Silicon Valley Redneck

Looks like the pipeline is empty

While the Colonial Pipeline is supposedly back in operation, the overall fuel distribution system seems to have gotten badly disrupted.

GasBuddy (the Web version, not the app, which I long since deleted from my phone for good and sufficient reasons*) currently shows all of the main gas stations in the area being out of fuel.  The ones that aren't showing empty?  Looks like their status is unknown, or last updated several hours ago.

(It does appear that some of the truck stops on the Interstate are actually reporting having fuel at the moment, so we're not in total Mad Max territory just yet.)

Update:  Based on driving by a few gas stations this morning, it appears that they mostly do in fact have fuel, and people are behaving fairly normally.  Prices are up substantially from last week, but there are no roving bands of mutants driving VW hedgebugs or whatever.

(We're having a strange morning.  Plan was: take Sumatra to the local vet for an echocardiogram, which he's supposed to get annually, and, after dropping him off, go pick up groceries.  So, bright and early, off to the vet, with Sumatra trying to contact the ARRL the whole way.  (W1AW!  W1AW!).  Arriving at the vet's office, we find that his appointment is for next Thursday.  So we bring him home, Joy gives the critters food, and we head off to the grocery store.  Their pickup bot doesn't have an order associated with Joy's phone.  Eh?  Back home, check order status... huh.  No pickup scheduled.  Some kinda glitch, or what?  Anyway, it's now scheduled for this afternoon.)

 

* As I recall, it had mutated into a nasty mess of adware/spyware, and insisted on draining my phone's battery even when I wasn't using it.  That was a few years back; I don't know if it's gotten cleaned up since then.

Zombie mode, day 3

Condition gradually improving, though I haven't exactly been making progress on the Stuff I Gotta Do.

Down in the New Victory Garden, the corn is sprouting.  The meal corn, anyway; I planted the initial areas of sweet corn a few days later, so I wouldn't expect it to be visibly sprouty yet.  Various squashes and melons are also sprouting.  And, I got the first round of tomato plants stuck in the dirt yesterday, along with some other things I'd sprouted in the basement.

(I refrain from checking for germination Miles Vorkosigan style, i.e., by digging up the seeds several times a day to see how they're doing.  I'd try sweeping a germanium detector over the garden, but it turns out that germanium detectors don't detect germination, nor even geraniums.)

And... in the ongoing (but largely on hold) lawnmower saga, I realized that my torque wrench has a nice long handle.  So, if I crank it up to 150 foot-pounds of loosen, and apply lots of force to the end of the handle... oops.  Not enough room.  I'll have to remove the deck, argh.  That's not a today thing.  Well, I do need to learn to remove the deck, if only to allow for sharpening the blades.

Supposed to be grilling dinner tonight.  An hour ago, we were having a fairly brisk wind out of the North.  Now, it's moderately diminished and coming from the Southeast.  Crazy weather patterns right here.  Well, it doesn't look too bad for grilling, though I may have to allow extra time for the charcoal to get going in the cool conditions.

Downtime reading

Sick days and odd bits of time... been reading the Evil Giraffe's "Fermi Resolution" tales.

They're weird.  Imaginative.  Future history crossed with urban fantasy, with an assumption that magic and civilization as we know it are incompatible.

I haven't found an explanation for the term "Fermi Resolution" so far, but I'll take a guess: it's an explanation for the Fermi Paradox, crossed with Clarke's Third Law.

Fermi Paradox: Space is big.  Really, really big.  The Universe is old.  Even making pessimistic assumptions for the many unknowns in the Drake Equation, the Galaxy ought to be positively crawling with spacefaring species.  So why aren't they here?

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

My surmise as to the Resolution: Once a civilization develops sufficiently advanced technology, the technology becomes magic and destroys the civilization, or at least enables its destruction.  In the timeline of these stories, it seems to happen around 2100.

Keep a close watch on the Shangqiu Institute of Demonology.

Immune system overreaction

Is a thing in society, as well as in biology.  We've been seeing a lot of it the last several years, and especially the past year.

The latest: Colonial Pipeline.  Some idiot let ransomware loose on the business computers... so the company shut down the entire pipeline as a precaution.  This is reportedly causing massive disruptions to the regional fuel supply, with downstream consequences to the general supply chain: there's a threat that truck stops will run out of Diesel, so trucks will stop operating, so goods (e.g., food) won't get delivered to stores.

I was pointing out, back during the Bush Administration, the potential for disruptive terrorism using readily-available (and reasonably harmless) materials to simulate a chem/bio terror attack and trigger a massive over-reaction by various security forces.  Nowadays, the attacker doesn't even need to be on site.

Afterthought:  Y'know, for those of us in that line of work (more or less), security of SCADA systems has been a big concern since before the Internet was even available to the public.  I'm talking 1980s, here, that I know of.  Yes, I know there's been a lot of gross negligence in setting up such systems, but... shouldn't it at least be possible to determine that a breach of the business network hasn't affected the SCADA system, and continue or resume operation?

(Yes, the Internet of Doohickies is a stupid idea.  Networked doohickies should have their own communication network, using protocols that are no more complex than necessary, and any communication with the Internet should go through a managed gateway.  I intensely dislike the idea of having, e.g., a "security" camera that connects to my LAN, inside the firewall, and talks to some mystery server somewhere in China.)

Zombie morning

Multiple ugh.

On top of several kinds of stress and a big list of stuff I gotta get done in the next few days, I started out the day with a nasty sinus headache.

Not making much progress on the must-do list right now.

Update:  Feeling moderately better Tuesday morning, but still kinda ugh.  Yesterday evening, Joy said I was looking pale and flushed at the same time.

What I really need is a vacation.  About a month of slacking off and decompressing.  I've been needing that for over three years now, and there's been no opportunity.

Silicon Valley competence strikes again!

I didn't get the complete story yet, and I'm only dimly recalling the background, but:

Seems there's now a lien against our property here.

Filed by Santa Clara County.

On the basis of... well, many years ago, Joy incurred some government debt.  Lapsed car registration, parking ticket, or something.  Anyway, the notices all went to a wrong address, being across the street from somewhere she had once lived.  Eventually, it escalated to some county collections department (note, government collection agencies are not subject to any of the laws that constrain ordinary debt collectors, nor, apparently, to any laws whatsoever), and eventually she got some sort of long-past-due notice, whereupon we went traipsing down to the county office and were informed that it was the last day to pay up and avoid dire consequences, so I had to pay on her behalf right then and there - by check, I think.  Should have the record of it, somewhere.

Anyway, it seems that the payment was never recorded, and notices have continued to go to the old, and wrong to begin with, address, and now the old county in the old state has tracked Joy down well enough to file a lien, but not well enough to send a notice to the correct address.

Further investigation will be required.  Legal action would seem to be called for, but... yeah.  Government.  Good luck with that.

Update:  Apparently it's a different long-ago-paid debt, something to do with taxes.  And it seems that zombie liens are just a thing, implacably following people around (without, mind you, any sort of notification) and expiring after 10 years.

Windy out there

The weather app on my phone popped up a wind alert this morning, but in fact conditions were calm enough mid-morning that I could get some herbicide spraying done around the driveway and overflow parking area.

This afternoon, though... gusts getting north of 25 MPH.  I brought the flag in earlier, since it was flapping rather too vigorously for comfort.  Had thought I might plant some more squash and/or melon seeds, but it's getting a mite fierce even for that.  And it's not a time to be out in the barn with the roll-up door open for illumination.

Supposed to be rainy this evening and tomorrow.  Oh, well.  There's plenty of stuff I need to be getting done indoors too.

Update:  Looks like the wind blew a bunch of cattle back to this side of the ridge!  They'd been out of view the past couple of weeks, but now it looks like a regular Future Steaks of America convention - all buttercup-fed!

Ah, memories of memories!

In the ongoing saga of CuriousMarc's frotzèd desktop computer, today's topic is DRAM.

He mentions the 1103, whereof he doesn't have a specimen.  Next time I'm rummaging through the barn, I'll have to see if I can find my box of them.  Never actually used them, given the arcane support circuitry required (including level shifters and sense amplifiers).

Then on to the 4116, a 16Kbit, multiplexed-address part.  Oh, yes.  Back in my 6502 days....

Initial RAM was a bank of 1Kbit SRAM chips.  Designed around the 2102, but what I actually had was something else... Signetics 2602?... that turned out to have a hold-time requirement on writes, so I had to futz with the control logic to narrow the WE- signal.  I think a one-shot was involved.

Then, expansion!  A separate breadboard with, IIRC, a whopping four banks of 4Kbit 2107B DRAM chips!  Not too difficult to use.  Had some timing requirements, but those were easily dealt with.  Everything TTL compatible except for the 12V chip enable, which needed a special driver chip.  I seem to recall that I was running a refresh cycle per bus cycle, as the RAM was twice as fast as the CPU, so why not?

Eventually, I got my hands on a batch of 4116s, and came up with driver logic to deal with the multiplexed address and the other funny timing.  Used an 18.432MHz clock, which, by the conventional wisdom of the day, was much too fast for a wire-wrapped assembly, but it worked!  That was the main RAM in my main computer for the next few years, until I bought a 6809-based kit from SwTPC, but that's another story.

Addendum:  It appears that the expression "16K - no way!" is unknown to DuckDuckGo, at least as it applies to DRAM pinouts.  I'm vaguely recalling that it applied to the 22-pin, non-multiplexed configuration, as used on the 2107; there was one pin available for an extra address line, to reach 8Kbits, but that was the limit, and Intel (?) was pushing the 16-pin, multiplexed format, on which replacing the CS- pin with one more address line would allow 16Kbits.

Additional addendum:  The 1103 having arcane requirements for support circuitry?  Now I'm having dim memories of an early EPROM, maybe the 1702.  Reading was fine.  Programming, though... something to do with high-voltage drive on most of the pins, and having to invert the address bus partway through the cycle?  My first Intel memory databook should still be around, somewhere, I think.  Another thing to dig out, IMCFT.  Anyway, the 2708 was easy by comparison.

Wait, terminology?

Spotted here:

On April 30, 2021, NASA’s Perseverance rover made history as the first spacecraft to record sounds from another spacecraft on another planet.

Excuse me?  One of those vehicles is a ground crawler.  The other is a frickin' helicopter.  How is either of them a "spacecraft"?

Yeah, yeah, they were carried through outer space to get there.  That made them space cargo, or payload.  But I guess they identify as spacecraft, and we mustn't hurt their widdle feewings?

"From the rancher mending fences with the wire she has found..."

No, not mending fences today.  Scavenging wire mesh from an old fence, and putting up trellises for various clambering legumes.  Cutting segments of that old wire and bending the ends to avoid sticky-out poky hazards is a bunch of work.  Also, an 18' segment is about all I can drag down to the garden without trying to roll it up or something; good thing that's the length the clambering-legume patch ended up.

Also, I find that, when it comes to installing T-post clips, fence pliers are not the right tool for the job.  They have many uses, but this ain't one of them.  Consult the U-Toobz... ah.  There's a little tool made just for the use.  Come to think of it, I was aware of this tool a year ago, but apparently failed to buy one.  Oh, well: order one for Monday, for future use.  In the meantime, find a demonstration of how to bend the clips with a screwdriver.  Back down to the garden, and get the trellises reasonably secured.

How did I not buy the clip-bending tool last year?  But apparently I really didn't; I looked in all the places such a thing might be, and it's not in any of them.

Planting tomorrow, I guess.  Almost time to start fixing dinner.  After dinner, more searching for things that aren't in any of the places they might be.

And one of these days I'll get around to turning more of that wire mesh into a compost-heap containment structure.

(Filk reference in title.)

Microclimate

I think I'd noted before that this particular hill doesn't always match the weather of the surrounding area very well.  Something to do with being at the confluence of weather patterns, and being a hill.

Yesterday's forecast called for a rainy morning today.

This morning's forecast had rain nowhere in view.

Tractor Mike put up a video showing how to grease a particularly difficult lubrication point on the front axle of a 4WD tractor.  Huh.  I don't recall even trying to grease that one.  And I have been consulting the manual, so... did I miss something?  The manual, like the tractor, is out in the barn.  Maybe I should go take a look.

Out the garage door... huh.  Sounds like rain.  Looks like rain.  Feels like rain.  Yup, that's rain, all right; great big drops, falling heavily.

Consult weather map: extremely localized rain.  Like, right here.

Oh, and now it's sunny again.  But meanwhile I found a PDF of the manual, and it doesn't show a grease point on the front axle.  Guess the Kubota B series doesn't need greasing there.

Ongoing lawnmower saga is ongoing

So!  I'd pretty much come to the conclusion that the only way to get that belt out of there, short of cutting it, was to remove the entire doggone left hydrostat.

Service manual (for a slightly different model; apparently the service manual for this exact model doesn't exist) says I need to remove four smaller bolts and three larger bolts.  Three?  I'm only seeing two.  Manual says one of them, being the first to be torqued on reassembly, is the "front inner mounting bolt."  Hm.  It's not evident in the pictures.  Not even a little bit.  Look underneath with a mirror.  Bingo!  It's... awkwardly placed, but I can get a socket on it.

Manual says it should be torqued to 50-55 foot-pounds.  Based on the effort required to loosen it, I'd say it was torqued to at least 1 foot-gorilla.  Also, it's nigh impossible to get a wrench on the nut, except from the top of the frame, reaching down through an opening in an aluminum casting that has nasty sharp jaggies on it.  Application of a deburring tool gets the casting reasonably defanged.  But, this really calls for an extra-long-handled wrench (plus a second person to hold it).

And, given the difficulty of applying force to the ratchet on the bolt (there's not much room for a cheater bar, even if I had one), I end up using a redneck impact wrench, i.e., whacking the end of the ratchet handle with a deadblow hammer.  This has two effects:  (1) the bolt rotates, carrying the nut along with it (nobody holding the wrench on the nut, yup), and (2) I receive a nasty owie of the left pinky finger.  Some bleeding, likely quite a nasty bruise, plenty of pain, though that's diminishing now.

Anyway, looks like I'll be needing an extra long 5/8" box wrench.  And not the ratchety type, 'cause one of those wouldn't fit between nut and hydrostat housing, from any angle.

Meanwhile out in the garden: the onion sets seem to be doing their thing, and the area where I'd scattered the clover seeds is showing lots and lots of tiny green sprouts... which is somewhat alarming, as I wouldn't expect clover seeds to germinate that quickly.  Guess I'll wait and see what the sprouts grow into.  And the lawn is growing like crazy, so I guess I'd better mow what I can with the tractor Real Soon Now.

Update:  Got some more urgent areas mowed, using the tractor.  It's unwieldy, even with the loader off, and rather too top-heavy for much of the terrain around here, but it does cut a wide swath.  Gotta get that mower fixed, and also contact the hay guy to make sure he wants the spring hay this year... and to let him know about the Annex.

And the finger isn't looking all that bad the next morning.  Still kinda messed up, but getting more better than worse.

Caffeination without calibration is not good

Gotta recailbrate my morning caffeine dose.

Initial dose, early AM, before breakfast, proves insufficient by the time it's getting light outside.  So I grab a supplement, in the form of a mini-can of diet cola.

This adds up to too much caffeine, leaving me jittery and definitely too nervous to make any phone calls (it doesn't help that I've always been nervous about making phone calls).  Also too jittery to work on stuff requiring focus.  Could do gardening, I guess.

Another lost concept

So, CuriousMarc continues his efforts at getting his extremely-vintage HP desktop computer back in operation, even resorting to wearing his quasi-replica magic pants.

(The pants don't have the true 1970s magic, as they're not proper bell-bottoms.)

Anyway.  The most recent installment features a pair of vintage HP diagnostic probes: an HP 546A logic pulser and an HP 547A current tracer.  They didn't work for tracking down the problem at hand, but the principle is intriguing: use the pulser to apply a signal to a net, then use the current tracer to see which trace is actually carrying current; the trace with the current leads to whatever is shorting out the net.

Hm.  I wonder if anybody's refined this, maybe into something safe for boards with the latest generation of low-voltage logic...?

Apparently no.  Seems like the only current tracer probes around nowadays are meant for use by electricians, and are much too bulky for poking around on circuit boards (even low-density 1970s boards).  I did find a reference to someone (since deceased) who'd had a go at making some sort of 547A knockoff, years ago, for his own use.

Well!  Seems like this is yet another thing to put on the Maybe-A-Product-Someday list.  Gotta make the probes (including the magnetic pickup for the current probe) pointier nowadays.  And... methinks selectivity could be improved by synchronizing the current tracer to the pulser, so it'd have a sample window just when the pulse ought to be happening.  Maybe the pulser could have selectable output levels, perhaps 1V, 2V, and 4V (in case anyone's still using 5V-tolerant logic) [see addendum].  And, selectable peak current, or pulse energy, or something?

Limitations, though... this'll play nice with 2-layer boards, or 4-layer with the inner layers used as ground planes, but utility falls off as the layer count increases.

Anyway, not something I'll be playing with anytime soon.  Maybe when I have a bunch of focused, brain-functioning free time, long about the 37^th of never.

(Alternative approach to finding the short: apply a low-voltage, high-current DC source to the offending net, and use a thermal camera to see what traces get warm.)

Addendum:  Seems the pulser probe accommodated a range of system voltages by the simple expedient of running off a user-provided power source and being able to handle 3~18V for TTL or [CD4000-series] CMOS.

Gotta recalibrate my hearing. Or maybe my listening.

Just heard an announcement that made me think people were getting guided-missile destroyers.  Going into the fun and lucrative privateering business, perchance?

Oh.  They're getting something called "Zoom walls."  Some sort of teleconferencing thing, I guess.  No relation to DDG-1000.

Warning: feral judge on the loose

I'm sorry, I'll read that again: "Federal."  Scare quotes required.

Somehow, I missed this story when it first came out.  A district judge back in the People's Republic of California ordered Los Angeles to offer housing to all the bums on Skid Row.

Sorry, but where exactly in the U.S. Constitution is a requirement imposed on the States, or political subdivisions thereof, to provide housing for anyone?  Or, for that matter, any authority under which Congress could by statute impose such a requirement?

This is utter madness.

Having a REMAIN INDOORS morning

By the time I woke up, there was a lot of thunder about.  Not a lot of rain - that started later - but sprinkles and much thunder.

By the time I'd normally be trudging down to the road to fetch the paper, my phone was popping up lightning-nearby warnings, and flashes of light through the windows confirmed this.

Then the weather radio squawked: severe thunderstorm warning!  High winds, heavy rain, quarter-sized hail*!  Likely hail damage to vehicles!  Stay away from windows!  (Affected areas seem to be a fair bit South and/or East of here, though.)

Later, the weather radio squawked again: flash flood warning!  The usual dire warnings about driving on potentially-floody roads.  Sounds like this one does apply right around here.

Oh, my goodness me.  Looking at the latest radar map, it appears that Pigeon Forge is getting clobbered.  Well, that is a fair distance to the South.  As is often the case, we're in the gap between to parades of truly fierce weather.

Maybe I'll just go back to bed for a while.

Update:  Repeated warbles from the weather radio, mainly updated severe thunderstorm warnings.  We haven't been seeing much of the wind here, though the rain has been somewhat intense at times, and there's been an abundance of thunder.  There was a convenient gap in the rain just when FedEx showed up with the new fire-resistant document box.  (Claims to be a "safe", and is styled accordingly, but locksmiths sneer at this type.  It was reasonably cheap.)

I should be hunting financial records in the barn, but not in this weather.  Forecast for tomorrow afternoon looks more promising.

 

* All this fuss over quarter-sized hail.  I'd hate to hear the warnings for full-sized hail!

Yargh.

One of those things about moving....

Trying to get organized to deal with taxes (yeah, extended deadline, been distracted).  I know I'm gonna need four numbers... which are on little slips of paper from 1976-ish and 1984-ish.  Those slips of paper are in a folder, which I could immediately lay my hands on back in Sunnyvale.

Been searching through boxes.  There are a lot of boxes.  I did find later records from the financial institution in question, which should have included the numbers I'm looking for, but apparently said institution had already forgotten those numbers by the early 1990s and just shows a bunch of N/A in those spaces.

Urgh.  I can approximate two of the numbers based on a tax form from a few years back, but the other two remain entirely missing.  Gotta find the folder.

Searching through boxes of papers is yet another way to bother my back.  Also, it seemed best to come back in from the barn, as the wind has picked up considerably and I got a lightning warning on my phone.  After a bit of rest, I'll resume searching the boxes in the basement.

Life continues busy

Trying to get more planting done before a week of rain commences.  Also, various areas of lawn are looking urgent on the mowing front.

The mower remains sidelined.  It appears that I'll need to dismount the hydrostat entirely.  Specs say it weighs something under 30 pounds, so I guess that's manageable.

Meanwhile, I took the tiller off the tractor and propped it up, then put the mower deck on the tractor and mowed a couple of urgent areas that aren't too steep.  A large area of the front lawn is too steep for the tractor, so I really do need to get the mower back in operation.  Guess that's a project for next week... assuming there's an opportunity to work on stuff in the barn with the door rolled up for light without having rain blow in.

On the planting front, I finished raking and seeding the Old Victory Garden, and, down in the new garden, got various squashes and melons planted.  There being plenty of room, I assume I'll plant more a bit later.  Still need to plant corn, beans, peas, etc., and eventually start planting out tomatoes and peppers.  I think it's about time to move the artichoke sprouts into larger pots, but not time to plant them out yet (lest they be devoured by bunnies).  Also got an assortment of grocery-store sweet potatoes sitting around thinking about sprouting.  (I found a bunch of sweet potato fragments in the old garden, so presumably the plants did well last year, but were hidden among the weeds so I couldn't find them to dig up the roots.)

And, I've ordered some selective grass killer to apply to the old garden.  There's a lot of grass sprouting up from rhizome fragments, and I really want to get rid of it in favor of clover and the occasional sunflower.  (Speaking of which, I suppose I could be starting a couple-dozen sunflowers in little pots in the basement.)

Almost time to head back out to the garden and do some more planting, placement of weed barrier, maybe placement of T-posts for bean/pea trellises, and other Fun Stuff.

Checks weather report... looks like there's a little rain in the area already.  Supposed to get significant rain tomorrow morning through early afternoon, Tuesday pretty much all day, and Wednesday all day.  I'm sure the vegetation will appreciate it.