I retired my old Android tablet and was going to give it away. Decided it might make a nice Digital Photo Frame for Mom. I have almost 10,000 family photos I scanned in (Dad was a professional photographer) so there would be plenty of content.

I search around and found discussion of apps, using Google Photos, but I wanted to keep it simple, without using WiFi if possible. Turns out the solution was pretty simple. I won’t give exact cookbook instructions, but it’s pretty easy to figure out.

• Do a factory reset, mostly for security purposes. Restart and keep everything turned off (WiFi, Google login, etc.)
• Copy photos to the device. My 10,000 or so photos only took about 20 GB. I used an old 32 GB SD flash card I had. Took a while to get the formatting right. Used FAT32 finally.
• Point the screen saver to the directory with all the photos. That’s it.
• Additionally, since this is for my 92 year old Mom, I got rid of pretty much all desktop icons, turned off everything I could (Bluetooth, updates, alerts, etc)

The default is that the screen saver only works when the pad is plugged in. Great.

Dr John has been gone a while. I heard at the end of his life he spent a lot of time “collaborating” with Doc Pomus. A Google turned up this nice Paris Review article. Meanwhile on PBS Beck is playing Willie Nelsons “Hands on a Wheel” from Willie’s 90th Birthday Celebration.

Farewell to Dr. John, Wherever You Is Now

Wow. Over a third of the renewable energy produced by Scotland’s wind turbines is “curtailed”. This means ignored, dumped, not used. Not that there isn’t demand for this power, just not enough power lines to move the electricity from where it is to where it’s needed. Or storage to hold it for when it is needed.  I realize the criticism of renewables is that it can be unreliable. But we are talking about wind in northern Scotland. It seems pretty reliable.

Scotland’s Wind Turbines Are Being Paid to Stand Still 37% of the Time

I have always been fascinated by the end of the Cold War and the transition of the former Soviet Union to a capitalist economy. Perhaps just because it was the big historic news story of my youth.

The short story is a group of US economists led the Soviet economy into capitalism via “Shock Treatment”. In retrospect it appears to have been an abject failure. But little has been said about this in the mainstream. Just googling around today out of curiosity I ran across the article from 1990 in something called the Monthly Review. It discusses how the former USSR and later China made their largely unsuccessful transitions to a modern Western democratic capitalist societies.

As the same group of free market capitalists continues to exert influence in the US, despite their repeated failures overseas, one has to ask if these “failures” weren’t failures at all but part of a plan. As the corruption mounts in the US and our Billionaires begin to resemble the Russian Oligarchs, you have to wonder where the US is headed.

The Necessity of Gangster Capitalism

From The Guardian (UK)

Trump Burger owner in Texas faces deportation after Ice arrest

From the Independent Voter Project. Based on primary voters.

Party Registration Statistics
Total Registered Voters: 17,485,702
Democrats: 8,133,683 (46.52%)
Republicans: 6,601,189 (37.75%)
Unaffiliated: 2,750,830 (15.73%)

Ths Google Newsfeed on my android Google phone keeps jamming Fox News content on me. I keep blocking them and they seem to come back with even more. Maybe half a dozen stories the morning. Even Orwell couldn’t predict this. Corporate sponsored political propaganda, for profit.

A good read from the London Review of Books.

Where the Power Is

Three times in the last four days I have tried to block Fox News from my default Google Newsfeed on my Google Android phone. Somehow it keeps coming back. What’s up with that, Google?