Don Lancaster's What's New?       2009 Archive Blog

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Closed out this 2009 blog archive and started a
new 2010 one.

Modified and revalidated our Bitmapped Fonts
library page.

This page is largely obsolete, having been replaced
by newer code in our Fonts & Images library page.
I've kept it as a historical archive.

Specifically, our newer Bitmap Typewriter creates
ultra high quality bitmap lettering on the fly. And
works with any PostScript font in any pixel count size.

This eliminates the neet for individual instances of
each and every pixel count in each and every font.

A revised Fonts & Images should appear in a few days.

A reminder that Linksys modems and wireless modules
had a heat problem that could cause slow and erratic
web responses after long use times.

Newer units have slightly larger ventillation holes,
although I suspect they are still too small.

Workarounds are to put the unit up on blocks so there
is a minimum of one inch of clearance off the desk. And
to NEVER stack units or put papers on top of them.

Updated, expanded, and improved our Book-on-demand
Publishing library pages.

The problem with Captain Video is simply this: They
are "for real" our goodwill ambassadors to outer space!
Along with Roller Derby and Kukla, Fran, and Ollie.

In 1949, our sun suddenly became a radio star, blasting
out vast quantities of new VHF energy. In 60 years, this
has swept out one million cubic light years of space and
has been sent to roughly 2700 candidate star systems.


And still at a sensitivity level detectable with our
current technology. And new candidate star systems are
being contacted at a cube law rate, while the energy
levels are only dropping square law.

What if...

What if a candidate star system receives a perfectly
lucid twelve second clip of "Roller Derby" as the
sum total of all that is known about Earth culture?

Updated, expanded, and improved our Gila Day Hikes
library pages.

I'll be presenting an ARA paper on this at U/A Tucson
Saturday January 23rd at 11:15 AM. More details here
as they get posted. All are welcome to attend at no charge.

I'll also be doing some eBay papers at Discovery Park
on February 13th. Based on this paper and this one.
In the Jupiter room at 6:30 PM. More details as they
emerge.

If you try Googling on a topic that is "too thin", you
might end up with mostly false hits or "wildly wrong"
responses.

It seems that I mentioned a company with an odd name
spelling back in March of 1993 as a bizarre source of
"not even wrong" pseudoscience. Actually, they were
so mesmerizingly awful that they were clearly in the
"what are they on and where do we get some of it?"
class.

Somebody Googled them, and we ended up in slots #2
and #3 in the response! They ended up calling me and
insisting that Iwas a source of supply for their "action
at a distance" utterhogwash.

The point being that Google works very well given a
"thick"enough subject. But otherwise can lead to the
truly bizarre.

Updated, expanded, and improved our Bee's Favorites
library pages.

Updated, expanded, and improved our Math Stuff
library pages.

By far the most popular use of photovoltaic pv solar
cells is in solar power calculators. What is the cost per
kilowatt hour for its electricity usage here?

Let's see. Assume the average calculator costs $5
and fifty cents of that is amortizable against the pv
sensing and charging system. Assume further that
the total lifetime energy consumption when calcs
are actually being made or viewed is one watt hour.

$5 per watthour is $500 per kilowatt hour.

Thus, the average pv user pays $500 per kilowatt
hourfor their electricity. And are happy as a clam
doing so.

Additional analysis of the ongoing pv scam appears
here.

Two freely downloadable episodes of Captain Video
appear here and here.

Which conclusively proves that the concept of
"mesmerizingly awful" appears to be time invariant.

Apparently several dozen episodes exist but are not
readily availalbe. Most of the others were apparently
destroyed shortly after Dumont went belly up.

Here's a simplified method to discount "overunity"
perpetual motion machines: If a 555 timer is involved,
the overunity concept is totally bogus. This is easily
proven by falsifiability. Just show me a counterexample.

The overunity scam de jour appears here, with its
debumkinghere.

In this case, a duty cycle was stupidly measured
backwards. Other usual causes are mismeasurement
of pulse waveforms or pulse feedback delaying battery
discharges.

More on "not even wrong" pseudoscience here.

Let me get this straight: There will shortly be a $100,000
fine for selling used children's books at a yard sale.

Your tax dollars at work.

When they marionate shrimp, how do they tie all of
those little strings on?

Managed to "backfill" all of our recent blog missing
entries. Please check the last few weeks for corrections
and updates.

The latest GuruGram #102 is on Some Possible Book
Scanning "Gutter Math".

Sourcecode is available here.  And additional GuruGrams here.

Our recent update of our Cubic Spline Library
page left many file extenstions corrupted, giving you
404's. Most of these have now been corrected.

Please report any further problems you may find.

An interesting collection of do-it-yourself Book
Scanners can be found here.

One higher priced commercial example can be found
here.

Most of these are based on one or more high res
digital cameras and opening the book by 90 degrees.

I'm wondering if some lower cost solutions are not
possible. Especially if you are only interested in
gathering together a few dozen reprints or only a
few books.  Where spending a little extra time per
page may prove
a useful compromise.

I'm exploring only opening the book by 45 degrees
and using a quality mirror and a single camera. This
should greatly ease guttering problems and spine
damage. Reversing the image should be trivial using
some upcoming variants on our Post Processing utilities.

Our local libraries seem to be in a death spiral and
they do not seem to have the faintest clue why.

Attermpted outrageous new charges are creating
extreme controversy. And,of course, will end up
having the exact opposite of their intended effect.

Many of the concepts of a local library are now
ludicrous. Such as having one or fewer available
copies of information. Or not being open 24/7.
Or requiring that an individual, the document, and
a control freak be physically in the same place
at the same time. Or items not being immediately
available.

Or the documents not containing links to more
detail  and related info. Or arbitrary distinctions on
what info is and is not "allowed". Or "read it aloud",
language translation, and similar handicapped aides.

Or even the concept that once scarce info now has
a major  big time glut problem.

If libraries are to survive at all, they'll have to immediately
and dramatically reporpose themselves to the concepts of
unlimited info access and otherwise meeting specific
community needs. Sadly, I do not see this happening.

Meanwhiile, the reality is that our best local library is
----> Burger King! With free WiFi access, long hours,
and far fewer food and drink restrictions.

The problems of getting useful technical and service
info on older electronic test instruments seems to be
easing dramatically.

One long term source that remains eminently useful
is the Boat Anchor Manual Archive. I now have
dozens of my own reprints up in our Guru Classsics
Library in single file and fully searchable formats.
And hope to make them all eventually available.

Meanwhile, Tektronix has formally released all of
their legacy and historic documents to the public
domain. Copies of most any older Tek anything
are now widely available on the web. Typically
in CD format and often for under ten dollars.

HP ( Now Agilent ) has taken the opposite route and
is making just about everything legacy availalble
free on their website.

( Update: A great re[romt spiprint source is now
https://www.americanradiohistory.com/ )

Heathkit has apparenttly sold exclusive reprint
rights.

Major problems remain in getting more scholarly
technical reprints, especially from IEEE. There
is absolutely no excuse for ANY published
paper more than five years old to not be
freely available on the web from multiple sources.

I thought I might catalog some of the prehistoric ag
items you might find while wandering around our
local bajadas...

LITHICS - most any rock that appears to
have been purposely broken. Especially
if distinct from all the other local rocks.

REWORKED LITHICS - Similar rocks that
appear to have secondary chipping. Typically
flakes are knocked off a core. The flakes are
then reworked into tools.

POTSHERDS - Broken pieces of pottery.
Differ from rock by their uniform thickness
and grainy interior. Very rare in ag sites.

TRADEWARE - Fancier potsherds that are
decorated by paint or slip. Often dateable
and strong indicators of trade patterns .

MULCH RINGS - Circular rock groupings
typically three feet in diameter. Often found
as a dozen or so in a spaced group. Likely
used to retain moisture for a single agave.
Sometimes wrongly called a "cairn".

ROASTING PIT - Similar rock groupings
somewhat larger in diameter but always with a
distinct internal depression.

CHECK DAM - Small semicircular rock
arrangement across a drainage. Forms a
small upstream "field", often five feet square.

APRON - Secondary rock structure below
a check dam, apparently to prevent erosion
by slowing water overflow .

CANAL - Often looks like a very smooth
hiking trail. Always flat with a very slight
slope. Very long. Purpose oriented.

LINEAR FEATURE - Rather long and
rather straight low rock wall across a
gentle slope. Forms an upslope field.

TRINCHERA - Definition varies.
May be a longer and not as straight
low rock wall used for water control.
Often associated with steeper slopes.
Easily confused with CCC boondoggles!

GRID ELEMENT - A rectanglar low
rock border, typically twelve by twenty
feet across a usually gentle slope. May
rarely have a single mulch ring in the middle.

GRIDS - A grouping of grid elements.
aranged side by side or sequentially
up slope. Tens of thousands (!) of these
appear to be locally present.

FIELD HOUSE - Single rectangular
group of higher rock walls, typically six feet
square. Always at an ag site when present.

HABITATION  SITE- Multiple rectangular
grouping of higher rock walls. Often associated
with potsherds and trash dumps. Almost
always destroyed by extensive pothunting.
Normally somewhat distant from ag sites.

A note that we still have some eminently collectible
slide rules and related products up on eBay.

We have only one USAF Aerial Photo Slide Rule
LM-221A by Astrodyne remaining. It is in near
mint condition.

Turning to our nuclear holocoust fashion accessories,
we have several "kiss your onager goodbye" nuclear
fallout circular slide rules. ABC-M28A1. Otherwise
known as NSN 6665-00-130-3616. These are all
ABSOLUTELY MINT and remain sealed in their
original packaging.

We also have some related ABC-M5A2 nuclear
fallout area predictors NSN 6665-00-106-9595.

We also have bunches of surveyor's stadia computer
circular slide rules. Also absolutely mint and sealed in
original packages. Gurley #3100.

It is extremely unlikely we will be able to find any more
of these in remotely comparable condition.

Outside of that Missus Lincoln, how was the play?

The number and stunning variety of "off the bajada"
prehistoric ag sites here in our Gila Valley continues to
amaze me. It is enormously difficult to wander around
outside without finding a new and unexpected one.

Virtually all of our mountain fed streams seem to have
elaborate canal systems whose 13th century engineering
appears well beyond stunning. Some of these exceed
ten miles in length; others are hung on a mesa side
90 feet above the local terrain; and others include
aquaducts that are well above grade. One appers to
have a "three way switch" that routes water to a
triad of wildly different drainages. And flows to this day.

It is not unreasonable to conclude that the 13th century
population may have exceeded the present day one.
Yet an enigma remains: The number of ag sites vastly
exceeds the number of known habitation sites.

As best as is known, the entire system was a giant
booze factory, converting agave into mescal.

Or, alternately the related ag grids were the first
instance of  prototypical Dilbert cubicals. The Alice
PMS Revolt of 1385  would clearly explain the latter
decline in population.

The folks at Wesrch have recently posted their
2000th paper and are rapidly approaching their
one millionth paper view.

This site is a superb way to instantly publish your
technical paper. To date, the average quality of the
presentations appears to consistently remain well
above that of many peer reviewed journals.

I do have some sixty or so of my "best" papers
cross posted there.

To become definitive though, they do seem to have a
long way to go. I'd estimate "critical mass" to be
50,000 downloads with 100 new papers per day.

At that point, the stupid arrogance of the traditional
scholarly journals would clearly become moot.

ALL technical papers over five years old should be
freely available from multiple web sources!

The number of exoplanet discoveries now stands at
416 and is increasing at a rate of nearly two per week.

Despite what eventually will likely prove to be incredibly
weak tools, the discovery rate is rapidly accellerating.

Present estimates are a hundred billion in the milky
way galaxy alone.

Finding a rocky "goldilocks" planet that is earth sized
in a habitable zone would appear overwhelmingly likely
"real soon now".

But finding an earth-moon combination that appears to
be demanded for climatic stability is another matter
entirely.

I've long used "not even wrong" to describe pseudoscience
or bad science in general. In which an individual obviously does not
understand the fundamentals of something they are hopelessly
clueless over.

Nor has the necessary tools to be able to intelligently evaluate
their claims. Or if the claims violate falsifiability.

An interesting background of the term appears here. Apparently one
of the original popularizers was Wolfgang Pauli.

MSNBC has greatly improved their Political Cartoon
coverage. What was once a week Friday updates is now
a continuous process. With much easier access.

A reminder that OEM's Trade is an enormously useful
resource. You simply enter most any electronic part number
and a dozen typical sources will pop out. Some even with
immediate prices, others with click-thru quotes.

Yet another reason for keeping a very low profile at
any and all auctions:

Bidder "A" has specialized expertise in one specific
group of items and a rep for making a major market in
them. Bidder "B" is a plain old opportunist junk
dealer who does not have the faintest clue what the
group of items is worth or what can be done with them.

Bidder "B" simply keeps bidding till "A" quits. Assuming
he will win the items at only slightly higher than their
genuine value.

A partial defense for "A" is to continue bidding to jack the
price up. But never beyond what a reasonable return can
yeild. A better "A" defense is to never let anybody know
what you know.

If you scan or photograph a partially open bound book,
you may encounter the "gutter problem". In which the
extreme right or extreme left words will be unacceptably
squashed. Besides looking bad, this can prevent OCR
recognition and later full text search.

I've been recently wondering how well and how generally
the gutter problem can be defined mathematically. And
then post processing repaired. Especially with a low budget
and only occasional use.

Let's limit ourself to a left page that is squashed right
and normalize our interest space to zero on the left and
one at the right. While a cubic spline approach may work,
all or our curvature is clearly at the end, and something
maximally flat might be a better route.

Instead, consider a sparse Taylor Series. Such as using
y = ax^b. Perhaps y = 0.15x^7. The value of "a" decides how deep
the gutter is and the exponent desides how soon or how
suddently the curvature will begin. A fairly simple expression
thus gives us a surprisingly good fit to a book page being
scanned.

The question is now to relate how much the actual page distance
delta-s changes for each horizontal distance delta-x? A small
change in x will also produce a calculable change in y. The
change in s will be their vector sum by the usual square-root-
of-the-sum of the squares. Pythagoras strikes again.

The correction we need will be deltas/deltax. Now, this could
be a function we could again find with a cubic spine or a Taylor
series. Chances are the exact math will involve more terms
and end up a tad ugly. Since it is the inverse of a square root .

Instead, if we think ahead to our upcoming bitmap repair process,
we certainly would want to avoid making a complex math
calculation for each and every pixel on each and every line.

Table lookup comes to the rescue. Simply make delta-x equal
one pixel in your post processing! And use a fast delta-s versus
delta-x table lookup. Then it should not matter in the least what the
exact formula for the gutter math is. 2000 or so samples should
work just fine.

How well this will all work in the real world remains to be seen.
I'm presently working up some demos and utilities.

Present thinking is to open the book by 45 degrees with a
quality mirror. This should minimize guttering and potential
book damage. Then digitally photographing with a high
pixel count camera to a bitmap. Then rectifying the bitmap
to correct vertical inversion, deskewing, anamorphic
scaling, and deguttering. From there, the usual OCR,
preferably with ClearScan or better.

Book scanning for individuals or those with limited budgets
are dramatically improving.

The high end folks simply project an infrared grid onto the
book pages and then do elaborate signal processing and
distortion correction using a costly system.

But what can be done by an individual on a limited budget
with only a few books or bound reprints to occasionally scan?

Goals of a scanning system are not only to capture the image,
but allow reliable OCR recognition. The latter both dramatically
reduces file sizes and allows full text searching. Plus possible
later editing, text reading, or other handicapped aides.

New  ClearScan features of Adobe Acrobat have very much
improved image capture for full text search.

These days, cameras are approaching 16 megapixels and thus
are more than competitive with conventional scanners.

Because of elaborate Bayer Filtering, the effective resolution
of a digital camera is not obvious. But 12 megapixels of B/W
or grays should be ballpark for a 16 megapixel sensor. Less for
reds or blues. And processing algorithm dependent.

12 megapixels effective translates to a square array of about
3500 x 3500 pixels. 3500 pixels in eight inches would be a
resolution near 440 DPI. And thus, with careful use of
maximum camera areas, should be more than good enough
for book scanning.

We should now have enough "excess" resolution that
elaborate image processing can become the norm.
Such as deskewing, "deguttering", image reversal,
or anamorphic size adjustment.

One possibility is to open a book by 45 degrees and place
a quality mirror in it. Illuminate the mirror from a uniform
diffuse source and digitally photograph the reflected
image. Then use image processing to rectify and invert the
image to its intended "flat" and "aligned" state.

Org. Got yet another email from someone about to
revolutionize electrolysis and would I please recommend
a highly qualified yet low cost electrochemist within six
blocks of Holt County, Nebraska.

One more time: There is a profound and fundamental
first principle of thermodynamics called "exergy" that
absolutely and positively GUARANTEES that electrolysis
from high value sources such as grid, pv, wind, or alternator
flat out ain't gonna happen.

The process would be exactly the same as 1:1 exchanging US
dollars for Mexican Pesos. There ALWAYS will be more
intelligent things to do with the electricity than immediately
and irrevokably destroying most of its value.

Just for kicks, try finding an electrolysizer manufacturer
sometime. Even if you find one, they certainly will not tell
you how much their products cost, and absolutely will not
sell one to an individual because of safety and liability
issues. The reason being that exergy limits such devices
to highly unique, specialized, and obscure industrial uses.

Virtually all bulk hydrogen gas is produced from hydrocarbons.
The amount produced by electrolysis is utterly negligible and
limited to exceptionally specific needs where system efficiency
and costs are not major design factors.

Exergy is a measure of the present quality and value of an
energy source. You measure exergy by converting that
source to another form, converting it back, and seeing how
much you have left. Resistance room heat is a classic
example of horribly wasted exergy.

Electricity is about the highest exergy stuff available. Unstored
hydrogen gas has exceptionally low exergy. Electrolysis is the
process of converting many high value kilowatt hours of energy
into fewer very low value kilowatt hours of energy.

And, thus, is normally and monumentally stupid.

As such, electrolysis clearly will forever remain totally incompatible
with efficient and sensible alternate energy solutions.

And that is before abysmal system efficiencies, amortization, or
stupidities ( such as stainless steel electrodes with its hydrogen
overvoltage of iron ). "Real" electrolysizers demand platinized
platinum electrodes that are regularly renewed.

Does exergy mean that solar to hydrogen via Faraday's Law
is never gonna happen? Not al all. But it does GUARANTEE
that conventional high value electricity will definitely NOT be
a mid process energy state.

Once again, our bottom line summary:

    If you do not understand exergy, you SHOULD NOT be
    pissing around with electrolysis.

    If you do understand exergy, you WILL NOT be
    pissing around with electrolysis.

Either way, the outcome is not the least in doubt. More can be
found here, here, and here.

Some unique software that lets you "play" an
image as audio appears at Photosounder. Some of the free
demos of this reasonably priced program are stunning.

Another recent surprise is that many older issues
of Desert Magazine issues are now readily available
online.

Bee had three travel stories in them here, here, and
here.

Amazingly, a schematic of one of the earliest scratch
built FM radios I ever built used to be be found on the web.

I bought the plans out of a Popular Electronics classified ad
probably sometime around 1959. This 957 acorn triode superregenerative
receiver remains a stunning example of elegant simplicity.

It worked like a champ on first try, pulling in dozens of FM
stations up to 25 miles away plus TV sound on channel six.
This type of circuit does generate great heaping bunches
of RFI, so its use is no longer in any way recommended.

The same flyer also lists a MN26C radio compass receiver
for $24.95. ( Weekly take home wages at the time were $34.65 ).

I did not get into this one till years later in college, but its AM
band performance was spectacular. North of Philadelphia, you
could tune to 1020 and have KDKA Pittsburgh come banging in.
Switch to 1030 for WBZ Boston. And other stations nearly on every
10 kHz multiple. All with a three foot antenna! Lower audio frequencies
only because of the reduced bandwidth.

Most of our classic construction projects that had immediately
available sources have now been upgraded and are found here.

There are many hundreds more to be located, scanned, OCR'ed,
and made into searchible single documents. I'd also like to get
all of my books online. Plus hundreds of tutorials and such.

Doing these tasks requires your support as a Banner
Advertiser, Synergetics Partner, InfoPack User, or Auction
Regional Sponsor.

Your simplest and cheapest support route is to simply use
this link for all of your book purchases of any author or title.

Updated and expanded our Gila Day Hikes library page.

Please email me with any corrections or suggested additions.

One of the "blue" alternate energy solutions involves
Osmotic Power. Per a lively discussion here.

By using a selective membraine, fresh water can migrate
into salt water, raising pressure and allowing power to be
generated. It turns out that the theoretical energy recovery
can be equal to a Hoover Dam height hydro site at each
freshwater river estruary.

While a fairly clean technology, infrastructure costs and
membraine lifetimes may or may not make the concept
viable. The usual problem cited is that a lot of brakish
water is produced that could demolish local environments.

Another factor that nobody seems to mention is that,  (since
perpetual motion is a no-no ), if you are going to recover some
high exergy, high quality electricity, the value of energy
released elsewhere has to decline by at least a comparable
amount.

This says that if you have river A emptying directly into the
ocean and river B doing an osmotic to electricity conversion
and then exiting, then river B has to exit colder!

Whether the temperature drop ends up significant and leads
to negative environmental and ecology factors remains
to be demonstrated.

More on energy fundamentals here.

Updated and improved our Auction Help library page.

Your own custom regional auction finder can be created for
you per these details.

Had one or our eBay buyers request exact brands
and part numbers of some of our surplus items. When and
if we have this info, we are certainly glad to post it.

The foremost rule of surplus is "what you see is what
you get". In exchange for super low prices, the history
and exact source of many items may be untracable.

Further, there may or may not be more available, either
now or in the future.

We try to list only items that we can guarantee usable.
And have inspection privileges on all but our lowest ticket
items. And have a long term goal of no unhappy customers.

But, surplus is surplus. Don't expect more of it that can
reasonably be delivered.

What drought? Very old maps here show an "artesian
hot well" in, of all places, Hot Well Wash. Newer maps
show it as a "hot well".

If you go to this bone dry site, you will find a large water
channel, ruins of a small,  a medium, and a large windmill
of progressively newer age, and derelict pieces of even
newer medium, larger, and humongous pumps.

Meanwhile, BLM is having to add solar boosted pumps
to their Hot Well Dunes artesian souces. These are
likely related to the same aquifier.

More on similar topics here.

Org. It turns out there are several different types of
30 MM metric threads. And that the ones used on
Square-D joysticks may prove impossibly difficult
to find.

The "normal" 30 mm thread pitch is 3 mm as in M30-3.0.
The "fine" 30 mm pitch is 2 mm as in M30-2.0

Most industrial pushbuttons and switches use an even
finer 30 mm pitch of 1.5 mm as in M30-1.5.

But, as near as I can tell, the Square-D joysticks usse an
ultra fine 30 mm pitch of 1.0 mm as in M30-1.0.

Apparently they thought they needed more retention because
of the joystick side loading in normal use. Please email me if
you know any source for these oddball threads.

Yeah, machining your own larger nut is not that big a deal. But
making a casting impression might get tricky because the zinc
body threads are discontinuous.

We have the joystick up on eBay, sans hardware.

A slowdown in your comm speeds over time can usually
be traced to Ethernet Tokens that are either corroded or
grime covered.

The usual treatment is to use Brasso. But a better long
term solution is to gold plate the tokens and then flash
overplate them with a few microinches of rhodium.

Approaches to improving photographed book pages for
OCR capture include using the Hough Transform for
deskewing as detailed here.

Or doing perspective corrections per this paper.

I'm also  wondering if a plain old FFT transform might not
tell you a lot about alignment and its optization.

Some of our newest PostScript utilities include S1.PSL
that lets you create Magic Sinewave test waveforms for
Sigview, and HTML4 or XHTML validation tools that
include FIXAMPS1.PSL for ampersand repairs,
AUTOVAL1.PSL for search and destroy phrase replacement,
and its scripted list variant of SCRIPVAL.PSL.

More on PostScript here and here.

I find it both gratifying and rewarding when a single
"real science" development can seemingly unify and
explain some of the worst of pseudoscience and free energy.

The CIBC developments in yesterday's entry may do
just that. For years it has been known that cavitation
can be exceptionally destructive, especially on ship's propellors
and fire pumps. And recent devlopement in sonoluminescence
have demonstrated astonishing temperatures and pressures
in a small collapsing bubble.

Apparently not enough for fusion, but astonishing nevertheless. And
certainly enough to produce ultraviolet and blue light.

For years, hydarulic engineers have noted what they call the
"micro Diesel effect" where hydraulic oil turns black and
gets trashed. This easily could be CIBC in drag, in which a
bubble containing air and hydrocarbons collapses and increases
in pressure and temperature beyond its ignition point.

Over on the pseudoscience side of the fence, two of the
more persistant and more enigmatic claims might also be
explained by the same CIBC phenomen.

Ever since the 1950's, there have been recurring claims
of "superefficient" electrical heaters based on an apparently
cavitating oil. CIBC could provide a credible explanation
for the rarely observed and obviously difficult to duplicate
effect that is totally within the bounds of "real science".

Another more recent fantasy development is called the
"Clem Engine"which has all sorts of overunity claims
associated with it. A Clem engine involves possibly cavitating
vegetable oil and, once again, CIBX could provide a credible
explanation for the observed anomolies.

A reminder that the NASA paper's mention of the possibility
of "net energy production" simply refers to getting above
an efficiency of ZERO.

More on bashing pseudoscience here and here.

This NASA Paper suggests a possible new thermodynamic
cycle with possible energy conservation and pollution advantages.

The process is called CIBC, short for Cavity Ignition Bubble
Compression.

It is based on sonolulminescence which we looked at here and
here. A collapsing cavitating buble generates astonishing temperatures
and pressures. But still ( as far as we know to date ) not even
remotely near what is needed for true fusion.

Instead, what if the bubble contains a stoichimetric mix of a
fuel and air? The collapse raises the temperature beyond
ignition, Diesel style. The thermodynamic efficiency can
in theory be well beyond the best of known engines.

The best the paper is willing to say is that the effect appears
to be real. And that it appears to have the potential of net
energy.

Note, of course, that net energy here would be defined as
anything above ZERO efficiency, and not anything in any
manner overunity. Long after you overcome the need for
sonic sources and compressors, you still have to have
enough excess energy to compete with conventional
fuel thermodynamic cycles.

One developing company who may or may not be valid
can be found here. Their interest among the overunity
crowd makes them somewhat suspect. Time will tell.

Walmart ( among many others ) sells some low cost
bag clips intended to reseal potato chip and cereal
packages.

These might prove exceptionally handy when using a
digital camera to copy books and bound articles.

The latest GuruGram #102 is on Web Validation
Utilities for HTML4 and XHTML.

Sourcecode is available here.
And additional GuruGrams here.

Expanded and improved our Gila Day Hikes library page.

Turns out there are some "book friendly" copier variations
out there, especially by Sharp. These and their accessories
go by the names of "binder friendly" or "Binder Minder".

Some have beveled edges combined with "to the edge"
optics. Older copies these days lack any bitmap output,
have outrageous toner costs, and additional hassles.

Half a dozen of these should be included in the upcoming
Pima Auction. I suspect no bids or ten dollar buys.

Am I the only one to still notice that, despite stunning
developments in CGI and incredible advances in computer
animation, that movie stagecoach wheels still turn backwards?

Added the Analog Frequency Meter, Psychedelia I Color
Organ, and the Musette Color Organ to our locally hosted
searchible single file classics reprints

We've seen several times in the past how the Public
Surplus website can occasionally offer exceptional
opportunities, even though its titleless 1974 pickup
trucks and broken highway paint stripers do sometimes
come of on the somewhat clueless side.

Very often, a totally unrealistic reserve price will be
placed on some of the better or more obscure items.
With the obvious result of no bids.

At that time, emailing them with a lowball cash offer
"just barely above insulting" can often nail some interesting
items at a fraction of their value. Very often, their primary
goal is making room for something else.

The site does stupidly include 5 minute auto extensions, so your
optimal bidding strategy is to bid once 53 minutes into
the last hour.

More auction tutorials and resources here. And your very own
custom auction finder here.

A well executed web hoax is a joy to behold, and this
one seems to have amazing staying power even after
several years.

Naturally, most any rancher or farmer would immediately
note that the musical instrument was really built from
Case International tractor parts and not those from John
Deere. Even a beginning FFA student could instantly spot this.

Among other things, the instrument was not even green.

More here and here. And, of course, here.

There's a flap on one of the newsgroups over a steam
automobile engine. Yes, steam does offer each stroke
being a power cycle. And delivers torque at zero speed,
largely reducing most needs for clutches or transmission.

And, yes, the primary reason steam autos folded was
hoof and mouth disease!  Seems that all the public
horsetroughs were emptied just as gasoline technology
was gaining a toehold on its production learning curve.

BUT -- Cylinder style steam engines were abandoned
half a century ago, because their best efficiencies were
in the one to ten percent range. Modern multi-stage
bottom scavenging utility steam turbines now approach
sixty percent (!) thermal efficiency.

Other major issues with steam include that condensing
is manditory to reduce water loss and corrosion is
outrageous. Even with force at zero speed, some
torque conversion would likely still be required. There
are also startup times and boiler safety issues.

Hollywood nonwithstanding, it is enormously difficult to
instantly release all of the energy in a gas tank in a
short time. But utterly trivial in a steam boiler.

There is a tendancy on newsgroups to confuse instant
paper designs with actual products. Often combined
with a failue to understand the background and history
of the technology being bandied about.

More on energy fundamentals here.

Many years ago, a certain New York editor who had
never been off the block at Lawn Guiland visited a
Texas ranch. He was amazed at how greasy the sheep
were and asked why they greased their sheep.

The ranch hands had a big laugh over this and tried
to explain lanolin. Then they moseyed up the draw to
the cow oiler.

A summary on current Magic Sinewave status:

Magic Sinewaves are a recently discovered math
technique that let you digitally synthesize sinewaves for
such things as industrial motor controls, electric autos,
or solar panel synchronous inverters.

Key features of a magic sinewave are that they let you
zero out ANY number of low harmonics and do so at the
highest possible efficiency. By their very definition.

A useful summary of the techniques appears here, while
an ultra fast JavaScript Magic Sinewave calculator is
found here.

Important tested and verified magic sinewaves include
Regular, Best Efficiency, Bridged Best Efficiency, and
Delta Friendly. The latter meets the exacting needs of
three phase power systems at a price of zeroing out
fewer harmonics.

About a year ago, I started asking the question whether
some sneaky tricks could further reduce the already small
early uncontrolled harmonics. In particular, a Regular magic
sinewave has early uncomtrolled harmonics that can be
the exact opposite in sign of a Bridged Best efficiency one.

Which suggested that dramatic further improvements
were possible. Sure enough, demos of exact cancellation
were easy enough to make. But sadly, ever attempt at
doing so using obvious half cycle and multi cycle techniques
introduced subtle and nonobvious subharmonics and other
terms. These terms made any improvements marginal at
best.

So, while the current crop of magic sinewaves work like a
champ, the jury is still out out on whether significant further
improvements will become possible.

Details on Magic Sinewave evaluation chips appear here.

A useful rule at live auctions: Always stay three to
five lots ahead of the auctioneer!

This lets you be in the auctioneers face on any lot
you want to bid on. You also "beat the crowd" to
the best location to get your bid recognized.

Force them to come to you.

This also says you should not pay much immediate
attention to a won lot. Celebrating or making a side
sale or worrying about security may trick you into
forgetting completely a better upcoming lot buy.

More on auctions in general here. And your own
regional custom auction finder can be built for you
per the details here.

Some sneaky geometry that can easily cause you grief:
The length of something wound on a reel often builds
up with the SQUARE of the diameter.

Which you can prove with a simple Calculus 101
integration. Exact details will vary a little with the tape
thickness and the hub diameter.

Or intuitively, the count or length per turn doubles with
each doubling of diameter. Thus the outside turns hold a
lot more than the inside ones.

Thus, a "half full" reel of, say 5000 SMT resistors is
more likely to hold only 1250 parts or so.

Some SMT reels have "0.2,  0.4  0.6  0.8 calibrations on
them. Which for a 5K reel would be 1K, 2K, 3K, and 4K.

Similarly, a three quarter roll of paper towels is half
used up.

The best route towards book scanning appears to be
the "Vee Method". In which the book is opened about
ninety degrees and two separate high resolution digital
cameras ( or one moved camera ) is used to capture
alternate left and right pages.

Regular scanners cannot get anywhere near a book
gutter, while hand held units are highly unlikely to
allow OCR good enough for reliable searching.

The issue of spine distortion remains. Google has an
elegant approach where they project an infrared grid
onto the page and use additional cameras to derive a
3D correction.

Intermediate solutions for individuals only wanting
to capture a few to a few dozen books seem lacking.
Entering some measured numbers per page would
not be a big deal if it only had to be done a few
hundred or a few thousand times total.

Clamping with glomper clips should help a bunch.

I'm wondering if the spine distortion cannot be fairly
easily defined with some sort of a sneaky power series.

Perhaps something like...

                         8 * 0.7 x^8 

.... as x varies from 0 to 1 over the printed portion of
a full sized page.

Stay tuned on this one.

A lively discussion of the LHC Large hadrian Collider
appears here. It seems a bird dropped a piece of bread into
its cooling system, causing untold zillions of dollars of damage
and further setting back its checkered history.

No, I am not making this up.

Managed to get our Book Pages revalidated. Over
a hundred of our website pages should now be fully
compatible with modern standards.

I created some automated validation utilities along
the way and should shortly have a GuruGram on them.

Yeah, some of the book lists are a tad dated. I'll try
to update them as the interest and need arises. Your
assistance as a Banner Advertiser , an Auction Resource
Sponsor, or a Synergetics Partner can speed up the process.

Meanwhile, please note that you can support our website
by using our Book Links for any and all book purchases
at no additional cost to you.

Added the Two Tone Alarm, Sports Timer, Nixie DVM, and
the Supertrol to our locally hosted searchible single file
classics reprints.

The ancient oriental art of TI WUN ON consists
of getting totally snockered but always doing so
in a professional and workman like manner.

There's an obvious fatal flaw in electric vehicles that use
battery exchange stations. I am surprised that nobody
has picked up on it,

Batteries are near certain to remain quite expensive, even
when and if they reach acceptable densities and lifetimes.

With an exchange system, there will be a battery in the car,
a battery being recharged, a battery sitting on the shelf to
meet peak demands, and batteries in transit going from where
there are too many to places where there are too few.

All of which says that each electric vehicle has to pay for
and support at least four batteries, possibly more. Plus
the costs and profit margins of the recharging stations.

Thus pricing the exchange concept out of the market.

More on similar energy absurdities here and here. .

It looks like we are going to skip the Terabyte memory
era entirely and move directly on to Petabytes.

Which means that every available song and every
available movie and every available book should soon
be able in a low cost thumbnail sized device.

All of them. Together at once.

Which, first of all, tells us that future designs may not
have to place a very high priority on memory usage.
Throwing another million calculations at something should
now become routine. As we've already done with our
Fun with Fields and Magic Sineaves.

And second, tells us that human brain sized memory will
be rather commonplace and mundane. Perhaps limited
to such low end apps as an electric can opener.

Many years ago, the Apple IIe community thoroughly
proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that DRM digital
rights management simply does not work.

Many have not yet gotten the message, but petabyte
memory is certain to complely eliminate any and all DRM.

If a profit is to be made from traditional media content,
it will have to charge only acceptable competitive rates
and clearly give the author or composer or artist the lion's
share of any generated income.

The Petabyte Memory era guarantees that this is
gonna happen. The results are not the least in doubt.

The SIGVIEW folks have recently improved their FFT
Fourier spectrum analysis software.

Our approach to using SIGVIEW with our Magic Sinewaves
goes something like this: We create a 8-bit signed binary data
file of sixty cycles of a bipolar waveform of the desired truncation.

Using $00 for zero, $40 for unity positive amplitude and $C0 for
unity binary amplitude in 2's complement.

Use of 60 cycles makes for a very long ( multi megabit, often 2,499,840 )
file, but it gives exact frequency callouts and dramatically minimizes
any of the usual FFT windowing problems.

To date, the Sigview routines show all of the earlier Magic Sinewaves
working as predicted and described. But attempts at GGMS cancellations
to reduce early uncontrolled harmonics so far have introduced subtle new
subharmonics or cosine components that make their potential improvement
marginal at best.

I was surprised to find out that there is no direct or
obvious way in Windows to text capture a list of files
or other directory content.

There apparently are several free third party utilities that
make this happen. One is called CopyFilenames.

To use, select one or more directory entries and right
click. New mouse options of Copy Filenames and
others should pop up. A control-v then lets you empty
the clipboard into any text accepting ap.

A useful directory of free online courses appears here.

The MIT offerings are found here.

Updated and expanded our Auction Help library.

Your own custom regional auction finder can be
created for you per these details.

I think I solved all of our Magic Sinewave Calculator
xhtml compatibility issues.

As we saw here, use of a "CDATA" bypass or an
external JavaScript file is a good first start. As is
converting each "name=" into "id="

But it also turns out that JavaScript interpretation is
much more strict under xhtml. In particular, IE allowed
a "short form" of id that was not part of JavaScript but
was picked up on other browsers.

These are no longer legal...

cfh05.bgColor="#CCFFFF" ;

eval ( unrejHarm1 + ".bgColor='#66FFCC'") ;

Instead, use these...

document.getElementById('cfh05').style.backgroundColor = "#CCFFFF";

eval ( "document.getElementById('" + unrejHarm1 + "').style.backgroundColor = '#66FFCC'" ) ;

Please email me if you find any more Magic Sinewave
calculator problems.

Just found out that nearly all of the New Mexico
subastas are going to be sold at auction!

Sales and shipping to New Mexico aren't quite as
bad as they used to be. Yeah, there's still the language
barrier and the hassles at customs.

One main problem was that all the New Mexico truck
tires are all a different size and spacing, so everything
needed  reloaded at the border crossings.

Fortunately, there are now REVERSIBLE truck tires that
can simply be insided out at the New Mexico ports of
entry.

More details at your nearest New Mexico embassy .

LOWSRC, we hardly knew ya.

This ancient html command is no longer legal either in
html 4.0 or xhtml. And will no longer validate.

It never was an actual part of html, but since IE used
it, many browsers copied it. The intent was to let you
load a small substitute image before the main one
loaded. This was useful for "banners load last"
getting the top screen load faster.

Browsers and comm have gotten ridiculously faster
so this is no longer an urgent issue. Still LOWSRC
can eliminate a brief but annoying glitch or two
during client loading.

I've had to drop most of our LOWSRC's during our
recent xhtml site revalidation.   

Boy, they sure don't make em like this anymore...

Made a rare find at a local community college auction:
A genuine Chandler & Price ultra rugged manual paper
cutter. 19-1/2 x 19-1/2 inch capacity, 23 inch blade. Handle
alone is 38 inches long!

This should be perfect for smaller scale BOD book-on-
demand or padding projects. Easily cuts a full ream of
oversize paper. Also is fully restorable to near mint
condition for a "hot lead" historical printshop reconstruction.

The blade is in good condition without nicks, but a sharpening
will likely be due fairly soon. Sharpening typically costs
$25 and the quad reversible companion plastic cutting sticks are
a dollar each. Unit has seen very little recent use.

It weighs around 400 pounds but can be disassembled into
pickup or larger SUV sized chunks. Includes companion
table. Buyer arranges pickup and shipping. FOB Thatcher, AZ.

email me if you have any interest in this unique opportunity.

Another "oops". We seemed to be having inordinate difficulties
moving our Magic Sinewave calculators over to verified xhtml.

It turns out that while html ignores scripts, xhtml parses them as
data.

There are two recommended fixes.

One is to add these two lines to your JavaScript script...

<script type="text/javascript">
        /* <![CDATA[ */
                  // JavaScript content goes here
        /* ]]> */
</script>

The CDATA part tells xhtml to ignore the
content, while the /* to */ tells html and older browsers
to treate the CDATA part as a JavaScript comment rather than
choking on it.

Anorther route is to import the JavaScript code from
another file...

<script type="text/Javascript"
         scr="externalfilename.js">
</script>

More details are found here and here.

We have now managed to corrected and reverify nearly all of our
Guru's Lair "What's New" Historical Archive.

In general, you can tell any revised and updated reverification
by its eBay link just to the right of the main title.

Since a historical archive is in fact supposed to be historic, we are
not going to correct 404's caused by dark external links. You might
be able to find or repair these using the Wayback Machine.

Or by emailing me with any specific problems.

As we've seen bunches of times, the general purpose PostScript
computer language can be absolutely outstanding for such tasks
as reading and writing any uncompressed diskfile in any language
and making obscure modifications to it.

Per this tutorial and possibly helped along by our Gonzo utilities
and their Gonzo tutorial.

This  FIXAMPS.PSL  latest utility is an "ampersand fixer" for xhtml.
You use it to help revalidate older web pages. The utility finds any and
all ampersands in a file that are not followed within eight characters
by a semicolon and changes them to "&amp;".

This is particularly useful to automatically repair website links that
have lots of semicolon delimiters in them. As is typical in eBay,
mapping software, and search engines. The routine is swift enough
to not change an already changed ampersand, such as &nbsp; or &gt;.

To use, you bring the utility up in your favorite word processor or
editor and change the input and output file names. Then send the
resaved routine to Acrobat Distiller.

Note that Distiller versions more recent than 8.1 default to a file
writing lockout, so you have to run these from your command line
by using "acrodist -F".

Note also that any single reverse slash in a PostScript string must
be replaced by a double reverse slash to be interpreted correctly.
Especially in Windows filenames.

The utility is especially handy because Dreamweaver has a bug
in it orders of magnitude beyond insidious that hours later into a
session will maddengly change most (but not all) of your ampersands
back the way they were before you fixed them!

There is one known bug: Ampersands within Visual Basic statements
must remain the way they were! So a manual repatching may be
needed. Problems may also be encountered in a web URL link that
freely intermixes ampersands and semicolons. These probably do
not exist ar all. Or at least are extremely rare.

A very interesting and useful math site can be found by linking the
online encyclopedia of integer sequences. You input a string of
numbers, and it second guesses what you are really trying to do with
them! Better yet, it tries to guess the underlying math and the next
numbers in the sequence.

Our GGMS Magic Sinewave research needed an answer to this question:
"For a given binary sequence length, how many states will have an
identical number of ones and zeros"?

Trial and error produced 2, 6, 20,... ( as in 2 words in a 2-bit universe,
6 words in a 4-bit universe, and 20 words in an 8-bit universe).   Which
the sequence generator ( not surprisingly ) returned as central binomial
coefficients.

And continued the series as 70, 252, 924, 3432, ...

Someone was questioning why their eBay sales seemed
to be dropping. Well, it is just that little dip between the
fall slack period and the winter slump.

Useful eBay strategy and tactics are newly found here.

Dr. James Neely, professor emeritus of the University
of Texas at Austin will be presenting a rare and major
free lecture on Prehistoric canals of the Safford Basin this
Saturday October 17th at 6:30 PM in the Jupiter Room
of the EAC Discovery Park Campus.

Discovery Park is located at 20th Avenue and Discovery
Park Blvd ( aka 32nd street ) in Safford, Arizona.
Telescope access. muiseum tours, and simulator rides
may also be available.

More info by contacting Harry Swanson at
(928) 428-6260 or <harry.swanson@eac.edu>

Oops. There seems to be a major flaw in our GGMS magic
sinewaves.

Yes, they can give a complete cancellation of the first group
of uncontrolled harmonics. And yes, they replace them with
much smaller and higher harmonics.

But, at least in the present REG-BBS-BBS-REG scheme,
some odd subharmonics get newly introduced that create
problems. At present, the cancellation gain only ends up
very modest at best.

Here is an 8 bit signed binary data file of 60 Cycles of
REG-BBS-BBS-REG of length 2,499,600 sample bytes
and amplitude 0.47 that can be sent to Sigview or another
spectrum analyzer.  ( file apparently "lost" - sorry )

In which complete and total cancellation of all the "thirties"
uncontrolled harmonics can be observed. With the first
major uncontrolled harmonic the 61st at greatly reduced
amplitude.

Sadly, there are new 30 Hertz odd harmonics caused by
the two-cycle cancellation. These can be seen to be
quite significant in the "thirties" region.

I'm not sure where to go from here. Using a four cycle
cancellation should eliminate the 30 Hertz odd harmonics
but likely will introduce 15 Hertz problems. "Shaking
the box" jittering of the quantized data values might
also give some further minimization.

At present, it looks like some schemes will work to
reduce uncontrolled harmonics of GGMS magic sinewaves.
But how significant they will end up remains to be
seen and convincingly demonstrated.

Made yet another trip to the Montes Toll road.

It appears to cross the diused southern extension
of the Back Country Byway halfway between the
low water crossing and the corral by the cliff.
Just north of the fence crossing.

At that point, the route consists of a twelve foot
cleared area with continuous low borders both to the
north and south.

The route becomes extremely indistinct for a quarter
mile to the east. It is easily followed to the west to
where it crosses modern route 191. Across 191, the
route seems to paralle the old and largely abandoned
US 70. But is easily confused with earlier road
alignments and apparent CCC projects.

We have completed updating and revalidating "many dozens" of our
Guru's Lair website pages and believe we have now covered around
97% of the more popular access points.

Again, an updated page can be identified by the eBay link just to the
right of the main title page.

Please email me with any updates, corrections, or noted errors.

It may take us a while to get to the rest of the site. Your support
as a banner advertiser, infopack user, or research associate can
dramatically speed up the process.

Updated, revalidated, and improved our Resource Bin
and What'sNew 2008 Archive web pages.

Our ISP recently changed our server and some of the more
obscure filename extensions may have temporarily 404'ed.

We think we have picked all of these up, but a few may remain.

Please email me with any problems.

Updated, revalidated, and improved our Library,
Site Map, and Book Access web pages.

The free Solar Industry trade journal seems to be expanding
both the quality and quantity of its more technical coverage.
The new CIGS info in the October 2009 issue is quite welcome.

To date, of course, all of pv remains an outright scam.

Not one net watthour of pv electricity has ever been produced and
the whole concept remains a gasoline destroying net energy
sink that clearly is neither renewable nor sustainable.

Net energy breakeven can be anticipated eight years after the fully
burdened true costs drop below twenty five cents per peak watt.
Things will, of course, get a lot worse before they improve.

More details here.

Updated, revalidated, and improved our What'sNew 1997
and What'sNew 2006 Archive web pages.

Updated, revalidated, and improved our Acrobat
and Third Party web pages.

Turns out the OTHER new Safford water tank is also an
equal opportunity demolisher. Totally trashing unique prehistoric
habitation and agricultural sites.

So far, it plowed right on through the twin boobs canal. I've yet
to determine further damage. It does seem to only be trashing
prehistory, compared to the other water tank which has taken out
both prehistoric as well as totally unique CCC depression projects .

"Shovel ready" strikes again.

What is really sad about all this is that a little bit of forethought
and a slight rearrangement could have bypassed most of the
damage. At a negligible change in total cost.

Added the 100 kHz Standard, Tic Tac Tronics, Digiviewer, and the
Bounceless Pushbutton to our locally hosted searchible single file
classics reprints.

Did a major overhaul, update, and reverification of our
Pseudoscience library page.

Found a little more of the Montes toll road.

Nearly a mile west of the topo site callout is fairly
easily and obviously followed on foot. It is typically
characterized by a 12 foot wide cleared area with
a rock wall to the South. The wall is typically a foot
high and eighteen inches wide.

Things become wildly indistinct and confused as the
Back Country Byway disuesed extension is approached.
Possibly because of storm or flood damage.

The route seems to go midway between the large dirt tank
and the corral by the cliff. It would appear to line up
with the original sudden turn of the byway.

The alignment is barely discernable on Acme Mapper.

Our GGMS Magic Sinewaves can even be further improved.
By alternating four cycles of REG8, BBE8, REG9, and BBE9
an additional prefiltering reduction of six decibels would seem
possible.

A typical example might be an 8/9 pulse per quadrant
amplitude 0.47 magic sinewave whose first 62 harmonics
are zero and whose 63rd would be 0.17 of the fundamental.
Some higher harmonics would also be significantly
reduced.

BEFORE filtering!

Whether this is worth the effort, the double storage space,
a slight increase in switching transitions, and possible long
integration times remains to be determined.

So far, these cancellation stunts remain to be verified. They
also only seem to apply to single phase solutions and are
not yet delta friendly. No delta friendly cancellation mechanism
is known. .

Added the Psyctone, ASCII Keyboard Encoder, Popular Electronics
DVM and the Ultra Electronic Stopwatch to our locally hosted
single file classics reprints.

Most ( but not all ) of these are now reasonably searchible. The
searchibility depends entirely on the source document and the
scan quality.

Our GGMS Magic Sinewaves seem far beyond being
"too good to be true". Ferinstance this example produces an
8 pulse per quadrant digital waveform of 0.47 amplitude
and whose first 62 harmonics are zero in theory and
astonishingly low ( 60 db or more down ) when 8-bit quantized.

The first uncontrolled harmonic is the 63rd at 0.33 of the
fundamental! Filtering should thus be trivial, even over
a wide frequency range.

Your independent testing and verification is desparately
needed. Please email me with your results.

An example of our new tools to create and analyze GGMS
Magic Sinewaves includes the 0.47 amplitude tools found
here for the spectrum, here for the analysis, and here for
the Gonzo sourcecode.

Other techniques may be required for amplitudes above
0.5 and there are some minor issues with amplitudes .48
and .49. Lower amplitudes are trivial with this code.

Made some "slideshows for dummies" of our eBay
buying and selling tutorials, suitable for upcoming lectures.

Find these as EBAYBUYS.PDF and EBAYSELS.PDF along
with their sourcecode of EBAYBUYS.PSL and EBAYSELS.PSL

Details on our custom PowerPoint alternate here.

GGMS Magic Sinewaves are a new development that
zero out twice the usual low frequency harmonics through
a cancellation process.

Here is an amazingly simple synthesis route, usable for
GGMS amplitudes from 0.0 to 0.50...

1. Analyze a DOUBLE AMPLITUDE
    bridged best efficiency BBE magic
    sinewave of TWICE the desired
    number of pulses per quadrant.

2. FACTOR this result into a REG and a
    BBE magic sinewave by regrouping
    alternating pulses or pulse edge pairs..

3. Create a TWO CYCLE waveform
    consisting of REG-BBE-BBE-REG
    half cycles.

There are subtle differences between these
REG and BBE magic sinewaves and earlier
ones. Involving cancellations of non-zero
but lower earlier harmonics.

At present, I do not have the faintest clue
how to synthesize higher GGMS ampliltudes with
total and true cancellations. But these most
likely do exist and some sneaky algorithm should
eventually evolve.

I'll try to work up a GuruGram on this shortly.

Please email me any verifications or observations.

Apparently there is a brand new CSI Gila Bend.  To go with
the existing CSI Tulsa, CSI Omaha and their knockoffs.

Here's some preliminary test results that should let you
test the GGMS magic sinewave concept.

Use a BBE 8 ppq 0.53 amp magic sinewave of...

10.5469382348     % p1s
11.6800357208    % p1e
21.1285109543    % p2s
23.3598053345    % p2e
31.7786679175    % p3s
35.0379144382    % p3e
42.5295661452    % p4s
46.7102405693    % p4e
53.4095480813    % p5s
58.3675249346    % p5e
64.4397435676    % p6s
69.9924227481    % p6e
75.6293832304    % p7s
81.5576901123    % p7e
86.9714692342    % p8s
90                         % p8e

And a REG 8 ppq 0.53 amp magic sinewave of

5.627729372532276
6.19843404746768
15.954913056116387
17.64272648388345
26.514295209330125
29.26888822066971
37.18699684487815
40.920239035121796
47.98464610634204
52.57145154365792
58.92717334595
64.20427732405014
70.02825035122738
75.7943652487726
81.2883086080619
87.3089976319381

Combine them into a REG-BFF-BFF-REG two
cycle pattern and Fourier Analyze. You can use
this sourcecode to produce this result file and
this plot. Code requires our Gonzo utilities per
this tutorial. This is internal use code and not
in any manner polished or finalized.

The results should be a magic sinewave whose
first uncrontrolled harmonic is a reduced 61st.

The benefits of two cycle GGMS alteration are
prefilter uncontrolled harmonics much higher in
frequency and lower in amplitude. The penalties
are 62 switch events per cycle instead of 60 and
approximately double the storage needs.

This remains "too good to be true" ane requires
verification.

Please report any confirmations or problems.

Expanded, updated, and revalidated our Flutterwumper,
Banner Advertising, and Infopack library pages.

May have a major advance in our GGMS magic sinewaves,
following some disappointing setbacks. A magic sinewave
is a newly discovered digital synthesis procedure that zeros
out any desired number of low harmonics using the absolute
fewest number of switching transitions. Important uses are
industrial motor controls, electric autos, and solar panels.

The question came up whether the first few uncontrolled harmonics
could be further reduced before filtering by some sort of spread
spectrum   or cancellation techniques.

Early analysis was unduly optimistic because quarter wave symmetry
was assumed but not present. Which combined cancellation with
newer odd cosine or even sine terms for only an arguably marginal benefit.

Instead, these preliminary results seem to show promise and can give
a very significant reduction at least to certain amplitudes.

Fourier analyze a TWO cycle waveform consisting of REG-BFF-BFF-REG
half cycles. Be sure to note that all resulting harmonics will be double
those of the real world. At 0.53 amplitude, a conventional 8 ppq BFF
has its first uncontrolled harmonic of 0.77 at the 31st harmonic. The
GGMS version has its first uncontrolled harmonic of 0.18 at the 61st
harmonic. That is BEFORE filtering. Filtering, of course, should end
up ridiculously better.

I'll try to work up a GuruGram on this once I have more results. Yes,
there still could be serious math errors, and yes, there could be further
hidden gotchas. Some question remains whether the real world will
tolerate harmonic integration over a full two cycles.

The potential for four cycle integration remains even more intriguing.
Predicted improvement would depend on amplitude.

Please email me with your independent check results.

Even after a dozen trips, I've yet to find exact route
info for the Montez toll road. What follows remains
mostly speculation, backed up with only weak evidence.

The route likely went from San Jose to Guthrie. There
was superb train service from Guthrie to Cliffton, Morenci,
and even Metcalf. There is one and only one credible and gentle
route up onto Tollgate Mesa from Guthrie. Acme Mapper
shows hints of a route which eventually becomes a modern
ranch road. All of which gets confusing at the corral near the
modern highway.

The northern modern highway cuts just west of the corral show
rockworks at their upper limits. These rockworks have unbroken
ancient desert varnish and may in fact be the toll road. The
positioning of the modern road cuts suggest an attempt was made
at historical preservation.

Things get confusing well before the summit. A ranch road to the south
shows an initial east-west portion that may be the original toll
road. Continuing west along the modern highway, there is little
evidence of the toll road. It is possibly buried under modern construction
or flood damaged. On the other hand, it is fairly obvious where the
route had to go along the bottom of the draw..

The "Tollgate Site" marking on the topo map probably is accurate,
and a fairly obvious stretch of the route can be found further west.
This typically is a twelve foot wide path whose rocks were cleared
to a running wall to the south. The wall was typically a foot high
and a foot and a half wide. Newer water pipes confuse the issue.

The route "had" to intercept the largely disused sothern extension
of the Back Country byway, but it is not yet obvious to me just
where. Probably near the wash "low water crossing". The rest
of the route probably followed old US 70 past what I call
the Unnamed Tank in our Gila Dayhikes library.

This is the only historical record I've been able to find, and
it is an undocumented popularization. Please email me if
you have any better info or field verification.

The HTML <li> list command seems to generate
all sorts of errors when validated to trnsitional or
better modern standards.

This command is "depreciated", which means you
should not be using it in newer designs and layouts.
Use CSS techniques instead.

The main problem is that <li> must NOT be inside
a <blockquote>...</blockquote> structure. Undo all
of yoour blockquotes and reposition the <li> portion
using the older <ul> and </ul>.

Finding right sized and properly positioned bullets
for substitution can be tricky. There is no bullet in
conventional ASCII, and the ampersand-#183 command in
ISO8859-1 gives a rather small bullet. And using a
larger font size moves the bullet vertically.

Expanded, updated, and revalidated our Hardware Hacker
library page.

BTW, you can tell the newly revalidated library pages
by the eBay block to the right of the title.

While less than half of the revalidation project is
completed, this is now over 95% of the page views
on our more significant pages.

It sure is amazing how much the HTML rules have
changed. To date, something like 60,000 "errors"
have been "corrected" on the website.

Please report any remaining glitches, however minor.

One of our current Magic Sinewave projects is to try
and use spread spectrum or cancellation techniques to
reduce the early uncontrolled harmonics. This is turning
out to be a lot more difficult than initially thought.

Many thanks to Robert Ackerman and others for their
independent checking on this. Attempts to date such
as this, this, this, and this have introduced additional
even sine harmonics or even cosine terms. Leaving
only an arguably negligible improvement.

The original premise was that a regular magic sinewave
and a bridged best efficiency magic sinewave have
their early uncontrolled harmonics that are often equal
and opposite in sign to each other. The question remains
whether some scheme can be created for cancellation.

Curiously, most any even bridged best efficiency magic
sinewave can be factored into two terms of a regular
magic sinewave of half the transitions and a BBE magic
sinewave of half the transitions. When combined, these
two clearly give a "perfect" loharms cancellation with no
new even harmonics or cosine terms.

The only tiny gotcha is that the number of pulse edges
double, thus reducing the switching efficiency.

More on magic sinewaves in general here.

Expanded, updated, and revalidated our Tech Musings
library page.

Expanded, updated, and revalidated our PostScript
library page.

There sure is a difference in researching our local toll
roads.The Weech Road up Shingle Mill Canyon was the first
road up Mount Graham. While vehicle impassible in
seven places ( mostly flood damage + a forest service
closure ). Most of it is quite easy to follow, although the
4WD vehicle passible portions are mesmerizingly awful.

Not so with the Montez Road up Toll Gate Canyon.
Only small portions are likely to remain obvious, and
even finding the ends and route are proving extremely
difficult. Flood damage, new highway construction, and
pipelines further complicate matters. Yet this was the
more important of the two routes.

Any hints would be welcome. More on similar hikes
are on our Gila Dayhikes library page.

Expanded, updated, and revalidated our Magic Sinewaves
library page.

The new sections on GGMS spread spectrum techniques
to reduce unwanted harmonics are not nearly as far along
as I wanted them to be. Nonetheless, there is tremendous
potential here for reduced filtering or even "filterless"
solutions.

And possible entire new classes of magic sinewaves.

Started uploading some classic tutorials to our Ask the
Guru Classics library. First offerings are Experiments with
WWVB and Electronic Metal Locators.

While www.google.com still holds the JavaScript speed record,
the new Firefox 3.5 is also impressively fast. In particular either
program makes our Magic Sinewave Calculators approach near
real time.

Present calculator extensions that need done is expanding the
Delta Friendly selections from 16 to 24 pulses per quadrant.
All of the "regular" Magic Sinewaves need added as well,
since they seem to be emrging in importance as they may
may have some surprising new uses.

A Magic Sinewave tutorial appears here, along with a
Development Proposal here.

A reminder that MIT has course materials freely available
either online or as dowmloads for hundreds of their offerings.
As do many other major institutions. There's no credit nor any
instructor contact, but pretty near everything else is there.

One slight gotcha on your first downloads. All the first pages
are nondescript and suggest a near empty file. Simply go to
page two or scroll down to get to useful content.

Did a major revalidation and update of our Tinaja Questing
library page.

There are not less than nine major bankruptcy auctions
of SMD houses coming up within the next few days.

Not sure what to make of this, but it would seem that now
is not a good time to go into the SMD assembly business in
the US. Bargains should abound in the auctions if the sales
interfere with each other in any manner. And the big players
should run out of money somewhere along the way.

The resale price of older SMD assembly equipment can
be expected to nosedive at least temorarily. But stunning
deals just might show up as "contents of room" or
"contents of cabin" after careful onsite inspection.

Did a major revalidation and update of our GuruGram
library page.

Added a Frequency Counter and a Shift Register
to our Classics Reprints.

As before, both are single PDF files with most text
searchable.

Six down ( up actually ). Only 1994 to go.

A reminder that most older web pages are likely to
have hundreds or even thousands of errors in them.
Which you can prove by using This Validator.

Ampersands are a particular problem, in that nearly
all of them should be represented by &Amp; . URL's
Can cause all sorts of problems, especially those from
eBay, Acme Mapper, and typical government agencies.

There are lots of maddeningly infuriating problems with
Dreamweaver. Possibly the worst is that if you use it to
change ampersands to "approved" form, it will change them
all back an hour or two later into your work session.

The rule is to CHANGE ALL YOUR AMPERSANDS
WITH AN ORDINARY WORD PROCESSOR AND
NEVER WITH DREAMWEAVER!

Which leads to an even more subtle gotcha: Dreamweaver
is swift enough to detect outside program changes and may
ask you if it should do an update. NEVER DO THIS!

Instead, always "fresh load" your word processor just
before your ampersand changes, and close it just after
completion. Then reload Dreamweaver by hand.

Otherwise, Dreamweaver may revert to code you edited
hours or even days ago.

One of the more curious features just added to our
Gila Dayhikes library page is the Deadman Canal.

This canal is routed along the HIGHEST point
on a bajada ridge and then gets "switched" in
three different ways to support three dirt tanks in
three wildly different canyons.

There is some suggestion that the original canal
is in fact prehistoric and dates from the thirteenth
century. Which makes its engineering even
more stunningly impressive.

Reverified and expanded our Hydrogen Energy library.

The updated format pages now include the home page,
What's new 09, Gila Day Hikes, Guru Archives and
It's a Gas.

Please email me with any corrections or suggestions.

Expanded and updated our Gila Dayhikes library page.

Added a Nixie Tube counter and a Signal Injector
to our Classics Reprints.

As before, both are single PDF files with most text
searchable.

Four down ( up actually ). Only 1996 to go.

I think I got a process of archiving reprints that is
at least "good enough". Files are medium resolution
scans OCR'ed into Acrobat 9 ClearScan. Each story
is in one PDF mult page piece, and much of the text is
now  fully searchable.

The task is rather daunting in that there are
likely over 2000 (!) of my reprints that need attention.

The dilemma, of course, is that many of these
are preelectronic and do not have sourcecode
beyond double spaced typrwritten pages or
original magazine page copies.

I'd like to see higher resolution with smaller
file sizes, editible and improvable ClearScan
fonts, efficient reworking of original printed
art into my Gonzo format, and better searching
of figure text. And better finding of "missed"
search terms.

Our first two "heavies' in the new format are
A solid State 3 Channel Color Organ ( good
old number one, as Scrooge McDuck would
say ) and the beyond legendary TV Typewriter
that was the first round fired in the personal
computer resoloutin.

Additional entries are being placed in the
same Classics area of our newly upgraded
Guru Archive Reprints.

The quality and speed of the archving can
be dramatically improved by your participation
as a banner advertiser, client / consultant,
auction resource sponsor, Magic Sinewave grantor,
or any other funding support.

I could use your help finding some of my "lost" books
and columns. Preferably high resolution scans.
But copies or even lists of issues-page numbers will
help.

I particularly need the HARDWARE HACKER columns
out of Modern Electronics. And most especially their
Marcia Swampfelder April Fool issues.

I also need a list of which of my
Turning to the really obscure stuff, The Goodyear AEEM's,
the Cave Crawler's Gazette publications, and the
Electronic Experimenter's Club stories would be nice.
As would the PE Handbook reprints.

Please email me with any assistance.

A cute and interesting surprise from Acrobat's new
ClearScan: The word searching is smart enough to
find both hyphenated and regular copies of the same word!

I've long avoided use of any hyphens in my stories. Mostly
to obsessively prove that you can do better fill justification
without hyphens than with. But also to work around electronic
searching issues.

Such as these examples. Or these.
More on avoiding hyphens here.

These days, of course, fill justification is largely
pointless and obsolete.

Its nice to know that the older pre-electronic paper
articles and columns now have improved search. We'll
shortly be adding bunches of these to our classics page.

At any rate, de-hyphenation is a very cute hack.

 

Still getting irate emails from individuals claiming
that "axial" means "out the radius" and "radial" means
"along the axis".

Which of course is not even wrong. As any 1929 radio book
will tell you.

The two most common forms of cylindrical electrolytic capacitor
are "single ended axial" and "double ended axial".

A radial electrolytic capacitor is so rare that the odds are
utterly overwhelming that you never have seen one.

More details in this photo tutorial.

Added several upgrades and improvements to our
Gila DayHikes library page.

We are now up to 241 main entries and almost 365
mentions!

The PostScript status command seems to have two
wildly different and easily confused uses.

When applied to an internal file object, the command
returns true if additional bytes remain to be read and
false otherwise. You can return to reread earlier bytes
using the fileposition command, with 0 fileposition
returning you to the beginning of the file

There is no direct way to find the length of an internal
file object. Instead you have to use...

         dup fileposition exch bytesavailable add

When the status command is instead applied to a filename
string, it explores the presence and condition of a file on the
host machine. Returning either false or -pages- -bytes-
-referenced- -created- true.

Note that the full pathname is usually required and that
each and every forward slash in the pathname must be
replaced by a double slash for proper PostScript interpretation.

Note further that Acrobat Distiller versions above Acrobat 8
default prevent writing to host disk files. You can enable
XP by entering Acrodist -F from the command line and other
systems by following these details.

UPDATE: Adobe now blocks all distiller disk file access.
Use GhostScript when you need fancy manipulation.

Managed to get back to the Nancy's Rockpiles enigma.

Some evidence is accumulating that this is really a CCC
boondoggle of one sort or another. There are a few classic
punched oilcans present and some markings on at least a
few rocks that suggest steel tools. The desert varnish and
lichen contrast appears too high for prehistoric. As does the
utter pointlessness and lack of windblown fill.

And the fact that the irregular structures are along drainages
rather than across them.

The local evidence is overwhelming that the CCC had a scant few
good and useful projects intersperced with great heaping
bunches of utterly worthless money-down-the-drain busywork.

Local new stimulus packages seem to be following an identical
throw-the-money-away path.

I seem to be spinning my wheels over trying to improve
the latest version of Acrobat 9. While their Clearscan feature
is quite impressive, it seems to have flaws.

Specifically, I would like to be able to retouch the final fonts
and clearly know which text words are in fact searchible. I
would also like to improve text in figures and make them
searchible as well.

Essential is an UncompressPDF.api plugin. But I cannot
seem to be able to get the one in the free Acrobat 9 SDK
to work. The immediate rude surprise of the SDK is that
all tools are in C language sourcecode and will need
compiled before you can use them.

It turns out that Microsoft has a new and free beta
of their Visual Studio 10 out that should have the
needed tools.

So far, this generates a "can't use mkdir" postproc error.
Finding the output code in the Debug folder does in
fact let you move a new copy of UncompressPDF.api
into the Acrobat plugins file. And does in fact
add the needed "Uncompress" menu item into
Acrobat. But so far it does not actually uncompress
the .PDF files I'm trying to use.

Plan "B" was to go to the free PDFTK open source
software that also includes an uncompressor. So far,
this seemed to install ok, but Win XP will not yet
recognize it from the command line.

Plan "C was to write my own uncompressor using
my Gonzo Utilities. But files are the only sure way
of dealing with all 256 characters and with lengths
greater than 65K characters. There is no stream or
endstream operators in PostScript, so these will
need converted to create new file objects which then
can be Flate uncompressed.

I did find a TypeTool 3 that looks like it should
be able to edit the custom Clearscan fonts.

Please let me know any solutions to the apparent
above problems.

What really galls me over alternate energy solutions is
simply this: Genuine breaktrhoughs are impossibly difficult
to fund and highly ridiculed. While ludicrously and laughably
"not even wrong" obvious fantasies grab the spotlight as
well as run away with the big bucks.

Consider this scheme to replace highways with pv solar panels.
There is so much "not even wrong" with this on so many levels that
I do not know even where to begin.

Clearly, such thinking could only have come from spending long
hours in the outhouse alone. And the epsilon minus government
bureaucrats that funded this electrocity should be staked to an anthill.

For openers, there is no such thing as a net energy pv
panel. Not one net watthour of pv energy as ever been
produced. Nor will it happen till several years after the
net net unsubsidisied cost of fully burdened and equipped
pv panels drops under twenty five cents per peak watt.

Until well after breakeven, each and every panel will
need carefully optimized if it is even to hope to become
something other than a gasoline destroying net energy
sink.

ANY factor that focuses on ANYTHING but net energy
is a fatal flaw.

Let's see. That means the optimum pv farm shape MUST
be a square or at worse a rectangle. And certainly
not an arbitrarily long linear array. A mile hiway lane
would produce far less energy than two or less acres of
properly designed pv farm. At two or more orders
of magnitude in cost.

That means the optimum pv angle MUST be elevated rather
than flat.

That means the pv panels MUST be carefully protected
from the slightest wear. Not to mention getting run over
by a truck or freeze expanded. Or covered with snow
and salt .

That means that the sole purpose of the pv farm maint
MUST be to preserve and optimize pv production. And
not worrying about distupting rush hour traffic.

This means that there MUST be something "wrong"
with the pv site that makes it inappropriate for any
other use. Such as very limited water.

A genuine alternate energy efficiency improving
breakthrough is instead found here.

A fearture that would make Acrobat's Clearscan even
more useful: A built in font editor.

Clearscan apparently makes a new font "A" by averaging out
and smoothing each and every "A" of a given style and size in
the text portion of the document. The result looks much better than
the original ( besides allowing much smaller files and text
smoothing ). But the font still may look a little ratty.

Caused primarily by defects in type on older documents.
Substituting fonts gets tricky because of the character
widths. Especially with fill justification.

But it sure would be nice to retouch the character shapes
with a hand tweaking. Ferinstance, a lower case "a"
might still be "fuzzy", "weak" or "too open" compared
to modern typography.

Yeah, you can really do this by hand using a print to disk,
compression removal, editing the font in a third party
product, and recompressing and resaving.

Manual font tweaking definitely should be a built in
feature.

Another tip when using Google imagry:

Their copy protection reappears as symmetric
lettering every two inches or so. These are easy
to confuse with "real" image details, especially
when you are looking for something prehistoric.

Beware of staggered symmetric patterns!

Sometimes unexpected detail can be extracted from
a tri-color bitmap by selectively boosting or cutting
each color plane with a color balance utility such as
free Imageview32 or Photoshop.

Further enhancement can be done by bumping the
contrast and/or gamma. Ferinstance, is this a copper
exploration or a prehistoric ruin?

Sadly, Acme Mapper seems to resist bitmap conversion.
There is an otherwise superb Firefox screen grabber
plug in here that does not work. But a free demo utility
called FastStone Capture 6.5 seems to work just fine.

Elaborate bitmap plane manipulations are easily done using
my Gonzo Utilities. Examples include single color to grayscale
conversion. Or blending a high detail color plane with a
lower one.

Lately, I've bren finding that OVER HALF of my
price or specs industrial email inquiries are outright
being ignored. Or delayed a month or two, typically
with a response that did not have the faintest clue
what I asked for.

Naturally, an email request for pricing should NEVER
be required in the first place. The pricing should be
conspicuously apparent on the website, or auctomatically
created by their shopping basket.

The first and foremost question any engineer has on
a compenent to be designed in is "How much does it
cost"? If you keep this a secret from me, this tells
me you are obscenely overpriced

While regenerative braking is certainly a worthwhile
addition to an electric vehicle, most individuals tend
to grossly overrate its potential and value.

A theoretical benefit might be fifteen to seventeen
percent. Which in the real world likely becomes nine
to ten percent. Minus conversion efficiencies. And
even less with sloppy driving habits.

You can easily prove this to yourself. Find a vehicle
( such as a city fire truck ) that has a retarder on it
and drive it for a while. You'll find yourself continually
"feathering" the gas to prevent the retarder from
kicking in.

The percentage of the time that kinetic energy is
being absorbed is largely negligible. And you get
the same energy back regardless of how fast the
initial accelleration got you up to speed.

As usual, there ain't no free lunch.

Hoffschnagles nefarious cave entrance theorem:

Cave entrances invariably occur in groups of two or
more, except when then occur singly.

Placed a copy of my very first technical article here.
On a solid state three channel color organ.

As Scrooge McDuck would say, "Good old number one".

I am not yet totally happy with the background or figure
quality. Yes, the text is ( almost ) fully searchible, but
the figure text is not. And, yes, it is a single multi-page
document for hassle free access..

Adobe's ClearScan in Acrobat 9 is clearly a major
step forward in this area. Their candidate correction
still needs improved, and it sure would be nice to be
able to replace fonts.

Doing the job right on all of these ( now over 2000! ) will
take additional banner advertisers or alternate
funding of some sort. .

A third party hosting of my "Experiments with WWVB"
is now available on line. From the August 1973 issue
of Radio Electronics.

The WWVB signal is noisy enough in most parts of the
country to give disappointing results.  Especially with
simple receivers. And most people failed to pick up
on the significance of a clock that automatically will
self-reset and is always accurate.

These days, we have tuning fork style 60 kHz crystals
for a dollar that have around the proper "Q". And
greatly improved ferrites are available for a 60 kHz
antenna. And phase lock loops that autocorrelate on
sine and cosine channels are no big deal.

But the really big improvement that could be made
is throwing a zillion computer horsepower at the problem.
We know exactly what the WWVB output is supposed to
look like for  the next 24 hours. Which means we should be
able to cross correlate with a local reference te to an
effective bandwidth of a tiny fraction of a millihertz!

Design services available.

There are several commercial solutions available off
the shelf. These tend to be pricey and not much in
demand. They usually beat the noise problems by
updating once a day in the middle of the night.

I'd also like to get all of my reprints available here on
my own website. With full OCR and a full text
search. This would take additional banner advertisers,
grants, or some additional funding source.

It is interesting to review how much technical writing has
changed in the last few decades. The key rule these days
is to think like a cartoonist. Frugal. Compact. Succinct.

Naturally, nobody pays for writing any more. The
real world return for tech writing has dropped by an
unconsionable factor of TWENTY or more. Despite
ridiculously improved quality and presentation.

Writing is also insanely more competitive than
it once was. Instead of half a dozen other authors
in a magazine, you have half a million or more on the
web.

A norm for a seventies story might have been 3000
words and five figures. These days, nobody will
sit still for such a morass of detail. A thousand words
is seriously pushing it.

"Bite Size" short paragraphs dominate. Each separated by
once excessive ledding. Fill justification is long gone.
Hanging punctuation generates a blank stare.
Bolding and color changes have replaced underlining
and italics. And fonts are no longer a big deal. They
are just "there".

Some became better. Full color is the norm with zero cost
penalty. There are fewer size restrictions and any
figures can be placed exactly where you want them
rather than forward or back referencing. You typically
have absolute and total layout control.

Vertical scrolling is trivial, but horizontal scrolling or
multiple columns have become extremely annoying.

Stories can now be the size thay need to be. Instead
of heavily edited to fit columns of editorial space.
Magnification is trivial. Both for additional figure
detail or for handicapped accessibility.

There are far fewer deadlines and those that remain
are more flexible. Full text searching is a given.
Links, of course, are a must. Both to more detail
and more fundamental tutorials.

The two styles are easily compared. With "old way"
methods here and here. And "new way" layout schemes
here and here.

A reminder that there are several problems if you simply
scan a document for Acrobat .PDF conversion. Not the
least of which are that the file sizes will remain enormous
and searching for text will not work. Because there is no text.

A scanned image of a text page can easily end up several
Megabytes or more in size. Our properly created text+graphics
pages using our free Gonzo Utilities typically average 9K per page.

Scan conversion should involve a three step conversion. First,
scan the image. Second, OCR the image using Acrobat 9 or
the latest competitive software. Third, carefully hand edit the
five percent or so that the OCR regonition typically misses.

More on efficient PostScript ( and .PDF ) here.

In a stunning genetics breakthrough, they have discovered
that socks are the larval form of the coat hanger.

A dark closet is apparently required for metamorphisis.

More on similar topics here.

While it certainly pays to aggressively seek out
each and every upcoming auction that could possibly
be of interest, getting really excited about a new auction
listing early on may not be a good idea.

Firstoff, many auctions are never held. They are
simply blackmail by a landlord or a bank or a supplier
to convince the bad guys they are serious about
getting paid. This is especially true of storage
shed auctions.

Other auctions may be "prewired" to a single bulk
buyer. Especially if they are allowed to proxy bid.
Certain items may have a tendancy to mysteriously
disappear between the first announcement and
the actual auction as well.

The initial descriptions always sound better than
what you actually will see during your preview.
And time conflicting auctions may create "better
choice to attend" triage situations.

A good rule is to let the auction announcement "age"
a little before you really get overly enameled of it.
By all means, put it on your calender. But do so in
pencil.

Many auction listings can be found here. And your
own custom regional auction finder here.

A certain town which shall remain unnamed ( despite
their sharing their western boundary with Thatcher, AZ )
decided to build a new water tower.

Apparently nobody noticed that all those funny rocks
everybody kept tripping over at the site was a
thirteenth century indian ruin of high cultural
significance and major scope.

The new pipeline itself also qualifies as an equal
opportunity demolisher as it took out a CCC
historical water diversion project.

This was apparently railroaded thru after another
site location got NIMBYed.

Your tax dollars at work.

The concept of "Lets keep the Cave / Fossil / Ruin / Hike a
secret so the bad guys can't find it" never was a very
good idea. These days, web and other developments make
the concept wildly less than utterly useless.

The first hints that all was not well emerged many decades
ago when the stunning discovery was made that the secret
dirty hippy insider underground publication for everybody
ripping off the phone company was ----> The Bell System
Technical Journal! And that the keyaag component needed
was included free in every box of Captain Crunch cereal.

Long before the Streisand Effect.

Back then, you actually had to know what a technical library
was and where to find one. And going to a remote physical
location involved several trips and a lot of luck. Rather than
simply saying N 33.16482 W 110.70876. GPS, of course.

Many thousands of people are now routinely into orienteering
and especially geochaching. Making finding any location trivial.
And freely publishing it world wide even less so.

Having the location instantly gives you a topo map and detailed
satellite imagry via Acme Mapper. Or land ownership via
GIS sites such as this one or tax roll sites such as this one.

And most everybody now has ready access to the insider'e
papers and publications. Or shortly will have. Such seemingly
innocuous inclusions as including two foot contour lines on
a ruin site sketch can tell you exactly where the ruin is in a few
minutes of topo searches. As can fitting two bends in a stream.

Doing your own low cost aerial photography has become
trivial, and shortly should approach super cheap.

As with such stupities as DRM or copy protection or draconian
NDA's, there always will be more bad guys than perceived good
ones. And they always will be smarter than you and always will
have accesss to more research materials and more time to
patiently explore nonobvious links and obscure source materials.

Yet another approach involves the Freedom of Information act.
But this route instantly brands you as a bad guy and draws
attention to yourself.

So, excessive secrecy is almost always totally pointless.
Besides usually having the exact opposite of its intended
effect.

One possible solution is not drawing attention to something
"secret". By not being that way in the first place. A second
is to actually trust people who, on the average, are likely to
benefit your research rather than hurt it.

A third is one both cavers and Apple computer has used --
put nonspecific but unique names on stuff that does not hint
on their location, but exactly tell you how "they" found it.

BTW, there's an outstanding Master's Thesis topic
waiting for somebody at N 33.16482 W 110.70876.
Especially if things turn out to be not what they seem.

A fascinating series of reprints to Desert Magzine
can be found here.

The "yellow boxes" that appear to be blatant
censorship are really just OCR screwups. More
often than not, you can second guess the missing
content.

More on similar topics here.

Verified that the Firefox 3.5 bug that occasionally may
give you an unwanted white or black background is in
fact caused by an unexpected interaction with Windows
XP high contrast accessibility mode.

The problem is more subtle than Firefox makes out
in that it also seems to be file size dependent. I've
noted a trip point around a 250K file size.

The cure is to never use the high contrast XP
mode. Always clear the flag in the accessibility
folder. Systems with the accessibility folder
removed entirely may behave erratically.

If you are listing several hundred or even several
thousand eBay items at once, it pays to verify your
inventory quantity and location on each and every
relist.

Further, if your store listings auto rollover every
thirty days, it pays to carefully check your rollovers
for typos and accuracy once each month.

Besides typos, your inventory might have started
out with a dozen new-in-box items and two slightly
scuffed or whatever. Since you normally sell
your best items first, the descriptions may
eventually need downgraded.

Naturally, you ALWAYS understate condition and
quality.

Some tips if you are planning your own hot tub:

It should neither go outside nor inside. Instead, provide a shelter
or well ventillated semi-building. Outdoors has problems with
uv degradation, dust and grime, convenience, privacy, and
heating costs. Existing indoors can cause mold and mildew,
rust, and excessive humidity .

Atriums or other plant intensive structures work well.
Good ventillation and separation from living areas are
both essential. Isolation from the coldest winter
temperatures is also recommended. Either through
thermal mass, insulated walls, or actual heating.

The usual biggest tub size is 6 foot 8 inches, because this is
the largest size that will fit through an Arcadia door frame.
The door itself may have to be removed during installation.

While the tub itself is usually a ready-to-go dropin, a rather
expensive electrical installation is normally needed. 220 vac,
with manditory higher quality GFI. A low voltage safety
control loop and a timer is strongly recommended. A
professional electrician is usually essential.

A fully insulated cover is a must. It is also important
that the underside of the tub be spray insulated. All but
the cheapest tubs now usually include this feature.

Hot tubs are quite heavy when full. Putting one on
the third story of a hundred year old home can
lead to rude surprises. 500 gallons of water is
around 4000 pounds or two tons! Plus people weight.
Your installation is best done over a reinforced
concrete slab. The tub must sit flat on its bottom
and never supported by any edge lip!

Most modern tubs are quite deep. You will need a
companion deck or ladder or whatever to conveniently
be able to step into them.

Solar heating or solar boosted tubs are usually
not remotely worth the hassle and inconvenience.
The confort temperature zone is quite narrow.

Retail markups in the industry are outrageous, so
always shop around. Older or used tubs can be bad
news because of cracking or crazing. And tub
refinishing is a highly specialized task that almost
certainly will be screwed up by any local fiberglass
outfit.

Had a controller go out on our hot tub. The most
likely cause was excessive humidity getting to their
piezo switch sensors. Two of the four switches
failed, the first one intermittently at first.

Hot tubs have improved dramatically recently.
But I still like those classic custom octagons that look
better architecturally, are easier to get into and
out of, and hold more people.

Everything essential is usually built into the tub
these days. A combination controller and heater
talks to the control panel via a RS422 Ethernet
type comm loop. Apparently they did not use
a conformal coating on the controller or otherwise
prevent a humidity attack. Long after the warranty
was up but still an unacceptably early failure.

Balboa is a leading wholesale supplier.

The technology still has problems. It is usually
tricky to remove the final 20 gallons of water.
A waterfall pump or a shop vac can sometimes
help. Siphoning usually does not have nearly
enough head. Tubs are typically filled from a
garden hose, rather than needing an actual
plumbing hookup.

An external windup or electronic timer can
significantly reduce your operating costs.
Even better if it is computerized and can anticipate
your warmup times. Perhaps using some sort
of table lookup to deal with ambient variations.

Electrically heated tubs are quite convenient but can
be very expensive. Eight kilowatts of heater for two
hours per day translates to fifty dollars per month.
And possibly double that if you are sloppy about
your lid covers or do not use a timer.

Curiously, using a tub every day costs about the
same as every second day. The reheating costs
are surprisingly comparable.

There is an obvious solution of a heat pump.
While there is no particular reason that these
should be expensive, they typically will double
your installation cost today and are in no manner
cost effective.

Did yet another update on our Gila Valley Day Hikes.

We are now up to 232 main listings, and nearly 365 mentions!
Enough to keep you busy for the next year.

Once again, I have personally verified almost all of the
entries. And tried to indicate where I have not.

I suspect that a few really glaring omissions remain, so
please email me with your experiences and suggestions.

The Russians have just invented synthetic caviar.

It is absolutely indistinguishable from the original,
except by taste.

As we have seen, "contents of cabinet" ond especially
"contents of room" auction lots can be exceptional bargains.

But it is super important that you view the lots and know
exactly what the room or cabinet purpose was.

Ferinstance, a maintenence stores should have all new or
nearly new stuff, while a "fix it someday" stash might
only hold abject trash.

And hour fourteen of a three hour auction can yield
exceptional bargains if the auctioneer gets further behind.
Especially if it is 120 degrees in the shade and no shade
except for the four inch hail. And the rabid bats are not
having much luck driving the scorpions away. Plus, of
course, no restrooms.

A "bankruptcy" or "forced sale" might have bunches
of nice stuff in the stash, while an "excess inventory to
ongoing options" routine sale likely only has worthless
and obsolete and broken useless leftovers.

The nature of the business also tells you a lot. Electronic
components from a failed porno coin-op loop shop are less likely
to be mil spec quality than from a belly up aerospace custom supplier.

Your risk goes sharply up if you are unable to physically
attend the auction. So much so, that it may not be worth the risk
unless the price is exceptionally low. Even then, you have to
ask why the price is low if others had the ability to preview.

Much more on our auction help library page.

The "white background" bug I reported a few weeks ago
with Firefox 3.5 may be caused by an interaction with Windows
XP accessibility options.

Specifically, the "Use High Contrast" option on the accessibility
options menu on the control panel can cause problems if
it is set.

If you have problems, try clearing this flag. And please email me
if you have further troubles with our Whats New 09 library page.

Curiously, the XP test machine had no accessibility folder present!
Which might explain how rare ( but real! ) the bug reporting was.

Freight shipments have dramatically improved in many
parts of the country recently.

First and foremost, there is now a UPS Freight that handles
LCL ( less than carlodd lot ) pallets of hundreds of pounds or
more. While kind of pricey by today's standards, they
completely blow away what the locals used to charge. And
are ridiculously easier to deal with.

Two tips: Rates can be much cheaper if you pick the item
up at your nearest UPS dock rather than demanding residental
delivery. And few if any trucking firms will prep stuff for you.
Even tasks as simple as shrink wrapping a skid. But, for
a fairly steep extra charge, some UPS Stores can provide
pickup and packaging services. Most now handle LCL as well
as normal UPS residental.

Some newer web sites are even better. I like U-Ship, but you
might also try Freightcenter. A typical rate for 400 pounds
two states away might be around $240.00. Pricier alternatives
that offer additional services ( but may not be in your area )
include Intershipper and Craters and Ferighters.

Another alternative is to ask around locally who makes routine
truck trips back and forth. These can be ridiculously cheaper and
can greatly simplify packing and prep. Or, use the shippers
yellow pages from your pickup city. Sometimes you can find
a hungry trucker that can cheaply shrink wrap and pick up for
you.

Lastly, U-Haul can be an outstanding bargain at $19 per truck.
But the 60 cents per mile plus fuel can eat you alive on
longer distances. Note that the U-Haul one-way rates from
A to B can be obscenely higher than from B to A.

If you are using this validator to bring your older
HTML code up to XHTML and modern browser
standards, it is not at all unusual for your high error
count to suddenly jump all over the lot.

While the usual explanation is that you did not make
the change you thought you did, some errors can
mask finding other ones. Such as a "&" in a URL
that has not been properly recoded as "&amp;"

Or, fixing a a semmingly minor omission that can have
all sorts of major structure implications. Such as leaving
a </td> off a table.

The usual rule is to attack the big lumps first,
Using search-and-replace to cause the largest
drops in error counts first. Plus doing the easy
stuff early and saving the subtle problems for
later. Chances are good that many of them will
disappear along the way all by themselves.

One crucial gotcha when doing a search and
replace is making sure your changes are very
specific. Ferinstance, changing width=4 to
width="4" might also force a width=47 to
an error generating width="4"7.

Sometimes leading or trailing spaces can help,
combined with manual replacement to catch
any erros of omission.

Just picked up a bunch of the "nails" used in
bed-of-nails ATE testing. These can be ideal for
your own custom test lashups and should shortly
be up on eBay.

The correct name for these are "music wire
translation pins". And they elegantly solve the
problem of getting from "standard" spacing on a tester
to "custom" pad patterns on the device being
tested.

Here is how they work: The pins are typically 3 to
4 inches long and have a crimp near one end.
A top plate matches your tester. A mid plate has
holes just big enough to catch the crimp and keep
the pins from falling out. A bottom plate matches
the pattern you are trying to measure.

The pins can typically be offset by as much as
0.4 inches, letting you easily match the exact
test pattern you need without going to a totally
custom test setup.

We have these available in small quantity lots
in several sizes so they are ideal for your custom
test setups. Especially for jobs that could not
justify a full blown ATE tester.

As we've seen a number of times in the past, it is
now often trivial to throw another million calculations
at a problem. Which is how much of our Magic Sinewave
results came about. Per this tutorial.

Our puzzle of a few weeks ago had only 362,880 possible
solutions. PostScript can easily run theough these in
only a few seconds at most.

One off the more general issues that came up when
brute force solving this code was "How do you generate
all possible combinations of nine unique digits 1-9?"

Simply picking a random 9 digit number would have an
excessive number of false hits. And random shuffling
( Monte Carlo style ) would only give you a 63%
probability of success on the first 362,880 tries.

Here's a cute and fast approach to generate "all but only"
of the combinations...

/testall {

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

9 {8 {7 {6 {5 {4{

3 { do exch do exch
         3 -1 roll } repeat

4 -1 roll} repeat
5 -1 roll} repeat
6 -1 roll} repeat
7 -1 roll} repeat
8 -1 roll} repeat
9 -1 roll} repeat
       } store

For each iteration of do, a unique nine digit
pattern will appear on the nine top stack locations.

Loop time ( exclusive of do activity ) is around one
fifth of a second!

Further expanded our Gila Day Hikes library page.

Auctions that combine a bulk buy option with lot
sales are almost always a sucker bet. I've yet to see
any auction where the bulk sale was not a prewired
giveaway to a selected insider.

This gets even worse when the winning bulk bidder is
allowed to place a higher proxy. Ferinstance, at a
picture framing auction, the chosen bidder might
bid and win at 30K, but proxy bid up to 45K. If there
were 300 lots, the average lot price would have to
exceed $100 without the proxy and $150 with.

Which clearly is in the "ain't gonna happen" range.

Yeah, there can be exceptions. But these are often
few and far between. If what is being sold is remotely
near being a viable business, and if any owner or
employee is not in jail or drug rehab, chances are
that bulk will win.

And that you are wasting your time attending.

Exceptions might be when there are an enormous number
of poisioned lots, only one or two very pricey items that
are not obsolete, or some outrageous obligation ( such
as an epa gas tank dig up ) attached to a bulk sale.

More on similar topics on our Auction Help page.

Another advantage of in-panel synchronous inverters
is that currents can easily be optimized by paralleling
cells.

Ferinstance, a one square meter panel could consist of
one hundred cell modules, connected as five groups of 20.
Each group might output 12 volts at 3.3 amps peak, and
five phase inverter arm would only have to deal with this
fairly modest current.

Depending on the cell technology used, the ratio of inverter
phases to cells could easily be optimized for the best efficiency
that is combined with the most reasonable per-phase cell
switching currents. Among other advantages, heatsinking
would be dramatically simplified.

By integrating cells with inverters on a per panel basis,
total system performance can easily be optimized.

More on pv fundamentals here and here.

More on efficient sinewave synthesis here.

For many end users, the cost of a synchronous inverter
added to a home pv system can consume 150% of the
value of ALL the electricity sent through it. Thus guaranteeing
you a gasoline destroying net energy sink, even with
completely free pv panels.

One emerging solution is to distribute the problem,
putting synchronous inverters on each and evey panel.

The electronics this way are far cheaper and simpler.
Once economics of scale and learning curves set in,
there's no reason the total inverter cost should exceed
$9 each, nor any reason they should be larger than a
two inch cube.

There are many advantates to "plug and go" panels
that directly output 110 vac. The lower currents
make the electronics and its heat control vastly
simpler. "Sweet Spot" Thevenin optimization
is easily included. UL and local approvals are
dramatically simplified. As is utility standardization.

Interface could be a plain old line cord with
a minor and cheap safety interlock modification.
Just plug it in anywhere.

One approach to "internal inverter" panels appears
here. I feel it is obviously waaay overdesigned for the
task at hand. Similar developments can be
found on an ongoing basis in Solar Industry
magazine.

More on the absurdities of pv here.

Expanded and updated our Auction Help Library page.

This page has also just been revalidated, so please report
any problems you may find, inside or out of Firefox 3.5.

I'm still trying to decide whether to add bouncy bricks
to the regional links. This would make the file size
quite long. Some other improvements and rearrangements
are probably also long overdue.

Your own custom regional auction finder can be
created for your per these details.

One working definition of "engineering" that I prefer
is "A sense of the fitness of things".

One REALLY BAD IDEA that needs immediately
stomped upon is supersizing solar power towers.

This is an engineering rathole of the first order
that is CERTAIN to far exceed costs and CERTAIN to
NEVER deliver net energy.

Conventional solar power towers are marginally useful
and clearly about to be blown out of the water by
stunning new pv developments. pv with advantages of
negligible water needs, incremental expandability,
compatibility with other land uses, minimum approval
hassles, little labor, upcoming true net energy at
competitive rates, low termperatures, future
dramatic learning curve cost reductions, simple
structures, few moving parts that are both low tech and
nonprecise, minimal land disruptions, etc... etc...

The supersize towers would demand a federal land grab
of mind numbing acerage for exclusive use. They will need
water resources far above and beyond what is sanely available.
They demand new strucutres MANY HUNDREDS of feet higher
than any existing Arizona building! I feel that convection
currents could easily create perpetual hurricane force winds and
conceviably disrupt both regional and global climate. Not
to mention military, bird, and general avaition hassles.

Alarmingly, the feds have been placed on "fast track
approval" for such stupidities.

It seems to me what happened is that a megacorporation spent
way too much money developing an unneeded and useless heat
transfer technology and is desparately trying to trump up uses for
it that would bail them out.

Fortunately, the concept has been thrown out of Nevada.
But certain areas in Arizona remain endangered.

Such "unfit" thinking, of course, could only have come from
spending long hours in the outhouse alone.

It is interesting to watch magazines coping with
their inevitable death spirals.

Machine Design has just gone from free to way too
much for digital and insanely too much for
their printed version.

Newsweek has tried "repurposing", giving their
current product new depth of meaning to the
term "mesmerizingly awful".

Normally, I am in favor of helping the handicapped,
but Newsweek obviously chose the wrong
remedial Special Ed class for their redesign.

It turns out there are two "flavors" of BNC connectors,
rated for 50 Ohms and 75 Ohms. The 50 Ohm versions
have pins nearly a millimeter in diameter and are intended
for microwave and rf use. The more common 75 Ohm versions
have significantly smaller pins and are intended for video
and cable uses.

For most people most of the time, using the "wrong" style
will not make much difference. Most modern BNC connectors
can safely be interchanged for all but the most critical
of highest frequency performance.

But cerrtain older 50 Ohm male plugs can distort some 75 Ohm
jacks to the point where their reliability could drop.

The rule is to try to keep 50 Ohm connectors in 50 Ohm
systems and 75 Ohm connectors in 75 Ohm ones.
But nothing bad is likely to happen if you mix up any
newer conenctions.

Continuing our expansion and enhancement of our
Gila Valley Day Hikes library page.

We are now up to 222 main entries and nearly 300 mentions!

It is becoming obvious that very few places in the country
can give you so much close in variety of neatly unique things to do.

Nonetheless, I strongly suspect I have overlooked some
glaring omissions. Please email me with your suggestions.

How bad is the error if you use the "wrong" shuffling
algorithm from two days ago?

The number of possible combinations is n^n. The
number of possible results is n!. The ratio of the
two simplifies to n^(n-1)/(n-1)!.

For equiprobable odds, this ratio has to be an
integer. How do various "n" values fare?

At n=3, we have 9/2 or 4-1/2. 50% of the
results will have a 20% higher probability
than they should. And clearly is uselessly bad.

At n=4, we have 64/6 or 10-2/3 20% of the
results will have a 10% higher probability
than they should.

At n=5, we have 625/24 or 26-1/24 4% of the
results will have a 3.8% higher probability
than they should.

The bias rapidly becomes negligible for
higher n. And is essentially zero for n=52.

Once you get past the obserssive part, math
can be utterly fascinating.

Two of my many early power control projects
can be found here and here.

Popular Science completely rewrote and trashed
the concept of the dual control, making it look
ultra hokey. The intended use was for a dual
photoflood controller for studio photography.

You would do your composition with low level
light to avoid the extreme heat. And then could
easily balance key and backlighting. Color
temperature was not that big a deal because
everything those days was usually black and white.

Several refinements in either project simply
were not there yet. Such as adding a second
resistor and capacitor to improve late angle
phasing and eliminate low brightness "jumping".

These ate am radios for lunch with their
incredible rfi. Adding a toroid dramatically
improved their am compatility.

And performance on drill motors and such
was rather wimpy till motor-specific controls
evolved that used simple but effective
torque feedbaack.

I've long been overly enameled of shuffling algorithms.
Some detailed coverage appeared in my Apple
Assembly Cookbook.

It turns out there are two different types of shuffling,
shuffling with replacement (such as dice) or shuffling
without replacement ( such as a deck of cards ).

Shuffling without replacement simply consists of
picking a random number. For dice, a 6 random using
my gonzo utilities works fine, per this tutorial.

Shuffling without replacement can have a sneaky
flaw that biases your results. The obvious ploy of
"interchange all cards with itself or another selected
at random" creates subtle errors.

Here's why: There are only SIX different outcomes
when shuffling three cards, ABC ACB, BAC, BCA,
CAB, and CBA. But there are TWENTY SEVEN ways
to interchange all with everybody at random. 27 does
not divide into piles of six each very well; thus there will
be unavoidable bias.

Admittedly the bias becomes negligible when you get
up to 52 cards, but it is still definitely there. Instead,
the correct algorithm is "interchange all cards with itself
or another card LOWER IN THE DECK selected at
random".

Again, this is easily done with the gonzo utilities.
Details vary with exactly what you have in mind.

I've started to revalidate many of our website pages.
The home page, What's New 09, and Gila Hikes should
be finished. At least temporarily.

Please report any problems on or off Firefox 3.5.

A very few ( typically 6 or 7 ) problems remain, but these
seem to be false positives from the validator.

I've pretty much decided to stick with our older "retro"
or traditional look to our website. Among other reasons,
this seems to be a good way to manage a site that has
many thousands of external links on it.

And if for no other reason than all of the innovative kicking
and screaming that I once had to go through for...

PDF Byte Range Retrival
.ASP subroutine availability
Custom Log Reporters
Efficient bouncy bricks.
Hassle free site searches
Automatic Banner Rotators
Banners load last

Here's a summary of the Firefox 3.5 bug I found...

Something like 25% of the XP viewers may observe
a switching to a white background for files whose
length exceeds 250K of sample files such as
revalidated https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu09.shtml.

Older nonconforming files, such as https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu08.shtml
may revert to an illegible black background instead.
The problem does not appear on other browsers or on
earlier versions of Firefox.

Please email me if you experience this effect or if you
can find a cause or cure.

A friend at dinner asked if, even without them being
in any manner renewable or sustainable or green, if
today's conventional silicon solar pv panels did not
in fact have a low carbon footprint.

The surprising answer is that, no, they do not.

First, the concept of "carbon free" is totally bogus.
"Carbon neutral" makes much more engineering,
ecological, and economic sense. Particulaly since
carbon appears to be an essential ingredient in
energy dense liquid fuels. And since its release
contributes significant energy.

Second, the amount of energy delivered by a
conventional pv panel is so laughingly miniscule
that the carbon produced by a conventional
power plant for the same energy is negligible.

But the third and key reason is that today's
panels remain net energy sinks. Most of their amortization
dollars pretty much represent the average carbon
penalty of the rest of society.

Not to mention the carbon emissions during
manufacturer or those of the delivery truck.

Much more in this tutorial.

Arggh! Found yet another insidious bug in Dreamweaver.

Validation of modern web code demands that you replace
every "&" in a URL with a "&amp;". eBay, search services,
and government websits are particularly adept at using
as many as a dozen ampersands that will need modified.

You can easily do a search and replace in Dreamweaver.
The only tiny problem is that the program will change them
all back to the way they were after an hour or two of
further work!!!

The solution appears to be to replace the ampersands
in an ordinary text editor. Dreamweaver will apparently leave
these the way they were.

Am I the only one that sees some irony in today's
announcement that the Feds will spend 18 million
dollars "improving" a website on government waste?

Prediction: When all the dust settles, virtually any
middle school math class could come up with a better
website design in exchange for a bag of hamburgers.

I remain convinced that there is a bizarre bug
in Firefox 3.5. Albeit one that is rare and
probably will not apply to you.

The symptoms are that a long and poorly validated
file such as https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu08shtml
will switch to an illegible black background after
one second. A similar revalidated file such as
https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu09.shtml will switch
to an annoying but still useful white background
after one second.

This only applies to files larger than 250K.
While it shows up on my Dell Windows XP,
at least three viewers report no problems.
But one does. Our sample size is somewhat
low, but this suggests a 25% problem rate.

Please email me if you get white or black
backgrounds on any of my website files
under Firefox 3.5. And especially if you
know how to make the problem go away.

An interesting development in pv solar appears in
the April 10, 2009 issue of science.

Low cost organic materials are used in a wire
like geometry. This greatly simplifies current
gathering.. The system also appears somewhat
self-focusing with a wide acceptance angle.

Sadly, efficiencies remain unnacceptable
at less than 4%. But this could turn into
quite a major innovation.

More on pv solar here.

BLM has a number of interesting and free
web download papers..

#1 -- Sonoran Desert Prehistory
#2 -- Southeast Arizona Archaeology
#4 -- Pinenut Kaibab Anasazi Site
#5 -- Patayan Country Peoples
#6 -- Lower Colorado River Resources
#7 -- Aravapia Ecology & History
#8 -- Bonita Creek Ecology & History
#9 -- Harquahala Solar Observatory

I've long found Midwest Products to be a great source
of modelmaking materials. Especially such things as
dimension cut lumber for models. They seem to have
newly added some hi tech carbon fiber tubing to their
product line.

I long ago did a review of places to go to get unusual
stuff as Resource Bin #10 you will find in this Archive.

An ouatfit similar to Midwest but a lot more plastics
oriented is Iasco-Tesco. K&S Engineering offers a
lot in the way of brass and aluminum shapes, but is
super snotty when it comes to dealer only sales.

Your best source for precut materials and whatever
you need to hold them together would be Small Parts.
Larger stuff can come from McMaster Carr, along
with electrics from W.W. Grainger.

And a superb but non obvious source for these
materials remains Model Railroader magazine.
Who still have by far the finest technical
writing anyplace ever.

One of the more minor skirmishes in the "indian
wars" was our local "Battle Mountain". More
correctly called the Battle of K-H Butte.

The injuns won this one 4-0 in double overtime.

The actual battle ranged from Cedar Springs, thru
two other locations, and ended up at K-H Butte.
Very little remains in the area today.

The best info is available is in an expensive and
hard to find book. Titled, of all things, The
Battle at K-H Butte.

Local copies can be found in the EAC Library or
the Pima Museum.

More on similar topics on our Gila Dayhikes page.

Only in Thatcher...

The new construction project is a combination feed
store and beauty salon.

Org. Found yet another hassle with Dreamweaver.

Should you copy URL's from one position in
a table to another, additional "loose" URL's
may remain in place.

These do not seem to cause problems by
themselves, but your files will get longer, and
hassles involving "&" conversions will get worse.

And, of course, your code is no longer clean.

The web design rules have gotten stricter over the years.
So it is a good bet that any older web pages of yours
may now have hundreds ( or even thousands! ) of
compliance errors.

Although browers have gotten better and better in
dealing with sloppy code, the better your compliance
the more likely that every modern browser will view
your code in the way you intended.

A useful free web validator is found here. Along with
a companion URL checker here.

Some modern compaibility issues...

LOWER CASE - strictly required
for just about any HTML command.

LITERAL STRINGS - most now
be in quotes just about everywhere.

NAMES - must now start with a
letter and not a number.

AMPERSANDS - Those in URL's
must now be spelled out as &amp;.

IMAGE ALT TEXT - Now required
instead of optional. Use alt=" " if
unwanted.

DELIMITING SPACES - Must
strictly be provided between all HTML
commands.

BLOCKQUOTES - Use <blockquote>
instead of <ul> and </blockquote> instead
of </ul>.

SELF DELIMITS - Each command
must have an ending. Such as <br />
instead of <br> and <img .... /> instead
of <img ... >.

The validation site site sometimes may give a false
positive. Ferinstance, a visual basic script with
lowsrc in it may return an error even with valid
code. And there are potential mixeups between
HTML's onmouoseover and JavaScripts
OnMouseOver. Also, reuse of a unique id may
not necessarily be an error if it is offsite.

Several goverment agencies have now placed alternate
energy proposals on a "fast track" approvial process.

This clearly has the same grevious flaw as "shovel ready"
stimulus programs that are clearly favoring really stupid and
utterly useless boondoggles over useful and needed projects.

The problem is this: Most alternate energy projects are
less than totally worthless. And not even wrong. We have
such outright scams as corn ethanol and conventional silicon
pv panels. And weapons in disguise as satellite focused
power. And fundamentally insane power tower supersizing. Or
ludricuous hydrogen anything.

A reasonable estimate is that only one project in
ten is potentially useful when directed towards
renewable and sustainable true net energy at
fully burdened utility avoided cost peaking costs.

Thus, fast tracking virtually GUARANTEES
engineering ratholes.

Some realistic apprasials here and here.

One underappreciated engineering concept is the threshold
effect. In which, before a key event happens, everything is
klutzy and expensive. And afterward, everything is cheap
and effective.

Three older examples are putting audio tape into cassettes.
Or helically scanning diagonally across a tape as the key
to video recording bandwidth. Or the recent revolution
in high resolution silicon image detectors.

Three thresholds obviously in the process of being crossed
are ultra efficient light emitting diodes based on multiple
point sources, flat planel displays now having blown CRT's
completely out of the water, and solid state flash memory
replacing moving media for dramatic improvements in power,
reliability, speed, and size. Plus, soon, cost.

It is fairly easy to predict our next probable thresholds...

NET ENERGY PV SOLAR -- New CIGS
techniques in mile long rolls promise to
finally deliver quarter-per-peak-watt power
that is truly renewable and sustainable.

"BETTER THAN BOOK" READERS -- It
is all over for printed books the instant that
they get over the DRM stupidities and klutziness
and deliver a product that is more pleasant to
use than a book.

SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER BATTERIES--
The theoretical limit for lithium is around
1200 watthours per liter. Such levels would
revolutionize both automobiles and portable
power. Nanotechnology may be the key.

MEDIA FREE TELEVISION -- Instant web
delivery of any and all movies and tv programs
from all time is poised to utterly and completely
blow away such quaintly arcane concepts as cable
or broadcast network television.

Picked up an additional stash of Apple IIgs computers,
including some fairly rare Woz limited editions. Plus lots of
memory cards, keyboards, and some unusual plugins.

These should eventually become eminently collectible. I'd
rather sell the entire lot to a serious investor than one by
one listing them individually.

Please email me if you are interested in this unique opportunity.

One of the leading indicator species of overgrazing
is -------------> cows.

Uh, Oops.

There seems to be some serious campatibility issues
with Firefox 3.5 and several of our files, most notably
this WHTNU09.SHTML blog and a few earlier ones.

The symptom is that the file switches to black wallpaper
near the end of the load, totally trashing everything,
especially black text. The problem kicks in above files
sizes of 230K or so.

Related factors may be HTML compliance issues with
older file structures, DreamWeaver, and Windows XP.
Preliminary attempts to sort all this out gave some
wildly conflicting results.

Present attempts are being made to make the files fully
HTML clean, so the problem can in fact be squarely
blamed on a Firefox 3.5 bug.

Please report any observations or solutions.

Your tax dollars at work: In a stunning local
development, stimulus funds are being used to
move the turnoff to a very seldom traveled dirt
road by a few feet.

While transporting a ridiculous numer of
cubic yards of plain old dirt 30 round trip
miles to do so.

The 60,000 yards claimed in the press release
is fundamentally insane. That would be 6000
trips of 10 yards each. There is, of course,
bunches of better dirt already available within
a few feet of the site.

All at more than the price of a sorely needed aerial fire
platform ( ladder ) truck. Or many years of funding for a local
public library threatened with imminent closure.

It would be far cheaper to pay each road visitor
$100 cash for each time they are inconvenienced by
a slightly nonoptimal turnoff.

The key concept here is called "shovel ready" Which
translates as "Get this fiasco started before anyone
realizes that such thinking could only have come from
spending long hours in the outhouse alone."

Bunches of pointless puzzles are of form...

? * ? - ? = 2
+    +   *
? - ? + ? = 7
+    -    +
?  / ? + ? = 12
=   =    =
21  3  24

in which ? are the used once digits 1-9
and the math operations take place in
correct order of multiplications and
divisions first and additions and subtractions
last.

You could easily brute force this using
PostScript as there are only 362,880 possible
solutions. But the solution key is that there
are only thirteen possible ?/? integer
solutions lower left....

   2/1+10 will not work as 10 needed to sum to 12
   3/1+9 will not work as 24-9=15 requires 5*3
   4/1+8 will not work as 24-8=16 requires 4*4 or 8*2
   5/1+7 will not work as 24-7=17 is prime
   6/1+6 will not work as 6 is duplicated
   7/1+5 will not work as 24-5=19 is prime
   8/1+4 will not work as 24-4=20 = 4*5
   9/1+3 willl not work as 24-3=21 = 7*3

   4/2+10 will not work
   6/2+9 needs 24-9=5*3 and moves to next level <---
   8/2+8 will not work

   6/3+7 will not work as 24-7=17 is prime
   9/3+9 will not work

This leaves 7, 8, 1, and 4 as upper left numbers
and only eight possibilities remaining. We quickly
see we need big numbers in the upper left
column. And that the top center cannot be a
four because the product is too big.

For a solution of

7 1 5
8 4 3
6 2 9

Totally pointless puzzles can end up ridiculously obsessive.
They also can drive home how much you can do with seemingly
unrelated web resources. From thousands of miles away.

Six decades ago there was a distinctive radio tower that defined
a certain city skyline in the 1950's. At the time, it had a rather
specialized format. I noticed it was still around and wondered
just what it was up to recently.

Starting with Google Maps and Google street view, the tower
was quickly located. Strangely, the address was ambiguious.
Curiously, the building was totally unmarked. Possibly because
of terrorism considerations, and possibly because most radio
stations sell so often that changing the signs gets expensive.
The dual coax feeds on the tower stuggested it was still
commercial FM and now served two frequencies.

An adjacent property was next located on a county tax
roll site similar to this one. From which an older owner
of the site was found. This owner was a radio megaconglomerate
who sold to someone else for $10. This was not a half bad price
for the property, which had a rather decent view.

Some tower info was found from a FCC site similar to this
one. Next, a list of local stations of the required distance
from city center was found from a radio resource site
comparable to this one. Their GPS coordinates rapidly
confirmed two active commercial FM stations using the tower.

Both of which were owned by yet another radio megacomglomerate
from a different city. They apparently are using the extra space
in the building to provide web media services to other broadcasters.

Got several emails pointing out that subsidies encourage
sales of pv panels.

Panels that are in no way green, renewable, nor sustainable.
And are gasoline destroying net energy sinks. Using
conventional silicon technology, they always were and always
will be.

Which is precisely the point: There should be a $1000 per
kilowatt TAX on every installed conventional pv panel that is
incapable of net energy. Rewarding the losers both penalizes
and delays innovation.

Net energy breakeven can be anticipated eight years
after the fully burdened panel costs drop under twenty
five cents per peak watt. Subsidies of loser technology
can only further set back net energy breakeven.

More pv fundamentals here. .

Expanded and improved our Gila Hikes library page.

We are now up to TWO HUNDRED main entries!

Is it intentional ecopornography or just an "accidental"
coincidence? A battery company just announced a
minor improvement in internal lithium battery resistance
as a density of 4500 w/l.

Surely nobody would notice the missing "h", would they?

An ENERGY density of 4500 wh/l would be a stunning
breakthrough in lithium technology. Approaching gasoline.
Unfortunately, this is about THREE TIMES the
ABSOLUTE THEORETICAL LIMIT for lithium
technology.

But a POWER density of 4500w/l is no big deal at all.
It is a minor improvement that most battery manufacturers
are working on by nanotech modifications of internal
structure.

One more time kiddies: Energy is how much; Power
is how fast.

One trade journal for such developments is this one.

Much more here and here. And here and here.

Yet another extremeophile is found here. This
one is ultra small, super cold and amazingly
persistent.

The best guess to answering "are we alone" is
called the Drake Equation. One convenient
calculator of which is found here.

Several things have recently happened to
dramatically raise the odds on the Drake
Equation. First, we are discovering one new
exoplanet a week and it seems that planetary
systems are much more common than were
even recently believed.

Second, we are finding more and more of the
extremeophiles here that can dramatically
extend what life is and where it can be found.

Admittedly, the snottites may not be into high tech.

Third, we are learning from our own
stupid mistakes. The frequency most searched
for SETI hints is the one in which worldwide
transmission is specifically forbidden!

Other civilizations are equally likely to stay
out of the waterhole.

Fourth, we are learning that watts on a satellite
or milliwatts on a fiber or cable beats kilowatts
blown out a broadcast tower.

More intelligent species are unlikely to be blasting
rf energy all over hell and gone. Especially if
there is a "come eat us" message attached.

But one negative is this: An earth-moon combination
might be essential for climatic stability. And may in
fact end up quite rare.

My own feelings remain that we are not alone.

I'm still curious what "they" are going to do when
they receive their first clip of Roller Derby as
the sum total of our civilization.

Yeah, right.