Don Lancaster's What's New? 2013 Archive Blog

Pick your blog year...
1997	1998	1999	2000	2001
2002	2003	2004	2005	2006
2007	2008	2009	2010	2011
2012	2013	2014	2015	2016
2017	2018	-----	-----	-----

One of the handier "rules of thumb" that
sometimes apply some of the time and can be
enormously useful is this:

Very often, one percent of what happens 
nationally happens in Arizona. And one percent
of what happens in Arizona happens in the Gila
Valley.

Thus, roughly, there are 300 million people in
the US, 3 million in AZ, and 30,000 locally.

While not super accurate, this rule can quickly
give you a rough estimate of an amazing variety
of events or tasks. Where you otherwise may
not have the faintest clue as to scale. 

Naturally, the "rule" does not apply to anything
with a regional bias. I suspect Thatcher has
more cotton module fires than Bangor, Maine
does. And that walrus attacks may be rare in
Nebraska.

My favorite rule of thumb applies to any Hazmat
situation: Hold your thumb up at arm's length
and close one eye. If you can still see the scene,
you are too close.

A minor tip: Sometimes misstating your zip code can
reduce some hassles for you.

The National Auctioneers Association seems to have a
one hundred mile limit on their searches. Which cannot
reach Phoenix and Tucson from Thatcher. But it
can from Globe.

The independent Search Tempest is a great way to survey
Craig's List. But you have to scroll through a bunch of
junk if you really want two specific areas. Ferinstance,
to get Phoenix and Tucson without the junk, use the
Casa Grande zipcode of 85130.

The local Radio Shacks have limited ineventory,
so changing your zip code can also find something
urgently needed. Same goes for inventory at
Wal Mart or Home Depot.

An interesting collection of free Souothwestern Archaeology
videos can be found here.

"Golly Gee Mister Science."

Few people realize how primitive the hardware options
were at the time the TV Typewriter was first designed.

Microprocessors were theoretical beasts that were
outragelously expensive and undeliverable with key
peripheral chips not even on the drawing board.

Magnetic core memory had just dropped to a nickel a
bit, and there were only rumors that solid state memory
might be able to compete in the dark distant future.

A controversial quantum leap in baud rates from 110 to 150
had just been announced.

The only dynamic RAM was the 1103 that drove
a whole generation of engineers insane with its 20
nanosecond wide temperature dependent timing window.

Static RAM was outragesly expensive and pretty much
limited to 64 bits or less per package.

Which left me with bucket brigade shift registers as the
only viable route to an on-screen tv text display. These
were cheap enough and fast enough at 1 microsecond, and
big enough at 525 bits, but you had to continuously refresh them.

These were not in any manner random access, as you had to
wait for the bit you were after to come out the end of the pipe.

Their dropout specs did not permit the several milliseconds
needed for vertical retrace, but fortunately, most all of the
tested chips managed to just barely coast through. We
needed seven milliseconds of delay and they only would
guarantee two.

The high supply voltages and high clock driver capacitance
also made these unit painful to use or interface.

Also unappreciated today was the utter hostility and ridicule
heaped on why anyone could possibly want to put words and
letters on a tv set.

"They" just did not get it.

Two Texans bragging about how big their lands were...

"Why, my spread is so big, I could drive all morning and
not get half way across it."

"Yeah? I had a truck like that once."

Thought I'd start a list of possibly upcoming predictions...

• PV Solar panels soon hitting the 25 cents per
  peak panel watt needed for true renewability
  and sustainability.
  
  
• A quantum leap in Goldilocks exoplanets.
  
  
• Sane pricing of 100 watt equivalent LED lamps.
  
  
• Extensive use of improved WWVB timing signals.
  
  
• Modest efficiency and range improvements for
  wireless power transmission. But nothing spectacular.
  
  
•  Increased climatic and weather variability. We has
    met the enemy and he is us.
  
  
• USB power supplies replacing wall warts in new designs.
  
  
• Corn ethanol at last being recognized for the worthless
  vote buying scam it really was. Your tax dollars at work.
  
  
• Greatly improved GPS/GLONAS vertical resolution.
  
  
• Sane net metering resolution. Because of offering
  "storage", utilities have every right to buy wholesale
  and sell retail.
  
  
•  New breakthroughs in HVAC efficicncy.
  
  
•  Total legalization of marijuana, everywhere.
  
  
•  The demise of books much faster than expected.
  
  
• Business as usual for perpetual motion schemes,
  free energy, cold fusion, and the usual incompetently
  engineered tomes from the Church of the Latter Day
  Crackpots.
  
  
• Most newsgroups failing because of eyeball siphoning
  from newer social networking.

I'll try to add more items to this list. Your comments welcome.

Apparently Siller Helicopters did the heavy lifting for
the fish barrier project.

What once were Sikorsky Sky Cranes are now
Ericksons. These have a 20,000 pound payload,
can hit 125 mph with a 230 mile range. Rotor
is 72 feet in diameter. About 110 exist.

Present costs are estimated at $15,000 per hour.
Plus standby fees. In-flight movies are extra.

These cannot lift a full size D8 bulldozer.

Apparently there is some sort of a jeep trail
to the site via Sunflower Mesa and Pat
Mesa, but it does not seem to have been
used on the project. Likely because of
wilderness restrictions or the route being
too utterly gruesome.

The Blue River Fish Barrier has apparently been completed
and has been picked up by Acme Mapper and Google Maps.

This would be a possible candidate for one of the longest
possible or most remote Gila Valley Day Hikes.

Amazingly, the complete field camps have vanished without a
trace, including the huge trailers, concrete plants, and tanks.

Some amazing more details here.

In response to an ever-diminishing number of requests, here
is a list of the most profitible eBay selling items arranged by
season...

        January - eBooks of dropshipping resources 
        Feburary - UK cable descramblers
        March - Plasma HDTV displays from Rumania 
        April - Nigerian lotteries
        May - Add three inches to your mortgage 
        June - Pallet liquidations 
        July - Norfolk & Waay overstocks 
        August - Korean laptops 
        September - Home theater pyramind buying rights 
        October - Escrow companies 
        November - Password phishing software
        December - Microsoft and Disney replicas

More on our Auction Help page.

Expanded and updated our Gila Valley Dayhikes page.

Some of the lesser known destinations appear here.

Please  email me with anything I missed or needs
further updating.

Similarly, a dodging white reduction array might use
this code...

/adjdepth 20 store
/whitecutarray mark 0 1 255
    { 255 div whitecut mul round cvi} for] store

...to generate this gamma correcting array...

/whitecutarray [  0   0   0    0   0   0   0 
         -1   -1   -1  -1  -1 - 1  -1  -1  -1  -1  -1  -1  -1
         -2   -2   -2  -2  -2  -2  -2  -2  -2  -2  -2  -2  -3
         -3   -3   -3  -3  -3  -3  -3  -3  -3  -3  -3  -3  -4
         -4   -4   -4 - 4  -4  -4  -4  -4  -4  -4  -4  -4  -5
         -5   -5   -5  -5  -5  -5  -5  -5  -5  -5  -5  -5  -6
         -6   -6   -6  -6  -6  -6  -6  -6  -6  -6  -6  -7  -7
         -7   -7   -7  -7  -7  -7  -7  -7  -7  -7  -7  -8  -8
         -8   -8   -8  -8  -8  -8  -8  -8  -8  -8  -8  -9  -9
         -9   -9   -9  -9  -9  -9  -9  -9  -9  -9  -9 -10 -10
       -10 -10 -10 -10 -10 -10 -10 -10 -10 -10 -11 -11
       -11 -11 -11 -11 -11 -11 -11 -11 -11 -11 -11 -12
       -12 -12 -12 -12 -12 -12 -12 -12 -12 -12 -12 -12
       -13 -13 -13 -13 -13 -13 -13 -13 -13 -13 -13 -13
       -13 -14 -14 -14 -14 -14 -14 -14 -14 -14 -14 -14
       -14 -15 -15 -15 -15 -15 -15 -15 -15 -15 -15 -15
       -15 -15 -16 -16 -16 -16 -16 -16 -16 -16 -16 -16
       -16 -16 -16 -17 -17 -17 -17 -17 -17 -17 -17 -17
       -17 -17 -17 -17 -18 -18 -18 -18 -18 -18 -18 -18
       -18 -18 -18 -18 -19 -19 -19 -19 -19 -19 -19 -19
       -19 -19 -19 -19 -19 -20 -20 -20 -20 -20 -20 -20]
            store

In this case white=255 becomes white235 and black=0
stays as black=0. Once again, the epth of correction is
set by /adjdepth.

The terms "dodgiing" and "burning" can get confusing
in that holding back light darkened things in a traditional
negative print darkroom. Usually you had a paddle to
block light to dodge and a piece of cardboard with a hole
in it to burn.

We'll call "dodging" holding back light or making the
image portion darker. And "burning" to make the image
portion lighter.

What we will want to do in our upcoming dodge/burn
code is to scan for pixels to be corrected, and then
either add to the pixel value to brighten it or subtract
from the pixel value to darken it. Being careful,
of course, to never exceed 255 or go under 0 in
our bitmap format.

Calculating corrections on the fly might end up
slow and awkward, so my favorite programming
trick of table lookup is appropriate. In which
we predefine how much to add or subtract from
each pixel needing correction.

Ferinstance...

/adjdepth 20 store
/blackboostarray mark 255 -1 0
   {255 div adjdepth mul round cvi} for] store

...should generate this gamma correcting array...

/blackboostarray [ 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 19
      19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 18
      18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 17 17
      17 17 17 17 17 17 17 17 17 17 17 16 16
      16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 15 15
      15 15 15 15 15 15 15 15 15 15 15 14 14
      14 14 14 14 14 14 14 14 14 14 13 13 13
      13 13 13 13 13 13 13 13 13 13 12 12 12
      12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 11 11 11
      11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 10 10 10
      10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10   9   9   9   9
        9   9   9   9   9   9   9   9   9   8   8   8   8
        8   8   8   8   8   8   8   8   8   7   7   7   7
        7   7   7   7  7    7   7   7   7   6   6   6   6
        6   6   6   6   6   6   6   6   5   5   5   5   5
        5   5   5   5   5   5   5   5   4   4   4   4   4
        4   4   4   4   4   4   4   4   3   3   3   3   3
        3   3   3   3   3   3   3   3   2   2   2   2   2
        2   2   2   2   2   2   2   1   1   1   1   1   1
        1   1   1   1   1   1   1   0   0   0   0   0   0
        0 ] store

In this case black=0 becomes black=20 and white=255
stays as white=255. Depth of correction is set by
/adjdepth.

We pride ourselves in having the finest images on
eBay, bar none. Much of the work is done by
spending most of our time in postproc with such
obvious candidates as Paint and Imageview32.
Helped along ocasionally by Irfanview and Filezilla.

But the heavy lifting gets done with three of our
custom and free Gonzo routines: The Bitmap Typewriter,
An Architect's Perspective Corrector, and an
automatic combined Auto Backgrounder and Vignetter.

I'm working on a fourth custom routine that would
provide localized dodging and burning. Useful
for such things as brightening poorly lit areas or
making labels more legible.

So far, I envision you would mark the areas to
be dodged or burned in a green=255 area fill
and save them as a mask. Scanning the mask
would then read a gamma correction file to
brighten, darken, or do nothing to the underlying
pixel routed to a new and modified file..

Details to follow as the program develops.
Your comments welcome.

Apparently Alan Turing has been granted a full pardon.
Some details here.

You don't want to rush these things. Next on the agenda
is to free Floyd Collins. Or -- dare we hope -- to free
the Indanapolis 500.

A reminder that we have several MILES of transparent
polyester sheet in dozens of rolls of varying lengths and
sizes.

I've been meaning to build up a rewinder but it seems
to be taking forever.

email me if you have any interest in this superb material
at one sixth or less of its normal price.

Always remember that you have no friends at an
auction! Least of all the auctioneer. Listen to
everything, volunteer nothing. Be invisible till it
is time to be in the auctioneer's face.

Dress down to the point of being shabby, but always
wear one very distinct hat or other piece of clothing.
If more than five percent of your bids win, you are
bidding far too high. Always stop bidding if anyone
is bidding against you and you even remotely approach
fair value.

Always stay for the end of the auction. In some cases,
utterly spectacular bargains will result. Especially if the
area has to be cleared for a new tenant or whatever.

Sometimes you can also make really great deals on unbid
or unsold items after the auction or during quiet times.

Don't sweat bidding on tons of garbage to get one or two
items. You can usually find someone to take (or even pay
for) the dregs after the auction. And abandoining stuff often
is not that big a deal.

Stay alert through numerious sitdown and meditation breaks,
sensible food and drink, mild painkillers, and frequent
restroom use.

Much more on our Auction Help page.

Fundamental Factors Underlying Recent Technicaal
Innovation appear here.

I'm saddened that this paper has not yet received the
attention I feel it rightly deserves.

Continuing our hanging canal by hanging canal list
of needed further work ...

The Riggs Complex near N 32.77846 W 109.78945
suffered a setback in that it is nearly invisible on the
latest Acme Mapper version. It is a group of small
braided channels that may be older than some of
the other canals. The braided channels are much
smaller than those on Frye Mesa.

A source and destination remain unknown and
the workmanship on these appears sub par.
A link to the Robinson Canal or a predecessor
appears likely. There is obvious damage from
stream piracy.

Considerable challenging work remains.
Local terrain is quite unpleasantly rocky.

Can't put one over on her. Nosiree.

Little old lady to a companion at a recent live auction:

"Why, that man has been talking all morning!"

Expanded and updated our Gila Valley Dayhikes page.

Some of the lesser known destinations appear here.

Please  email me with anything I missed or needs
further updating.

Some interesting new developments in thermoelectricity
can be found here.

Few practical devices exist today. First because of the
Carnot Limit that tells us you can do no better than the
ratio of the absolute temperature difference.

And second because of thermal impedance effects in
which there is an unavoidable delta-T between the hot
side source and the device and a second delta-T between
the device and its ambient heat sink.

Another biggie has been space charge, where electrons
pile up instead of freely flowing. The above paper addresses
the space charge problem and doubles potential efficiency
from 10 to 18 percent in a typical use situation..

More on why thermoelectric cooling has not happened much
to date appears here.

At first glance, Safford and the Upper Gila Valley does
not appear to be much of a high technology place. But
for centuries, we've had bunches of world class and
( literally ) off the wall tech stuff. Such as...

The LBT large binocular telescope and friends.
Tens of thousands of prehistoric archeological grids.
The solvent extraction process of copper refining.
Over fifty miles of prehistoric hanging bajaja canals.
World class prehistoric lowland river canals.
Newly efficient cotton drip irrigation.
The Mount Graham aerial tramway.
The Morenci Southern Railway loops.
Toll Roads through difficult terrain.
Spectacular logging flumes.
Leopard Frog Renarium
Check dams with aprons
The UFO fish fillets

More on some of these here.

Continuing our hanging canal by hanging canal list
of needed further work ...

The Allen Canal needs a credible destination and the
route determined between the mesa edge and the dam.

One possible end point would be fields presently buried
under the Central Dam. But numerous trips have failed
to reveal any obvious link.  

Spring canyon water was apparently a resource shared
with the Frye Mesa canal. It needs further study in that
it likely was a much more significant source then.

Areas around the Hawk Hollow tank have yet to be
precisely located with numerous CCC items also
in the area.

Allen Dam itself is an enigma in that its watershed is
quite small. Possibly it relied heavily on Allen Canal
water. And may in fact have a prehistoric original.
Or possibly have used presently unknown artesian
sources.

The Culebra Cut is dramatic enough that it demands
further photography and study. There is also a
lesser but longer cut largely unstudied north of the
Mud Springs back road.

The present northern limit is in a small pass that demands
further study. Its location and use appear brilliant.

The "normal" Ghostscript output on windows seems to
be limited to the last 200 output lines. Should you need more,
there are apparently arcane ways to change the output
format. Or you can write your needed output to a disk file.

The usual cut-and-past also does not seem to work on
the formatted 200 line output. But there is a subtle icon
at  the upper left that lets you copy to clipboard.

Ghostscript has become of a lot more interest to me
ever since Adobe banned most disk reads and writes
from distiller.

More on my Gonzo utilities here.

Just picked up a Targus camera tripod from WalMart
that has several interesting features.

The most useful to me is a quick release plate. You
attach this somewhat permanently to your camera
bottom and then snap it onto the tripod or shift a
lever to get your camera back.

Additional quick release plates may be available
here.

Expanded and updated our Gila Valley Dayhikes page.

Some of the lesser known destinations appear here.

Please  email me with anything I missed or needs
further updating.

Continuing our hanging canal by hanging canal list
of needed further work...

The Robinson Canal has seen major historic rework
making its interpretation difficult. The first mile starting
with a Frye Mesa Canal ponding area at N 32.75995 W 109.81151
has not been explored yet, but is rather clear on
Acme Mapper and is not expected to produce
much in the way of surprises.

The canal route marking has recently been improved
in Acme Mapper. Its exact destination remains unknown,
but is believed to be in the Robinson Flat area. The
most likely candidate is the empty lake at N 32.81371 W 109.77061
It could also underlie the Mount Graham Golf Course
perhaps near N 32.81125 W 109.77465.

The latest Google and Acme images seem to have far less
detail useful to canal identification. The is possibly caused
by lower resolution, different times of day, or different
spectral sensitivity.  

Exploration in the northern area is difficult because of
extensive historic reqork. Also needing study is
a small artesian pond at N 32.80263 W 109.78087

The CCC appears to have purposely destroyed
portions of the Frye Mesa Canal, presumably in
the 1932 time frame. This would seem to place
a last use date for the Robinson Canal. Unless
an alternate Frye Creek source was substituted.

Tesla's dream of wirelessly and safely and efficiently
transmitting power long distances likely will never
happen. And certainly will never be in any manner
overunity.

Inductive air coupling at 60 Hertz is pretty much
limited to electric toothbrush distances and power
levels. While focused beams have serious safety
and realizability issues.

But a new method may promise to allow modest
amounts of power to be wirelesssly transmitted
over moderate distances at acceptable efficiencies.

This is done by resonating a pair of coupled high frequency
coils in reasonable proximity.

Some intersting papers can be found here.

Revised and updated our hanging canal resource directory.

A reminder that my favorite bed and breakfast of all
time remains the Black Range Lodge, cleverly hidden
in the part of New Mexico that you cannot get to.

Their Kingston Frisbee Festival runs from January 1st
to December 31st this year. And the Percha Creek
Salmon run remains as spectacular as ever.

Two other places of interest are Casitas De Gila outside
of Cliff ( Check out their real time planetarium simulator
above the hot tub. And the art gallery. ) 

Had a bunch of idiot lights trip on our 4Runner just
as we were leaving for a major auction.

It turns out that idiot lights can warn you of very
bad things and certainly should not be ignored.

On the other hand, a loose gas cap or a worn
gas cap gasket can create the same symptoms!

.docx files can be hard to deal with ust if you do not have
bunches of expensive software on a Windows machine.

Many of these can be converted to Acrobat .PDF, usually
making them smaller and more flexibily dealt with.

You can try saving a .docx tile to desktop, loading it
into Word, and then saving it as .PDF.

Otherwise, buying and installing a version of Office can
bypass most of the hassles.

Shocking.

Just discovered that all of the New Mexico subastas are
going to get sold at auction!

Continuing our hanging canal by hanging canal list
of needed further work...

The Frye Mesa canal could well represent a world
class set of crown jewels for the entire system.
But all we have for sure at present is two huge
canal structures near N 32.75997 W 109.81149.

By any possible measure, these are stunningly
"beyond beyond".

One of these appears to be the unverified source for the
Robinson Canal. The second HS Canal, which is very
spectacularly counterflow, services Frye Creek in some
manner. Ultimately reaching fields uner the Blue Ponds
has not yet been ruled out.

Frustratingly, the Acme Mapper imagry of Frye Mesa
is not remotely as lucid now as it was in their previous
data base. Possibly explained by season vegetation
differences or time-of-day photography But braided
stream channels with possible CCC rework do remain
dim but findable. Delivery slopes are eminently credible.

The most likely water source would be the spring in
Spring Canyon at N 32.73900 W 109.85188.
There is a modern water development here that
could have underlying prehistoric origins feeding the
Frye Mesa Canal. This obviously needs major
further study. The canal itself could possibly have
been under the Frey Mesa falls road.

Apparent CCC construction seems to have gone out
of their way to destroy the canals on Frye Mesa
proper. This certainly needs further verification.

Finally, a key question remains as to why the major
development based on spring canyon that largely
ignored Frye Creek itself.

There's an active Raspberry pi newsgroup at comp.sys.raspberry-pi

Some other Raspberry Pi resources can be found at...

http://www.raspberrypi.org/
http://www.raspberrypi.com/
http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs
http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi
http://www.element14.com/community/community/raspberry-pi
http://www.engadget.com/tag/RaspberryPi/
http://makezine.com/category/electronics/raspberry-pi/
http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/
https://plus.google.com/+raspberrypi/posts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r456d0imYPE
http://www.slashgear.com/tags/raspberry-pi/

Along with these competitors....

http://beagleboard.org/products/beaglebone%20black
http://linuxgizmos.com/arduino-compatible-boardset-runs-linux-on-x86/

Amazingly, Pima now has SIX mexican restaurants in
varying shades of newness. But Juanitas is overwhelmingly
in a class by themselves. For price, quality, authenticity,
and ambience.

Juanitias is cleverly hidden in Bush and Sherts in the secret
part of Pima that only a cotton farmer can find. To fit in
with the locals, knowning the difference between "mosey"
and "hunker" is an absolute must.

Check out the Jamaicas and Horchatas. Menundo on Saturdays.

Our new bright red pound pup may in fact be an
Australian Shepard after all.

I always thought of Aussies as being black and gray
with blue eyes. But apparently there is an "Irish Ssetter"
flavor of aussies that look exactly like Sally.

Per this image.

I seem to have gotten myserf buried in eBay inventory
that is likely not only unsellible but even unlistable.
So, I guess an inventory reboot is long past due.

Throwing away half of everything.

Here's some guidelines on whether something should
be kept or not...

• Lottable at $9 or more.
• Expected return greater than $70.
  
• Near current production OR collectible.
• Price findable here, here, or here.
• Item sell rate to clear within 15 months.
• Free data available online.
• Clean or group refurbable.
• Can hold item at arm's length.
• Preferably priority mail shippable.
• Modest but definite sales elsewhere.
• Reasonably testable.
• Is it "pretty"?
• Storage needs not excessive.
• Unique items consistent with real demand.
• SBR near 30:1 maintainable.
• Properly located and inventory controlled.
• One sixth cost new price feasible.
• No bad vibes - feel good about item.
• Not particularly fragile or user abusable.
• Buyer incompetence unlikely.

So, I should have bunches of free stuff available for
the next few weeks. Whose only rule would be
"take one, take all". email me for details.

More eBay tips and techniques here.

Expanded and updated our Gila Valley Dayhikes page.

Some of the lesser known destinations appear here.

Please  email me with anything I missed or needs
further updating.

A fairly complete collection of full and free reprints to
Kilobaud Magine can be found here. Along with lots of
other interesting archival stuff.

The original text to my "Winning the Micro Game" can
be found here in the August 1980 Kilobaud. This later
also became a show and tell item in several talks and
a chapter in my Micro Cookbook.

I feel that much of the story remains surprisingly
relevant, and there is very little I would change.

Continuing our hanging canal by hanging canal list
of needed further work ...

The Shingle Mill canal needs proof it actually existed,
a source and a destination. The middle third is
quite obvious as the historic Minor Webster Ditch,
and located between N 32.79806 W 109.87271
and N 32.81060 W 109.86761.

Proof of prehistoric origins is presently only indirect,
based on the strong "steal the plans" tendancy
elsewhere in the valley and the fact that lack of a
shingle mill prehistoric canal would be highly conspicuous
by its absence. Given that every other nearby stream
has been fully exploited by one or more canals.

The canal becomes progressively harder to trace west and
south of the McEniry Road, eventually subject to heavy ravine
like erosion. There are moderate potsherds in the area. The
original takein is presumed to be somewhere around N 32.79275
W 109.88735.

Routes north of N 32.81060 have not yet been checked. But
likely have been extensively reworked by historic pioneers
and later Arizona Game and Fish modifications.

An extensive collection of vacuum tube data sheets can
be found here.

Managed to get a hanging canal paper submitted to Wikipedia.
There acceptance/rejection backlog is now several months.

To participate in Wikipedia, you first have to register. There
are separate places for images and articles. Images should
be done first. You must personally own all rights to your images
and be willing to post them on a Creative Commons basis.

Images can be uploaded using their Commons Upload Wizard.
Articles are apparently best done by using a private provided
sandbox. Once formatted and tested, the article can be
submitted for others to review.

Articles basically use a variation of HTML or XML with a few
added details. Bolding is pretty much reserved for headers
and subheaders, while italics are the preferred method of
emphasis within an article. The easiest way to do italics
is to trace over and use the I button. Otherwise, the
italized portion can be marked with two single quotes.
As in ' ' italic stuff ' '

External url links are marked with single opening and closing
brackets. Either as [url goes here] or [url goes here | text
different from url ]. Internal url links that cross reference
another Wikipedia article use double brackets instead.
As in [[other Wikipedia reference ]]. Or [[other Wikipedia
rererence | text different from link name ]].

Images are similarly double bracketed in a [[File:image name|
thumb|right|caption]] format. This automatically provides a
wraparound thumbnail that click epands into the full image.

Headers are bracketed by one or more equals characters.
= stuff = is the largest and = = = = = stuff = = = = = the
weakest. ( Note the equals signs should be contiguous
without intervening spacing. ) A horizontal rule is provided
after the largest headers.

Alexander Grahm Kernatski was the first telephone pole.

Some details on Google Maps elevation reporting services
appear here.

It is important to note that the elevation reports use interpolation
from four nearby data points. The distance between points
is reported by their resolution reqponse to an elevation
inquiry.

A foremost rule of interpolation is that no new information can
be added. All you can do is minimimize interpolation artifacts.

Thus, if a wash or ravine or building happens to sit between the
original data points, no way will your elevation report be
accurate.

All of which suggests that the Google service might not be
quite good enough for resolving hanging canal slope or
location issues.

An interpolation assumes that the slope of the function is
continuous and has continuous deravitives. Otherwise
known as a "smooth" surface.

A tutorial on some of the math involved can be found here.

Continuing our hanging canal by hanging canal list
of needed further work ...

The Jernigan canal is one of the few that has a very
well defined field destination. It includes moderately
hanging portions, a French Drain cascade, and a
midsized but undated Mesquite tree mid channel.

It is a good choice for tours as it is easily accessible
and has a wide variety of features and nearby
habitation sites.

The split from Mud Springs canal appears well  defined at
N 32.82782 W 109.81981. Some small rocks suggest
some sort of headgate structure that remains unexcavated
and unexplored.

The canal seems to vanish between a knuwn N 32.83143
W 109.81792 and a presumed N 32.83727 W 109.81502
and needs verified. The area between N 32.83727
W 109.81502 and N 32.83961 W 109.81354 needs further
study in that the route is only dimly suggestive.

There is a branch which may lead to an aqueaduct
or dam structure at N 32.83911 W 109.81543. Or might be
a historic artifact or rebuild that needs resolved.

A major portion of the canal remains unlocated between
N 32.84295 W 109.81238 and N 32.84192 W 109.81496 
despite many attempts at discovery. Careful altitude
measurements might restrict the range of possible routes.

Free copies of Mathematica are now being included in the
Raspberry Pi firmware. More details here.

Over two million Raspberry Pi computers have been sold.
One upcoming competetor is the Beagle Bone.

Managed to finally get back to the Chircahaus after their
devastating fire. Basically, the entire mountain is just
plain gone.

Devatstaion is utter and total over an extreme area.
Recovery will take a minimum of one hundred years,
assuming no further global warming surprises.

Bee's Barfoot lookout burned in the utter and total
devastation. As did Rustler Park. The USFS is trying
to rebuild the campground, but it is presently an
utterly depressing totally trashed moonscape.

The monument more or less survived, but also suffered
fairly extensive damage.

An interesting and definitive pair of books on lookout
towers can be found here. While other area things to
do can be found on our Gila Dayhikes library page.

I've started the byzantine process of uploading some of our
Hanging Canal info to Wikipedia. There seems to be layer
upon layer of painstaking detail involved in the learning
curve. .

At any rate, our first two images can be found here
and here.

Please suggest  any additional image categories that can
be added.

Typical vintage vacuum tube boat anchors often sell for
only slightly more than their shipping cost.

If you have a bunch of these, one alternate route is to
sell parts off them that often break or go missing. Such
as full knob sets or panel meters.

The smaller items can be much easier to ship, in at
least modest demand by collectors, and easier to
deal with than the time and expense of a full refurb.

Our eBay items can be found here and more tips
and techniques here.

A website that converts property legal descriptions to
latitudes and longitudes can be found here.

One of the foremost rules of eBay sales is to finish
what you start.

It is trivially easy to, say, do a bunch of batch
processed image photography or postprep
only to have the work pile up unlisted and
unfinished for weeks or even months.

There is no possibility of any cash return until
after each item is listed.

A good rule is "If you touch it, deal with it."
All the way through listing.

More eBay tips and techniques here.

Continuing our hanging canal by hanging canal list
of needed further work ...

Mud Springs is sort of my favorite as I've spent the
most time with it and parts of it have easy access.

A case can be made that Mud Springs was the
pilot or prototype for the other 28 known canals in
that there were several locations where pretty much
the entire canal route can be viewed at once.

Our foremost problem is finding out the Mud Springs
destination. The route vanishes under a jeep trail at
N 32.84796 W 109.81104 and many searches to date
have not found even a hint of where it was supposed to go.

My best present guess is that the canal took a
sharp left and ended up in fields under the now
totally trashed central dump.  Possibly near
N 32.85631 W 109.81522

While an actual tie in to lowland riverine canals was
clearly possible, the amount of deliverable water involved
would not seem to have been remotely worth the effort.

A small piece of canal is missing between N 32.83087
W 109.81533 and N 32.83389 W 109.81139. Possible
explanations are damage from sheet flooding or simply
looking in the wrong place. An automatic level could
possibly be used to restrict candidate elevations to those
below the known source and above the known continuance.

A mystery tank that appears historic yet Mud Springs
related can be found at N 32.82769 W 109.81896. The
watershed here seems much too small unless the Mud
Springs canal was in fact the source of the water.

What we call the troll house can be found at  N 32.82540
W 109.82280. While clearly related being flush with
the canal bottom and literally one meter away, the
pithouse suggesting structure defies explanation to
date. There appears to be no charcoal or significant
potsherds.

The canal appears to have a much smaller and
inexplicable branch near N 32.82322 W 109.82523.
This same area has been overworked with huge
SCS or CCC water channels.

The next mile or so is fairly well studied but poorly
photographed. A huge mesquite tree mid channel strongly
sugests age. The tree has not been dated yet owing to the
ease of instrument destruction and the false rings typical
of Mesquite hardwoods.

A very interesting hanging portion lies near N 32.81442
W 109.82790 in the hardest to access reach of the canal.
It needs additional photograhy. There is some mystery
to the route for a few hundreds of feet south. There is
also some CCC water spreader work in this area.

The area from N 32.80319 W 109.83946 to N 32.79424
W 109.85148 has not yet been explored, owing to a
small portion of it unfindable at the north end. Survey
should now be easy and fun to trace.

The Ash Creek road has recently been dramatically
improved, greatly simplifying source access to mud springs
canal. But the exact N 32.79200 W 109.85302 to N 32.78569
W 109.85440 route and takein point remains unknown.

Portions of conglomerate with vertical walls strongly suggest
catastrophic flooding.

A reminder that it may pay to place a "secret" code line
as the last entry in each of your eBay listings.

The code might include where the item is located to the
nearest shelf or bin. Or its stock number if there are
lots of similar items. Or at least part of the local image
url. eBay has made it difficult to trace where an
image has come from. And they do not keep records
of what got sold or unsold nearly long enough.

More eBay secrets here. And more on auctions here.

The alternate route to decent eBay photos is to use a
scanner instead. Scanners have a far higher total
resolution and can be ideal where fine print must
be preserved.

You do have to use a scanner with decent depth of
field. Such as an HP Scanjet. model 3970. Keeping
the glass squeaky clean continuously is also a must.

Depth of field is easily evaluated by scanning a
soup can or something similar.

Scanners are best used for flat and shallow
imaging. They are also useful as a "magnifying
glass" where fine print is difficult to read. Or
to enhance such print by changing contrast and
brightness.

I've written some Bitmap Typewriter code that
can greatly enhance "flat on" scanner derived
lettering. The latest code appears here and an
older tutorial here.

Due to Adobe's recently banning Distiller file
writes, the Bitmap Typewriter has to be used with
GhostScript instead.

When scanning such items as multiple integrated
circuits, you can sometimes cheat and use a
common background, changing only the relevant
lettering. The number of pins or the size is easily
changed using copying and mirroring.

If you are going to have many similar ic's it pays
to let the Bitmap Typewriter generate an entire
alphabet and place it below the prototype bitmap.
Logos and agency marks can be similarly saved.

More details here.

When scanning, say, an oscilloscope front, the scanner
can sometimes be placed on the object, rather than vice
versa. If the object is too big, multiple exposures can
be used, as can copy-and-paste of edges.

Scanning and digital photography can sometimes be
combined using these techniques. A scanner can give
infinite depth of field by cutting and pasting into an
image plane.

Some useful web friendly PostScript Colors handy with
scanner post prep can be found here.

We pride ourselves in having the finest eBay photos,
bar none. Such as this, this, and this recent example.

Much of the photography is done with a 10 Megapixel
digital camera, although some is done with a scanner
and some using both at once. For convenience, the
camera has an Eye-Fi auto uploader. Highly diffuse
light sources are normally used that include two
skylights, a pair of CCFD cool white room lights, and
adjustable CCFD lights for main, key, and backfill.4
A tripod, of course, is a must.

At least two hours should be spent in image post prep.
Thus, the actual camera setup and photography is
a totally negligible portion of the time and effort
needed to do the job right!

Our main postproc tools include Imageview32, or rately
IrfanView and our in-house Architects Perspective Correction,
Automatic Mottled Background System, and our
Bitmap Typewriter. The latter three normally run
under GhostScript following my Gonzo Utilities.  

Architects Perspective is used on most appropriate subjects.
In which all lines perceived as vertical are made vertical
to a one pixel accuracy. The image is first rotated so a
prominent vertical feature is in fact vertical, and then
the Architects Perspective Correction is run.

A moderate amount of internal image retouching is done
where appropriate to correct camera defects, remove
shadows, sharpen borders, and repair any glitches that will
be removed by a later cleaning anyhow. But the majority of the
retouch normally applies to the outside and the borders
of the items photographed.

In the case of a collectible where exact appearance is important,
great restraint should be used in internal corrections.
Otherwise, the image should be made as informative as
possible, perhaps comaprable to the retouch that would
go onto a Time Magazine ad.

If lettering is crucial, consider the scanner and Bitmap
Typewriter route instead. Perspective Lettering from
scratch can be done, but is usually not cost effective.

Very often, the lettering will become illegible as it
is reduced from working pixel sizes to final eBay
images.

We usually seek out shadowless images. Double, triple,
or quadruple exposures are sometimes used to deal with
murky lighting, meter faces that need brightened, or
attachements whose alignment can be improved.

Commercial autotrace programs are largely useless
because of murky edges needing the most work. We
trace an outline using any color with a red=255 component
and route it to our Automatic Mottled Background System.

It is important to use a somewhat mottled background as
this dramatically reduces JPEG edge effects with only
a negligible increase in file size. Some Web Friendly
PostScript Colors can be found here. These are suitably
mottled before their actual use.

Internal backgrounds are dealt with by solid red=255
color fills, as are any undercuts. It is important to make
sure there are no inadvertent red=255 pixels before
running the auto backgrounder. Simply backing the red
color balance off one click will usually do this.

The backgrounder includes an optional vignetter of
variable density and thickness. An incredibly sophisticated
"electric fields" algorithm is used for the auto rounded
corners. It is important that the image be cropped to its
intended aspect before running the backgrounder if
vignetting is in use.

Final eBay formatting can be done with Imageview32
This includes resizing to 600 to 900 pixels, reducing
the gamma, increasing the brightness, and AT MOST
one or two clicks of sharpening. The image is then
saved in JPEG format for eBay uploading and website
retention.

Seminars and custom image work available.
More on eBay technique here.

Jstor is an interesting and expanding collection of digital
scientific journals, books, and primary sources. Many of
which are free or reasonably downloaded.

Also check out Doaj.

An interesting ( but European ) report on solar pv
economics can be found here. Note that one euro
is worth about seventy cents.

Apparently world prices are pushing fifty cents per
peak panel watt for utility scale buys. This is about
TWICE what pv solar needs to become a competetive
and truly sustainable and renewable resource.

True renewability and sustainability now at long last
appears close in acheivable. Brought about by learning
curves, production volumes, and reasonably anticipable
believed forthcoming tech developments.

Meanwhile, the pv solar breakthrough of the week
can be found here. But note that these major stunning
breakthroughs have a half life of six days and twenty
three hours.

And more evidence on why concentrating pv is doomed
to failure can be found here.

More on energy fundamentals here and pv specifics
here.

A muffled intermittent yowling inside a laser printer can
sometimes be repaired by opening the lid and letting the
cat out.

We still do not know where the Allen Hanging Canal
goes or what its purpose is, but its likely destination
would seem to be fields underlying the Central Dam.

Almost certainly, the present fields are a siltation
artifact of the dam itself. But prehistoric precedents
would seem both possible and likely.

Found some really cute engineering just where Allen
enters Central Wash near N 32.83388 W 109.80419.
There are a group of low and small hillocks that block
canal access except for one point that we might call
"the pass".

The canal very carefully aligned itself on the most suitable
route through the lowest part of the small pass. It is a lot
wider and shallower than normal at this point.

Another mystery of the canals in general is how
infiltration was controlled over their typical six
mile lengths. For even minor "soaking in" loses
would leave you with no deliverable water.

Yet, infiltration was obviously controlled, or they
would not have repeatedly built so many long canals.

Getting decent photos of oscilloscope waveforms can be
a problem with modern digital cameras. Owing to IR flooding
of the autofocus, flash issues, timing between shutter and
scan speeds, beam, scale, and external balances.

A surprisingly fast and easy workaround is to get the best
digital image you can and then overtrace it in Paint.

Providing actual output waveforms of test gear for sale
on eBay can dramatically convince potential customers
that the instrument is in fact working.

Mirroring and symetry and replicating make most of the
image rather trivial. A sinewave or a swept sinewave
can be done by using Paint's little known spline drawing
tool ( between straight line and circle )  for the tops and
bottoms of the waveform, and then linking them with
straight line segments.

Hint: change the waveform color enough that the
traced portion can be distinguished from the original.

... And here is how you send multiple recordable
elevation requests. The trick is to use a vertical
bar ( or "pipe" ) delimiter as a separator...

http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/elevation/json?
locations=39.7391536,-104.9847034|39.7391636,-104.9847034
&sensor=true

( You may have to cut and paste the above url for the correct
double elevation result. )

You are allowed 512 requests per url transmission
and 25,000 total requests per day.

The main problem with all of this is that the actual
elevation points are rather few and far between.
Some sort of interpolation ( likely linear, but
possibly quadratic or cubic spline ) is used that
may in no manner reflect the actual topography.

Differential elevations should end up more accurate
than absolute ones, but even this is not clear.

Nearby buildings also affect the results. The
technique should work best on flat desert.

I have my doubts that this will be good enough to
predict the paths of unknown hanging canal
portions.

Here is how to gather a recordable elevation in
Google Maps:

Send this over the web...

http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/elevation/json?
locations=39.7391536,-104.9847034&sensor=true

And get this back...

{
   "results" : [
      {
         "elevation" : 1608.637939453125,
         "location" : {
            "lat" : 39.7391536,
            "lng" : -104.9847034
         },
         "resolution" : 4.771975994110107
      }
   ],
   "status" : "OK"
}

There is a limit of 25,000 requests per day.

Thought I'd start a hanging canal by hanging canal list
of what needs done next. So far, a typical canal is only 60
percent or so defined. Key issues are the destinations
for many of the canals, more accurate dating, and in
resolving infiltration issues on a six mile canal reach.

The crown jewels of the Safford system appear to be
on Frey Mesa. Where a ponding area can be found
routed to the spectacular HS and Upper Robinson
canals. HS is particularly intriguing because it is
counterflow and heads up canyon. A possible but
wildly unverified destination could be the Blue
Ponds area.

A logical but as yet unproven source for the Frye
Mesa water could be the spring in Spring Canyon.
Which also eventually feeds the Allen canal. There
is a modern water project that accepts Spring Canyon
water and routes it down Frye Mesa that suggests
an unverified "steal the plans" prehistoric original.

The braided water routing down Frye Mesa apparently
required some tricky engineering to maintain slope.
The issue is complicated by what appears to be CCC
cross channel rework that seemed intent on destroying
the utility of the underlying originals.

A related question is what was "wrong" with Frye Creek
water that required such an elaborate second source
bypass. The HS canal was clearly intent on preserving
as much delivered water as possible, rather than simply
dumping any excess over the mesa side. Possibly a
spring source would be more reliable and less subject to
flash flooding or seasonal variations.

There is a short modern canal apparently once intended
to switch water between the Blue Ponds that may or may
not be HS related. Some Acme Mapper route hints seem
to be abandoned wagon roads, complete with horseshoes.

Yet, clearly, "they" obviously had something big in mind
for the HS canal. Considering the extreme time and
energy needed for its construction.

Added new culebra1.jpg and culebra2.jpg images to our
hanging canal image stash.

This is the deepest cut on the Allen Canal  and lesser only
to the aquaduct on Marijilda, the HS Canal and the Upper
Robinson Canal on Frey Mesa for amount of excavation.

The Culebra Cut is approximately two meters deep, three
wide and a hundred long.

More on the hanging canal s here.

As near as I can tell, the www.msnbc.com website has been
totally and irrepairably trashed.

The new link for the original format can be found at
http://www.nbcnews.com/

I'll try to update this link on our home page as time permits.

Well, maybe just the punchline:

"The Koala Tea of Mercy is not strained."

More details here. And  here.

A useful medhod of comparing new utility grade power sources
or Levelized Cost of New Generation Facilities can be found
here.

I am surprized that focused solar furnaces are still in the
running. They already cost twice as much as tracking pv
and the disparity is certain to dramatically increase.

Not to mention requiring the highest structures in their
respective states, some with their enormous water needs
in their typical arid use areas, lack of progressive expandability,
blinding pilots or truck drivers, potential climatic disasters,
wildlife uncertainties, and near certain hidden consequences,
overruns, and other very rude surprises .

Sanity may eventually prevail, with this project
being dropped completely and this one.

Part of the problem is federal and state agencies being
told to be far too aggressive in approving questionable
or outright bogus "paint it green" land and water grabbing
proposals.Combined with questionable technical competence
of those doing the approving.

Or so it seems to me. More on similar topics here.

There seems to be several new services that, for
a fee, will show you how go get a 100 percent
return on eBay.

The only tiny problem with this is that a 100 percent
return is a sure fire recipe for disaster. For this equals
a ludicrously low SBR Sell Buy Ratio of a laughingly
pitiful 2:1.

Thus, these services do not have the faintest clue
what they are talking about. They are not even wrong.

We strongly recommend a minimum SBR of 30:1.
Thus, you should NEVER pay more than sixty
seven cents for an item you sell on eBay for twenty
dollars.

30:1 SBR's are quite easy to acheive through
industrial auctions, especially on "contents of
room" and "contents of cabinet" deals.

Many more free but tested and thoroughly
proven details here and here.

Found a rather tall armless Saguaro Cactus here.

Many thanks to those of you who attended our guided
tours of the hanging canals this weekend.

The tours attracted an amazing number of "name brand"
professional archaeologists. Typical comments were
in the "There is something unique and special here that
has tremendous research potential" class".

More on these newly rediscovered world class engineering
wonders here, with possible tours, lectures, or research
opportunities here.

Meanwhile, please ship all of your spare Draganfly's to
3860 West First Street, Thatcher AZ, 85552.

I find the classic statistical Monty Hall Problem
utterly fascinating. Particularly the way nearly
everybody is loudly and emphatically dead wrong 
about the odds.

A game show host offers a contestant a choice of
three doors, one of which contains a car and two
of which contain goats. The contestant guesses a
certain door. At this point, you might rightly 
conclude that their odds on the car are 1 in 3.

Now, the host KNOWINGLY opens a door that
is GUARANTEED to have a goat behind it and
ALWAYS asks the contestant if they want to
change their guess.

The surprising answer is that changing their
guess DOUBLES their odds of winning the car!

Most people will wrongly argue that a new guess
involves two doors and that the odds are 1 in 2 of
either door winning on the new guess. But that is
NOT at all what happened.

Because -- the original guess had 1 in 3 odds. The
number of doors has not changed. The number
of goats has not changed. And whatever was
behind the guessed door has not changed. Thus
the odds on the original guess REMAIN as one
in three!

Since the odds of there being a car in the open
door with a goat in it is now 0 in 3, the unguessed
closed door has to have odds of 2 in 3 of holding
the car. 

Or TWICE as good a bet as before. 

When it comes to Italian food, you cannot be both
pro volone and anti pasto.

We are in the process of porting our Magic Sinewaves
to the Raspberry Pi.

There should be a number of significant advantages.
the first and foremost of which is zero or near zero
custom hardware.

Second is the ease of doing precision high accuracy
time delays in a single step. Eliminating code "pinch
points" and complex multi step delay code.

Thirdly are the deeper nulls available through higher
clock frequencies. Possibly -85 db down on the Pi
compared to -65 decibels on the PIC.

And fourthly, the ability to combine frequency setting
and magsine generation together into a single step.
Owing to the ridiculously higher total storage available.

I'll try to work up some suitable code shortly.

After a brief outage, BAMA, the Boat Anchor technical
manual archive is now back in operation.

Sadly, the Heathkit stuff remains to be restored. But
virtually every other classic electronic product source
is well represented. Over 400 brands.

This weekend's Hanging Canal tours are expected to
go something like this:

Initial meeting at the Discovery Park parking lot at
10:15 Saturday October 19th. Morning tour to the
lower Mud Springs canal and the Jernigan canal
which will be followed by lunch at Juanita's ( Bush
and Shertz ) in Pima.

An afternoon tour will visit the seldom seen portions
of the Mills Collection in Discovery Park.

For those wishing more on the canals, there will be
a ribs night dinner at 6 PM at the Branding Iron
( north on Safford's Eighth avenue, cross bridge,
left at Airport Wye.) At least five major southwestern
archaeologists are expected to attend in this unique
meet and greet.

Sunday's activities will depend on interest and skill levels
as well as the number of participants.

They tentatively would include one of the most
spectacular hanging canal portions, the Aquaduct, the
utterly mind boggling world class HS Canal, and possibly
original research over a still unexplored upper reach
of the Mud Springs canal.

You are certainly welcome to attend on either or
both days. Additional background here and
specific info here. Or by calling 928-428-4073.

There's now over a thousand known exoplanets and
the score is increasing faster than several per day on
the average.

Meanwhile, the number of Goldilocks exoplanets
remains at twelve. While this suggests a one
percent Goldilocks hit rate, the actual figure
is likely to be much higher, possibly in the five
or six percent range.

Owing to Goldilocks planets typically being
smaller and much harder to find with the
currently available technology.

Meanwhile, Roller Derby, Captain Video, and
Kukla, Fran, and Ollie remain our main goodwill
ambasadors to outer space. Having now swept out
over one million cubic light years of volume.

We just picked up a whole bunch of gun drills from a
machine shop auction. These let you drill very precise
and amazingly deep holes.

You normally use them with a lathe or a CNC machine.

The tailstock holds the drill stationary and routes coolant
through its central hole. The work spins as the hole is
deepened "Used" coolant and chips are returned down a single
external flute. Drills are usually carbide or carbide tipped
and apparently can be resharpened a number of times.

Normal price is $80 to $100 each, but we can offer brand
new units in original packaging off eBay for about one third
of their normal cost or less.

Please email me for details on remaining available sizes
and which are new and which have been protessionally
resharpened. All are fully guaranteed.

Typical sizes are near 0.2015 by 16 inches.

It still never ceases to amaze me the number of individuals
laboring under the delusion that use of electrolysis from
high value sources such as grid, pv, or wind in some
manner represents some sort of solution to something.

In reality, thermodynamic fundamentals involving exergy 
will absolutely and positively GUARANTEE that such
electrolysis flat out ain't gonna happen.

Exergy is a measure of the quality of energy and directly
determines its price and its value. More specifically, 
exergy is a measure of the reversibly recoverable
energy fraction.

Electrical energy is just about the highest exergy stuff
available. Because of its convenience in efficient
conversion to other forms. Bulk hydrogen energy, on
the other hand, has very low exergy because of its
inherent inefficiencies in coversion and the outrageous
amortization costs in doing so.

Electrolysis is pretty much the same as 1:1 converting
US Dollars into Mexican Pesos. There ALWAYS will
be more intelligent things to do with high value electrical
sources such as grid, pv, or wind, than instantly and
irrecoverably destroying most if its value through
electrolysis.

Much more in our Energy Fundamentals and Electrolysis
Tutorials found on our Hydrogen Energy library page.

Along with a master directory here.

A once-again reminder that we have guided tours of the
hanging canals coming up on October 19th and 20th.

Apparently some leading Southwestern Archaeologists
have said they are going to participate. Which should
make these tours into a significant gathering.

You are welcome to attend. Per these details.

Just came from an industrial bankruptcy auction that
strongly reinforced the key things to look for in deep
distress auctions: Poor promotion by a second tier
auctioneer. Utter panic by a lienholder who just wants
their building back.

Few but huge lots, most of which are poisoned and need 
major triage. Astounding bargains in "contents of cabinet"
and "contents of room". Hassles over payments, removal
dates, and cleanup. Time and date conflicts with a major
competitor.

120 degrees in the shade except for the four inch hail.
And, of course, the restrooms not working.

Much more in our Auction Resources Library page.
Your own custom local or regional auction finder can be
created for you per these guidelines.

Almost always, online piecemeal auctions combined with
bulk offers are a sucker bet. The bulk offers are almost
certain to win, unless there are major bigtime site issues.

You can often get an advance warning over whether there
is any point in continuing, by dividing the bulk bid price
by the number of lots.

Unless the price per lot that has to be consistently
acheived is ridiculously low, bulk will likely prevail.

More on similar topics in our Auction Help page.

Updated and expanded the Arizona Auction Resources
portion of our Auction Help Page.

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

Magic Sinewaves are a new method of very efficiently
generating power sinusodial wavefroms from simple on-off
switching. Their foremost characteristic is that any number
of low harmonics can, in theory, be forced to zero. And
in the real world to astonishingly low levels.

Our Magic Sinewave library can be found here with their
latest tutorial here and an amazingly fast performance
calculator here.

Custom development and symposia services available.

The "next big thing" in energy efficiency is likely to involve
heat pumps and air conditioning. For even the best of these
are woefully inefficient.

The breakthroughs are likely to come from variable speed
and variable capacity becoming the norm, followed by
dramatic improvements in heat exchanger performance.

The latter is likely to come about through new developments
in MEMS and nanostructures. One new example of which
can be found here.

Have you ever wondered what the name is of the little
black book that Big Brother uses to stash all your
secret stuff?

It is called Spillman.

Many years ago, I was attending a folk concert. The
opening act was a single and an unknown flute player,
performing in front of the closed stage curtains. His
job was to warm up the audience for the high priced
help that was soon to follow.

He was good. Very good.

But as he went along, the music started getting strange
and finally downright weird. He was playing chords on
his flute, along with notes with unbelievably strong
tonal structures. Eventually, the music turned into
bunches of Impossible sounding and god-awful squawks.

Almost all of the audience got bored and restless as the
music seemed to deteriorate. Just then, I happened to
notice a friend beside me who had played in and had
taught concert band. He was literally on the edge of his
chair with his mouth open.

He briefly turned to me and said very slowly, ''You
can't do that with a flute. It is not possible."

Of the thousands of people in the audience, at the most
only five realized they were now witnessing a once-in-a-
lifetlme performance involving the absolute mastery of
a very difficult musical instrument. To nearly everyone
else, It sounded like a bunch of god-awful squawks.

Always play for those five.

Truth in advertising: Like when an eBay seller posted...

"All fright arrangements are to be made by the buyer".

A copy of Safety Last is apparently up on YouTube.

AKA the hanging clock scene. Apparently a new false wall
on a roof and sneaky camera angles made this SLIGHTLY
less dangerous than it really was.

At the time, Harold Lloyd was missing a finger and a thumb.

Eurostyle and many other modern connectors apparently
have TWO different sizes that are nearly identical and
most definitely should NOT be interchanged.

One group is on 0.2 inch or 5.03 mm centers. The other
is on 0.197 inch or 5 mm centers. Watch this detail!

A reminder that we have a pair of hanging canal tours coming
up on October 19th and 20th. These will include a bunch of
"name brand" southwestern archaeological professionals
and you can find further details here.

And the related Glyphs story is newly available for free download
here. Its live linked and combined web version can be found here.

Or email me directly.

Did I ever tell you my story with my involvement with the
CIA? It took place somewhat before ( and was a proximate
cause of ) the Bay of Pigs incident.

As we tended to do, Bee and I were wandering around
southcentral Arizona and came upon a then presumably
long abandoned Marana airstrip. We continued with the
vague ( but unlikely ) hope of finding some unusual
planes stashed or even an open restaurant.

We were stopped by a military uniformed type of
person having no identifying marks whatsoever and
holding an ancient SCR 536 WWII handi-talkie.

He asked us what we were doing and we told him.

Things then proceeded to get bizarre in that he in
no manner could stop us or tell us what to do
because --------> he was not there!

We continued our tour and noted shadowy figures
furtively hiding just at the edge of buildings carefully
tracking our activities, also with ancient handi talkikes.

But again, they could not interfere in any manner
with us bacause ------> they were not there!

At the time, I held a DOD secret clearance, so I
eventually decided that what was happening was not
quite right. As suspected, there was no restaurant,
and the only planes were a bunch of derelict connies.

The outcome of the Bay of Pigs clearly indicaded the
skill levels of the epsilon minuses involved. It seemed
to me that a simple "ROAD CLOSED" sign might
have helped their cause significantly.

Eventually many years later, the CIA involvement
was admitted.

A while back I decided to write a PowerPoint emulator
using my Gonzo Utilities. Aimed at short and fast loading
and host independent single Acrobat .PDF files that had
improved graphics and did url automatic linking.

A tutorial on the emulator appears here, details on Gonzo
here, secrets of autoposition linking here, and the actual
Gonzo routines here.

Some of the generated file examples included...

Successful eBay Buying Strategies
Successful eBay Selling Strategies
Little known Gila Valley Dayhikes
Prehistoric Hanging Canal Lecture
Energy Fundamentals Intro & Summary
PV Panel Intro & Summary
Mount Graham Aerial Lumber Tramway
An Introduction to Magic Sinewaves
Three Phase Magic Sinewaves

With these companion sourcecode documents...

https://www.tinaja.com/glib/ebaysels.psl  
https://www.tinaja.com/glib/ebaybuys.psl
https://www.tinaja.com/glib/unusualh.psl
https://www.tinaja.com/canal/newhangshow3.psl  
https://www.tinaja.com/glib/nrglect2.psl
https://www.tinaja.com/glib/pvlect2.psl
https://www.tinaja.com/glib/tramshow.psl
https://www.tinaja.com/glib/msintro1.psl
https://www.tinaja.com/glib/deltams1.psl

Things have gotten slightly more complicated in that Adobe
now forbids you doing disk access while Distilling PostScript.
One obvious workaround is to tow a full copy of Gonzo
along in each file's sourcecode.

A new site area index has been added here. 

Google recently updated their satellite coverage of the Gila
Valley. With some disconcerting results.

The new resolution seems about the same as the old, but
obvious variations in time of year and time of day seem to
have appeared. Besides obvious changes in building
construction, some areas are better, and some worse.

In particular, portions of Frye Mesa that previously revealed
major obvious hanging canal artifacts are now vague and sketchy
at best. What is here now is not nearly good enough to
even suggest the unique canal potential of this area.

Fortunately, the old imagry has been largely field verified.

The same imagry is apparently used by Acme Mapper.

A collection of print style archaeological publications
can be found here.

And some newer open access archaeological sites
can be found 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.

What may be he entire world's remaining supply of three
pin round HP power cords ( also used on some Heathkits
and many other pieces of vintage equipment ) can be
found here.

I tried finding useful sources a year or two back with
no luck at all. These would make a superb eBay item
if they could be found in reasonably quantities and
pricing.

One highly unsafe alternative is to attach two Molex .093
WM-50 female connector pins to a regular line cord. The
"outside" two pins are live, whle the middle one is ground.

A very few apps used the hot pins opposite to HP. This
was typical of certain tape recorders and appliances.

This stunt at least allows temporary testing of vintage equipment.
EXTREME SHOCK HAZARD! Also trips breakers and
starts fires if careless!

There are three problems with substituting an IEC jack and a
modern cord: First, there might be a limiting amount of
back panel space. Second, cutting a rectangular hole
is labor intensive. And, Third, modifying a piece of
legacy equipment can severely damage its valus as
a collectible.

The Gerber File Format has long been a standard for
describing printed circuit layouts and such.

A freely downloadable version of the spec can be
found here.

Thought I'd review what passes around here for a
"style sheet". Our latest technical paper can be found
here. And literally hundreds of more examples on
our website. Amazingly, I've published well over 2000
papers to date, nearly half of which are now online.

I still do writing using raw PostScript by way of my
Gonzo Utilities and web posting or submitting as an
acrobat .PDF file. Sourcecode is often made
separately and freely available in a standard
textfile readable .psl format. Short for "PostScript
Lancaster".

Recent changes in the Acrobat Distiller have made
things a lot more difficult as you cannot any longer
read or write disk files. Workarounds have included
still using Distiller with a full copy of Gonzo attached
to each file, or going to GhostScript when and where
disk access is essential. Such as here, here, and here.

A foremost rule here is to typeset first and edit last.

For both the form and function of a block of text
contribute to its legibility, its readability, and its
overall generated interest.

Our preferred format is "book page size" with text
and graphics freely intermixed when and where they
are needed. Live web links are generously provided
when and where they can add to content. As does
magnification options.

I prefer short to mid sized paragraphs left justified.
Hyphens are NEVER used, rewording the text as
needed for well behaved right margins. Widows
and orphans are similarly studiously avoided. No
attempt is ever made to fit a standard size; each
document is as long as it needs to be.

I overwhelmingly prefer the Stone series of fonts.
Titles and subtitles are normally a mid green, while
links are the usual dark blue. A unique feature of
Gonzo is that url links automatically follow any
resizing or repositioning as text is entered or edited.

Oversized raised caps are used at the beginning of text,
rather than the drop cap that is also Gonzo available.
Paragraphs are not indented but are separated by
a half vertical space.

Should a "Powerpoint" or "slideshow" style format
be more approapriate ( such as here, here, here, here,
or here ), I've written a PowerPoint emulator and
tutorial here. And actual code can be extracted
from any of the just mentioned but .psl trailer files.

I'd very much like to get the rest of my books and early
papers online, but this would take additional funding
and your sponsorship.

There appears to be a dramatic regurgence in all things
Heathkit. And eBay prices are sharply up and many items
are selling at their opening Buy It Now prices.

Free schematics and manuals are starting to once again
appear on the web, after an ill advised and abortive series
of "what were they thinking?" takedown notices a few
years back.

Many years ago, both HP and Tektronix defined how
legacy products are to be dealt with on the web. First
and foremost, any and all tech info gets placed into
the public domain and can be provided by anybody in
any form.

Secondly, the HP and Tektronix websites become the
definitive free source for any and all of their own
legacy info.

Here's a revised list of local emergency scanner
frequencies...

122.80000 Safford Airport

153.68000 Graham Electric
153.95000 Fort Thomas Fire

154.08500 Thatcher Fire
154.32500 Safford Fire
154.43000 Mount Graham Observatory
154.72500 EAC Security

155.05500 Graham #2
155.14500 Pima Fire
155.17500 Southwest Ambulance
155.20500 Search and Rescue
155.26500 Search and Rescue #2
155.71500 GRAHAM DISPATCH
155.83500 Graham #3

156.18750 Graham #4

159.10500 Klondyke

162.16250 BLM Gila

164.82500 Tonto Fire Net

168.05000 Coronado Fire
168.15000 Coronado Heliograph Fire
168.60000 National Fire 3

169.60000 Coronado Heligroph

171.70000 San Carlos

460.27500 Highway Patrol Statewide
460.32500 Highway Patrol Safford

Many listings for other areas can be found here.

One of the more infuriating features of the vacuum tube era
was that the tube markings tended to be impossibly
diffcult to read initially and often vanished completely
with time.

Several manufacturers of MOV varistor chips seem to
be repeating this debicle. With low contrast markings
that are hard to read, mysterious, or even rub off.

We had to flush thousands of MOVs that, while we knew
exactly who made them and what they were, ended up
completely illegible. And thus largely eBay unsellable.

If the markings are there but dim, we sometimes will
"improve" them in our eBay images by using our
Bitmap typewriter. Latest version here.

Obvious tricks to read any dim numbers include an
illuminated magnifier or to scan the chip at 600 DPI
and view it in Imageview32.

Our policy will continue to be flushing the illegible but
shipping the dimly but certainly viewable.

Overheard some alternate energy enthusiasts who
were lavishly praising Sterling engines as the
ultimate solution to low delta-t energy recovery.

It quickly became obvious that they did not have
the faintest clue of the underlying thermodynamics
or economics.

To date, the Sterling engine has been one of the
largest and most monumental engineering ratholes
of all times. Here is why...

    Carnot Matters -- There is a fundamental and
     unavoidable law of thermodynamics that says
     the best possible efficiency of any heat engine
     is proportional to the absolute temperature
     delta fraction. Thus your best possible efficiency
     a 20 degree rise at 70 degree F room temperature 
     would be 20/(459+70) = 3.8 percent. And no
     real world system can be even this good. 

    Efficiency Matters --As efficiency goes down,
    the size and complexity of the energy recovery
    device will disproportionately increase in a 
    hyperbolic or worse manner for a given set of
    recovery values. Which is why absolutely free
    pv solar panels of less than six percent efficiency
    are totally commercially useless. 

    Amortization Matters -- If your energy recovery
    device is producing an average of two cents worth
    of electricity per day and your total cost of ownership
    is three cents per day, you have a gasoline destroying
    net energy sink. The longer you run it, the more
    gasoline you destroy

   Gotchas Matter -- A Sterling engine needs a
    special part called a regenerator. Regenerators
    have to be long and thin and short and fat.
    They also have to be very good conductors of
    heat and outstanding insulators. Extreme
    engineering compromise is needed and nobody
    has come up with a good regeneration solution
    to date.

Much more in our Energy Fundamentals tutorial.
And in our Engineering Ratholes story.

www.engineeringtv.com is a new collection of industry videos,
tutorials, and related technical info.

I'm suprised that I never heard of Tele-Tech magazine,
an apparently one time outsstanding trade journal for
the broadcast and television industries.

At any rate, an extensive collection of freely downloadable
and utterly fascinating historical downloads can be found
here.

Intel just announced a Raspberry Pi alternative called the
Minnowboard. With details here , a video here, and discussion here.
Along with critical comments here.

Instead, it appears to be more of a beached whale. Oversized,
overpriced, and of limited performance.

What were they thinking?

Just after WWII, our sun suddenly became a radio star.
owing to widespread expansion of VHF television broadcasts.

And Captain Video, Roller Derby, and Kukla, Fran, and Ollie
suddenly became our goodwill ambasadors to outer space.

These signals have now swept out over ONE MILLION CUBIC
LIGHT YEARS of space and have been overwhelmingly likely
to annoy many distant extrasolar goldilocks planets.

At signal levels that remain detectable with our current
technology. Curiously, the signal strength drops off with
the square of the distance, but the number of annoyed
planets increases with the cube of the distance.

Consider this: What interpretation would "they" make over
a lucid ten second clip of Roller Derby as the sum total of
Earth based humanity?

A reminder that we have several MILES of transparent
polyester sheet in dozens of rolls of varying lengths and
sizes.

I've been meaning to build up a rewinder but it seems
to be taking forever.

email me if you have any interest in this superb material
at one sixth or less of its normal price.

A locatl utility just did a major remote meter reading
upgrade, and I now have great heaping bunches of
several generations of earlier power meters.

These include both the classic mechanical "spinning
wheel" mechanisms and newer all-digital LCD
readout designs. I should shortly have these up on
our eBay site. Just as soon as I get a test setup
completed.

They are the traditional 220 volt center tapped home
power versions. I'm working at seeing if these can
be modified for 110 volt use in alternate energy,
power efficiency, or photovoltaic solar energy research.

As is, they should be quite useful for mobile home
parks or sublet leasing. Besides being eminently
collectible at a tiny fraction of their usual price.

Ownership and use of these meters is completely
legal so long as they are not in any manner
involved in utilitly theft of services.

You can email me for further details and suggetions.

The solar energy pv breakthrough of the week can be
newly found here. With a discussion here.

Traditional pv cells have to waste a lot of energy
as unwanted heat, as any frequency below the work
function is ignored. As is any "spare change" above.

Unfortunately, pv weekly breakthroughs have a half
life of six days, 23 hours, and 59 minutes.

Here we go again. Boy, a whole flock of them flew over
this time. With additional details here in its 9-11-13 entry.

My very first magnetic perpetual motion machine
can be found here. And originally here.

In normal use, a certain amount of energy is externally
stored in a magnet's field. You can borrow some of
this energy temporarily, but you have to put it back
if the magnet is to continue operating at full strength.

When you borrow some of the field's energy, its
size and strength must proportionally decrease.
Thus, a magnet does work when it is moved
to the refrigerator and has work done on it
when it is removed. No work or energy loss
occurs when the magnet is just sitting there.

For work equals force times distance. If
it just sits there, the distance moved is zero.

How much total energy is stored in a better 
grade magnet?

You can calculate this sort of thing directly.
Or else use an equivalent solenoid and the
Joules = 1/2 Li^2 formula. But there is a
much faster and vastly sneakier way:

Here is a typical magnetizer for "normal"
magnets. Its total energy storage is 8000
Joules. A Joule is one watt second and there
are 3600 watt seconds in a watt hour. 

If 100 percent of this energy were to end up
in the magnet ( dream on ), you would be 
talking a whopping 2.22 watthours of energy
storage.

Enough to run a 100 watt lightbulb for slightly
over one minute!

Thus, the total energy stored in a typical 
magnet is quite miniscule.

More on pseudoscience bashing here

Half of our first fully professional hanging canal paper
is now in print...

Neely, J. and Lancaster, D. 2013.
The Bajada Canals of the Safford Basin:
Small Corporate Group Collaboration in
Southeastern Arizona. GLYPHS,
Arizona Archaeological and Historical
Society, Vol. 64, Nos. 3 & 4. Tucson

Presumably part I should shortly appear for
free download on the Glyphs website.

Meanwhile, you can view the entire paper
with live web links here.

Until yesterday, we had been getting an intolerable several
hundred obvious spam messages a day. Miraculously, these
seemed to now have dropped to ten or so. Apparently Fat Cow
has an incredibly effective and highly welcome new spam filter.

Just in case the new filter is too powerful and includes false
hits, be sure to re-email me if you do not get a response the
first time.

Curiously, the Gila Valley seems to have used at least
six ( and possibly seven ) major and innovative prehistoric
ag tools. While somewhat mutually exclusive, in places
they are literally piled on top of each other.

Possibly the oldest are what I call mulch rings and
others have named "cairns". Basically a filled ring of
rocks three feet in diameter and one rock high whose
apparent use was to retain moisture and limit evaporation
for a single plant, perhaps an Agave. These are typically
randomly arranged in groups of fifteen or so, perhaps
twenty feet apart.

Second are the grids, which bear an astonishing
similarity to Dilbert office cubicals. These are a
rock border perhaps twelve by twenty four feet
that define a field area. Apparently crops were
planted under the rocks, rather than in the
more obvious middle. There are possibly tens
of thousands of these north of the Gila and
likely at least few hundred to the south. Their
definitive text is found here.

A possible third are the UFO Fish Filets.
These appear to be a cross between grids and
trincheras. Only one example is known and
it is both fairly remote from more dense habitation
areas and could possibly be an odd CCC artifact.
They are definitely in need of further study.

Fourth are the aproned check dams. These cross
intermittent small washes and have a fine soil area
built up behind them. Their size suggests some
sort of plant nurseries. A smaller apron is often
below the main dam, perhaps for a secondary
crop area or to prevent erosion.

Fifth are the roasting pits. These are "miniature
sinkholes" that were apparently used to roast
agave. They are typically five feet across and
two feet deep. And are quite discinctive because
of their negative terrain.

Sixth are the lowland canals. These are large
and Gila river derived and quite similar to
Hohokam canals in the Salt River Valley.
While truely spectacular and impressive, the
enginerring behind them was not all that great
as it involved nearly level dirt and obvious
routes using gently sloping constructs.

And finally are the bajada hanging canals that 
apparently made spectacular use of virtually
every drop of Mount Graham stream water.
28 of these are known for a total distance of
50 miles. In places, they are literally hung on the
edges of steep sided mesas, making their
slope largely independent of the surrounding
terrarin! Their astonishing engineering over
incredibly hostile terrain remains world class.

More on similar topics here.

The classic Richard Feynman physics lectures have been
newly released in free downloadable HTML forma.t.

Per these details, this discussion, and this video

So who built the hanging canals? Where did the technology
come from? One possibility is that these are in fact world
class unique and amazingly rapidly evolved in place.

Of the four or five Gila Valley "trading partners", only
the Hohokam had significant canal technology. And their
canals are remarkably similar to the riverine lowland
canals here. A strong argument for lowland adaption can
thus be reasonably made.

But the hanging canals involve orders of magnitude
fancier engineering and skill sets. They also seem
"complete" in that there are no obvious additional
locations. And ( with possible exception of Henry's )
are conspicuously lacking in upgrades, outright failures,
or obvious rework.

No similar systems are known elsewhere in Basin and
Range. But a case can be made that Mount Graham is
unique unto itself with additional height, numerous preannual
streams, much higher snowpack, and convenient northeastern
conduit mesas.

In short, there does not presently appear to be any known
source to directly import the needed technology and skills.
And thus, the hanging canals might be uniquely evolved locally
within the Safford basin.

The motivation for such rapid technological advancement
remains highly enigmatic. Bordering on the astounding.

Much more here.

Expanded and updated our Gila Hikes web page.

Please email me with anything I missed or needs
further updating.

Tucson Electric Power ( TEP ) seems to have an expanding
mix of traditional and alternate energy power sources. Some
interesting facts and figures from them are found here.

Some non-obvious points from their presentation: The
best of their traditional power plants are combined cycle
units that now approach a 60 percent thermal efficiency
at a cost of $83 per megawatt hour. ( TEP apparently
has no hydro power or comparable figures. And the
obsolete Childs hydro site was just demolished. )

Surprisingly nuclear and tracking pv cost about the same
and come in somewhat under double this figure. But it is
very reasonable to expect nuclear to cost a lot more and
pv to cost a lot less in the future.

The advantages of tracking pv are apparently strong
enough to exceed their additional complexity. These
systems currently beat out mirror style solar and should
do so very more so in the future. To the point of
which future mirror solar appears to be a sucker bet.

At present, wind comes in at $128 per megawatt hour.

Note that $83 oer megawatt hour is the same as 8.3
cents per kilowatt hour.

Some energy tutorials can be found here and here.

One of the latest free energy scam du jours seems to be
rapidly approaching its inevitable crash and burn phase.

At least according to this apparently credible analysis.

Secrets of effectively bashing pseudoscience appear
here and here.

A map showing the conflicts between the newly discovered
prehistoric hanging canals and one proposed Sunzia
transmission line route can be found here.

The most reasonable and practical proposed southern
route that is many miles away from the canals seems
to be raising major NIMBY complaints.

To me, it makes the most sense to create integrated
resource corridors. In which the identical route is
used for interstate thruways, railroad lines, fiber
optics, pieelines, solar and wind farms, local power
transmission, and regional power interties.

Some new and free software now allows just about any
amateur with a decent telescope go on their own
Goldilocks planet hunt.

The open source software works by monitoring an
area of stars and looking for subtle changes in a
single star's brightness during a possible transit.
The technique is called differential photometry.

A reminder that we have a very active local
astronomy club and free use of a twenty inch
telescope.

More here, here, and here.

Speaking of which, a useful directory of local scanning
frequencies can be found here.

Oddball and klutzy wall warts may be on the way out.

With most newer lower power electronics favoring USB
for both rechargable battery power and computer updates.

Normally, these are plug and go from any computer. If you
must operate locally ( such as on a public service scanner )
$5 USB chargers are readily available from a number of sources.

These compact wall plug devices offer full regulation and
switchmode operation. They usually run a little high at
5.25 volts to allow for cord losses.

One tip: unpowered USB expanders may not be able to provide
useful power. Use a direct computer connection or a powered
USB expander or a charger instead.

Found an additional stash of "kiss your ass goodbye" nuclear
holocoust fashion accessories. Area Predictor, Radiological that
you use as a clear and grease pencil markable overlay for a
standard topo map. NSN 6665-00-106-9595.

Rare collectible "as new" in original mil packaging with
TM 3-6665-304-10 technical manual included. Vinyl this
old ends up slightly wrinkled, but still clear and readable.

On eBay or email me for details.

An interesting and free online Calculus Course can
be newly found here.

A directory of southwestern waterfalls appears here.
It seems to have bothgross omissions and little known
inclusions.

Ferinstance, Frye Mesa Falls, the two Deadman Falls,
and Grant Creek Falls are missing from the Grahams.
As is Kennedy Falls near Aravapia, but this one may or
may not even exist.

Curiously, two very remote falls in Greenlee County are
listed. These are Sardine Falls and Chitty Falls. I have
no idea how big they are. Access looks painfull.

And the little known spectacular ( when it runs ) Seneca
Falls on theSan Carlos res also seems unmentioned.
As does San Carlos falls itself.

Another Seneca photo appears here. Note that there
is a second waterfall below the plunge pool that is
quite difficult to visit or photograph.

The ancient oriental art of Ti Wun On consists of 
getting totally snockered, but always doing so in 
a professional and workmanlike manner.

Google has updated their local imagry for Google Maps
and Google Earth. The same data base gets used for
Acme Mapper.

Some of the image capture was done around May
of 2013, and seems to apply mostly to developed areas.
The resolution remains pretty much the same.

Note that image dates appear on Google Earth but not
on Acme Mapper or Google Maps.

Some remote areas appear slightly different, while
others clearly still use older data. Elsewhere, newly
developed flybys and other features are now offered.

Once again revised our Hanging Canal summary here
with its sourcecde here. This should be pretty much
near the final version.

More on the hanging canals here.

Rediscovered a group of southern grids just off the
Porter Springs road. The score now approaches
several thousand north of the river and a few
hundred to the south.

The new finds are pretty much invisible on Acme
Mapper. They also include mulch rings, roasting
pits, and a strange canal-like water management
scheme that includes both long linear walls and
crosswise aproned check dams. Bizarre.

The key paper on the grids appears here with
an image here and more on our hanging canals here.

The grids were apparently a giant aqave booze factory
and the very first Dilbert office cubicals.

Yorg.

You should NEVER use a space or ( especially ) a percent
sign in a url! Apparently ASU IT has not yet picked up on this
obvious and essential rule.

I started getting some bizarre links when going between .PDF
and Chrome. A url that includes ...stuff stuff... or ...stuff%20stuff...
would 404 as ...stuff%3520stuff...

What apparently was happening is that BOTH arcrobat AND chrome
were substituting for the HTML reserved parenthesis character.

The sledgehammer workaround around url stupidity seems to be
to redirect through a "clean" url on your own website, thus taking
acrobat out of the loop....

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Old HTML redirect</title
<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html;
     charset=UTF-8">
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;
    url=http://ltvtp.shesc.asu.edu/Hunt%20et%20al_2005.pdf">
</head>
<body>
Redirecting
</body>
</html>

Thanks to some new developments, selling and shipping
to New Mexico has eased somewhat.

Yeah, there still is the language barrier and all the hassles
at customs. But at one time, everything needed reloaded
at the border crossings because of the different sizes
and spacing of the truck tires.

Fortunately, reversible truck tires are newly available
that can simply be insided out at the border crossings.

More here and here.

Arizona has a number of areas that include lots of impressive
sinkholes. While none of these more obvious larger areas
presently lead to significant caves that I know of, their
very presence suggests enormous voids in their deeply
underlying limestone. Possibly forever unreachable.

At least seven major sinkholes are known in the Sedona
area that were recently covered in this gological report.

And this report covers the Holbrook Anticline that seems
to include at least three major sink areas.

These include the McCauley sinks here, the Zeniff
sinks here, and the Snowflake sinks here.

And the two classic "Rand Study" papers appear here
and here. It is my understanding that portions of this latter
paper have long been either challenged or discredited.

And here is yet another Holbrook Sink.

Just created a new image subdirectory for our web
hanging canal files. Some of the intitial images include...

allen0.jpg - Allen Canal takein
allen1.jpg - Allen Canal below dam
bestgrid.jpg - Best Northern Grids image
culebra1.jpg - Culebra cut with Dr. Neely
culebra2.jpg - Culebra cut raw
dragan.jpg - Draganfly promotion
frye1.jpg - Robinson Topo ( misnamed )
frye2.jpg - Frye Mesa Braided + HS Canal
gc1.jpg - Golf Course image #1
gc2.jpg - Golf Course image #2
hangcan1.jpg - Original Marijilda hanging
henry1.jpg - Middle of Henry Canal
jern1.jpg - End of Jerningan Canal
map2.jpg - Screen dump of early kml
mary2.jpg - Nicer image of Marijilda hang
mud1.jpg - Middle of mud springs below dam
mud2.jpg - Lowest known end of Mud Springs
rinc1.jpg - Twin boobs ponding area
rinc2.jpg - Detail of Twin Boobs + Cactus
rob1.jpg - Main hanging portion of Robinson
rob2.jpg - Hung Robinson detail
rob3.jpg - Robinson top of mesa
safcan1.jpg - GIS Map
safcanmap.kml Google Earth Map
threeswitch.jpg - Narrow portion of Deadman
tranq1.jpg - Mid tranquility in urban area
tranq2.jpg - Tranquility rebuild detail
trol1.jpg - Troll house mid Mud Springs
twinb1.jpg - Twin boobs before Safford trashing

Added a new Hanging Canal Image to our image stash.
It is pretty much the same as this older one, but is far
more colorful and shows the "water flows uphill"
illusion somewhat better.

The mountains in the background are the low and very
arid Whitlocks. There once was a scheme to put a luxury
destination telescope resort on top of this totally inaccessible
range.

More happy horseshit on the Whitlocks here.

More on our hanging canals here.

An interesting new barometric sensor can be found
here and described here. It costs $5 in quantity,
is micropower, and can give down to an eight inch
resolution.

We earlier looked at a competitive item here.

We still have not found an optimum method to
measure hanging canal slope. The sensor in the
Garmin etrex30 is much better than a direct
GPS measurement, but still not nearly good
enough.

Current thinking is to use a surveyor's automatic
level. Such as one of these.

One of the more amazing and utterly inexplicable features
of our local prehistoric hanging canals under study is
simply this: They appear both "perfect" and "complete"

It seems that literally every drop of northeastern Mount
Graham stream water was fully and completely exploited.

There are no obvious remaining locations to build any
new canals. Of the existing canals, all of them seem
"perfect" and fully functional. There is no evidence of
any work in progress, nor any remnants of construction
mistakes or errors.

Surely somebody screwed up something somewhere along
the way. But such evidence remains conspicuously absent.

Bezier Cubic Splines are an excellent and preferred method
to draw the smooth continuous curves often found in typography,
CAD/CAM, and graphics in general.

Among their many advantages is a very sparse data set allowing
a mere eight points to completely define a full and carefully
controlled and device independent curve.

Cubic splines are exceptionally easy to use in the PostScript
computer language.  But are also generally implementable
in most higher level languages and in all but the smallest of
bare bones microprocessors.

Many tutorials and examples are now present in our Cubic
Spline Library.

A non-obvious trick when trying to extract info from Acme
Mapper or Google Earth: False color tricks can sometimes
make invisible or subtle features more apparent.

Obvious choices are normal, invert colors, red only, blue only,
green only, not red, not blue, and not green.

One simple method is to use your Print Screen key to grab
a sreen image and then send it to Imageview 32.

This story and this discussion have come to the conclusion
that drive-in theaters might be endangered.

Doing them in this time is the major movie studios switching
to all digital formats and dropping traditional 35 mm movie
can distributions. The updating costs of a quarter of a million
dollars or more is waaay beyond what they can deal with.

I'm coming to the conclusion that Salvex is more
bizarre entertainment than a useful auction resource.

Nearly a dozen times, I've been high bidder only
to have my reasonable offer rejected. Other times,
they switch from bidding to "make an offer" that
goes on forever before vanishing without comment.

They do have unusual stuff. Like the truck full
of now mashed mashed potatoes that was in a
wreck. Or the truckloads of napalm they got
off Home Depot when somebody found out it
burned. Or pizza that is clearly out of warranty.

Some useful auction stuff here, with Arizona specific
links here.

Expanded and updated our Gila Hikes web page.

Please email me with anything I missed or needs
further updating.

There are a surprising number of Arizona observatories,
as this list reveals.

Our nearest local observatory is the 20 inch telescope at
Discovery Park. Which you are welcome to visit most any
time. And even can gain full control of by taking a simple
college course. Light pollution here is rather bad..

The obvious biggie on the hill is the LBT. While drop in
visitors are definitely a no-no, EAC does offer all day
guided tours Saturdays during the fall and winter months.

While they do not have any larger telescopes, the
Casitas De Gila bed and breakfastst offers the
finest night skies most anywhere and has many
smaller instruments available for your use.

Check out their real time planetarium simulator
above the hot tub.

Those compulsory faculty teas that drove me away from
an advanced archaeology degree might not have been
that bad...

           ....if only they hadn't been intravenous.

A reminder that Adobe Acrobatt does NOT update any
links when you replace a page!

This can cause severe problems in text pages when the
url click thrus can all end up in the wrong positions.

Alternately, this can be a benefit if you want to predistill
full page image click-thrus. Per this PostScript code...

/sfpurl { /cururlname exch store % save url string
mark % start pdfmark
/Rect [-5 0 47 53]
/Color [ 1 1 1 ]
/Action <</Subtype /URI /URI cururlname>>
/Subtype /Link
/ANN % annotation type
pdfmark % call pdf operators
} def

The above code is intended for 10X layout pages
using my Gonzo Utilities. For normal page sizes,
multiply the /Rect values by ten.

It is also important to make sure you do not have
any "double" links or inadvertent unwanted earlier
links present. Some browsers may pick the wrong
link!

A possible Wikipedia entry for our hanging canals
appears here with its sourcecode here

And a slight variant for Wesrch can be found here
with its sourcecode here.

These are rough drafts of preliminary files. Please
email me with any critical review or comments.

A reminder that I have a pair of very rare 1908 
commercial silent movie projectors available. 
They are presently disassembled, so they would
easily be UPS shippable. They seem to be nearly 
complete and should be eminently restorable.

Please email me if you have any interest in this unique 
opportunity. Inspection welcome. We will shortly
be dramatically be expanding our refurb activities, so
I very much need the shop space back.

Some eBay sellers seem obsessed with having as high a
sellthru rate as they can, attempting to sell everything
every time on its first listing.

In reality, there probably is no correllation whatsoever
with fast sellthru and optimal eBay profits. In fact, if
things are selling too fast, you are probably charging far
too little.

My own feeling is that if it takes a few weeks or even a
few months to sell something, the chances are you can
get a much higher price for it. And that your total return
even after the extra fees should be significantly higher. 

Especially since your first relisting is free.

At least to me, a twenty one day cashout and a fifteen
month hang time appears about right for industrial items
acquired in quantity. Especially if a 30:1 sell/buy ratio
goal is in fact acheived.

More on our Auction Help page.

Got one of the usual late night phone calls from an
individual who just invented a new way of marketing and
wanted to run out and get a patent on it to "protect" their
invention. The individual, of course, had never really
marketed anything themselves.

For openers, a patent in no manner prevents anyone from
stealing your ideas. All a patent does is give you a right to
sue someone should your idea in fact get stolen. As the
typical enforcement cost of patent litigation is in the 
$300,000 range  ( yearly litigation insurance alone normally
costs more than $90,000 ), the cost of a getting a patent is
pocket change that simply does not enter into the economics.

It is thus extremely foolish to try and patent a million dollar
idea.

There is, of course, not one patent in one thousand that cannot
be busted outright by a diligent enough search for prior art in
obscure enouth places. Nor does more than one patent in
five hundred or more ever return a net positive cash flow.

I may have mentioned this a time or two before, but any
involvement whatsoever by an individual or small scale
startup with the patent system is VIRTUALLY CERTAIN
to result is a HUGE net loss of time, energy, money, and
sanity.

Much more on these topics in our Patent Help library.
especially our Collected Patent Tutorial Reprints, and
specific files on When to Patent, The Idea Mortality
Curve, How to Bust a $650 Patent, and, of, course, our 
classic Case Against Patents that started it all.

Plans are underfoot for another hanging canal tour on
Saturday October 19th. Chances are that you would
be welcome to attend.

A possibly final ( or at least temporarily final ) version
of the hanging canal .GIS map appears here.

Most ( and hopefully all ) of the papers referencing
it supposedly have been updated.

Just noticed that the once dim bulldozer trace to
Mescal Crack is now almost totally invisible. But
this pit can still be seen as a black diagonal gash
inside a small funnel in Acme Mapper or Google
Earth.

Many caver trips were spent decades ago to try
and pin down this elusive cave. Depending on the
caver, its depth is between 90 and 120 feet. It is
in Precambrian Mescal Limestone of the Apache
group. Which only rarely forms present caves.
I only know of El Diablo and Copper Mountain
as other examples.

Another pit is rumored to be a mile and a quarter
northwest, but nobody has even tried to find it
for decades. Supposedly "rocks roll forever"
and its tenative name is Strawberry Awful.

Both are located in the "hat" area of Arizona, a
region the casual tourist often bypasses. You can't
get there from here.

Beware of a new eBay phising attempt that attacks by
way of a "sent a message" route.

Typically, they will include an item number that is not
yours and be vague enough that you might be motivated
to ask them which item they are referring to.

The scam is that clicking on the "respond" button does
not go to eBay but routes to them. From which they
can ask for your password, your VISA or worse.

Always check to be sure the respond address is not
suspicious!

Another clue is that you might get as many as four
of these at once.

Always forward anything strange to spoof@ebay.com

Our own eBay offers here.

Found some more curious rock alignments here, but have
not yet fully explored them.

They appear to be old but not canal related. Unlike
typical grids, they seem to be on undulating or sloping
land. As usual, they raise more questionss than they
resolve.

There are also mulch rings and other structures in
the area. Including a "plaza" just east of the road.

I've long been interested in bashing pseudoscience and in
promoting real science. But there is a phenomon that seems
to be stuck in the middle, neither fish nor fowl. This is
the hum on the desert.

Here's how we covered it long ago in our Gila Dayhikes
page:

  "HUM ON THE DESERT" -- Enigmatic "lopeing generator"
     sounds are heard by some in the Desert Southwest. Myself
     included. With no generally acceptable explanation. These 
     could be real or variations on tinnitus or individuals that have   
     exceptional infrasonic capabilities. Meanwhile, the classic 
     southwestern sounds of coyote pup yip yarfs, the call of the 
     canyon wren, and the creaking and groaning of an Aeromotor
     windmill should be lovingly cherished.

And here is what Wikipedia did with it. And here is some of the
latest coverage.

If this was an external source, it seems to me that a few minutes
with a decent audio spectrum analyzer would nait it down once and
for all. But this does not seem to ever happen.

Building a PC audio card synthesizer with a bunch of knobs
might be interesting. Followed by comparing time reports
and knob settings.

My present theory is ostoacoustic emissions.  In a quiet room, one
of my ears can clearly sense an object placed within an inch of it.
The sensing lasts only a second. I assume this is some sort of a
"balance recalibration" or "acoustic background pattern
adjustment". I have no doubt it is real.

And might explain why the effect seems stronger inside a van or
SUV, perhaps owing to acoustical filtering or resonance.

But no credible solution to the hum on the desert has yet
appeared. I predict it will turn out "real but internal".

Amazingly, it is trivial to convert a Raspberry Pi into a
wide range rf signal generator per thesee details.

Just took a speed reading course and managed to read
War and Peace in seven minutes.

It's about Russia.

Found another mystery prehistoric hanging canal up on
Deadman Mesa. As usual, it generates more questions
than it resolves.

It looks sort of older and smaller than the others.

This one has yet another example of what we might
call "knife edging". The highest portions of many
mesas can be extremely narrow. With knife edging,
a three foot wide canal precisely aligns itself with
the uppermost highest six feet of the mesa.

Its destination remains unknown, but it seems to
be heading directly to Upper Deadman Tank.
The only tiny problem is that there is a huge
cliff in the way.

The engineering and thinking that had to go into
this sort of thing is utterly mind boggling. In many
cases, knife edging is the only feasible route that
can preserve the needed canal slope.

There are now two knife edges on Deadman Mesa,
two on Frye Mese, one on the Marijilda route,
and several others. Clearly, they are a major
concept used in the system design of the hanging
canals.

There is at least one example of the opposite of
knife edging as well. Where a canal crosses a
very narrow saddle between Ash Creek and
the Mud Sprongs bajaas. Via the only feasible
route.

This find has not yet been field proofed.
Your help  is welcome. An ATV would
greatly simplify access.

Much more on all this here.

Google now has an image search feature. The only tiny
problem is that it seems to deliver too many false hits.

You can add image search to Chrome with this plugin.
It appears as a new munu item when right clicking
over an image

This item was up for an auction sale. Using the search
found dozens of omelet images. But nothing useful.

I did go to the sci.electronics.design newsgroup. Out of
a dozen reasonable suggestions, one was a Kroy Lettering
Machine. It turns out that only Kroy has a six wide keyboard
and a tiny case notch upper left.

But it does not appear to be a K5100 because of the bottom
connector. Any ideas?

Just made the summer issue of Lafayette Magazine.

Did I ever tell you about the time I made the cover of
the Rolling Stone? Er, actually, it was on page 23 and
there were a few others in the picture. About 275,561
of them as I recall.

Amazingly and inexplicably and astoundingly, our
picnic cooler was prominently featured on the next
page.

Expanded and updated our Gila Hikes web page.

There seems to be a bug in Windows 8 in which windows
extend below the bottom of the screen and prevent
themselves from being vertically resized.

A simple fix that often works is to pull the top of
the window down, then reposition.

Another thing you can try is to use alt-space. The menu
created seems to reset most windows to reasonable
sizes.

Another possibility is to dramatically lower the
screen resolution, then close and reopen. This
is a pain and may rearrange your icons, though.

Not sure if it is a bug or a feature, but it sure is totally
infuriating: If you replace a page in acrobat, the old
links are preserved and the new ones ignored!

This is especially maddening if the purpose of the
page replacement was to alter or edit the url links.

To enter new links, you apparently have to do so
separately and manually after the page replacement.

Just uploaded the initial version of our Hanging Canal
Lecture III here with its soucecode here,

Version II remians available here with sourcecode
here.

Adobe's crippling of Distiller has made using the
sourcecode more difficult, in that images now 
have to be hand inserted and linked after PDF
creation. Or else page substituted.

Much more on our hanging canals here.
Yes, tours, talks, and research opportunities
are available.

As we've seen, Adobe has hopelessly crippled Distiller in
Acrobat X and higher by locking out disk access. As a
result, I'm having to rework most of our early PostScript
programs.

At present, the Hanging Canal slide show is up for revision.
In the good old days, I had a completely automatic image JPG
inserter, sizer, and linker in my Gonzo utilities. This no longer
works due to the disk access ban. You now have to manually
insert and link images after the .PDF file is distilled.

The process now has to go something like this: You insert
a full version of my Gonzo Utilities inside each file to be
distilled. Every place you want to insert a full page image,
you add a dummy page with a very wide black margin and a
reminder note to yourself with the name of the image and
the link.

After distilling, you go to each dummy page and add a watermark (!)
containing the desired image. Be absolutely sure you do not overwrite
any previous watermarks and that you are limited to the specific
page you are working on! You then expand the watermark to the
desired full size. After that,you go to the advanced editing tools
and insert the desired url link. Then save the full PDf file to a new
filename.

At this point, it is a very good idea to extract your single page
image as a .PDF file. That way, on later revisions, you only
have to replace a page rather than go through the pain of
a watermark and link.

I sorely miss the ability to run disk files in Distiller.  In those
cases where there is no other workaround, I've gone to
Ghostscript. Which freely allows full disk access, But it seems
to have problems in generating complex PDF files.

Just noticed that the Q Ranch Lodge is now an upscale
bed and breakfast. Cleverly located in the secret part of
Arizona you cannot get to, they offer a prehistorically
rich area and even classes on scientific illustartion.

Back during the first moon landings, Bee and I did a
pair of summer field digs here at their nearby Flying V.

One high point of the dig was an unintended culture
shock experiment. It seems the dig attracted a bunch
of snotty little rich girls from prestigious New England
colleges. Strictly Upper Crudney on the Thames.

We took this gaggle of ingenues and without warning
dumped them into Oni's Redneck Bar in Young, Az.
Whose normal denizen's social skills were most
generously described as less than formative.

Amazingly, the rodeo belt buckles prevailed. The
next Saturday saw the worst traffic jam in Young
since the Pleasant Valley War.

Mickey Mouse logic is alive and well. NXP has just
come out with their 74AXP1G58 chip which can
be pin programmed to be any one of nine different
logic gates.

It works down to 0.7 volts, is tiny, and costs
a quarter each in quantity. Schmidt inputs.

A uL914 in drag.

Uploaded a rare ( rather than medium or well done ) copy
of our classic Active Bandpass Filter paper.

Along with its companion tutorial.

Other classic reprints here.

Much more on active filters here and here.

A reminder that the Synergetics edition is much cheaper,
autographed, and has a much better binding. email
us for direct shipment.

The new format changes in WWVB  promises both orders
of magnitude improvements in reliable reception and
in single chip ( or near single chip ) compatibity.

Just had a legacy WWVB product salesman call me
who did not have the faintest clue that ALL of their
previous products are now instantly dead in the water.

Meanwhile, the chip supplier to watch is XtendWave.
Who are a fabless chip house out of Dallas.

They apparently have the inside track on new chips as
they have been working closely and directly with NIST
on the new format.

At present, they do have some eval chips and demo boards
available but only to potential large clients. And then only
under  highly restrictive NDA.

Updated our Hanging Canal and Tinaja Questing sampler
pages to pick up Neely's Lefthand paper, and our
combined Hanging Canal Summary and its sourcecode.

In the latest major scientific breakthrough, the shelf life of
Hostess Twinkies has just been dramatically extended.

And humanity can rejoice.

Uploaded a rough preliminary copy of our new joint
Hanging Canal Summary paper here with its
sourcecode here.

The GIS map is not quite finalized and the
Google Earth version is not nearly complete.

Other hanging canal papers and related info
can be found here.

Another reason inkjet ink does not last very long is that
ink is also used for calibration and setup, never
appearing on any page.

One way to minimize this is to leave the printer on
all the time. The issue is discussed here. and here.

Not quite sure what reserachgate.net is up to, but it looks
like a potential new way of circulating scientific research.

Membership is apparently by invitation only and takes
a week or two. Some details here.

I guess I am not persionally much into social networking.
I did need to join Facebook to find some of our local
alternatives to the nonexistent Craig's List, and ended
up with nearly a thousand friend wannabees.

One thing that is sorely becoming apparent is that the
social networking eyeball siphoning is apparently
desimating the traditional usenet news groups.

Some highly disconcerting fire weather info can be found here.
Scroll down to their July 2nd.

Another take on the same theme can be found here.

One of the reasons people become firemen is that
arson is generally frowned upon.

Uploaded a copy of Dr. Neely's Lefthand Canyon
paper here.

More on local prehistory here.

It seems we have this tuxedo-furred felis domesticus
with uncanny abilities involving keyboarding or sending
faxes to randomly chosen destinations.

And certain models of HP printers have an outrageous
"feature' of switching from black to fuzzy light gray on
certain ( apparently felis related ) driver commands.

The problem is mentioned here. One possible check
is to print from a different host to see if the problem
goes away.

The locals are arguing again on whether they should
raise the library rates, expecially for out-of-towners.

But the bottom line is this: Unless a public library
radically and immediately repurposes themselves,
their imminent failure is a certainty.

The coneept of an individual during limited hours
accessing a rare one-off document in the presence
of a gatekeeping control freak is no longer even
quaint.  

And it is not helped any by the outrageously
skyrocketing charges of scientific journals.

Like it or not, the finest library in the Gila Valley
is now Burger King. But their WiFi now has dozens
and shortly will have hundreds of competitors. Many
of which  have very few food and drink restrictions.

Possibly aggressive lecture series combined with
tours and hackerspace might salvage the community
library. But this happening locally is unlikely.

Fundamental changes in tech innovation got reviewed
here.

The Goldilocks score is now up to an even dozen.
With Glise hogging the stats. Per details here.

Along with 723 confirmed exoplanets and 3098
Kepler candidates for a total of 3821.

Sure, I've heard the horror stories about how low end inkjet
printers have utterly outrageous ink costs, but we recently
had an old printer blow up and had to substute a cheapie.

Our ink charges literally went through the roof.
We were making two trips a week to the ink store.

This site has done an analysis of your true printer costs.
For a three year lifefime, if you print as few as TWO
color pages per day, the more expensive printers end
up far more cost effective!

A very bad choice is the HP 3520 , while effective cost
printers include their 8100 or 8600. The latter weigh
in at 1.6 cents per B/W page or 7.7 cents per color.

Really cute is their new  Ofrice Pro X  which has a full
width printhead for blinding speed. But is unlikely
to be cost competitive on total costs.

NIST is in the process of dramatically improving their 60 kHz
always-accurate-clock WWVB transmitter per these details.

A whole new time code that is phase modulated had been added.

This should promise dramatically improved noise performance.
Similar to FM blowing away AM for signal-quality. Error
correction has also been newly added.

Amazingly, the old code remains more or less intact. Curiously,
cheaper receivers based on diode detection or homodyne will
remain compatible. But high end receivers based on PLL
demodulation may need a frequency doubler analog multiplier
added.

A zero degree 60 kHz reference phase is now transmitted for
the first tenth of a second. For a zero in the new code, the
phase stays the same for the rest of the second. For a one
in the new code, the phase inverts by 180 degrees. Since a
phase receiver can be hard limited, the AM noise problems
of the past should be dramatically reduced in new designs.

The first few bits of the code are for faster synchronization and
look something like a Barker Code. The rest of the minute
provides a count of the hours gone by since the start of
the century. Plus minutes, seconds, and DST stuff. This newly
includes parity bits that can fix a one bit error and report two
bit errors.

Some additional technical details, both old and new, can be
found here, here, here, and here.

We did some classic stories on "old" WWVB here and here.

New Mexico's spectacular Silver Fire came literally within
a few hundred feet of the Black Range Lodge, our favorite
bed and breakfast.

The rest of Kingston ( craftily hid in the secret part of New Mexico
that you cannot get to ) also remained green and undamaged with
zero injuries.

In a rather stunning breakthrough, a pair of Texas researchers
managed to reduce the size of particle accellerators by
several orders of magnitude.

Going from the size of several football fields to a desktop!

More details here.

Some of the locals seem to be taking matters into their
own hands over Craig's List not yet listing Safford/Thatcher/Pima.

First and foremost, contact Craig's List via here and
once again request the addition. Apparently they
changed the rules and you have to register before you
can request a new city.

Be sure to use Safford/Thatcher/Pima as I suppose they
might get confused over a dozen other possible names
for the Greater Bonita-Eden-Sanchez metropolitan
area.

At any rate, most of the alternatives are facebook
related and quite small. But there is incredible
enthuasiasm and stuff is definitely selling.

Here's some Facebook related sites...

Auctions for Graham County
Buy, Sell & Trade in Safford AZ
Duncan AZ Buy Sell Trade
Gila Valley Giveaways
Graham County Web Sales
Grahm County Weekly Yard Sales
Greenlee and Grahm County Garage sale
Greenlee County Gifts and Goodies
Gila Valley Garage Sale
Guys only Gila Valley Trades and Sales
Safford Thatcher Pima Buy, Sell or Trade
Safford's Treasures

Meanwhile, there's a fairly new third party search service
for Craig's List called Search Tempest.

Plus, of course, our own eBay site. No shipping charges
on local pickup.

Some random reminders of neat stuff:

Its been a while since we mentioned Animusic and its
related hoax. My own hoax stuff here.

As any beginning FFA student could tell you, no way
could this have been John Deere parts. They were not
even green! But, amazingly, Intel took the hoax and
built a real one, using bunches of computers and
paint ball guns at a cost of $160,000.

Our favorite online weaving store remains Cotton Clouds.
Amazingly, this is likely the only weaving store that
has a prehistoric hanging canal going through the
middle of it!

And we remain enthuased over Fat Cow, our ISP
provider. They also have a new ultra low cost service.

Managed to get a rather poor copy of our Experiments
With WWVB part 2 up to our classics archive. Part I can be
found here.

Bacause of am noise problems, reliable operation over most
of the US was rather difficult. In addition, at the time, few people
realized the significance and advantages of a self-resetting
NIST traceable clock.

Modern hacker WWVB receivers and kits seem to get
discontinued rather quickly. Again ( until very recently ) owing
to reception difficulties, interference, and a limited market.

But that is about to change radically.

At least these days, suitable type 77 ferrites for antennas
and low frequency crystals for filters are readily available.

If you wanted to do a legacy receiver today, you would start
with a ferrite antenna and a double filter, homodyne or PLL
demodulate to baseband, then lowpass filter. A full WWVB
emulator with considerable computer smarts could then be
phase locked to the incoming data with an enormously low
bandwidth. AGC would likely remain a must.

It would probably be best to try and synchronize only at
midnight, rather than continuously as well.

Ferinstance, you could start recording at 11:58 for four
minutes and then cross correlate your own code against
the WWVB code. With a high enough score, you could
make any needed correction. And sound an alarm if
the codes fail to match. This would give you an effective
noise bandwidth of .004 Hertz or so.

This is an interesting and low cost WWVB gadget, but
it seems to have negative customer vibes.

BUT - there are some brand new changes in the WWVB format
that should improve things substantially and open up all sorts
of new opportunities for reliable reception . Additional useful
info can be found here and here.

My errant Wesrch article finally started behaving. It
had rocketed into a bogus first place with typically
500 hits per day. In the last three days, it suddenly
droped to a more reasonable ( but still slightly high )
15 hits per day.

The only tiny problem is that its score remains
high by 35,000 hits or so. Its "real" score should
be somewhere around 87th place.

I have no idea what the cause of this glitch was.
But Google made major algorithm changes in
exactly the same time frame.

My apologies to other legitimate Wesrch posters

One of the other eBay items we once did quite well on
were our tinfoil hat liners.

These were genuine Cho-seal   from Chomerics and we got them
declassified from Holloman Airforce Base. Normal cost new was
outrageously expensive.

And they flew on outta here.

As any multiple abductee will gladly tell you, there is an
important use consideration. The Cho-Sealf material should
go on the inside of the tin foil hat if you want to stop them
from reading your mind.

And on the outside if you want to keep them from controlling
your thoughts.

Each layer provides up to 120 decibels of attentuation.

We used the same stuff years ago when we were first exploring
low cost keyboards. BTW, at least some of the stock Apple I
photos has myASCII keyboard on them.

eBay apparently no longer keeps track of your original
image filenames.

So, a case can be made for puttig a "secret" code at the
end of each and every listing.

Ferinstance, on a three line code, the first entry could
be an inventory control number. This gets important
fast whenever you ave multiple items that look the
same but are in fact quite different.

A second code line could give the approximat location
of the item in inventory. This is very useful whenever
you have multiple storage units or whatever.

And the third code line could give most of the url
for your original image. You could end this just in
".j" rather than ".jpg" to make the code less obvious.

Is the Blue Ponds Canal the crown jewel of our local
prehistoric canals? Or just a fignent of my imagination?

So far the ground truth remains lacking.
Evidence to date goes something like this...

The spectacularly sized HS canal off Frye Mesa needs a
delivery destination ideally met by the Blue Ponds route.

Most historic and modern water projects stole the plans
from an underlying prehistoric original. Projects based
on Frye Reservoir and Deadman sourcing were by far
the largest and thus "borrow the blueprints" candidates.

The Blue Ponds route is eminently practical and its
lack would be conspicuous by its absence.

Acme mapper shows both a hanging construct and
most of the route traceable. Sadly, at least a portion
of this seems to be a wagon road complete with horseshoes.

A short prehistoric looking canal segment exists whose
purpose appears to be routing between the two ponds but
includes a modern diversion headgate.

Your assistance welcome.

The Ben Heck Show is an interesting hardware hacking site.
With back issues here.

There are quite a few alternatives to the Raspberry Pi
emerging.

The highest profile one is the Beagle Bone Black, while
some others can be found here and here.

A reminder that there is an independent and free
Craig's List search service called SearchTempest.

This can be enormously useful for flagging oddball
items for you.

One tip: Flag the latest entry in each category of interest,
even if you have no use for it. This changes its color and
lets you know how many new items appear on your
nex search.

More on little known and hard to find auction resources
here and here.

As I see it, approximately 95 percent of all local pioneer historic
water projects were "steal the plans" and "dig out an old ditch"
from prehistoric origins.

The remaining 5 percent were "borrow the blueprints".

More here.

What is the "best" possible image processing program for
a scientific publication? This is proving to be quite a problem
for our upcoming hanging canal publications.

For internal use, Acme Mapper wins hands down for its high
resolution satellite imagery, internal topo maps, easy email
linking, convenience, magnifiability, and instant GPS readings.

For classic "static" figures , something GIS based offers the
most attractive appearance and the easiest way to do things
like rotated text, fancy paths, or custom details.

But for full "flyby" interaction, .KML files under Google
Earth are clearly the wave of the future. While pretty paths
have recently been added, some simple features such as
dotted paths, direct text, topo maps, highest resolution, or
text rotation are not yet available. But such features can
nearly certainly be soon anticipated.

As can improved path data entry.

At present, we have multiple people working on "all of the
above".

A few other older yarns can be found here.

Of these, by far my favorite and one that I
continue to be dumbfounded by is the LAN of
the 80's. First used in the Eighteen Eighties!

This single wire network supported dozens to
hundreds of IP addresses, had automatic packet
switching, self-addressing, error detection and
crorrection, diagnostic options and even failure
mode analysis and alternate routing.

All done with a handfull of fist sized wind up
clockworks. And it even had a baud rate.

Yup - ONE BAUD!

Virtually all screen grabbing software is malware that can
be guaranteed to steal your home page, your opening
page, and your search engine.

But there is a usually ignored key on many Dell and
ofther keyboards marked Print Screen SysRq.

This instantly grabs your screen to the clipboard from
whence you can forward it to ImageView32 or
elsewhere for processing.

Among other uses, this is particularly useful in extracting
info from Acme Mapper.

A litle known tip: You can also do an Alt Print Screen
that grabs only the open top window.

BTW, a GIS related mapping tool can be found here.

I guess it has been long enough that I can reveal some
secret insider details of my favorite pseudoscience yarn,
the saga of the magic lamp.

The only "correct" way of measuring power in a changing
waveform is to take very small samples and multiply their
instantaneous voltage times their instantaneous current.
This is called a "RMS" or a "Root Mean Square"
measurement.

Until recently, true RMS measurements were outrageously
expensive and virtually all cheap instruments measured
average rather than RMS values. On a full and clean
sinewave, the difference was only eleven percent or so.
Which the meter people dealt with simply by stretching
their scale and most everybody else simply ignored.

What was little known and eventually became Beginning
EE Student Blunder #001-A was that the differences
between average and RMS could become utterly outrageous
for low duty cycle waveforms. Ferinstance, a half wave
phase control set in the 130 degree range would have an
average to RMS error of around 3:1!

An individual was playing around with a circuit pretty much
the same as a half wave thyratron phase control from a 1939
industrial electronics text. On the cheap meters they were
using, they noted a 3:1 voltage difference and a 3:1 current
difference, which led them to the conclusion that their
"magic" circuit only was drawing one ninth of the normal
power. The key waveform involved had a very low duty cycle,
which let them run a 28 volt light bulb off the 110 volt line.

At this point, they could have saved bunches of hassle and
trouble by touching the lamp and noticing that it was not any
cooler than normal. Or simply recognizing that a 9:1 energy
savings in an old stock and popular circuit might have been
noticed by somebody else somewhere along the way.

In general, perpetual motion machines are frowned upon and
the immediate question that should have been asked was
"Exactly where and how did I fuck up?"

Instead, they went out and patented their miracle energy
saver. The fact that the patent was granted was sort of
strange since it was an old textbook circuit that I alone had
published nationally in one form or another in dozens of
projects over several decades. Albeit without any energy
anomalies.

At any rate, they offered a construction story and kits in a
national magazine, not recognizing that what they had was
criminal fraud rather than an earth shaking new energy
breakthrough.

The magazine managed to work out from under their part
of the four paw by coincidentally having the story run in
an April issue and later publishing disclaimers in their
letters collumn.

The closest that I personally dared to get to all of this
was this column and this column in a related magazine.

But finding out exactly where and how they screwed up was
certainly a highlight of my ongoing pseudoscience bashing
activities.