Spent a lot of time playing Pac-Man and later Mrs. Pac-Man. Definitely my favorite game of all time.
The game that ate the world: 40 facts on Pac-Man’s 40th birthday
Year: 2020
I Was Right
I like to read and keep up with the news, especially these days. Since I get most of my printed (?) news on line, a big problem is avoiding nonsense and click bait. Click bait is an easy one to solve. If the headline isn’t a headline (that is a short summary of what the article is about) then I ignore it. It could be a perfectly legit and interesting article, but if it has a clickbait headline, I’m not reading it.
I also look at the source. Something from a sketchy source I also tend to ignore. Sometimes I may read it but, as they used to say, take it with a grain of salt.
Today I came across this one. From the Times of Israel. Seems to be a legit news source. The person being written about seems to be claiming vindication of his theory that all infectious disease outbreaks peak in 40 days and end in 70. Seems nonsense on the face of it. Lots of plagues in history have gone on for years. Who is this guy? Well, he is:
Isaac Ben-Israel, a prominent mathematician, chairman of Israel’s Space Agency, and a former general
Whatevs. Still a crank it appears. Then I did something I try to never do:. I read some comments. There were only a few, half highly dismissive, the other half laudatory. I couldn’t resist looking up one of the positive commenters. Someone from Bob Jones University. Ok, call me an academic snob if you want.
Anyway, maybe it was click bait. Should have been suspicious of any article that starts with “I Was Right”.
I was right, says prof who predicted pandemic would play itself out in 70 days
Isaac Ben-Israel says virus disappears everywhere at same speed, rendering interventions irrelevant. Public health expert: He ‘has no clue about epidemiology and public health’
Electric Riding Mower Project
I have a 20+ year old MTD Yard Machines riding mower. I’m not much of a mechanic but over the years I have managed to keep it running. No real engine work, but just about everything else has needed attention at one time or another.
I’ve been thinking about doing an electric conversion on this one but felt like it was a bit too much out of my skill set. Saw some plans on line but many of them seem already dated. With all the eBikes, electric motorcycles, scooters, etc around these days, the technology has really matured and lots of components are available that would make this much easier than it would have been even a year or two ago.
You can even buy new electric riding mowers at Home Depot now, but they tend to be pricey ($2500+), and that may be the right way to go, but where is the fun in that? Can’t say I’ve decided to convert the old mower, but might start putting some notes out here as I go along.
Most of the early decisions would be around the engine. It is a 14 HP. Should I just replace it with a suitable electric motor? This seems to be the simplest way at first.
Another approach is to use one motor to drive the wheels, perhaps directly from the rear, and two smaller motors to drive the blades. This eliminates all the pulleys, belts and transmission functionality and could make for a clean simple design. I’m leaning toward the three motor solution, but need to look at the rear transmission.
BTW, this lawn tractor / riding mower seems to be a popular if not durable beast. Lots of YouTube repair videos out there which can give you some ideas and a good look at the internals without having to take the machine apart.
Spent last night looking at some smaller motors for the blades and associated controllers. Interesting stuff. This motor kit for an electric scooter also caught my eye.
Failed States
The Guardian (UK) asks the question: What respect do people owe a government that cannot protect them and cannot claim democratic legitimacy?
Wisconsin is starting to resemble a failed state
Feudalism American Style
A good Sunday read from the Los Angeles Review of Books. Post-war America was mostly successful in keeping money and power at arm’s length from each other. Since the Cold War wealth has concentrated, politics has been infused with vast sums of money in the form of “campaign contributions” which now seem limitless (see: Citizens United). Where does this lead? Back to one of the most stable systems ever, Feudalism.
Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?
Tesla Supercharger Use
Probably lots of charts like this out there that track / reflect the pandemic and it’s effect on the economy. This one seem pretty telling from Elektrik Check Tesla’s impressive chart of pandemic’s impact on Supercharger use.
A Lot of Bull
Ran across this fellow on a bike ride today. They graze occasionally on the land of a big pharmaceutical factory. Hard to keep up with who owns them these days; it seems to change hands every few years. For non-Texans, this isn’t some sort of Texas “thing”. It is a good old fashioned tax dodge. All this land is now “agricultural” resulting in a vastly reduced property tax bill for this big corporation. Hey, now that I think about it, what could be more Texan?
Ramen Recap
Yesterday I made a large pot of soup for three. I call it ramen, but again I used those flat Vietnamese (my tho) noodles. I have gotten good at a simple broth with soy, garlic and ginger. Added chopped onion and carrot and cracked in three eggs, one for each of us. Cooked the noodles for four minutes and let everyone add some leftover sliced steak on their own. Topped mine with a slice of cheese and some home made sauerkraut and a few green onions. Got rave reviews.
The world’s most nutritious foods
From the BBC. Lots of fish on the list but I have to say I was surprised that pork fat made the top 10!
The world’s most nutritious foods
My Raspberry Pi 4 WiFi Hell
I think I may have finally gotten to the bottom of my Raspberry Pi 4 WiFi problems. I installed Ubuntu 18 and the WiFi networking never worked properly. It would work sometimes, then drop off randomly. I thought it might be a hardware problem and returned the unit for a new one. Still the same. Thought it could be a power supply issue, so I offloaded everything on the USB to a powered USB hub. It ran a bit cooler but that wasn’t it either. There were lots of reports of signal issues when using certain hi-def HDMI modes on the monitor. Nope that wasn’t it either. I had a fancy metal heatsink case which was rumored to cause WiFi problems. Nope.
Gave up an bought a USB dongle which appeared to work at first, then it didn’t. Later I put the WiFi dongle on the end of a short USB cable, thinking that moving the WiFi away from the actual Raspberry Pi 4 unit might do something, It seemed to work for a while. Then I upgraded to Ubuntu 20 (because I accidentally trashed my SD card). Well, it was time to upgrade anyway.
After the upgrade there was no WiFi at all. Found out that it had to be enabled in /etc/network-config. Things were looking up. Now I could boot up and see a reasonable WiFi. But soon it deteriorated again. More googling lead to all sorts of people with similar problems, including people using different versions of the Cypress firmware. I didn’t want to go there. I would use a wired ethernet and wait for a fix if I had to.
Yesterday I read something that sounded worth pursuing. Some people had WiFi set to the wrong country (UK for instance). That would be a problem. I also noticed my 5 GHz WiFi wasn’t showing up. Probably a warning sign I had ignored too long.
I’m not a networking or WiFi guy (and I don’t really want to be one) but a quick look turned up my WiFi country set to “country 00: DFS-UNSET“. Probably not what I want. Manually set it with “sudo iw reg set US” and immediately I saw my 5 GHz WiFi! Seems more stable, and it should be. Now I just have to figure out where to set this in the file system so I don’t have to remember to type this command after every reboot.
Steven A. Guccione 