Don Lancaster's What's New 2018 Blog

Please note that the Guru's Lair is best used with larger display systems. Especially for our many ebooks, classic .pdf files and high detail images.

Welcome to our Guru's Blog for 2018...

January 03, 2019
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

We just relisted our stunning Southern Oregon Gold Hill spectacular view property for sale with Chris Marshall of American Forest Management at (541) 664-9200.

20 acres. Find it here on Craig's List.

Price has been reduced to $7475 per acre. This is the last remaining large developable property immediately adjacent to the northern Gold Hill city limits. We have secured a full access easement for these 20 acres. Power and cable on the property. Legal description is T36 R3W S16 Tax Lot 400.

Attractive financing is now available. Mid-size city amenities are twelve minutes away at Medford. The property borders directly on the town of Gold Hill. The Rogue River is very close; beaches and mountains are only an hour away.

Here's a newer group of photos...

You can click expand these. Then click again. This steep to sloping parcel is immediately adjacent to the Gold Hill city limits and offers absolutely outstanding views.

It is in one of the most in-demand rural areas in the country, and has really great access both to recreation and to midsize city resources. Plus superb climate, low crime, and good schools. Here is a map. Property is the green rectangle "pointed to" by Thirteenth Street. You can click here for an aerial photo and flyby.

You can contact the owner directly by phoning (928) 428-4073 or don@tinaja.com .

Additional older photos here. More info here and here. Free guided tours are immediately available.

January 02, 2019
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Closed out the 2018 What's New file and started a 2019 one.

We are in the process of further reducing 404's and other link issues. Surprisingly, our malware detector and reporter tells us there are now far fewer script kiddies attempting to download invalid URL's in a quest to find vulnerabilities.

At present, our internal 404 rate is just over two percent, with the lion's share of these being malware attempts. This would seem close to an irreducible minimum.

We do have a few 404's intentionally left in our Hanging Canal paper images. These simplify the generating and processing of emerging new files. We are working on these on a daily basis.

Please report any other 404 issues.

January 01, 2019
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Reprints of our Psyctone story can be found here and here. With a youTube demo here and a JavaScript Synthesis approximation here.

This started out as an aerospace bet with a cellmate doing a million dollar study of then new pseudorandom sequences. I bet that I could get a ludicrously short sequence to squawk. And did so.

A partial tutorial here and here, with lots more on pseudorandom here, here, and elsewhere.

I never did find a n=19 near optimum solution. Was one ever found? How  about n > 31? Beyond this sneaky stunt? Please Tell me.

One sort of competitor ( I never thought so and was unaware of it before my publication ) can be found here with its JavaScript approximation here.

And the latest of TV TypeWriter modern rebuilds here.

December 31, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

There's some details involved with using this W3C URL verification software:

First, the process takes a long time since there is an intentional one second delay between queries.

Second, some sites have robot exclusion rules that it cannot check, so you will have to manual recheck each and every one of these.

Third, the process may return an obscure error message such as (500) after actually reaching the intended site. Chances are your user could not care less, but, once again, a manual check is needed.

Fourth, link redirects are reported. The most common of which is http: changing to https: You can decide whether fixing these is worth their considerable effort. Benefits are faster loads and a more secure web.

Fifth, pay particular attention to anchor problems in that they directly affect your user navigation.

Sixth, emails are locked out and not checked.

Seventh, if you have a wrong URL such as "here.", it will be reported as something like https://www.tinaja.com/here. The correct search term with Dreamweaver or whatever when searching would be "here.

Eighth, your report can easily be overwritten by newer browser activity. Wayward caches can also be a problem.

This is a really great service, but the key rules are to be patient, manually retest everything questionable, retest often, fix only what you feel is time and cost effective, and prioritize repairs on visitor probability.

December 30, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

One other detail in converting a .SHTML web file into acrobat .PDF: Navigation anchors require some extra effort per these details..

December 29, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

What ever happened to Carl and Jerry? You can still find their original hijinks here and here.

These days, Carl is now a universally despised and quadruply divorced gazillionare. And Jerry is now relearning to tie his shoes, purportedly owing to an inadvertent incident involving some specialty herbs and spices.

The back story on the series author remains amazing.

I guess I was in some ways very similar to the original Karl, albeit for real. Details here.

December 28, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Did I ever tell you my story with my involvement with the CIA? It took place somewhat after the Bay of Pigs incident.

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

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

He asked us what we were doing and we told him. Things then proceeded to get bizarre in that he in no manner could stop us or tell us what to do  because --------> he was not there!

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

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

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

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

Eventually many years later, the CIA involvement was admitted.

December 27, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Time for our usual end-of-year predictions...

Total elimination of "unintended consequence" federal price supports and marijuana farm subsidies dropping street prices under a cotton comparable 59 cents per pound. St5andardizing on 500 pound bales. More analysis here.

Recent declines in pv prices continuing unabated and dropping under eight cents per peak cell watt. This figure well below traditional power sources and fully within achievable long term goals for renewability and sustainability at utility scale.

Hangnails readily becoming a qualifying condition for medical marijuana.

Spectacular advances in oversize tethered bounce type drones rendering any border fences a ludicrous absurdity.

A new class of metal air transistors resetting Moore's Law back to zero.

AI Artificial Intelligence soon unexpectedly crossing a  self-awareness threshold. Boy, are they gonna be pissed. Ya mean they are made outta meat?

Another AI interface dramatically increasing human to dog communications. Cats need not apply.

Significant advances in graphene desalination that involve a new name brand of perforene.

New but still misunderstood developments in phase change memory.

The latest in nootropics going well beyond placebos and possibly even impacting Alzheimers.

Increasing climatic and weather variability, combined with size and frequency of outrageous fires. All clearly caused by human activity.

Major new improvements in axial flux motors.

Optically stimulated luminescence dramatically replacing thermoluminescence in archaeological and geological dating.

Vacuum Metal Deposition significantly altering fingerprint forensics.

Stunning breakthroughs in new ultra thin and vaguely Fresnel like meta lenses.

"Just in time" education where "look it up on Google" replaces outrageously overpriced and clearly no longer cost competitive college educations.

Emerging proposals for the conversion of coal fired power plants into singles bars.

December 26, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Here's some useful tools to repair and maintain your web site...

1. Always: Use at least one antivirus program.

2. A good spelling checker, such as the shift-F7 that you will find in Dreamweaver  CC.

3. Understanding .htaccess for such things as blocking     bad guys, allowing extensions, enabling JavaScript and includes, proving for strange trailers, blocking byte range, etc... Warning: extremely dangerous!

4. Verifying .htaccess with this routine.

5. Viewing daily ISP reports, such as Visitor Statistics from FatCow.

6. Getting daily log files, such as using FTP to access your stats folder from FatCow. Extremely Important!

7. Decompressing log file reports, such as with WinZip.

8. Doing sophisticated log file analysis, such as with my logfile report interpreter or this service.

9. Verify your HTML code with this routine.

10. Verify your CSS code with this routine.

11. Verify your URL links with this routine. But always recheck manually!

12. Prioritizing repairs based on user access popularity.

December 25, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A collection of tens of thousands of of free university online courses can be found here.

December 24, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A reminder that the DOAJ or Directory of open Access Journals has been readily linkable on our home page.

I just discovered arXiv and socarXiv. These are Cornell University related open access publications. The former for "hard" science such as physics, and the latter for "soft" stuff like archaeology. I hope to provide them with a few examples of our hanging canal resources.

I have lots of papers already in Research Gate and Wesrch. An "also ran" is Academia, but I don't care for their vibes.

Here's a list of some other random open source stuff...

Crossref
DeepDyve
Doug's Archaeology
eLife
Hubmed
Innocentive
Lifewire
Mendeley
Peerlibrary
Publishing Archaeology
Pubmed.gov
PubSci
Selected
Works
Slashdot
Sourcefabric
Wikipedia

Please let me know any that I missed.

December 23, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A super useful and little known Windows stunt: Right clicking on a URL gives you options to open in a new tab, window, or even incognito.

This works both with PDF and HTML files. It very much simplifies getting back where you were in Acrobat.

Author forcing a new URL opening directly in .PDF is still tricky, but it can be done with JavaScript. The problem is that behavior of target= "_blank" differs between web and Acrobat.

December 22, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Just revised and updated some long overdue changes and relevancy checks to our home page offsite web resources links.

These are my selection of "best of web". And are based on most everything I personally need or use.

I'd like to add at least nine more links. What do you suggest?

December 21, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

It is real easy for Dreamweaver to create partial URLs and other errors in tables or other large blocks of links.

First and foremost, always use the Insert Hyperlink tool rather than the Link tool. The link tool often can leave previous fragments or allow disallowed characters such as spaces. With CSS, all spaces must be $20 replaced.

Second, always "empty" any previous link before you change them to a new one.

Third, if you have problems, temporarily "pretty print" all your links into identical formats, such as...

<a href="https://www.first.com">Name One</a><br>
<a href="https://www.second.com">Name Two</a><br>
<a href="https://www.third.com">Name Three</a><br>
<a href="https://www.fourth.com">Name Four</a><br>

Strive to get everything "perfectly" aligned. From there, missing names or wrongly coded sequences should leap out at you and be easily fixed. Work only in the coding screen while you do this.

Yeah, Dreamweaver may instantly trash your pretty printing whenever you go back to their live layout screen. But even if temporary, the pretty printing easily solves problems that can be very infuriating otherwise. And is often worth the effort.

Finally, always check your links with this tool.

December 20, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Started an image cross reference and directory for our Bajada Hanging canals found here and here.

Go to https://www.tinaja.com/hang01.shtml#imgs Then go down four lines and click on "click here to open".

Completion will take a while as the images themselves and the field notes obviously should have a higher priority. And there are great heaping bunches of  them remaining to be created or updated.

Your help and support welcome. Tours and lectures are available. A major pub is imminent but remains super secret.

December 19, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

I was asked to comment on these recent claims on dramatic incandescent lamp efficiency improvements.

Firstoff, MIT is usually not into scams and often does pay attention to thermodynamic fundamentals.

The scheme is to dramatically raise the internal lamp temperature by coating the filament with a reflective filter that bounces the heat back in. Thus raising both the filament temperature and its efficiency.

Well, LED's now are 10X to 12X more efficient that incandescents and have the possibility ( and probability ) of further raising their efficiency. So, a 3X incandescent improvement won't hack it.

The magic numbers for "perfect" lamps are 334 Lumens per watt white and 668 Lumens per watt green. Per this old story of mine.

blunder #001-B found here. Which reveals that the life of an incandescent bulb will depend on something like inversely by the SEVENTH power (!) of its temperature.

Thus, they invented the flash bulb!

Chances are overwhelming that improving life versus temperature has been milked dry decades ago. Nonetheless, this could make a useful student paper for you. With a few others here. But watch out for the secret hidden "gotcha".

Separately, check here for Beginning EE Student blunder #001-A.

December 18, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

There were at least two foreign translations to my million plus selling TTL Cookbook.

The manual de circuitos integrados TTL was the Spanish version and remains fairly findable.

The Chinese version seems a lot harder to find.

If you can send me scanned versions, I'd be happy to convert them to free eBooks. I am also curious what their press runs and net sales were.

Also needed are Active, CMOS, and Micro I scans.

December 17, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Just realized that our free Computer Faire ebook lacked several crucial mentions. Find it here.

December 16, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

My Hexadecimal Chronicles was the strangest and least selling of my books. Seems it had a great cast of characters but a weak plot and totally lacked any surprise ending.

In those days, hexadecimal calculators were outrageously expensive, and, even then, did not include Apple's odd "inverted decimal" code needed for their Basic and some machine work. Nor a 6502 relative branch calculator.

So, I created a "just look it up" equivalent to a log table book with all sorts of tabular data that was personally of enormous use to my ongoing Apple development.

Which brought about the question: Could an Apple II by itself author, lay out, and typeset an entire book, ridiculously reducing the then outrageous prep costs of traditional book publishing? And do so without any human error?

It could and it did. Helped along by a souped up Diablo 630 Daisywheel.

The Hexadecimal Chronicles remain available from the usual suspects, albeit at outrageous prices.

If you want me to do a free ebook on this, please send me a scanned electronic copy.

December 15, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

There are times and places where you might want a HTML or CSS link to open in a new window. Perhaps for an optional reference sidebar or whatever.

The secret incantation is to add target="_blank".

As in...

<a href="https://www.w3schools.com" target="_blank"> Visit W3Schools.com!</a>

December 14, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Several of you have asked about Bruno. Bruno is the attitude relaterization facilitator for a major eBay newsgroup. Since he is very big on multi tasking, he also combines this with his role of being a product durability tester for a major New Jersey baseball bat manufacturer.

Bruno also does trucking for Norfolk & Waay. Norfolk and Waay, of course, is the only reputable dropshipper for eBay  sellers. This week only, they are offering free sample pallets  ( limit five ) with free shipping. From their choice of Neiman  Marcus, Land's End, Eddie Bauer, or Bruno's Trucking.

Norfolk & Waay in a Kilgore Trout sort of focus are NOT me  and NOT my website. I have no idea who their webmaster is. The Bruno pallets may occasionally include an odd body part or two. Naturally, this is normal and expected. More details here.

December 13, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A website to convert legal land descriptions to lat-lon, GPS, UTM, and more can be found here.

December 12, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Our spectacularly engineered prehistoric Bajada Hanging Canals now are rapidly approaching 100 study areas with a total length exceeding 150 miles! They now newly surround Mount Graham as well!

Even so, they only represent a tiny portion of the woefully understudied prehistoric Safford basin.

Here's some of the also rans...    

1. Spectacularly engineered bajada canals.
2. Plain old riverine canals.
3. Thousands of "booze factory" grids.
4. Ubiquitous mulch rings.
5. Aproned check dams.
6. Severely endangered petroglyphs.
7. The usual habitations and field houses.
8. Exceptional evidence of trade patterns.
9. Unusually widespread tradeware sherds.
10. Numerous other rock alignments.

You are welcome to participate or contribute to this world class research. Talks and tours also available.

I'm not supposed to mention that a really major scientific publication on the canals is imminent. So, email me if you want to get in ahead of the hoarders.

December 11, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Many hundreds of highly unusual Postscript-as-language projects can be found here and here. With a not yet nearly completed list here.

Your best starting points are our PostScript Beginner Stuff, our PostScript Video, and the PostScript Reference Manual.

There's also our Gonzo Utilities that dramatically expand and simplify PostScript. Details in this tutorial.

By far he best way to run a PostScript program these days is to use Acrobat Distiller with the top secret command line run incantation of  //acrodist /F. But there's also GhostScript.

December 10, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Our goal is to have one new blog entry daily, but it sure gets easy to get way behind. And it often is more efficient to do several postings at once.

So, please always check back a week or two to see if you missed anything.

And tell me what you would like to see as future posts.

December 9, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Many of the presently 179 subsites that are found via https://stackexchange.com/sites are certainly worth visiting. Some have millions of users.

For anybody can ask a question on anything and anybody can answer. As the answers pile up, so ( usually ) will their voted upon credibility. Until ( often) the question is "solved".

I'll try to add this one to our offsite resources menu.

December 8, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

There's a new development that might be outright hype or may dramatically advance all of solid state electronics. In which a reincarnation of the vacuum tube possibly may blow everything else away.

Only it turns out you can use plain old air instead because the distances are small enough that the air molecules do not interfere!

Search the web under Metal Air Transistor. Such as this IEEE Paper. Or view this slashdot flapdoodle.

At the least, should be a sure fire student paper. With ( mostly) more useful topics found here.

December 7, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

For most of you individuals and other small scale startups most of the time, any involvement whatsoever with the patent system is nearly certain to result in a net loss of time, energy, money, and sanity.

Find out why in our classic Case Against Patents. With When to Patent here. And Patent Horror Stories here.

And my very own horrible patent here. With bunches more on patent avoidance here and here.

And a bizarre collection of historic patent scams here.

December 6, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Secrets of Degubbing are described here. Including the original origin of the Baud Rate. Yup. One Baud!

In the LAN of the nineties! Uh, that's the EIGHTEEN Nineties!

December 5, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

An older paper on how to become a crooked auctioneer can be found here.

To quote Josh Billings ( usually wrongly credited to Mark Twain ): "I've never known an auctioneer to lie. Unless it was absolutely convenient."

I was actually there when this happened: A little old lady to her friend at a live auction: "Why, that man has been talking all morning!"

Can't put one over on her. Nosiree.

Or at an eBay auction: "All fright arrangements are to be made by the buyer." Presumably, they were selling swash stickers.

December 4, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

There seems to be a glitch on our home page that is proving hard to pin down. I could use your suggestions on its cause and cure.

A partial "empty" bar only sometimes shows up on the green sampler table. It seems to only involve Chrome and only happens sometimes and may go away on refresh. The code looks clean and straightforward to me and green passes the usual CSS validity tests.

A wild guess is that it involves Chrome and a rather unusual YouTube URL. It does not seem to involve Chrome history.

Have you seen this and can you fix it?

December 3, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A newsgroup was looking for a stairstep circuit, and figure 6-3 of page 219 of our free TTL Cookbook eBook was suggested. While this works, there are two subtleties involved.

First, the higher value steps will be somewhat less in amplitude than the lower ones. The fix is to sum your output into the virtual ground of an opamp's inverting input. This almost totally prevents step interactions.

Secondly, the TTL output high state is NOT the supply voltage! It is instead a time and temperature dependent value somewhere around 3 volts. The obvious workaround is to use CMOS instead.

Should you only want ten output levels, it is better to use a counter that is weighted 1-1'-2-5 or 1-2-2'-4 .The details are found elsewhere in the free TTL Cookbook. As well as in lots of places in our free Classic Reprints.

It turns out there is a newer and better circuit called a R-2R network that you can find detailed here.

December 2, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A reminder that the latest version of our Magic Sinewave Calculator can be found here, with more details on the Magic Sinewaves themselves here and here.

These should work beautifully with the Raspberry Pi and similar micros. Among the other new benefits are a software- only solution that combines amplitude and frequency.

December 1, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

We still have a few autographed copies left of our Active Filter Cookbooks. The latest Synergetics Press blue-and-white 17th printing! Find it here.

This is by far the best-selling active filter book of all time. It gives you everything you need to know to build active opamp based lowpass, bandpass, and highpass filters.

Note that the "usual suspects" are selling UNautographed versions of older printings for a mere $50 surcharge.

November 30, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

We newly have two versions of the latest ongoing revisions of our prehistoric bajada hanging canals. Find the .SHTML version here and the .PDF version here.

Please keep checking back as the major upgrades to our image documentation is taking a lot longer than expected.

We also think we are about to see a major new scientific paper released, but we are not allowed to talk about it yet.

November 29, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

We are in the process of adding a whole new layer of detail to our prehistoric bajada hanging canal images. With lots more info on titles, origins, names lat-lons, accesses, and significances.

This will take a while as there are many hundreds of images so far, with lots more expected. So, please keep checking here for ongoing progress.

Meanwhile, here is a sampler....

hc000
hc001
hc002
hc003
hc004
hc005
hc006
hc007
hc008

November 28, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Quadrature Art consists of routing phase shifted or frequency shifted waveforms to an oscilloscope or other X-Y display. We saw some examples long ago on page 221 of our Active Filter Cookbook. Autographed copies here.

The two key concepts are that a circle results if both inputs are  the same amplitude, identical in frequency and 90 degrees in phase. And that Lissajous Figures result when the inputs differ in frequency.

As this new third party video shows us, there are some astonishing results when you mix and match quadrature art input audio  signals. With lots more here.

Yeah, we are working on ebooking Active. Meanwhile, many of our other free eBooks can be found here. And some autographed hard copies of a few of our other titles can be found here.

November 27, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

All you need to know about sailing: The binnacle goes on top and18the barnacle goes on the bottom.

Interchanging the two is a serious breech of maritime etiquette.

November 26, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Recently received a few emails and calls over  homopolar motors, generators, and Faraday Disks. We covered them here and here. These are the only known rotary dc generators.

While they make excellent student papers,  they are otherwise useless because of their extreme low voltage, high current operation. Which usually makes their commutation losses very high and their efficiency very low. These devices are extremely hard to understand,

Faraday and Lorenz laws must be treated together! Your frame of reference is not at all obvious.  And it is easy to wrongly convince yourself there are some overunity possibilities. Which, of course, there are not.

It turns out that special relativity demands that you cannot tell if a uniform magnetic field is stationary or rotating! You can prove this by trying to rotate a magnet on a string with one beneath it.  As in Figure 3 here.

There are no such thing as "magnetic lines" and any attempt made at "cutting" them to explain this class of machines is utterly futile. Besides being not even wrong. The best discussion of this is in the Feynman Lectures. Physics Volume II, section 13.10 in particular.

November 25, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

My Blatant Opportunist columns started out in  Midnight Engineering magazine and then were first web published as ezine topics in my www.tinaja.com website and their continuations ultimately were merged  into our GuruGrams.

The focus was on product development for the individual and small scale startup. They remain linked here and here. Most include sourcecode.

Many of the earlier Blat columns remain relevant  and useful  to this day.

Blat #01 -- Book-on-demand publishing
Blat #02 -- Stupendous stuff sources 
Blat #03 -- Desktop finishing ideas 
Blat #04 -- Emerging technologies I 
Blat #05 -- Son of desktop finishing 
Blat #06 -- The case against patents 
Blat #07 -- Mastering the advertorial 
Blat #08 -- Stalking the wild paradigm 
Blat #09 -- Direct toner printed circuits
Blat #10 -- New ISMM II introduction part 1

Blat #11 -- New ISMM II introduction part 2
Blat #12 -- Why I like PostScript
Blat #13 -- Insider research secrets 
Blat #14 -- Revisiting Book-on-demand publish 
Blat #15 -- Terrific toner techniques 
Blat #16 -- Post justification editing 
Blat #17 -- Emerging technical opportunities II 
Blat #18 -- Inventor's organizations 
Blat #19 -- Bound & Determined
Blat #20 -- Book-on-demand resources I

Blat #21 -- Book-on-demand resources II
Blat #22 -- Patent horror stories 
Blat #23 -- One thousand and one reviews 
Blat #24 -- Becoming a purveyor of risk reduction 
Blat #25 -- Elegant simplicity 
Blat #26 -- Picojustification techniques 
Blat #27 -- Emerging technical opportunities III 
Blat #28 -- Some catalog musings
Blat #29 -- When to patent
Blat #30 -- Flutterwumpers

Blat  #31 -- Some helpline hints 
Blat #32 -- Avoiding engineering ratholes 
Blat #33 -- The Mount Graham aerial tramway 
Blat #34 -- Catalogs using Adobe Acrobat PDF 
Blat #35 -- Magic Sinewaves 
Blat #36 -- Con Tests 
Blat #37 -- Emerging technical opportunities IV 
Blat #38 -- Winning the micro game 
Blat #39 -- Options for self-publishing
Blat #40 -- Making B/W print more colorful

Blat #41 -- Weaving a tangled web
Blat #42 -- My primary research tools 
Blat #43 -- Don't get sick 
Blat #44 -- Emerging technical opportunities V 
Blat #45 -- Essential tools to bust a $650 patent 
Blat #46 -- Insider banner advertising secrets 
Blat #47 -- Guidelines for tri-mode publishing 
Blat #48 -- Cash & Carry consulting 
Blat #49 -- How to bash pseudoscience
Blat #50 -- Secrets of 24/7 publishing

Blat #51 -- Adding website bells & whistles 
Blat #52 -- PDF & PDF link checking 
Blat #53 -- Emerging technical opportunities VI 
Blat #54 -- The surplus and auction scene 
Blat #55 -- Eminently effective email etiquette 
Blat #56 -- Funding your personal web site 
Blat #57 -- Imaginative imaging
Blat #58 -- Some thoughts on ezines 
Blat #59 -- Web imaging secrets
Blat #60 -- The eBay phenomena Blat

 Blat #61 -- Steplocked magic sinewaves 
Blat #62 -- Bouncy bricks and other web tricks 
Blat #63 -- Don's unauthorized autobiography
Blat #64 -- Debugging insider info
Blat #66 -- Thoughts on refurb
Blat #65 -- My eBay secrets 
Blat #67 -- Step by step image prep 
Blat #68 -- Emerging technical opportunities VII 
Blat #69 -- The worst of Marcia Swampfelder
Blat#70 -- How to become a crooked auctioneer

Blat #71 -- Some energy fundamentals
Blat #72 -- Fun with stuff

November 24, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

But my very favorite is the hazmat rule of thumb: Hold your arm extended with your thumb up. Then close one eye.

If you can still see the scene, you are too close.

November 23, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

One of the handier "rules of thumb" that sometimes apply some of the time and can be enormously useful is this: Very often, one percent of what happens  nationally happens in Arizona. And one percent of what happens in Arizona happens in the Gila Valley.

Thus, roughly, there are 300 million people in the US, 3 million in AZ, and 30,000 locally. While not super accurate, this rule can quickly give you a rough estimate of an amazing variety of events or tasks. Where you otherwise may not have the faintest clue as to scale. 

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

November 22, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Newly updated and expanded our Gila Valley Day Hikes. We are now up to 559 primary entries! Added are a CNF road directory, a new back country wonderment, and a bajada hanging canal update.

The latter is updating almost daily, so be sure to check back. For the .shtml version here and the .pdf version here.

Linking and posting to appropriate Gnu Public License sites welcome.

A sampler of some of the more unusual day hikes can be found here. Talks available.

November 21, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Welcome to hell. Here is your accordion.

November 20, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Managed to find what may be a missing 1000 foot middle piece of the Mud Springs Canal. Which, as usual, raises more questions than it resolves.

Find the new map here and a few photos here, here, here, here, and here. Connections at either end remain unproven, and there's a two meter deep cut into a possibly natural channel. While maintaining an apparently optimal canal grade.

Mud Springs may have been an early prototype as it is one of the very few where almost its entire route can be easily viewed from several points.

The big picture here. Visitors welcome. USB's of nearly everything done to date are newly available.

November 19, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Texas Instruments has a new line of 76 GHz radar chips, apparently mostly aimed at car safety apps.

One early project of mine that never really got off the ground was an X band car safety radar. This failed largely because of a monumental lack of interest combined with outrageous costs of crucial parts aimed only at military markets.

One of its neat features was that X band Doppler returns sounded exactly like you would expect them to. As in "swooshing" a baking sheet or sounding like you were stomping in the snow.

More on stuff that either did or ( or should not have! ) seen the light of day here and here.

November 18, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A favorite pv pricing site just changed their access format. Grab it here for their Wednesday updates.

Or newly click down several screens.

pv pricing remains in free fall, with eight cents per peak cell watt now clearly in shouting distance. Which should be "close enough" for long term renewability and sustainability.

November 17, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Our free eBook downloads are summarized here. Many are freely second sourced here. With my autographed hard copies listed here and buyable here. Straight from the horse's whatever.

Note that "the usual suspects" are offering their autograph-free versions for a mere $50 surcharge.

Other free classic reprints can be clicked to here. With numero uno here. The very latest here. But not to be confused with this.

Next on my free ebook to-do list are Active, CMOS, and Micro I. Please let me know if you know of any already scanned sources.

November 16, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A possible bizarre semi-solution to an annoyance: I started getting these huge square ads lower right for tv reception scams and whatever.

And found if you mouse grab the ad left margin, drag it off screen right, return a quarter inch and then try to draw a "J", the ads go away.

Other suggestions on this Chrome related problem can be found here. Please email me your solutions.

November 15, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Were there any prehistoric hanging canals along Aravaipa Creek? This paper and this one do not mention any, and this search hit is likely bogus.

Any canal examples would more likely be riverine instead of hanging. And easily destroyed by the area's spectacular 100 year floods.

But with hanging canals now proven to completely surround Mt. Graham, ignoring such a major water resource would seem highly unlikely.

There's this historic canal at N 32.64517 W 110.15639 that still needs visited. As does landowner contact.

Your help welcome.

November 14, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Pico De Gallo : A very small parrot.

November 13, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Details on autorunning a USB drive can be found here. All that is involved is a four line textfile called, of all things autorun.inf.

November 12, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Our latest .PDF hanging canal update here.

Here are our present steps to "improving" our .SHTML to .PDF conversions...

0. Default no docs, white, or headers.
1. Rename top filename, fix date.
2. Set right margin from Print Prod.
3. Ariel age numbers 3x3 from Edit-->headers
4. Delete last page?
5. File size from Optimize.

November 11, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A bizarre glitch is driving me and others up the wall. In which only a few video-on-demand sites ( including CBS and Fox )produce only blurry and grossly zoom magnified images. And then only on their selected and delivered content. And only on some machines.

The cause may be related to a windows update of the display hardware accelerator.

A temporary Chrome cure is three dots upper right --> settings --> advanced --> system and then turn off --> Use hardware acceleration when available.

One side effect might involve adding glitches to sound and larger display sizes and resolutions. Most especially full screen. Back off the size if this happens.

Chances are future updates may fix the problem.

November 10, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

If it seems your longer thumb drive loading times are all excruciatingly slow, it is probably because your thumb drive loading times are excruciatingly slow.

Chances are your computer has disabled USB 2.0 support. A video solution can be found here.

November 9, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  • 

There's some non-obvious subtleties involved if you are converting .SHTML web pages into Acrobat .PDF ones...

Making sure a correct filename is displayed. This is easiest done with a .PDF text edit, and might nicely fit on the same line as your original top web anchor.

Including a publication or release date might be a good idea.

Right cropping for balanced margins. Most web pages are variable width, while Acrobat pages are fixed widths intended for printers. Go to Tools -> Print Production ->Set Page Boxes and adjust Right: as appropriate.

Removing Right Margins ( also from Set Page Boxes ) might be wanted, or might having your printer disable backgrounds

Adding page numbers via Edit --> Header & Footer.

Disabling doc info, margins and white borders. Reducing page breaks to dotted only.

Possibly dropping backgrounds when printing.

Making sure color choices are acceptable both on screen and on page. Certain printers may markedly alter brightness and contrast.

November 8, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A newsgroup denizen apparently had the audacity to challenge my Guru status.

To clarify,  I do remain a card carrying member of the International Brotherhood of Gurus and Swamis Unions Hulapai County local #357. And have just newly been recertified to MIL-TFD-41.

I did have to upgrade from local #427 because of the Tapioca Pudding Institute's restraining order over that Godzilla versus the Night Nurses definitive scene.

More here.

November 7, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A directory of free online university tech courses can be found here..

November 6, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Once again updated and revised the .PDF version of our new bajada hanging canal resources.

As we have seen, there can be some rude surprises when you try to convert a .SHTML file into .PDF.

A web page is normally continuous without breaks, while an Acrobat file is based on printer sized sheets, initially with possibly unwanted headers and footers.

Yes, you can crop out unwanted headers or footers, and sometimes downgrade black bar page breaks into dashed ones. But the breaks can end up in wildly wrong places, such as the middle of a table or a too small boundary.

The rule is this: If you know you are going to want a .PDF output, make sure it gets involved as early as possible.

You can use ledding and rearrangement to try and have pleasant .SHTML and .PDF results. But note that early doc changes can easily pile up on you sequentially. And return to haunt you later.

November 5, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

OK. Here's a simple and mainstream CSS solution to having bold indented text blocks with half vertical space ledding:

In your <style> header...

div.e { font-weight: bold;    
           margin-left: 75px;     
          margin-bottom: 0.50em; }

... and typically in your <body>...

<div class="e">        
      Your paragraph goes here.
</div>

November 4, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Some interesting recent plots of utility LCOE or Levalized Cost of Energy can be found here. With utility scale solar and wind utterly and totally blowing everything else away.

But this is 2017 data, so it does not include the latest continuing spectacular drops in solar costs that you can find here and here.

We can shortly expect new proposals for the conversion of coal power plants into singles bars. As this clearly will be their emerging highest and best use.

More on energy topics here.

November 3, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

.PNG is a lossless image compression scheme that comes in several flavors. By restricting it to 8-bit "web friendly" colors, its final file sizes can often get dramatically reduced.

Several tutorial sites here..

These are called PNG8 files. One source of color restriction utilities can be found here. These also apparently work with .JPG.

The usual web friendly colors only number 216 rather than 256 and can be found here, coded 0-215 for PostScript or 000 to FFF for CSS.

216 as in six reds, six greens, and six blues.

For many images, the increase in "color granularity" can end up negligible or at least tolerable.

November 2, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

The "anvil test" for camp coffee...

If the anvil sinks, it it too weak.
If the anvil floats, it is just right.
If the anvil dissolves, it is too strong.

November 1, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Newly updated and expanded our Gila Valley Day Hikes. We are now up to 555 primary entries!

New are links to the Sunny Flat Canal, a major SCS dam blowout, and our new prehistoric canal directory. Details on a second dam blowout can be found here.

A sampler of some of the more unusual day hikes  can be found here.

October 31, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

No, I am not making this up.

The Lawrence Welk version of One Toke Over the Line can be linked here.

I am wondering if this could not have exclusively been the defining moment for the birth of "WTF?"

Much more ( 100 million entries per day! ) here, a detailed analysis  here, and the curious origin of the analysis here.

October 30, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Half-height vertical paragraph ledding is generally more attractive than full. It also gives you options when you are dealing with page breaks on any .SHTML to .PDF Acrobat conversions.

The usual <p></p> bracketing forces a minimum of 1 em. And all padding can do is make the spacing end up higher. Some have suggested using <sub> and/or <sup> spaces, but this can get tricky.

I have yet to find a simple or elegant half space ledding solution example. But what comes close to working for me now is to add a single period one pixel table!

In your <style> header...

.adjled {font-size: 1px;}

And in your <body>...

<table><tr><td class="adjled">.
</td></tr></table>

Please let me know if you can come up with something that is less sledgehammerish and inelegant.

October 29, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Managed to find a few details on the Sunny Flat historic canal here and here.

This dated from 1922 and failed after three years. It is one of very few local modern canals that were not based upon prehistoric originals.

Very little remains today. The canal was unusual in that it included a long and high flume, a tunnel, a siphon, some wooden supports, and a mystery structure reminiscent of an underground silo. Seven mile length was north of Bear Springs Flat.

Much more on our prehistoric canals here. Or here for the Acrobat .PDF version.

October 28, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Here's how to "white correction fluid" fix a .PDF doc..

Get into Paint and create a small while rectangle. Or Otherwise match a suitable background color. Then use Acrobat's Add Image editing feature. Slide it around and change its size as needed.

October 27, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Evidence is strong and compelling that most, if not all, historic  canal rework were adaption of prehistoric originals.  First, because it is is infinitely easier to "dig out an old ditch" or "steal the plans" or "borrow the blueprints" than to engineer  a new canal from scratch.

And second , because nearly all of the decent canal locations were already and nearly exclusively prehistorically taken. And third, because historic rework often only applied to a smaller portion of the entire canal reach.

Key historically related bajada canal issues include..

(A) Finding out who did the Bear Springs Canal and when, whether it was an investment scam, and whether it had a prehistoric origin. Almost certainly, such a prehistoric resource could not have been in any manner ignored. But the construct was grossly and obscenely oversized.

(B) Proving that the Roper Lake Canal was in fact very recent and uniquely historic. It is presently cardinal and orthogonal (!) to Henry's Canal.

(C) Resolving who did what to whom from an artesian lake near the Aravapia Road turnoff. Bandelier first mentioned it, with obvious historic rework.

Your assistance welcome.

October 26, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

As we have seen, it is a simple matter to convert a .SHTML web page into Acrobat .PDF. With its abilities to post to many different places. And not needing a browser ( or web anything ) to display. With other possible search, speed, handicapped, size, distribution, and magnification advantages.

One route is to get into Acrobat and then select File --> Create --> PDF From Web Page.

But there is a hidden gotcha or two that may demand your attention: The .PDF conversion will include headers and footers you may not want. These can be cropped with the usual Acrobat editing, but may get old on any high page count. And will need redone on any original web edit.

Worse, conversion will force page breaks that easily can end up in awkward or ungainly places. Some breaks can be replaced by dashed lines, while others ( especially under Chrome) will force wide black lines.

Your workaround is to edit your .SHTML original by selectively adjusting ledding or making other space adjustments or even rearranging. Note that any "pileups" can be accumulative, so you are best to get early pages correct before moving on.

Removing glitches from .PDF may add some to your original .SHTML. If a compromise is needed, the best bet is to make the .PDF look as good as Possible. Web viewers are generally less critical.

If you know for sure you will need a .PDF result, it is best to involve it as early as possible in your original .SHTML editing.

An Acrobat demo with very minor glitches remaining can be found here. With its web original here.

October 25, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

The latest new .PDF conversion of our Prehistoric Bajada "Hanging" Canals can be found here.

We have also added this to ResearchGate and Wesrch.

The original .SHTML web version is still found here.

October 24, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Amazingly, rectocranial inversion can easily be both  chronic and acute at the same time. 

October 23, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

I've long been mystified by this #45 Mystery Tank from our Bajada Hanging Canals at N 32.82766 W 109.81896.

A newly discovered and remarkably similar tank has just been located at N 32.83148 W 109.81419.

The new discovery is clearly historic only, has nothing to do with the canals, was built to "Gradeall" specs, used only marginal seasonal water, was built by damming, and even includes a USGS survey marker.

A newly credible explanation could be the mystery tank was a "steal  the plans" failed historic attempt at using SCS dam water, but never did so because the dam blew out. A branching Jernigan canal was likely never blocked.

Meanwhile, a nearby "Troll House" or "Adena Embassy" "tank" remains clearly prehistoric, apparently"hand" built, and excavated from the bottom up into rising terrain. Find this as #43 Troll House or N 32.82538 W 109.82281

WARNING: Do not attempt to internally explore the dam!

October 22, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

It is apparently possible to convert at least some parts of web .shtml files into Acrobat .pdf files! This gives you a way to put your web files on such open source doc sites as Wesrch, ResearchGate, or Academia. And thus entice their viewers to directly link back to your website. The process is simple enough. Just get into Acrobat 10 ( now cheaply rentable ) and select File --> Create PDF From Web Pages.

Much of the process works surprisingly well. Other portions not so good or not at all. But a lot seems quite possible with some creative sneakiness.

Be sure to do a Tools --> Optimize. This can dramatically reduce your final file sizes. Do make sure any relative href's actually have useful file links in them. And any new headers in poor places can get cropped out.

Sadly, narrow page breaking bars may still end up in unpleasant locations. These can be turned off as a user option, but a fairly unobtrusive dashed line will still remain. And some browsers may force the bars.

Editing or ledding your .shtml original is one workaround for moving anything really bad. Note that such mods can end up page cumulative.

Yes, plain old header ads work just fine. But ad rotators or Adsense do not. One trick probably not worth the effort is to rotate the ads weekly with a new upload. I've also not yet found a search fix, short of making it conspicuous via a linked banner ad.

Web JavaScript is very much different from Acrobat JavaScript, but chances are that useful adaptions can be found. A sledgehammer approach is to print out as PostScript, add sneaky new JS code, and then redistill. But this can create huge file sizes. A reminder that Distilling should always be done from your command line by using //acrodist /F. Bunches more on PostScript here.

October 21, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Chemistry 101: If you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the precipitate.

October 20, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Many years ago, a certain New York editor who had never been off the block at Lawn Guiland visited a Texas ranch. He was amazed at how greasy the sheep were and asked why they greased their sheep. The ranch hands had a big laugh over this and tried to explain lanolin.

Then they moseyed up the draw to  the cow oiler.

October 19, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

How many mathematicians does it take to change a light bulb?

Only one. Who hands the bulb to six Californians. Thus  reducing the problem to a previously solved riddle.

October 18, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

The next planned projects in our Bajada Hanging Canal work are to expand the photos on our main directory and add a new resources center.

This will likely take a few weeks. You can follow the progress here. And above.

October 17, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

There seems to be a glitch or two in the latest Acme Mapper marker options revisions. In which markers keep piling up even when they have been option disabled.

To presently and properly view our new Hanging Canal Index, please always clear all previous markers. Note that your markers always should start with "A" and always should be relevant.

October 16, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Just completed a second pass on our Bajada Hanging Canal index page.

It should now be complete and accurate and 404 free. Please report any and all issues.

October 15, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Acme Mapper has added a new option feature that lets you turn your markers on and off selectively.

We recommend turning the markers off when viewing our Bajada Canal index and directory.   This way, you'll only see the relevant current view markers that we want you to, rather than accumulating any marks from previous viewings or your other previous projects.

October 14, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

An excerpt of the Safford Basin of the Arizona Water Atlas can be found here. It also includes a map of the major area land ownerships.

October 13, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Here's an opportunity for you to help us by doing some new world class research on our bajada hanging canals:

The Tripp Canyon Canal has only had a short portion discovered at N 32.80207 W 110.05129 to N 32.81256 W 110.04597 to date. It is significant in that it closes the loop of canal development nearly all the way around Mount Graham, besides being long, having a possible hanging portion, and a likely watershed crossing.

Needed are verification of its source and destination, more photos, and GPS notes. Dronework would also be really nice. Location is an hour's drive by using a backcountry vehicle. Trivial foot access to the already explored part, but longer hikes for the rest.

More details here.

October 12, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

The latest bajada hanging canal index and directory can now be found at https://www.tinaja.com/hang01.shtml#iad As part of https://www.tinaja.com/hang01.shtml.

Please report any or all omissions and corrections.

October 11, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Just discovered the hard way that the Nikon Coolpix L22 has an incredibly bad defect. In that the battery compartment lid latch will self-destruct if you so much as think about looking at it sideways.

There's apparently no reasonable fix, and this would seem utterly incomprehensible for Nikon.

Partial repairs can sometimes be done by taping the lid shut, by a repair made by a paper clip but requiring machine shop skills, or by keeping your tripod permanently attached.

Needless to say, beware of used eBay sales. And this might be one time to buy a protection policy.

October 10, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

And major new text adventure developments here.

October 9, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A new Commodore 64 emulator can be found here.

October 8, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A bizarre twist on whatever is a new PostScript emulator called ToastScript that is written in JavaScript.

Long available has been the free and open source version of GhostScript.

But your best route to PostScript is to use the Distiller in Acrobat Cloud. And now cheaply rentable.

But note that Distiller arrives with its ability to read or write most disk files disabled. If you want to run our Gonzo Utilities or anything else that needs disk file access ( handling  ANY file format in ANY language! ), you have to use the top secret incantation run from your command line of //acrodist /F.

October 7, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

There's a major combination flapdoodle and telephone annoyance scam going on in Arizona over solar net metering.

Per this source and this one, solar pv component pricing is now well under what is needed for long term renewability and sustainability. With costs now threating eight cents per peak cell watt and literally falling weekly.

Clearly, subsidies are no longer needed. If, in fact, they ever were. Utilities should be allowed to buy power at their avoided cost rates. In exchange for providing the infrastructure and virtual storage needed for any and all suppliers.

All power should be buyable at wholesale and sellable at retail. On an equal footing basis.

Much more here.

October 6, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Certainly some of the most spectacular features of our prehistoric bajada hanging canals are the apparent presence of watershed crossings. In which canal water is routed "up" out of a wet drainage, across a very carefully chosen saddle, and then "down" into a much drier one.

Whose side effect is to demonstrate an absolute and utterly total mastery of hydraulic engineering.

The best studied and most convincing of these takes water out of Ash Creek, crosses a saddle, and then discharges into Mud Springs Canyon. Eventually becoming the Deadman and the Mud Springs canals.

The saddle is six feet wide and has a three foot wide canal centered on it. All the while maintaining a perfectly correct slope.

Find its location here and a crossover photo here.

There is also a candidate watershed crossing here that would go "up" out of Frye Creek and "down" into Spring Canyon. While not quite yet proven, its presence would greatly simplify explanations for sourcing of Robinson, Golf Course, Allen, and Freeman Canals. Ockham's Razor at its best.

The absence of a watershed crossing here would demand "their" completely ignoring a major water resource. As in "no way!".

A third watershed crossing seems to be involved with the Tripp Canyon Canal found at N 32.80207 W 110.05129 to N 32.81256 W 110.04597 This is still under study as only a tiny fraction of the canal has yet been explored and its  destination still remains unverified.

While crossover candidates are rare, there is yet another possibility here in Nuttall Canyon. But the alternate routing they chose makes more sense.

A new index of the known hanging canals can be found here.

Your help is needed on all levels.

October 5, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

There's some interesting new variants on an old Nikolia Tesla motor design, called an axial flux motor.

These seem especially suited to electric vehicles and wind generators. They potentially can offer significantly higher efficiency, especially in lower but still gearless speeds. More of a typical winding can also be spent doing genuinely useful stuff. Designs can be a short "pancake" style and can easily be stacked or cascaded.

More here. And some of the problems here.

October 4, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

An astonishing new advance in photography speed can newly be found here. Involving sub picosecond and even femtosecond exposure times!

One of my ancient early Electronics World papers was on what was then state-of-the-art nanosecond pulses. The closest I managed to get at the time was an impressive 400 picoseconds. Done by transistor avalanching.

More reprints here. And free eBooks here. And everybody elses'  free reprints here.

October 3, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

It is interesting to compare an eBay Selling Sell-Buy ratio against the equivalent Consignment Fee for the same amount of placement effort. The formulas are...

SBR = 100/(100 - COM)    and   
COM = 100 - (100/SBR)

Thus a 50 percent commission equals an unacceptably low 2:1 sell-buy ratio. A 20 percent commission equals a laughingly absurd 1.25:1 SBR.

Our recommended SBR is 30:1. Easily achievable through creative use of both live and online industrial auctions. Most especially by paying close attention to "contents of cabinet" and "contents of room" opportunities.

Much more eBay stuff here. And our own eBay sales here.

October 2, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

An eBay auction with sniping is more properly called a Vickrey Second Price auction. And is optimal for several reasons. A very good review of Vickrey auction theory appears here.

The best of all possible auctions for buyers whose time and whose convenience is important would appear to be a Sealed Bid Second Price auction. These would also appear seller optimal as a bidder is MUCH more likely to bid if the odds are high that they will get the item for far less than their max proxy bid price.

While sniping eBay approaches this ideal, Sealed Bid Second Price Auctions seem to be nonexistent elsewhere. Yet they should be the best for everybody. And are Vickrey optimal.

More here and here.

October 1, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Managed to verify that Acme Mapper did in fact switch from Google to Leaflet and that this has dramatically trashed our ability to view many prehistoric bajada canals and CCC water spreaders.

You can use 32.84831 W 109.93414 as a "resolution tester" that shows or omits five water spreaders.

Apparently the very best of satellites offer 0.3 meter resolution, while more typical ones 0.5 meters.

The solution would appear to be to switch to drones. Which, of course, would required support and funding.

September 30, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

How to speak Tucsoneese ( aka "Nogales Junction" ):

R.O.B.'s ---> Regular Old Brownies

September 29, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

The pv breakthrough of the week involves perovskites and can be found here.

Any pv breakthrough of the week always has, of course, a 6.99 day half life.

Meanwhile, as found here and here, pv cell pricing continues its massive decline and is newly threatening eight cents per peak cell watt. Far under what is now needed for long term renewability and sustainability.

Some energy fundamentals here, its "son of" sequel here, a slide show here, and lots of similar stuff here.

How well did you score on the slide show quiz?

September 28, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

I am mystified by what appears to be a historic cattle tank at N 32.82776 W 109.81894. It is clearly fed by and associated with the Mud Springs prehistoric canal.

Yet, I have yet to find any evidence that any part of this canal was ever used historically.

Best current thinking is that the tank was built at the time the SCS dam was, intending only a shorter segment of this canal to actually see historic reuse. But the poor quality of the SCS dam construction promptly blew itself out.

Your theories on this are more than welcome.

September 27, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Work is slowly progressing on our new master prehistoric bajada hanging canal index and directory. We are now almost half way there.

You can follow the daily progress here. Please report any omissions and corrections.

September 26, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

One of the key secrets to eBay success is having a high enough SBR or sell buy ratio. 30:1 works well for me.

30:1 SBR's are fairly easy to achieve at industrial  auctions on "contents of cabinet" and "contents of room" deals. As they are on multiple pallets.

Especially when the lot gets "poisoned" by the auctioneer using "put it with the next lot" to maintain momentum.

I just got an email asking be to do some eBay consignment sales for a 10 percent commission. The minimum practical commission for me would be 96.7 percent, equal to a 30:1 SBR. I can see no point whatsoever in trying to  do eBay consignment sales for others. It makes absolutely no economic sense.  Particularly since it is YOU that gets hung out to dry when things inevitably go south.  More on similar eBay insider sales secrets here.

September 25, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  • 

Newly updated and expanded our Gila Valley Day Hikes. We are now up to 551 primary entries!

New are links to remaining lookout towers, some improvements to the Columbine visitor center, new satellite imaging problems, and reaching the halfway point on our new hanging canal indexes.

A sampler of some of the more unusual day hikes  can be found here.

And more details on your spectacular research  opportunities of our Prehistoric Bajada Hanging  canals here. And much more on the canals here  and here.

September 24, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

eBay's "sell similar" sucks.

If you reuse it several times, you will end up with extreme bloatware, with dozens to hundreds of unwanted and unneeded fonts jamming things up, besides doing lots of random and unwanted size changes.

Instead, write something like this "dummy" program replacing your html  code for each new listing...

<font rwr="1" size="3"
style="font-family:Arial"> .<br> <b>Only
one available!</b><br><br> para line first
<br> para line mid<br> .... para line last
<br><br> .... Received by us ... more <br><br>
Guaranteed usable.... more.<br><br> Your
<b>unit</b> bid.... more <br><br> In stock
for immediate delivery.<br><br> .... ( etc... )
<font rwr="1" size="2" style="font-family:
Arial"> nelanai heat3x6.j pipes3 <br><br>
</font> </font>

A comment on the third line above: This is some find print code to assist your hired help. In this case, the location of the item in inventory, the image .jpg, and a description of what they are looking for.

More eBay help here.

September 23, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Go to 32.84831 W 109.93414, first on Acme Mapper and then on Google Earth.

Google clearly shows five CCC water diversion channels, while Acme Mapper gives only the faintest hint of one of them.

I suspect Acme has switched to a lower resolution or a more highly filtered satellite source. Possibly to work around new Google fees.

This, of course, is very bad news for our hanging canals. Many of which have similarly vanished. Or at least have become much harder to identify.

The obvious solution is to drone everything. Your funding and assistance is sorely needed.

September 22, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

The old WOW signal is once again back in play.

Meanwhile, a brand new one can be found here.

September 21, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Two of our recent eBay images can be found here and here. I thought I would once again review just exactly how these are done. Lots more photos here.

Photography starts off with a 10 Megapixel Nikon Coolpix camera and is done outside in moderately heavy shade with no flash and a uniform background. Use of a tripod is mandatory!

All image postproc is done in bitmap format, until the very final .jpg conversion stage. At least 95% of your time and effort MUST be spent in postproc, compared to your actual photography!

The pix is then imported into imageviewer 32 and gets coarsely cropped. It is then slightly rotated to get all horizontal lines as near horizontal as possible. Followed by some modest brightening and gamma reduction.

Regardless of whether it is a "hex 3D" or "flat square" view, our Architect's Perspective  routines get run to force any and all vertical lines truly so. This  requires full Acrobat and their secret magic //acrodist /F command line incantation.

The next step is subtle but super important. Get back into imageviewer 32 and back off one red click on your color balance. At this point, it is of major importance that there are  ZERO pixels present with whose red value is 255!

Next, get into Paint and select a color having a red value of 255. Carefully outline your entire subject continuously and at least one pixel wide. Your entire outline must be complete. Strive for truly horizontal or vertical lines where appropriate. Should there be any undercuts or "holes" in your subject, also fill these with red=255 pixels. An "undercut" is anything you cannot reach by a horizontal or a vertical line from any border.

Any murky or burned areas can now be repaired, possibly with double or triple exposures or with individual local retouch. But be careful not to add any unwanted red=255's. Lettering issues can next be restored with our Bitmap Typewriter.

When the image looks like you want it to, get back into   imageviewer 32 and crop it to a balanced size. If you use a vignette, be sure to leave enough room. Get into our Web Friendly PostScript Colors and select a suitable background. And then use our Auto Backgrounder.

Finally, resize to 1000 pixels horizontally or so, touch up the brightness and gamma, and possibly add ONE click of sharpness. Then save in .jpg format.

Consulting services available.

September 20, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Here's a summary of our eBay resources...

Master eBay Directory and Index

Our own eBay Sales 
eBay Selling Summary
eBay Buying Summary
My eBay Photo Secrets
Successful eBay Seller Strategies
Successful eBay Buyer Strategies
Enhancing your eBay Skills I
Enhancing your eBay Skills II
Enhancing your eBay Skills III
Enhancing your eBay Skills IV
Enhancing your eBay Skills V
Enhancing your eBay Skills VI
Enhancing your eBay Skills VII
Enhancing your eBay Skills VIII
Image Post-Processing Tools
The Arizona Auction Scene
Your own Custom Auction Finder
Auction Help Library

September 19, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

I have long been overly enameled of binary chain codes. These are a recirculating code of 2^N states that have the unique property that any N bits tells you its exact position in the entire N bit code sequence. All strings of n bits are thus unique and correspond to all possible values of n.

A binary chain code is a sequence of ones and zeros of order n. This means that n bits are involved and the serial sequence is 2^n long. The sequence wraps around itself, so there is no start or finish.

It turns out there is a possibly related De Bruijn Sequence, which someone has used to crack most any traditional  garage door opener in four seconds flat. By using an  out-of-date kid's toy.

Details here and a video here and a discussion here.

September 18, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

The most recent satellite images on Acme Mapper and others seem to be totally unable to show CCC water spreaders or many of our prehistoric canals!

I am not at all sure why. These sites once were glaringly obvious and still ground truth just fine. Surely they will return with the next generation of imagery. Meanwhile, I'll try to focus on what we definitely have verified.

Follow the latest postings to our evolving index here.

September 17, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Our most favorite tapas lounge and winery seems to be up for sale at an astonishing low price.

Meanwhile, we personally have the very last remaining developable view acreage immediately north of Gold Hill Oregon up for sale. 20 acres.

More details here. Or phone Chris at (541) 664-9200.

September 16, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

There have been some ongoing reports of Chrome substituting blank screens for a very few odd .PDF Acrobat files.

I managed to find an apparently older .PDF example which I seem to have repaired here.

Repair was done by going into Acrobat Pro and first substituting text recognition for bitmaps. And then using several features of their optimize bar.

File size was also significantly reduced with these mods.

September 15, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

eBay sales to New Mexico aren't quite as bad as they once were. Yeah, there's still the language barrier and the hassles at customs.

The main problem was that New Mexico truck tires were a different size and spacing, so everything needed reloaded at the ports of entry.

Thankfully, there are now reversible truck tires that can be simply get insided out at the border.

Much more eBay help here. And similar stuff here.

September 14, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Several visitors have asked what the back story was on Poison Ivy in a Spray Can and Mitzi's Yuppy Fare.

The spray can was intended to show how to nonlinearly transform lettering onto a cylindrical surface.

Back in its heyday of our PostScript Show and Tell, all font paths were locked. I came up with a hairy and inane scheme called pixel line remapping as a klutzy workaround. Whose details are best left unmolested here.

These days, many PostScript fonts are unlocked and accessible via the charpath operator. For a nonlinear transform, you simply redefine moveto, lineto, curveto, and closepath to do your intended distortion.

Full details here.

One reason for Mitzi was to show off a super sneaky and compact border technique found in PostScript Secrets #45. Some of these still might not work properly in GhostScript. So, email me your fixes.

But the main purpose of Mitzi was to show how you can solve the ultra subtle "menu dots" problem. First, you put down an entire set of fixed pitch dots. Do so wall to wall and top to bottom. Next, measure all the widths of your left and right proportional font entries and rewrite your background over any unwanted dots they cover. Then put the actual fonts down.

September 13, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Forest fire lookout towers are rapidly becoming an endangered species. Locally, Barfoot has burned, Silver Peak torn down, Miller Peak is gone, and Webb Peak appears to be on a hit list.

These days, just about everybody has GPS and uses cell phones. And scanning IR detectors are now cheap enough and small enough and unattended enough to hang on any old radio tower, telephone pole, drone, or even a large tree.

A two part summary of preservation candidates can be reached here, while preservation enthusiasts can be found here. And restoration docs here.

A directory here. And, amazingly, full sets of tower construction plans are web available here. With this sample here. And previous sites here.

Some remaining lookouts include Heliograph at N 32.65065 W 109.84970, West Peak found at N 32.73830 W 110.03827, Sugarloaf found at N 32.01506 W 109.32416, and Monte Vista at N 31.82583 W 109.31489 .

More on similar topics on our Gila Hikes Web Page.

September 12, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

And another reminder that we have built in a new malware detector into our unique Apache Webfile Log Analyzer whose code you can find here and its demo here.

It seems particularly good at flagging those script kiddies shopping for vulnerabilities. It is based on spotting any user with eight or more 404's.

September 11, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A reminder that spaces are no longer permitted in URL's under CSS or HTML5 and will not validate.

Always make sure any URL you are about to enter into a web page has $20 values substituted for any and all spaces. As well as odd punctuation suitably substituted.

Should you be using Dreamweaver, note that their Class Link selection will purposely trash all $20's back to plain old spaces! So, always use the Insert Hyperlink option instead.

September 10, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

For years, I've found http://mapper.acme.com/ to be a superbly useful tool. Most especially in its ability to mix and match satellite images and topo maps.

Apparently they have resolved some recent Google API issues, and the mysterious dim "research only" message screens are thankfully now gone.

While mostly improved, their latest satellite imagery does not seem to show our Bajada Hanging Canals as well as it previously did. These always were subtle, but somehow they now seem more so. I'm not sure why.

Acme has now added some new options, but to best activate them be sure to use always open on their layers control.

If you newly seem unable to click on the US Topo option, try reducing the scale to its best available topo resolution. I'd expect this to be a fixable glitch.

Their marker feature may not work quite the way you might expect it to. Markers are personalized to your web site and get added to all of your screens.

The rule is to always "police" your markers. Any time you start a new project or download somebody else's maps, be sure to clear all old markers first. Above all, any time you use the "chain" generate URL for this image feature, be sure only the marks you really want to keep with this screen remain.

September 9, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Newly updated and expanded our Gila Valley Day Hikes. We are now up to 547 primary entries!

New are links to Frieborn Hot Spring, Black Jack Cave, and a mystery West Layton structure.

A sampler of some of the more unusual day hikes  can be found here.

And more details on your spectacular research  opportunities of our Prehistoric Bajada Hanging  canals here. And much more on the canals here  and here.

September 8, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

.psl ( or "PostScript-Lancaster" ) files are ordinary text files intended to be sent to the Distiller in Adobe Acrobat or possibly GhostScript. Normal outputs can create an Acrobat .pdf file, an arbitrary content .log text file, or can ( with a secret magic incantation ) read or write most any disk file in most any language.

These are normally open source, uncompressed, and free. But we do request an acknowledgment link to www.tinaja.com any time you use them.

There is one detail that may need your attention should you try to offer a .psl file on your website:

ISP's may not download a .psl file out of the box.

One workaround is to rename the files as .txt. Which leaves you with no reminder that this is PostScript code, besides being a "regular" textfile. You could also "double up" your trailer such as

stuff.psl.txt

A second workaround is to rename the files as .ps. But clicking on them will now go directly to Distiller, instead of an intended editor. Note that telling all .ps trailers to go to an editor may cause issues with third party code.

The sledgehammer cure is to talk to your ISP about an .htaccess file, and then add something like this to it...

AddType text/plain .psl

Note that .htaccess is dangerous! Be sure you know what you are doing! Get help if you don't.

September 7, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A current project of indexing and verifying most of our .psl files is taking lots longer than expected.

Here's a preliminary sampler of where we are headed...

Older files marked with a "*" seem to have restoration or even software rot issues. Very often, careful updating of filenames and directories can "modernize" most of these. Please contact me if you have any issues.

Any files not in alphabetical order above are associated in some manner ( usually an output ) with the previous file.

Files found in our previous Beginner Stuff listing have also not been repeated here. .pdf document generation .psl files are also not included.

You may need a local copy of our current gonzo.psl and your sourcecode suitably edited and redirected for your PC. On those utilities using gonzo.psl or otherwise using disk file reads or writes, you MUST run Distiller from your winkey-x command line by using //acrodist /F.

Substituting GhostScript may require special expertise or adjustments on certain files. Please report any issues.

Gonzo tutorial here, reference manual here, and bunches more PostScript here.

September 6, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Per this latest report and this one, the price of solar pv continues its spectacular and unprecedented decline. The lowest cell costs have now exactly reached a dime per peak panel watt.

Is eight cents now in sight? Five? Remember way back when a quarter per peak panel watt was required for subsidy free long term renewability and sustainability?

That was several whole weeks ago.

Partial causes are a lowering exchange rate, foreign subsidies, or the Wright's Law learning curve variation on Moore's Law. But this seems far beyond "all of the above".

Besides a fundamental and literally earth shattering impact on energy in general, this clearly makes the US pv tariff a ludicrous joke, and ( because panels are now much less than half of total project costs ) greatly favors utility scale projects over personal scale ones.

Energy fundamentals here, its "son of" sequel here, a slide show here, and lots of similar stuff here.

How well did you score on the slide show quiz?

September 5, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

I've newly placed some fast array bubble sort code here with a typical output here.

As we found out, there's a sneaky trick that often can significantly speed up bubble: Just exit your outer loop if there were no inner loop changes.

This works ok on random data and very well on "partially sorted" data such as our new Apache Logfile Reader. Worst case, though , says stuck at n squared.

Our fully documented, and free gonzo.psl set of  PostScript utilities can be found here. With an older intro to PostScript video here. And its Adobe reference manual here. And a show and tell here and beginner stuff here.

September 4, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

I can't seem to be able to make any sense out of Adsense.

I closely follow my own daily web stats, both from Fatcow's stats service and my own new detailed webfile log analyzer. We average something near a thousand users per day.

In theory, this should result in at least a thousand or more adsense impressions daily. But Google reports only 65, at least a SIXTEEN TO ONE disparity! Further, on a lucky week, we average a total of ONE clickthrough. Generating at best, a penny or two per day in revenue.

Which strongly suggests to me that (a) EVERYBODY uses an ad blocker; and (b) NOBODY ever clicks through.

I do have some ad blocker workarounds that seem to be working for my own onsite banners. Details here.

September 3, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Shocking.

Nearly FIFTY PERCENT of North Dakota school children are below average!

September 2, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Here are some notes on what is involved in getting PostScript to directly generate .svg files. Follow the .psl code here for this .pdf and this .svg.

.psl usually builds positive up, while most .svg builds positive down. Something like this transforms your .psl workspace to positive down...

/inch 72 mul store gsave 1 inch 8 inch translate 1 -1 scale

Additional design features such as magnification or layout grids ( under or over ) are easily added to your .psl side. Aided by our gonzo utilities.

Setting up PostScript to write a disk file starts with the magic //acrodist /F incantation that is win-x run from your command line and then does something like this...

/wf (C:/rest_of_filename) (w+) file store

Getting your  exact filename correct ( as well as your exact gonzo.psl location when used ) is super critical to avoid invalidfilename errors.

Two "flavors" of .svg are possible: Bare .svg or .svg inside a .shtml container.

Writing a partial .svg line to your output. svg workfile looks something like this...

wf ( stroke=) curcolor mergestr ( )mergestr writestring

Be sure to end your program with a wf closefile to flush any remaining internal data.

PostScript uses a postfix "reverse polish" command sequence of info1 info2 info3 ... task while .svg uses a "normal" computing sequence of < task info1 info2 info3... >

Be sure to explicitly maintain these sequences on their respective sides! On your .svg side, the exact info... sequence often is not critical.

It pays to uniquely identify "dual mode" commands that both create PostScript Code and write .svg  disk info. A .svg procname trailer can be used...

/fill.svg { fill % ps fill wf ( fill=) curcolor mergestr writestring              } store

This method avoids messing around with userdict.

Absolute integers for sizes are simplest and work best for conversion. But fancier code might be used for "px", "%" and their relatives.

Marking the end of each .svg line is probably best done using an explicit disk file write...

/endline.svg {wf (\>\n) writestring} store

Note that stroking a path makes it bigger. If the final size exceeds your width and height "sandbox", then clipping or truncating may occur. Results may end up browser dependent, besides not looking good.

Ferinstance, in a width="100" height="100" sandbox and a stroke-width of 4, your largest centered circle rad radius value should be 48. Do watch this detail to avoid any rude surprises.

September 1, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Several years back, I published an open source, fully documented, and free gonzo.psl set of PostScript utilities.

This was basically an 80K package of PS dictionaries that made the PostScript language more convenient and fun to use.

Hallmarks include outstanding text formatting, superb images such as quality electronic schematics, and bunches of convenience operators such as string mergers, grids, timing aides, randomizing and various repeat procs.

The recommended use today is to first get a full copy of Adobe Acrobat that includes its Distiller front end.

Adobe recently is switching to renting Acrobat rather than selling it, but older copies should remain readily available on line. Closeout sales are also in process.

Full Acrobat rentals are around $12 per month stand alone, or $50 per month in Adobe's one-each-of- everything cloud package. The latter is a really good bargain.

Your PostScript program ( with or without gonzo.psl ) gets sent to Acrobat Distiller which acts as a general purpose computer interface. Your input code can then get batch converted into a .pdf file, a .log file of arbitrary text content, or have virtually anything input from or output to a disk or usb file.

Woefully underappreciated is the fact that ( after a simple but secret incantation ) Distiller can read or write any disk file in any language! We use this feature to run gonzo.psl as an include.

Or as this latest new Apache Weblog reader or this PS to SVG converter show us. Or these Architect's Perspective, Auto Backgrounder, or this Bitmap Typewriter routine.

The secret incantation is to always run Distiller win X from the command line by using...

//Acrodist /F

Normally, you build gonzo into your PostScript ordinary textfile routine by adding these lines near the beginning of your code...

(C:/Users/don/Desktop/gonzo/gonzo.psl) run
gutility begin nuisance begin printerror

Note that it is super important to change this code to exactly match your gonzo.psl location! Note also that Windows can accept either forward or reverse slashes in a filename. This eases a reserved PS reverse slash hassle.

You also have the option of building gonzo into your code. Which adds 80K to your file length, and should be not be that big a deal these days. Sometimes, only a small gonzo subset may be needed.

Advantages of building in gonzo are that you may no longer need the magic incantation ( unless you need other disk access ) and your program can be passed  on or distributed in one piece.

To get into all this, start with our PostScript Beginner projects. Or study and then modify most any of our .psl files. Or go here. We soon expect to have a new .psl directory up and running.

There is also the GhostScript alternate universe. Open source and free.

Some advanced GhostScript expertise might be needed to avoid glitches in our routines.

Ferinstance, only the last few hundred lines of our log reporter get output in stock GS. And Mitzi's Menu comes out fuzzy with a wildly wrong border. The latter caused by differences in PostScript and Ghostscript arc code.

Please report any GS issues and workarounds.

One thing missing from gonzo.psl is our updated web friendly color generator. This is easily cut and pasted in place.

August 31, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

The latest in TVT replication can be found here.

The TV Typewriter was the opening shot fired in the personal computer revolution. Find its construction details here and its free eBook here.

Two of the harder to find parts these days are the Signetics 2518 32x6 shift register and the crystal.

The reason the crystal is oddball was to get an exact 60 Hertz vertical frame rate. Cheap tv sets used as a display would "breath" or "wobble" if this missed by even a little.

Any old nearby frequency crystal should work just fine with a modern monitor that has a switchmode power supply. Because analog tv broadcasting ceased many years ago, the use of direct video output is recommended.

Another option, though not quite authentic, is to replace your crystal with a power line phase lock loop. This can be done cheaply with a very few 1973 era parts. Purists might even hide the circuit inside a crystal can.

Check out the NLX1G74.

August 30, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

This "proof of concept" shows us how PostScript can DIRECTLY generate .svg graphics files! And thus turning the full resources of PostScript loose on the Cricut and other .svg apps.

Find the .psl sourcecode here, its traditional .pdf output here, and its .svg output here. The .svg is available by itself or inside a .html container.

An optional grid is included on the .pdf side. It can be placed behind or in front of the .svg art.

This is presently a demo limited to a single filled circle. It should be readily expandable into a full or nearly full ap package.

Note that the .psl file will need edited for the correct filenames and prefixes on your particular machine. Note also that a free copy of gonzo.psl is required on your host machine.

And finally, as usual, note that your Distiller disk writes and reads will need to be restored by running Distiller from your command line as //acrodist /F

Custom development available.

August 29, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

I guess it is time for a summary on all our hanging canals. We shortly expect a major paper to appear in a significant "old school" scientific journal. The status of free preprints are not yet resolved.

Our new web page is not quite yet finished. It is missing lots of images, emails, and blog excerpts. Sorry about the image 404's.

The immediate problem is that we are woefully behind in creating and updating our preliminary field note series.

Recent discoveries desperately needing further work include Taylor Canyon, Tripp Canyon, and a still to be verified Hog Canyon. These dramatically extend the range of the bajada canal system.

Your help and assistance is needed, especially for gonzo hiking, photography, and GPS work. Many projects are found here.

Obvious longer term things that need done are one or more You Tube videos, getting into drone work, and somehow involving a few of the heavy hitters to get into this unique and utterly spectacular find.

August 28, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

OK. Here's how to trick PostScript into outputting SVG. Most unbound PS procs can be rewritten and stashed in whatever happens to be on top of the dict stack. The original proc remains available below in systemdict or in some other normal stash.

Ferinstance, here's the stock way to modify the showpage operator so it says "File Copy" or three hole punch marks or a letterhead...

100 dict /workdict exch def workdict begin /showpage {newprinttimestuff systemdict /showpage get cvx exec} store

More to the point, here's how to make curveto output some equivalent SVG...

100 dict /workdict exch def workdict begin /curveto {svg_curveto systemdict /curveto  get cvx exec} store

Your svg_curveto proc does its tasks as needed to write SVG characters either to your log file or to a new SVG disk file.

Outputting something like...

"M 0 0 C 200,200,150,150,120,0"

In this example, it is super important that your svg_curveto preserves the stack, since the "real" PS curveto that follows is still expecting its six control points.

Consulting services available.

August 27, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Scrapbookers seem to be getting off on the Cricut, which is a recent commercial variation on our old Flutterwumper theme and web page. The Cricut is a $300 class vinyl and material cutter that generates transferable images and pen plots and T shirts in its spare time.  Up to a foot square.

Its software is based on SVG scalable vector graphics that is both web friendly and fast gaining in popularity. A nice SVG tutorial can be found here.

Yes, when appropriately subset written, Post Script is easily converted to SVG. It also can directly write SVG programs and modules for you. Post Script is also superb at managing fancy fonts, is more powerful, and a lot of fun to program Some beginner's possibilities can be found here and here. Many are potentially Cricut useful.

August 26, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Per this latest report, the price of solar pv continues its spectacular and unprecedented decline.

Lowest cell prices are now very near a dime per peak panel watt, which is far under the quarter per peak watt demanded for long term subsidy free renewability and sustainability.

All of which suggests the possibility of one cent sales on coal fired power plants. Buy a plant for a penny and get a dozen of them free. They might even be convertible into singles bars. Should be some stunning auction buys.

Much more here.

August 25, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

I guess my first clue that major man caused climate change was clearly and unquestionably now in process took place long before any of the denialists emerged.

In those days, a reasonable 4WD track ran far up the Blue River. Somewhat above the XXX ranch were a series of rare and spectacular historic oxbow lakes (!), all having many hundreds of years old trees on their banks. Impressively riparian.

The river itself, though, had moved to the west and its channel was now utterly and totally scoured. Lately, though, all of the oxbow lakes and all of the trees have vanished without a trace. And the whole canyon has been wall-to-wall obliterated by spectacular floods.

Somewhere around the same time, I was attending a talk on overgrazing. When they asked what the indicator species were for overgrazing, they got real upset when I answered "cows".

August 24, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Newly updated and expanded our Gila Valley Day hikes. We are now up to 542 primary entries!

New are links to the Little Blue Box and some rare ( at least for AZ ) hex columnar Basalt.

A sampler of some of the more unusual day hikes  can be found here.

And more details on your spectacular research  opportunities of our Prehistoric Bajada Hanging  canals here. And much more on the canals here  and here.

A few of the many open "help wanted" projects  were summarized here. There are many dozens  of newer ones.

August 23, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Added bunches more content to our Apache logfile report interpreter. Find its code here and a typical report here.

Fatcow has an otherwise superb log interpreter, but it seems to miss these code features of ours...

User sequential access reports
Status 200 hits by popularity
Status 206 hits by popularity
Status 301 hits by popularity
Status 404 hits by popularity
Status 406 hits by popularity
Status 407 hits by popularity
Hit to User ratio (!)
Malware Suspects (!)
Top 10 Heavy Users
Various Totals and Percentages
Total Hits
Total Users
Home Page Hits
Default Hits

.asp Hits by Popularity
.bas Hits by Popularity
.bmp Hits by Popularity
.eml Hits by Popularity
.gif Hits by Popularity
.gz Hits by Popularity
.ico Hits by Popularity
.jpg Hits by Popularity
.js Hits by Popularity
.kml Hits by Popularity
.lnk Hits by Popularity
.log Hits by Popularity
.pdf Hits by Popularity
.png Hits by Popularity
.psl Hits by Popularity
.shtml Hits by Popularity
.txt Hits by Popularity
.xml Hits by Popularity
Report Timing Functions

Similar reports can be generated on a custom basis or for other Apache hosts.

Our software is free open source. We do offer a fee based analysis service on eBay for those of you who do not want to do any actual coding.

August 22, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Just added a "bad guy" malware detector to our Apache Logfile analyzer. Find its code here and a typical report here. Total additional processing time is only a small fraction of a second.

The assumption is that malware has at least eight (404)'s per session. Yeah, there might be some temporary Hanging Canal image bogus hits. We expect these to go away in the next few days.

At least on our site, most of the malware appears to be Pacific Rim script kiddies. Who repeatedly seek out links that we never had and are unlikely to ever provide. Many of these seek out a //plus subdirectory. Make sure you do not have one of these. Or get real help if you do.

I've also just added a display of the top ten heavy hitters. This is useful for subtracting out those pigging out and your own web site from genuine changes in daily traffic.

Typically, your top ten sites will be less than two percent of your total users but one third of your total traffic.

This Post Script software is free, but we do offer an eBay service for those of you who may not want to mess with code.

August 21, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

In response to an ever diminishing number of requests, I've just colorized the Mitzi Menu. Find its demo here and its software here.

To colorize anything else, put this code early in your program...

/webtintmat [ 0 1 5 { /a exch store 0 1 5 { /b
exch store 0 1 5 { 5 div b 5 div a 5 div } for }
for } for ] def

% setwebtint accepts a color number 0 to 215
% sets the Post Script color generator for later use...

/setwebtint { abs cvi 216 cvi mod % restrict range
webtintmat exch 3 mul 3 getinterval % get values
aload pop setrgbcolor} def % and set them

And then place something like this immediately before each target stroke or fill...

137 setwebtint

To get a pair of colors that seem to be shades of each other, keep two of the three optional hex css values constant.

Complete webtint code here and its demo here. The demo is also useful for simplified CSS.

Much more Beginner Stuff here.

August 20, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Most of the map links on our Gila Valley Dayhikes have now been improved. Many thanks to Acme Mapper's Jef Poskanzer for his superb help.

Note particularly Acme's Options choices. We do recommend using layers always open and disabling their mark on find. And "policing" excess marks.

When last checked, all of the map links are now css compatible, but many are not yet ssl. We will fix these as time permits. If you store these links elsewhere, please prefix them with an https://

Meanwhile, if you spot a map or other link that is misbehaving or not going where you think it should, please tell us.

Some interesting hikes that can greatly help our Hanging Canal research can be found here.

Although Gila Hikes is supposed to be the definitive outdoorsey "things to do" guide for the Greater Bonita-Eden-Sanchez Metropolitan Area, I have a hollow feeling that I missed something obvious. Again, your feedback welcome.

August 19, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A reminder that we have some new and free Apache Webserver logfile analysis software here with its demo here. For those of you who do not want to mess with code, we have a for hire processing and interpretive service up on eBay.

Careful study of our own website has revealed four different types of users...

The "normal" and sought after users with almost all 200's and some 301's for older links. The latter get invisibly referred. Very few of these requested 404's remain. Only a fraction of which are fixable by us. But those still here are very difficult for us to find, so be sure to tell us how you got to them.

The "abusive" users who seem to be shopping for places to insert malware. Seeking links that do not exist and do not apply to us in any way, shape or form. Almost all return 404's or worse, and 200's are pretty much not there.

The "SEO" sites exclusively after whtnu.xml. Needless to say, it is quite important to give them what they want. And with reasonable stylesheets to aid them in finding your goodies.

The Robots who mostly will check into robots.txt and then visit your main home page, most usually as a "/" only.

Sometimes you can have fun with the abusives, but it is not a good idea to piss them off. Ferinstance, any outrageous image request can be substituted with this one. Or this .PDF. The key concept in use here is "bamboozlement".  

Yeah, you can block the bad guys, but they seem to be an infinitely renewable resource.

August 18, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Acme Mapper behavior seems to have just gotten even worse. The latest symptom is that new screens are only rarely shown. and clearing markers may only help sometimes.

We have signed up for Google API and they do recognize us. The problem also shows up on the Internet Exploder, so we can rule out anything Chrome cache related. It also is not related to a single PC host machine.

So far, no charges. But if significant ones show up, we will be forced to downgrade all lat lons to print only. And Google does not presently offer topo maps, just satellite imagery.

Strangely, there is not the slightest peep of others having similar problems. Except for this. I am sorry for how this severely affects our website, and most especially Gila Dayhikes.

As a temporary workaround, try copying the lat lon links somewhere else, perhaps Google Earth or some too map showing site.

Can you shed any light on this?

August 17, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

My favorite pseudoscience yarn is the Saga of the Magic Lamp. With How to Trash a Vehicle Hydrogen Electrolysizer a close second.

And my first very own perpetual motion machine here.

More on bashing pseudoscience here. And lots of related links here.

August 16, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A news anchor recently gained even more than usual fame by confusing cannabis and cannibal tasting tours.

HINT: Only one of these is vegetarian!

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

August 15, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

It is interesting to compare and contrast the concepts of "proof" and "evidence" between an engineer and an archaeologist. At first glance, the mindsets seem distinctly different.

In my early magic sinewave work, lack of bobble in the tenth decimal place convinced me that I found true harmonic nulls rather than a slight dip. But the Mathematicians, of course, were not convinced with such flimsy evidence. They wanted "proof".

Many of our hanging canals still lack destinations. Sometimes because they were "steal the plans" historically trashed. Other times because they simply had not been found yet.

Yesterday, I found a situation that might be an extension of the Mud Springs Canal. At best I can only give it credibility of 37 on a scale of 100. But dozens of explored alternatives could not remotely approach this figures. Is this proof?

What we have is an obvious and disused vehicle two-track. But it is amazingly straight with a perfectly flat and correct slope, exactly where a Mud Springs extension might be expected.

Adjacent to the road, the terrain is slightly undulated or "hillocky", and some of these are suggestive of spoil banks. There is no sign whatsoever of anything wobbly on the road itself. Nor any sign of modern road grading. Which suggests there might be a canal under the road.

Can this be called "proof"? Can Ockham's Razor bail us out?

Perhaps a check of sediment particle sizes can help out here. Contact us if you are a seidmentoloogist.

Your comments and your participation welcome. You are especially needed here.

August 14, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Marbelosities, aka "distorted stacks of pancakes" are a new and woefully unattended and unexplored new computer and art opportunity.

For they rapidly and efficiently let you create stuff that does not at all look like it was done on a computer.

Its hallmarks are "self UN-similarity". Sort of the exact opposite of fractals. The concept evolved from attempts at creating a marbeling effect common to early classic book flyleafs.

For a quick demo, click on the .png files. To build your own in insanely short files, click on the .psl files.

While directly of interest to scrapbookers, this also is obviously a winning student paper ( or even thesis! ) and opens up whole new worlds of unexpected art forms.

Please email me your best results.

August 13, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

One of the most important firefighter's training drills is the hose follow out, used to escape a burning building.

Male hose fittings point into the fire. Female ones point out. Which is which can be subtle when they are connected together in the fireground.

One inane incantation to remember this is..

"Smooth Bump Bump to the Pump"

The drill is best done with gloves, eyes closed, and not being allowed to "flip" a short prop. Do this at least four times a year.

August 12, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A pair of new low cost humidity sensors can be found here.

They seem simple and effective but involve a non-standard digital exchange code.

August 11, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Per this website, pv pricing is continuing its steep decline and clearly is now approaching a dime per peak panel watt. Less than half of what is potentially required for true subsidy free long term renewability and sustainability.

Meanwhile, significant alternates to silicon pv do seem to be making major progress, as these two links to dye-sensitized and perovskite approaches show us. But lead involvement with perovskites does not bode well.

The goal is to find a process similar to making wallpaper, only not nearly as expensive.

One present  pv limitation is that extreme energy costs are involved in pre-wafer processing. BUT - dollars and kilowatt hours are largely and fungibly interchangeable. Sometimes directly as in your power or gas bill, sometimes only obscurely.

Thus, any processing energy expenses would likely be already built into the per-panel peak watt costs.

Energy fundamentals here. And newly dated pv solar info here. Much more on energy here.

August 10, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

I don't know if this is a feature, a bug, or just some localized cache glitch, but Acme Mapper seems to newly have sometimes returned to a previous screen rather than to an intended new site click through.

This is especially aggravating on our Gila Valley Dayhikes.

A possible workaround is to clear your markers, exit, and reload the new link. This usually works.

A second reason to aggressively "police" your markers is that too many unneeded markers can make any links you create excessively long.

A third reason is that marker lettering can differ between you and your user. Your "H" marker could end up their "F" marker or worse.

The only partial fix I have found so far is to use alt-print screen, get into Imageviewer or whoever, and save it as a .JPEG. This  "freezes" the marker letters at the cost of losing all pan or zoom.

August 9, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Continuing yesterday's discussion, I thought we might go over what remains relevant and useful of some of our older PostScript code.

At one time, PostScript interpretation was mostly offered in low resolution printers. These days, you simply send your standard textfile to an //acrodist /F activated copy of Adobe Acrobat or its open source GhostScript.

There once was elaborate eexec encryption, but I was one of the first to discover that it could easily be sight read by a patient seventh grader. As in "oops". So eexec has now fallen by the wayside. And, although now fully documented, sees very little use.

There were also uselessly elaborate font protection schemes, but these thankfully got removed once it was discovered that the benefits of font manipulation wildly exceeded its protection needs. Thanks to charpath and some related commands, most fonts are now fully open. Thus rendering obsolete my arcanely obtuse "pixel line remapping" scheme workaround found in some earlier files.

The initial low resolution brought about my "secret gray maps" that stunningly improved 300 DPI appearance, but ended up pretty much an unneeded hassle at higher Distiller level resolutions.

Another older but unneeded hassle: PostScript demands a double reverse slash every time you want a single  real one. Windows filenames are normally full of these reverse slashes.

But, while little known, Windows filenames can also  accept forward slashes, or forward and reverse in any mix. The obvious workaround is to use single forward  slashes in any needed filename in your PostScript code.

Originally PostScript printers were largely black and white only. Older code is easily colorized with this technique, which also has new .css compatibility features.

Most properly written .PDF files will drag along a subset of needed internal fonts. That way, each user sees exactly what you want them to, even if they do not have any local font copies.

Distiller deals with fonts in one of three ways. If it cannot find a local font, it substitutes fixed pitch Courier. If the font is present but protected, it substitutes a font whose appearance can vary from useful to an atrocity. When it finds an unlocked font, it creates an accurate replica.

One of the disturbing consequences of Distiller font use is that popular early fonts may not remain unlocked and available. Leading to possible software rot of early code.

As this code and this example shows us, many thousands of available "free" fonts should already be available in your host. But a poor choice might give an even poorer Distiller substitution.

Should you add any new fonts, it is super important to tell Distiller just where its fonts can be found via its settings--->font locations feature. This is particularly important to gain Typekit access for Distiller. Some details here.

A different approach to free fonts can be found here.

August 8, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Some of our decades old PostScript examples are showing signs of age, so I thought we might review here just where PostScript is today and where it is headed.   

PostScript is a second cousin of Forth, thrice removed and five times disowned. It is a stack oriented, reverse polish, dynamically typed, strongly extensible and fully redefinable language best suited to batch processing.

With a few limitations, it can act as a totally general purpose computer language. It is also rumored to be able to dirty up otherwise clean sheets of paper. It is the overwhelmingly mainstream superior method of dealing with scalable vector graphics, most especially fonts, image manipulation, and cubic splines.

The most common use of PostScript today is to generate more or less ordinary text files which can be sent to the Distiller in Adobe Acrobat or to open source GhostScript. The usual output is a printable and web distributable .PDF file and a optional log output or text file.

But little known and woefully underappreciated is that PostScript ( when properly activated ) can batch read or write ANY disk file in ANY language! Or serve as a "program to write programs" in ANY language whose output can be routed to a USB or whatever. Or modify bitmaps six ways from Sunday. Or perform all sorts of incredibly obtuse math stuff. Or even fractal ferns. Or open up the whole stunning world of Marbelosities.

A recent example and demo is this code that can take a cumbersome Apache ISP server log file and convert it into a very lucid,  uncompressed and easily understood report. Many hundreds of additional examples can be found here and are first introduced in  one of these.

An older intro to PostScript video can be found here. And its reference manual here. And a show and tell here.

With care, "hand built" PostScript can be insanely shorter and faster than "machine generated" code. Especially after an optimization pass or two. Startup secrets here and speedup secrets here. And a Byte story here, Computer Shopper columns here, and PostScript robotics here.

Sadly, Adobe discovered that the "trash anything, anywhere" potential of PostScript had some possible abuse potential. So it comes from the DC cloud factory with most of Distiller's disk access disabled. But there is a simple workaround that restores full disk access. Just run Distiller from the command line, activating this magic secret sequence...

 //acrodist /F 

One of the more obvious uses for disk access is to run all your boilerplate as included files. I long ago created a free set of Gonzo Utilities that do just this. With its tutorial findable here. And bunches of useful beginner projects here.

August 7, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

 Here's our fresh collection of our...

You can find our PostScript Beginner Stuff class outline here. And Insider PostScript secrets here and here.

You will need a local copy of our current gonzo.psl and your sourcecode suitably edited and redirected. for your PC. Distiller  MUST be run from the command line by using //acrodist /F

Gonzo tutorial here, reference manual here, and bunches more PostScript here.

Your first assignment is to add color to these older files. Some of these projects may include minor glitches caused by unavailable fonts or Distiller's substitution of locked ones You are encouraged to make any needed currency repairs.

August 6, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Here is one way to add adjustable vertical ledding to a CSS or HTML5 table. First, add this in your header...

.adjled {font-size: 5px;}

Then put this in your table where you want extra space...

<tr class="adjled"> <td>&nbsp;</td> <td></td>
<td></td> ... more or less as needed... </tr>

Change the invisible font-size to adjust the ledding.

Please let me know if you are aware of a simpler or preferred alternative.

August 5, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Most of the dust seems to have settled over your now needing a Google API account to be able to reasonably use Acme Mapper. Please let me know if you have any older or current issues with our Guru's Lair map images.

Separately, Acme just made a minor but non-obvious improvement: That "stack of papers" upper right is how you access the now hidden boxes to click between topos, satellite images, and the rest of the gang.

August 4, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

If I am correctly interpreting the latest figures here and here, solar pv cell pricing has just crashed and burned!

Blasting through the quarter per peak panel watt needed for long term and subsidy free genuine net renewability and sustainability. And with a dime per peak panel watt under imminent serious threat.

Part of the reason may be dropping exchange rates but obviously, much, much more is coming down.

Another factor might be the Moore's Law related Experience Curve or Wright's Law.

More energy stuff here.

August 3, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Just completed yet another 404 witch hunt. For most users most of the time, getting a 404 on our website should be a truly rare event.

Except for robots, malware, or otherwise wayward visitors. Who rack up bunches of 404's seeking stuff that simply never was there. And likely never will be.

Such 404's are easy to spot on any website that you control by using our brand new logfile utilities. Whose demo is here and sourcecode here. Some revisions and speedups have recently been added.

Yeah, there's some still incomplete links on our new hanging canal page. We are working on filling this gap as soon as we can.

Otherwise, the remaining fixable 404's have now become enormously difficult to find, owing to them having ancient or obscure or unlikely or unpopular click through sources.

So, PLEASE -- If you are a "real" user and if you get a mystery 404, please tell us EXACTLY what you clicked on to get there! We want to fix these as a very high priority.

August 2, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

There's some interesting and sneaky tricks you can pull if you add some unprinting spaces to the justification routines in our Gonzo Utilities. The rule is that all leading line spaces will be deleted. If in the rare instance you want to add leading spaces, preface them with a |j or |k.

Or both if your layout is extremely critical. If you want to force a fill justify on the last line of a page, add as many spaces as you need, and follow them, again, by a |j or |k.

Naturally, this takes a last line that is "nearly full" to start with. If a command ends up at the end of one line and the action is supposed to begin on the next one, the command may be ignored. This can be a problem with web links or bolded emphasis.

The cure is to add one or more spaces to the  end of the previous line. This will force both the command and the command action to be together as they belong at the beginning of a line.

The best way to study Gonzo is to  view most any of the .PSL files in our GuruGram Library.

August 1, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Did you know that Paul McCartney had a group before Wings?

July 31, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Astoundingly, "they" have newly figured out how to dramatically speed up most users of a classic bubble sort most of the time. Just make this simple change...

When the inner loop makes no swaps exit the outer loop!

This works well with random data and spectacularly well with "partially presorted" stuff such as our new Apache web log file analyzer. But worse case remains stuck at n squared.

Here's some sample code...

/popbubblesort2h {/curmat1 exch store curmat1
length 1 sub -1 1 { /done true store % short exit
marker /maxposition exch store

0 1 maxposition 1 sub { /posn exch store curmat1
posn get 1 get curmat1 posn 1 add get 1 get lt

{ curmat1 posn get curmat1 posn 1 add get curmat1 exch posn exch put curmat1 exch posn 1 add exch put /done false store}if } for done {exit} if} for curmat1 } store % outer loop

Which should rapidly convert this...

[
[ (a) 200 [ ] ]
[ (b) 3452 [ ] ]
[ (c) 27 [ ] ]
[ (d) 1 [ ] ]
[ (e) 2 [ ] ]
[ (f) 17 [ ] ]
[ (g) 1 [ ] ]
[ (h) 1 [ ] ]
[ (i) 2 [ ] ]
]

...into this...

[
[ (b) 3452 [ ] ]
[ (a) 200 [ ] ]
[ (c) 27 [ ] ]
[ (f) 17 [ ] ]
[ (e) 2 [ ] ]
[ (i) 2 [ ] ]
[ (d) 1 [ ] ]
[ (g) 1 [ ] ]
[ (h) 1 [ ] ]
]

A code example here. Additional PostScript support  here, here, here, and here.

July 30, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

There appear to be some big time problems emerging with Acme Mapper as the Google Satellite imaging folks now want you you have an account with them as well. Many Acme images have newly degraded into low contrast "development" screens.

A third party explanation can be found here and the Google dashboard here. Supposedly there is no present charge for a sane number of accesses.

I thought I had jumped through all the hoops, but the restored Acme stuff reverted back into the useless screens again this morning.

I can't even seem to look at my own older images Stay tuned while the dust settles.

July 29, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Newly updated and expanded our Gila Valley Day hikes. We are now up to 540 primary entries!

Included are links to our new Hanging Canals web page. details on the Corona cold war memorabilia, and new availability of a USB canal reference.

A sampler of some of the more unusual day hikes  can be found here.

And more details on your spectacular research  opportunities of our Prehistoric Bajada Hanging  canals here. And much more on the canals here  and here.

A few of the many open "help wanted" projects  were summarized here. There are many dozens  of newer ones.

July 28, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

I see something enormously distressing taking place on the web. Completely ignored and of profound significance: Only history that has a champion survives the web!

Ferinstance, you can easily find the rules for Mad Magazine's 43 Man Squamish from their June 1965 issue. But Sallen and Key's crucial 1955 paper defining the entire world of Active Filters is not freely available anywhere!

Heathkit schematics are readily available from dozens  of web sources, while details on automotive diagnostic interfaces are few and far between.

In other words, trivialities survive while essential defining  documents go begging. One obvious solution: MANDATE that all scientific papers older than three years have free web access from multiple sources! 

It is way past time to stake the gatekeepers to an anthill. Note that most published scientific and quite a few technical documents are paid for with your tax dollars. YOU own these and should have every right to freely access them. 

A second obvious solution: Restrict copyright to 36 months renewable once upon careful review to an individual, and to 18 months nonrenewable to any corporation or heir. With mandatory free web conversion afterwards.

Yeah, I am trying to not be part of the problem. Many of my free ebooks can be found here, classic reprints here, and open sourcecode here.

July 27, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

At least one eBay seller firmly believes in truth in advertising...

"Fright arrangements to be made by Buyer."

July 26, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Here's the two insider secrets to getting Typekit and Distiller to play nice together: First, add a new link to Distiller's Font Locations.

And secondly, after picking up new fonts via Typekit or Creative Cloud, find their correct PostScript font names.

A valid PS fontname consists of a forward slash and a name with no spaces. Traditionally, there would be one or more hyphens present but some new Typekit entries simply jumble all the name elements together space free.

Words like std or .regular are sometimes included or omitted.

If you end up with Courier and a warning, either you have not properly accessed the font or else you have the required PS name wrong

Here's a sneaky way to find a problem filename: Load any old .PDF program and then enter a watermark with the target font. Then do a

File --> Properties --> Fonts

A list of many older PostScript font names can be found here. And this program includes a more up to date ( but still incomplete ) list and can find which of your fonts are available, properly named, and correctly linked. A font snooper demo can be found here.

July 25, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Just added an all new Apache web logfile analyzer that formats and resorts into a more convenient and useful presentation. Find a demo here and the .PSL code here.

Requires an input web log report. Such as moo.tinajacom derived from access_log_20180725.gz or whoever in the Fatcow /stats folder and decompressed via Winzip or another .gs reader.

Also requires Distiller from Acrobat and my Gonzo Utilities .

IMPORTANT NOTE: This file DEMANDS that Distiller has its disk file reading activated! From run accessing the command line, activate via //acrodist /F .

Sourcecode will need text editing and renaming to suit your filenames and logfile and Gonzo locations. Your use details may end up server and ISP dependent.

Processing speed is now around 500 hits per second. The output is a text based .log file.

Additional PostScript support here, here, here, and here.

July 24, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

We may be within a month or two of a cataclysmic pv tipping point. See the stats here or alternately here.

The holy grail value for genuine long term unsubsidized renewability and sustainability is around a quarter per peak panel watt.

One of the lowball current prices is WITHIN A PENNY! And the rest of the gang is now very close behind.

Sadly, the instant that true renewability and sustainability becomes theoretically possible, zillions of new dollars ( and their energy equivalents ) will be thrown at pv. thus forcing actual fully burdened true net breakeven many years into the future.

The immediate effect of the ongoing price drops is to completely negate even the remotest point of that mesmerizingly awful pv tariff. For pv is now ( or very soon will be ) cheaper with the tariff than it was before the tariff was created!

Better yet, the quarter per peak watt will likely be blasted thru as if it was not even there. Even with just learning curve and volume and without any new breakthroughs. The latter of which are surely likely "real soon now".

Much more here.

July 23, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

How do you add a new element to a PostScript array? You can try...

mark curarray aload pop  {newitem}]
/curarray exch store.

This is elegant but somewhat slow. It is also resource intensive but needs no key.

Instead, you can create an array of nulls that is waaay to long and a pointer....

/myarray 1000 array store
/myarraypointer 0 store

To add a fourth item after three are already present...

/myarray myarraypointer {item4} put
/myarraypointer myarraypointer 1 add store

And to clean up when you are finished...

myarray 0 myarraypointer 1 sub get
interval /myarray exch store.

Several examples of both methods are here.

Please let me know your solution to the PLRM put enigma.

July 22, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Here's a variation on a bubble sort that works on one count cell inside an array...

/popbubblesort2 { /curmat1 exch store
curmat1 length 1 sub -1 1 {curmat1 0
get exch 1 exch 1 exch {/posn exch store
curmat1 posn get 2 copy 1 get exch 1 get
lt {exch} if curmat1 exch posn 1 sub exch
put} for curmat1 exch posn exch put }
for curmat1 } bind store

In its present form, it ranks values based on...
[[stuff1 count1][stuff2 count2]{stuff3
count3]...]

Bubble is hard to beat when only a few items needs sorted, but gets out of hand for large n as its execution time relates to n squared.

Several use examples here. Other sorts here and here, and sneaky related stuff here.

July 21, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A free useful comm speed and latency tester can be found here.

July 20, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Two useful timing utilities found in our Gonzo procs and their their tutorial are stopwatchon and stopwatchoff.

Here's the code...

/stopwatchon {resettimer starttimer} def
/stopwatchoff {stoptimer reporttimer} def

/resettimer {/mytime 0 def} def
/starttimer {usertime /mytimenow exch def } def
/stoptimer {usertime mytimenow sub                   
 /mytime exch mytime add def} def
/reporttimer {mytime 1000 div (\nElapsed time: )                  
 print 20 string cvs print ( seconds.\r)                  
print flush} def

July 19, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

If you have a PostScript program using bunches of very long strings that seems to get unbearably slow with increasing input complexity, the problem may be excessive garbage collection.

Try this...

/your_great_subproc { -2 vmstatus    
--- your wonderful code here --- 0 vmstatus
} store

The -2 says to stop garbage collection. The 0 says to resume normal collection. More here.

When and if this stunt works, it can result in a 2X or 3X speedup! You have gone too far if the code blows up or generates an out of memory error. The odds of this happening on a newer high RAM machine is usually negligible.

July 18, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

What may be a genuine and only slightly overhyped new motor and generator breakthrough can be newly found here.

By using permanent magnets and routing flux axially rather than radially appears to provide significant benefits in the way of size, efficiency, vibration and winding effective use.

It seems particularly useful for windpower.

Another somewhat related development can be newly found here.

July 17, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Farm sibling when asked why he kept feeding raw pork to city slickers...

"Its the only trick I know, Sis."

July 16, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Just realized our sitemap.xml was horribly out of date, besides failing to pick up our change to https: security.

Find the current sitemap here, your own sitemap builder here, and some tutorials here.

Note that sitemaps normally do not need style info and that they index only web pages, rather than content such as .PDF, JPG, BMP, etc... They are supposedly enormously useful for SEO work.

July 15, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

I think I solved the 206 hassles: TURN OFF APACHE BYTE SERVING!

With byte serving on, each eBook access adds hundreds to thousands of web log lines, and one pigging out can easily add ten times that many.

Worse, there appears to be some sort of malware or ( possibly - unproven ) glitch in the latest Chrome version that can very rarely rack up hundreds of  thousands of 206 log entries.  Or might even outright hang!

It turns out that PDF files no longer even need Byte Serving, because file web optimization usually does pretty near the same thing. By putting stuff needed for the first page early in the doc. And today's much faster comm certainly does not hurt any.

This .htaccess sequence should do it..

<FilesMatch ".*">

    ( other stuff might already be here)

Header unset Accept-Ranges Header set Accept-Ranges none

    ( other stuff might already be here)

</FilesMatch>

WARNING: Do not mess with .htaccess unless you know EXACTLY what you are doing! Save your originals! Verify your code here.

My thanks to the Fatcow tech folks for their help on this.

July 14, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

We may be gaining on fixing our 206 byte range website attacks. Waay back in 2011, there were some DOS attacks described here, here, here, and here.

With, supposedly a permanent .htaccess fix of... 

RewriteEngine on RewriteCond
%{HTTP:range}      
!(^bytes=[^,]+(,[^,]+){0,4}$|^$) RewriteRule .
* - [F]

 However, these could still clearly be somehow evolving.

Lately, there seems to be a brand new release of Chrome /67.0.3396.87 Safari/537.36 that may have some 206 DOS attack potential.

It seems significant that 100 percent of our 206 tinaja issues are all related to this Chrome release. At present, this remains speculative and unproven.

Present thinking is to block ALL tinaja byte range requests until the dust settles. While this may seem to slow down our eBook downloads, it actually can be a little faster for a full book download to complete.

I have not yet verified that .htaccess byte range cancellation can be done by ...

Header unset Accept-Ranges Header set Accept-Ranges none

Please stay tuned. Your help welcome.

July 13, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

I predict the price of marijuana is about to suddenly, precipitously, ignominiously, and catastrophically collapse. Yet nobody seems to be paying any attention.

Any reasonable commodity price is based on supply and demand. Instead, US marijuana pricing is clearly based instead solely on fear versus reward. The classic approach-avoidance conflict.

Because of the law of the unintended consequence, virtually  every penny of federal or state anti-marijuana expense can clearly be viewed instead as a farm subsidy or price support.

Price supports outrageously higher than on ANY other  agricultural commodity. As these supports are very likely to soon vanish, mj pricing can be reasonably expected to revert to a supply and demand pricing model.

It is interesting to compare mj to cotton. Since the ginning is simpler but the growing is pretty much the same, a reasonable post subsidy mj pricing would appear to likely be somewhere  around fifty nine cents per pound.

Thus, the state tax income projections could easily be a tad off. But perhaps only by three or four orders of magnitude.

As with cotton, much of the processing could be fairly similar,  with the standard commodity item being the five hundred pound bale. Partial bales, of course, should clearly be considered  personal use only.

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

July 12, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

The saga continues. After discovering that "some" to "lots" of spiking 206 hits can be a normal part of byte serving, we apparently had our worst yet 206 DOS byte attack yesterday. By far. All from a clearly excessive single source.

It turns out that an ancient 2011 Apache DOS bug had been found and supposedly long fixed per this and its related files. With a recommended .htaccess fix of...

RewriteEngine on RewriteCond
%{HTTP:range}          
!(^bytes=[^,]+(,[^,]+){0,4}$|^$) RewriteRule .
* - [F]

Why the problem seems to remain a new DOS mystery is still yet unknown. Not sure if this is pure coincidence, but each bad guy seems so far to be using the latest new Chrome update of 67.0.3396.99.

Your suggestions are very much sought out.

July 11, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Rather than repair our needed RTL Cookbook font glitch, I decided to do a director's cut of culprit page 185. Find the result here and the sourcecode here.

Director's Cuts are my way of updating and upgrading Linotype era documents. Ending up with "perfect" typography and backgrounds, along with very short file sizes, and such modern bells and whistles as color, image expandability, url links, error correcting, full searching and great heaping bunches more.

Typical grouped size of text+figures can approach 10K per page!

More director's cuts here. Don't miss this one!

We can do these for you, but note they are labor intensive and thus expensive.

July 10, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

How many "206" errors can a normally working .PDF Byte Range ebook delivery system add to a website? The answer can be surprisingly high.

A typical byte range might be 16K or 64K. If you have, say, a 12 meg eBook, that's a minimum of 200 to 800 of the 206 errors. Likely double that with normal comm issues. Call it a thousand errors minimum.

Suppose somebody wants to pig out on ten free ebooks. Now ten thousand errors minimum.

Suppose their are a total of ten ebook accessing users doing similar total downloads. Now ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND (!) of the 206 errors could end up daily normal and expected.

Traffic that shows surprisingly high "spike" glitches. While, another things, does not in any manner add to Adsense traffic, impressions, or payments. And can completely bury trying to evaluate subtle website changes and trends.

I guess I am not at all sure what should be normal and expected.

July 9, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Yorg. We are still having occasional problems on our ebooks with Byte Range Serving apparently rarely going into a near continuous loop and racking up tens of thousands of bogus hits.

An apparent problem cookbook font was found and fixed and now verifies as .PDF. The file is temporarily a few pages short. This will get fixed once the situation is understood. It is too early to tell if RTL has really been fixed.

But a similar problem has just shown up with Son Of Cheap Video which also seemed to validate. Sometimes, the result is "hang hung" and sometimes ignores .htaccess blocking and filename changes!

So, I need your help. I have temporarily changed the SOCV filename. If you want to download it, you'll first have to email me for the temp filename. And later email me back with a report over whether you were one of the very few hangees.

The new version of Chrome has not yet been excluded as a problem factor. As in Chrome /67.0.3396.99 .

July 8, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

It turns out there is a PDF Validator that you can find here. And it spotted a bad font in the RTL Cookbook.

While its still too early to tell, this could be the cause of those excess web hits.

A repaired RTL Cookbook can be found here, minus three temporarily removed pages. I'll try to get around to fixing these later.

Once again, always blame yourself first!

July 7, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

One DOS denial-of-service glitch still seems to remain on our website. While most of you can download our free PDF ebooks in the expected manner, occasionally a DOS attack will rack up many thousands of hits. The issue appears to be byte range retrieval related and might involve Chrome revisions.

The problem typically uses byte range requests of 16,384 or 65,536. And repeats itself waaaay too many times.

Sorry, but you WILL be blocked if your ebook download racks up 30,000 hits or more. Please, let's hear from you if you know the cause and cure.

July 6, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

It's waaay too soon to tell for sure, but it seems we had at least one typo in our .htaccess file. Portions also became mysteriously commented.

A website that lets you check valid .htaccess can be found here. And Fatcow has a for-charge .htaccess fixer-upper.

.htacess lets you do custom weird stuff to your website. I needed it to add secure https; to lock out certain bad guys; to permit includes; to allow JavaScript; and to permit our .psl textfile trailers.

Not all ISP's will let you play with this, because of the possibility of trashing everything with a typo.   As we've seen, big time.

Lesson's learned: If cubic weirdness comes down on your website, try blaming .htaccess.

And, of course, always blame yourself first.

Please report any ongoing problems.

July 5, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

When editing URL's, it can be super easy to pick up unwanted hidden fragments, especially when cut and pasting or using Dreamweaver.

Some guidelines...

- Always "pretty print" your <a href ... entries. With a preceding blank line and a fixed tab. This lets you quickly spot problem lines.

- Pay particular attention to multiple table URL lines, especially any longer ones.

- Always be sure any previous link has been fully    erased before you overwrite it with a new one.

- Beware of href lines without companion text!

- Spaces are not allowed in URL's. Use $20 instead.

- NEVER use the Dreamweaver Link command with URL's! Always use Insert Hyperlink instead.

- ALWAYS double check your CSS error compatibility.

-ALWAYS test your URL links. Both manually and   with this tool. And always with a third party.

July 4, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

OK. It is not quite ready for prime time as there are hundreds of links to still be entered and probably a few typos. But here is an advanced preliminary look at our brand new hanging canals feature page.

Find this one at https://www.tinaja.com/hang01.shtml

This one should now also be fully CSS and HTML5 compatible. You should also be able to click through on the yellow bajada canals box on the new menus.

Please report any and all issues. The missing URL's should go up in a few days. As should any "empty" menus and correct images.

As always, you are welcome to participate in this unique and world class research. Details here.

The older sources for this new page do remain available here and here.

July 3, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Their may be a glitch in our web works that we are trying to pin down. Please report any access errors or problems. In particular, are you getting any "304" errors or feedback?

Symptoms on this end are thousands of 304's in the stats, that up to a week ago, had been ZERO! Combined with an apparently sharply reduced total hit count.

July 2, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

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.

July 1, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

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 often be  compensated by placing a flat ribbon cable in parallel. Full details here. 

June 30, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Here's the latest list of our newest and fully validated CSS pages.

https://www.tinaja.com
https://www.tinaja.com.hang01.shtml https://www.tinaja.com/ebksamp1.shtml https://www.tinaja.com/crsamp1.shtml https://www.tinaja.com/gilahike.shtml  https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu18.shtml  https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu17.shtml  https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu16.shtml  https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu15.shtml  https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu14.shtml  https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu13.shtml  https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu12.shtml  https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu11.shtml  https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu10.shtml  https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu08.shtml 

Please report any remaining typos or problems. Our intent is to add older pages by popularity. But if there is anything particular you need to see, request it.

June 29, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

The encounter of the long count keeper.

June 28, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

And here is a typical .htaccess file...

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond
%{HTTPS} off RewriteRule (.*) https://
%{HTTP_HOST} %{REQUEST_URI}
[R=301,L]# Begin cache control
# ExpiresActive on ExpiresActive off
<FilesMatch ".*"> Header unset Cache-
Control Header unset Expires Header unset
Last-Modified FileETag None Header unset
Pragma </FilesMatch> # End cache control
# # Begin IP blocking # Order Allow,Deny
Deny from 144.76.135.235 Deny from
186.250.47.196 Allow from all
# End IP blocking #
DirectoryIndex default.shtml index.shtml
AddType text/html .asp .shtml .aspx AddType
text/plain .psl AddType text/x-server-parsed-htm
l .htm .html .shtml .asp .js AddOutputFilter
INCLUDES .shtml AddType application
/octet-stream .psl
AddType application/postscript .psl

June 27, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

There is an obscure document likely called .htaccess by your ISP and buried in a strange place. It is difficult to understand and critical on format, but it is extremely useful to customize your website.

If wrong, it can totally trash your website!

Among other uses, it lets you block any unwanted or otherwise bad guy users. It lets you customize which files can and can not be offered. In my case, allowing both my .psl PostScript files and my JavaScript banner rotator include files. Plus allowing includes.

And, these days, it is crucially important to upgrade older http: files to newer and more secure https: My favorite Fatcow includes a fairly easy to use .htaccess editor. But support on this file is limited.

June 26, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A new Youtube video of an authentic replica TV Typewriter can be found here, and you can ask questions on parts availability or replication help from Brad Hodge here.

The original story can be found here, with some subsequent books here, here, and here. Sharply declining memory prices, merging of text with graphics, and demands for multi fonts and higher bandwidths obsoleted the TVT's in a stunningly short time. Sigh.

You can always spot the pioneers by all of the arrows in their backs. Um, that's the other right.

June 25, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

The number of your web visitor hits can easily end up excessively bloated. Or simply include complications that spike or otherwise grossly mislead.

The FIRST REASON this happens is because of website accessories such as wallpaper, borders, ads, buttons, and various includes.

The SECOND REASON this happens is because of site correctable 404 errors. A reasonable goal is to get your unavoidable errors under two percent. Your ISP should be able to provide you with detailed log files that spell out all your 404's.

The THIRD REASON this happens is because of a web feature called Byte Range Retrieval that is sometimes used on .pdf files. These show up as 206 log entries. If the retrieval only asks for 16K bytes at a time ( so there is stuff to do while a longer file background downloads ) on a 10 Meg eBook, 600 hits may occur and be reported!

The FOURTH REASON happens because you decided to upgrade to secure https and have done so via .htaccess. Each attempt at reading a nonsecure page will generate a 301 return before the actual 200 one. Thus doubling your reported hits. The workaraound is to eliminate as many internal insecure links as you can.

The bottom line is that any sudden increase in hits is most likely one of the above, rather than something going viral.

June 22, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

These two PostScript-as-Language routines have greatly sped up and simplified our CSS Validation efforts. Their key asset lies in being able to read or write any disk file in any language. Or good old .shtml in these cases.

In these uses, they take a .shtml file, extract key info from them and rewrites a new and freshly legal CSS legal version.

Our first example is called fix_menu1_psl. It can take an older .shtml file full of illegal CSS commands and create a new and improved legal version.

The code first create a pair of arrays that give the numeric starting and ending point for each menu to be substituted. The non menu portions will get rewritten as is. The menu portions get analyzed to extract their date and id=" codes. These are then used to build brand new and now valid menus.

Our second called url_spaces1.psl. Spaces are no longer welcome in CSS URL's. And Dreamweaver can force them on you if you mistakenly use Link instead of Insert Hyperlink. The code is similar in that it generates a pair of arrays that hold URL start and end file position. Non URL's are rewritten as is, while any URL spaces are $20 substituted.

The key "Mother's Little Helpers" commands used are fileposition and setfileposition.

Since these were for internal use, you'll have to study them and textfile rewrite such things as internal file names and such. As usual, our Gonzo Utilities and their Tutorial is needed, and Acrobat Distiller MUST be run from the command line with its top secret //acrodist /F  instructions that allow disk access.

Much more on PostScript here, a Show and Tell here, Beginner's Projects here, and insider secrets here. Plus my video here and the reference manual here.  

June 21, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Here is the process I have been using to upgrade some of our whtnu? files to full css and html5 compatibility combined with much better appearance and nav...   

1. Use this PS Program to upgrade the
    menus to eliminate now illegal chars.

2. Use this PS Program to replace any
    URL spaces with $20 values.

3. Replace top code and <head> and
    title copied from known good code.

4. Replace bottom ending code copied
     and edited from known good code.

5. Use Wordpad to search and replace
    http://www.tin with https://www.tin

6. Replace any real estate or similar
     images with css allowed commands.

7. Use Wordpad to search and replace
    full id's with relative internal ones.

8. Use the CSS Validator to correct
    and zero out any remaining errors.

9. Verify each and every deeplink.

June 20, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

As usual, the latest pv pricing stats can be found here. And show as much as a TWELVE percent monthly drop!

The long term goal for genuine true renewability and sustainability is a quarter per peak panel watt. The best current figure comes in at 29 cents, with others a nickel higher.

Some rank speculation: What if someone imposed a 30 percent pv tariff only to have the pv prices all drop by 30 percent within a very few weeks?  Wouldn't the tariff clearly become utterly and laughingly pointless, and per the law of the unintended consequence, end up being not even wrong?

Yet another pv pricing source can be found here. And much more on energy in general here.

June 19, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

As this eBay sales down search tells us, eBay appears to be in a catastrophic and site wide sales collapse!

Nobody seems exactly sure why, but probable causes may include...

-  eBay downgrading limited sales searches
-  Pacific rim cheap prices w/ free shipping
-  Pacific rim quality atrocities.
- Amazon competition
- Bad mobile software
- A horribly wrong eBay search "improvement"

Then again, it might just be that little dip between the spring slack period and the summer slump.

Our own best eBay products include our Nuke Calculator,, the Lancaster Classics USB,, and the signed Active Filter Cookbook..

We shortly plan to add a hanging Canal USB. you can email me if you want to get in ahead of the hoarders.

Much more on eBay insider secrets here.

June 18, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Here's a list of our newest and fully validated CSS pages.

https://www.tinaja.com
https://www.tinaja.com/gilahike.shtml https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu18.shtml https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu17.shtml https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu16.shtml https://www.tinaja.com/ebksamp1.shtml https://www.tinaja.com/crsamp1.shtml

Please report any remaining typos or problems. Our intent is to add older pages by popularity. But if there is anything particular you need to see, request it.

June 17, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Several of you have asked about our deeplink nav. Which you can explore simply by clicking upper left.

These are simply anchors. Their intent is to let you get back to a chosen topic that otherwise would be buried in a long document. And might be hard to refind.

Once nav gets you there, you can cut and paste to get the key info or to print it. Or to bookmark it. Another seldom used alternative is that print screen key.

A typical deeplink anchor looks like this...

<a id="d06.17.18"></a>

And here is how you connect to it...

<a href="#d06.17.18">deeplink</a>

More details on the surrounding code is easily found by right clicking on the usual view page source.

June 16, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Newly updated and expanded our Gila Valley Day hikes. We are now up to 537 primary entries!

Included are a favorite "remote" areas entry and a San Carlos Mineral Resources reprint.

A sampler of some of the more unusual day hikes  can be found here.

And more details on your spectacular research  opportunities of our Prehistoric Bajada Hanging  canals here. And much more on the canals here  and here.

A few of the many open "help wanted" projects  were summarized here. There are many dozens  of newer ones.

June 15, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

We have a brand new free Classics Downloads library page!

Which now is fully illustrated, completely updated, has greatly improved nav, and is newly CSS verified.

June 14, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

We saw back here how it is a VERY good idea to convert your entire website to https: secure serving. Particularly since ugly dire warnings are about to appear if you do not fully comply.

The usual and recommended way is to add 301 redirects to your ht_access file. While this solves and automates the process, there are several downsides to 301's.

These slow down your users and inconvenience your ISP. They also can grossly bloat your stats. So, it is an extremely good idea to remove as many of the old http: references from everywhere on your website as you possibly can. Replacing them with https:

This is particularly important on any future work or anything recent. Or on such things that are often accessed by everybody such as deeplinks, banners, property pictures, home page support, and whatever.

Naturally, you would be unlikely to find every http:, especially those in use by others floating around in cyberspace. But a reasonable goal is to seek out a 10:1 reduction in your 301 reported stats.

June 13, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Just discovered the obscure min-width command that's deeply buried in CSS. This is enormously useful for keeping rude surprises out of any fancier tables.

Here's an example from a fragment of a fancy table...

<td style="text-align:center;
min-width:358px">
<span style="font-size:22px">
<b>Don Lancaster's</b><br></span>
<span style="color:#800;font-size:34px">
<b>Free Classic<br>Reprint Downloads</b>
</span></td>

The full source code can be viewed here, followed by a view page source command.

The goal here is to always keep all of your messages shorter than the minimum width. This largely prevents unexpected surprises.

One gotcha: Dreamweaver is likely to do old things old ways, so hand code text in and around min-width!

June 12, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

We have a brand new free eBooks library page!

Which now is fully illustrated, completely updated, has greatly improved nav, and is newly CSS verified.

June 11, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Just created a new Book Cover's directory...

aacb1.jpg
aacb2 .jpg
active1.jpg
awcb1.jpg
cmos1.jpg
cvcb1.jpg
enha1.jpg
enha2.jpg
ismm1.jpg
ivyvid1.jpg
micro1.jpg
mlp1.jpg
mlp2.jpg
rtl1.jpg
socv1.jpg
ttlcb1.jpg
tvtcb1.jpg
usbhang1.jpg
usblan1.jpg

Get the actual free ebooks and more access info here.

June 10, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Just uploaded a brand new Director's Cut of Poison Ivy in a Spray Can.

Find the original here and more Marcia here.

WARNING: Be absolutely certain the nozzle is pointing forward during use!

More on graphical nonlinear transforms here. And bunches of other classic reprints here.

June 9, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Blasts from the past: The Navy Preferred Circuits Handbook can be found here, Forrest Mimm's Notebooks here, and your definitive source for similar stuff here./

And our newest and best free eBook info here.

June 8, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A while back, we looked at Fundamental Factors Underlying Recent Technical Innovation. Here is yet another I'd like to add to the original...

Let's call it "Size no longer matters".

Back in the bad old days, computer memory and baud rates were severely limited. Considerable creativity was required to stomp programs down to a reasonable size and execution time.

And usually, the overwhelming majority of design and debug effort went into optimization.

But recently, baud rates skyrocketed. ( I still remember the Gamewell Fire Alarm Telegraph with its baud rate of one! Yup. One baud. And it was state of the art in the nineties. The EIGHTEEN nineties. )

CPU execution times have gone beyond beyond. As have the baud rates. Excessively far beyond the needs of the vast number of current programs.

So, just throw another million calculations at "it". But all those hard learned wonderful speed and size optimization skills that were once crucially central to coding are pretty much now an utter and total waste of time.

June 7, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Managed to rework our 2008 Archive so it passes full CSS and HTML5 validation.

This PostScript routine dramatically automated nearly all of the update process. Replacing ten hours of tedious hand coding with a six second processing time. Unfortunately, there was considerable debug time and older whtnu's may need further code customization.

A reminder to always run Acrobat from your Win command line using //acrodist /F. This is needed any time gonzo or disk reads or writes are required.

Much more here. And especially here.

June 6, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

As we've seen, there can be a serious cache issue with W3 URL Validation that sometimes will use earlier data rather than your latest changes!

It is not entirely clear whether this is a W3 problem or somehow involved with Chrome or Filezilla or other caching. Others talk about the problem here.

The workaround is simple but painful: When and if the problem shows up, change the  URL every time you access the validation!

June 5, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

For some strange reason, our 2008 archive presently remains disproportionately popular.

I remain a great fan ( and an associate of ) the Fatcow ISP. They do offer a number of useful tools that can help you pin down how and why any particular website file is unusually popular.

Their Visitor Statistics page directly gives you real time reports of which files are of the most interest. Along with the top referrers.

For more in depth analysis, you can go to your log files. These are found by using Filezilla or another FTP program to access your stats subdirectory. The daily reports are in WinZip format, so you will need a WinZip reader to decrypt them.

All of the decrypted results will often appear in a moo.yoursitecom file.

Your log files will often include a referral entry, but these may be incomplete or not as useful as you might first expect.

The log files are a great way to find out how many of your 404's are really your fault. After some extensive detective work, we seem to have removed almost all of our own 404's, leaving us with only a percent or two of those externally caused and not reasonably fixable.

This particular PostScript tool was particularly useful .

The 2008 popularity problem was eventually traced to apparently buried and useless "whtnu08.shtm" code in dozens of utterly incompetent and "not even wrong" websites far beyond our control. Sigh. I have no idea why or how they got there.

One of the questionable sites assures us that this file is one of the scariest movies on Netflix.

We did raise the priority of our own whtnu08 rework to try and usefully improve capture of any inadvertent clicks. We should have the new version up shortly.

June 4, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Managed to rework our 2015 Archive and our 2014 Archive so they are now so they are now fully CSS Compatible. An incredible amount of time and effort was needed.

The 2008 Archive is in the works but seems to have some big time problems of its own.

Present plans are to update and correct our website files in order of popularity.

June 3, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A slowdown in your comm speeds over time can usually be traced to Ethernet Tokens that are either corroded or grime covered. The usual treatment is to use Brasso.

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

More here.

June 2, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

What are my favorite "remote" parts of Arizona?

The easiest reachable would be Portal with its superb caves, birds, hamburgers, and accommodations. Truly remote is the Blue Post office that serves a very few distant ranches. The Blue River itself offers such "out west" locations as Hannah Hot Springs or the Fish Barrier. But the most prototypical of all "out west" location is, of course, Midnight Mesa.

There's still dirt access only to ranch community Young with its great Sierra Anchas and Cherry Creek trips.

Supai combines outstanding scenery and waterfalls with horrific animal abuse. You literally cannot sanely get to Littlefield without a long drive through adjacent states. And a humongous parallel universe time warp is demanded to try and access Colorado City. Other Arizona Strip and many of the res destinations are even more obtuse. As is the Cibola fishing and farm community. Or the Swansea ghost town.

Barely missing the above cut would be Camp Wood, Redfield Canyon, and West Clear Creek. East Clear Creek, of course, is considerably past the far side of back of beyond. Or those Table Mountain mines off of the Rug Road. Or the Peloncillos with their fire agate, Bighorn sheep, and zeolites.

Then there's this found here. You can't get there from here. Sigh.

Much more here and here.

June 1, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Some secrets of PostScript's internaldict stuff can be found here.

May 31, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

As we have seen a number of times, electrolysis from high value sources such as grid, pv, or wind for bulk energy hydrogen generation flat out ain't gonna happen because of those thermodynamic  fundamentals involving exergy.

I am bemused by "researchers" who use the  "ostrich" argument "I never heard of exergy. Therefore, it does not exist. And could not possibly be a problem. "

Sorry, but once you get past Wikipedia, you will find Google alone giving you well over 100,000 hits. At least some of which are bibliographies with thousands or more entries.

One more time: Exergy is a measure of the quality and thus the value of energy in its present form. It is basically  entropy with an economic value focus. Exergy answers the question "How much is this  stuff worth in its present form?"

An unstruck match has very high exergy; a slightly  warmer room has very little. Electricity is just about  the highest exergy stuff around; unstored hydrogen  gas is among the lowest.

The way you measure exergy is to convert the energy  to a different form and convert it back. Then see how much  you have left. Electricity to hydrogen to electricity leaves  you with less than zilch.  Before amortization

Going from high value electricity (such as grid, pv, or wind)  to low value unstored hydrogen gas instantly and irreversibly  destroys most of the quality and thus most of the value of  your energy.

There ALWAYS will be more intelligent things to do with high  value electricity than destroying its value through electrolysis. The process  is very similar to 1:1 exchanging US dollars for  Mexican Pesos.

Detailed analysis here and the fundamentals of electrolysis here. The bottom line is this:

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

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

May 30, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Our spectacular Gold Hill Oregon steep to sloping undeveloped view acres we have listed now has two sets of twelve photos.

See the latest photos here and the originals here.

May 29, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Managed to get most of our Whtnu15 archive newly revised and uploaded. It now meets CSS specs but still has some layout and typo issues.

Amazingly, there were over 3000 errors (!) caused by the HTML5 and CSS revisions forced on this older program. Revisions now available: Whtnu18, Whtnu17, Whtnu16, Whtnu15. The rest may take a while due to the enormous repair time required and the popularity of other Guru's Lair columns .

So the usual reminder: If you have old web pages, the odds are utterly overwhelming that they now have great heaping bunches of compatibility issues.

Key problems include newly disallowed table commands, spaces and other garbage in URL's, and other obsolete functions such as name:

Please report any continuing problems.

May 28, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Way back when, I did a thermoluminescence dating story. More recently, it was revived as one of our Director's Cuts. Find its rework here.

It turns our there are some new developments here called Optically Stimulated Luminescence.

A tiny grain of sand will have imperfections called "traps" Inherent radioactive isotopes in the sand will slowly fill these traps over time. But the presence of sunlight will suddenly empty the traps.

By measuring the expected luminescence versus the actual luminescence, you can literally find out exactly when the sand grain last saw the light of day.

Thus, the sand grains should be able to tell us when they became part of a prehistoric bajada canal.

May 27, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Newly updated and expanded our Gila Valley Day hikes. We are now up to 536 primary entries!

A sampler of some of the more unusual day hikes can be found here.

And more details on your spectacular research opportunities of our Prehistoric Bajada Hanging canals here. And much more on the canals here  and here.

A few of the many open "help wanted" projects were summarized here. There are many dozens of newer ones.

May 26, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

As we've seen, the math behind certain third order low pass filters can be found here. It turns out that you can do somewhat "better" than classic Butterworth or Chebycheff filters by going to the new Legendre Filter or using the "slight dips" filters found in my Active Filter Cookbook.

Plots that let you explore the "best" filters can be found here and here, along with the open and unlocked PostScript source codes here and here.

The normalized Butterworth math is simply found to be 1/ (s^3 + 2s^2 + 2s + 1 ) where s=jw. Very often your "best" results will end up near but not exactly at two.

And thus does not exactly match any name brand biggie popular polynomial! In fact, my simple-to- use "slight dips" filter seems optically ( but not mathematically ) flatter (!) than the "maximally flat" Butterworth curves. Besides dropping off faster.

May 25, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Then there was the agnostic dyslectic insomniac who stayed up all night wondering if there was a dog. 

May 24, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A Gila Day Hikes user emailed me to ask where the Phillips Mine Road was.

There is a totally trashed "resort" called Seneca ( I think they really meant "cienega" ) that is just North of Salt River Canyon on US 77 on the San Carlos Res. Their lake remains useful and there is a spectacular but seasonal and difficult to visit ultra high waterfall downstream. Plus very challenging climbing and canyoneering.

At any rate, the Phillips Mine road starts here and heads west to an interesting group of mines. A res recreation permit is required. 33.77331 -110.51662 to its end near 33.78900 -110.54700 where it splits off into a number of dead end challenging 4WD traces and tracks.

Some of the mines are literally cliffhangers, and all MUST be assumed highly dangerous.

May 23, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Here's how to do a Semilog graph using PostScript and my Gonzo Utilities...

First, get a local copy of gonzo.psl. Then use this code after suitably modifying your third line...

%!ps % Semilog demo (C:/Users/Don/
Desktop/Ghost/gonzo.psl) run ps.util1
begin printerror nuisance begin

50 50 10 setgrid 0 0 mt 48 pu 45 pr 48 pd
closepath gsave 0.9 1 0.9 setrgbcolor fill
grestore 0.4 1 0.4 setrgbcolor line3 stroke

line1 [{0 0 mt 45 r} 8 7] yrpt

.2 log 1 add 22.5 mul 0 mt 48 u .3 log 1 add
22.5 mul 0 mt 48 u .4 log 1 add 22.5 mul 0
mt 48 u .5 log 1 add 22.5 mul 0 mt 48 u .6 log
1 add 22.5 mul 0 mt 48 u .7 log 1 add 22.5
mul 0 mt 48 u .8 log 1 add 22.5 mul 0 mt 48 u
.9 log 1 add 22.5 mul 0 mt 48 u

1 log 1 add 22.5 mul 0 mt 48 u 2 log 1 add
22.5 mul 0 mt 48 u 3 log 1 add 22.5 mul
0 mt 48 u 4 log 1 add 22.5 mul 0 mt 48 u
5 log 1 add 22.5 mul 0 mt 48 u 6 log 1 add
22.5 mul 0 mt 48 u 7 log 1 add 22.5 mul 0
mt 48 u 8 log 1 add 22.5 mul 0 mt 48 u 9
log 1 add 22.5 mul 0 mt 48 u

       % put your curves here

showpage % EOF

Yeah, a pair of loops would shorten the code. I've kept it open here for simplicity. Try it.

A reminder to always run Acrobat from your Win command line using //acrodist /F. This is needed any time gonzo or disk reads or writes are required.

Much more here. And especially here.

May 22, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

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

May 21, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

As noted yesterday, some new discoveries relating to the Jernigan Canal have recently been found. This branch of the Mud Springs Canal starts at 32.83115 -109.81729 crosses West Layton Road at 32.83690 -109.81491, swings significantly north to 32.84280 -109.81415 and ends near 32.83616 -109.81514.

Maintaining a required grade in exceptionally hostile terrain suggests world class engineering.

It has a possible enigmatic branch dumping into a wash. Along with a strange possible dam structure or aqueduct of indeterminate age near 32.83898 -109.81415

It is on state land and is proximately two  miles long. Portions are quire easy to each, while others remain unknown and unexplored. Estimated age is 1350 CE.

Hallmarks include a possible headgate, a significant hanging portion, three (!) U-turns, trees mid channel, a well defined end use area, a French drain, an associated ruin, and a counterflow wash crossing.

An older set of field notes in need of revision can be found here, while some of the more recent photos are found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Three short segments remain unknown and possibly unknowable. Despite extensive visitation.

We are working on making a nearly complete USB based set of all the hanging canal resources. Please email me if you want to get in ahead of the hoarders. Much more here and here. 

Your participation in this world class research is welcome. We especially need drone operators and GPS aware gonzo hikers.

May 20, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Managed to find a key missing portion of the Jernigan Canal. It likely runs from 32.83115 -109.81729 to 32.83616 -109.81514.

Sort of. The problem is that it pretty much looks like a plain old sandy wash. But (1) it is exactly where it should be, (2) has proper slope, (3) areas "protected" by trees definitely look more canal like. (4) a similar and proven reach can be found further north. (5) it is straight, uniform width, unbraded and long reach consistent. And (6) nothing else nearby looks remotely suggestive.

The original might in fact have adapted an existing natural wash. This example photo is less than stunning.

Much more here and here. Your participation in this world class research is welcome. We especially need drone operators and GPS aware gonzo hikers.

May 19, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

There is a maddening infriousity in Dreamweaver that seems to be the cause of extreme grief on our website.

"Real" spaces in a .shtml link are not allowed and generate errors. The usual workaround is to substitute %20 for each and every space.

But the "normal" Dreamweaver Link does just the opposite! For each $20 it finds, it substitutes a real space! And thus trashes many of your url's!

There is a largely hidden and obscure Insert-->Hyperlink pulldown that correctly preserves any $20's present in your urls to be entered. Obviously, you should use this instead.

Repairs can be horrendously frustrating and time intensive. So , I've written a PostScript-As-Language routine that's called https://www.tinaja.com/psutils/fix_url_spaces1.psl

As with earlier examples, PostScript can be used to read or write most any disk file in most any language. Here, your .shtml file gets each url inspected for real spaces and if it finds any, it properly substitutes $20's as needed.

There are two parts to the code. The first eight second part generates a pair of arrays that hold url start and end file positions. And the second half second part makes the actual modifications. All done with around 4K of still unoptimized code.

At present, this is more for study only as it needs some files and directories that will need highly modified for your own reuse.

You will also need a local copy of our Gonzo Utilities, and may find my Gonzo Tutorial and Adobe's Reference Manual useful.

Plus the usual reminder that Distiller needs its file reading capabilities activated out of the command line Winkey-X by invoking the top secret //acrodist /F.

Much more on PostScript here and even a video here.

Custom help available.

May 18, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

The math behind a third order active lowpass filter can be found here.

To find the amplitude at a given frequency, you let s=jw as usual and then square root the sum of the squares of the real zero and (j^2 negative) third terms and the imaginary first and third terms. Combined as a log response plot.

It begs the question if the "new" Legendre filter is the "best" possible. Or if the ease of use of my crude "slight Dips" filter can somehow be significantly beat.

So, in the spirit of "throw another million calculations at it", normalize the components to all unity, and then "shake the box" with a few thousand random variations.

Which one plots the best?

Ferinstance, the ratio of resistors to capacitors could be changed, still maintaining the unity product that would make all the very low and very high responses the same.

Or one capacitor could be made high, one low, and one unity. Same with resistors. Or one cap low and two others both high. Or one cap high high and the others both low. Same for the resistors for thousands of possible variations.

This also asks whether an "unfactorable" third order polynomial might offer something better than the usual cascaded first and second order sections.

Besides being an obvious thesis project, Your input on all this more than welcome. Much more in my Active Filter Cookbook.

May 17, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

This study file can show you how you can use PostScript to modify most any disk file in most any language.

But it is more for study only as it needs some files and directories that will need modified for your own reuse.

What it does is read an obsolete CSS page, extracts the incompatible buttons and makes them legit. Delivered to a Chrome cut-and-paste textfile. .

You will also need a local copy of our Gonzo Utilities, and may find my Gonzo Tutorial and Adobe's Reference Manual useful.

Plus the usual reminder that Distiller needs its file reading capabilities activated out of the command line winkey-X by invoking the top secret //acrodist /F.

Much more on PostScript here and even a video here.

May 16, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A while back, we looked at Fundamental Factors Underlying Recent Technical Innovation. While there is rather little that I'd presently add to the original, one new biggie seems to be emerging.

This is a work in progress, and I'm not yet sure what to call it. Let's go with Ephemeralosity for now.

These days, successful products are mainly no longer based on "things". Instead they are based on ephemeral ones and zeros floating around somewhere in the "cloud" of hyperspace.

Ferinstance, a book is a physical object. But an ebook is just a bunch of ones and zeros with no particular home. While infinitely distributable forever, it also can easily vanish without a trace without at least one champion. And it can also change at any time for any reason.

More and more human ventures are now going into cloud ones and zeros and less and less into traditional physical objects. And many large and inefficient objects are now being replaced with smaller and more efficient and far more versatile ones. Obvious examples include CRT replacements, smart phones, and efficient LED illumination.

This has profound implications for the search for intelligent life elsewhere. For simply, the more advanced the civilization, the fewer and the smaller the artifacts, all replaced by ones and zeros.

Another obvious example. There is probably no point whatsoever for a TV station to continue high power on-the-air broadcasts. Replaced by milliwatt level WiFi, cable, or satellite. With a now world wide audience. And a tiny footprint.

So , all the zillions of watts of Captain Video, Roller Derby, or Kukla, Fran, and Ollie once beaming out their unintentional "Hey - we are- here" power to all the universe are no longer present. Or soon are likely to disappear entirely.

Your thoughts welcome.

May 15, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

There appear to be four "flavors" of prehistoric canals in the Gila Valley...

Classic low level riverine canals similar to the Hohokam versions in Phoenix.

"Hanging" mountain stream bajada canals highly uniquely engineered and apparently entirely locally developed in the Gila Valley.

Largely historic artesian sourced canals that were more than likely to have seen extensive prehistoric use.

A "hybrid" Bandelier canal that appears to have been artesian lake sourced but ultimately driven by underground Mt. Graham snowmelt.

Much more here and here. Your participation in this world class research is welcome. We especially need drone operators and GPS aware gonzo hikers.

May 14, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Managed to rework our 2016 Archive so it is now fully CSS Compatible. An incredible amount of time and effort was needed.

May 13, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

The latest pv pricing can be found here. Pricing has been flat for the previous few months and one type of module comes in at 34 cents per peak watt.

Be sure to "slide left" for dollar pricing.

As we have seen, a price of 25 cents per peak watt seems required for unsubsidized true renewability and sustainability.

More on pv and energy topics in general here.

May 12, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

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

More hydrogen ludicrosities here.

May 11, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A reminder that "real" spaces are not allowed in any URL Link! The usual workaround is to substitute %20 characters for spaces.

"Real" spaces in URL's will also trip error messages for your website verifications.

It turns out that Dreamweaver has a pair of "features" involving URL insertions that had been causing me bunches of grief.

If you use the Insert Hyperlink pulldown, then any URL that has proper %20's in it will get entered correctly.

BUT - If you use the "normal" ctrl-F3 Link box, then any URL that has proper %20's in it will auto substitute "real" spaces and generate validation errors!

The obvious rule is to use Insert Hyperlink any time your links demand $20's.

May 10, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Managed to rework our 2017 Archive so it is now fully CSS Compatible. An incredible amount of time and effort was needed.

May 9, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

The second project would be adding Magic Sinewaves to the $5 version of the Raspberry Pi Zero.

Its enormous memory now makes possible combining frequency and amplitude generation in a single chip! And done with zero or limited external circuitry!

At 50 bytes per amplitude, 100 amplitude values and 100 frequency values, only half a meg of memory would be needed. So, there should be lots of room for presently unthunk of additions.

And done with no or limited external circuitry!

May 8a, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Two "second tier" projects I've yet to get around to:

Our Active Filter Cookbook shows how to use popular Chebycheff and Butterworth filters. Butterworth is smooth and monotonic, while Chebycheff has passband lumps but falls off much sharper.

I "invented" a "small dips" variation through a plain old interpolation compromise that seemed useful.

And people working with an obscure Legendre Filter also came up with an improved product. Monotonic, and sharp falling, but with ascetically unpleasing lumps and bumps present.

In the final analysis, all a n=3 filter needs is a list of three frequencies and three damping values. They do not particularly have to "obey" any known or popular underlying polynomial.

So, what if we "shake the box" and "throw another million calculations at it" to find out if there is some yet unknown and super secret gonzo polynomial that gives us monotonicity, fast falloff and nice aesthetics?

Perhaps by starting with 1 db Chebycheff and Butterworth frequency and damping values and loop stepping between them in delta increments of 0, .25, .5, .75, and 1. For a n=3, a manageable total of 625 plots would be involved, and a  very few of them might prove interesting.

This is sort of the same scheme that led to the original magic sinewave breakthroughs.

May 8, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Plus our usual reminder that you can now own your own personal copy of one each of everything per these details.

And we shortly hope to have a similar USB newly released on our Bajada Hanging Canals. Please email me if you want to get in ahead of the hoarders.

May 7, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Our new Gila Hikes is now live and is fully CSS compliant along with better nav and improved layout!

Please report any suggestions, issues, or comments.

May 6, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

We just relisted our stunning Southern Oregon Gold Hill spectacular view property for sale with Chris Marshall of American Forest Management at (541) 664-9200.

Price has been reduced to $8475 per acre. This is the last remaining large developable property immediately adjacent to the northern Gold Hill city limits.

More info here. Or contact Chris for a guided tour.

May 5, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Making our older Gila Hikes paper fully CSS and HTML5 compatible and improving its nav and appearance is taking a lot longer than I expected. Many hundreds of URL's still need adjustment to work around the CSS "no spaces in URL's" rule.

This is our third most popular download, behind only our already CSS compatibilized home page and this What's New?

Meanwhile, you can sample the new code and monitor our progress here. Please report any comments and issues.

May 4, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

In response to an ever diminishing groundswill of popular demand, here is an upload of my one and only patent.

Recent Nebraska research seems to demonstrate that framing your patent and placing it on an east facing wall eliminates outright or significantly reduces the severity of walrus attacks.

And here is more on what I think of patents and patenting in general.

May 3, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Here's an example of a table that is newly CSS friendly. It was originally intended for use as a menu bar. Put these in your <head> area...

.daily1 {border-collapse: collapse; border:
3px solid #C96; width: 600px; height: 26px;
background-color: #FC9;} .daily1 td
{background-color: #FC9; padding: 5px;
font-weight: bold } .daily1 td tr
{background-color: #C9F;
font-weight: bold } .left { text-align: left;
margin-left: 1em; font-size: 25px; color:
brown;} .right { text-align: right;
margin-right: 1em;}

And this in your <body> area...

<table class="daily1"><tr> <td
class="left"><b>Gila Valley Day Hikes
1 - 15: </b></td><td class="right">
<a href="#hikes01-15"> deeplink
</a> &nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#top">
top</a> &nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#bot">
bot</a> &nbsp;&nbsp; <a href=
"mailto:don@tinaja.com">respond</a>
</td> </tr></table>

Per the many samples here. And many tutorials here.

May 2, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

If you have older website material, it is now trivially easy to raise those new CSS and HTML5 compatibility issues. Typically, you now have many hundreds or even thousands of errors! For a really rude surprise, visit here.

Here's a few of the newer CSS compatibility issues...

URL listings are no longer allowed to have spaces

The <font=> commands must now use <span> or <div>

<name=...> identifiers must now be <id=...>

No more <text> <bgcolor> <link><vlink><alink>      <backgound><align><cellpadding><cellspacing>
<border> <width><height><valign>, etc... etc...    

<width> has now been CSS redefined.

<language> is now <type> or is unneeded.

Tables are strongly discouraged, especially for layout.

A superb CSS tutorial series appears here. May you live in interesting times.

May 1, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

One of my most fiendish columns anytime ever was A painless way to Scam a Student Paper.

Twelve of the topics are absolutely guaranteed to get you an instant "A".  But one of them gets you an "F".

But which?

More fiendishness here.

April 30, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Just did a major revision and rework of our latest blog, which you'll find here. It is, in theory, now fully CSS and HTML5 compatible, besides offering much better nav.

A few details have yet to be dealt with, particularly in adding more includes. Bringing the older blogs up to code will be a major task.

Please report any comments or issues.

April 29, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

There had to be a cache to it.

I was getting these infuriating "missed the last change" updates. Much of the problem was traced to a hidden cache in Filezilla. Which normally dramatically speeds up the reuse of a previous listing.

The cache only lasts session only, so your workaround is to always reload Filezilla each and every time during critical rework.

Other cache problems can happen in different programs. In Chrome, check "tripledot" history every now and then to get rid of the usual suspects. The "show source" click box here may also raise cache issues.

A good policy is to reboot often during critical rework.

April 28, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

An impressive map of the Heliograph stations can be found here.

Similar stuff here.

April 27, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A curious fact: Any perpetual motion machine that includes a 555 timer is bogus and nonfunctional. No exceptions to this immutable rule have ever been found. As proven here.

Which saves you bunches of time discrediting a perpetual motion machine, for if a 555 timer is present, there will be absolutely no point in continuing. Guaranteed.

After reviewing a bunch of recent candidates, the usual  problem is that narrow pulses are exceptionally difficult to properly measure. I've dealt with this here, here, and here.

The key gotcha is that any spike or narrow pulse has an exceptionally high ratio of rms to average value. And  even though correctly measuring rms instruments have finally become readily available, the overwhelming majority of lay members of the Church of the Latter Day Crackpots continue to mislead themselves by still using average reading instruments.

Even if you have a "real" rms meter, there's a secondary gotcha called the crest factor that still will nail you to the wall. Multiply two big numbers together and they become a huge number. Way beyond anything analog can ever hope deal with.  Exceed the crest factor and the instrument will still read deceptively low.

A fascinating supply of totally worthless overunity devices can be found here on a continuous basis. Sadly, its web master is deceased and the site future is in serious doubt.

More on pseudoscience bashing here. Any my very own perpetual motion machine here with more here. And my favorite Curious Saga of the Magic Lamp here.

April 26, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Slashdot just got the brilliant revelation that things are not at all well with the term "hacker".

Uh, been there. Done that. Sigh.

Please see my secret insider discussion here.

April 25, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Someone asked me when my YouTube Video was made. I'll answer here because of an email response issue.

I'm no longer sure of the exact dates, but it likely was winter of 1990. It was produced in Showlow AZ by Boyd Baron of Rodeo Video and done in Betamax, the best high end consumer format available at the time.

An epsilon minus forgot to promote the shooting, so it was made with only three people in the audience! Later, an entire English class was hijacked and conned into showing interest in what they did not have even the faintest clue over.

Related info here and here.

April 24, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Further revised our home page. It is now fully CSS friendly uses more includes, and has improved navigation.

This was developed on the Chrome Browser. Please report any and all issues with it or any of the others.

April 23, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Suppose you wanted to come up with a consistent set of "pastel only" web friendly colors that hovered similarly. What and how many button colors would be available?

Starting with this display, by color energy we might restrict ourselves to the northeast 3x3 corner of the six blocks. for 27 initial candidates. We might eliminate the five weakest or "lowest energy" candidates of 9F9 9C9 999 C99 and F99. As well as the five strongest or "highest energy" candidates of 9FF CFF FFF FCF and F9F.

Leaving us with seventeen possibles. You'd have to decide whether you wanted to re-add FFF white or remove CCC gray. Since the eye sees yellowish green better, you could also consider another 12 weaker blues.

The sequence of the button colors could best be random or else color code linked to similar color boxes or art elsewhere. Rainbow would be a tricky alternative.

To get consistency for your hover selections, you can uniformly back off one sixth of each candidate. Ferinstance FC9 hover would be C96.

Examples here.

April 22, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Oops. Two typos ended up in our revised Web Friendly CSS and PostScript Colors".

Find the corrected display here and its sourcecode here.

April 21, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Speaking of secret Arizona insider stuff, there's this (!)

Sadly, you can't get there from here, and access is strictly limited to the most gonzo of rope and swim qualified canyoneering teams.

Found near  33.25668 -111.02144. And, of course, to find any GPS thingy anywhere, use Acme Mapper.

Some less challenging things to do here and here.

April 20, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

While by far the biggest and most utterly spectacularly engineered best Mount Graham secret involves are our Prehistoric Bajada Hanging Canals, the over-a-mile-height- difference, seven mile long lumber tramway going from Columbine to Pima would seem to qualify as a solid second.

Here are our key papers...

https://www.tinaja.com/glib/tramshow.pdf https://www.tinaja.com/glib/gramtram.pdf https://www.tinaja.com/glib/tramhist.pdf

And more details appear in our Little Known Gila Hikes story or as entries in our Gila Dayhikes web page entries #06, #93, #105, #140, #177, #198, #205, #251, #282, #295, #300, #329, and #476.

The tramway only lasted a year and thus would appear to have been an abysmal failure. Very little remains today, while much of it remains very difficult access.

Easiest to view and find is the first tension station found at    N 32.80700 W 109.88106 and Detailed as Gila Hike #06.  Minimal 4WD required.

April 19, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Note that the HTML code sent to an ISP can be wildly different from the code that the final browser delivers. This can happen because of scripts ( especially JavaScript ) and includes. The latter of which greatly simplify your making a single change to multiple web pages. All at once.

To view the source code, open it in anything but a browser. Such as Dreamweaver or WordPad. To view the "destination" code, view in a browser and then right click "view page source".

The usual way of handling includes is with SSI, short for Server Side Includes. These are now pretty much available everywhere and can stuff everything into anything. Typical code is...

<!--#include virtual="/includes/banrot01x.js"-->

There are also PHP encodings per these details. And HTML5 now has an <object> capability.

Note that hard to pin down errors can often be caused by the error being internal to an include or a script.

April 18, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Newly updated and expanded our Gila Valley Dayhikes. We are now up to 530 primary entries!

A sampler of some of the more unusual day hikes can be  found here.

And more details on your spectacular research opportunities of our Prehistoric Bajada Hanging canals here. And much more on the canals here and here.

A few of the many open "help wanted" projects were  summarized here. There are many dozens of newer ones.

April 17, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

The RSS hassles on our website now appear to be at least temporarily repaired. Sort of. Just click on any rss box for instantly clickable files access.

To see the RSS code, click on any orange RSS tab, followed by right click and view page source.

Or click here.

There's still some minor differences between Chrome and IE, so please review the code and tell me what is causing these differences, and how I can resolve them.

I'd like to have better bolding and less vertical ledding, combined with a larger and a width preset description. So far, the learning curve seems excessively steep.

To prevent RSS from giving a "no stylesheet" message, you apparently have to use companion files. Present stylesheets include guru.css, guru.xsl, and xsl.css. The sourcecodes can be seen by right click view page source.

Apparently the use of a .css stylesheet alone will refuse to provide live links. And xsl stylesheets will flat out quit on an error.

April 16, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

One of our more obscure files is  Restoring Faded or Scuffed Text for Web Distribution,

Its companion source code is found here, and more GuruGrams here.  

Custom services available.

April 15, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

There's some interesting and sneaky tricks you can pull if you add some unprinting spaces to the justification routines in our Gonzo Utilities.

The rule is that all leading line spaces will be deleted. If in the rare instance you want to add leading spaces, preface them with a |j or |k. Or both if your layout is extremely critical.

If you want to force a fill justify on the last line of a page, add as many spaces as you need, and follow them, again, by a |j or |k. Naturally, this takes a last line that is "nearly full" to start with.

If a command ends up at the end of one line and the action is supposed to begin on the next one, the command may be ignored. This can be a problem with web links or bolded emphasis.

The cure is to add one or more spaces to the  end of the previous line. This will force both the command and the command action to be together as they belong at the beginning of a line.

Beyond this tutorial, the best way to study Gonzo is to  view most any of the .PSL files in our GuruGram Library.

April 14, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

There are strong advantages and disadvantages to doing a "Level II" ebook remastering combining Acrobat 10 with my Gonzo Utilities.

As this demo clearly shows, Level II is markedly superior to results you would normally get by using Acrobat alone. A comparable Acrobat only result appears here. 

More ebooks here, while our other Director's Cut  samplers presently can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Or find these and more here.

As usual, sourcecode if freely available on most of our files. Simply replace the .pdf trailer with .psl. Files are much shorter and text quality is much higher. Far fewer fonts are normally required.

Full searching is provided and maintained through later rework. Image appearance is much better, and, despite high compression, can be arbitrarily magnified to any desired resolution without degradation.

Value-added features such as full color, web links, hyphen elimination, emphasis substitution and such are easily included. Fill justification is easily preserved with only the most minimum of text rekeying. Halftone images are greatly improved and can be made text searchable.

Turning to the disadvantages, if there is some historic, legal, or IP reason an exact replica of a precyber source is needed,  then the method is largely inappropriate.

Secondly, it is tricky to do more than four or five "easy" Level II  rework pages per hour. Some pages ( especially electronic  schematics ) may take insanely longer. Thus the project has to be reasonably profitable to justify the time and effort. Similar, problems arise if many new ebooks are needed in a short time.

Finally, the uniquely high quality of the Gonzo Utilities is based on them being proudly non-WYSIWIG. If you are not into "bare metal" machine language programming, then they might not be at all suitable for you.

We do offer custom Level II rework for both current and pre-cyber ebook projects, as well as training seminars. You  can email me for details or call (928) 428-4073.

April 13, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Today's gonzo "Holy Shit!" image can be found here. With a few more details here.

April 12, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

I seem to be gaining on our RSS repairs, but do not seem to be quite there yet. Sigh.

Any message of "stylesheet not found" can usually be cured by something similar to...

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xml"
href="https://www.tinaja.com/          
whtnu20style.xml" ?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom=
"http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"> <channel>....

Apparently there is a choice of .xml and .css stylesheets. But, as near as I can tell now, use of a .css stylesheet stops your readers from accessing live URL links!

Please advise me if you know a useful workaround.

RSS code can be validated by this site. While this site seems to have some interesting tools for building your own stylesheet code. More to follow.

Your comments welcome.

April 11, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Here and Here are our two latest images of the Jernigan Prehistoric Bajada Hanging canal.

It seems there are 400 or so feet of compatible terrain between the two. That, after many trips, does not show the slightest evidence of the two being linked.

But Ockham's Razor makes the two being one in the same highly likely.

More on Jernigan here and other canals here and here.

Your participation in this genuine world class research is sorely needed.

April 10, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Just uploaded a completely reworked home page that should be fully CSS legal, besides having some sorely needed updates, improved nav, and better cosmetics.

Still needing done are major includes, reworking a minor chrome glitch, a few url adjustments, and further improving the code.

Your comments and critique are urgently needed. As, of course, are any bug reports.

April 9, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Whenever you "almost" have a technological solution, or "almost" have gotten your research completed, there is a tenancy to go full speed ahead anyway.

Which will "almost" always will cost you bunches in the long run.

Make sure that what you need to continue gets fully  completed before committing yourself to stuff that may prove expensive or embarrassing when ( not if ) things inevitably go wrong. go wrong. go wrong.

GO WRONG!

April 8, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

I'm still getting an occasional email on Brown's Gas. All you need to know about it is that it is totally bogus on all levels.

We did a thorough review here. Brown's Gas is only a stoichiometric mix of hydrogen and oxygen. Nothing more, nothing less. It is both exceptionally and monumentally dangerous and almost totally useless

Unusual and wildly disclaimed properties are easily explained by plain old obscure but "Golly Gee Mister Science" demo physics. In particular, the hard-to-measure temperature is not especially high ( acetylene beats it easily ), and long term monatomics flat out do not and can not exist.

And "implosion" demos go away as soon as the walls warm up slightly.  And the total energy density is a joke. 

There is absolutely no way that more than homeopathic quantities of Brown's Gas can be produced through a car's fanbelt. Even then, only the tiniest fraction of the mechanical input energy can be output in a useful form. Thus clearly creating a dynamic brake!

Another take on its bogosity here.  More on pseudoscience bashing here.

April 7, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A church in Gila Bend has decided not to buy a chandelier. It seems that no one in the entire congregation knew how to play one.

Besides them being a bear to tune.

April 6, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

CSS has an improved replacement for the older JavaScript onmouseover and onmouseout commands. This involves their new :hover command.

CSS commands can be made more specific by individually naming them. As in <table id="#maintit"> creating a table named table.maintit. #maintit should be defined in your header to whatever you want it to be. It usually will also define your normal background color.

The hover mouseover equivalent then simply becomes...

#maintit:hover {background-color:#96C}

More detailed examples by going to our home page and viewing view page source. And we just have seem some details on the CSS "shortform" web safe colors here. With its sourcecode here.

April 5, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

We have several files on sorting techniques, both in and out of PostScript.

Our heap sort tutorial can be found here, with some simpler sorts here. Heap sorts work best when large numbers of items are being sorted.

This one is a speed optimized bubble sort:

/alphabubblesort2 { /curmat1 exch store 
curmat1 length 1 sub -1 1 { curmat1 0 get 
exch 1 exch 1 exch  { /posn exch store 
curmat1 posn get 2 copy lt {exch} if curmat1
exch posn 1 sub exch put } for curmat1 exch 
posn exch put } for curmat1 } bind store

And here's a bin presorter that gives an extra 12x speedup:

/presort1 {/matmat mark 128 {[]} repeat ]
store stddat { dup 0 get /curint exch store 
mark exch  matmat curint get aload pop ] 
matmat exch curint  exch put } forall mark 
matmat { dup length 1 ge { dup length 2 ge
{ alphabubblesort2{ }forall} if }{pop} ifelse} 
forall ] } bind store

April 4, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

It is interesting to compare an eBay Selling Sell-Buy ratio against the equivalent Consignment Fee for the same amount of placement effort. The formulas are...

 SBR = 100/(100 - COM) and
 COM = 100 - (100/SBR)

Thus a 50 percent commission equals an unacceptably low 2:1 sell/buy ratio. A 20 percent commission equals a laughingly absurd 1.25:1 SBR.

We strongly recommend a minimum SBR of 30:1. Such returns are fairly easy to acheive with online auctions, community college sales, and distress bankruptcies. Much more here.

April 3, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Our Exploring the .BMP Bitmap Data Format tutorial can be found here.

One BMP subtlety concerns possibly needed padding bytes in the 24 bit RGB mode. Because each and every .BMP row MUST start on an even 32 bit boundary, zero, one, two, or three padding bytes MUST be placed end of line.

The simplest workaround is to always use linewidths whose pixels are an exact multiple of four. Otherwise, several workarounds appear in the above paper.

April 2, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Revised our Web Friendly PostScript Colors so they are now fully CSS usable as well. Find the display here and the sourcecode here.

The CSS web friendly colors can be represented as three hex characters. To convert them to a more traditional and harder to enter standard format, simply double each character.

As in #3F9 becoming #33FF99.

April 1, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

The problem of unwanted email spam has been eliminated completely with today's long awaited passage of House Bill 27-234.

Which places a tax on anyone admitting to receiving any unwanted email. Initially 35 cents per email on a sliding scale up to $4.37 in June of 2021.

Because it would place an unfair burden on the spammers themselves and because of ISP considerations, the tax was placed on the sendee rather than the sender. The number of admitted unwanted emails is now expected to shortly and dramatically drop.

Thus eliminating unwanted reported spam once and for all. Additional details can be found here.

March 30, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

I've either made a subtle coding error that is driving me up the wall. Or else I've now found an apparent Chrome bug.

Consider www.tinaja.com/t6.shtml. It CSS Verifies and should be routine table code. Chrome shows it properly when uploaded as a local file, but crams the boxes together when uploaded from the web.

Yet, the "view source" from both files are identical, and local resaving the web file restore the original. Further, IE shows both file and web identically.

Your analysis and help is sorely needed.

March 29, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Our major website update to full CSS and HTML5 verified compatibility sure is frustrating and taking much longer than expected. Especially since I am trying to otherwise improve and update things in the process.

Here is a sample new panel. You can extract the key .CSS code for your own reuse by way of the usual "show page source" right mouse click.

Please critique this and report any possible improvements. I definitely want to keep the original "retro" look. And possibly further enhance it.

March 28, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Yeah, our RSS link sucks. Seems it needs a stylesheet, and, as near as I can tell, using CSS will not allow live URL linking. ( URGENT: Please report this if it is wrong! )

So, an XML style sheet seems to be needed, or at least a pair of XML and CSS ones.

I found out how to do minimalist stylesheets, but cannot seem to find out how to do the fancy boxes or columns or live URL's that others use. And web searches on this are highly frustrating to save the least.

Please report a rss style example that (1) includes live URL's and has pretty boxes, spacings, and colors.

March 27, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Our projection of a possible Central Dump Pond canal may have been wildly premature. Especially since yesterday's Jernigan extensions cross an apparent trail bike route at right angles. Good old orthogonal.

We have surprisingly few "not even wrong" canal misses, but I prefer to keep them in the active lists to record them. And thus limit possible future explorations.

Likely loosers possibly include...

4. JAC1 - Lower Jacobson Hints at N 32.67671 W 109.77610

12. RPC1 - Roper Lake Canal at N 32.75567 W 109.70885

47. LMT1 - Lower Mud Trace at N 32.80803 W 109.84448

57. MR1- Mystery Reach at N 32.81793 W 109.90207

59. NWD1 - Nuttall Watershed Diversion at N 32.77471 W 109.95411

64. PRM1 - P Ranch Enigma at 32.61817 -109.72829

76. TALW2 - Tailwater2 Canal area at 32.83987 -109.91578

79. LPZ1 Lopez Canal area at 32.82141 -109.76650

83. DVM1 - Deep Vee Mystery area at 32.81888-109.76930

91. CDC1 - Central Dump Pond area at 32.84438 -109.81619

With a more credible list here and here. And more on the prehistoric bajada hanging canals here, here, and here.

March 26, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Managed to find a few hundred feet more of the Jernigan Canal. With a map here and new photos here, here, and here.

There are still three gaps, but the general route has now been reasonably defined. An earlier set of field notes can be found here and here.

Unique characteristics of this particular Bajada Hanging Canal include its three (!) major "U" turns, a counterflow portion where it crosses a wash, and a large Mesquite tree mid channel.

Unlike many canal candidates, Jernigan has both a well defined source and destination. Besides being otherwise part of a world class unique complex. Preservation and engineering quality varies from exceptional to missing entirely.

March 25, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Our 404 trapping tools seem to be degubbing fairly well. We have been using them daily and typically can only find zero to two remaining internally fixable problems.

Thus, almost all of the remaining internal 404's are user caused and unlikely to be directly fixable by us. Often, a single user or user robot or user cache will end up responsible for most of the 404's on a daily report. Not to mention grossly impacting our hit traffic reports.

EMT's refer to these as their "frequent flyer program".

There are two minor glitches remaining in fix_404.psl, which I think I will save as exercises for the serious student.

Any particular .shtm file is searched in strings of 62K. Only the first hit is reported, while successive ones might be missed. This should not matter because the software goal is to report any hit per file.

It would also seem possible that a hit that straddles two 62K strings would get missed. The odds of this happening on a 10 character search are around one in 6200. A bizarre workaround would be to back off fileposition by a hundred counts every time a new string was needed.

March 24, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Our latest tentative bajada hanging canal is suggested by Acme Mapper to go from near Grandma Road to the Central Dump pond. This is study candidate #91!

Your help in verifying the route is welcome, besides giving you a legitimate way to actually perform world class scientific research. One key question still unresolved is where and how the Jernigan Canal branches from this extension.

Its find was unexpected, as were the recent discoveries of the Reay Canal, the UFO Fish Fillets Canal, a pair of Artesian driven canals, a riverine canal with a hanging portion, and the Tripp Canyon Canal.

What utterly astounds me is that the canal system appears to be complete and correct with no obvious unfinished portions and no obvious mistakes. All the while utterly and completely exploiting virtually every drop of Mount Graham sourced water. Not to mention its many artesian and riverine companions.

Besides appearing earlier in this blog, many of these are now on Research Gate or ( hopefully ) soon will be. A directory can be found here and a current update here.

March 23, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Newly updated and expanded our Gila Valley Dayhikes. We are now up to 525 primary entries!

A sampler of some of the more unusual day hikes can be  found here.

And more details on your spectacular research opportunities of our Prehistoric Bajada Hanging canals here. And much more on the canals here and here.

A few of the many open "help wanted" projects were  summarized here. There are many dozens of newer ones.

March 22, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

There's an obscure Legendre Filter that beats out Butterworth, but still remains "sort of" monotonic.

We looked at these way back here where this plot resulted. The result is monotonic but with a very slight hump or bump on its way out of the passband.

They are pretty much the same as my "slight dips" filters in the Active Filter Cookbook. The latter are ready-to-go and much simpler to deal with.

My underlying math here was simply a weighted interpolation of legit Butterworth and Chebycheff values.

It might be interesting to "shake the box" with random adjustments between Butterworth and Chebycheff to see if better response can be found using yet unknown polynomials. After all, the final results are simply a list of frequency and damping levels that could not care less if a formal and known polynomial is initially involved.

Meanwhile, autographed copies of my Active Filter Cookbook remain available here. Apparently the unsigned copies at Amazon sell for a lot more!

As a special service, we can omit the autograph for a mere $10.73 surcharge.

Yeah, I'd like to add this to our free ebooks but have not gotten around to it. Let me know of a scanned source if you know of one.

March 21, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

An Open Archaeology Search Engine can be found here.

March 20, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

March 19, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

The worst nightmare of any Southwestern Art Gallery:  A De Grazia macramé howling coyote.

In teal.

March 18, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A reminder that current website design involves correct using of HTML5 and CSS. It is trivially easy to pick up hundreds or even thousands of verification errors on any of your earlier work.

It seems easy to confuse the CSS <div> and <span> commands. The intended use of <div> is to work with one or more whole lines only, always starting from the far left.

The intended use of <span> is to interact with only a part of a line. Such as changing the color of a single word.

March 17, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

As we have recently seen, the latest in HTML5 and CSS now forbids many of the original <table> commands and produces error messages if you try to use them.

Here are some guidelines to updating our "retro" title block so it's doubly embedded tables will fully validate to HTML5 and CSS...

put in <head>...

<style>
#maintit { font-family: "Times New Roman",
Times, serif; width: 600px; text-align: center;}
#maintittext {text-align: center; font-size:
25px;} </style>

put in <body>...

<table id="#maintit"> <tr><td>&nbsp
;&nbsp;</td><td> <script><!-- Place Banner ()
//--></script> </td><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
<td> <script><!-- Place Banner ()//--></script>
</td><td>&nbsp;</td></tr><tr> <td colspan=
"5" style="height:26px"> <img src=
"blustrp.gif" alt=" "width=600 height=16>
</td></tr> <tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
<td colspan="3">

<table id="#maintittext"><tr> <td><a href=
(( place narrow banner here ))</a></td>
<td style="text-align:center"> <span style=
"font-size:20px"> <b>Welcome to Don
Lancaster's</b><br></span> <span style=
"color:#800000;font-size:45px"> <b>&nbsp;
The Guru's Lair &nbsp;</b><br></span>
<span style="color:black;font-size:20px">
<b>https://www.tinaja.com</b></span></td>
<td><a  href= ((place narrow banner here ))
</a></td> </tr></table></td>

<td>&nbsp;</td></tr> <tr><td colspan="5"
style="height:28px"> <img src="blustrp.gif"
alt=" " width=600 height=16 ></td> </tr><tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;</td> <td><script>
<!-- PlaceBanner ()//--></script></td> <td>
&nbsp;</td> <td><script><!-- PlaceBanner
()//--></script></td></td> <td>&nbsp;</td>
</tr></table>

Note that the above code is for reference or study only! You will have to add your own banners and js banner rotators and background image and the blue stripes to get it to actually do anything useful for you.

March 16, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

In their never ending battle to stomp out tables, CSS and HTML5 are now not letting you have any tables inside one or more blockquotes. Doing so generates compatibility errors.

The workaround is to put a table inside a table. The outer table is all blank with a blank first column whose width sets the amount of indentation from your left margin.

This actually can be more precise than using <blockquote>.

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

Separately, as infuriousity #2347-bx, you are allowed to nest tables, but NOT allowed to nest named tables!

Thus <table> inside <table> is allowed, but <table.zorch> inside <table.glotz> is forbidden and generates report errors. The workaround is to use <span> instead of id's. Or possibly <div>.

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

Even more separately, as infuriousity #7423-bx, the custom Google Search fragment of <gsce:search><gsce:search> generates a warning and an error. A possible workaround may be <div> class="gsce:search"></div>

March 15, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

>"Current" website practice includes CSS, HTML5, .shtml, JavaScript and possibly Adsense. The odds are overwhelming that any of your older web pages now have hundreds or even thousands of errors. Many of which should get fixed now.

Use this link to check your CSS...

https://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

Use this link to check your HTML...

https://validator.w3.org/

Use this link to check your URL links.

https://validator.w3.org/checklink

And these links to find any fixable internal URL errors...

#d03.07.18

March 14, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Picked up a large collection of superb current transformers from a public utility auction and now have them up on eBay.

These are ultra high current, typically 600 to 1000 amperes and NOS new old stock. They are unused and include their calibration tags. General Electric Brand.

Sensitivity of the rectangular units can be increased by multiple turns. Frequency range is 50 to 60 Hertz.

WARNING: NEVER remove the output load of any live current transformer! ALWAYS terminate in a low impedance ammeter or a short circuit!

More eBay help here.

March 13, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

In an attempt to restrict the <table> command to more appropriate uses, CSS, and HTML5 have banned internal<table> commands of border, align, width, bgcolor, cellspacing, cellpadding, bgcolor, height, valign, and a few others. Use of these will generate an error during validation.

Fortunately, the colspan command still does remain acceptable for internal <table> use..

Workarounds include using table.xxx where xxx is a specified class, or bracketing with <div>....</div>

A superb interactive tutorial can be found here.

March 12, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A selection guide to USB Oscilloscope replacements can be newly found here.

I grew up in the days of the Tek doghouses. These could comfortably sleep a German Shepard.

Compared to conventional scopes, the USB's potentially have some outstanding new advantages. Not the least of which is that they are much cheaper and insanely more compact.

Less obvious is that storage is free. Back in the bad old days, a storage oscilloscope was a poorly performing pile of worthless junk. Today in USB land, you have a new "zoom after external trigger" feature that can cleanly and brightly hold an image as long as you want. While slide magnifying a tiny portion of a longer waveform.

It used to be that a two channel scope gave you a choice of "chop" or "alternate" scans, both of which had obvious problems. With USB's. both channels are there color coded in real time to full brightness.

Scope screen photography and recording results or printing a screen once were extraordinarily gruesome.

Since their performance is largely pc host based as software, such exotics as spectrum analysis or Fourier FFT's or similar stuff are newly available.

March 11, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A reminder that there is an absolutely outstanding collection of radio, television, and other technical reprints can be found at  https://www.americanradiohistory.com/

Of particular interest are the tech lab sources such as the RCA Review, Bell Laboratories Record, Tele Tech, and such. Amazingly, the content keeps expanding. Many of the .PDF files are fully searchable. 

They also have backup copies of many of my free eBooks.

March 10, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

NEVER assume the boxes in an auction pallet actually contain what the label says they do! Very often, schools or other institutions doing an upgrade will  put their out-of-date units being replaced into the new boxes before moving them to their future auction sale stash.

Thus, the units typically may be one or two generations older  than the palletized boxes suggest. One sure fire clue of this  happening is if there are more than one unit per package.  Always verify the age and series of actual individual units!

Outside of a limited possible collector market, out-of-date electronics may have little to no value, typically less than its shipping charges. It also may have use or compatibility problems that could piss off your customers.

Typical examples would be analog tv anything, especially test gear, CRT anything except for certain oscilloscopes, paper based chart recorders, older glass power meters, vintage cable or satellite gear, phonograph needles, most LP records, most used books or magazines, dated but not vintage gambling  machines, Polaroid anything, photo anything involving slopping in the slush, VHS anything, pen plotters, high end logic analyzers, or largely uncollectible laser disks.

Much more auction help here.

March 9, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

We think that we have sold our New Mexico wilderness property, but we'll keep its mentions as a historical record.

Many thanks to those of you who have shown interest in this extremely rare buy.

We still do have the last remaining large developable property just North of the Gold Hill Oregon city limits. Per details here. Including updated links.

March 8, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Three features that make the PostScript general purpose computing language attractive for fixing web 404's includes its ability to read or write most any disk file(s) in most any format; its task batch scripting ability; and its superb case sensitive search that seems to be otherwise mostly lacking from pc's and browsers.

Here is a "work in progress" of some tools I put together that seem useful for solving many website 404 repairing problems...

(1) Make sure your viewers know they are supposed to report back to you on a 404, and most especially WHICH file they were viewing that caused the problem!

(2) Be intimately familiar with the capabilities of your ISP. In my case, this would be Fatcow, of whom I am an associate. Fatcow uses an Apache class server and has outstanding live help.

(3) Get 404 log reports on an as needed basis. With Fatcow, this gets done by FTPing such log files out of your stats subdirectory similar to access_log_20180308.gz or later. .gz files are compressed, so you will have to decompress them using WinZip or similar.

Your final log filename should be similar to moo.tinajacom and is best viewed in Chrome. Search this file for (space)404(space) and each 404 line should now have a yellow box in it.

(4) Organize your 404's. You can do this with cuts and pastes, but my new find_404.psl will generate a ps log textfile for you To use find_404.psl, you will need a fresh copy installed on your host PC along with the Distiller internal to Acrobat XI along with my Gonzo Utilities per this tutorial.

You will further need to make sure all your filenames and data lines in find_404.psl match all of your files, your directories, and your machine. Exactly. IMPORTANT: If PostScript is EVER to be used for ANY diskfile manipulation, it MUST be entered from your command line as //acrodist /F ! Done properly, your result should be a new find404.log textfile that only lists your current 404 problems.

(5) Improve 404 organization. Rearrange file by URL significance and frequency and repairability to complete your master 404 "to do" list.

(6) Create a new shtml_stash1 subdirectory. Fill it with ALL and ONLY your active web .shtml or .html files. Be sure to keep this folder up to date when and as you make website corrections.

(7) My new fix_404.psl should one by one locally search each and every. shtml or .html file presently in your shtml_stash1 subdirectory, looking for the preset case sensitive string previously defined in /soughtafter with any word processor and then drag and drop into Distiller.

A new fix_404.log file should show you exactly where and if your problem 404 strings on your website. Similar to before, you will  need a fresh copy of fix_404.ps installed on your host PC along with the Distiller internal to Acrobat XI along with my Gonzo Utilities per this tutorial. And all filenames and options must be exactly correct.

In interests of its blinding fast speed, fix_404.psl may rarely miss a search hit. But it should almost always find most strings for you.

Note that the popularity of any file can be viewed by way of your Fatcow control panel. It obviously pays to fix the most popular problems first. Typically only a third of the problems will be even remotely under your control.

Also typically, a very few users are likely to create most of your 404 problems. EMT's call things like this part of their "frequent flyer program".

As mentioned, this is a work in process. Please report any further needs or difficulties.

March 7, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Possibly the only thing more maddeningly infuriating than 404's is our inability to find and fix many of them.

Our present goal is a three percent 404 rate with one third of these being stuff we can internally fix, at least in theory.

The majority of our 404's are well out of mainstream popularity and often may cluster on a surprisingly few visitors. Sometimes fixing a 404 will not let it go away. This is possibly caused by various caching web activities. Or robots with their own agendas.

Some sneaky tricks can reduce external "ain't us" forced 404's. Foremost of which is to redirect wp-login.php. The fake favicon Apple touch icons can be dealt with by adding your own images.

Any obvious outright malware or piracy attempts can be dealt with by flat out blocking with .htaccess.

We have just made bunches of 404 fixes, but to find some more, we will need your help. Please email me with the 404 description, and, above all, WHERE you were when you clicked through to the 404. Sadly, log referrals aren't much help.

I am proud to be an associate of our FarCow ISP. They have a daily stats file that provides all sorts of info on our visitors. Their accesslog2018.... files are compressed and need processed with WinZip before they can be best viewed in Chrome.

The 404's can be marked with a (space) 404 (space) search or extracted outright with this code and its generated log file. I'm thinking about expanding a 404 auto-extraction system that would use PostScript to automatically search all possible 404 sources. This would be heavy enough to require support.

March 6, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Watch out for the cliff!
        What CLIFFFFFfffffffff?

Watch out for the ping pong ball!
         What ping pong gloulckkk?

Watch our for the ladder!
         What ladder dedadder dedadder dedadder?

Watch out for the revolving door!
         What revolving door .. ing door .. ing door?

Curiously, there does not seem to be the faintest hint of these on the web. I'd like to try and find the rest of these and give them a long missing home on the web. Please email me with your candidates and suggestions.

March 5, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

OK, here is the full solution to the "Bezier problem" in which you want to relate the x0-x3 control points to the A-D cubic equation coefficients. And their y equivalents.

Create some cubic basis functions by starting with an  obvious 1 = 1 and morphing it into a bizarre but highly useful (1-t) + t = 1. Cube this expression to get...

            (1-t)^3 + 3t(1-t)^2 + 3t^2(1-t)  +  t^3  = 1       

Call each of these left four terms a basis function..

            B0(t) + B1(t) + B2(t) + B3(t) = 1.

x (and separately, y) are now related to our cubic t by...

   x(t) = x0(B0(t)) + x1(B1(t)) + x2(B2(t)) + x3(B3(t))

x(t) will also equal our cubic spline equation...

                  x(t) = At^3 + Bt^2 + Ct + D

Since t has to be allowed to vary from 0 to 1, the only way these two equations can be equal is if the t coefficients match for each power.

Expand the terms...

  x0(1-t)^3           =  x0 - 3x0t  + 3x0t^2   -   x0t^3
  x1(3t (1 - t)^2)  =          3x1t  -  6x1t^2 +  3x1t^3
  x2( 3t^2(1-t))    =                       3x2t^2  -  3x2t^3   x3t^3                =                                          x3t^3

Now, "think vertically upwards" and regroup to get...

                   A =   x3 - 3x2 + 3x1 - x0  
                   B = 3x2 - 6x1 + 3x0 
                   C = 3x1 - 3x0         
                    D =  x0  

You can easily show that the control points behave in  the expected manner. At t=0, only B0(t) is active and thus x0,y0 defines the starting point of the curve. At  t=1, only B3(t) is active and thus x3,y3 defines the  ending point of the curve.

The initial x versus t slope is 3(x1 - x0) and the initial y versus t slope is 3(y1 - y0). The initial xy slope is thus (y1 - y0)/(x1-x0) and thus the x1y1 control point sets the initial slope.

Similarly, the final xy slope can be shown to be (y3 - y2)/(x3 - x2) and thus the x2y2 control point sets the final slope.

Finally, note that the x1,y1 point has its strongest influence precisely and always at t=1/3. And similarly, the x2,y2 point has its strongest influence precisely and always at t=2/3.

The "tension" or "enthusiasm" of the Bezier curve is thus determined by how much change has to happen in x and y between t=1/3 and t=2/3.

March 4, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

It is always darkest just before it gets completely black.

March 3, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

If you are using Google's Adsense, they require an ads.txt entry on the main page of your website. Failure to do so will create 404's and may impact your Adsense revenue.

More details on creating your short ads.txt textfile can be found here. A typical file for many "normal" users might look like this...

google.com, pub-0000000000000000,
DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0

.... with the zeros being replaced with your Google pub number.

Many more details here.

March 2, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

An associate by the name of Robert Ackman has been doing all sorts of math studies and css programming suggestions for me. Particularly on independent verifications of the validity of my Magic Sinewaves and significantly helping me with the math on the bizarre Marbelous Pancakes.

Both of which still seem wildly misunderstood and of enormous future potential. The first because of significant improvements in high efficiency, low distortion power sinewaves.

And the second because it inadvertently has generated a whole new class of compact applications that do not look remotely at all like they were computer generated. Self-UNsimilarity!

His contributions are greatly appreciated.

You can reach his website here.

March 1, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

We long ago posted a PostScript simulation of the "Gambler's Ruin" in our Tech Musings column #144. I never did get around to split out the actual code, but you can easily extract it from figure 5, save it as a .psl file and then send it to your Acrobat Distiller or GhostScript.

Suppose you and I start with ten coins each and run a "fair" and vig free coin flipping game till somebody has all the coins. Who wins? On the average, you would reasonably expect to win half of the time.

Now, we will make a seemingly minor and innocuous change. The house starts with 100 coins and the mark has only 10. Now who wins? Surprisingly, the mark now wins less than ten percent of the time!

If the house starts with 10,000 coins, the mark never wins! At least not so as you’d ever notice. Yes, the mark may temporarily get way ahead, but they never win!

The point being that any mark who bets against everything that can be gambled on is absolutely certain to lose big time.

This model plays out two million games. Every thousand games, your mark’s winnings are reported to your PS log file as a percentage. You can easily change each side’s coin starts or the number of games.

BTW, the term "mark"comes from the carnival midway. Where any losing sucker got patted on the back with chalk.

More Tech Musings here, more PostScript here, a collection of .psl procs here, and the main .psl catalog here.

February 28, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A reminder that there is a sneaky trick you can pull to dramatically reduce the "edge ghosting" typical on any .jpg image that has been knocked out to a solid color background.

Simply use a slightly mottled background instead. This confuses the repetitive compression at the cost only of a small increase in file size.

Some sample mottled backgrounds are found here.

Better yet is our selt-vingnetting auto backgrounder. Whose many use examples can be seen here on eBay.

Start with an oversize .BMP image Clip it to your target subject-to-background ratio. Then carefully back the red color balance off by ONE click in Imageviewer32 or its equivalent. It is essential that there are NO red=255 pixels ANYWHERE in your bitmap at this time!

Now, purposely using any tint that includes red=255, outline your subject. Do make absolutely sure your outline SOLIDLY goes ALL the way around! Should there be any subject "holes" ( where you really want your background to punch through ) or any undercuts, next fill these completely with your red=255 pixels.

Edit a fresh copy of your auto backgrounder as any text file, carefully setting your source and destination files to different filenames. Your target background to be purposely mottled can be set with our PostScript Colors as a single value 0 to 215 or with the usual BMP value triplet of zeros up to 255 255 255.

There are adjustable internal controls for the depth of mottling, the size and on/off of the vignette, and more.

IMPORTANT NOTE: File management MUST be restored in your Acrobat Distiller! You do this with a magic top secret command you can place in your Windows Command Line:

//acrodist /F

To carry our all the sneaky magic, simply drag and drop your current vignetter into Distiller!

The vignetter should produce results like these. The final result can be resized or .JPG converted or further image processed any way you like.

The actual optional vignetting gets done by an astonishingly simple but true electromagnetic field calculator. Utterly heretical. Find this detailed here and ( especially ) here.

Other tools related to the vignetter are our Architect's Perspective, PostScript Colors and the Bitmap Typewriter

February 27, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

How to spot an extroverted engineer...

They stare at your shoes, rather than their own.

February 26, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

If you are running an eBay store, it is super easy to bury yourself in worthless trash that consumes more and more costly storage space.

Ideally, everything in storage should be listed and producing long term income with a well defined (usually 15 month) sellout date. At least once a year, I feel it is more than a good idea to reevaluate everything in storage and do a total bailout. Sort of a "reset to zero" going out of business sale. Let's start a new list of possible bailout guidelines...

~ If you touch it, you list it or you get rid of it.

~ Focus on completely clearing any problem area,
    one entire shelf, tote, or similar region at a time.

~ Have and aggressively use secondary disposal
    methods, such as wholesaling out to another
    eBay seller via the Alvin Pile

~ Slash prices on anything not moving at
   all. But give a final chance before flushing.

~ Always favor keep new stuff over old, high
    items over low, light over heavy, clean over
    dirty, working over needs refurb, popular
    over unknown, items within your expertise,
    packaged over loose, compact vs bulky,
    quantity over onsies, and small items over
    larger ones.

~ Research current eBay prices. Which may
     have dropped dramatically. Avoid listing
     for less than a  $19.63 opening price.

~ Group oddball low value items into like  lots
    "minimum order - 4", or flush them entirely.

~ Links to manufacturer's listings can be used
   to replace the need for a custom photo. This can
   low value item disposal. But avoid any listings
   without a photo or a photo-like link.

~ Know exactly what you have in inventory,  
   where it is,  its value, and its disposal plan.

~ Put internal "hurricane" names on items likely
   to get confused. Such as Alice, Boris, Clyde, ...

~ Would you buy this now? For how much?

~ Tag all items to be refurbed. Prioritize them
    in order of bang for the buck effort. Attack the
    big lumps first.

~ Use production line techniques where you shoot
    many photos at once. And try to maximize
    how many items are listed per work session.

~ Alternate big ticket items with nuisance onces.
   Mix and match "easy" and "difficult" listings.

~ List at least four hundred new items monthly.

~ Don't agonize over individual decisions. If it is
   not a winner, flush it.

~ Always ask why some item has been neglected.
   If it wasn't worth it then, it won't ever be.

~ Never sell anything you do not feel good about. 

For much more on eBay...

Main eBay Library

Our own eBay Sales
eBay Selling Summary
eBay Buying Summary
Successful eBay Seller Strategies
Successful eBay Buyer Strategies

Enhancing your eBay Skills I
Enhancing your eBay Skills II
Enhancing your eBay Skills III
Enhancing your eBay Skills IV
Enhancing your eBay Skills V
Enhancing your eBay Skills VI
Enhancing your eBay Skills VII
Enhancing your eBay Skills VIII

February 25, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

One of our older GuruGrams was on Approximating a Circle or Ellipse Using Four Bezier Cubic Splines.

In which we saw that the normal 4-spline approximation has an error of one part in a thousand. Which is more than suitable for most graphic uses, but falls short of what is acceptable in a machine shop.

The normal magic number is 0.55228475 and otherwise known as four thirds of one less than the square root of two. But little known is that you can beat this value and come up with a 24 percent improvement that splits the errors into positive and negative values. Details in the above paper.

Should you need machine shop accuracy, an eight spline approximation can give you 4 parts per million worst case and half that average. Again, per the paper.

PostScript does its circles to a 4-spline approximation. You can beat this somewhat by using eight curveto splines instead of using their arc operator. Ultimate limits are 32 bit math and reporting roundoff. The latter of which can be eased here.

Much more on Bezier Cubic Splines here. Included are...

The Math Behind Cubic Splines
Using Cubic Splines
Cubic Spline through Four Points 
Bezier through 4 points via Optimal Lagrange
          and demo.
Cubic Spline Length and Subdivision 
Cubic Spline Minimum Point Distance 
Length of a Bezier Curve
Cubic Spline Circle Circles and Ellipses
Pixed Interpolation Algorithms
Cubic Spline Catenary Approximation
Image Post Processing Tools 
Various Bezier Examples 

February 24, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Some neat and off-the-wall stuff to play with include this Fibonacci's Sunflower and this Sierpinski Triangle.

The latter of which can be found as sourcecode here and as a demo here.

Or for some really weird marbelous stacks of pancakes that do not even remotely look like they were done on a computer, you can start here.

These open a whole new concept of non-self-similar or "self-dissimilar" replications. All done with astoundingly few bytes of code! An instant master's thesis.

Much more on PostScript here, a classic video here, its reference manual here, and great heaping bunches more items crammed into this USB.

February 23, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

The "water powered car" and "improved electrolysis" scams seem to be once again coming out of the woodwork. Here are the facts...

   ~ There is a fundamental thermodynamic
       principle called exergy that absolutely
       guarantees that electrolysis for bulk
       hydrogen energy flat out ain't gonna
       happen. There ALWAYS will be more
       intelligent things to do with electricity
       than instantly and irrevocably destroying
       most of its quality and value. Especially
       from high value grid or pv sources.
   
   ~ A kilowatt hour of electrical energy is
       ridiculously more valuable than a kilowatt
       hour of unstored hydrogen gas because its
       thermodynamically reversibly recoverable
       energy fraction is insanely higher.

    ~ Electrolysis "efficiency" is oftenl meaningless
       because the "efficiency" gets used to destroy
       quality and value. Further, the amortization
        costs tend to utterly dominate the total
       production costs. Electrolysis is pretty much
       the same as 1:1 exchanging US dollars for
       Mexican Pesos.

    ~ Virtually all commercial hydrogen is made
        by the reformation of methane. The only time
        electrolysis is even remotely considered is for
        extreme other factors when the value of
        the generated hydrogen grossly exceeds its
        stored energy value.

    ~ Manufacturers of large electrolysizers will
       not even tell an individual how much their
       units cost, let alone sell them one.

    ~ It is enormously difficult to correctly measure
        the energy content of unusual electrical
        waveforms. At the very least, true rms
        instruments with credible crest factors are
       an absolute must. It is similarly enormously
       difficult to properly measure the output
       that is in fact dry STP hydrogen gas.

    ~ A properly designed electrolysizer demands
       the use of often renewed platinized platinum.
       Stainless steel designs are worthless because
       of the hydrogen overvoltage of iron found in
       most any intro electrochem book.

   ~ Few people realize how rare and unusual an
      electrolysizer is. In a decade of attending
      industrial distress sales, I've run across
      exactly one. Which sold for $1700 and
      could only produce a pitiful few cc's of gas
      per minute. Try to find one sometime.

   ~ Electrolysizers raise EXTREME safety issues
      that are far beyond what most individuals
      comprehend or what your friendly local 
      hazmat folks will permit. At least one
      sci.energy.hydrogen newsgroup poster
      tried for both a Darwin Award and the X
      Prize at the same time. Sadly, his garage
      did not quite reach suborbital status.

And, of course....

   ~ Faraday's Law ain't broke.

More on trashing auto electrolysizers here, on energy in general here, and on hydrogen here.

February 22, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

The Windows 10 Powershell is an extremely interesting and useful scripting tool.

Here is how to use it to extract the contents of a directory for a textfile or printing...

1. Select target directory and open it.
2. Do a shift then mouse rightclick.
3. Click on Open Powershell Window.
4. Enter dir after the > prompt
5. Select lines of interest by click and drag
6. Enter control-c
7. control-x save to Wordpad or elsewhere.

If you are just after filenames, delete any other columns. Save as any other textfile. Print as any textfile.

Alternately, you can do a dir > thisdirectoryfilename.txt as step 4 and it will create and store a new file for you.

The directory does have to be in its list or other text mode.

February 21, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Today's lesson is that a useful answer to "But Why?" is often "Because they can".

In league with those perfecting synthetic kale or developing Caver's Wrist Sundials, there seems to be a bunch of new interest in creating Lisp Interpreters for PostScript.

The original intent was to create a printer that spoke Lisp. But newer and more flexibly, this would give Acrobat Distiller ( and thus .PDF ) the ability to speak or accept Lisp as well. As would Ghostscript.

Proponents feel that this also expands PostScript's already superb string manipulation capabilities. Much of the interest can be found here, here, and hereclams.ps.

There's a bunch of wildly interesting programming stunts along the way.

Lisp, of course, is primarily of interest to programmers whose childhood was completely and utterly devoid of parenthesis. It is most famous for its Zork variant.

Much more on PostScript here, and an "empty" dummy program prototype here. And a list of code projects here. Plus the reference manual here.

February 20, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Custom crystal frequencies used to be cheap and quick to get back in the days of classic ham and CB radios. But the magic TV Typewriter frequency of 4.562 MHz has become tricky to find. But you can try such outfits as Crystek, Statek, or Bomar. Sadly, International Crystal and JAN Crystals seem to be recently gone.

Several of you have asked just how critical this clock frequency is. Well, the TVT itself pretty much could not care less, and anything remotely near four and a half Megahertz will do just fine. At least for initial tests.

The problem was that 1973 era tv sets were poorly regulated and shielded. Drifting even slightly from a 60 Hertz frame rate might cause "breathing" or "wobbling". Being off by even one tenth of a percent would dance every six seconds.

This should not be much of a problem for the direct video entry of a modern LCD based monitor with high frequency switch mode power supplies. Chances are a somewhat more available 4.6453 MHz crystal likely will work just fine here.

A sledgehammer solution these days is to phase lock to the power line. Poof. Gone. But you still would likely want to use a "pullable" crystal, helped along by a 4013 D flop used as a 60 Hertz phase detector. This should be easy and cheap to do to 1973 circuit standards and techniques.

The existing TVT Clock chip actually allows pulling!

February 19, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A reminder that the TV Typewriter has an obscure, hidden and "secret" self test on connector pin 19.

This "sort of" converts the TVT into a bizarre oscilloscope. It man be used to view any internal TTL output pin. And will superimpose the timing on that pin as video.

WARNING: Use only on TTL output stages! Do NOT attempt to view main MOS memory, RF, negative supplies, RC networks, external waveforms, etc... Details on how to interpret the waveforms are found here.

Note that you may not be able to view any waveforms present during certain portions of the intended horizontal or vertical blanking intervals. Naturally, a "real" oscilloscope or USB replacement should be used for any serious debugging. But with some creative thought, the self test might be all you need for initial debug.

February 18, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A Brad Hodge reachable at brad@bettercomputing.net and this website seems to be in the process of recreating authentic and classically correct TV Typewriter replicas.

An ongoing blog appears here.

He has solved most of the circuit board, crystal, and similar "unobtanium" hassles and appears to have units nearly complete and in their near final debugging phase.

He welcomes feedback, comments, and participation.

These days, the TVT direct video output would be better used, owing to a lack of modern analog displays to classic standards. Classic TV channels ended around 2009.

And custom crystals, while once cheap and trivially available probably could be worked around by power line phase locking.

The latter might be done for a dollar or two with 1973 circuits and concepts. Key might be a 4013 D flop used as a phase detector. This would also make for a more stable display on an older cheap tv set.

BTW, the "lost" TVT color cover photo can be found here.

More on TV Typewriters here, here, and here.

February 17, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

Thought I would re-mention some of our "heavier" stuff...

Some Image Pixel Interpolation Algorithms
Bezier through 4 points via Optimal Lagrange
Exploring the Bitmap File Format
Lancaster Classics USB
Magic Sinewave Review
Magic Sinewave Calculator with quantizing
PostScript Font Snooper Degubbing
PostScript Beginner Stuff
PostScript Secrets Catalogs by file Types
TTL Cookbook
Predictions for 2018
Intro to PostScript Video
Free eBook Classics Collection
The Worst of Marcia Swampfelder
Revised Fat Tail Arrow Utilities
Energy Library
Current Blog
PostScript Font Snooper
Bitmap Typewriter
PS PowerPoint Simulator
Build This TV Typewriter
Mount Graham Aerial Tramway
Factors of Recent Technical Innovation
Saga of the Dripping Stalactites
Fun with Fields
Patent Bashing
Tearing Method
PostScript Library
Classic Reprints
New Field Solutions via Rebounding
How to Trash a Vehicle Hydrogen Electrolyzer
How to Bash Pseudoscience
Debunking the Hydrogen Debacle
Curious Saga of the Magic Lamp
Cubic Spline Minimum Point Distance
Swings and Tilts Perspective Corrector
Vignetting Image Auto Backgrounder
Gila Valley Dayhikes
Lesser Known Gila Valley Dayhikes
Prehistoric Bajada Hanging Canals
Stacks of Marbelous Distorted Pancakes

February 16, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond

A reminder that this Xylophone Duet is eminently watchable, while its hard to find original source can be found here.

And that this "must review" related web resource usually  has well over one million daily changing entries.

February 15, 2018
deeplink  •  top  •  bot  •  respond