Somehow it's turned into one of those really busy months, where I've been working on stuff more than anything else. Thing is, most of it isn't really worth talking about; not yet, anyway. Lifestyle maintenance is like that. It's not glamorous, interesting, or even all that fun, but it still has to get done, if only for the sake of one's mental health.
For starters, I've been trying to free up some room in my office (where I spend most of my days, if only because of my day job). Talking to someone a week or two ago about home …
Time and funds permitting, I try to go on retreat every year or two. I like driving someplace new, someplace I've never been before, and getting off the grid for a couple of days. I find that it makes it much easier to relax, rest, catch up on my reading (or sometimes television), do some writing, tinker with locks a bit, and generally be nonverbal for about a week. It's not easy these days (and won't be for a while, I suspect) but it is something that I at least attempt periodically. The AirBnB I rented had a most unusual …
Early in October of 2022.ev, we paid a visit to an exhibit of artifacts at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco from the reign of Ramesses II, third ruler of the nineteenth dynasty of Egypt. Since covid started we haven't done a whole lot of going places so we figured that, all things in our respective risk models being equal, this would be an outing worth making the time for. As I write those post I don't know if it's still there, but the museum's page didn't 404 so it probably is. If you're in the area, it's …
Warning: I'm going to be geeking about about science fiction to provide context for the rest of the post. Either skip to the bottom and page up a few times or close the tab. Also, the narrative is going to wander around a bit because there's a fair amount of setup.
Note: There are a couple of affiliate links.
As my handle implies I'm a sucker for time travel stories. I love the idea of seeing history as it happens and not just reading about it. I'm not that inclined to talk about fandom, so I tend to not bring …
After things slowed down a bit at work over the summer, I finally took some advice given to me by a number of people in various capacities and took a vacation. When your boss orders you to take a couple of weeks off because he's afraid that you'll spontaneously combust, it's kind of hard to argue the point. So, I put in for almost a month off, rented a car (because my family wanted to retain the option to travel as necessary), and scouted out someplace suitably far away in the mountains for as long as I could afford (which …
A couple of jobs ago I worked in an electronics lab that had all the toys - from tool cabinets as tall as I am to anti-static gear all over the place (and ruthlessly enforced rules for making use of it) to signal analyzers and oscilloscopes. Unfortunately, my job (and the project) were such that I couldn't just go messing around in there to teach myself to use the diagnostic instruments. If the 'scopes weren't in use at the time then they'd been set up specifically for the hardware we were working on. This means that messing around with the settings …
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the worst year in a long, long while was capped off by discovering that my car had been wrecked and towed without my knowing about it. I finally got the pictures I took at the junkyard up for the horror and edification of all and sundry. Long story short, my car was indeed totalled, undrivable, time for an insurance payout. As usual, Captain Corner Case strikes again and everything was way the hell more difficult than it ever really needed to be. Where should I start?
One of my holiday break hobby projects, a palate cleanser if you will, was reconditioning a classic Radio Shack touch tone dialer I'd picked up on eBay somewhen around Thanksgiving. They're retrotech to be sure, dating back to the days when the touch-tone dialing that we take for granted these days (so much so that we don't even hear them anymore because we use mobile phones) was actually pretty rare.
Note: A lot of the following history of telephony has been edited to reflect only the salient points for this article. Telephony experts out there will probably rankle a bit …
Last year at Thotcon the presenters were given what were purported to be faraday shielded backpacks - backpacks manufactured with fabric woven out of very fine conductive wires that are said to reflect radio frequency signals inside and outside. The idea is that if you have a cellphone and you put it inside the bag, you could be sure that the phone was not talking to any cell towers so it would be harder to track the person carrying the phone, as well as preventing any malware that may have been installed from phoning home. So the reasoning goes, even if …
A couple of days back I posted a writeup of how I restored my old Commodore 64, from taking it apart to putting it back together and firing it up for the first time in over 30 years. As I am wont to do, I periodically took photographs of my progress. Well, here they are. I didn't do a full how-to because folks more experienced than I have already done so (that's how I learned how to do this in the first place). I'll put more stuff online as I make more progress. Enjoy.
