled a bit.  Came time for their shots / blood work / pill / transdermal stuff?  Southmoon apparently went full mountain lion.  We had to reschedule her for Wednesday morning, at which time she's supposed to have consumed a dose of Kittydämmerol or whatever it's called - got the bottle of dope in front of me, but I'm too lazy to read the label just now.

We did manage to administer her dose of Revolution this morning.  Tried to feed her a little of a favored canned food with the Capstar mixed in, but she's in no mood for eating yet.  At least she's being somewhat social; Huckleberry scampered under the sofa at the first opportunity and is still pretending not to exist, while Top Hat has been hiding in the family room, moving from one place of concealment to another.

We'll see how the whole sedating-Southmoon thing goes, in the morning.  And it remains to be seen how they'll interact with Malo; she's been wandering in and out, but apparently just strolling right by their hiding places.

Wednesday update:  Southmoon did indeed eat of the drugged kitty chow, and the vet techs managed to administer the vaccines... but not to draw a blood sample, for one reason and another.  So she has to go back, again, next week.

Back on the home front, Southmoon actually appears to be settling in, exploring the house and even venturing into the back yard (under close supervision).  She's also demonstrated the ability to squeeze through the 76200μm pore of the semipermeable kitty filter, so I narrowed it up a bit with some hot glue.

The other two, though... Top Hat is mostly hiding in the far corner of the Interim Lab, sometimes venturing out for petting when I'm at the Interim Desk.  Huckleberry is still mostly hiding under the sofa and pretending not to be there, though he's emerged, briefly, under his own power a couple of times.

Sudden microbiology

Sunday lunch was leftover curry from Saturday dinner, over some rice/carrot/mushroom stuff from a couple of nights earlier.  Nothing seemed amiss.

Sunday dinner ended up being IKEA Swedish meatballs, heated up and served over... um.  I was thinking the last of the rice stuff would be about right.  But it turned out to be seriously moldy.

Did that really all happen in just a few hours?  Was it almost that bad at lunchtime, and I just didn't notice?  (The curry would have covered up a fair amount of off-taste.)

I haven't shown any symptoms of having eaten things I oughtn't.  Maybe the mold was harmless.

And, yes, I dumped the visibly-moldy rice thing, and cooked up some pasta with garlic-herb butter instead.

Added:  Turns out there were multiple rice-and-stuff leftovers buckets in the refrigerator, getting variously moved around.  It's entirely possible that the one I grabbed in the evening had been in there for weeks, and had just been shuffled to the front during ongoing reorganization.

Back on the air, sort of.

Got the computer stuff hauled to the new Secure Undisclosed Location.  Then, with almost everything hooked up, I had to run back to the old location, because I'd omitted to bring the keyboard (the expensive one!) and mouse.

OK, then.  With all connected, try getting bhrian (the current file-dhcp-etcetera server, and future Internet gateway) to talk to the WiFi here.

Nightmare.  The signal in this corner is weak; also the router's been kind of erratic of late.  Make a Fry's run for a WiFi dongle with an antenna on it.  Oops!  Needs firmware.  Find the firmware, download using my laptop, carry over on a thumb drive, and install.  Now it looks right, and finds the access point, but no luck connecting.

By chance, the cable guy stops by to address another issue.  I ask whether the WiFi power on the router can be turned up.  He says no, but that's an ancient router, and he can run out to the truck and fetch the current model, which has all the latest bells and whistles.

The router having been replaced, the signal here is indeed stronger.  But still no luck connecting.  Time to do some searching (on the laptop again).

It appears to be a fairly common issue with current Debian and friends, USB WiFi dongles, udev, and the network-management software.  Something to do with the devices being assigned absurdly long names that don't fit the traditional "wlan0" pattern.

Muck about with udev, attempting to adapt someone's suggested rule for fixing the name.  No soap; I need to review how udev works.  Meanwhile....

Meanwhile, reconfigure stuff so the WiFi dongle plugs into the workstation instead.  With not-too-much fiddling, it works!

So: network configuration is currently suboptimal, but I do indeed have communication.  Including use of the file server.  And the ability to post new blog entries!  And watch YouTube, I think, except that I didn't bring the speakers yet either.

Additional:  Moving a bunch of stuff, even not very heavy stuff, in hot weather is no fun.

Also, I came down with a case of PC Thumb.  It's kind of like M1 Thumb, except that it results from imparting momentum to a massive tower-type PC and then discovering that its trajectory doesn't quite clear the car door, just in the place where one's thumb is protruding.

And (this is a Sunday morning update) I brought over the speakers and their extension cable, so I now have sound, and it's set up for ease of unplugging the speakers and plugging in headphones in their place.  (I haven't yet confirmed that the level on the speaker output is actually correct for my headphones.  If not, I may have to procure another 1/8" stereo M-F extension cable to reach the headphone jack on the workstation.)

Further, I should note that the cable guy didn't just randomly show up; my father had called up AT&T to switch the voice line from dedicated analog to U-Verse, being as how the dedicated analog connection had been added back just for my mother's emergency-call thingie.  It was, however, fortuitous that he was here when I was having trouble with the WiFi.

More odds'n'ends

Stuff from the back of the lab closet: not much to keep, but I suppose I should sort through the box of assorted plastic containers in case there are any worth keeping.

Hm.  Some 35mm film cans (albeit the cheesy plastic ones).  I'd thrown away a bunch earlier, and then had a nightmare involving their lack.  Gotta keep a few of those, just in case.  Also some nice clean store-boughten dispensing bottles for solder flux and the like.

And a little teeny tin, like Jetex fuse used to come in...?  Ah.  Formerly contained, let's see, Vorderlader-Zündhütchen, apparently.  Do front-end loaders need little ignition hats?  I never went to material-handling-machinery school.

Planning on doing the office move today, after an early lunch.  May be Off The Net for several hours, as I haul the workstation, file server, Ethernet switch, KVM switch, keyboard, monitor, backup drive, and a whole mess of snakes! cables over and try to get things set back up.  And the printers have to move, but not necessarily today.  And I'll have to mess with the network configuration, given that the existing DNS/DHCP server doesn't go along at this stage (and gets decommissioned soon, possibly repurposed as a lab or workshop machine).

More on those prototypes

Those.  Yes, the troublesome ones.  Much delayed, then it turned out that some of the connectors were installed backward, the 0.1% tolerance resistors were 1% parts, some of the values were off by three orders of magnitude....

Turns out it wasn't a new contract manufacturer; it was one that my client had used before*, with good results.  This time, it was a total flamingo-up**.  Client had to order from Digi-Key, and ship overseas, parts that the CM swore were unavailable until much later in the year.  That kind of stuff.  And the boards arrived all sticky with solder flux.  The power connectors weren't properly soldered.  And on and on....

I've seen this sort of thing happen before, when a company changes ownership and management and totally loses the recipe for the secret sauce.  Is that what happened here, or were they just having a bad month?  How long do the hangovers from Chinese New Year last, anyway?

* But let's not mention names when we don't know who's about.

** It's like a cock-up, but much bigger.

Not packing that one.

Packing up some of the odder household items.

From the far corner of patio shed, extract a styrofoam bottle-protector.  Remove the top to check on the contents.

Er.  Why do I smell nitrogen dioxide?

Oopsie.  The fumes from my half-empty bottle of nitric acid have, over the years, eaten through the lid of the bottle, which is now a decomposed-looking mess.

What to do, what to do... there are some nice clean like-new brown glass bottles handy, but the lids are not of the acid-resistant type.

For the moment, re-label the shipping container, tape it closed, and put it right-side-up on a level surface.

Maybe I'll dump it in the back yard, where it'll react with the horribly alkaline soil to become fertilizer...?  Probably ought to dig a pit for the purpose, lest it encounter little kitty paws before being neutralized.  And I'm not doing any digging now, when it's 85 degrees horribly Fahrenheit out there.

Blind spots

I'd noticed quite some time ago that Estately showed next to no listings in West Tennessee, and also that the Morristown area was unrepresented....

Well, now the entire Knoxville metro area seems to have gone poof! from Estately's knowledge.  Which is rather unfortunate; Estately tends to have information that Zillow and Realtor are lacking (and they, in turn, often have information that Estately is lacking; in particular, Zillow's map presentation is better, even if the aerial views are outdated, and includes property lines in areas where the others don't).

I seem to recall that there was a grand disappearance of listings from the on-line services a few years back, when a regional MLS was making what seemed like totally wonky demands.  Maybe that's happened again?

And, while I'm ranting: most listings are lacking important information.  If you're trying to sell a house and land, how about including an aerial view with the property lines drawn in?  Especially if the land on offer is being carved out of a larger parcel?  And a list of what rooms are on which floor would be most helpful in the preliminary selection process when, e.g., we need to be sure there's at least one bedroom and full bath on the main floor.  Listing utilities available (including Internet) would seem obvious, too, especially in areas where those can't be taken for granted.

Must check under the bed more often.

Communists might be lurking under there!

Well, Communist memorabilia, anyway.  Also other things I hadn't seen in years, and in some cases had been wondering about, e.g., Grandpa's furry "Genuine Sealoid!" duck-huntin' hat.

Under piles in the office, all manner of things.  My 2003 tax paperwork.  A bunch of oddly-assorted paper-ish things, stuffed into an envelope, spanning 1993-2009ish.  The instruction booklets for my old chainsaw and a #4 Enfield.  Floppy disks and manuals for Borland Turbo C version 1.0.  A GyroPoint mousepad...?

Lotsa stuff ends up in trash or recycling.  Some gets sorted into various "keep" categories.

And it's getting to be time to make another storage-locker run.  And I gotta make a vet appointment for the fuzzballs, to get them caught up on their vaccinations and resupplied with anti-flea stuff.

More sorting

Getting near the bottom of the pile of bags of literature brought home from trade shows.  It helps that I'd gone through it not-too-many years ago, so there wasn't that much to do.

Tucked under most of the pile, as the bags move to the "empty" pile (many of the earlier-vintage bags already being empty), hmmm.

An odd pseudo-reptilian leather artifact.  Oh, right: it's my blaster holster.  It's not just a tacticool drop holster; it's specifically designed for shooting bounty hunters under the table, with no need to draw the weapon first.  (Caution: this maneuver may result in a scorched knee.  Assuming you have a real blaster.)

A box of assorted bits of paper from the early 1990s.  Receipts form the trip to Fargo in... well, I remember the PGI convention was in town, so that makes it 1993, right?  Receipts from the Florentine restaurant, back when the quick pasta joint was still operating under that name.  Business cards for bird breeders and munitions merchants.  Notes regarding sundry long-forgotten business.  The usual schematic fragments from long-forgotten projects.  Two scribbles having something to do with cyanuric acid...?

A saber frog.  I'd quite forgotten I had that.

A bag of computer manuals - motherboards and such.  Including a Certificate of Authenticity for an AMD K6 CPU.  I think these are just a little out of sync with the hardware I currently have.

Oops.  Cats escaped, and are playing in the back yard again, as the daylight fades.  Time for a kitty roundup.

☢ ZOMG PANIC ☢

Some miscreant stole some radioactive materials!  Owned by the Government!  Right out of a parked car!

Terrorists!  Nukes!  Dirty bombs!  We're all gonna die!!!!

Er.

Sounds like little sealed calibration sources.  Not large enough quantities to be useful for seriously evil purposes.

Heck, I've got a little plastic disc source with most of a microCurie of cesium 137 in my toolbox.  Bought it by mail order a few years back (it was a whole microCurie back then), when I had a couple of projects that needed a bit of ionizing radiation.

Yeah, you can't buy a plutonium calibrator by mail order.  But, given that this is the mainstream press reporting it, the material in question might have been polonium.

Update:  'Tis reported elsewhere that it was plutonium 239... with a link to an official government report on such incidents that mentions "one plutonium 239 check source", so that's probably right.  How much plutonium is that?  The best reference I can find quickly suggests it's somewhere between 1 and 10 nanoCuries.  Which, even given the low radioactivity of plutonium, is a gonna be a teeny amount.  As in, less than bomb quantity by a great many orders of magnitude.

The report also mentions that the instruments and sources were in "unmarked Pelican brand cases."  Which is probably what got the attention of the thieves; such cases are expensive in their own right, and generally used to transport valuable items such as professional photography equipment, etc.

A few dwarfs short of a fairy tale this morning

Groggy, Queasy, and Achey showed up for work.  No sign of the others.

Have to see what I can accomplish with those three.  Or take the morning off to try to get rid of them, and see what I can accomplish this afternoon sans dwarfs.  Caffeine, nap, naproxen... but what do I do about Queasy?

Further annoyance

Chrome has this somewhat hidden submenu for managing saved passwords.

It doesn't allow editing the saved passwords.  Displaying, yes.  Changing, no.

Someone raised this issue with Google support last year.  Apparently it's broken as designed, and there's no intention of fixing it.  The suggested solution is the password-cache equivalent of "try turning your computer off and back on again."

So much for that appliance.

Just for giggles, I thought I'd break out the old pressure cooker this evening.  Old, as in I think it's been in the family longer than I.  A Presto model S-60.  For some reason, I can't seem to find a PDF of the manual on line...?

Says on the handle it'll cook beef stew in 12 minutes!  Suits me; stew beef is what I brought, plus diced tomatoes, carrots, mushrooms, and bay leaves fresh from the tree.  Also toss in some garlic salt and smoked paprika, and cautiously initiate pressure cookin'!

After a couple of minutes and some fussing on my part, it started making the pressure-cooker sound I remember from when I was a kid.

[I got a few seconds of cellphone video, and maybe eventually I'll figure out how to upload and embed it.  For now, it's on my phone.]

Feeling somewhat confident that all was in order, I set about unloading the dishwasher.

PSSSSSSSSSSSST!

Ohcrapohcrapohcrap.  Yank the cord out first, and assess the situation later.

Um.  It blew a gasket, is what.  Literally, like.  The gasket is protruding on one edge, and tomato/paprika stuff has sprayed all over the formerly-clean contents of the dishwasher.  And the kitchen floor.  And me.

Oh, well.  Clean up the mess, move the contents of the pot to a conventional pot, and allow as how it'll take a lot more than 12 minutes to finish.

Looks like it's possible to buy a replacement gasket, but since we're planning to buy one of those newfangled multi-function electropots to celebrate completion of Operation Bug Out (whenever that might be), there's not much point trying to revive the dinosaur.  And, as far as I can tell, it's not collectible or anything.

Annoyance

One of those many data leaks over the last few years, involving plaintext passwords, must have included the lame password I used to use, back when the Web was new, for sites where security didn't matter much.  (Anything that involves commerce gets a strong, unique password; that's been my policy since e-commerce was first a thing.)

Just got a scam e-mail:

I will directly come to the point. I am aware ******* is your password. Moreover, I do know about your secret and I've evidence of it. You do not know me personally and nobody paid me to examine you.

It is just your hard luck that I discovered your bad deeds. Let me tell you, I installed a malware on the adult video clips (sexually graphic) and you visited this site to experience fun (you know what I mean). When you were busy watching videos, your internet browser started working as a Rdp (Remote control desktop) with a keylogger which provided me with accessibility to your display and also cam. Just after that, my software collected every one of your contacts from fb, and e-mail.

Next, I put in much more hours than I should've looking into your life and made a double-screen video. First part displays the recording you had been watching and other part shows the view from your web camera (its you doing dirty things).

Yeah.  Riiiight.

For starters, I've never used that particular password on a porn site.  I've never logged into a porn site.  Try a little harder next time.

Your RDP doesn't work on my configuration.

And my webcam?  Is unplugged except when I'm actually on a videoconference.  Which is hardly ever.

But... my old lame password is indeed compromised.  So now I gotta run down all the sites where I've used it (such as are still in existence), and change my password, lest someone impersonate me in a comment section, or download free software in my name.