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Sand Wash Prehistoric Canal has been verified as #33. Some preliminary
field notes...

Observations on Acme Mapper suggested yet another canal complex in
the previously unstudied Nuttall Canyon drainage area. A portion of this
canal has been verified as highly likely to be both prehistoric and
typical of the assemblage. And seems to presently form the westernmost
confirmed candidate in the hanging canal study area.

The primary study area lies on State and BLM Land just off the Sand Tank
road and offers exceptionally easy vehicle and foot access. State lands are
south of the fence and gate; BLM to the north.

Field verification included a Sand Wash level area, followed by a classic but
low hanging "climbing" portion with the usual "water flows uphill" illusion,
followed by a fairly deep cut, followed by a long mesa top run. Most
of which are fully typical of other canal reaches in the study area.

The long mesa top reach, though, appears highly atypical in that it
is quite small, being well less than half normal size. And would
appear unlikely to be able to deliver significant water a long
distance.

A premise as to why no canal survey tools exist system wide might
be that pilot extensions of the canals themselves served as water
levels. Once a route of credible slope was statically verified,
the actual major canal construction could be expanded. The size
of the mesa top canal reach would seem to add credence to being a
work in progress, acting as a pilot to the intended full canal.

Further canal routing to the north is restricted by modern private
homesite development. Cottonwood Wash would seem to place a
fairly near limit on how much more northern extent is missing.

Areas to the south have not yet been studied. The sand wash itself
may be a takein point, despite its very name suggesting an inability
to deliver surface water long distances. This wash is normally dry,
but a historically built and large Sand Tank apparently saw some
water development potential. Despite the main Sand Tank watershed
being apparently limited in size and largely disconnected from
mountaintop snow melt access.

There is a curious other possibility for a water source. An eastern
branch of Sand Wash actually "almost" merges with perennial Nuttall
Canyon stream at N 32.77695 W 109.9562. Water diversion at this point
would appear to be within the bounds of prehistoric capability. The USFS
presently has a gravity fed stock tank in this area that clearly verifies
such a possibility. This tank project is remarkably similar to one
overlaying a prehistoric canal in the Frye Mesa Falls area.

Regardless of the ultimate source of water, this canal seems to rather
strongly suggest both a wetter climate and more robust stream runoff
than present.

The canal preservation is remarkably good in the initial study area.

A twelve inch Mesquite tree mid channel and highly consistent patina
and caliche add further to the canal's credibility in the study area.
Somewhat disconcerting is the presence of a single glazed terra cota
drain pipe placed in the canal wall to dump any water back into Sand
Wash. Possibly this state land recent construct was done to prevent
further silt deposition.

Images to date can be viewed as...

sand1 East from mesa top shows unusually small size.
sand2 West from mesa top from same location.
sand3 Near the state lands fence line border.
sand4 A "water flows uphill" from "hanging" area.
sand5 Typical reach between hanging and deep cut.
sand6 Rather deep cut south of state land fence.

One of the implications of this canal is that the canals in the Lefthand
Canyon area are no longer an outlier. And instead seem to be a fully
integrated portion of the Bajada hanging canal complex. This canal also
adds credibility to the historic Minor Webster Ditch system also
having prehistoric origins.

More on the hanging canals here.
Ongoing developments in https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu15.shtml and earlier.
Field mice and research assistants welcome.

It is a bit early to call this Canal #33 or Prehistoric Sand Wash Canal,
but its Acme Mapper hints sure look intriguing.

While not yet field verified, this sure looks like a water development
starting in Sand Wash with an initial "hanging" portion followed
by a linear on-mesa run of half a mile or so.

Alternately, this could be an extension of the known Lamb Tank canal.

Such a canal would need more water than is typical of today's wash.
But somebody once historically built the fairly large Sand Tank further
upstream.

More interestingly, there is an east branch to Sand Wash that seems to
go all the way up to Nuttall Canyon. Provided some prehistorically
manageable diversion took place near N 32.77672 W 109.95655.

The main Nuttall stream appears perennial at this point.

Curiously, there is an apparent USFS gravity tank development
here that is remarkably similar to the one skirting Frye Mesa
Falls. There is strong evidence of the latter being "steal the plans"
blueprint borrowing from a prehistoric original.

If real, Canal #33 would have some strong implications involving
rainfall and climate. Being westernmost known to date, it would
further integrate the Lefhtand Speer canals into the main regional
canal system.

Field mice and research assistants are most definitely welcome.

An interactive master GIS map of Arizona land ownership
can be found at http://gis.azland.gov/webapps/parcel/

Wikipedia now seems to be offering two slightly different
formats called Mobile and Desktop.

Our Arizona Bajada Canals can now be found here for
Mobile and here for Desktop.

Additional info here.

Uh, there seems to be a brand new and conspicuously posted
gate blocking Coyote Drive, the usual access route to both
the Lefthand Archaeological District and the Goat Hill Ruin.

There does seem to be an alternate workaround route to
the west of Lefthand Canyon. Which may or may not also
eventually end up gated and posted.

Much more Gila Dayhike info here and here. I'll be talking
on some of this at Discovery Park on January 24th.

A temporary stash of the new WWVB receiver pinouts and
user guide can be found here.

"Official" related docs can be found here and here and
here.

With my ancient WWVB reprints here and here.

So, how can you tell something seems to be a prehistoric
canal, rather than a vehicle two-track, a cowpath, a
game route, an old fence, an historic wagon road, a film
scratch, or ATV damage?

The glib answer is that you know it when you see it.
And, of course, field verify it.

Some other guidelines include...

The slope will be very low and nearly constant,
typically around one percent.

The slope will NEVER be negative! Not even for
a little bit.

GPS, Google Earth, and Barometric devices are
not nearly accurate enough to measure slope.
Required is an automatic level. Or possibly
a new cellphone ap.

The routing will be rather straight but not
transit straight and almost always will not be in
a consistent cardinal direction.

When appropriate, portions of the route may be
literally "hung" on mesa edges, making slope
largely independent of adjacent terrain.

Construction effort will be seen to be exceptionally
energy efficient, with most effort being directed
across rather than along the route. Caused by
the lack of beasts of burden or iron age tools.

Routings ultimately end up extremely purposeful,
efficiently going from reliable water sources to
needed field destinations.

Both Acme Mapper and field evidence will typically
be vague and indistinct. And broken by both natural
erosion, flood damage, and modern constructs.

Any omissions to totally exploiting Northeastern Mount
Graham water will be conspicuous by their absence.

The route will often be run over without accommodation
by dams, roads, fences, and even cemeteries.

There will be many other similar routings in the area
with similar goals, architectures, and appearance.

"Steal the plans" historic or recent reuse will usually
be obvious. Especially if the CCC was involved.
Reuse tends to only use a portion of the entire route.
And significantly omits much in the way of expected
concrete, iron, or maint roads.

The center will usually have originally been significantly
lower than the surrounding terrain, with "spoil piles"
often defining the edges.

Rock patina, caliche, and lichens will be uniform and
properly oriented.

Cacti, large Mesquite trees, and slow growing and non
water loving shrubs may be present mid channel.

During floral blooms, "dead flowers" may clearly mark
the routes, owing to fine grained fill moisture retention.

A strong illusion of "water flowing uphill" is often present.

Vehicle two tracks tend to be more obvious, more uniform
and of much wider width. They also tend to orient with
historic or more modern needs.

Routing will usually be along drainages, rather than across.
CCC projects tend to be across rather than along.

Projects will appear to be "big picture" consistent with the
total energy efficient exploration of a major regional
water resource.

"Counterflow" runs where the route runs downward into
rising terrain will be very rare and specifically goal
oriented. Such as positioning for a wash crossing or
returning water to a natural drainage.

When fully traced, the route will be both exceptionally
consistent and exceptionally long. Six miles is not at
all unusual in the present studies.

Unless recently reworked, the channel will tend to be
full of water born or aeolian fine grained fill.

There is more hydrogen in a gallon of gasoline than there is
in a gallon of liquid hydrogen.

More hydrogen ludicrosities here.

I needed some new files of my Mt. Graham Aerial
Tramway tower and carrier drawings for yesterday's
PR blurb..

The original PostScript code appeared in the sourcecode
here and can be extracted as needed.

Instead, I cropped and reduced this file to produce this
.pdf file and this one using Acrobat XI.

The results are pure distilled PostScript, and thus can
be arbitrarily resized or magnified with no loss of detail.

Here's a rough draft of a tentative PR blurb for my January
Gila Hikes talk...

=======================================================

"Gila Valley Day Hikes" subject of Saturday's Discovery Park Talk.

Local author and researcher Don Lancaster returns to the
Discovery Park lecture series this Saturday January 24th in the
Jupiter Room at 6:30 PM. Topics will include new info and revisions
on some little known local day hikes, along with a major update ( now
including many new maps and well over 400 locations ) to
https://www.tinaja.com/gilahike.shtml

Potential hikes will include San Carlos Falls, Hannah Hot Springs,
El Capitan Canyon, and many of the other usual suspects. And, of
course, the UFO fish fillets of Taylor Canyon.

You can preview portions of the talk at https://www.tinaja.com/tinsamp1.shtml
or pick up more specifics at https://www.tinaja.com/glib/unusualh.pdf

Reports on the latest Gila Valley Hiking Club activities including
a McEniry Tunnel trip are also expected. An original web source for
the McEniry Prospectus seems to have disappeared, but a new copy
is now available through https://www.tinaja.com/glib/mtso.pdf

This blatant investment scam was based on tunneling all the way
through twelve miles of Mt. Graham. In which you would simply
scrape the gold off the ceiling directly into your ore car.
Sadly, the geology of Mt. Graham consists largely of Precambrian intrusives
that are nearly totally unmineralized. It was also not quite clear
how you would ventilate twelve tunnel miles using 1906 technology.

More into on the hiking club can be reached through
http://www.visitgrahamcounty.com/Gila_Valley_Hiking_Club/

Discovery park is located near the corner of Discovery Park Boulevard
and 20th Avenue in Safford Arizona. For more details, contact Paul
Anger or Jackie Madson at(928)428-6260 or discoverypark@eac.edu .

Suggested Companion Photo...

   https://www.tinaja.com/glib/tramtower.pdf

     Drawing of a typical Mt. Graham Tramway tower. Portions of the
     challenging route up Shingle Mill Canyon can still be explored.

Alternate Companion Photos...

    https://www.tinaja.com/canal/images/mary2.jpg

      One of the more spectacular prehistoric bajada "hanging" canal
      reaches. Thirty two canals with a total length over fifty
      miles are presently under study. Additional researchers are
      welcome.

   https://www.tinaja.com/canal/images/bestgrid.jpg

      There are many thousands of prehistoric dry farming agave
      grids north of the Gila River and a few hundred more to the
      south.


   https://www.tinaja.com/images/fishup.jpg

      Little known and seldom visited Fisherman's Point just into
      New Mexico offers spectacular cliffs, swimming, picnicking, and hiking.


   https://www.tinaja.com/images/rob2.jpg

      The Robinson Ranch Ditch was based on a prehistoric original
      and still creates a strong illusion of "water flowing uphill".


   https://www.tinaja.com/images/msrr1.jpg

      Historic photo of the Morenci Southern Railroad. Several steel
      bridges and tunnels ( and one loop ) remain. These are fairly
      easily visited.

Few people realize that most electronic devices run on smoke.

If you let the smoke out, they do not work any more.

There seem to still be some issues with the WWVB receiver.

Pinouts are not yet obvious from the web docs. The data sheet
suggests an external crystal, yet one is apparently internally
provided.

Considerable programming skills and development time at
present is needed to use this module. Sorely needed are
reference designs, especially for the Raspberry Pi A+.
Along with the Beagle Bone Black, general Arduino,
and something PIC related.

I'll try to get to some of these, but getting the B+ to
work with my Magic Sinewaves has a higher priority.

As does our prehistoric hanging canals.

As does getting out from under our latest eBay potential stock
haul. Which, to date is only producing something like a five
percent yield and 95 percent Alvin Pile trash.

Some recent discoveries that soon should get added to
our Gila Valley Dayhikes page...

There are far more CCC water spreader projects locally
than most people expect. I suspect they will end up in
the thousands, rather than just in the hundreds.

All of which ended up totally pointless and utterly useless,
of course.

We recently saw these somewhat west of O'Conner
International Airport. Spread out over many square
miles that are very rarely visited.

Even less known are the dozens or so in the lower Merrill
Wash area. Including this group of five and this separate
group of five.

And even more scattered around N 32.82179 W 109.97644

Some constructs a few feet north above US191 may in fact
be part of the Montez Toll Road. These likely head
north across the mesa on modern ranch roads on their
way to Guthrie.

Speaking of which, there is apparently a "hidden"
fourth iron Morenci Southern Railway bridge here.

These bridges are best viewed at a distance as they
are likely to be highly unsafe.

Fatcow finally came through! Both the banners and the .psl
files with intact carriage returns seem to be working perfectly.

As suspected, these two magic incantations are involved...

             AddType text/plain .psl 
             AddType text/plain .js 

These go in the .htaccess file area.

Please report any further issues or problems.

Some subtle stuff was involved in several of our latest
eBay image photo processing...

In this image, the top lighting was initially weak, so a
double exposure was used with the top being imaged
lighter than the front.

In this image, we have a curious study in off center
single point perspective. Helped along by some
symmetry adjustments.

In this image, we use rotation and our Architects
Perspective for a two point result. One small
hole ended awkward looking, so we simply
cropped it.

Sometimes leaving something very minor off or,
say, interchanging the focus and intensity knob
callouts on an oscilloscope can give you a major
and totally subtle form of copy protection.

Stenography at its best.

We seem to be having a communication problem with Fatcow
over treating our .js and .psl files as shtml .txt files.

The symptoms of which are getting an error instead of banners
with the .js file, and totally trashing carriage returns on the
.psl files.

Apparently only some of their technicians understand the issue
while others try and blame host side issues.

As far as I can tell, all that is needed on their end is a pair
of...

             AddType text/plain .psl 
             AddType text/plain .js 

Yet they seem to be giving me one or the other but not both.

( Apparently repaired per here. )

Just received a sample copy of the ES100 QFN new WWVB
receiver module and two antennas from Everset Technology.

Apparently the units do exist. I'll try to evaluate them just as soon
as I get a change.

The data sheet can be found here. Average supply current is 5 mils
at 3 volts, with 22 ma peaks during processing.

You will also need a host pc such as a Raspberry Pi and a 16 MHz crystal.

The units are about what you would expect. A circuit board around an
inch square with three smt chips on them. The dual antennas are somewhat
smaller than I would expect, being only an inch and a half long.

This is an obvious item for Sparkfun. It will be interesting to see
when and if this happens.

Older posts on Everset here and here and here. With my
long ago original WWVB stories here and here.

Prehistoric hanging canal candidate #32 appears to be well northwest
of the Cluff Ponds area.

This appears to be a disused modern canal whose obvious hallmarks
are three concrete control structures found at N 32.82803 W 109.84607,
N 32.82835 W 109.84603, and N 32.82875 W 109.84582.

And two more at N 32.83039 W 109.84473 and N 32.83047 W 109.84470.

This reach could be part of the Minor Webster Ditch System, or
could separately have been derived from Lower Ash Creek.

While no prehistoric origins have yet been proven, there is no
credible reason why they should not exist, based on canal
structures and developments elsewhere in the system.

Combined with the obvious exploitation of virtually every
drop of Northeastern Mt. Graham stream resources.

This world class prehistoric hanging bajada canal system is
getting totally out of hand, and is already well beyond the
capabilities of two semi retired researchers.

Field mice and associates are most definitely in order.
Please email me for details.

Made some updates and corrections to our Prehistoric
Hanging Canals sampler and directory.

Sourcecode for the Prehistoric Hanging Canal Engineering
has had its link repaired.

Added one of the Madeira Levadas to the image collection.

Added the Lair Mt. Graham CNF Survey to our third party
papers.

There was a big flap in the media about shilling on eBay

Since shilling is not possible on eBay I do not understand
what the big deal was.

Firstoff, in the US, shilling is in no manner illegal. The 
Uniform Commercial Code specifically allows it when
preannounced or during a distress sale. Otherwise, the
draconian remedy is that the price drops back to the
preshill level. Nothing more.

The reasons that shilling does not work on eBay are that
its two essential elements of mark demeanor feedback and
auctioneer bailout are not present. In a live auction, the
shill must carefully watch the mark and know when to quit.
A "winning" shill, of course, loses. Thus the auctioneer must
be ever vigilant with an "I'm sorry sir, I could have sworn 
you had your hand up".

Further, a 100 percent defense against misguided shilling
attempts on eBay is to simply proxy bid your max ONCE
very late in the auction.

Actually, since you rarely have to pay your full proxy bid
price, bidding something like 130 percent of your absolute
max should average out pretty nearly all the time.

If the price is too high, you simply do not bid. If the price
is still acceptable, then it does not matter in the least to you
how the price got to that point. 

A third reason shill bidding does not work on eBay is
that whoever is stupid enough to try it will be making
enough other dumb mistakes to guarantee failure.

Much more on our Auction Help library page. 

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

JavaScript seems to have more than its share of obtuse
command rules and conventions.

an if (n=1) {doSomething) ; does wildly different and 
wildly wrong things compared to the correct syntax
of if (n==1) {doSomething) ;

The rule is that a double equals sign must be used for
an equal comparison. 

Thus, n 1 eq {dosomething} if in PostScript becomes 
if (n==1){doSomething} ; in JavaScript.

Never store carbide in a non-locking carabiner!

Several readers have asked if eBay sales appear a little off.

Turns out it is just that little dip between the fall slack period
and the winter slump.

Here's  yet another two point perspective image that did not turn
out all that bad.

The original is found here, with the eBay listing image here.

Our Architects Perspective routines weren't quite up to the
entire job, so the rear corners of the supports had to be
manually realigned.

A reminder that some browsers cannot properly handle our .PSL
files and may squash carriage returns. We are working on the
problem, but meanwhile, either add your own carriage returns
or email me for a clean attachment copy.

Here are some Canal 31 details to add to our "by watershed"
summaries of our hanging canals.

Tentative name is the Goat Tank canal. It has not yet been field
verified, but the Acme Mapper evidence is compelling and there
apparently is a CNF area study available that we have not yet
received.

It is presumed to source from Jacobson Creek near N 32.68467
W 109.76145, pass west of Goat Tank near  N 32.68243 W 109.75862,
and continue along the southern edge of Ledford Mesa near
N 32.68268 W 109.74505, N 32.68507 W 109.73921, and apparently
supports a modern but possibly disused pipeline at N 32.68468 W
109.72937.

This strongly suggests that the Ledford Tank area might have been
the most intensively developed of all the known prehistoric canal
systems. It also apparently partially flows and still supports several
cattle tanks. Eastern trending jogs in the CNF boundary seem to greatly
add to their portion of the canal systems.

It is somewhat embarrassing to find such a major discovery relatively
late in the hanging canal research. The only excuse I have is that
I simply did not notice it. And that the previous Ledford area canals
were already much more than significant.

Access also appears to be somewhat difficult.

Its been a while since we looked at Vee Machine book
scanners. Mostly because this source has enormously
helped my own scanning and restoration needs.

But some interesting Vee Machine developments can
be newly found here, here, here, here, and here.

Thanks to Richard Holbert for this update.

Added several odd and interesting items to our eBay store.

One of these is a polycarbonate lens that fits over a standard
5 mm LED and "magnifies" its image to a relatively huge
20 mm. For better people visibility, and possibly to add
callouts or a message.

These lenses simply push onto a standard LED and can be
further secured with superglue. The pattern is fairly narrow
and includes a central artifact but possibly can be enhanced
with a little work with a #8 drill.

The original supplier is believed to be Luxeon. We have a
lot of these available and can offer them for ridiculously
less than their usual $2.30 each normal distributor cost.

An independent archaeological survey of the Ledford Tank and
Goat Tank areas can be newly found here. I used Acrobat XI
to make their document fully text searchable.

While still largely unexplored, the hanging canals in this area might
end up being the densest developed portion of the entire 80+
kilometer hanging bajads canals system.

More details here.

Our original source for the McEniry Tunnel stock scam
seems to have 404'ed. Its replacement showed only the
drawings and not the prospectus.

Luckily, I seem to have an original copy stashed in an
obscure downloads folder, so I am now hosting this
fascinating document here. And linking it here.

One of the Triumph Tunnel advantages was that
you simply scraped the gold off the ceiling, letting
it fall directly into your ore car.

Um, as an engineer, I would question exactly how you
would go about ventilating a twelve mile long tunnel
using 1904 technology. It certainly would not be simple
or cheap or cost effective.

The Gila Valley Hiking Club is planning a McEniry
tour mid January. You are invited to attend.

A reminder that JPG edge effects can be pretty much
eliminated entirely by going to a slightly mottled background.

At a price of an only slightly larger file size.

Some ready to go mottles can be found here, along with
a sampling of PostScript friendly base colors here.

Our autobackgrounder can be found here and lots of
examples here. And custom work done here.

Sadly, our ISP delivery does not seem to handle .PSL
files well and tends to swallow carriage returns. We are
still working on the problem. Meanwhile, either add
your own carriage returns, or email me for a clean
copy.

As we've seen a number of times before, the usual pv panel
breakthrough of the week often has a 6.99 day half life.

One entry this week provides double sided bifacial panels that
overlay a white reflector. With efficiencies approaching 21.5%.

A second adds groves similar to those on a CD ROM to trap
incoming energy better for a similar efficiency improvement.

Meanwhile, the November pv pricing figures are in and approach
45 cents  per peak panel watt, If the present price drops continue,
hitting the magic 25 cents per peak panel watt required for net
energy renewability and sustainability could happen in as little
as eight months.

In related news, pv arrays are in the process of being newly added
to the Red Horse II Cochise wind project. Combining wind and
pv can use common transmission facilities and provides a
better time of day coverage.

Much more on energy stuff here.

Made some further corrections and adjustments in our Gila
Valley Day Hikes.

Which now include full click through location maps to all but
the most sensitive of areas.

A presentation is tentatively planned for the Gila Valley Hiking
Club January 15 meeting at the Discovery Park Ranch House.

You are invited to participate in some Hanging Canal hikes on
January 17th in the McEniry Tunnel area, and I'll be giving one
of my usual Discovery Park lectures on the Gila Hikes that
Saturday in the Jupiter Room at 6:30.

Please report any typos or additions or corrections to my website.

Acme mapper has strongly suggested a new prehistoric canal #31
that appears to be a southern extension of the Ledford Complex...

http://mapper.acme.com/?ll=32.68774,-109.74391&z=15&t=H
&marker0=32.68235%2C-109.75862%2C5.1%20km%20WxSW
%20of%20Artesia%20AZ
&marker1=32.68549%2C-109.73224%2C2.8%20km%20WxSW
%20of%20Artesia%20AZ
&marker2=32.68272%2C-109.74508%2C4.0%20km%20WxSW
%20of%20Artesia%20AZ&marker3=32.68507%2C-109.73923
%2C3.4%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Artesia%20AZ
&marker4=32.68467%2C-109.72937%2C2.6%20km
%20SW%20of%20Artesia%20AZ

Tentative name would be the Goat Tank canal. The area appears very
difficult to explore. The canal seems to support a modern pipeline
as well. Evidence suggests that the Ledford Complex may end up being
the most intensively developed of all the prehistoric canals.

A major step forward in open source documentation with
Nature Magazine now offering free viewing of all papers.

They have some scheme to allow viewing only, rather
than downloading or printing. It is not clear how such
a scheme would bypass screen grabs with that obscure
PrintScreenSysRq keyboard key.

Science magazine would also be very likely to follow
suit, but IEEE can be expected to drag their feet.

Just as the key revolution in creating documents was
to typeset first and edit last, the key to open sourcing
is to publish first and peer review later.

Academia.edu is a leading open source publisher.
Additional resources include Wesrch, Doaj,
Questia, Stanford, Wikipedia, Plos One,
Figshare, Quartzy, Mendeley, Vixra, MyScienceWork,
Arxiv, and SSRN,

Thought I'd start my end of year predictions a little earlier
than usual this year...

The price of utility grade solar panels finally dropping under
twenty five cents per peak panel watt and eventually leading
to true net energy generation, renewablility, and sustainability.

LEDs finally dropping into cost competitive range for 100 watt
incandescents and automotive headlights. Combined with an
utter and sudden demise of CCFL fluorescents.

Marijuana rapidly becoming totally legal everywhere and simply
no longer a big deal. Once the federal marijuana farm price support
subsidies inevitably stop, pricing should end comparable to cotton,
or possibly lower because ginning is simpler. As with cotton, 500 pound
bales should become a standard commodity. With partial bales
considered personal use.

And, related, government projected estimates of potential marijuana
tax income ending up obscenely overvalued, possibly by five orders
of magnitude.

A resurgence in traditional electronic hacking, driven by Arduino,
Raspberry Pi, Beagle Bone, the Basic Stamp plus its derivatives,
magazines such as Circuit Cellar or Make, and such suppliers as
Sparkfun, Marlin Jones, American Science & Surplus, and even
( should they last a few more weeks ) Radio Shack.

Dramatic increase in popularity of hackerspaces , makerspaces,
and fab labs.

"Cold fusion" fiascoes continuing "business as usual". And hot fusion
remaining its usual immutable constant ten years from practicality.
Both, of course, continue as engineering ratholes.

Nanostructures dramatically improving both photovoltaics and conventional
HVAC air conditioning.

A total merging of telephones, cameras, navigation, books, networking,
social media,  movies, monitors, tv, and video.

Books and magazines and newspapers and traditional network television
largely  vanishing. And, sadly, libraries unless they dramatically repurpose
themselves.

New understandings of building thermal management, leading to
significantly reduced heating and cooling costs.

Battery and related energy storage developments continuing gradually
and evolutionary. But hydrogen remaining an outright joke due to exergy.

The terabyte revolution being largely ignored, moving directly instead
into the petabyte revolution.  One thumb drive to hold all movies, or all
books, or all history. With emerging utterly disruptive IP issues.

Substantial medical breakthroughs, especially in the areas of cancer and
diabetes and Alzheimers.

The new WWVB formats dying stillborn with an utterly amazing lack of
interest. Sorry, but I was dead wrong on this one. Sigh.

Stunning new archaeological discoveries, combined with incredibly powerful
new research tools. But continuing problems in publication acceptances
and delays.

The stranglehold on technical research publication finally being broken,
with open source dissemination dominant, low access costs, easy publication,
long term access, and peer review taking place after publication rather
than before.

Major breakthroughs in understanding human brain architecture and
functionality,  combined with significant new I/O capability.

Dramatic reduction in price and greatly improved availability of non toy video
drones. And significant improvement in long term downed drone location.

Major increases in the Goldilocks Exoplanet count, with some unexpected
and highly unusual but still lower level lifeforms becoming apparent elsewhere.

A student revolt against backpacks.

Craig's list finally coming to Safford.

ACS or Assets Conversion Specialists of Tempe has newly started
a series of online auctions. Mostly aerospace overstock items and
such, but otherwise a large variety of interesting stuff.

The easiest way to get a nearly complete list is to search under "lot".

Being new to the game, they seem to have very few bidders so far
and many items close at their opening bid price. Which is $10 for
the majority of the items.

As with any online bid, your best strategy is to proxy bid 130 percent
of your max very near the close of the auction, but not so late as to
trip any auto extension.

More auction strategy here.

Fascinating details of an ancient Fourier Synthesis computer
can be found here. And Fourier fundamentals here.

Fourier, of course, plays a major role in our Magic Sinewaves,
particularly in their high speed calculation.

Misunderstanding Fourier is also the root cause of many perpetual
motion scams, particularly those that appear in the Church
of the latter day Crackpots.

For, there is no such thing as "pulsed dc". What you have instead
is a dc term, an ac fundamental, and various supporting harmonics.

All of which are absolutely indistinguishable from the composite.

In particular it is only the DC term that can contribute significantly
to electrolysis. The ac stuff mostly just reduces efficiency and
creates excess heat.

More on similar concepts here and here and here..

Oops. Many browsers cannot deal with my .PSL
files. Which are called PostScript-Lancaster, but
otherwise are strictly an ASCII text file. The
browsers apparently choose to image them as
HTML instead.

As a result, most carriage returns end up missing
and everything is jammed together and first
appears as gibberish.

I'm not sure what the best solution is. FTP works
just fine but raises extreme security issues.
Renaming them as .TXT files has major hassles.

The apparent best two solutions are to either to
add the carriage returns yourself after downloading.
Or else email me and I will email return a clean
copy of the .PSL code.

A kiddies violin being out of tune revealed this bunch of
free online pitch references and reminded me of the way things
were, my unauthorized autobiography.

One of my earliest "fun with numbers" project was trying to find
the "best" eight bit sequence to accurately synthesize the equally
tempered musical scale. This is not a trivial task in that the
irrational tones are spaced in frequency by the twelfth root
of two, or 1.05946309436.

The only "computer" I had at the time at Goodyear Aerospace
was an ancient Olivetti Programma 101, a yard square boat anchor
that used huge magnetic cards. Some after hours playing around with
this beast eventually revealed this 232 219 207 195 184 174 164
155 146 138 130 123 116 magic sequence. And also proved that this
sequence was unique for the least error for all notes. Beating the 3
cents ( one cent is approximately 0.06% ) capability of a typical musician.

I ended up designing this early and cheap integrated circuit musician's
pitch reference and published it in the September 1968 Popular Electronics.
Its reprint is now in my Classic Reprints library.

A year or so later, Mostek came out with their MK50240 top octave
generator which had the unspeakable luxury of using this better nine
bit sequence of 478 451 426 402 379 358 338 319 301 284 268 253 239.

Cheap and simple top octave generators dramatically simplified classic
electronic organs, but they were quickly blown out of the water by
MIDI and improved synthesizer technology. Problems included the
notes being locked together rather than chorusing, severe background
noise problems because all notes were present all the time, and an
architecture that pretty much demanded rats nest wiring.

Much more on my fun with numbers discoveries here, with the real
biggie being my Magic Sinewaves and this ultra fast calculator.

I decided to do a major revision of our Gila Valley Day Hikes
in which we have live linking to actual locations for all but the
most sensitive of prehistoric, cave, and similar sites.

Please report anything not working or missing, typos, or
suggestions for other entries.

One of the more minor eBay listing infuriations is finding out
where you are when you switch to HTML format for an
included URL link.

One workaround is to cut and paste an edited older link and
then add several underline characters to the middle of the link.
When you switch to HTML, the positioning of the intended
new link now becomes completely obvious.

More eBay insider secrets here.

Added my DotnBar tv pattern generator to our classic
reprints from the July 1967 issue of Radio Electronics.

This was a very early project using RTL integrated circuits.

The battery life was an atrocity, and the horizontal frequency
was off a tad, but nobody seemed to complain too much.

The only available outside unit photo known to be available
was this less than stellar one. I made some minor adjustments
to it using the Bitmap Typewriter.

Amazingly, I still seem to have a few of the original DotnBar knobs,
so I ended up photo substituting them.

Photo reconstruction assistance available.

Updated and expanded our Arizona Auction Links page.
Removed some dead links and added ACS.

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

And more auction help in general can be found here and here..
And, of course, our own eBay sales here.

Online auction photos tend to be small and murky and
blurry. Here's a trick that sometimes can help...

Right click your mouse to copy to clipboard. Then paste
into Imageview32 or similar. Then try magnifying and
a click or two of sharpening.

Changing brightness and contrast and gamma can also
sometimes reveal all sorts of hidden stuff.

More online auction help here.

I'd like to start a definitive directory of utterly useless ( but
nonetheless absolutely true ) factoids. Such as...

The Canary Islands were named after a large dog.
The eastern end of the Panama Canal is on the Pacific Ocean.
There are only forty six states in the US.
Reno is west of Los Angeles..
The propane fire training simulator often adds icicles to its fireball.
Arkansas has six states on its southern boundary .
Lake Havasu City AZ has more lighthouses than anywhere else.
The tallest mountain in the world is in the United States.
The original Woodstock closing act was supposed to be Roy
      Rodgers and  Dale Evans singing "Happy Trails".
New York state is north, south, east, and west of Norwalk, CT.
It is possible to score a one point safety in NFL football.

The latter last happened in 1942, but they have since tightened up the
rules. It still remains possible.

Please email me your contributions.

Have some Madeira M'Dear?

What would things look like if our prehistoric recently canal
folks also had some access to concrete and iron? It turns
out one possible answer can be found on the small Portuguese
island of Madeira

Where you will find lots of spectacularly similar hanging canals
comparable to those of Southeastern Arizona except for the
obviously improved modern technology.

These are called levadas, and among more obvious uses, they
are outstanding hiking trails. One guided tour can be found here.

As far as I know so far, these are the only worldwide comparable
hanging canal features known. Development was almost certainly
totally independent.

But both based on the same fundamental engineering principle
that the slope of a hanging canal can be made largely independent
of the surrounding terrain. Much more here.

Added A tour of some prehistoric hanging canal images  to
academia.edu.

Added Newly discovered trinchera in Southeastern Arizona.jpg
to the Wikimedia Commons. A rotated and somewhat 3D Google
Earth version can also be found here.

Added our newly revised Some Gila Valley Day Hikes to Wesrch.

Some Gila Valley Hiking Club projects that should tie in with
our prehistoric hanging canals are tentatively planned for
mid January.

You are certainly welcome to participate. More details as
they unfold. A talk of mine on our newly revised Gila
Valley Day Hikes is also scheduled for mid January in
Discovery Park.

Here's a brief summary of the process we use to restore a
$10 auction computer. We may expand this into a GuruGram
eventually.

0. Preferred units are Vista age with lots of USB jacks and 100
Gigs of hard drive. MUST have original CD's available! Connect
pc and monitor power cords and monitor cable, add fresh batteries
to mouse and keyboard ( or add new wireless units ). Place operating
system CD in drive and reboot. Seek out desktop screen with working
cursor and mouse and keyboard functional. Run additional factory
application and driver CD's.

1. Run both Wordpad and Paint, creating shortcuts. Create a new folder
and save test files to it. Save work to thumb drive. Old version of Paint
is not upgradeable, so you may eventually want to substitute Paint.Net
or whatever. Use the Control Panel to adjust monitor size and background.

2. Add a wireless interface such as a Netgear WNA3100. CD must be in
drive before connecting. Add velcro where appropriate. Access an existing
WiFi network of proper 4 or 5 amplitude and ( if needed ) passwords. Use
Internet Explorer to install Google Chrome being sure to use its real site
and not a malware link. Add Chrome shortcut. Test Chrome and WiFi by
accessing www.tinaja.com.

3. Download and install Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Service Pack 2
if needed. Then download and install any Windows updates. Again, be sure
to use the "real" Microsoft sites rather than malware.

4. Download McAfee Internet Security or an equivalent. Make sure it is
working. Some packages allow use on three or more computers.

5. Accessorize Chrome as wanted. Recommended more tools - extensions
are No Underline and SpeedDial. Populate SpeeDial with your most likely to
be used websites. I, of course, would recommend www.tinaja.com as your
first entry. Our second entry on the previous rebuild needed this Spanish
Translator. Our third recommendation would be eBay. Add what you want
as appropriate. Set your Chrome search engine to Google. Flush any attempts
at search engine piracy.

6. Download Acrobat Reader or ( preferably ) Acrobat XI and test .Be sure
to use genuine Adobe downloads and not a malware site. Download
Imageview32 and test. Download Filezilla and test. Be sure no personal
FTP links are left in Filezills on any computer you are going to give to a
third party!

7. Resolve your email options. My recommended is to use Fatcow as your
website ISP along with their companion email services. Fatcow requires
that I tell you I am one of their associates.

8. Add headphones or stereo sound to the rear audio jack. Test the sound.
Watch a video.

9. Once the dust settles, add a printer and a printer driver. If the printer does
not include a scanner, add and test a standalone one. My recommendations
are the HP OfficeJet Pro 8600 and the older HP Scanjet 3970.

=============================

Please report any missing crucial details in any of the above.

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

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

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

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

More details at your nearest New Mexico embassy.

Made some updates and adjustments to the offsite links on our
home page.

Added Academia.edu as a Wesrch alternate.
Saucer Smear apparently died with its webmaster.
Upgraded to the new Central Arizona Grotto website.
Added Search Tempest for better Craig's List access.
Picked up the new Pittsburgh Streetcars web location.

In regards to the latter, attempting to view all of these in one session will
result in yinz guys pronouncing "beer" as "airn". Or making a mill
outta a chopaam sammitch and Olde Frothingslosh Pale Stale Ale in
Sliberty.

Fortunately, a desert rat like me is immune. Skooze me while I redd up
the website.

Please report any link corrections or requests.

Just discovered the free Netgear Genie. This one gives
you real time plots of your net activity.

Two obvious uses would be to make sure no one has pirated
your computer. And to verify that any open WiFi links are not
being hijacked by a neighbor.

Many of our eBay guidelines can be found here.

I strongly feel that any merch you buy for eBay resale absolutely
MUST have taken a staggering hit in value, leaving NO ROOM
WHATSOEVER for supplier pricing based on original value.

Such inventory buying opportunities typically and often happen
with "contents of room" and "contents of cabinet" auction lots,
"poisoned lots" including worthless trash, "put it with the next one"
auctioneer momentum ploys, heavy items that can allow minor valuable
parts recycled, large quantity assorted lots, items requiring major
triage, items needing mix and match part swapping refurb, or simply
your being the only bidder that recognizes value.

Or whose seller's primary goals are to free up real estate, make room
for new projects, or clear up bankruptcy issues.

Or, with traditional auctions, being very late in the auction, 120 degrees
in the shade except for the four inch hail, the rabid bats largely failing
to drive away the rattlesnakes, and, of course, no restrooms.

I very strongly feel that you should always seek out a 30:1 Sell/Buy ratio.

Anything less cuts into your other business expenses, such as labor,
storage, refurb, wrong guesses, lack of eBay interest, utilities, slow
sales, and, above all, the value of your time and effort. Thus, the
price of your inventory should be an utterly negligible portion of
your actual business costs.

Note that a 30:1 SBR is equal to a 97 percent commission, making
consignment selling for others a laughingly ludicrous joke.

A reasonable selling price for our types of items on eBay would be
one sixth of normal distributor cost. Combine this with a 30:1 SBR
leaves you with a maximum inventory buy price of a penny on the
dollar. We normally seek out one half to one third of this price
ceiling.

Naturally, if all of your inventory buy offers are accepted, you are
paying far too much. Our usual goal is to hit a five percent acceptance
rate. Which, of course, you make up for by bidding on twenty times
the quantity of items you could possibly use.

WARNING: Most popular apps may be more easily gotten from
malware sites rather than the authentic "real" one.

Ferinstance, if you Google "Get Acrobat Reader" or "Download
Chrome",  the "real" site may end up sixth or seventh on the list,
with the higher ranking sites usually being malware. Such malware
will typically hijack your website, grab your home page, force its own
search engines on you, or otherwise take control of your computer!

The malware sites get this way by manipulating the Google popularity
rules. Your obvious defense is to make absolutely sure your Acrobat
Reader comes ONLY from Adobe and your Chrome Browser comes
ONLY from Google.

These malware substitutions more often happen with multiple search
words. Thus, searching on "Chrome" will often rank the real program
higher than searching with "Chrome Download".

Be sure to watch these gotchas.

Apparently You Tube now has bunches of free and mostly
classic full length movies available for download.

Sadly, the cross genre classic Godzilla versus the night nurses
is not included. How they did the tapioca pudding scene
remains under strict NDA. And the restraining order from
the Tapioca Pudding Institute caused the flick to be
released directly to eight track.

Access to many dozens of free video download sites appears
here. Of these, I find CBS and Fox interesting. Especially
CSI Gila Bend. Plus the beyond ultra nerdy Twit. And the
thousands of free college football games at NCAA.

My own video can be found here.

A reminder that two of our newest web page additions include
a major rework of our Gila Day Hikes that now include lat lons
of many non-sensitive locations.

Plus the usual reminder that Acme Mapper is incredibly useful for most any
exploration.

Plus our recently accepted Bajada Hanging Canals paper newly
up on Wikipedia.

More on the hanging canals here.
Your comments on either addition welcome.

Astounding bargains in used computers seem to be becoming
available at high school, community college, and even military
auctions. I just picked up a dozen Vista machines with 100 gig+
drives for $10 each. And more can be expected at this weekend's
upcoming Thatcher High School auction.

So far, there was one dead mouse and a scratched monitor with
a somewhat mottled, but still highly usable background. Which
likely was moisture caused, because it went away after a few
hours of "cooking".

The usual gotcha, of course, is that the hard disks have been
totally wiped. But the EAC auction provided full recovery disks.

These machines are more than fast enough for home video and
easily connected to a smart Vizio or whatever. School systems
tend to use headphones rather than speakers, but this can be
worked around with a sound cable to your tv.

One trick is to bid $10 and then fold. Doing so as early and as subtly
as you can. The auctioneer will usually welcome this as a way to keep
momentum. And the key to the low prices is to have only a few bidders
that are only after a single machine.

Supply and demand and all that.

The usual software you may want to download new would include
Chrome, Acrobat Reader ( or full Acrobat ), Filezilla, Imageviewer32,
and Irfranview. Curiously, old versions of Paint are not upgradeable,
so you may want to add Paint.NET or something similar. Plus printer or
scanner software if you need these.

Should you be hosting your own website, my favorite remains Fat Cow.
But they insist I tell you that I am one of their associates.

Another gotcha to beware of. Even legitimate freeware sites may try
to hijack Chrome or force all sorts of useless downloads on you.

After each download, check to see if your home page and search
engine are still yours. Then check your program files for the current
date and flush anything suspect that you do not want.

Acme Mapper has proven to be enormously useful for our
Hanging Canal research. Despite having "not quite" the
resolution needed to actually see most portions of most
canals.

Aerial canal views tend to be more or less invisible anyway.

A reminder that addresses and place names found in
Google Maps can be entered, besides the usual lat-lon
in many different formats.

I was wandering around an obscure part of Arizona with
Acme, and discovered a knoll top collection of four nested
triangles. Whose most likely explanation are quite old
prehistoric Trincheras. On checking with a trinchera specialty
archaeologist, I found that these may in fact be unknown to the
scientific community.

Acme's major contribution here was the ability to instantly switch
between topo mapping and satellite imaging. As mentioned before,
it sure would be nice to be able to selectively blend the two.

As per this very crude example of Pacman, Arizona.

On further inspection, several dozen adjacent knoll tops also
had what may or may not be man made structures. While only
one other one has a somewhat triangular motif, when considered
in context, the others do suggest possible tentative trinchera
candidates.

There is not the slightest hint of any relationship with CCC water
spreaders. Their viewing literally screams "very old". CCC stuff
tends to be down on the flats, focused on drainages, sharply imaged,
and virtually never on knoll peaks.

Why such a ( now ) arid and ( now ) desolate area would have been
chosen at all remains highly enigmatic.

These are located south of the Mackenzie River.

Your comments  welcome.

There is a vile and despicable pile of malware crap called
Astromenda. This attaches itself to many supposedly "free"
downloads and hijacks your home page, your back button,
and becomes your only available search engine.

It is fairly simple to remove the main Astromenda program
using Add or Remove software out of the Control Panel.

And fairly easy to reset your Chrome home page and home
button using their Settings feature. But getting rid of the ban on
all other search engines seems tricky as they may have locked
out any ability to enter new engines. This insidiosity is marked
by the new engine blocks turning pink when you try to use them.

Completely removing Chrome and its folder and reloading did
not make the problem go away for me. It turns out there are
twelve or more hidden Astromenda routines maliciously
stashed in unexpected places in the windows operating system.

Details on options appear here. There is a ransomware site called
Spy Hunter that will find out if you have Astromenda for free, but
charges you at least $39 for your first repair. And tries to charge
you double by a misleading order box.

Spy Hunter did appear to work for me, but ransomware is ransomware.

Graham County wines?

A fledging industry seems to have started with some fifty tons
of grape harvest by Bonita Springs Vineyards. These folks
are just north of the tomato factory at N 32.47433 W 109.93799.

Admittedly, this part of Graham county is very much more Willcox
oriented, rather than Safford associated.

Much more on interesting things to do in Graham County here.

There's a new "A+" version of the Raspberry pi out.

It is smaller, cheaper, and lower cost with improved I/O.
On sale now at $20!

The term "tipping point" seems to be newly emerging in many
endeavors, such as here and here.

I strongly feel we have finally at long last reached the tipping
point for electric utility photovoltaics.

To date, not one single NET watthour of pv electricity has ever been
produced when taken in energy totality. And when properly treating
subsidies as 7X energy liabilities rather than 1X energy assets.

Also to date, pv has not been in any manner renewable nor sustainable.

But after years and years of the outrageous pricing that has traditionally
made pv panels a net energy sink, we are finally and rapidly approaching
the quarter a watt peak panel price needed to eventually achieve both
renewability and sustainability.

This site is a good source for tracking declining pv costs. We now seem
to be at 47 cents per peak utility based panel watt. And dropping at a
penny per month rate.

Where does the quarter per peak panel watt needed for pv to go mainstream
bonkers comes from?   Ar present ten cents per kilowatt hour is a ballpark
figure for electricity from traditional sources. And a one kilowatt panel on
a good Arizona day should produce something like five kilowatt hours of
electricity now competitively worth fifty cents. Or around $15 per month.

How much can we afford pay for such a one kilowatt pv system?. Using this
amortization guide, we find that a 10 year, 10 percent investment of
$1135 will cost us fifty cents per day breakeven in principle and interest.

Or around $15 per month. Which is where the "buck a peak watt" holy
grail figure originally came from.

But wait. There are two huge gotchas here. The first is that this figure is for
total systems cost that include installation, maintenance, financing, synchronous
inverters, shipping, land, net metering, and such. Typically, the peak panel watt
pricing ends up one half or less of the total system costs. Thus, for buck a watt
system costs, the peak panel cost would have to be around fifty cents per peak
watt.

Which we finally seem to be under.

The second gotcha is that fifty cents per peak panel watt is only a
"paint it green" equivalence. It does not make much sense to generate
traditional electricity at ten cents a watt only to use it to pay for a ten
cents per watt pv panel.

For pv to become renewable and sustainable, it has to not only meet this
fifty cents equivalence price, but significantly beat it. Hence, twenty five
cents per peak watt would seem to be a ballpark magic number tipping
point for true renewability and sustainability to emerge.

Sadly, once the twenty five cents figure is reached, zillions of investment
dollars ( and their ten cents per kilowatt hour energy equivalents ) will be
thrown at pv, setting back by years the actual true energy breakeven point.

But such breakeven now appears a near certainty.

Much more on energy topics here.

accademia.edu seems to be a second alternative to http://www.wesrch.com/ .

They have 15 million people and four million papers combined with
16 million visitors per month.

I have yet to evaluate them or work with them.

An alternate to a simple and cheap POE Power over Ethernet
adapter cable can be found here.

This fakes true POE by simply using unused cable wires. It
is NOT compatible with true POE.

Except for a few yet to be adjusted typos, our fully revised
Gila Day Hikes is now ready to go. We are in the process
of taking out all of the old typos and putting new ones in.

Besides additions and updates and corrections, the big new
feature is that most locations are now spelled out as Lat and
Long.

Such locations are purposely NOT provided on certain caves,
indian ruin habitations, and a few other highly sensitive entries.

The lat longs can be directly clicked into Acme Mapper. From
there you can switch between topo, satellite, and other display
formats.

Such locations typically are in the usual blue and appear at the
end of each listing.

The easiest way to find these is to go to our home page, and, if
the brown saguaro banner is not up, keep refreshing until it
appears.

Then click through to reach https://www.tinaja.com/gilahike.shtml.

We'll have a Discovery Park lecture on these updates in
mid January.

Please report any additions or corrections or anything I missed.

A review of some of the tricks and hidden gotchas to our auto
backgrounding and vignetting utility...

The utility works by first scanning from the west border to find
the end of the first continuous sequence of red=255 pixels. It then
replaces everything found with a slightly mottled background based
on a selected of 215 web friendly PostScript colors.

Mottling a background dramatically reduces JPEG edge artifacts
with only a negligibly slight increase in file size.

It then continues by scanning from the east border, then the
south border, then the north border.

It is super important that there are no unwanted red=255
pixels in the original art. The easiest way to guarantee this is
to use Imageviewer32 or a similar program to back off all reds
by two clicks.

It is also super important that there are no breaks whatsoever
in the outlining red=255 border. For even a one pixel break
will place one or more "bulldozer tracks" in your final art.

There is an optional feature that will also overwrite any internal
red=255 pixels. This is handy for any "holes" in your artwork.

Undercuts can create subtle to outrageous problems in your
final artwork if the area is not reachable by a vertical or horizontal
line from the west, east, south, or north borders. The solution
is to mark these areas as if they were internal red=256 pixels.

The utility must be run from GhostScript as disk access is newly
forbidden in Distiller.

Here is an example of where inaccessible undercuts should be
premarked.

Other examples of the autobackgrounder can be found here.

We should have bunches of unusual neat stuff up on eBay.

Including circular mil connectors ( both wired and fiber optic ),
SMA attenuators, genuine walk-don't-walk signs for mancaves,
huge crimp terminals, assorted pc boards for artist uses,
premium grade miniature Teflon coax, servo pressure controllers,
rare and pristine GR 1863 Megohmmeters, genuine Strobotacs,
various Hubble connectors, AMX MSP Ethernet controllers,
Simpson meters, and stainless steel conveyor belting.

Plus great heaping bunches of audio and video gar we have yet
to test.

We also have a unique collection of classic Apple IIe, IIc, and IIgs
computers, boards, and software that we are closing out and will
sell by the lot. Buyer is responsible for pickup or shipping.

A video on on free printed circuit board software is available
 here.

And a new book on classic Heathkit items here. The web seems
to be recovering from the Heathkit debacle of a few years back.
One source of free manuals and schematics appears here.

With other Heath resources here, here, here, here, and here.
Plus any I may have missed here.

Naturally, Arizona has no caves to speak of. And super
secrecy is a hallmark of Arizona Caving.

BUT - Mescal Crack seems about to vanish off the face
of the earth. Besides, you cannot get there from here.

Somewhere near N 33.87363 W 110.80808 is a very tight
and narrow 95 foot + deep pit in 0recambrian Mescal
Limestone. While it was somewhat visible on a previous
satellite image on  Acme Mapper, it now seems to have
newly disappeared entirely.

Many hundreds of CAG manhours went into the initial
search decades ago for this ultra remote cave. Over the
years, the then dim bulldozer track accessing it seems to
have disappeared almost entirely.

Very few Apache Group Precambrian cave features are
known.

A second legendary pit is also rumored to be two miles
northwest more or less in which "rocks roll forever" and
whose tentative name is strawberry awful.

On the bright side, though, the Q Ranch is now reportedly
an outstanding bed and breakfast.

Other unusual locations here.

A few years ago, I was at a lecture where they asked "What
is one of the indicator species of overgrazing?"

They sure got upset when I replied "Cows".

Apparently one of the sources of docs on the McEniry tunnel
is no longer available, so try this one instead.

This was basically an outrageous scam in which you would
simply scrape the gold off the ceiling and let it fall directly into
your ore car.

BTW, this spelling is clearly from the original document. There
are lots of incorrect local variations around here.

Similar fascinating places here.

Here's some before and after photos that show off our
Bitmap Typewriter.

This offers you the highest possible resolution this side of
going to subpixel techniques.

Managed to get a start on adding more specific location
info to the nonsensitive listings of our Gila Valley Dayhikes.

But it appears it will take a lot more time and effort than
I first suspected. Some of the locations I presently need
help in finding exact lat lons for include...

Cotton Cave
Klondyke Wall
Yellowstone flying buttress dam
Pima Box Arch
Dragoon Arch
Zeolite Mines
Espiritu Tinajas

Please advise if you can help on any of these.

Yet another centered one point perspective example can be found
here. These can be very useful to illustrate eBay instruments.

The satin finish can be a real hassle to photograph, so this
one was done outside in fairly deep shade. Vertical architect's
perspective correction was done with our usual tool, while
the horizontal correction was minor enough to be done by
chasing small samples across the screen.

The whole satin part got redone for uniformity, which
needed some fairly minor lettering rework.

I did not like the right side of the instrument, so I
mirrored the left for best appearance.

We can do this kind of work for you on a custom basis.

Don't know if it is a recent update or not, but the FIND
feature of Acme Mapper now seems amazingly flexible in
that it can find most street addresses, place names, and
pretty much anything that's also findable in Goggle Maps.

Did I ever tell you about my secret Fire Lookout's gourmet
recipe for boiled can?

There's a 24 hour prep time involved since you have to use the
previous night's dishwater.

Many thanks to all of you who attended last night's
Hanging Canal lecture. Despite heavy tailgating
competition, we ended up with more or less of a
full house.

This was an interesting experiment in a "tag team
lecture". Many thanks to Dr. Neely for joining me.

There are many, many hanging canal projects we could
use your help ( and funding! ) on. Besides being fun
dayhikes, these could give you the opportunity to
actually participate in real world class scientific research.

Once project in particular would involve some fancy
ATV exploration in a difficult to reach portion of
Deadman Mesa. Please contact me if you have any
interest in this.

Much more on the hanging canals here.

A very short notice reminder that both Dr. Neely and
myself will be talking about our prehistoric hanging canals
tonight at 6:30 in the Jupiter Room of Discovery Park.

You can preview the talk here, with more on the hanging
canals here.

Discovery Park is located near the corner of 20th avenue
and Discovery Park Boulevard in Safford, Arizona.

Dr. Neely and I spent a very interesting morning with George
Hayes, the manager of the Cluff Ponds facility of Arizona Game and
Fish. A better name for what we called the Cluff Ponds canal would
Be the presently inactive Smith Tank Canal. Its source is easily traced
to a multi gated diversion structure on Ash Creek near N 32.81347
W 109.84917

A new area that we are going to call the Cluff Southwest Complex
centers on N 32.82521 W 109.85507 and has a collection of
1930's era diversion structures that appear to overlay more of
our prehistoric hanging canals. We'll tentatively call this
Canal #31 and believe it pushes the total well past sixty miles.

When combined with the previously studied Minor Webster
Ditch system, there are a total of three canal areas on interest in
the Cluff areas. Proving these in fact have prehistoric origins
may end up enormously difficult, but such prehistoric origins
would certainly be very conspicuous by their absence.

Several unrelated questions came up during our visit. As best as
I know, the actual Shingle Mill was much further up the canyon
than most people believe and was somewhere near the Hulda
Gap Corral near 6000 feet elevation. I do not know where
the end of the logging flumes were, but photos in the Pima
Museum might prove useful.

Much more on the Allen Dam disaster here, with more on
Gila Valley dayhikes here.

An ad in this morning's Craig's List assures us that "all reasonable
offers will be excepted".

Which is almost as good as the ancient eBay "Fright arrangements
are to be made by the buyer".

Freescale has just come up with a pair of solid state replacements
for the vacuum tube magnetrons still used in microwave ovens
in their part numbers MHT1003N ( 250 watts, 2450 MHz, 58%)
and MHT1002N ( 350 watts, 915 MHz, 63% )

Units are medium gain amplifiers rather than resonant cavity devices
and can apparently be run in parallel The projected cost is in the
$35 range in quantity. They can be are powered from a 32vdc supply
and potentially should be smaller and last a lot longer, besides offering
real time feedback of oven conditions.

Development systems are available but pricey. Additional content here.

With CRT monitors and tv's having recently been blown out of the water,
this was the last major consumer market for vacuum tubes. Except, of
course, for the retro audio epsilon minuses.

Finding the slope of a function can be enormously useful,
as the whole branch of differential calculus can tell us.
Ferinstance, a zero slope indicates a local maximum,
minimum, or an inflection point. And finding the slope
of the slope can tell us which is which.

One crude way of finding slopes is to make a very
small incremental change in the function's variable and
see how much the function itself changes. But if the function
can be mathematically defined and is reasonably well
behaved, chances are its slope derivative is already
well known.

The basic scheme is called the fundamental rule of
differential calculus and goes something like this...

slope of a function = the limit as delta x
goes to zero for (( f(x) + delta(x) - ( f(x)) /
delta(x).

The usual example is to find the slope at a point
along a parabola y = x^2. (x + deltax)^2 is
x^2 + 2x*deltax + deltax^2. Subtracting
x^2 and letting deltax^2 vanish and dividing
by deltax leaves us with a derivative slope of 2x.

Good old u^n(du).

More in our Math Stuff and Magic Sinewaves and
Cubic Spline libraries.

I've had several requests to expand and improve the actual
locations of our Gila Valley Dayhikes. And will be doing
most of these, except for very sensitive locations or any
that I am unsure about or have not personally verified.

The new locations will mostly be in purple. You can easily
cut and paste them into Acme Mapper or Google Earth.

I expect the process will take a few weeks to complete.
Your comments welcome. A Discovery Park lecture is
planned for mid January.

A reminder that I will be doing a Hanging Canal lecture
in the Discovery Park Jupiter Room this Saturday October
18th at 6.30 PM. The lecture is free and some southwestern
archaeologists are likely to also participate.

You can preview portions of the talk here.

Discovery Park is located near the corner of Discovery Park Boulevard
and 10th Avenue in Safford Arizona.

Also, several tours are planned the week of October 13 to
18th, and some slots are still open if you want to join us.

You can email me for details.

It can be a good idea to include scope traces of working
waveforms with any intended eBay instrument sale.
To prove the instrument is more or less alive and well.

Getting quality results such as this one or this one
can be tricky. The usual approach is to get one grid
block looking decent and then replicating as needed
over the entire screen. While maintaining uniform
horizontal and vertical spacing.

One trick in dealing with sinewaves or swept sinewaves:
The tops and bottoms can be done with the little known
and less used Paint quadratic parabola tool, while the
mid portions of the "curve" can easily be approximated
with straight lines.

Naturally, you do not want to alter the actual waveform
in any manner that is deceptive or different from the
original.

Consulting services, screen designs, and seminars available

If a premise on our Prehistoric Hanging Canals that "they"
fully exploited literally every drop of available Northeastern
Mt. Graham water and related springs and artesian sources
is valid, and if the system can be assumed to have been
complete or nearly completed, and that most historical canals
in the area were "steal the plans" or "borrow the blueprints"
to "dig out a n old ditch" it might be of interest to regroup the
canal arrangements by watersheds.

Starting from the southeast...

P RANCH CANYON - This would appear to be the far limit
of possible canal development with an obvious takein point
at N 32.59434 W 109.73912 and a possible secondary one in
Veech Canyon. Despite many research trips and persistent
local rumors, no significant results have yet been observed.
There is a possible small canal reach of indeterminate age at
N 32.61347 W 109.72820 and an apparent water control
structure at N 32.65462 W 109.71854

LEFTHAND CANYON EAST - There are two Lefthand
Canyons, with this one being the easternmost near the
Metate Peak area around N 32.67358 W 109.73808.
This region forms an unstudied "gap" in canal occurrences
and may have in fact been devoid of perennial water sources.

JACOBSON CANYON - Forms the apparently still used
Ledford Tank Complex at N 32.68618 W 109.74301 with
numerous branches and steep off mesa drops. Largely still
understudied due to somewhat difficult access.

MARIJILDA CANYON - A very rich and well studied area
sourcing from N 32.70626 W 109.77726. Several smaller branch
canals diverge from this point. The main Marijilda Ditch at
N 32.71724  W 109.76735 was historically reworked and still
sees use to this day, feeding Lebanon Resovoir #2 at N 32.73493
W 109.76074. A southern divergence formed the possibly older
and original Henry's canal, studied from N 32.73760 W 109.74198
to N 32.74566 W 109.72640. Meanwhile, the High Marijilda original
canal first crosses an aqueduct at N 32.72371 W 109.76240 and
then forms one of the most spectacularly hanging portions at
N 32.73317 W 109.75794 and eventually feeding Lebanon Resovoir #2
at and sourcing the ( likely ) updated modern Roper Canal terminating
at N 32.75569 W 109.70786. A second presumed branch from Lebanon
Resovoir #2 is believed to be buried under modern agricultural development,
eventually "tunneling" under the Lebanon Cemetery at N 32.76159 W
109.73320 and forming the Twin East Canal feeding the Twin Boobs
ponding area at. N 32.76603 W 109.73595. Separately, the Rincon Canyon
is believed to route down its namesake at N 32.75326 W 109.75370 servicing
several domestic sites and possibly becoming the Twin West Canyon also
delivering to the Twin Boobs ponding area at N 32.76603 W 109.73595.

TRANQUILITY CANAL - Believed to be unique as it is potentially artesian
sourced, shorter, and routes over private inholdings. Possibly originates
somewhere near N 32.75759 W 109.73297and believed to deliver water to
the Cooks Resovoir area at N 32.77415 W 109.72812. While portions are
clearly modern,  an underlying prehistoric original remains somewhat
likely but unproven. At one point, the Tranquility Canal comes amazingly
close to the Twin East canal, separated only by a significant cliff of only
30 feet or so of height. The two remain presumed totally unrelated.

DEADMAN CANYON - An original and significantly hanging portion is
believed to have been replaced by a modern pipeline from N 32.73900
W 109.81155 to N 32.74463 W 109.80704. This canal still flows to this
day, servicing several top mesa tanks. Area has evidence of "knife Edging"
where canals are carefully routed across the highest possible and extremely
narrow mesa tops. An apparent three way switch at N 32.76058 W 109.78133
seemed to allow selective routing to Porter Springs Tank at N 32.77033
W 109.77811, Upper Deadman Tank at N 32.75845 W 109.77030, and
Lower Deadman Tank at N 32.77141 W 109.75142 Meanwhile, a potential
and enigmatic southern knife edge branch remains unexplored from
N 32.75403 W 109.78250 to N 32.75652 W 109.77705 and may have been a
still unproven primary or secondary source for the Twin West Canal at
N 32.76478 W 109.74227. Numerous braided channels or trails remain a
highly enigmatic mystery at N 32.75461 W 109.78203.

SOUTH OF FREEMAN - A large area here seems conspicuous by
the absence of any known canals, yet might in fact been too arid or
of to complex a topography to support prehistoric interest. Largely
unvisited due to more promising terrain elsewhere. Centers on
N 32.77622 W 109.75398 and is difficult of access.

DISCOVERY SOUTHWEST - Area from N 32.79452 W 109.72842 to
N 32.78222 W 109.73994 is rich in archaeology yet no canals are known.
Includes the Clay Knolls ( aka Beer Bottle ruin ) sites and many rock
alignments, mulch rings, field houses, and such. Many mulch rings were
trashed by the City of Safford during a water tank construction. Possibly the
densest collection of southern grids appears at N 32.78550 W 109.74270.

LONGVIEW AREA - A prehistorically rich area full of habitation sites,
rock constructs, check dams with and without aprons, grids, many linear
features, and mulch rings. Only a very short hint of a canal wall is known
at N 32.78923 W 109.75944 without any yet supporting evidence of links to the
Porter Springs or Frye Mesa areas. From N 32.77999 W 109.76410
to N 32.77999 W 109.76410

FRYE MESA COMPLEX - Perhaps the most extraordinary assemblage of
all the prehistoric canals and has the most elaborate constructs. Water is
believed but not yet proven to be diverted above the falls at N 32.74376
W 109.83971, across a saddle and over into Spring Canyon where it merges
into a ponding area below a spring at N 32.74572 W 109.84043. If not
diverted, the water routes down Spring Canyon to an Allen Canal takein
point at N 32.78238 W 109.83555 Allen canal continues for several miles,
eventually routing under Allen Reservoir at N 32.83191 W 109.79555
continuing through an enormously huge Culebra Cut at N 32.83567 W 109.79799
and a carefully engineered saddle gap crossing at N 32.83313 W 109.80475,
finally believed to end up in unproven fields beneath the Central Dam at
N 32.85032 W 109.8000 . Meanwhile, alternate diversion is believed to route
water under the Frye Mesa Falls Road extension at N 32.75101 W 109.83855,
through various braided channels at N 32.76001 W 109.81462 to a ponding area
at N 32.76000 W 109.81149 . The higher elevation portion of this routing is
partially supported by a "steal the plans" forest service pipeline. The
water apparently is split two ways at the ponding area, first going to a spectacularly
impressive counterflowing HS Canal. While the HS canal clearly returns water
to Frye Creek at N 32.75803 W 109.81509, unproven beliefs strongly suggest it
is the source for the Golf Course Canal, portions of which are currently known to
route from N 32.79840 W 109.78269 to N 32.79883 W 109.7761. Also suggested
is that the HS Canal might be a possibly prehistoric source for the modern Blue
Ponds Canal at N 32.78088 W 109.77833 or might be a factor in the extensive
Longview development near N 32.77800 W 109.76661. Several braided channels
have also been noted that might be related, although they seem to be older and
more primitive constructs. These were named the Riggs Complex and found at
N 32.77846 W 109.78945 and hints of a possible nearby portion of Golf Course
Canal remain largely unstudied and unlinked at N 32.78465 W 109.78724
Meanwhile, back at the N 32.76000 W 109.81149 ponding area, the second
routing is believed to form the Robinson Canal ( Historically renamed the
Robinson Ditch ) that routes over a spectacular hanging portion at N 32.77173 W
109.79672 then "climbing" to the main portion of Robinson Mesa at N 32.78467
W 109.79339 is believed to reach fields North of  Daley Estates, presumably near
N 32.81054 W 109.77185.

LOWER FRYE EAST - A strange construct near N 32.76705 W 109.79332 may or
may not be canal related, and visual clues further north turned out to be an abandoned
wagon road, complete with horseshoes. The area could link to the modern short
Blue Ponds diversionary canal at N 32.78095 W 109.77841 or might serve the
Longview area in some yet undiscovered manner. CCC projects are also in the area.

MUD SPRINGS CANAL - This main canal is the only one where its entire
length can be viewed from several places, which suggests it might have been
the original prototype. The original takein is believed to be in upper Ash
Creek near N 32.78748 W 109.85463, followed by a projected hanging portion
that may or may not still exist owing to potential flood damage. A key feature
is an exceptionally well located critical saddle crossover found at N 32.79145
W 109.85390 followed by an easily traceable but not yet completely surveyed
route down past Mud Springs to N 32.80347 W 109.83937. The canal continues
quite traceably northward to a seldom visited hanging portion near N 32.81632
W 109.83207 and one of the largest mid channel Mesquite trees at N 32.81917
W 109.82737. The canal continues to a well researched area near some CCC
constructs and is overrun without accommodation by a SCS dam at N 32.82371
W 109.82411. There is appears to be a minor branch of the canal northward
of unknown purpose. The canal continues northeasterly past a curious water level
pithouse-like structure called the Troll House. No obvious evidence of charcoal
is present at this site at N 32.82683 W 109.82118. This is the only known structure
in direct association with most of the canal systems. Near N 32.82755 W 109.81949,
the Jernigan Canal splits off to the north and is believed to cross West Layton Road
at N 32.83690 W 109.81498 barely touch the road at N 32.84016 W 109.81273 and
make a projected but unverified loop to a counterflow crossing of a small wash at
N 32.84176 W 109.81453. The canal makes the third of three large U-turn loops
in a significant hanging portion at N 32.84207 W 109.81552, then heads northerly,
terminating in a  French Drain like construct serving well defined end use fields in
the N 32.84160 W 109.81678 area. The Jernigan habitation site is nearby.
Meanwhile, the main Mud Springs Canal continues easterly just past a historic tank at
N 32.82764 W 109.81896 and then can be traced to N 32.83054 W 109.81588,
temporarily lost, and then retraced to a modest hanging portion and caliche colored
reach at N 32.84261 W 109.81052. Near this area, the Mud Springs Canal and the
Jernigan Canal are only separated by a few hundred feet horizontally and a few
dozen feet vertically, despite over a mile of split construction. The main Mud
Springs canal can be easily followed to N 32.84796 W 109.81104 where it suddenly
vanishes without a trace. Its destination fields remain unknown at present.

CLUFF PONDS CANAL  - A modern but disused canal can be traced routing
from Ash Creek to N 32.81874 W 109.84679 to N 32.82009 W 109.84462,
once servicing a pair of ponds arranged such that the easternmost pond acted
as an overflow to the  westernmost one. No immediate proof of prehistoric
origins have yet been found, but indirect evidence is compelling. Not the least of
which  being such a prehistoric origin would be highly conspicuous by its
absence. There are numerous potsherds and a larger habitation site in the area,
and the canal technology appears well within prehistoric capabilities. This is
in midst of the largest regional riparian area and the ponds could well have
served as destination fields,

SHINGLE MILL CANAL - A second disused modern canal was known as
the Minor Webster Ditch and routed from N 32.79785 W 109.87270 to
N 32.81087 W 109.86743, apparently sourcing from Shingle Mill canyon.
Construction did include a service road and a deeper vee typical of a Gradeall,
but prehistoric origins would seem quite likely, again with such a canal being
highly conspicuous by its absence. And with the route being consistent with
prehistoric engineering capabilities. There are numerous potsherds in the area.
and the modern Cluff Ponds region would seem an ideal fields destination.

LEFTHAND & GOAT HILL AREA - This second Lefthand Canyon is in
the Spear Ranch region. Some highly interesting and well studied canals
appear directly related to destination fields near N 32.80647 W 109.91850.
These canals seem to differ from others in the study area in that they are
significantly shorter, multi branch, and are clearly end use,  rather than
intended for longer range delivery.

LAMB TANK CANAL - A longer range delivery canal appears to have
been sourced from Lefthand Canyon and routed from N 32.82133
W 109.92391 to N 32.82868 W 109.92224 and merits further study.

NUTTEALL AND CARTER CANYONS - Mt Graham drainages tend to
be drier and less promising to the west. These two canyons at N 32.78839
W 109.97474 could form potential logical extensions to the canal complex,
although little work has been done here and no canals are yet known.

BEAR SPRINGS & BIGLER PONDS - The region from N 32.85171
W 109.94775 to N 32.85009 W 109.94483 are major artesian sources
unlikely to have been ignored as prehistoric water development. There
are also likely destination fields in the area, although the area has been
little studied as canal candidates. A spectacularly large and currently
disused canal at N 32.86676 W 109.93024 appears to have been
primarily a modern real estate scam.

THE UFO FISH FILETS - The highly unusual and wildly atypical
construct at N 32.81509 W 109.97079 would appear to define the
westernmost limit of the present canal study area. While believed
of primarily CCC origin, there may be prehistoric precedents that
are related to water management issues.

Ongoing maps of these areas can be found here and here. With additional
content here and an image collection here.

Your involvement and participation welcome.

Picked up a bunch of walk - don't walk signs that should be
ideal for man cave misapplication. We would shortly have
them up on eBay.

These are in quite good condition and are complete units
with outer packaging, seals, and a programmable internal
computer. They include a countdown timer, which we  have
not quite figured out how to use yet.

External control is quite simple, but the timing to a flashing
don't walk must be externally provided. The trailing edge
of the external don't walk first flash apparently trips countdown.

Control appears quite simple. Blue to white Common 110 vac
lights the walking man. Orange to white Common 110 vac lights
the orange don't walk. Stopping orange to white starts the
large orange LED countdown.

Speaking of which, these might also be useful for industrial timing
aps. Programming of a number of options can be done using
internal DIP switches. Most units are genuine Dialight brand.

Being LEDs, these should be reliable and long life. Units are tested
before shipment.

More info here.

A reminder that low density polyethylene rods can be used with
an ordinary glue gun. Which is one way to quickly build up a custom
connector, tack a wire to a pc board, fix a bezel, or make a small
light use part.

Or tack them onto an XY table for a Santa Claus Machine. An
older exploration of possibilities appears here and here.

Here's a rerun on some more of my live auction insider secrets...

Always dress down to the point of almost appearing shabby.
Listen to everything; volunteer nothing. Wear a hat or shirt
or whatever that is VERY distinctive. Always set your max
bid to JUST ABOVE a currency denomination threshold and
NEVER go over it.

If you would like to try and steal an item, get out in front of
everybody else but not quite in the auctioneer's face. Their
entire field of view should be one-quarter you. While the item
IS STILL BEING DESCRIBED, hold your bidder card against
your chest with one hand and do a Churchill V for Victory with
your other hand, against your chest. Be sure that ONLY the
auctioneer can see you. You are giving the auctioneer a message
of "Here is a $2.50 floor bid if and when you care to accept it."

If you really, really want an item that is unlikely to have much
competition, do the above, but continually rock your bidder's card
back and forth after the first counterbid.

If you suspect the bidding will be highly competitive,WAIT till just
under your max and bid ONCE on the second going of going going 
gone.

NEVER get tired, or lazy, or in a hurry. The spectacularly best deals
usually happen very late in an auction. Ideally, the temperature should
be above 120 degrees except for the four inch hail, and the rabid bats
should not be succeeding at driving the rattlesnakes away.

And, needless to say, no restrooms.

Abject trash tends to poison a lot, and you can usually give anything
you do not want to another bidder. Bid on the value of what you want
and ignore everything you will have to flush anyway.

Much more on our auction help page. Especially AUCTSCNE.PDF.

Our Prehistoric Bajada hanging canals of southwestern Arizona
article has just been accepted by Wikipedia.

Wikipedia usually very strongly discourages articles involving original
research. But, as a sub footnote on page 3857 of Volume XVII
of the nineteenth revision of the Wikipedia Rules and Regulations
tells us, a topic involving original research can be accepted so long
as there is strong enough and notable enough independent major
media coverage in several significant publications.

Authors also have to strongly suppress ego and very much discourage
any internal self promotion as well.

Many thanks to Dennis Wagner of USA Today and Joanna
Althands of www.arizona.com for bailing us out on this one.

Much more on our hanging canals here.

A possible, yet still unverified, extension to the Golf Course
Hanging Canal can be found here.

This would preclude artesian or Robertson origins and would
greatly strengthen ( but still not prove ) HS Canal sourcing.

Remaining is the mystery of the Riggs Complex braided
channels somewhat further south at N 32.77846 W 109.78945.
But these somehow seem cruder, older, and totally inconsistent
with the Golf Course Canal architecture.

I'm surprised that nobody has yet seen fit to provide the
ability to transparently overlay both a topo map and its
underlying imagery.

Preferably real time adjustable. If such a feature is
available, I sure do not know about it.

I ran a crude demo of the possibilities long ago with
this ancient and non-adjustable Pacman Arizona demo.

One aspect of the problem is getting the imagery. and
the topo to exactly the same scale and registration at the
pixel level. A send is to be able to transparently combine
two  layers.

The later is easily done with Acrobat, PhotoShop,
GIMP, and possibly KML.

Real time. Getting the layer dates identical or nearly so would
also certainly be useful.

Please tell me if you know of this capability.

An interesting flyby of some local Gila Valley scenery
done by a quadcopter can be found here.

It turns out there can be a tremendous difference between
cheaper and more expensive units. Mostly centered on
gyro flight and camera stabilization, GPS interaction,
flyability, flight time, and download capabilities.

Apparently no units that I know about have downed craft
long term reporting. I can see spending a zillion dollars
for a premium unit, only to have it permanently vanish
off the edge of a mesa into heavy brush.

It would be equally bad to con someone else into doing
surveys for us, only to lose their unit.

As I have already done with a fire pager in Shingle
Mill Canyon.

Your comments ( and loaner craft ) welcome.

Thanks to the Steampunk movement, the Caver's Wrist
Sundials are now commercially available and selling well.

These make a much stronger personal statement than a
Rolex and are pretty much as useful these days as most
any other wristwatch.

Long ago, the caver's wrist sundials were just about as much
in demand as synthetic spent carbide.

Curiously, one of the original patents appears here.

Current thinking on the Frye Mesa Complex of our Prehistoric
Hanging Canals suggests even more incredibly utter stunning
engineering. Present beliefs appear reasonably credible but
definitely require additional field evidence.

The thoughts go something like this...

Apparently Frye Creek water was diverted above the falls somewhere
near N 32.74336 W 109.83994 to cross a divide at N 32.74474
W 109.83848 and merge with the water from the spring in Spring
Canyon at N 32.74572 W 109.84038.

Aerial photos suggest the modern Frye Mesa Trail exactly follows
this route and appears to have a totally consistent allowable topography
and a steep but quite uniform slope.

After merging water sources, a simple switching apparently may have
allowed routing down Spring Canyon to form the source water for
the Allen Canal at N 32.78239 W 109.83558.

Or alternately, may have been routed under the present Frye Canyon
Road to eventually form braided channels at N 32.75997 W 109.81554
to a presumed ponding area at N 32.76003 W 109.81144 where
further diversion allowed a split between the Robinson Canal at
N 32.78461 W 109.79329 and the counterflowing HS Canal at
N 32.75804 W 109.81510.

The relationship between the HS Canal and a required source for
the Golf Course Canal remains tenuous but seems the best Ockhams
Razor candidate. As does any relationship with the Blue Ponds.

A modern "steal the plans" pipeline adds credibility to the Frye
Road projected routing above. The trail itself also suggests "borrow
the blueprints" as it is easy to walk you or your horse up a filled in
canal.

Your participation ( and funding! ) welcome.

Repeated averaging can be a useful way of smoothing noisy
multiple data points, and eventually can approach something
like a Gaussian low pass filter.

Consider points a through h. Averaging the first two will give
you...

( a + b ) / 2

And averaging the average of the first three gives...

( a + 2b + c ) / 4

Averaging the average of the average gives...

( a + 3b +3c + d ) / 8

And again and again...

      ( a + 4b + 6c + 4d + e  ) / 16
  ( a + 5b + 10c + 10d + 5 e + f ) / 32

And our result seems to be approaching a Gaussian
smoothing. You can repeat this as much as you
want or have the patience for..

Note that this works best with lots of points, because
the beginning and ending values will not be smoothed
quite as much as the midrange ones.

More on filtering here.

Got an email asking whether two point or four point barbed
wire was a better choice for speaker connections, compared
to the usual gold plated and oxygen free wire.

Little known is that either type of barbed wire gives a
much better soundstaging, reduced midrange granularity
and better bass speed.

But because they are sharp, barbed wire connections
tend to raise the pitch of your music. This can be
compensated by placing a flat ribbon cable in parallel.

Full details here.

Our Scamming a Student Paper ancient Resource Bin
column should still remain amazingly current and useful,
once you update the main research link to Google.

The key secret to a winning paper or report, of course
is to make it as thick as possible. And the little known
and even lesser used way to do this, of course, is to use
thick paper.

I guess it is way past time to reveal a deep dark
secret for this posting. Of the sixteen suggested
research topics, fifteen are guaranteed to get you
and A. The sixteenth is guaranteed to get you an F.

But which? Why, the one that seems the most likely
and the most interesting, of course.

Additional fiendishisms here.

Here's a workaround for the Raspberry Pi GPIO 3.0 Wedge
connectors breakout adapter that won't fit a standard nylon
breadboard. As we found out here.

Clip the easternmost ground pin pair. Clip the westernmost
3V3 pair. The wedge will now fit popular breadboards.

You have two other ground pins, either of which can be
externally jumpered to a supply rail if you want to. And, if
needed, a one inch jumper can be soldered to the 3V3 pins
and plugged into a different supply rail.

It has become obvious to me that our bajada hanging canal
discoveries to date have clearly become utterly unique and
world class prehistoric energy efficiency engineering and
would  appear poised to  dramatically alter significant portions
of what is known of southwestern archaeology.

To date most of the project research has only involved two
totally unfunded and nearly retired individuals, one of whom
normally lives many hundreds of miles away.

Here's some of the stuff I would like to see happen...

1. Funding for larger and more formal
    discovery and exploration programs.

2. Improved awareness among southwestern
    archaeological professionals.

3. Expanded additional publication in higher
    level quality journals and online services.

4. An ability to mentor younger participants.

5. Continued research of mystery canal portions,
    especially the counterflowing HS canal.

6. Resolution of prehistoric origins for pioneer
    and historic canal rework.

7. Threat mitigation, especially SunZia, Safford,
    and ADOT.

8. Significant new use of aerial survey devices.

9. Continuance and improvement of mapping programs,
    most especially flyable KML.

10. Much greater involvement of EAC, hiking club,
     and Gila Watershed Partnerships.

11. Detailed mapping of each individual canal complex.

12. Improvement and expansion of online services,
      availability, and awareness.

13. Additional tours when and where appropriate.

14. Finding those missing canal gaps, sources,
     and destinations.

15. Extensive video recording and many additional
      photographic images.

Please dump all of your spare Draganflys in my driveway.
And contact me for any involvement you can assist with.

Awesomely outstanding. http://www.americanradiohistory.com/
is in the process of building up a superb collection of historic radio,
broadcast, hobby electronics, and similar magazine reprints. Plus
bunches more.

Zillions of them!

Most are higher quality scans that are fully searchable. Much of my
early reprints are newly available here. Kilobaud is missing but
separately can be found in part here. They DO have early Byte
Magazines! Midnight Engineering also remains missing.

Many of my reprints are available on my website. Particularly here,
Plus ebooks here and videos here. I'm in the process of adding
more as time and funding and sponsorship permit.

Modern Electronics remains conspicuous by its absence. I
would hope it would soon get added.

The latest issues of Electronics Now are also not yet scanned.
I suspect this may have something to do with copyright expiration.

A separate problem I have with EN: Sometime between 1992 and
2001 ( 97? ) believed to be in an April issue was a perpetual motion
"magic lamp" that spectacularly showed the problems with
Beginning EE student Blunder 0001A, namely confusing
average and RMS values for strange waveforms.

Can you find a reprint of this? Or at least tell me which year it was?
Plus the appropriate letters columns two or three month's later.

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

I am usually fascinated by odd math transforms. Sometimes
they can give you a totally different approach to a problem,
and other times they just may be useless fun.

In our Magic Sinewave Calculator, the breakthrough trig
identity that ridiculously simplified and sped up calculations
was...

cos(a+x) = cos(a)cos(x) - sin(a)sin(x)

Now, if you are near a solution, x will be small and sin(x)
will be x - x^3/3 + ... or nearly x, while cos(x) will end up nearly
1. Which tells us our improved closest guess for small x is...

        cos(a+x) is approximately cos(a) - x*sin(a)

and since you already know cos(a) and sin(a) from your
previous trial and they are constants, the above result
forms a trig free linear equation! One that ridiculously
simplifies and speeds up the Magic Sinewave Calculations.

A second cute transform involves cubic splines. While normally
expressed as x = At^3 + Bt^2 +Ct + D, you can make this
expression "cube free" by changing it to (((At) + B)t + C)t + D.

And similarly for y.  

Yet another transform that I just ran across, and the reason
for this blog entry is that...

        sqrt(a^2 + b^2) = b*sqrt(1 + a^2/b^2)

You can trivially prove this by multiplying both terms by
b^2/b^2 and simplifying.

I'm not too sure what good this is these days, but it
apparently simplified slide rule vector calculations and
made them a lot more accurate.

We usually answer our phone with "4073", which solves the
problem of using the same phone both personally and for a
business. Another benefit is that this forces scamsters to
loose their place in the script. And forces "hello" recognizing
autodialers to befuddle themselves.

Normally, you want to get rid of scamsters as quickly as possible,
because they are stealing your time. And the foremost rule of a
scamster is to never, never, NEVER terminate any call.

But sometimes it is fun to mess with their head. Or at least run
a stick over the bars. Just be sure you do not piss them off to
the point where they can start a vendetta against you.

One of our favorites is when they ask you "Is this a home or a
business?". To which, of course, you reply "Yes it is. Thank
you for asking".

Another favorite is to say "you have the wrong number" From
which they start an argument. You exactly repeat "you have the
wrong number", only louder, slower and lower in pitch. From which
they intensify their argument. You then follow up with "I am sorry
about your hearing problem."

Another ploy is to tell them this number is on a national do not call
list and they have just committed a felony. "Please stand by while I
transfer you to the Hualpai County Sheriff's Office for your
arraignment" Then make your fire pager beep twice.

Arizona, of course, does not have a Hualpai County, but it sure sounds
like they might be able to use one.

Yet another ploy when they say "Hi. I am Jan from American
Veeblefeltzer Enterprises" is to reply "I think I found your problem."

Somehow the name "Elmer" has gotten onto the scamster lists
in association with our phone number. Who does not exist.

If they ask to talk to Elmer, I'll usually respond that "I'd
like to connect you but Elmer is doing five to ten in Fort Grant
for blowing away the previous scamster -- favorite expletive
here - who tried to con him.

How to tell an extroverted engineer: They stare at your
shoes rather than their own.

A third party SPICE analysis of a Magic Sinewave inverter
suitable for smaller pv panels can be found here.

Oops.

Some of the Raspberry Pi breakout adapters listed here do NOT
fit most of the more common white nylon breadboards!

GPIO Extension Board V3.0 in particular.

Apparently some of the other versions fit just fine. Crucial is a
spacing between the + and ground leads of 0.15 inches.

Some adapters have their supply pins on 0.1 inch centers, while
most of the more popular breadboards space their supply
pin rows by 0.15 inches.

I'm still looking to find anything that fits.

Watch this detail!

One utter time wasting activity I find incredibly entertaining
and fascinating is a daily Google search of "Marijuana News".
Which, on a slow day, typically produces just over 800,000 hits.

Of these, there appears to be a bare daily minimum of one or two
significant new steps positively advancing to full legalization.
To me, this appears to be well beyond any "tipping point" and
that terms like "overwhelming", "avalanche", or "torrent"
might seem to reasonably soon apply.

Sometimes I look at things in a different and highly perverse
manner. Which can occasionally provide odd insights, profit
opportunities, or simply different ways of viewing a situation.

So, what if...

What if...

What if most of the federal involvement to date was really nothing
but a US Marijuana Farm Price Support Subsidy? .

Clearly, their US Marijuana Farm Price Support Subsidy was and
remains the only known positive result of the total marijuana federal
actions to date.

Chances are that prices might drop somewhat if this subsidy payout
was eliminated.

Ferinstance, today's cotton price comes in at a ( really panicking
my neighbors! ) 62 cents a pound. Now, harvesting and ( especially )
ginning marijuana is a lot simpler, so we might project a government
subsidy free 59 cents a pound. Or about $295 per 500 pound bale.

Or about 3.7 cents per ounce. Or just over a tenth of a cent per gram.

This suggests to me that much of the current long term projected tax
revenue just possibly might  be somewhat overestimated.

But possibly only by a mere five orders of magnitude.

Partial 500 pound bales might end up being considered personal use.

The definitive video on all this, of course, appears here.
And, curiously, its rather obscure origin here.

"Black on black" subject areas in eBay or industrial or technical
photos can create a number of problems. Here's a typical subject.

In general, we "shoot" for shadowless photography, because most
shadows do far more harm than good. Unless they are carefully
attended to.

An early problem with black-on-black subjects is that the camera
auto focus will not work. Workarounds are to place the subject on
some high contrast text, or to back off on the distance for more
depth of field, or to use manual focus options.

The original part number and build date of the cylinder was an
almost illegible black on black stamping, so it was enhanced with
much more viewable mid-gray lettering in Paint.

The left port was almost illegible because of low contrast, so a
slightly reduced copy of the right port was substituted. In
extreme cases, double, or triple, or more exposures can be
used to enhance critical areas. This technique is most useful
when a subject needs brightened without burning out any
labels. Ditto for meter face enhancement.

Burnout and shading issues on the actual cylinder were dealt
with by cutting and pasting desired areas over the problem
ones. Hint: raising or lowering the pastes by a pixel or two can
dramatically improve the final match.

The curved cylinder and rod ends were dark and murky due
to largely unavoidable shadows and shading. There's a little
known and seldom used quadratic shape maker in Paint
( second from the top left ) that can make perfect adjustments.
Draw the true edge first in a highly contrasting color and
then ( at full magnification ), retouch the individual edge
pixels as needed.

Consulting and custom image postproc services available.

There's a number of Prehistoric Hanging Canal events
upcoming and planned for the Week of October 18th. You
are welcome to participate in any or all of them.

A rare midweek tour is planned Tuesday and Wednesday
the 14th and 15th and should include both Dr. James Neely
and a number of other noted Southwestern archaeologists.

A second tour is planned Saturday and Sunday the 18th and
19th and likely will cover some of the same canals, but
this time with a different collection of noted Southwestern
archaeologists.

The Tuesday and Saturday events might be followed by an
afternoon Meet and Greet at Juanitas.

And Saturday night in the 18th in the Jupiter room of
Discovery Park at 6:30 , I'll be talking on a collection of hanging
canal images. Other speakers may also be present, but
the plans for them remain fluid. The lecture(s) is/are free.

You can preview parts of the talk here.

You can email me for more details.

Well, since you asked...

Yes, I am a card carrying member of the Guru and Swami's
Union local #144.

Oops.

I gambled big time and lost on some locked "contents of
cabinets" at a pc manufacturer's auction. Inside were
hundreds of thousands of dollars of brand new but presumably
now worthless aerospace circuit boards, panels, and flexible
connectors.

Typically smt era.

The chances of finding a "real" use for these is slim to
none. But, before putting them on the Alvin Pile, I do
have them up on eBay at just under ten cents each.

Uses: Museum exhibits. Tech lecture show and tells.
Cast-in-place table tops or bars. Video and Sci Fi props.

And all sorts of artist stuff such as wall hangings or high
tech sculptures.

A typical board may look like this. Then again, it
may not.

There may be some gold, but not remotely enough to
economically recover.

You presently have your choice of "mostly similar",
"mostly different", or "some of each" And "boards",
"panels" or" flex". Personal inspection and high grading
welcome. Bunches of shipping costs can be saved by
throwing these in your SUV.

Locked cabinets can spectacularly pay off. After all,
"they" put the lock on for a reason.

Nearly all units are presently packed in poly wrap.
You can email me for further details.

Machine language compiled from an assembler is an
essential route towards a Raspberry Pi app if you need
something that runs as fast as possible or if ultra
precise timing or highly unusual coding is essential.

Two useful books to get started are Raspberry Pi for
Dummies and Raspberry Pi Assembly Language. An
essential tool for hardware apps is a breakout
connector. These are readily available on eBay and
elsewhere on the web.

I'm in the process of porting our Magic Sinewaves over
to the Pi. I've found the pi's capabilities, addressing modes,
and instruction set absolutely exceptional. The only
tiny bit of klutziness I've found so far is that you cannot
nest subroutines without going to some nonobvious extra code.

A second limitation apparently needed for extreme speed is
that pipelining presents complications in exactly timing machine
language instruction sequences.

There is a hidden high high speed timer in the Pi that clicks
along at an astonishing 256 megacounts per second at a
full 32 bit resolution. This solves several PIC era magic
sinewave problems in that it further reduces the real
world low harmonics, greatly simplifies coding by eliminating
timing"pinch points", getting rid of embedded factored specific
timing loops, and  allows one file oriented identical routine
to access hundreds or even thousands of combined amplitude
and frequency magic sinewaves.

Usual access is...

ldr r1,=84625
bl wait

If you are coming here from 6502 country, .ldr is sort of a LDA #xx
load the accumulator immediate and bl is somewhat similar to a
JSR subroutine jump. Except that the 6502 is swift enough to
be able to nest its subroutine calls without fancy help.

Amazingly, many of the fundamental concepts found in my
6502 era free Machine Language Programming Cookbooks
ebooks remain in part more or less applicable to the pi.

Some previous archaeological cloud projects for you on our
hanging canals have been listed here, here, here, here, and here.

Let's try a SIXTH archaeological cloud. Very much for real.

This is your opportunity to potentially make some world
class archaeological  prehistoric hanging canal discoveries. 
It might go something like this...

At your own risk and expense and following normal 
Upper Sonoran snake season 4WD TEAM procedures 
and techniques for a rather strenuous 7 hour  dayhike...

Using this and something like this, go between N 32.75385
W 109.78278 and N 32.75385 W 109.78278 to see if this is
in fact a previously unexplored prehistoric branch portion
of the Deadman Canal complex.

If so, trace and link the canal eastward to the main prehistoric
hanging Deadman Canal here at N 32.75026 W 109.79621.

Then attempt to find the relationship between this canal and
Rincon Canyon. In particular trying to find out if this is in fact
the presently unverified source of the Twin East Canal at
N 32.76785 W 109.73773 .

Finally, there are great heaping bunches of braided somethings
due north of the original exploration area. Try to determine
whether these are game or cattle trails, some even more-than-
usually-bizarre CCC busywork, or are in fact are an ( unlikely )
genuine stunning prehistoric agricultural development.

This area involves very strenuous hiking or very creative ATV
work. Note that the usual return trip is very much uphill.  

Record pictures and GPS locations. And report here.

Yet another example of one point perspective can be
found here. This is an even more restrictive format we
might call centered one point perspective. While its use
is rare, it can really look good on a highly restricted class
of images.

Extra care is required during photography to be centered
and have the predominate horizontal lines as near as
horizontal as possible.

The image is then sent to our Architect's Perspective
Utilities to make the intended vertical lines truly so.

Dominate horizontal lines are then further treated by
isolating and improving a very short portion of them.
They then get "chased" east and west to form a complete
demarking line.

Should any vertical line alignment issues remain, they also
can be small area selected and chased truly north and south.

The item then can have all its red=255 pixels reduced
in saturation and then get red=255 outlined for use
by our auto backgrounder and vignetter. Internal
and any undercut areas can be separately identified.

The top had some shading issues, so the left half was
optimized and then flipped.

It is extremely difficult to avoid shadows and shading on
the front panel, so the panel color was unified to match
the middle and best tint.

It is extremely important to improve the image as much as
possible, yet still honestly portray the item condition.

The item is up on eBay. Consulting services available.

For most individuals and small scale startups, patents are virtually
certain to result in a net loss of time, energy, money, and sanity.   

One reason for this is the outrageously wrong urban lore involving
patents and patenting. A second involves the outright scams which
inevitably surround "inventions" and "inventing". 

A third is that the economic breakeven needed to recover patent costs
is something between $12,000,000.00 and $40,000,000 in gross sales.

It is ludicrously absurd to try and patent a million dollar idea.

Much more on all this in our Patent Avoidance Library.
And this link collection.

Key papers include...

The Case Against Patents
Patent Horror Stories
When to Patent
How to Bust a $650 Patent.

As this search suggests, new wind farm projects are in
deep trouble and are being canceled in droves.

To me, it appears the main cause was some outrageous
subsidies being discontinued and thus no longer available
for big time ripoff scams.

Some more detail here.

But other factors include (1) Machinery and equipment
costs skyrocketing, compared to dramatically dropping
PV panel prices; (2) Many of the selected sites having
been selected politically rather than scientifically; (3)
radical reductions in natural gas prices owing largely
to fracking; (4) Local NIMBY issues and popular
opposition; (5) Environmental concerns such as
bird whacking and people noise, vibration stress, and
aesthetic complaints .

To me, the key issue is whether an alternate energy
scheme has the potential to truly become renewable
and sustainable, generating net useful energy.

At present, the price goal range would appear to be near
a subsidy free and "paint it green" free ten cents per
kilowatt hour.

Some existing wind sites have in fact approached
this value.

PV appears poised to shortly approach its equivalent
value of twenty five cents per peak panel watt for
utility scale projects .

Much more here.

Some previous archaeological cloud projects for you on our
hanging canals have been listed here, here, here, and here.

Let's try a FIFTH archaeological cloud. Very much for real.

This is your opportunity to potentially make some world
class archaeological prehistoric hanging canal discoveries. It 
might go something like this...

At your own risk and expense and following normal 
Upper Sonoran snake season 4WD TEAM procedures 
and techniques for a moderate but not extreme 4 hour 
dayhike...

Using this and something like this, go to N 32.80245
W 109.78926 and see if it is in fact a portion of the
Robinson Ditch.

If so, trace it north and south as far as possible.
With goals of linking the known  upmesa portion
and finding the canal's presumed destination
somewhere in the Robinson Flat area.

Record pictures and GPS locations.

If not, go upmesa as far as required to link the
obvious main portion of the Robinson Ditch and
separately proceed tracing it northward.

A related project is to try and prove there is or is
not an ( unlikely ) eastern branch linking or possibly
forming the Golf Course Canal somewhere in the
neighborhood of N 32.79851 W 109.78157.

The main canal route is clearly but questionably marked
on the topo map.

Note that the 4WD tracks near N 32.80554 W 109.77593
may need some shovel work. Use caution.

We looked at some one point perspective tricks here.

Newer is another example with its original here and its
final here. This one can be done without using my
perspective utilities.

Sometimes a "minor partial repair" scheme can quickly
give you highly useful results.

You first rotate the image so the center dominate
line ( the top front edge ) is truly horizontal. Then
you fudge the upper and lower dominate horizontal
lines ( the top rear edge and the front bottom ) in
Paint so they are truly horizontal. You do this by
modifying and sharpening the image to background
edges. Only a minor adjustment is needed for this
particular image.

Then you adjust the left and right lower front edges so
they are truly vertical rather than slanty trapezoidal.

By one of the most astounding coincidences that
sometimes infest this blog, this instrument just
happens to be up on our eBay store.

One of our apparent rules for eBay success involves maintaining
a 30:1 or higher SBR or sell buy ratio. Per details found in
various resources linked here.

As we've seen many times, such high SBR's are fairly easily
reached through online industrial auctions often involving contents
of cabinet or contents of room lots. As offered by these and
similar sources.

Your own secret supply resources can be created for you
per these details.

Keeping your inventory costs super low is thus crucial. A rule
we try to follow is to make sure that 95% of your bids are
rejected and outbid by others.

The secret insider trick to making this work, of course, is to
always bid on TWENTY TIMES as much stuff as you could
possibly use.

A related rule in any online auction is to always bid about 130
percent of your absolute maximum ONCE very late in the
auction, but NEVER so late that it trips any vile and obscene
auto extensions.

And, of course, to NEVER get into a pissing contest with
another bidder.

Brown's Gas seems to be once again trying to reincarnate itself.
As usual through its manic fan club at the Church of the Latter Day
Crackpots.

Meanwhile, here is where you go for the insider secrets of How
to Totally Trash an Onboard Vehicle Electrolysizer.

Boo. Hiss.

A rather impressive potential electrolysis breakthrough has been
totally trashed by a "not even wrong" press release in which
those lacking in engineering expertise could mistakenly conclude that
all you need to solve the hydrogen car economy is a single AAA cell.

Yes, they did apparently find a way to somewhat increase the
efficiency and reduce the cost of electrolysis used for chemical
apps, industrial refining, and related non bulk energy uses.

Per this paper.

What they don't mention is that electrolysis is inherently a low
voltage process that they only made slightly lower. A useful
non-demo electrolysizer would still take tens of thousands of
amperes of current. Or its equivalent energy in stacked cells.

Equal to your entire town's supply of AAA batteries placed in
series or parallel.

One more time: There is a fundamental thermodynamic principle
called exergy that absolutely guarantees that hydrogen for
vehicle or other bulk energy from grid, pv, alternator ( and certainly
not primary batteries ) flat out ain't gonna happen.

For the simple reason that electrolysis is the process of
converting very high value energy into very low value
energy. And is pretty much the same as 1:1 exchanging
US dollars for Mexican Pesos.

Much more here.

Magic Sinewaves are a new class of mathematical functions that allow
the synthesis of digital power sinewaves with any arbitrary number of
low harmonics efficiently forced to precisely zero in theory and to astonishingly
low levels ( -65 decibels or better ) in practice.

Our magic sinewave library can be found here, an incredibly fast and
powerful calculator based on a sneaky trig identity here, and an
independent third party researcher here.

Present work involves translating these to the Raspberry Pi. The
disadvantage, of course, is a much higher cost than using a PIC.

But there are otherwise overwhelming advantages...

Amplitude and frequency setting now combined.
Real world harmonics can now be even lower.
One memory card can hold zillions of sinewaves.
Filtering simplification through different "n" values.
More of solution can now be standard hardware.
Research tools can now be more readily available.
Different "flavors" of magic sinewaves easily compared.
Reduction of pinch points through higher delay resolution.
Cleaner and more simplified coding.

The innermost secret to computing magic sinewaves is being able to
quickly calculate extremely precise long time delays. Preferably to
one machine cycle precision. This is well beyond any higher level
language, and the Adrino sometimes plays jitter tricks for optimization
in how it plays with its instruction set. But it does have a jitter free
high resolution time delay that seems ideal for Magic Sinewaves.

Here's what the key code for one n=10 quadrant might look like.

loop:
# quadrant one (0 through 90 degrees)
str r2,[r4]
ldr r1,=96040
bl wait
str r6,[r3]
ldr r1,=11658
bl wait
str r2,[r4]
ldr r1,=84625
bl wait
str r2,[r3]
ldr r1,=23113
bl wait
str r2,[r4]
ldr r1,=73662
bl wait
str r2,[r3]
ldr r1,=34160
bl wait
str r2,[r4]
ldr r1,=63361
bl wait
str r2,[r3]
ldr r1,=44596
bl wait
str r2,[r4]
ldr r1,=53934
bl wait
str r2,[r3]
ldr r1,=54215
bl wait
str r2,[r4]
ldr r1,=45596
bl wait
str r2,[r3]
ldr r1,=62801
bl wait
str r2,[r4]
ldr r1,=38560
bl wait
str r2,[r3]
ldr r1,=70106
bl wait
str r2,[r4]
ldr r1,=33034
bl wait
str r2,[r3]
ldr r1,=75813
bl wait
str r2,[r4]
ldr r1,=29213
bl wait
str r2,[r3]
ldr r1,=79518
bl wait
str r2,[r4]
ldr r1,=27255
bl wait
str r2,[r3]
ldr r1,=40407
bl wait

# more quadrants here

An executive guide to magic sinewaves can be found here, and the
secret insider tricks to achieving three phase compatibility here.

At present, magic sinewave research funding is a tad on the thin
side. Your active participation would be more than welcome.

Consulting and seminars available.

Free online copies of Ruthroff's classic broadband transformer
paper can be found here.

Got a helpline call [ (928) 428-4073 ] asking how to encode special
Eastern European  characters into a PostScript font.

The key document is called Roman Font Re-Encoding Issues
available free as Adobe Technical Note #5125. The big
appears as the Adobe Reference Manual. Special font
characters can also be done as Glyphs if they are not
already precoded.

My own PostScript stuff appears here, with my Gonzo
Utilities here and here. An ancient video here. And great
heaping bunches of PostScript stuff here.

One of many sneaky tricks in Gonzo is the ability to
overstrike characters with the |o command. This
lets you add a canyon tilde to a font where it is not
normally available, or else complement a logic variable
by putting a horizontal line above it.

The seminal Richard Feynman physics lectures are now freely
available online.

My favorite part is where you cannot tell if a uniform magnetic field is
rotating or not because there are no such things as magnetic lines.

Richard Feynman was a bongo drum player. While inventing quantum
mechanics, building the atomic bomb, cracking safes, solving the
Challenger tragedy, teaching at Cal Tech, and playing practical jokes.

Two standard methods to compare energy density are by volume
as in watthours per liter or by weight as in wathours per kilogram.

Gasoline is often a standard of comparison at 9600 watthours per
liter and 13,500 watthours per kilogram. Lithium batteries only
can normally provide 250 watthours per liter or 350 watthours
per kilogram. Raw unstrored STP hydrogen gas theoretically
offers 39,000 watthours per kilogram but only a ludicrous
2.7 watthours per liter.

But the 39,000 watthours per kilogram is utterly useless smoke and
mirrors. Energy density by weight is only of interest for extraterrestrial
apps and is totally worthless otherwise. Ferinstence, if a miracle
liquid equal to the gasoline volumetric energy density but infinite
kilogrammetric density became available and used, its effect
would be to reduce a vehicle's weight by something like a spectacular
"golly gee mister science" thirty pounds!

A further crucial problem is that the 39,000 watthours per kilogram is
the UNCONTAINED energy density of hydrogen. When containment
devices and methods are considered, the energy density by weight
becomes ridiculously less than gasoline and drops dramatically as
the tank or whatever is emptied. And drops bunches further when
amortization is properly and fully considered.

Much more on all this here. And especially here and here.

We are in the process of revamping our inventory controls
on our eBay sales. Things were getting hard to find and
some items never seemed to get listed at all. And abject
trash was overwhelming our storage areas.

There are four elements of decent inventory control:
(1) an excel data base, (2) areas with known and strictly
limited contents, (3) The actual eBay listings, and (4)
a "secret" code line in each listing with findability docs .

Also important is a testing program that clearly resolves the
apparent condition of each offed item.

And most important is being willing to throw away any stuff
that for any reason does not meet your eBay standards.

More here.

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

The Ledford Canals located between  N 32.68456 W 109.76176
and N 32.69322 W 109.72125 are in a very difficult access area
that normally requires extensive hiking, major 4WD, or  ATV
access. These clearly have been adapted for pioneer cattle tank
use. And have not yet been thoroughly or completely studied.

One major goal should be seeking out additional evidence
of underlying prehistoric origins. There is little to no evidence
of modern concrete, rebar, or access roads and the canals
origins seem totally consistent with nearby ones that appear to be
clearly prehistoric.

There are several significant mesa falloff areas clearly visible
with their greener vegetation .  These need further study as does
the water use below the mesa edge requires further study. Better
mapping and GPS logging are also needed.

The related Metate Peak area also would seem to need further work..

Camera auto focus may not work all that great with a black
on black subject.

Several things to try is to place the object on a sheet of
high contrast text, to back the camera off and use a
smaller composition where depth of field is less critical,
or to place the object between a pair of items that are
good at autofocusing.

More here.

And here are the simplified steps involved in us doing a
decent eBay photo...

determine "best choice" suitability for now
decide camera or scanner
thoroughly clean item
setup lighting
prop or support as best view

compose image
take 15 megapixel picture
transfer to pc
crop somewhat oversize
rotate principal key axis to true vertical

correct architect's perspective
back off red two clicks
verify no unwanted true reds or whites
correct worst lighting defects
do any double, triple, and quadruple exposures

correct appropriate retouching
outline red to zero dropouts or punchthrus
do red inside fills and undercuts
crop to final border
knock out background & vignette

correct any punchthru glitches
resize to 1000 pixels wide
brighten and reduce gamma
sharpen two clicks maximum
save as jpg

backup to website
enter into ebay list.

eBay has started a new valet selling  program that makes
absolutely no sense to me and appears to me to be a
guaranteed recipe for utter and total disaster.

As we've seen here and elsewhere, a useful SBR sell buy ratio
for long term eBay seller success is best kept above 30:1. This
is equivalent to a 97 percent consignment rate. And is easily
and routinely achieved through "contents of room" and "contents
of cabinet" industrial online auction offerings.

The first big problem with the new service is that I find their SBR
utterly ludicrous at 1.42. The second are the inherent double
shipping costs. The third would be the staggering loses involved
in returning unsold items to the original seller. The fourth would
be the shipping delays and the relisting hassles of typically
far overpriced items. The fifth would be the gross overexpectations
typical of non-experienced eBay sellers.

The sixth would be "eat you alive" competition from eBay
sellers routinely using sane SBR's. And the seventh would be
the usual problems in dealing with the general public.

The bottom line: There are infinitely better merchandise sources
for a long term eBay seller to use.

A reminder that there is a fundamental reason why hydrogen
energy electrolysis from high value pv, grid, battery or alternator
sources is absolutely GUARANTEED to flat out never gonna happen.

The little known but thoroughly studied and documented reason is
called exergy. Exergy is a measure of the present economic value of an
energy source. More significantly, it measures the thermodynamically
reversible remaining energy recovery possible.

Virtually all processes significantly reduce exergy, An unstruck match
has a very high exergy, while the slightly warmer room after the
match is struck has an exceptionally low exergy, thanks to Carnot's
Law.

Electricity has exceptionally high exergy, while unstored hydrogen
gas has exceptionally low exergy. And that is before system amortization.

Electrolysis from most pv, grid, or alternator sources for bulk hydrogen
energy thus unavoidably destroys exergy. Big time. It is the equivalent
to 1:1 exchanging US Dollars for Mexican Pesos.

And thus nobody, but nobody could possibly be stupid enough to want to do this.

Much more here.

Google Chrome has a new free SpeedDial ap that basically gives
you a bunch of selectable home pages.

The first screen puts up as many thumbnails as you like.

Many people will do anything to save the environment.

Except take a science course.

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

Henry's Canal seems to only have been "half" studied to
date, with useful coverage only from N 32.73718 W 109.74223
to N 32 44.689’ W 109 43.717. This area is easily traced and
includes a modest hanging portion where the canal first leaves a
wash.

It is not clear whether the destination is a field at the latter above
GPS address or whether it merged with a previous version of the
Roper Lake Canal. The fact that there is a much more complex
and more highly engineered high "bypass" via the Marijilda Roper
path might suggest that Henry's Canal was an earlier version
that may have had significant problems meriting a major rerouting
or expansion.

The initial path from the presumed vicinity of the Marijilda Ruin
to the present survey beginning has not been accurately located.
There are hints of bits and pieces of canals in the area, but
they seem significantly smaller, disjointed, and of apparently
lower quality.

Present tasks are thus to find the "front half" of the Henry's
Canal, to resolve its destination, and to determine why an
alternate path seemed to be corrected.

Much more here.

A good technical reviews of the "new" WWVB can be
found here.

But interest in the potentially spectacularly improved new
phase coding format seems to me to be very slow in developing..

Xtendwave apparently has ES-100 and ES-200 chips only,
but these seem package less. A complete clock is also
supposedly separately in the works by a different
supplier. I've been unable to find further info or chip
data, and things seem to be dragging.

This link suggests big time financial problems.

"Old style" WWVB cards are being discontinued as well,
suggesting a total lack of interest or demand. Before the
new format changes, WWVB had a long history of unreliable
reception.

I'm wondering if cell phones largely replace the need for WWVB.

My take on all this way back when can be found here

Current work on the Robinson Ditch hanging canal centers on
the region from N 32.80197 W 109.78995 to N 32.80316 W 109.78879
per this acme mapper image.

It is not yet known whether this is in fact part of the canal route. Giving
the canal a pioneer topo name obviously implied historic use of some sort,
but the nature of the canal is virtually identical to 30 or more prehistoric
hanging canal examples. With no obvious modern upgrades.

There is also an unlikely possibility that this canal splits and heads east to
become the Golf Course Canal. The southern extension of the Golf
Course Canal remains a major enigmatic mystery.

Similarly, the original destination of the Robinson Ditch remains unknown
but seems restricted to the Robinson Flat area. Other Robinson mysteries
remaining are the early routing from a presumed source as the spring in
Spring Canyon. And the presumed "high route" following the HS
Canal split.

A review of pioneer journals and documents might prove interesting.

Field Mice Welcome. More here. With an ongoing blog right here.
A mid-week tour is planned October 14th and 15th

Here's the steps we go through to list an eBay item...

Triage, clean, test, and verify as best listee now.
Photograph, postproc, and save image.
Research current value, demand, and competition.
Find best useful helping third party web link.
Start "sell similar" from best previous.

Pick appropriate store and eBay categories.
Add longest possible title.
Pick and expand condition. Avoid "used".
Clear old galley picture; add new one.
Add more photos only when genuinely useful.

Flush worthless "removes".
State quantity available as lead bold.
Add selling text from general to specific.
State origin, provenience, and accurate condition.
Provide useful third party web links.

Restate exactly what is being offered.
Include any needed cautions or warnings.
Add Paypal boilerplate.
State exact and accurate shipping charges.
Provide links for more personal help.

Add "secret" code line-for location, pix url, etc...
Enter price and optional buy it now.
Update ship info. Use priority mail when possible.
Verify charges to avoid unwanted selections.
Carefully proof, especially any unremoved text.

Actually click on the list tab.
Verify links and typos.
Create an inventory tag. Forward to stock.
Have third party reproof and enter as inventory.

You can find listing examples here. And more help here.

It is a lot more fun to go to auctions and to post proc pictures
than it is to list stuff on eBay.

As a result, we seem to have stashes as much as TEN YEARS
old that have never been listed.

Important new rules are...

If you touch it, deal with it completely.
Aim for a 28 day cashout and 15 month sellout.
If you photo it, postproc it and list it.
Avoid storing anything not listed.
Tighten inventory control dramatically.

Be able to quickly find everything.
Thoroughly test everything testable.
Sell only the best, flush the rest.
$9 lot, $70 total minimums.
Continually ask "Why hasn't this been listed?"

Give potential higher income items priority.
Be willing to cheaply relist for weeks or months.
Start with high listing, then slowly drop to reasonable.
Minimize rental fees and other forward obligations.
Be generous with full refunds; block bad buyers.

Flush problem items for whatever reason.

Some CCFL fluorescent sleezoids have changed the shape
( and raised the price ) of their lamps to try and convince
you they really are LED's.

Which raises an interesting point and an obviously missed
marketing importunity:. An old lightbulb in a typical ceiling
fixture is more or less omnidirectional. Which means that
about half of its light inefficiently goes "up" to light the
ceiling.

But LED's can easily be made unidirectional or have any
pattern you like. Why not make a version that shines
"mostly down", without going to actual spotlights or
excessively narrow patterns ?

The perceived room illumination should appear
substantially higher for the same energy input.

Nearly all newsgroups have either vanished completely or
have become a rude and vile ( and utterly useless ) shadow
of their one time greatness. With social media being the
apparent culprit of their demise.

sci.energy.hydrogen is thankfully dead, with the word having 
finally gotten out that exergy flat out guarantees the hydrogen
economy is a ludicrous joke that will be stillborn at best. Not to
mention that outright scams are at long last being seen for their
"gross and egregious fraud" actuality.

Sadly, alt.marketing.online.ebay has become all but useless. But I
still find sci.electronics.design enormously useful. At which you
can often find any answer to any question.

Also remaining highly useful are comp.lang.postscript and
comp.sci.rasberry.pi

An eBay auction is somewhat similar to a classic Vickrey
Auction in that the final price is determined by the SECOND
highest bidder plus the current bit increment. Many online
auctions will also use proxy bidding but will add a vile and
despicable automatic auction extension to the mix.

Here is the auction strategy that works for us, both online or
eBay: Proxy bid 125% of your absolute maximum and do
so only ONCE very late in the auction. But NEVER so
late as to trip an auto extension.

There normally can be only one of two possible results -
either you win the auction - usually for a lot less than you
really are willing to pay. Or you are laughing yourself silly
over that epsilon minus who just badly overpaid.

Three to five minutes before any auto extension trip time
is usually optimal, as this allows for password hassles or
multiple lots that close at or near the same time.

The reasoning on 125% of your maximum is that almost
always you will either be badly outbid or you will win
for significantly less than you were willing to pay. On
the average, your actual win price should be less than your
intended maximum.

You can think of the extra 25% as dollar cost averaging,
in which most of the buys are enough under your real
maximum that they more than cover any single excess.

The reasoning on NEVER tripping an extension is
that it reveals your intent and starts nearly always
unwinnable pissing contests. There also can be
conflicts with multiple closures.

It also pays to bid in strange penny increments. Of
utmost importance is recognizing the "don't go there"
currency thresholds. People do not like to break a
twenty, hate to break a hundred, and refuse to break
a thousand.

Thus, you should alway bid ABOVE a currency threshold.
Such as $21.29. Naturally, when listing or selling, you should
use $19.73 instead.

Much more here.

Picked up a bunch of interesting all-the-bells-and-whistles
traffic light controllers and got them up onto eBay. These
include bicycle lanes, walk-don't-walk, left turns, time of
day, emergency access, power backup, etc etc...

These are Legacy Econolite ASC/2S-2100 units removed
from service by a larger Arizona City. They are believed
functional and we guarantee them to be usable by an
appropriately trained traffic engineer. Units originally
sold for around $2500 each. A photo here.

There are several minor gotchas. The power is normally
input by way of a very fancy "A" connector. It can
also be found on J19 or on a modified power supply
connector.

We are also not sure of the status of the backup battery
jumper. It this was in the "on" position after removal from
service, the chances are the normal small lithium backup
battery may need replacing.

Unit only provides "medium power" I/O. Higher level
ac external drivers may be needed in typical uses.

These should be eminently hackable as a general purpose
automation controller, owing the the huge number of
inputs and outputs.

We have ten of these. We may be able to find some more.
Most include codes taped to them. Free programming manuals
are available here and free service manuals here.

And more help here.

How much photo retouching is "enough"?

I strongly feel that a minimum of 90 percent of your
picture taking and processing time should be spent in
postproc. Which has given us the finest photos on
eBay bar none.

But how much is too much? Here is an original photo,
its postproced version suitable for sale as a collectible,
and its total rebuild suitable for normal product sale
or for an ebook restoration.

"How much" very much depends on the funding and
the purpose of the postproc. A general guide for a
routine eBay quantity item sale might be "about the
same postproc as goes into a Time Magazine ad.

We'll first assume that you have unarguable IP
intellectual property rights to the subject photos.
OR that those rights are exceptionally mukry
enough through age, acquisitions, and bankruptcies
that you are highly unlikely to be hassled over them.

Or that the first sale doctrine lets you photograph and
use obviously protected media.

If the postproc is being used for an eBook rebuild,
the usual criterion is "How much can you afford?"
In the way of time and effort that you can put into
the project for the projected financial or ego return.

If the posproc is being used for an eBay "new other" subject,
the guideline should be to accurately represent the item
being sold. Distortion correction, sharpening, background
vignetting, lighting improvement, "cleaning" items that
will also be cleaned before shipment, etc, are normally
reasonably justified.

On the other hand, if the postproc is being used on a
collectible, the final result should still accurately and
honestly reflect the exact condition of the item being
offered.

Tools for our postproce include our Architect's
Distortion Corrector, our Auto Vignetting Backgrounder,
and our Bitmap Typewriter, along with this older tutorial.

Consulting services available.

It sure would be nice if someone would provide a
complete set of reprints to Popular Electronics, 
Radio Electronics, Electronics World, and even
Modern Electronics.

Scant bits and pieces can be found here and there.

I am in the process of restoring and uploading at
least some of my reprints here. And some of the
secrets of stunning precyber scan improving here.

Jeff Duntemann has reprinted the Carl and Jerry 
series here. And Michael Holly has some of the 
SWTP related stuff here.

Note that there are two different Electronics Worlds.
The one of interest here is a US magazine that started
off as Radio and TV News and became Popular
Electronics. There is also a British Electronics World
magazine that used to be Wireless World.

More recent reprints of Kilobaud can be found here.

Our architect's perspective routines can also be used
for one point perspective! Although the times and places
where this might be wanted may be limited.

We just uploaded a humongous public utility current
transformer to eBay. And as this image shows us, it
ended up as a good one point candidate.

Our perspective corrector normally makes corrections
horizontal line by horizontal line. So, you first do a
"regular" correction to make all vertical lines truly
vertical.

Next, you rotate the partially corrected image by 90
degrees and do a new correction. Then you rotate back.

One minor gotcha: If the second correction is narrower
at the top, you have to use a negative value for howmuchtilt.

I'm not sure what the exactly correct term for this projection is.
It may instead be dimetric or nearly so. At any rate, you have two
orthogonal and full scale X and Y axes, and the Z axes diminishes
somewhat diagonally into the image. Regardless, the projection is
eminently suitable for this particular subject.

Just noticed that there are slight differences in scale between the north,
south,. east, and west portions of the body. This can be corrected
simply by cutting and repasting the "hole" somewhat to the southeast.

This example also shows off our bitmap typewriter. Which gives
you the highest possible resolution and sharpness this side
of subpixel techniques.

More here. Consulting services available.

I was asked for my views on copyright. The present system,
of course is ludicrous and has the exact opposite of the 
intended initial purpose. It is also clearly in the process
of self destruction.

Copyright should BRIEFLY provide protection and income for
the INDIVIDUAL involved and nothing more. It should be
primarily based on common law copyright where anything
is immediately protected once it appears in tangible 
form. Free of fees or registration. 

For the INDIVIDUAL involved, copyright should initially be
for 34 months. Renewable only once and then only under
exceptional circumstances. 

For heirs, corporations, agents, or similar sleezoids, copyright
should be strictly limited to 17 months, nonrenewable under any 
circumstances. With MANDITORY transfer to the public 
domain afterward.

A Josh Billings quote, often wrongly attributed to Mark
Twain...

"I've never known an auctioneer to lie. Unless it was
absolutely convenient."

As we have seen here and here, not one net watt of pv
solar energy has ever been produced. And that net
energy sustainability and renewability can be predicted
some eight years after the average price of solar panels
drops under twenty five cents per peak panel watt.

The time delay being at least partially being caused by zillions
of new and unreturned investment dollars being thrown at
an obvious new breakthrough.

Amazingly, we are almost ( but not quite ) there. A few
panel buys are now showing up at thirty four cents per
peak panel watt, based on full container sales to utility
grade projects.

Also of interest is a new thermal solar development in Gila
Bend. This one gets rid of many of the "power tower"
problems ( like blinding pilots, scamming bureaucrats, bird roasts,
trashing local weather, and creating the highest structures in the
state ) and has an  enormous advantage over straight pv in that
energy can be stored for up to five hours.

And thus both runs in the dark and often meets peak demand hours.

Yet I feel that it is unlikely that solar pv will ultimately be
able to compete with pv on long term price and scalability.

More here.

Hewlett Packard aka Agilent is now Keysite Technologies.

One of the worst electronic test instrument secrets of all time
was that the last decent oscilloscope that HP ever built was the 130C.

For years and years, to them, "trigger" was a horse.

Despite all the "apologist" publications that think they see 
a future in books, I remain firmly convinced that the sudden
and complete demise of books will happen faster and more
spectacularly than anyone could possibly imagine.

No, decent readers are not here yet, and yes, the ludicrosities
of DRM and copyright have not yet been blown aside. But
it is just a matter of time. And ebooks are already outselling
dead tree ones by an ever expanding margin. The key point is 
that there are clearly fatal flaws in books as an info 
distribution method.

Flaws that are utterly and totally bypassed by electronic
media distribution. Let' s start with two subtle ones and
then go on to the obvious...

The first is the dirty little secret of the book industry:
Because of the Thor Decision, your federal government in
their infinite wisdom pays publishers to shred books. In
fact, more books have recently been shredded that were
destroyed during the entire dark ages. 

Overwhelmingly so.

This happens because the IRS ruled that back inventory
has to be carried at full value, rather than its scrap or
remainder value. Thus, any book that drops even a 
little bit in current sales popularity gets destroyed and 
becomes terminally unavailable. 

The second and not too unobvious secret is that students
are pissed over dragging around backpacks. And a revolt
against at least the heavier of them would seem in the offering.

Going to the more obvious, books cannot be full text 
searched. Books lack links. Adding color and images to books 
is expensive, but virtually free with electronic distribution.
Many books never sell and have to be destroyed. It takes
time and energy to haul books around or store them. Books can't
easily be read out loud. Most books are only read once. 

The total energy waste and carbon footprint of books 
utterly and totally overwhelms that of what goes into
the readers. While some quote a "twenty books to pay
for one reader's environmental impact", the average
reader can eventually be expected to provide access
to thousands or tens of thousands of titles. 

An utterly overwhelming superiority.

Electronic media is instantly available 24/7. Its storage
space and volume is negligible. Prep time is ridiculously
shorter and simpler. Revisions, updates, and corrections
are trivial.

A brick and mortar bookstore at best can stock something like 
5000 different titles in modest quantities. But even the
smallest and sleaziest of online suppliers today can provide
millions of titles in unlimited numbers of copies. And that
is before the upcoming petabyte revolution where all books
can be provided all at once on a single thumb drive. 

Acceptance of an eBook for publication is a certainty. As
opposed to a dead tree publisher who shall remain unnamed
who sat on one of my titles for over a year and then rejected
it because it was "not timely". 

There's finally accumulating outrage over scholarly pub
houses charging utterly outrageous prices for research that 
was paid for by your tax dollars in the first place. Open 
source publication is now well on the way to becoming
inevitably dominant.

On the other side of the fence, Book-on-Demand publishing
largely arrived stillborn. Its window has slammed shut. Owing 
to outrageous costs and the key problems of economical trimming 
and binding having never been addressed, let alone solved.

Our own eBooks can be found here and our classic reprints
here.

Once again expanded and updated our Gila Valley 
Dayhikes page. We are now up to 405 main entries.

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

Speaking of Apple computers, I seem to have THE
definitive stash of many hundreds of Apple IIe, Apple IIc,
and Apple IIGS computers, cards, drives, and such.

Plus a few commodores and even a rare pre Osborne I.

I'd like to clear these with a bulk sale that should
represent an outstanding investment opportunity.

Most of these are retired from high school service
and are fairly clean. Some appear ready to use,
while others may need some restoration of parts
recombinations.

The only Gotcha is the sale is for the lot and you
have to arrange your own shipping. These should
fit a pickup or a larger SUV and there is a U-Haul
literally on premises. A UPS Store type of competitor
can be found here, and outstanding shipping rates
can be found through U-Ship.

Estimated weight is around 900 pounds.
Volume would depend on the repacking.

Some photos can be found here, here, here, here, here,
here, and here. I am presently working up a complete
inventory and will publish it on eBay shortly.

We will gladly help you with loading. You can enail
me for further details.

We are currently dramatically cutting back on our unlisted
eBay items, combined with more testing and better inventory
controls.

One of the surprises of triaging away far too many items
that got away with being unlisted for far too long was to
discover a buried Osborn I computer!

A real Osborn I from the first production run! With a
serial number of #230. It is still untested and not quite
mint, needing a spacebar replacement, missing the vent
cover, and having its keyboard base painted the wrong
color. But appearing to be eminently restorable.

I'm not sure how close a readily findable Apple II
spacebar will work. I suspect some equalizer rework
may be needed as a bare minimum.

Osborne boot code is readily available free here. You
will, of course, need to translate this from your modern
download browser code to a single sided single density
5-1/4 inch floppy diskette. Much of the other Osborne
software should also be readily available online.

Please email me if you want to get in ahead of the
hoarders on this one.

The easternmost two Cluff Ponds are rather unusual in that
they clearly are at two different elevations. With the smaller
eastern pond being higher than the western one which seems
to act acting as an overflow route.

Which might suggest underlying prehistoric fields.

The larger pond presently has a pool measurable from Google
Earth of 3113 feet. The smaller eastern pond presently has a
pool of 3123 feet. There is a separating dam between the two
that has a half elevation channel cut through it, apparently
around 3118 feet.

The feeder canal slopes from 3140 feet, cleanly making it
a supplier from its Ash Creek source.

Apparently, when the big pond fills, there is backflow through
the separating dam, protecting the maximum allowable height.
On a recent visit, there was just enough rain to add water to
the smaller eastern dam that there was a counterflow, with
water barely flowing from east to west. This would seem highly
unusual.

Proving that the second Cluff Ponds canal does or does not
have prehistoric origins is proving problematical.

Canal #30 does have a well defined but abandoned historical
purpose in feeding two easternmost Cluff Ponds from Ash Creek.
There is no concrete or steel involved and there is no maint
road.

There are many potsherds in the area, at least one major
nearby ruin, and several smaller ones. The length and purpose
of the canal for prehistoric uses is rather obvious, and NOT
using it prehistorically would be highly conspicuous by its absence.

The area is also the "most riparian" of the known canal sites and
would be the easiest to develop as well. The engineering would
appear trivial compared to the other known canal routes.

Parts of the canal approach a two meter depth, but the total
excavation is much less than the aqueduct, the HS canal,
of the Allen Canal cut below the dam.

Acme Mapper does suggest a third canal in the area which
could become Canal #31 and which would tend to verify
#30 also being prehistoric. However, this week's attempt
at ground truth strongly suggested this is an abandoned
and ungraded vehicle two track. The slope, while quite
uniform, seems to barely miss being canal useful.

Approaches to resolving Cluff would be contacting
knowledgeable historians and historic records for the
area. And thoroughly mapping non-canal prehistoric
sites and artifacts in the area.

Just noticed that the latest solid stare drives are
approaching half a terabyte.

But why piss around with terabytes at all?
Let's just get into the petabyte era and be
done with it.

After all, there is no sane reason that ALL books
cannot appear on a single petabyte thumb
drive. Or All movies. Or All music. Or ALL
magazines.

Although a single drive for EVERYTHING might
have to wait for the upcoming Exabyte era.

I can see some interesting IP questions coming up
over this inevitable development.

The original to the Xylophone Duet can be found here.

Sally, our number two dog, got her coat so heavy and so
matted that we couldn't tell for sure if there was a dog
in there somewhere or not.

Don't know if it was a coincidence, but after a normal
trimming to normal dog fur size, she seemed to develop
an abject fear of thunder.

It turns out that this is fairly common and that there is an
"acupuncture like" cure called a ThunderShirt. Supposedly
the pressure of a jacket has an enormous caliming effect.

As might bunches of extra fur.

Its too early to tell for sure, but the ThunderShirt seems to
be both working and cost effective.

A reminder that there is a very easy way to get rid of .JPG
edge artifacts. Simply knock out the background and
replace it with a slightly mottled one.

The continuing changing colors prevent the usual "ghost
lines" from appearing.

Many examples appear in our eBay photos. There
is an automatic background mottler in our bitmap
typewriter. A collection of useful bitmap mottled
backgrounds appears here. And our automatic
background vignetter does the task semi-automatically.

Consulting services available.

A tutorial on the bitmap .BMP format can be found here.

We have a bitmap typewriter that can give you the finest
possible bitmap text resolution this side of using the
subpixel techniques discussed here, here, and here.

Two examples can be found here and here.

One minor gotcha: The present version of the bitmap
typewriter is intended for use with Ghostscript because
of Adobe's banning of diskfile reads and writes in
Distiller.

An internal upgrade at Fatcow caused our banner rotators
to not work for the last few days. Posting a directive error
instead.

The problem has supposedly been repaired.

Please report any further issues.

It turns out you have to specify the allowable downloading of
any less-than-usual filetypes in a AddType text/x-server-parsed-
html .htm .html .shtml .asp .psl.js format.

Fatcow is an associate of ours. To date their job ticket
approach to solving problems has been consistently
outstanding.

I was surprised to see that Android cell phones have dozens
of free aps that are electronic bubble level related.

These might prove barely useful for our hanging canal work
especially where canal slopes and routings need proven.

Most of the schemes are based on using the internal game 3-axis
accelerometer to measure the X and Y gravity acceleration
intensity. The tangent gives you the tilt and ( because of quadrature ),
the measured tilt is largely independent of the absolute
gravity acceleration

A tutorial with the underlying math can be found here.

Many interesting components can be found at Sparkfun

Canal #30 in Cluff Ponds is proving very difficult to establish
whether it does or does not have a prehistoric origin.

Its last use was clearly historic, providing water from Ash
Creek to one or two of two easternmost reservoirs. It
seems presently derelict. There is no iron, concrete,
or maint road. Nor any obvious use of heavy machinery.

But a maximum depth may exceed two meters. Which would
seem excessively atypical of prehistoric designs. .

There is a major ruin in the area, and wide distributions
of potsherds, both sparse and dense. IF this was NOT
a location for a prehistoric canal project, it certainly
would be conspicuous by its absence.

It certainly could serve as a "starter canal project" centered
on the most riparian and most workable of the southern bajadas.

Perhaps a thorough survey of prehistoric but non-canal
artifacts in the area could resolve the problem. There is
a hint of a possible second canal not yet verified that
clearly would have prehistoric potential.

Besides bailing #30 out.

There is also compelling evidence that quite a few of the
historic canals were based on "steal the plans". It certainly
is much easier to "dig out an old ditch" than it is to
engineer, design, and construct a new canal from scratch.

Tours and lectures available. Funds and Draganflys
welcome.

I was surprised to see that the flux inside rolls of solder
has a shelf life. Per these details.

The solder rolls we are selling on eBay should still remain
useful, but we have no idea how old they actually are.

They were current use aerospace surplus and we have
held them around a year or so. We will definitely
guarantee them useful.

Buying and selling old test instruments can be fraught with
peril. Especially on eBay where the acquisition and resale
shipping charges can eat you alive. Yes, opportunities
abound for certain items of certain ages, but random
instruments are likely to end up short.

Many instruments are now called Boat Anchors judging
by their extreme weight and their use inconvenience.
Ham radio operators who are the fans of boat anchors
sold at hamfests can usually be spotted by their extremely
long arms.

A good source for BA info can be found here. Most manuals
are now available free on the web, with originals typically
going for $25 and CD ripoff collections selling for as low
as $5 each. Many years ago, both HP ( Agilent ) and Tektronix
purposely placed nearly all of their legacy docs in the
public domain. An incredible stupidity involving Heathkit
has caused some problems, but web docs are rapidly now
re-emerging. Such as here, or here.

Yeah, some things have extreme value. Such as certain
HP and Tek gear, early computer collectibles, classic
General Radio and Shallcross gear, and even Western
Electric ancient electronic components.

There's little demand for integrated circuits that are
pre flash. Or chips of smaller memory capacity.
Unless you have MIL Spec originals in original
sealed packaging. These can be outrageously profitable
even justifying their usually slow sales rate.

But some items have no value whatsoever. Ferinstance:
CRT monitors except for legacy collectibles. Analog
TV Test equipment such as waveform monitors or
vectorscopes . Chart recorders or pen plotters with their
supply and maint hassles.

Older unstuffed circuit boards are largely useless,
even if you have the schematics for them. But the
parts that go into thru-hole boards can be very good
sellers indeed. Trying to salvage gold off the boards
is almost always dangerous, poisonous, and nonprofitable.

Pre ROHS stuff is not supposed to be used in new
production, especially anything involving lead or
mercury.

Sometimes stripping and rebuilding can recover hidden
value. I bid on a whole trailer full of "burned out" traffic
light controllers. Turns our that almost all of them had
overheated input caps and the solid state relays
were perfectly good $10 eBay sellers.

Surprisingly, some Tektronix gear has zero demand.
This includes most any oscilloscope based on a
storage tube or scan converter. Also, most of their
Doghouse scopes, with the 545 and 585 just barely
holding their own. 7000 series is a joke, and 5000
series is not even funny. Tek also had a bunch of Fourier
Analyzers based on Windows 3.0 or worse. These
typically have glacial and impossible to find software
combined with memory best described as mesmerizingly
awful.

Wet "slopping in the slush" darkroom stuff also has
zero interest, unless old enough to be collectible or
lenses salvageable for new uses. Interest in most anything
Polaroid is pretty much zilch. Nobody uses fiber optics
for anything local anymore.

Spectrum analyzers sell well IF they are newer ones that
use Fast Fourier Transforms for a dramatic speedup.
For some uses, sound cards can be substituted for a
"real" FFT machine. As can a VHF tuner.

Demand for oscilloscopes has dropped dramatically,
first because of much lighter hobby use and second
because of PC based USB units that are often much
cheaper and better.

Most vintage analog power supplies have gotten blown
out of the saddle by switchmode units that are ridiculously
smaller and lighter. And old network gear is klunky and
incompatible and way too slow. We've had replacement
phonograph needles listed for years with zero interest.

AC instruments that predated sane priced rms techniques.

Wall wart anythings are reaching end of life, standardizing
on cheap and better USB 5 volt 1 amp switchmode supplies.

Second tier "ham" test equipment such as Eico, Olsen,
B&K, Radio Shack and the rest of the gang has become relatively
worthless. Except for occasional rare mint Heathkits.

More on related stuff here and here.

I was surprised to see that the flux inside rolls of solder
has a shelf life. Per these details.

The solder rolls we are selling on eBay should still remain
useful, but we have no idea how old they actually are.

They were current use aerospace surplus and we have
held them around a year or so. We will definitely
guarantee them useful.

Speaking of test gear, we do have some highly collectible or
otherwise useful General Radio instruments newly up on
our eBay site.

The most impressive is a near mint copy of their #1863
Megohmmeter. Clones of these still sell new for $4300.00
each!

We also have a very rare, much older, used, and far cheaper
#1644 Megohmmeter in a larger and older package. Either of
these instruments can read to 1 TeraOhm ( ! ) and are
normally used for electrical insulation safety and
similar apps.

And we also have a classic Strobotac 1531A in clean used
condition and apparently fully working. This one does
have a minor hardware mod made to the handle. It can
be used to measure the speed of moving machinery or
for freeze frame and similar ultra speed photography.

We still get emails over accepting checks and VISA/MC.

We had accepted VISA/MC for many years. But since nearly
all of our sales are now Paypal, the minimum monthly charge
on VISA/MC clearly makes them noncompetitive.

As to checks, all they do is convert an instant and hassle
free transaction into one that may or may not take place
some place in the dark distant future.

We have gotten to the point where we feel that the
overwhelming majority of users of checks are felons,
flakes, and troublemakers.

To the point where you clearly label yourself one if you
even have to ask.

Additional eBay secrets here and auction secrets here.

I started working on my Kilobaud Reprints. You'll find
Clocked Logic III ( A CMOS Cookbook reprint ) here.

Some of these may not be the quality I am aiming for.
We have some spectacular restoration techniques for
Linotype era technical stuff, but there has to be enough
interest to justify the time required to generate any .psl
sourcecode .