Thoughts Aloud

Archive for the ‘Technical’ Category

I enjoy reading a daily newspaper; but gave up on my lame local paper years ago. I have enjoyed the ability to read news and commentary from all over the world here on the internet and count on aggregation sites like The Drudge Report to point out interesting content elsewhere. Unfortunately, I just want the text to read and find all the gee-whiz graphics, videos, banners, ads, etc. irritating and distracting. I use the Firefox browser and eliminate most of it with Adblock Plus and especially NoScript (which Troy turned me onto a few years ago) add-ons.

Recently, I have installed a new add-on called “Read-it-Later” that is marvelous. When installed, it puts a gold chevron shaped tool button in the upper right beside the search field and the outline of one within the URL field beside the bookmark star. Then, when surfing one lands on a page one wishes to read later, but would not necessarily wish to bookmark, clicking on the empty chevron fills it and places it’s link in a reading list accessed by clicking on the tool button. One cool thing for me is that it keeps my reading list online and synced between my desktop and my laptop from anywhere.

More importantly, one can also right click on a link and select “Read This Link Later” to add it to the list without even opening it. I can and do quickly go through Drudge or other aggregation sites marking interesting links for reading later. I now do this even if I intend to read it immediately, because of its neatest feature.

When one opens the reading list and points the cursor at a link, to the right an icon of a capital “T” appears. If one clicks on the “T” rather than the link, a superb text parser displays just the article’s text, full page, somewhat similar to the “Printer Friendly Format” available on some sites. No pictures, no graphics, no ads, etc. Awesome. For old eyes, <Ctrl-+> a few times zooms the text to a readable font size with text wrapping changing as appropriate. It seems to work on most sites flawlessly, although for those which use “Read More” multi-page formats to force more page views, it may parse only the first page.

Now, for the newspaper. I happened to be watching Fox News yesterday when Rupert Murdoch and Apple formally introduced his new online newspaper called simply “The Daily.” It is available for a subscription price of 99¢ per week, but only on an Ipad. Now, I have been looking for an excuse to get an Ipad, and this may be it; but the Ipad II is coming out in the Spring and I will wait until then to decide. Meanwhile, it would be nice to check-out the quality of “The Daily.”

Then, this evening I stumbled across: The Daily: Indexed, which also archives past issues. It will be interesting to see Murdoch’s reaction to this site. I wouldn’t be surprised if it get’s shut down by his lawyers; but then it might be useful to hook potential customers for the future who do not yet have an Ipad. In any case, Read-it-Later’s text parser works beautifully on its news and opinion articles. I will be visiting it daily as long as it lasts.

Check it out while you still can. Murdoch has invested millions in this venture, which he sees as the newspaper of the future. He has reportedly staffed it with some serious journalistic talent. So far it looks pretty good, and I haven’t even seen all the cool graphics, 360 degree pictures, etc. that are supposed to be dazzle the Ipad kids. I’ll stick to the text. ◄Dave►

Yeah, you are where you thought you were going. I was becoming depressed watching this (so far) bloodless coup the Progressives are so rapidly perpetrating on our country. As a distraction, I decided to try designing my own theme for my blog. I enjoy such creative endeavors, and it has been a welcome break from politics. I am sure I will be tweaking it forever now that I can; but I have been wanting to widen the article column for quite some time, and so far I am pleased with the results. Critical comments welcome. ◄Dave►

My cyber-buddy Troy has started a new forum that I have agreed to help him with. We spent an enjoyable year together on a forum with a small group of other rational thinkers, before we burned out and broke up to start our blogs. Some of our old friends dislike the blog format for discussion and debate, so Troy has started one of the Ning.com social networking sites at:

berational.ning.com

I hope many of the regular commenters here will check us out and join in our discussions there. Any other readers who might be interested in reasonable discourse are invited as well. If you already have a Ning.com identity, you can just log in using the same user name and password. If not, you will need to register with them first. Once registered as a member of the Be Rational site, you will have your own home page and blog and have access to the common BBS type forum, where most of the debate will happen. I hope to see you there. ◄Dave►

OK, I have been poking and tweaking the back end of this thing today. I have enabled gravatars now, so those with a global gravatar at WordPress.com or Gravatar.com et al ,should have it show up here on your comments. If you do not have one uploaded there, it generates a pattern that is unique for you. If you look at one of my comments, it will be obvious that I created my own gravatar and uploaded it as a picture file to the WordPress site.

I also enabled a spam checking plug-in that is supposed to catch most of the robotic spam. I made a test comment and it was just as fast as usual, so I hope it doesn’t slow down the commenting process appreciably. I will be more dilligent at looking in the moderation cue to make sure it didn’t trap a legitimate comment. ◄Dave►

Bloggers are starting to post their life’s job history, and some of them are interesting. I first encountered it at American Digest, and traced the meme back to one called Stageleft:

The most interesting things about blogging is the bloggers. I’ve only ever met four of you out there in the real world, but in some ways I think of many of you as friends.

But I don’t know very much about anyone. And it’s been a long time since we had a new meme. So here’s one.

It’s simple. Just list all the jobs you’ve had in your life, in order. Don’t bust your brain: no durations or details are necessary, and feel free to omit anything that you feel might tend to incriminate you. I’m just curious. And when you’re done, tag another five bloggers you’re curious about.

Serendipitously, I mentioned in a comment just a couple of days ago that I have had a lot of interesting life experiences; but still hadn’t decided what I am going to be when I grow up. I’ll play. So far, I have tried:

• Lawn Mower
• Fishing Worm Breeder/Wholesaler
• Snow Shoveler
• Paper Boy
• Pig Farmer
• Pine Cone Gatherer
• Chicken Farmer
• Car Wash Attendant
• Farm Laborer
• Fruit Picker
• Almond Knocker (hardest job ever)
• Grease Monkey
• Grocery Box Boy
• Busboy
• Ice Cream Dipper (Thrifty Drugstore)
• Sales Clerk
• Radio/TV Repair
• Grocery Clerk
• U.S. Army Soldier
• Microwave Radio Repair
• Morse Code/RTTY Operator
• Waiter
• Bartender
• Bouncer
• Policeman
• Electronic Test Equipment Repair /Calibration
• Satellite Tracking Station Telemetry Technician
• Computer Engineer
• Computer Programmer
• Computer Designer
• Electrical Contractor
• Burglar Alarm Business (Seychelles Islands)
• Farm Manager (Rhodesia)
• 2-Way Radio Repair (Rhodesia)
• Quasi-mercenary (Rhodesia)
• Solar Energy Contractor
• Solar Collector Manufacturer
• Solar Collector Traveling Salesman
• Charter Boat Deckhand
• Commercial Fisherman (California)
• Newspaper Columnist
• Yacht Captain (Mexico)
• Tuna Boat Captain (Hawaii)
• Marine Electronics Business
• Fishing Magazine Columnist
• 2-Way Radio Business
• Cell Phone/Fax Machine Retailer
• PC Clone Manufacturer
• Computer Consultant
• FM Radio Station Engineer
• Cattle Rancher
• Retirement Care Facility for the Elderly
• Montessori Preschool
• Business Consultant
• Webmaster
• Ghost Writer

Many were entrepreneurial pursuits rather than jobs, so I just listed all the different ways in which I have earned money. I have lived in eight countries and sixteen States, so home is where my bunk is at any particular time. Several were repeated in new locales; but the list was already long enough, so I didn’t repeat the duplicates. I suspect I may have left a few out.

I tag all the other few bloggers who happen to read this. You know who you are, and I would be interested in reading your background. ◄Dave►

Well, I didn’t know what it was either, until I read this post from Hugh Hewitt. After following a few links there, including the one to get the Twitter 101 beginner’s guide, which explains how useful it could be, I signed up for an account.

My Twitter URL is simply twitter.com/thoughtsaloud and now I need some associates to “follow” and “tweet” to. So, if you Twitter send me a tweet and I will add you to my list. I suppose I will tweet every time I add a post or comment here, and perhaps make quick comments on things I surf across that do not merit a post here.

If you do not currently Twitter, it is probably because you are a fossil like me. Lets give the kids a run for their money and join in their new paradigm for staying connected. Sign up and reply to one of my tweets and I will reply to yours. Good grief, this sounds silly; but I think there is perhaps some utility to it, if for no other reason than to expand our horizons and perhaps attract more commenters to our blogs. ◄Dave►

As a followup to my Child Wind post below, here is another example on Michelle Malkin’s website:

Jeffrey Rosen’s piece there is rather interesting.◄Dave►

This story at Atlas Shrugs bothers me – a lot! I first encountered it last night as I was making the rounds of the key players in the Obama Birth Certificate saga. I figured there was some reasonable explanation, and that Pamela was just becoming paranoid. Now, 24 hours later, there are more damning updates to it, and Google seems to be avoiding dealing with it.

If it really is what it increasingly appears to be, I feel a chill wind blowing across our internet. Say it ain’t so… please! Else, what is the next best search engine? Google just got really sour for me. ◄Dave►

I saw this “badge” on another blog and decided to check it out.  When I entered the URL for this blog it returned the code to embed here to produce this:

I found that encouraging, because I have often been criticized for my verbosity and penchant for fifty-cent words. It seemed implausible, however, and I noticed that my last entry was the simple one regarding my new hardware; so I tried it again using the URL for my “About Thoughts Aloud” page. This returned:

Come on… OK, how about my serious essay on Sovereign Rights? This returned:

Ouch! I guess I wasted my time with that one! How many geniuses am I going to entice to read it? I tried several more and a few of the longer posts I have made. They all came out as Jr. High School, High School, or:

Finally, I retested a few of them to confirm that it is consistent, and not just generating a random output. If this thing has any validity, I am pleased; for that means my writing is readable by most nominally educated folks, even if they occasionally need to use a dictionary.

You can try out your own blog, or just about any webpage, by clicking on any of the above images; they all take you to the same test. ◄Dave►

Phil, you may be the only one still following this blog who will find this interesting; but I’ll make the report anyway.  I am located too far from town to get cable or DSL service, so I have had a Hughes Satellite system for several years. When not throttled back because I have exceeded my daily limit, it provides download speeds approaching 100 KB/s.

I have also had a Cingular (now ATT) aircard for a couple of years for my laptop, which got me speeds in the 25 KBS range on their Edge Network anywhere my cellphone would work.  Recently, I noticed that my cellphone was indicating that the new 3G network was available at my home location.  Yesterday, I purchased one of ATT’s new “Mercury” USB adapters that you see the guy plug into his laptop in weird locations in current TV commercials.

The device is a marvel of technology.  The installation software is built into it, so all one need do is plug it in to any computer and run the painless install program.  It even has a slot for a micro-SD memory card, so that it can also be used as a portable flash drive. I bought it at Radio Shack, and a 2GB memory card only cost $ 13 (I still can’t get used to how small and cheap memory is now).

The performance is even more amazing. The response time to a request is noticably faster than dealing with the latency of the trip up and back through the satellite and Hughes Network Center.  More importantly, it is approximately twice as fast on the download speed.  I reach speeds over 300 KB/s with it, although it averages less… probably 150 KB/s, which is still half again Hughes best speed, and I would have been tickled with a 75 KB/s average on that network.

So far, I couldn’t be happier with my purchase, and will probably now cancel my Hughes account.  It is like I just got a turbo system.  Not only is it nice to be able to watch videos uninterrupted because they load faster than they play, I can download an hour-long podcast in a couple of minutes, and fast servers like the Drudge Report load and refresh snappier; but as far as I know there is no FAP (fair access policy) to throttle me back for transferring too many MB of data in too short a period. ◄Dave►

This is a test post to try the “Blog Post” feature in MS Word 2007. This is a really nice feature that allows one to use the word processer to make a post to a blog without even having a browser open, much less the blog. While the internal WordPress editor works fine, I am quite impressed with the utility of ScribeFire for making a quick post in response to something while surfing without having to open the blog; but for essay type posts, this feature of Word is awesome. It even automatically went out and imported the “Category” list so one can categorize the post as it is made. Sweet.

By some estimates, one trillion dollars was lost in the stock market yesterday. Where did it go? The same place the “value” in our homes went in the past year? The same place the new $650 bn of credit came from that the FED made available to the financial markets yesterday, perhaps? This demonstrates how worthless our currency actually is. 34,722 Tons of gold didn’t just disappear at the Wall Street casino yesterday. Nor did 22,569 Tons of the stuff suddenly materialize over at the FED. No wonder it seems like every other commercial one hears on radio and TV these days is for some gold trading company. (I miss my forum emoticons… eyes should be rolling here.)

The thing to notice is that the value of individual savings denominated in U.S. Dollars took yet another enormous hit yesterday. Those invested in the stock market took a double hit. On average, their stocks, mutual funds, and retirement accounts lost 7% of their value in a single day. Then, the buying power of what is left was diluted by the introduction of another $650 bn of brand new funny money, representing nothing but thin air, by the FED. One way to understand the effect of that mindboggling figure is that it is the equivalent of adding another 21,666,667 welfare families to our population overnight. Then giving them each an unearned $30K tax-free income for a year, to compete with us in the marketplace for exactly the same amount of goods and services that existed yesterday, none of which they helped produce. The market is rational, even if the government is not. Supply and Demand are always balanced by Price. In a free marketplace, it could not be otherwise. Is there any question that prices will soon increase accordingly?

That is why, when I could not buy silver with it, I went and bought another $1K worth of coffee, tobacco, and beans. It is interesting to note that back when I was earning that money just a few years ago, a three-pound package of Jose’s Columbia Supremo coffee beans at COSTCO was under $7. I buy some every trip I make there and have watched the price steadily climb the past couple of years. I had to pay almost $11 a bag for the two cases I bought yesterday; but I have no reason to think it will ever be cheaper. As an imported commodity, assuming that COSTCO survives, it will be interesting to see how much it costs a year from now. If they don’t, it may be more valuable than gold.

Today, I am thinking of going to buy some more ammunition. Not that I need it; but since I can’t find any silver, it will undoubtedly conserve the value of my ready cash better than all these worthless green pictures of Franklin. Besides, if we do spiral into unfettered hyperinflation, bullets could come in handy for bartering. ◄Dave►

This is a test post using ScribeFire (new tool) on my old blog, which I am now resurrecting.  It has been a few days since I stopped participating on the Reasonable Rationals forum (where I made 2,240 posts in a year), and with the world as we know it coming to an end, I need a place to comment on current events… even if nobody reads them.

I moved the index page of my blog to the front page of this website; but all the old files are still where they always were.  My old index file has been renamed, so that it can be accessed at the [Old Site] link on the right in the Internal Links section and will then function as it always did.  Once there, the “Home” button will bring you back here. (Eventually, I will change its name to “Blog,” and delete the current “Blog” button, which is currently a broken link… I don’t have Expression Web installed on this machine, since all my websites are now dynamic, so I will have to drag out the laptop to fix it.)

I guess the word for today is 777.  Interestingly, that was almost exactly 7% of the market wiped out in a single day, and I got the news from a TV set in a bank as I drew out most of my ready cash.  I left just enough to keep my debit card useful for gasoline stations, etc.  I expected to get an argument, but didn’t.  She even had it in the drawer and didn’t bother to call a manager.  There wasn’t a long line, or anything like that; but I got the impression that they had become quite accustomed to folks walking in and withdrawing several thousand dollars in cash.  I intended to buy some more silver with it, but silver has dried up all across the country.  Even Kitco can’t supply small denominations:

The following products have been temporarily removed from our Precious Metal Store until further notice due to production and delivery delays that retailers are currently facing; 1 oz Gold bars, 1 oz Kitco Gold bars, 10 oz Gold bars, 1 oz Silver Eagles, 1 oz Silver Maples, 1 oz Silver Philharmonic coins, 1 oz Olympic Silver Maples, 100 oz Silver bars and 1 oz Palladium Maples.

Since congress promptly decided to take a couple of days holiday after their failed bailout bill crashed it, tomorrow’s stock market activity should be rather interesting too.  It sure feels good not to have any assets invested there.  Since they did not pony up the $700bn the financial markets needed, reports are that the FED printed another $650bn today!  The future for gold is looking brighter all the time. ◄Dave►

I have done some rearranging of the forum. First, I did away with the Essays forum to consolidate and spread out the lopsided topics. Nothing is lost, and all links to individual posts still work, but I have moved all the Essay topics to other forums. Those that could be classified have been put where they are topical. Older essays that don’t fit the classifications have been moved to the Miscellaneous Forum. The Reason vs. Tyranny forum has been renamed Galt’s Gulch in honor of Ouray, Colorado and the second most influential book ever written, “Atlas Shrugged,” by Ayn Rand. The Reason vs. Religion forum has been renamed a less formal Atheist’s Corner. The Science vs. Skepticism forum has been renamed Science & Such and the subject “metaphysics” added to the description, for it will surely turn up.

That accomplished, along with the addition of the FREETHINKERS? essay, now I am ready to go trolling for some more libertarian thinkers. ◄Dave►

OK, Scott, I had to take that ignoble pile of balsa out of the Jeep yesterday to go shopping. I got tired of looking at it this afternoon, so I stripped it. The aluminum prop adapter was tweaked; but I guess that saved the motor shaft, because the motor itself is fine and runs true. The motor controller, receiver, and all the servos are undamaged. I suppose that one of the additional advantages of the new 2.4 GHz radio control system is that I don’t have to worry about a faulty VHF crystal now either.

The cowl was history, but the canopy was unscratched. That, the magnetic hatch, carbon fiber spar, and misc. hardware was all I bothered to save. Even though everything aft and one of the wings was perfect, I just don’t have room for saving spare airframe parts anymore. It is just as well; back when I had a garage full of them, I rarely used them. Now all I need to do is glue up the new model, and reinstall all the electronics. I am on it, buddy; but don’t expect to be ready by Sunday. L

Btw: The problem we were having last night with the laptop was the mapping software desperately trying to get a GPS fix even though I had unplugged the receiver to bring it out to the picnic table. I am glad it happened, for I had been blaming Vista in my mind for my ever-busy and thus power hungry processor, and certainly don’t need to load it when I am sitting still. I also download a new Vista compliant driver for the touchpad which I hadn’t bothered to do yet because I use a wireless mouse on the desk. The sudden shutdown at the end was just a depleted battery, which Vista recovered nicely from. I guess we spent more time viewing Adams’ animations than I had thought. J Meanwhile, I have added some additional remarks on the subject to the forum debate on it HERE.◄ Dave►