Don Lancaster's What's New?      2019 Archive Blog

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Phased out our whtnu19.shtml blog and started a new
whtnu20.shtml one.

Yeah, we are working on making this much more mobile
friendly. This may take a while. The first three candidates
will be this blog, the homepage, and Gila Hikes.

Meanwhile, much of this "purposely and intentionally
retro" website design works best with larger screens
and is more than likely to stay that way.

So, please use big screens!

Just posted a Dr. Neely paper on the riverine San Jose
Canal. Managed to compact it somewhat.

More on the bajada canals here, here, here, and here.

Similarly, a complete directory of HTML5 commands
along with interactive exercises can be found here.
Again, it almost certainly pays to cycle each and every
entry.

Many of the earlier HTML commands have now gotten
depreciated by CSS and typically will generate errors in
the usual Verify Web resource, along with its Verify CSS
and Verify URL companions.

Among other no-no's are upper case and certain width and
height commands. Even tables are strongly discouraged
with their recommended replacements using newer CSS
techniques.

A complete directory of CSS commands along with
interactive exercises can be found here.

There really aren't than many commands, when you
allow for all the related or "gee whiz" ones.   It
almost certainly pays to cycle each and every entry.

Note that these commands interact with the HTML5
ones and may not be available on older browsers.

We have already seen that there is a sitemap.xml
file that is essential for your website to dramatically
improve your SEO search engine optimization. And
that it has other benefits of finding web errors and
helping your viewers spot your more obscure files.

We also saw that this source is one free to low cost
we resource for generating your own greatly improved
sitemap1.pdf "or .xsl eliminator" files.

But there is also a serious downside. There are now
malware services that use your .xml files to "click
here to steal an entire website".

Used even once, this may triple your normal web hits
at questionable benefit to you. Used several times a
day might mightily piss off your ISP. And clearly
consist of a DOS denial of services attack.

There are several workarounds. The simplest is to
block any "steal this site" hits when and where they
show up.

These are obvious whenever your hourly traffic
suddenly goes through the roof. Sourcecode for a
fancier tool can be found here and an example
here. With the rest of the gang here.

Better might be to try and get your ISP to throttle
more than, perhaps 200 immediate hits and then
inserting a few seconds delay per hit after that.

Requiring "steal the plans" permission each time is
a polite solution that ain't likely to happen.

Please let me know any alternative solutions.

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

Stunning breakthroughs in quantum computing
making highly disrupting cryptocurrency value
generation nearly free.

Because of their production similarities between
cotton and marijuana, standardization emerging on
500 pound bales. With partial bales being deemed
"personal use".

A rapidly accelerating rate of conversions of the
few remaining coal fired power plants into singles
bars. As their highest and best use.

Single passenger drones ( possibly tethered ) that
make border fences even more utterly ludicrous.

Dramatic improvements in presently terrible HVAC.
In theory the SEER max is 300 or a COP of 120.

Effective solutions in making older display or print
formatted info becoming much more mobile friendly.

Significant improvements in solid state Peltier-like
cooling, but still restricted to specialty aps.

All hell breaking loose after PV cell pricing having
already blasted through the crucial eight cents per
peak cell watt threshold like it was not even there.

Utter dominance of LED lighting techniques driven
by its outstanding efficiency and design flexibility.
Especially for vehicle headlights.

Hangnails rapidly becoming a qualifying condition
for medical marijuana.

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

Significant improvements in Google Drive getting
able to not choke on PostScript.

Resolution of open source and creative commons
issues in scholarly publishing, with embargo times
newly a year or less.

Increasing climatic and weather variability, along
with the size and frequency of outrageous fires. All
clearly caused by human activity. As to the deniers,
they better hope and pray that it is human caused,
because otherwise it will be a lot harder to fix.

Imminent elimination of the traditional outrageous
federal farm subsidies and price supports dropping
marijuana pricing into the 59 cents per pound range.
With tax revenue estimates off a tad, but perhaps
only by four or five orders of magnitude.

Several major dental breakthroughs.

Libraries dramatically downscaled or repurposed
based on information no longer needing returned.

The latest update for our Bajada Hanging Canal image
menu is newly available here with its sourcecode here.

Yeah, Its taking a long time, but we probably are halfway
there. More on the canals here, here, here, and here.

A heretical approach to understanding and using field
theory appears as Fun with Fields and More Fun
With Fields.

The technique is so stunningly simple it can even be
used to generate vignettes such as these.

The Curious Saga of the Magic Lamp.

One of the hallmark features of our prehistoric bajada
hanging canals is that many of them were literally "hung"
on the edges of steep sided mesas. Making both their
slopes independent of local terrain (!) and representing
utterly sophisticated world class engineering.

Sometimes the hanging portions were even used to go
"down" to the top of a mesa!

To date, hanging canal examples of comparable scope
and extent and stature remain rare in the American
Southwest, and the best world wide known similar
examples are the historic Levadas of Madeira.

BUT - we have this nearby San Jose Canal which is
clearly riverine and Gila River Sourced and likely
Hohokam that seemed to use the bottom edge of a
mesa for slope maintenance.

While possibly of a much lesser technology, the
obvious question is what relationship, if any, this
larger canal had with the bajada hanging canals.
Which otherwise studiously avoided all of the
riverine ones.

The question remains open. Your comments are
welcome. More photos here.

This Gila riverine canal is rare in that it was not
historically rebuilt. Its modern replacement lies
somewhat to the west. The original still remains
obvious and easily visited.

Two utterly fascinating places are found here and here.

Although somewhat out of range, I've added these as
our latest Gila Valley Dayhikes. I've also picked up the
long missing Biosphere II. I actually met two of the
original biospherians long ago and far away.

This brings our Gila Hike main entry total to 578.

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

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

Or here for Pittsburgheese.

The way things were.

Can't put one over on her. Nosiree.

A little old lady to her friend at a live auction: 
"Why, that man has been talking all morning!"

Someone historically added a four inch pipe with a
175 foot head to a remote mesa edge of one of our
bajada prehistoric canals. At first glance, this might
seem to offer a really better than most pico hydro
opportunity. What do the numbers predict?

As a fireman's best guess, I'd estimate the effective
friction loss at a deliverable 200 gpm. We can use
this link to change this to .012 cubic meters per second.

Using this site and values of .012 cubic meters per second
53.35 meters of head and default densities and efficiencies,
the theoretical power available is 5.65 kilowatts.

Or just over fifty cents at a dime per kilowatt hour.
Assuming a rather steep mesa edge slope of 60%.

Most real world pico sites, of course, do not come even
remotely near this flow rate and friction loss and its
effective height. 175 feet of genuine head is utterly and
totally exceptional. This equals a static pressure of
175 x 0.434 = 75.9 psi.

It is not yet clear whether power generation was in
fact done. There are several similar pipes of much
less head used for irrigation or cattle tanks.

The overwhelming majority of "pico hydro" projects
are likely to prove extremely bad .

First, because of a failure to "do the math" which
you will find here. Hydro takes an enormous amount
of water or an enormous amount of head. With few,
if any, exceptions.

Second, because of a failure to appreciate just how
much of a bargain a ten cent kilowatt hour really is.
Until you try to produce one by running up stairs
continuously for two and one half hours. Per this
analysis.

Third, because of a usual failure to accurately and
continuously measure the power generated and
delivered and matched to the end use loads. The
chances are overwhelming that the final delivered
power ends up utterly negligible. And certainly a
rude surprise.

Fourth, and as any fireman can tell you, the friction
losses in any pipe are significant and end up utterly
ludicrous in a garden hose. Thus negating much
and possibly nearly all of the theoretical head. Per
this calculator.

Fifth, car alternators are woefully inefficient. Their
primary design goals are cost and reliability. Their
efficiency can easily end up under fifty percent.

The saga of the dripping stalactite gives you the back
story of where our Magic Sinewaves came from.

These were originally based on trying to get
chords out of the Apple IIe binary speaker.
And started out as an exhaustive search of
all possible binary sequences of length "n".

Which conclusively proved beyond a shadow of
doubt that there seem to be a lot of 420 bit binary
words. Around 2.707685e+126 give or take a few
strays. This severely taxed the Apple IIe skill set,
so we had to go to PostScript.

But 420 bit long words ended up much too short to
get at the really good stuff. Eventually, a genuine
magic set of numbers was found that zeroed out
any chosen number of low harmonics. And did
so at the maximum possible efficiency owing to
the absolute minimum number of switch events.

Any sharp edged binary waveform will, of course,
have to have some harmonics somewhere. Magic
Sinewaves move these remaining harmonics very
high in frequency by way of spectrum management.
Where they can be more easily dealt with by use of
filtering and other methods.

A calculator here. Much more here.

We "sort of" have a live chat service on our Guru's
Lair website, along with edited comment feedback
and even a live no charge telephone tech helpline.

Just click on "respond" or "email" when and where
they occur on the website.. Or call us at 928 428-4073.

How to bash pseudoscience.

BTW, it has been thoroughly proven that any overunity
free energy device that includes a 555 timer is a bogus
scam. No exceptions to this rule have ever been found!

This can greatly simplify your discrediting such ludicrosities.
Much more here.

This link lets you check your website performance on
lower resolution screens.

Elegant Simplicity.

Yeah, our Guru's Lair mobile compatibility sucks.

First, because it is a huge site with over 2200 major
pages. Second, because many of those pages have
detailed tech coverage of "retro" topics. And, third,
because the overall appearance of the site is both
intentionally and purposely classically "retro".

We are slowly working on correcting some of the more
blatant mobile problems, but the bottom line is that
much of the content ( and nearly all of the nav ) simply
demands larger screen viewing.

So, we request that you view the Guru's Lair on
a larger screen.

How to scam a student paper.

As to the CMOS Cookbook, find its free download
here, along with dozens of others. The most popular of
which are currently found here, here, here, here, and
here.

Also available are thousands of free reprints, many of
which are of classic electronic construction projects and
tutorial . USB's of nearly one each of everything are also
available. As are our eBay offerings. Videos here and here.

Other foci of our website include prehistoric bajada hanging
canals, Gila Valley dayhikes, PostScript as language,
xsl eliminators, avuncular sleezoids, poison ivy in
a spray can, fractal ferns, slamming the hydrogen
ludicrosity, new Google Drive code, Marcia Swampfelder,
marbelosities, patent diatribes, and expanded new menus.

Plus great heaping bunches more.

I welcome all of our new visitors who have been breaking
attendance records the last few days. Many of you are
after Magic Sinewave info and others are downloading
our free CMOS Cookbooks.

Please let me know where you first heard about us.

Magic Sinewaves are a new class of mathematical
functions that promise to significantly improve the
efficient generation of power digital sinewaves.

They are highly efficient in that they use far fewer
switching events than classic PWM and feature the
ability to force ANY chosen number of low harmonics
to zero (!) in theory and to astonishingly low values in
real world quantization.

You can find the main directory here, a tutorial here,
a three phase tutorial here, an executive guide here
and our latest incredibly fast calculator here.

The math has been fully verified as valid by at least
one competent and independent mathematician whose
link is available on request. The latest Raspberry Pi
sourcecode excerpts can be found here.

Testing ongoing. Consulting services available.

We have added a bunch of new menu and navigation
files to our website. These easily let you reach just
about every file on the entire website.

The two biggies are our .xsl eliminators. Use this
one and its sourcecode for site nav, and this one
and its sourcecode to menu tour the canal images.

Otherwise, check these out...

https://www.tinaja.com/sitemap.xml
https://www.tinaja.com/sitemap_images.xml
https://www.tinaja.com/sitemap_video.xml
https://www.tinaja.com/glotz1_video.xsl

https://www.tinaja.com/sitemap1.html
https://www.tinaja.com/sitemap2.html
https://www.tinaja.com/sitemap3.html
https://www.tinaja.com/sitemap1.txt
https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu.xml

Enameled dealing with four paws and groundswill.

There are two flavors of Windows filenames, relative
and absolute. With absolute, the exact full filename
is needed and any reuse ( such as saving to USB or
selling a copy, or moving to another machine ) will
likely be wildly wrong.

With a relative filename, only the name itself gets
used with the assumption it either is in the current
directory or nearby.

Ferinstance...

/greatfile is in the same directory
/zorch/greatfile is one directory down
/zorch/zounds/greatfile is two directories down
../greatfile is one directory up
../../greatfile is two directories up.

Newly updated and expanded our Gila Valley Day
Hikes. We are now up to 575 primary entries!

Expanded info on our artesian stuff, announced
a pair of new hanging canals that could use your
exploration help, and listed our new canal imaging
menu and sourcecode. Plus added a new viewport.

More details on a few lesser known hikes here.

We looked at the Speake FGM-1 earth magnetic field
sensor here. A new winding has since been added and
its linearity now ( with adjustments ) can approach 0.2
percent. PWM output. Details here.

It is still a little pricey but it now is Arduino compatible
and has at least one replacement source.

A local library has just shut down for a year's worth
of remodeling.

The fundamental premise of a library is that information
has to be returned. This concept is now somewhere
between quaint and ludicrous.

Phone robocalls seem to have gotten completely out of
control.

Two tricks we use are first to answer with your phone
number. This causes them to loose their place in the
script.

A second tip: quietly tell them "There is nobody here
by that name".

When they start arguing, respond with "I'm sorry about
your hearing problem."

Above all, absolutely minimize their total time with you.
Further confrontation only pisses them off while stealing
your time.

Has something bad happened to Wesrch? This major
open source paper resource seems to have vanished
without a trace. Web comments are conspicuously
absent. Your comments welcome.

I've got a sneaky "website malware attack detector"
build into this sourcecode and this demo.

We pride ourselves in keeping 404 errors to an
absolute minimum, helped along by these daily
reports. Except for a very few "intentionals" that
temporarily aide our image report development.

So, anybody that gets eight or more 404's is
likely looking for vulnerable attack points that
simply are not there, were never there, and will
never be there. Other parts of the software
let you in fact verify the bad guy attacks.

On our website at this time, such attacks often
are under one percent of the total visitors. It
is not clear whether blocking will do more harm
than good.

I recently had a malware attack that featured a three
inch square ad lower right overwhelming everything
over and over again.

My usual first check is to look into the "remove programs"
feature of the control panel to see if there are any recent
dates of unwanted software entry. This did not help, and
with some testing I convinced myself that my problem
was Chrome related.

The problem was apparently at least temporarily solved by
clicking the three Chrome dots upper right followed
by Advanced followed by Cleanup Computer.

This gave an immediate fix but at a horrible price: It
eliminated all cookies and saved passwords! If you
try this, be sure first that the problem seems Chrome
related and then make sure you record your passwords
for immediate reentry.

Supraluminal dowsing for Brown's Gas in Roswell.

The essential very first step in making any web page
mobile friendly is to add this line to the top of your
code...

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,
  initial-scale=1.0">

If this is a problem, you should get a "Viewport not set"
error message. More details here and here. Some browsers
may set the viewport for you if it is missing.

On larger or fancier websites, it may pay to initially add this
command to your more popular pages. You can find your
most popular pages with something like the Fatcow stats, or
we have more detailed popularity analysis code here and an
example here.

We looked at some steps to improve .PDF files for mobile
friendliness here.

Fundamental Factors Underlying Recent Technological
Innovation. Sourcecode here.

If you check this source and this one, pv pricing has
just broken through the eight cents per peak cell
watt barrier!

I feel this is a magic "all hell breaks loose" limit
to the overwhelming rapid development and use of
photovoltaics.

And it seems to be crashing through like it was
not even there. Contributing to the breakthrough
are ongoing learning curve economics, a reduced
spread between minimal and premium cells, and
expected major cost and efficiency breakthroughs
in Perovskites.

The pricing has been dropping so rapidly that
the new tariffs have no effect whatsoever. The
new price with tariff is much less than the old
price without.

I'd predict the next barrier/breakthrough limit
to come in at five cents per peak cell watt. At
this point, the horrible shackles of net metering
and all pv subsidies could be eliminated entirely.

Meanwhile, of course, the conversion of coal
power plants into singles bars continues unabated.

If my website observations are correct, the overwhelming
majority of sites are finding AdSense income to end up
somewhere between disappointing and utterly useless.

I'd predict the minimum profitable AdSense participating
site to need 70,000 users per day of uniquely sole sourced,
often updated, non-obnoxious, mobile friendly, and very in
demand content.

I wrote some site analysis software you can find here with
its demo here. Not surprisingly, it totally agrees with
Fatcow's user stats. But for every 1000 unique visitors,
I'd expect 3000 or so page views of a single ad each.

Adsense only reports 125 or so page views!

The least sinister explanation for this is that the vast
majority of my viewers now have an ad blocker installed.
An ad blocker that totally trashes AdSense but still may
let bunches of viri and malware through.

Another factor might involve browser caching.

Note that "hits" are vastly overinflated compared to
"pages". The usual exchange rate is 6:1 to 15:1
caused by other needed page downloads and 301's.

Ad blocker workarounds can be found here.

Also not surprising, AdSense pays a lot more for a click
through than it does for a page view. I seem to be getting
only one click through per 4000 site visitors. A response
rate of a pitiful 0.025 percent.

The least sinister explanation for this is that web users
have been conditioned over and over again to NEVER
click through to an unknown site. Due, of course, to
viri, malware, and worse. Creating highly negative vibes
of ANY ad, anyplace, anytime.

I did find one way to modestly but significantly increase
AdSense response. Bringing it clear up into the "pocket
change" area.

While little known, most search engines look for files
that are named sitemap.xml, sitemap_image.xml and
sitemap_video.xml. Not offering these files is sheer
folly. Details here.

.xml's are normally enhanced with companion .xsl files,
but some .xsl eliminators such as this one or this one
can give you superbly better results. Sourcecode here
and here.

Our Hanging Canal image guide is slowly approaching
half way. Find it here and its sourcecode here.

For more on our canals, start with this Wikipedia
Article, and, if you can afford it, this professional
paper. A free author's preprint can be found here.

A few odd 404's may be present. These ease our
new entry process. Please check back later.

A paper with bunches of links that we use for some
of our talks appears here. And our latest free video
can be found here.

There's a number of things you can do to make a .PDF
file more web friendly. These mods usually need the
Pro version of Acrobat 10 or later, or else use of the
Adobe Creative Cloud...

Restrict downloads to Acrobat 10 or later.
Convert scans into searchable text.
Optimize file size.
Restrict .JPG quality if appropriate.
Downsample image sizes if appropriate.
Conduct other optimizations.
Check into discard objects options.
Separately optimize for mobile versions.

More options here. If all else fails, rewrite with
raw PostScript using our Gonzo Utilities and Tutorial.
While labor intensive, this can sometimes dramatically
reduce file sizes and viewability. More here.

I just modified a version of our ISMM Incredible Secret
Money Machine free eBook so it can be more mobile
friendly.

Find the original here and the mobile version here.

Please report any issues. More eBooks here.

Eastern Arizona College seems to have gotten into the
Public Service auction website with several dozen
offerings. They are expected to continue with more.

Present bids on computers and monitors are a dollar
each! Historically, they have had lots of great stuff
at their earlier live auctions. .

Here's a summary of where we are in our spectacular
series of Prehistoric Bajada Hanging Canal discoveries:

The canal all time engineering is clearly world class
and is otherwise beyond beyond. These date from the
1350's. So far, we have a hundred study areas and a
total length of 150 miles (!) from which "they" literally
exploited every drop of Mount Graham runoff.

Parts of these canals were literally "hung" on the edges
of steep sided mesas in incredibly hostile terrain. Thus
making their slope independent of topography and showing
an absolute mastery of water source engineering.

Start with this Wikipedia Article, and, if you can afford
it, this latest professional paper. A free author's preprint
can be downloaded here.  A paper with bunches of links
that we use for some of our talks appears here. And
our latest free video can be found here.

The vid is newly downloadable and Creative Commons
distributable. You are encouraged to upload this to the
widest possible audience.

Our latest and still incomplete project is a directory of
all the annotated images including locations. We are
only roughly halfway on this, so please keep checking
back. Find the image menu here and its sourcecode here.

Besides lots of links here, we are also in Research Gate,
Wesrch, and several others including American Radio
History. As are USB's with nearly all available content.

Your participation and support is welcome. This is a superb
way for you to instantly participate in world class scientific
research. 

But your easiest and cheapest is to simply click through top
of screen on our website..

I still need your help in adding to our free eBook
collection. Whose current top five are currently
TTL, ISMM, TVT, CMOS, and ACTIVE.

In particular, I still need a March 1968 Electronics
scan of  "For low cost, count on RTL". Plus a scan
of "Micro Cookbook, Volume I".

Also needed are the Spanish and the Pacific Rim
versions of the TTL Cookbook.

And, if I can find somebody with a serious compulsive
obsessive disorder, please send me a scan of the
"Hexadecimal Chronicles".

The latter of which was authored by an Apple IIe (!)
and error free typeset by a Diablo 630.

The encounter of the long count keeper.

Yesterday's trip revealed a possible extension to the
Smith Canal here with an image here.

While still wildly unproven, this could be a source for
the Central Dump canal. Besides strengthening the case
that the rebuild of the Smith canal was in fact a historical
rework of only a small portion of the entire canal.

The combined length would also newly be consistent with
the length of many of the other canal routings.

Much more on the canals here, here, here, and here.
Your participation welcome.

Don't miss these videos here, here, here, here, and
here! With bunches more here.

The worst of Marcia Swampfelder can be found here.

The insider secrets of how Marcia created the tapioca
pudding scene in the film noir cross-genre classic Godzilla
versus the Night Nurses remain under strict NDA.

Because of the court order of protection and the restraining
orders issued by the Tapioca Pudding Institute, Marcia's
film never reached the theaters,  going  instead directly
to release on eight track.

A reminder that sitemap.xml, sitemap_image.xml and
sitemap_video.xml are super important web resources
for SEO search engine optimizations.

Besides doubling for error detection and maintenance as
well as giving your viewers access to complete lists of all
available files. Other maint tools here.

One useful source of free to low cost sitemap generators is
https://pro-sitemaps.com. Companion .xsl files are sometimes
needed to fancify the display of .xml info, but these are not
normally used or needed by the SEO Robots.

.xsl files can be obtuse, difficult, and can give downright ugly
results, so I have come up with a set of .xsl eliminators that
create superb quality .PDF substitutions for you.

Find a file solution here with its sourcecode here. And an
image solution here with its sourcecode here.

Consulting services available.

Here is how to generate a list of all our .PSL files...

1. Go to sitemap1.pdf
2. Search on ".psl".

Also works on many other trailers as well.

Finding accurate slope information for all our bajada
prehistoric hanging canals can be enormously difficult.

An essential hallmark of any canal is that its slope must
be held exactly constant over long distances, or typically
just under two percent. Less than that and you don't get
enough water. More than that and you self-destruct.

Hillocks need not apply.

Compounding the problem is that many of our canals show
a very strong "water flows uphill" illusion.

It sure is tempting to use the elevation figures from Google
Earth. And these do often seem to verify what you hoped they
would show you. But the underlying satellite imagery is only
vertically accurate to a few hundred feet.

And thus Google Earth's altitude info is utterly and totally
useless in verifying prehistoric canal slopes! It does, though
sometimes give you a warm and fuzzy feeling.

GPS is not much more of a help in that its unassisted vertical
accuracy is MUCH worse than horizontal, especially if only a
few satellites are present or if some are near the horizon.

Garmin attempted to improve this by building in barometric
sensing altimeters in their receivers. While much better, they
introduce a weather dependent factor that is still huge when
compared to our needed canal measurement accuracy.

One hack is to field measure forward and then return to your
starting point, averaging your results. Or, better yet, repeat
your back and forth measurements a number of times. Or, as
pilots do, real time measure your airport barometric pressure.

You can find typical barometric variations here as well as spot
the times of day when they are fairly flat. The relationship that is
between barometric pressure and altitude error can be found here. 

Where we see that an hour's change in weather might end up as
30.10/30.06 - 1 = .00133   And that a 500 foot change at 3000 feet
might be 26.82 /26.33 -1 = 0.0186 equal to a one foot change of
0.0000372 or an error of 35.75 feet!

Thus, precision survey techniques may be needed. But these
are of little help when scouring web images for new canals.

One example of precision slope survey would be the water level.
And, judging by a total undiscovered lack of survey instruments, pilot
extensions of the canals themselves might have in fact been water
levels used for construction.

One sledgehammer cure is called an automatic level. This is a
type of transit with a built in leveling pendulum that gives you
a level line of sight .

Much more on the canals here, here, here, and here.
Your participation welcome.

Several of you have asked how our brand new and
spectacular .xsl eliminators work. And how they can
instantly get rid of all of the .xsl obtuseness, learning
curves, and downright awful final appearance.

Just read your .xml file with PostScript! As its
first simple and easy task converting the .xml data
into an" array of arrays" key info. Then point this
array in the general direction of Acrobat .PDF for
the best final results anyplace anytime.

The only tiny insider secret is to be sure to activate
Acrobat Distiller from your command line with the
//acrodist /F "bubble bubble toil and trouble"
incantation. GhostScript might also be useful.

Two impressive examples here and here, with their
sourcecode here and here.

Consulting services available.

A reminder that we've just made some major upgrades
in our website nav. With nearly all files and many
images and dozens of video links newly available...

sitemap.xml
sitemap1.pdf *
sitemap1.psl *

sitemap_images.xml
imenu1.pdf *
imenu1.psl *

sitemap_video.xml
glotz1_video.xsl
whtnu.xsl

* - These are .xsl eliminators !!  

A new set of image menus that include locations and
documentation are coming together for  our prehistoric
bajada hanging canals.

A monumental amount of work still needs done and
there's still typos and 404's and such. But you can see
where we are headed here with recent sourcecode here.

Please check back often.

You are welcome to field proof most of these.

"Director's Cuts" are my scheme for restoring and
improving Linotype Era technical reprints. This
method is labor and time intensive, but produces
spectacular results. Some examples...

AACB1"Level II" Rework
Applewriter Cookbook and sourcecode
Fasterized Fractal Fern and sourcecode
MLPCI "Level II" Rework and sourcecode
Paleomagnetism & Archaeomagnetism and sourcecode
Poison Ivy in a Spray Can and source
SigForth Intro to PostScript and sourcecode
Superclock Rework
Tearing Method from Enhance I and sourcecode
Thermoluminescence and sourcecode 
TVT Image Rework
Winning the Micro Game and sourcecode

Custom services available.

Some of our GuruGrams seem to have never gotten
properly main page indexed. Such as these...

123 Prehistoric Bajada Canals of Southeastern AZ
122 Glyphs Hanging Canal Summary
121 Little Known Gila Valley Dayhikes
120 Apple Assembly Cookbook I and II
119 Web Friendly PS Colors
118 Some "Fat Tail Arrow" Utilities
117 Level II Precyber eBook Conversions
116 Restoring Faded or Scuffed Text
115 An "unhalftoning" scheme for eBooks
114 Remastering a Technical Book
113 Allen Reservoir Failure Analysis Docs
112 Prehistoric Hanging Canals Slide Show
111 My Metal Locater Thesis
110 Remastering Video for Web Distribution
109 Gauss-Jordan Stability Issues

Its been a while, but I long ago predicted the latest
James Dean movie. I called it the "Digital Bogey".

Find the story here and more detail in part 71 of this
anthology. Here's the rest of the series...

Emerging technical opportunities VII
Emerging technical opportunities VI
Emerging technical opportunities V
Emerging technical opportunities IV
Emerging technical opportunities III
Emerging technical opportunities II
Emerging technical opportunities I

Find the rest of the blats here.

Thought I'd review some of our newest and best stuff.
Latest is our Hanging Canal image menu. Find it here
with its sourcecode here. This is very much a work in
progress, so keep checking back.

Newly added our CMOS Cookbook to our ebooks.
Other currently popular ebooks include ISMM, TTL,
TVT, and Active.

I recently discovered how crucially important Sitemap
Files are for SEO. Upon investigation, these also
turn out super important for web maintenance along
with these tools. They also give website end users
access to each and every file in your entire website!

So, here's the latest on our newest and best...

sitemap.xml
sitemap1.pdf *
sitemap1.psl *

sitemap_images.xml
imenu1.pdf *
imenu1.psl *

sitemap_video.xml
glotz1_video.xsl
whtnu.xsl

* - These are .xsl eliminators !!

We also have a new collection of triply compatible
PostScript-GoogleDrive-GhostSript demos and
utilities that are summarized here.

And, speaking of videos, here's the latest, unlocked,
and freely downloadable version. Along with good old
number one.

Above and beyond our Bajada Hanging Canals, there
are bunches of obscure regional stuff you can find on
our Guru's Lair.

One of the biggies is our Gila Valley Day Hikes, along
with its more detailed Little Known Gila Hikes. I've
long been a fan of the Mount Graham Tramway, and you
can find more details on this here, here, and here.

Besides the tram, I'm also a fan of engineering disasters
when and where they happen. Find the scant and hard to
pin down info on the Allen Dam Disaster here. Local
lore had this as a water skiing facility.

Plus, of course, this secret place that you can't get to
from here. Do not try this at home!

Thanks to stack overflow to pointing out that extracting
image pixel info often not needs a programming language.
Instead, operating system command line instructions can
be used.

Three solutions are apparent: .BAT files, Windows Power
Shell, and Mediainfo. The latter seems to work just fine.

Some comments on our new hanging canal master menu
index found here with its sourcecode here.

First, this is a work in progress that is not nearly ready
for prime time. Many, many images need entered or
updates or corrections. A huge amount of effort remains.

Secondly, your first pass of the sourcecode to Distiller's
command line //acrodist /F will generate an insanely large
.PDF file. Probably done because Distiller initially keeps
huge .JPEG data present. Such data is not needed since
the menu clicks through to other web sources. So, be
sure to use Acrobat to optimize your .pdf size results.

Present optimal size should be around 6 megs, which
considering that thumbnails for a zillion images are
involved is not all that bad. This will expand somewhat
as new photos are added or edited.

Thirdly, avoid ever having more than one huge file
on your machine. Eliminate them as soon as possible.

Fourth, although there are white keys and black keys,
I've always tended to play in the cracks. Each image
has two links on top of each other, where the image
expands while the text expounds.

It is not at all clear how Acrobat prioritizes multiple
overlapping links, but it seems to do so just fine.
Please report any rules on this that you may find.

It may be needed to further reduce the thumbnail
quality and size on the final project. Or else split
it into several files. Image quality should not be
that big a deal on a click through thumbnail.

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.

Just added a new master menu index for most of our
prehistoric bajada hanging canal images. Find the
initial demo here and its sourcecode here.

Much more on the canals here, here, here, and here.

Your participation in this world class research project
is welcome here. Drone expertise is particularly needed.

Our .pdf replacement for .xsl on sitemap.xml seems
to work just fine. Just "press the button" for instant
generation using this sourcecode.

But there are several issues with a .pdf replacement
for sitemap_images.xml. Although so far, we have
come up with this spectacular replacement using
this software.

There are two steps to the process. First is conversion
of sitemap_images.xml to an array of subarrays of
form [ url_full_filename short_filename xpixels ypixels ].

One tiny immediate problem is that xpixels and ypixels
are easily found in Windows by right clicking on image
properties. Which presently adds six hours (!) of manual
processing to what should be a fast automated task.
Please email me a fast and easy workaround.

The second step in the process is to use PostScript to
create a .pdf eliminator for .xml. I am very much
overly enameled with my jpegimageprocwithlink code.
This demands .jpg files only and copies of the files
both on the website and the home pc. It also works
best if all .jpg images are in a single directory.

Nonetheless, this .jpg .xml elimination scheme would
seem to have enormous potential. And - obviously-
is even useful as is.

OK, here's a status report on out new major Guru's
Lair improvements.

We've seen that adding sitemap.xml, sitemap_video.xml
and sitemap_images.xml to our older whtnu.xml is super
important for SEO search visibility.

Underappreciated is that these files can have two other
major uses. First, with the help of PRO-sitemaps.com
or similar, you can get reports that are extremely useful
to find and fix your website problems. These can be easily
combined with the other repair tools that we use.

Second, by the use of "real" .xsl stylesheets or our brand
new .pdf stylesheet .xsl eliminator replacements, all sorts
of highly useful "menu cliickthroughs" can now be created
for your web end users.

Stylesheets are not needed for normal SEO uses. If used,
they must be in the same directory as the .xml file and the
xml file has to be told the .xsl location by entry of a
second from the top line something like...

<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="glotz1.xsl" ?>

In general, .xsl stylesheets can be obtuse and hard to
work with. Let's look at three use or avoidance apps...

In the case of our sitemap.xml, a .pdf eliminator of
sitemapt1.pdf was created using this sourcecode. The
flexibility and quality here clearly exceeds most .xsl.

You create the .pdf file using sitemap1.psl routed to
Acrobat Distiller via a command line //acrodist /F. This
will need redone each time you want a viewer update.

In the case of our sitemap_video.xml a renamed
glotz1.xsl was located and linked. Its video manipulation
( especially the thumbnail images ) were good enough to
not yet pursue a .pdf workaround.

In the case of our sitemap_images.xml, a .pdf eliminator
was pursued that led to this stunning image directory and
its sourcecode. But the process on this is not yet fully
automatic and other issues remain to be addressed.

Using .PDF as a sitemap_ image xsl eliminator can be
tricky and may involve some manual intervention. But
as this demo and this sourcecode shows us, it most
certainly can be done.

It is particularly useful to give all your web users a
complete menu of all your selected images!

The lj, fj, cg, rj, and friends justification routines in
our gonzo utilities and its tutorial are super powerful
and easily deal with mixed paragraphs, kerning, use
of multiple fonts, selective colors, plus bunches more.

Their key secret is deferred operation where the
current positioning waits until final locations are known.

But there are times and places where you might not
want to tow along most or all of gonzo. Instead, here
is a pair of center and right justification routines that
only work on single font "no frills" left justification...

/simplecj { dup stringwidth pop currentpoint 3 1
                   roll exch 2 div sub exch moveto show} store

/simplerj { dup stringwidth pop currentpoint 3 1
                  roll exch sub exch moveto show} store

Used like this...

20 30 moveto (your text here) simplecj

Here's a reminder over our "new" bubble sort routines.

They can be significantly faster for most users most
of the time in that they exit their loops if there was no
previous change made. Results might now be two seconds
for 2000 sorts.

This code sorts an array of integers, reals, or strings...

/bubsort3a {/curmat1 exch store % STRAIGHT
curmat1 length 1 sub -1 1             % start outer loop
{/done true store                           % short exit marker
/maxposition exch store
0 1 maxposition 1 sub
{/posn exch store                           % inner loop
curmat1 posn get                           % find current count
curmat1 posn 1 add get                 % compare next higher
gt{curmat1 posn get                       % swap only if needed
curmat1 posn 1 add get
curmat1 exch posn exch put
curmat1 exch posn 1 add exch put
/done false store                             % a swap was needed
}if
} for                                                  % inner loop
done {exit} if % stop on no swaps
} for                                                   % outer loop
curmat1                                             % update sorted array
} bind store

A minor gotcha on sorting strings: PostScript does a
lexical sort, as do most other languages. Thus, your
end sequence might be 1, 10, 11, 2, 3, 4, ... and you may
want to make a manual adjustment to get a "true"
alphanumeric result.

This code sorts an array of arrays. In this case, it
sorts on the second entry of the subarray...

/bubsort3b {/curmat1 exch store     % SUBARRAY
curmat1 length 1 sub -1 1
{/done true store
/maxposition exch store
0 1 maxposition 1 sub
{/posn exch store
curmat1 posn get 1 get
curmat1 posn 1 add get 1 get
gt{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 % inner loop
done {exit} if
} for
curmat1
} bind store

Managed to get sitemap_video.xml to work in the
expected manner. The key to the image thumbnails
lies in involvement with a Google video scheema.

First, you somehow acquire lawful IP rights to the
related .xsl. Save this to an appropriate directory
such as your home page with the filename glotz1.xsl.

Similarly, somehow acquire lawful IP rights to the
main .xml. Enter an editor and enter...

<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="glotz1.xsl" ?>

as your second line from the top of the document.

Then save as a suitable original or new filename.
Make sure both the .xml and .xsl files are both
in the same directory!

Your end users should now have fancy access
to every vid ever mentioned on your website.

See if you can spot what's "not quite right" here.
Avoid the use of "pinafore" in your reply.

As we just discovered, such files as sitemap.xml, or
sitemap_images.xml and sitemap_video.xml are
super important and primary routes towards SEO
search engine optimization. Stylesheets are not
needed or used for these SEO uses.

Underappreciated is that there are at least two
other uses of stitemaps that could end up at
least as important to you as SEO.

Web sitemap generators such as the superb
PRO-sitemaps.com can give you details on
nearly all of the errors in your entire website.
These can be hard to find with any other web
repair tools.

And second, these can lead to interactive insider
clickable lists for your end users that show all of
your website features. Per this demo or this one.

Here's some of the advantages of using XSL eliminators:

1.  You do not need to learn obtuse XSL.
2.  .PDF graphics can be stunningly better.
3.  No need to modify underlying XML.
4.  Better display flexibility.
5.  Simple alphabetizing and/or filtering.
6.  Minimal IP issues.

You do, of course, keep the original .XML files so they
can be accessed for SEO by search engines. XSL
files are not needed for this use.

A second fake sitemap demo sourcecode can be found
here with its sourcecode here. This one adds a filter
so that only our website .psl files are shown. Internal
flags are easily adjusted to meet your own needs.

The .PSL format is designed to open in a text editor,
while any companion .PS file is intended to open in
Distiller.

With .PSL, best start here with these latest demos
that also happen to be GhostScript and Google Drive
compatible. Then go on to the video, the beginning
projects, the manual, and all the sneaky stuff.

Modern .PSL files are normally run in Acrobat
Distiller from the command line via //acrodist /F.
It is super important to change internal flags.
And especially filenames and their prefixes before
you reuse any code.

Started a new tentative series of "XSL Eliminators".

These convert certain unmodified sightmap.xml's into
all sorts of new display and linking features.

In their spare time, they can give you immediate and
total instant access to nearly all of our website files!

Find the first .pdf demo here and its .psl sourcecode
here. You run .psl sourcecode by command reaching
Acrobat Distiller with an //acrodist /F.

Much more here and here. Your comments welcome.

An interesting list alphabetizing interactive online
service can be found here.

Our new and improved and faster bubble sort can be
found here.

At present, it sorts an array of arrays on each second
subarray entry. I'm exploring its use with strings, but
do not anticipate any problems. Stay tuned.

Per this source and this one, pv pricing continues its
ongoing decline. Their figures seem slightly different
at a minimum of 9.0 or 9.9 cents per peak cell watt.

I feel the magic "all hell breaks loose" number is
eight  cents per peak cell watt. Combined, of course,
with the ongoing rapidly increasing conversions of
coal power plants into singles bars.

More on energy topics here.

A church in Gila Bend decided not to get a chandelier. 
It turns out nobody in the congregation knew how to
play one.

They also can be a bear to tune.

Now adding three major features to our Guru's Lair.

These are...

sitemap.xml
sitemap_images.xml
sitemap_video.xml

They are not quite ready for prime time yet since
some issues remain with companion files.

Eventually they should let you instantly click
through on every tile and every image on our
site, besides letting you pig out on every video
that we ever so much as mentioned.

Speaking of which, be sure to check out the
xylophone duet and Lawrence Welk's WTF
version of One Toke Over the Line. Plus,
of course, versions of the turbo encabulator.

These also are intended to improve SEO, and
there are hints this may already be happening.

While our own videos should eventually be
viewable with the above links, if you want to
save them to another site or redistribute them,
you should instead use this link or this one.

Our separate https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu.xml
for our more popular files remains available.

Stay tuned for further improvements.

A reminder that PostScript is a totally general purpose
computer language that goes far beyond its ability to
dirty up otherwise clean sheets of paper.

The question came up whether PostScript might be
able to replace XSL with potential advantages of
not having to learn a really obtuse new language,
avoiding unavailability or IP issues, or offering
spectacularly better graphics with its .PDF output.

At first glance, the possibilities seem simple and
easy. First, we note that Acrobat Distiller demands
a command line //acrodist /F if it is to read or write
disk files such as an XML file. And that any text
only file is easily scanned into line by line blocks
for further processing by using PostScript's readline.

Routines such as the /jpegimageprocwithlink found in
our gonzo utilities make providing live web links and
image "click expands" links in .PDF a snap.

The opportunities here would seem intriguing.

If your website is big and older, the chances are more
than overwhelming that there are hundreds to even
many thousands of hidden errors present.

Caused by, among other things, a mix of secure and
non secure links, 404 not available errors, remnants of
.asp files, 301 overloads from no longer needed byte range
retrieval, upper case now being a no-no, and lots of CSS
"improvements" that obsolete older HTML commands.

Yeah, most of the problems are largely invisible and
show up mostly as unneeded traffic slowdowns. And
malware often adds bunches of 404's and 301's in
attempts to crack access.

Some errors may also cause browsers to respond
differently.

I've once again tried cleaning our Guru's Lair
website and think I've managed to get it faster,
cleaner, and better.

While we just listed all of our web maint tools here,
the three biggies are found here, here, and here.
The latter with its demo here.

Plus, of course, Fatcow Stats.

Please let me know anything I missed. A very few
Hanging  Canal image 404's do purposely remain as
a programming convenience.

The Airpot folks are offering free samples of their
robotics dashpots.

These are basically precision shock absorbers that
consist of an air cylinder and an adjustable valve. The
valve setting determines how much force will resist
and thus dampen any sudden input motion changes.

Set by how fast air can enter or leave the cylinder.

As we have recently seen, there are some enormous
advantages to having a sitemap.xml file on your website.

This can be your single most important ( and free to low
cost ) SEO search engine optimization. And the strongest
single factor to your Google visibility.

It also gives your viewers a complete list of all of your
available files.

We've also seen how there is a pro-sitemaps.com site that
offers free to low cost services to generate the .xml files
for you.

They also create sitemap_video.xml and sitemap_image.xml
for you. The xml vids are click-through and let your users
pig out on every vid you ever mentioned or linked on your
website. Same goes for images.

We'll get these other .xml's live just as soon as we can.

Meanwhile, there is a stupendously enormous other
"secondary" feature of pro-sitemaps.com: Their reports
offer an interactive way to stomp out nearly all of your
website bugs and errors.

And very much complement ISP stats services and our
own logfile analyzer sourcecode and demo

eBay sales seem to be catastrophically down for just
about everybody. And it seems to be getting a lot
worse. Some analysis here.

While there are rumors of purposeful eBay blackouts,
one credible possible explanation is that buyers are
leaving in droves for Amazon's free to low shipping.

This may be unfixable, short of Amazon buying eBay.
Your input welcome.

EAC ( Eastern Arizona College ) apparently is going
to switch from their classic fall auctions to the online
Public Surplus web site.

Additional listings are purportedly expected "real
soon now".

I predict some rude surprises along the way.

More auction stuff here.

Just had a file disappear, and its recovery ended up
worse than slow and scary.

I cannot emphasize strongly and often enough: Back up
all your PC and web resources six ways from Sunday!

And do so "defense in depth" in many different ways.

The obvious first choice are USB's that are now both
cheap and huge. Camera memory cards are a second
backup method. Cloud storage is now readily available
and sometimes free. Obvious choices here are Adobe
Creative Cloud and Google Drive.

Giving backup copies to friends or associates makes a
lot of sense. As does "all we have" eBay USB offers.

Posting to open source websites such as Wesrch,
Research Gate, and the rest of the gang can be most
useful for scientific or technical stuff. .

It may even be worthwhile to have a totally separate
backup website and a totally separate backup PC.

There is not the slightest doubt that you WILL eventually
be done in from everything like stupid mistakes, power
glitches, equipment failures, malware, third party disasters,
or scams. How bad this gets will be depends entirely on your
backup policies and how vigorously you enforce them.

Just realized that some of the links were either broken or
non-obvious to our water soluble swimsuits.

Find the newly reworked links here.

And a related product of comparable value here.

The fee based portion of pro-sitemaps.com can also
give you printouts that are extremely useful for website
repairs and maintenance.

This includes referred 404's, http versus https mixups. any
unneeded 301 redirects, unsupported filetypes( including
our .psl's ), mismatched sub domains, responses other than
200 class, mis located url's, and great heaping bunches more.

In short, listings of many different web problems that are
otherwise extremely hard to spot. Referrals tell you exactly
where and how the problem gets tripped.

Here's some of the other web creation and repair tools
that we have found very useful...

Adobe Acrobat
Adobe Distiller
Dreamweaver
Fatcow
A third person live proofer.
A decent spell checker
Gonzo utilities and tutorial
PostScript Reference Manual
ISP logs
Wordpad
Imageviewer32
Log file analyzer & demo
W3C Website Verifier
W3C URL link checker
W3C CSS Verifier
Filezilla
Google Chrome
Paint
pro-sitemaps.com
sitemap.xml verifier
Architect's perspective
Auto vignetting backgrounder
Bitmap typewriter

Two of the ( often free ) Search Engine Optimization SEO
tricks are super important and very little known.

First, Google wants to know you are you. Per this process.

They give you a short free file to upload to your website.
The file starts with "Google" and is followed by some
cookie-like alphanumerics . This goes on the home page.

Second, their search algorithms are much more thorough
and complete if you have a file named sitemap.xml on your
home page. Naturally, it has to obey all the rules. Which
you can check with this sitemap.xml verifier. And optional
Google submitter.

Our own sitemap can be found here. This doubles as a directory
of many of the files on our website. Sadly, it does not include
our unique .psl files, which we will deal with separately.

An outfit called pro-sitemaps.com can generate these .xml
files for you. There is no charge for websites less than 1000 files
nor for the first 1000 files of a larger website. Fees are charged
for fuller coverage and other very significant benefits.

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

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

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

But there are otherwise overwhelming advantages...

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

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

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

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

# more quadrants here

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

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

Consulting and seminars available.

Many people will do anything to save the environment.

Except take a science course!

Much more from time to time here.

Much of the previous Heathkit debacle has now gone
away, with two good free sources of manuals here and 
here, among many others.

There is a "new" Heathkit here, but terms like "rather
underwhelming" and "less than stellar" seem to have
come to mind.

These days, the focus on many former Heath fans would
be the Raspberry Pi.

Newly updated and expanded our Gila Valley Day
Hikes. We are now up to 571 primary entries!

Added are info on our brand new ARA hanging
canal video, the May Wildlife Area, a xylophone
duet link, details on the Salsa Trail and Salsafest,
plus updates on the Sunglow Ranch.

The vid is newly and freely downloadable under
Google Drive guidelines.

Here's an alternate approach to delivering videos
that avoids overloading your ISP with giant files
or running afoul of YouTube's ban on downloads:

0. Compress and edit the file with a
    suitable video editor.

1. Upload the file ( preferably HD MPEG4 )
    to Google Drive.

2. Right click on Sharable Link. Copy it.

3. Announce the links appropriately.

It is not unusual for your upload to take hours or more.
But your viewers should see it near instantly owing to
the Byte Range Retrieval feature of most browsers.

You typically will be allowed three or four free video
uploads.

Two examples here and here.

A curious fact: Any perpetual motion machine that includes
a 555 timer is bogus and nonfunctional. No exceptions to this
rule have ever been found.

Which saves you bunches of time discrediting a perpetual
motion machine, for if a 555 timer is present, there is
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. Waaay beyond anything that analog can
deal with.

Exceed the crest factor and the instrument will still read
deceptively low. Additional analysis here.

More on pseudoscience bashing here.

The YouTube rules say that you are not allowed to save
or capture any files. And, while there are bunches of
third party YouTube vid grabbers around, at least a few
of these may trap you into malware or worse.

Here is a temporary link to our ARA "Hanging" Canal
video that is freely downloadable and may copied or
distributed under Creative Commons rules. This is
still full HD, although we are working on reducing file
sizes and doing a few minor edits.

You are more than welcome to distribute this to the
widest possible audience. Again within Creative
Commons guidelines.

And here is a copy of our Introduction to PostScript
video that is similarly freely downloadable and may be
copied or distributed under Creative Commons rules.
Sadly, the history of this project limits its quality.

An older video editing tutorial of ours appears here.

But these days, you are probably better off using
Adobe Premier Pro. Which is now available as part
of Adobe Cloud. Which also now includes dozens of
programs , thousands of fonts and millions of images .

Just realized that our Pulse Generator reprint from the
April 1966 PE was not indexed properly. Although it
is present on the classic reprints part of our website.

I was fascinated by four layer diodes in that they let
you build test equipment without tubes or transistors!

The crucial part was renamed a 1N5160 and seems
to just barely still be available. Related devices do
still see some use in light dimmer phase controls.

A companion "Golly Gee Mister Science" project
was the Amligner.

More on elegant simplicity here. The P38 can
opener, of course, was the greatest invention
of the 20th century.

Shocking.

Nearly fifty percent of all North Dakota school children
are below average!

Unlocked and freely Creative Commons downloads
of our recent ARA video are newly available here.

Similarly, free author's preprints of our still embargoed
JFA hanging canal story are available here.

You are invited to bail out our embargo.

Many of the Radio Shack Engineer's Notebooks are
newly available here.

As well as zillions of other historic radio docs.

As this older tutorial tells us,  pure green light has an
electrical efficiency ( or more correctly, an efficacy ) of 668
Lumens per Watt, while pure white light comes in near 251
Lumens per watt. The latter lowered by eye response.

A typical incandescent bulb only has a minuscule 12
Lumens per watt. Which explains why LED's have
just run away with all the marbles near 120 Lumens
per watt.

A similar disparity and huge opportunity exists with
HVAC. Modern air conditioners come in with a COP
of 3.5 or a SEER of 15.

This is only the ludicrously tiny fraction of a desert best
COP of 13 or SEER of 46. And the best "average" that
is achievable is a far more significant COP of 36 or a
SEER of 120. Details here.

No, Peltier devices won't hack it. Even with the expected
ongoing new developments. But opportunities with hybrid
evaporative precooling or adsorption systems or potential
new MEMS exchanger technology would seem to be just
around the corner.

Even going to variable speeds and adjustable size capacities
can help significantly. As can decent maintenance. Particularly
needed is an efficient and economical heat pump hot tub solution.

Opporknockity tunes but once. But not here.

Here's an updated list of our recent triply compatible
Distiller-GoogleDrive-GhostScript utilities and apps...

#23 - Rope-a-Dope                sourcecode and  demo
#22 - Spherical Transforms   sourcecode and  demo
#21 - Poison Ivy Spray Can   sourcecode and  demo 

#20 - 2D Perspective Cube    sourcecode and  demo
#19 - Fractal Fern                  sourcecode and  demo
#18 - URL  Linking                sourcecode and  demo ***
#17 - Print Diverter!               sourcecode and  demo
#16 - PS Error Reporter!       sourcecode and  demo

#15 - Dictionary Snooper       sourcecode and  demo
#14 - Marberlous Pancakes   sourcecode and  demo
#13 - Meowwrrr Pussycat     ( list of available modules )
#12 - PS Accuracy Improver   sourcecode and  demo
#11 - Cubic Spline Length      sourcecode and  demo

#10 - "Lite" Gonzo Shell         sourcecode and  demo
#9 -  Constant Cubic Spline     sourcecode and  demo
#8 -  Fake Log Demo              sourcecode and  demo
#7 -  Avuncular Sleezoids       ( list of available modules )
#6 -  Tuna Can                         sourcecode and  demo

#5 -  Font Reporter                 sourcecode and demo
#4 -  Brick Wall                      sourcecode and  demo (!)
#3 -  Scribble                          sourcecode and  demo 
#2 -  Fat Tail Arrows              sourcecode and demo 
#1 -  Web Friendly Colors      sourcecode and  demo

The final results from meowwrrr can be viewed in Google
Drive, but the key part where it traces a .JPG is not yet
compatible. Your help is needed on this.

*** = still has issues.

And, of course, ground zero on all this can be found
here, here, here, and here. 

A reminder that the Raytheon Surplus auctions now are
handled as an open application through Exostar.

One of their more interesting new features is that they
continue to report  your status if you are not still the
winning bidder.

An obvious omission of most online auctions most of the
time: They never report the final prices on closed auctions!
Probably because some ( many? ) auctions give such pitiful
returns that could make the auctioneer look bad.

Much more on online auctions here, with our own eBay  
auctions here.

Entry #23 in our ongoing series of triply compatible
Distiller-GoogleDrive-GhostScript code demos is on
the ropeadope.

Find its sourcecode here and its demo here.

This was based on #27 in this original. There is really
knotting to this. The illusion is created by writing an
"under" knot portion, then an "over" knot portion,
and then selectively over writing individual "knotettes"
of the "under" knot portion.

In this example, the aposn flag only allows rewriting of
knotettes 8, 9, 10, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 42, 43, 44,
and 45.

Per these tutorial details.

Our new spherical mapping sourcecode and its demo does
include a super sneaky way of gaining extreme accuracy
of approximating a circle to waaay beyond machine shop
needs. Perhaps even pushing the limits of 32 bit math.

Thought I'd mention several useful tools here...

An arc chord calculator
Bezier curve through four points
Approximating a circle or ellipse
Graphic nonlinear transforms

The sneaky trick is to change a plain old lineto into five
( or more or less ) "weak spline" curvetos. And then change
those curvetos ( which usually miss their control points ) with
a four point Bezier that goes exactly through them.

The magic transform is amazingly simple...

x' = sin(x) cos(y)
y' = sin(y)

Details here.

There seems to be some emerging interest in TV Typewriters.
My best advice these days is to use a Raspberry Pi or one of
its simularosities instead.

One modern "authentic" TVT reconstruction can be found here
and here and here.

Much of the finest and cheapest stuff at the time is now enormously
difficult to find. Analog tv sets for display are no longer sold. And
NTSC at best can only deal with 32 or 40 character lines. Display
of one single color upper case only dot matrix font is now very little
in demand.

Steeply dropping memory prices quickly eliminated any need to
treat text different from graphic pixels. Hundreds bits newly in a
easily modified glyph rapidly became cheaper than the hardwire
decoded six bits in an upper case only ASCII character storage.

What was a fifty cent crystal is now very expensive. The TVT
itself could not care about its exact frequency, but if you missed
by even a little bit, cheap tv's of the time would annoyingly "breathe"
while slipping power line cycles.

This problem may no longer even exist on a modern regulated
switchmode monitor. At any rate, the fix is a power line PLL lock.

Rude modern surprises include the MC4024 dual multivibrator
not being remotely similar to a CD4024 binary counter. And that 
the Signetics 2518 recirculating  32x6 register often can be pretty
much unobtanium.

At any rate, you can still find the original story here and its three
books here, here, and here.

Entry #22 in our ongoing series of triply compatible
Distiller-GoogleDrive-GhostScript code demos is
on spherical mapping and transformations.

Find its sourcecode here and its demo here.

Hidden in its code are some sneaky Bezier-thru-
4-points code that can give you both programmable
and extreme accuracy for circle approximations.

This works best with Distiller by way of the usual
//acrodist /F and is based on this tutorial.

Much more here.

Just noticed that the Putney Swope movie is available
on YouTube.

I'm still waiting for a free source of Buckaroo Banzai.
which is by far the finest medical, science fiction, love
story, rockumentary, comedy, racing, comic book,
quantum mechanical, musical, pro nerd, intergalactic
war documentary, watermelon ode, and survivalist 
movie of all time.

Overwhelmingly the best movie of its type ever made.

Key sound bytes...

Assumption is the mother of mistakes.  
No matter where you go, there you are.

The finest movie of all time, of course, was the cross genre
Godzilla Versus the Night Nurses. Sadly, the restraining
order from the Tapioca Pudding Institute forced its release
directly to eight track.

The Hazmat "rule of thumb":

Hold your arm outstretched with your thumb up. Close
one eye.

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

There are apparently two flavors of Walmart auctions. They
run their own merchandise auctions here. Typical pallet
lot prices are in the $800 to $2000 range. With scrap tv sets
at $4000 to $5000 per lot. And averaging $25 per set.

The locations vary all over the US. Shipping within 500 miles
is often free. Bidding is often by the semi truck load.

While store closing fixture auctions vary with the location,
the easiest and most current access is to Google "Walmart
store closing auctions"

Individual merchandise inventory items are usually not
offered in store closing auctions.

Much more auction stuff here.

We've seen how to draw a Bezier Curve through four
points here.

If you draw a "regular" curveto, it will "miss" the first
and second influence points. It will also usually stay
"inside" of them, directly contacting only the initial
and final points.

BUT - If you REPLACE your curveto and its moveto
command with a bez4pts1 command, the final curve
will EXACTLY go through ALL FOUR points!

Which should end up ridiculously more accurate when
curve fitting and even possibly as "perfect" as 32 bit
math allows.

Which should prevent all corner cutting on a spherical
transform. Or, better yet, dramatically improve the
accuracy of approximating circles or ellipses with cubic
splines.

Hopefully, some code and a possible detailed error
analysis shortly.

I'm wondering what our prehistoric bajada hanging
canals can tell us about climatic reconstruction. The
premise put forth here suggests that the 1350's were
wetter times. Possibly significantly.

At present, there are only four northwest trending
streams on Mount Graham. Namely Marijilda, Fry
Deadman, and Ash. Most of the other canyons are
dry most of the time and have very little total runoff.

But there seem to be apparently successful prehistoric
canals on each and every possible drainage! A few of
which do include Veech, Goat, Ledford, Taylor, Shingle
Mill, Mud Hollow, Carter, Lefthand, Nuttall, and Tripp.

Nothing seems to have been missed.

And Ash Creek appeared to have enough water to source
many canals, one of which was the watershed crossing
Mud Springs and its Jernigan Branch.

Similarly, Deadman Canyon seemed to have enough water to
source a pair of watershed crossing canals.

The amount of engineering time and effort that went
into these canals is truly staggering. Such effort would
more likely have gone into more continuous, rather than
seasonal solutions.

Our new spherical transform demo seems to be going
together for our ongoing series of triply compatible
Distiller-GoogleDrive-GhostScript projects.

Much more on nonlinear transforms here. One big
gotcha that needs attention is that any nonlinear
transform that  converts straight lines into curves
may involve corner cutting! In which your line
goes "straight through" your 3D perceived 2D object
instead of "around its intended 2D front surface.".

Now, in general, corner cutting is not that big a deal
on small lines and curves. Usually you don't have to
worry about it on portions of small text. But any
major construct ( such as a latitude changing chord )
the corner cutting easily becomes hideously obvious.

The fix that was discovered on a spherical transform
to repair needed corner cutting was to replace each
and every long problem lineto with five "weak" cubic
splines.

Now, that sounds gruesome, but it is really quite simple.
And goes along with our "throw another million calcs at
it" we've looked at elsewhere. And your needed code
only takes milliseconds at most.

The initial results were just barely corner cutting. And
a disgustingly elegant trick ( to be revealed shortly )
lets you virtually completely eliminate spherical corner
cutting.

Demos and code to follow after some more testing.

Here's the EIS for the Mount Graham telescopes.

This holds lots of background info for our bajada
hanging canals found here, here, here, and here.

A free and highly useful collection of online calculators
can be found at https://planetcalc.com/.

Of particular recent interest is this arc cord calculator.

Ferinstance, if you were to approximate a unit quarter
circle with five straight line segments of 18 degrees each,
your worst case cyclic error would be 0.0123 or an error
function sinewave near 0.00435 rms.

Instead, if you used fifteen straight line segments of 6
degrees each, your worst case error would be 0.00137
or an error function sinewave near 0.000484 rms.

Naturally, using cubic splines instead would give much
better results.

The magic math above is...

h = R ( 1 - cos ( ang/2 ) )

We seem to be gaining on the Jernigan "Hanging
Canal", although several mysteries remain. Its older
field notes are now sorely in need of revision.

The Jernigan Canal begins as a Mud Springs Canal
branch at N 32.82754 W 109.81950. A few atypical
rocks here suggest a now buried headgate.

This Canal remains fairly traceable to a 4WD crossing
at N32.83210 W 109.81817. Here, it becomes largely
indistinguishable from a natural drainage that pretty much
demands its credible continuation north to its West
Layton Road crossing at N 32.83688 W 109.81498.

A historical road waterbar appears to overlay the canal
at this point further north, The routing is quite easily
followed to its Grandma Road crossing at N 32.83891
W 109.81464.

A mysterious but apparently historic construct crosses next.
This may include a short wash crossing aqueduct remnant (?)
somewhat to the west at N 32.83912 W 109.81550.

The canal then splits into at least two pieces, with the main
portion following three or more ambiguous braided natural
drainages largely free of spoil banks. It once again becomes
a distinct, rather deep and rocky canal near N 32.84203
W 109.81412   

A large mid channel tree can be found here, adding credibility
to the canal potential age. Note that potential germination
time can very significantly add to the actual tree age.

A short portion of this canal branch vanishes near a postulated
counterflowing stream crossing at N 32.84111 W 109.81427,
suggesting sheet wash or other flood damage.

The westerly remainder of the canal is very impressive, quite
distinct and of significant depth with major spoil banks to its
apparent end at a sudden drop near N 32.84079 W 109.81680.
Possible destination fields are clearly observable here.

Meanwhile, the northern branch continues on its own, again via
braided and apparently natural and largely spoil bank free
channels. It crosses the now discredited "Jernigan Ext"
study area at N 32.84232 W 109.81398 which has been
deemed a trail bike route owing to erratic elevation changes.

The northern branch shortly disappears but may be very near
its destination, owing to significant area cultural resources.

Another possible Central Dump water channel has been newly
located somewhat west at N 32.84480 W 109.81925 . Whether
this is in fact prehistoric and its relation to the Jernigan Canals
remains unknown and awaits further research.

Interesting features of Jernigan are its four (!) "U" turns,
some rather significant and fairly deep cuts, counterflowing at
one stream crossing, and a large tree mid channel. It is also
clearly associated with several cultural resources and is one
of the few canals that still has a fairly identifiable probable
destination.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And, thus, is normally and monumentally stupid. 

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

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

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

Once again, our bottom line summary:

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

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

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

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

He was good. Very good.

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

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

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

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

Always play for those five.

The next project in our ongoing series of triply compatible
Distiller-GoogleDrive-GhostScrpt neat stuff to do is a
spherical transformation.

This would be a variation on our Poison Ivy in a Spray Can
with some of our original nonlinear graphics background here.

The surprisingly simple original nonlinear transform in degrees
goes something like this..

x' = sin(x)cos(y)
y' = sin(x)

Input can be "lat lon" normalized with 90 0 = east, 0 90 = north,
-90 0 = west and 0 -90 = south. Or else unity normalized. The
usual PostScript scaling then brings everything up to your desired
size.

More details soon.

Four free MEMS microphone samples are newly
available here.

A reminder that free eBook versions of the CMOS
Cookbook and the Active Filter Cookbook are
newly available.

CMOS is often tied with the TVT Cookbook for
third web place and has finally come close to a
million total copies.

Your help is still needed in getting scanned versions
of Micro Cookbook I, the Spanish TTL Cookbook,
the Pacific Rim TTL Cookbook, and the Hexadecimal
Chronicles.

Plus, of course, I do need an uncut MPEG4 HD version
of Godzilla versus the Night Nurses. Only the eight track
version seems to still be available on eBay. Most likely
because of the restraining order from the Tapioca
Pudding Institute.

My most favoritiest place you can't get to from here
can be found here and here.

WARNING: For advanced canyoneering teams only!

Note that Arizona has several Devil's Canyons and
Devil's Chasms. Many of which make for interesting
exploration on their own. Devil's Chasm in the Sierra
Anchas is particularly impressive.

More accessible stuff here with additional details here.

The Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem
smarter when they come at you rapidly.

There might be a bajada "hanging" prehistoric canal tour this
Saturday September 7th starting at 8 AM out of Thatcher.

More here and here.

A few slots may remain available. email me or call
(928) 428-4073 for more details. No charge except
possibly for Juanatia's lunch.

Appropriate desert hiking gear essential.

Our Build this TV Typewriter story seems to have just
gone mini-viral.

If you want to get in ahead of the hoarders, click here
now for your free ecopy. With more details here.

At the time, recirculating PMOS shift registers were the
ONLY available low cost memory. They also had a big
advantage in that a "phase shift" cursor could be used
instead of direct addressing.

Also at the time, now unobtainium custom crystals were
not that big a deal. The TV Typewriter did not particularly
care about its exact frequencies, but the cheap tv that you
connected to it would "breathe" annoyingly if the frame rate
"slips" power line cycles.

A simple and "era compatible" workaround would be a power
line pickoff and a CMOS D flop phase detector used to lock
the main oscillator.

Note that analog tv sets have now nearly vanished completely.

With some recent discoveries, I guess I want to revise
y my list of high technology in the Gila Valley. Presented
here in order of cubic wonderment....

1. Prehistoric Bajada Hanging Canals.
2. The Safford grids
3. Mount Graham International Observatory
4. Mine solvent extraction and electrowinning.
5. The Mount Graham Aerial Tramway
6. The five Morenci Southern Railway Loops
7. The EAC Fab Lab.
8. CCC infiltrating water spreaders.
9. Ubiquitous WiFi web com.
10. The Ash Creek flumes
11. The Emigrant Canyon Marble Quarry
12. The tomato factory
13. Cotton drip Irrigation and real time GPS

A newly revised Gila High Tech slide can be found
here with its improved sourcecode here. Plus more
on PostScript powerpoint emulation here.

More on similar discoveries here. 
And my secrets of technical innovation here.

For years, I've been creating what, for a better name,
we might call Lancasterisms. These are intentional but
apparent topographical errors intended to reveal a
higher or greater truth.

Such as a groundswill of popular demand. Or what
those French Veterinarians call a "four paw". Or being
overly enameled on some idea. Or ending up a few
bricks shy of a full deck. Frosting the lily or gilding the
cake. Or not being able to hit the barn side of a broad.
Or the mythinterpretiation of something.

Or sources close to an associate of the barber of a
usually reliable spokesperson. Some  New uses for
Chebycheff Polynomials would take the Cheby to the
Leby. Many of the web perpetual motion schemes
and those electrolysis fantasies involve electrocity.

All in one swell foop. Provided there's no oint in the
flyment An unauthorized autobiography. A jerk of
all trades. The local hysterical society. A fragrant
volition. The word  "gullible" is not in any major
dictionary or spell checker. 

Godzilla versus the Night Nurses. Especially the
tapioca pudding scene.

Letting the cows come home to roost. So long as
they are elected by acrimination. That little dip
between the winter slump and the spring slack
period. Sort of the qualm before the scorn. Confusing
Cannabis and Cannibal tasting tours. Geranium
transistors. A wine that "pours well".

Plays a mean eclectic guitar. Pioneers new methods
of animal husbandry. Speaks Esperanto like a native.
Bruno's attitude relateralization facillitation. The long
lost oriental martial art of Tai Wun Oun. Will be
persecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Reaching
a new millstone.

Geologists, of course, classify rocks as sedentary,
ingenious, or metaphoric. And New Mexico hikers
might call an emergency rain shelter a Poncho Villa.
The illegal aliens in the Alabama Grits Harvest, will,
of course, be used for flavor only. 

Right after the Ayatollahs Bar Mitzvah. Rectocranial
Inversion being both simultaneously chronic and acute.

"I'll give you just three hours and fifty one minutes to
STOP THAT!". Norfolk & Waay is the leading eBay 
supplier of drop ship items. Separating the useful
adjuncts for porcine whole body cleanliness from the
total hogwash. 

These are somehow related to the Yogi Berra's of
others, such as "Nobody goes there because it is too
crowded", "Deja Vu all over again", or "Let's keep
the Status Quo right where it is. Or "When you come
to a fork in the road, take it".

Or Ed Abbey's classic "Androgynous Ammonia".
Which might even involve an engendered species.

I have a hollow feeling I've lost some of the better
ones of these somewhere along the way. As you go
through some of my older books and stories, please
report any that may be missing in action.

Because Opporknockity tunes but once.

Much more here, here, and here.

Postscript demands exact font names! Otherwise it
will substitute Courier for a really bad name or else
will try to approximate it with usually awful results.

If all else fails, here is a possible stunt to extract
a needed and correct font name...

1. Make sure the font is properly
    installed on your machine and
    correctly accessible to Distiller
    via Settings --> Font Locations.

2. Take any old short scrap .PDF
    file and load it into full Acrobat.

3. Attempt to add a new watermark
    to the file. Make sure your font is
    available!

4. Actually watermark the file and
    save it under a new name.

5. View file --> properties --> fonts
    to find the filename and save it.

Here's some valid Adobe Type filenames...

/Blenny-Black
/FilsonSoftHeavy
/FilsonProHeavy
/FilsonProBold
/Madrone
/Eco

Please note that our new address is Box 640. The old
Thatcher Box 809 is no longer active.

Adobe renamed their "Type Kit" as "Adobe Type". Many
tens of thousands of top quality fonts are available without
surcharge to their Creative Cloud subscribers.

At one time the Type Kit and Distiller would refuse to
play nice together. At least not without some inane secret
skulduggery.

As far as I can tell, this still needs a workaround.
Please email me with a cure.

Sunday's trip revealed a long segment of a sand filled
water path going from to N 32.84172 W 109.82027 to  
N 32.85111 W 109.81766 .

Projected length is at least one mile.

It rigorously follows the need for a constant canal slope,
but has no spoil banks. While other canals and cultural
resources are in the area, none yet appear to be in any
close association.

The route is quite small at half a meter across and has
no obvious water source and no immediate destination.

Although there seems no immediate impossibility of a
source near the dam on the Mud Springs Canal and
a destination near the Central Dump lake.

This also shows up best as 2011 Google Earth history.
There is no obvious evidence of historic tool use or intent.

I'm hesitant to call this a prehistoric hanging canal in
that stronger evidence should be reasonably expected
beyond "What else could it be?

More here, here, and here.

Just discovered there are some "new" PostScript commands
hidden in GhostScript. Some of these can choke Distiller.

One example is .max which can be taught to Distiller as...

/.max {2 copy ge {pop}{exch pop} ifelse} store

And a second complementary example...

/.min {2 copy le {pop}{exch pop} ifelse} store

Or this integer reporter...

/.== {20 string cvs print} store

I can't seem to find any obvious docs on these. Please
report your findings and workarounds.

There seems to be an infinite number of hoops to jump
through towards my goal of making many of the fancier
PostScript files triply compatible with Distiller, GhostScript
and Google-Drive. So far, we have gotten so far.

The latest gotcha is that the Windows command line will
not allow relative path names unless it is pre-taught to do so
by Administrative access to Environment Path Variables.

The usual symptom is //acrodist working just fine but
//gswin64 choking on unfound. I'd guess their need for
specific paths involves possible name conflicts combined
with the search time for thousands of unused paths.

I'll try and test some code as soon as I can.

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

One reason for this is the outrageously "not even wrong"
urban lore involving patents and patenting. A second
involves the outright scams which inevitably surround
"inventions" and "inventing". 

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

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

Some resources...

Patent Resources Links
Our Main Patent Page
The Case Against Patents
When to Patent
How to Bust a $650 Patent
Patent Horror Stories
Risk Reduction Ploys
Tech Innovation Secrets
Perils of Patents and Patenting

With a fascinating history of urban lore patent
scams here.

And the source of the sour grapes here.

An interesting collection of archaeological films can
be found here.

With our own vids here and here.

Managed to get GhostScript to work with the sourcecode
to this demo of using internal Google Drive links.

The key problem is that if you drag and drop any old
routine PostScript code into GhostScript, it executes
in a screen display mode that has no provision for links.

Instead, "normal" GhostScript use demands incantations
sent from the command line to set up specific instructions.

Such as win-r ( without carriage returns ) ...

"C:/Program Files/gs/gs9.27/bin/gswin64.exe"
-sDEVICE=pdfwrite
-o
"C:/Users/don/Desktop/google_drive/docs/test1_me.pdf"
"C:/Users/don/Desktop/google_drive/docs/url_demo1c.psl"

The first line says to run GhostScript with the additional 
info that follows. The second line says to create a .PDF
file document rather than a screen image. The -o tells
GhostScript that the next info is an output filename.
And finally, the last line is the actual PostScript code
to be processed.

Naturally, you will have to very carefully adjust these
links and filenames to suit your machine.

Full absolute filename links were shown here.

Here's our most popular free ebooks...

CMOS Cookbook
Active Filter Cookbook
TTL Cookbook
Incredible Secret Money Machine
TV Typewriter Cookbook
RTL Cookbook

And the most often gotten classic reprints...

Build this TV Typewriter
Little Known Gila Valley Dayhikes
Don't Get Sick
Secrets of Technical Innovation
Worst of Marcia Swampfelder
The Case Against Patents

And our most visited library pages...

Home Page
What's New for 2019
Gila Valley Dayhikes
Auction and eBay Help
PostScript Library
Cubic Splines
Magic Sinewaves

And our Prehistoric Hanging Canals...

Prehistoric Hanging Canals
JFA Preprint
ARA Video
Wikipedia Story

How to avoid "sugar" or "speckle" in eBay or other
photo post processing...

Spend at least 90 percent of your total
imaging time in postproc!

15 Megapixels minimum!

Always stay in full .BMP format all of
the way through postproc.

Work at least 2X your intended final
cropped resolution.

Reasonably clean the object, but save
any major effort till the item gets sold.

Consider electronic sprays, compressed
air, sandblast, or even an actual shower.

Have a totally neutral background that
does not selectively reflect into the image.

DO NOT USE FLASH! Shoot outside in
medium but fully diffused shade. All that
lighting does is create unwanted shadows.

If needed, enhance the "undershade" by
using a large white card.

ALWAYS use a tripod! Clean your lens!

Favor architect's 2D perspective with two
vanishing points but true vertical lines.

Knock out background to maximize your
apparent sharpness. Add vignetting if
and when appropriate.

Use a mottled final background to very
much reduce JPG edge artifacts.

Much more here with many examples here.

Just discovered that the Windows 10 command line
does not allow spaces in a filename.

Two workarounds are to put the whole filename in
bracketed quotes, or to replace the spaces with $20's.

Sincerity is everything.

Once you have that faked, nothing else matters.

Noticed a yet unchecked hanging canal candidate at
N 32.84494 W 109.81924. It seems to have "ok" web
appearance, length, slope, and a credible destination,
but it is not at all clear on any possible source.

A possible branch of the Mud Springs/Jernigan canal
complex near the dam would not immediately appear
topologically impossible.

I'd presently give it a fairly low priority. It is "medium"
hard to reach and you are more than welcome to do so.

A superb ATV project. Other things to do here and here.

Despite Marcia Swampfelder's perpetual motion machine
shown here, I've long been a foe of Pseudoscience. Find
our main library here, a key tutorial here, blasting that
magic lamp here, insider secrets of Supraluminal Dowsing
for Brown's Gas in Roswell here, more on the Brown's Gas
fiasco here, arguments against the Hydrogen economy
here, homopolar myths shattered here and here, demolishing
Tesla Turbines here, here, and here, all the while trashing
vehicular electrolysis here.

Finding an unlimited source of free energy would, of course,
be the most unimaginably heinous crime against humanity.
for it would nearly instantly convert the planet into a cinder.

Some reasons for the new YouTube reemergence of Tesla's
latter day Crackpots Church...

"Not even wrong" being a major ( and often
dominant ) factor in most any issue of technical
competence.

Heavy reliance on faith and self-reliance, rather
than on the falsifiability and "shoulders of giants"
of the Scientific Method.

Until recently, many cheap measuring instruments
were dead wrong and based on an outright lie. The
details here and here.

Painting the "eleven percent" non RMS error on a
meter face convinced many it was some immutable
physical constant, instead of being utterly outrageous
on many waveforms.

And some guidelines if you are serious about pseudoscience
bashing...

NEVER attack an issue with a manic religious
fervor, as you will become one of "them".

NEVER directly attack a proponent as they
are clearly a few chips shy of a full board
and might take umbrage at any threats.

Respect Ockham's Razor, falsifiability, and,
most especially exergy. Remember that NET
is an acronym for "not entirely true".

On any unusual development, your first and your
foremost goal should be to prove yourself wrong.

Follow the money. Do a meta study.

As always, extraordinary claims will demand
extraordinary evidence, preferably from multiple
and verifiability independent sources.

Just added Poison Ivy in a Spray can to our recent triply
compatible Distiller-GoogleDrive-GhostScript utilities
and apps. Find the sourcecode here and the demo here.

In real life, this shows you how to wrap PostScript fonts
and artwork around a cylinder. More on our nonlinear
transformations here.

New demos work best with desired fonts available.

WARNING: Be sure the nozzle is pointing forward
and away from you before any use!

Here's a list of our recent triply compatible Distiller-
GoogleDrive-GhostScript utilities and apps...

  #21 - Poison Ivy Spray Can   sourcecode and  demo

  #20 - 2D Perspective Cube    sourcecode and  demo
  #19 - Fractal Fern                   sourcecode and  demo
  #18 - URL  Linking                sourcecode and  demo ***
  #17 - Print Diverter!               sourcecode and  demo
  #16 - PS Error Reporter!      sourcecode and  demo

  #15 - Dictionary Snooper       sourcecode and  demo
  #14 - Marberlous Pancakes   sourcecode and  demo
  #13 - Meowwrrr Pussycat     ( list of available modules )
  #12 - PS Accuracy Improver   sourcecode and  demo
  #11 - Cubic Spline Length      sourcecode and  demo

  #10 - "Lite" Gonzo Shell         sourcecode and  demo
   #9 - Constant Cubic Spline     sourcecode and  demo
   #8 -  Fake Log Demo              sourcecode and  demo
   #7 -  Avuncular Sleezoids      ( list of available modules )
   #6 -  Tuna Can                        sourcecode and  demo

  #5 -  Font Reporter                 sourcecode and demo
  #4 -  Brick Wall                       sourcecode and  demo (!)
  #3 -   Scribble                           sourcecode and  demo 
   #2 -  Fat Tail Arrows              sourcecode and demo 
   #1 -  Web Friendly Colors      sourcecode and  demo

The final results from meowwrrr can be viewed in Google
Drive, but the key part where it traces a .JPG is not yet
compatible. Your help is needed on this.

*** = still has issues.

And, of course, ground zero on all this can be found
here, here, here, and here.  

So, what would a true 2D generic perspective transformation
look like? For some reasons, I have been having inordinate
difficulty finding or deriving an example.

Consider six inputs in perspective space: x0 the right x vanishing
point, y0 the left y vanishing point on the horizon and z0 the distance from
the horizon to 0, 0, 0 in perspective space.

For these values, we seek x' and y' in transformed flat space given
x, y, and z perspective space inputs.

We might ( almost ) expect something like this...

x' = yo (x - xo ) / (y + yo ) 
y' = yo (z - zo ) / (y + yo )

But this code that we explored here and here clearly is not
what we need in that it obviously is lacking a (z - z0) factor.

Your help is welcome. What does the true transform look
like? I'd very much prefer a "ninth grade math" solution than
one involving matrices.

On the other hand, here and here allows vanishing points that
are not co-horizontal! While a no-no for buildings, these allow
for fancy eBay object positioning.

More on nonlinear transforms here.

For years, I have been touting this formula as a solution
to 2D perspective transformation...

x' = yo (x - xo ) / (y + yo ) 
y' = yo (z - zo ) / (y + yo )

This can be explored with this new sourcecode and this
new demo. Be sure to explore this with an available font!

It turns out this is really one of many perspective transformations
but is not a true generic 2D perspective transformer!

Picture a perspective cube. With this code, you can project
flat regular artwork onto any of its three faces. Also,
amazingly, you can rotate the cube into different aspects.

At present, you can send this sourcecode to Distiller via
the usual secret command line incantation of //acrodist /F.

This code appears to be triply Distiller-GoogleDrive-GhostScript
compatible and is number #20 in this new series.

Your suggestions welcome.

A reminder that weekly pv pricing gets reported here
and here. The lowest cell pricing is now nine cents per
peak cell watt.

Which is fast approaching what I feel is the "all hell
breaks loose" price point of eight cents per peak cell
watt. A barrier that I feel not only will be approached
but will be slammed through like it was not even there.

Meanwhile, this resource reports on the ever accelerating
rate of coal power plant conversions into singles bars.

Just made our Cheap Video Cookbook eBook much more
compact and web friendly.

Cheap video was a concept that let you add video to such
low end micros as the KIM1, AIM65, SYM1, and H8.

It was based on using software to provide specific timing
rather than its usual use of resolving algorithms. It saw
some use in the Timex Sinclair, but its most spectacular
success was in the NewTek Calibar.

Its need largely disappeared with sharply declining memory
prices, the demand for more and better fonts, and bandwidth
needs far in excess of NTSC analog tv.

Son of Cheap Video was its sequel, found with these other
free eBooks. Many more examples of code-as-timing rather
than code-as-algorithm appear here and here.

Some of the many advantages of magnetic tomcats include:
(a) They will point north if you pick them up by the tail; (b)
they store easily overnight on the side of your refrigerator;
(c) herding cats is a lot easier if they are all oriented in the
same direction. And, of course (d) you can levitate them by
using an appropriately powered electric blanket.

More on totally unrelated topics in MARCIA.PDF.

Here are the arguments against the Hydrogen Economy...

1. Terrestrial hydrogen is ONLY an energy carrier or
    transfer media and NOT a substance capable of
    delivering net NEW BTU's to the on-the-books
    economy.

2. Terrestrial hydrogen creation is often inefficient as
    considerably more energy of usually much higher
    quality has to be input than is eventually returnable.

3. No large terrestrial source of hydrogen gas is known.
     Water, of course, is a hydrogen sink and, by fundamental
     chemical energetics, is the worst possible feedstock.

4. The CONTAINED energy density of terrestrial
     hydrogen by weight is a lot LESS than gasoline. And
     drops dramatically as the tank is emptied. The energy
     density of hydrogen gas by volume is a ludicrous joke.

5. Virtually all bulk hydrogen is produced by methane
     reformation. And thus is EXTREMELY hydrocarbon
     dependent.

6. Hydrogen has one of the widest explosive ranges
     known, the least spark energy required for ignition,
     and has no known colorants or odorants. Its flame
     is often invisible or nearly so.

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

8. No effective vehicle compatible means of hydrogen
    storage is known that is remotely as cheap, safe, dense,
    and convenient as carbon bonded hydrides.

9. No infrastructure exists for gaseous hydrogen distribution.
    Pipelines in particular raise major density and embrittlement
    issues.

10. Electrolysis from high value sources such as grid, wind,
      or pv is totally useless as a hydrogen source because of the
      staggering loss of exergy. There ALWAYS will be more
      intelligent things to do with the electricity.

11. Improper burning of hydrogen produces highly polluting
      nitrous oxides.

12. Terrestrial hydrogen is basically a POLLUTION AMPLIFIER
       that increases the pollution of its underlying sources. It is
       utterly ludicrous to claim that hydrogen is in any manner, way,
       shape, or form "nonpolluting".

13. Hydrogen rots most metals through embrittlement .

14. "Carbon Neutral" solutions would appear better than
     "Carbon Free" because (A) A significant measure of the
     energy of most fuels is in its carbon fraction, (B) Carbon
     appears to be essential for convenient and safe room
     temperature liquids, and (C) Reformation is not required
     or else is simpler, cheaper, and wastes less energy.

15. An optimal hydrogen storage solution exists by carbon
     bonding as in heptane or iso-octane. Both of these room
     temperature liquids ain't broke.

16. A kilowatt hour of electricity is ridiculously more valuable
      than a kilowatt hour of unstored hydrogen gas.

I particularly like #7. The entire concept of the hydrogen
economy is thus not even wrong,

Much more here, and on energy in general here.

A reminder that our CMOS COOKBOOK and ACTIVE
FILTER COOKBOOK are newly available as free
eBooks.

Find lots more eBooks here, classic reprints here, and a
very few remaining autographed hard copies here.

And USB's of nearly one each of everything here.

A review of nonlinear graphics transforms can be found
here.

One of my all time favorites is the "Architects Perspective"
or two point perspective. In which there is a y
vanishing point and an x vanishing point, but the z axis
remains perfectly vertical.

This is particularly useful for buildings, where most any
building tilting or leaning seems just plain wrong.

Let xo, yo, and zo be the distances from the
observer to the 0,0,0 perspective origin.

x is left-right; y is in-out; and z is up-down.

One possible 2-point transform is…

x' = yo (x - xo ) / (y + yo )
y' = yo (z - zo ) / (y + yo )

Some software I use on eBay to realign product images
to Architects Perspective can be found here. This is
usually followed up by a vignetting backgrounder you
can find here. With many examples here.

One interesting emerging workaround to scientific paper
paywalls is the Author's Preprint.

This is a new paper you created by yourself and posted
to your own website. Followed by reposting to Research
Gate or Wesrch or Tdar or Academia.

Or the rest of the gang here.

It is super important that your author's preprint have
zero content that was internally physically generated by
the paywall source. Fonts and layout must be original!

Note that the word "reprise" is pronounced "preprint".

One of our recent author's preprints can be found here.

The latest phone scam: "Hello, is Don there?"

If you are a real Don, of course, they hang up on you
immediately. And very few phones have a Don attached.

This is likely some sort of a phishing ploy. Once the
non Don's are contacted, they likely open some sort
of dialog. Possibly ending in a bogus money transform.

One general workaround that we use: Answer your
phone with its number instead of "hello". This often
causes the scamee to loose their place in the script.

And works particularly well if you have a home business.
More on home businesses here and here.

A second tip: The first person to speak after any
"How are you today?" ---> LOSES!

A very interesting electronic and automation auction
can be found here. So far, there seem to be zero bids!

Shipping makes this waay too far back east for me and
the stuff is obviously dated, used, and clearly in need of
refurb. $5 opening bids!

But, outside of that Missus Lincoln, how was the play?

A reminder that our curvetracing routines can simply
and easily approximate perspective circles! Per
this demo and this sourcecode.

First, you define a perspectively transformed bounding
"square". Then you calculate the halfway distance
along the "square" sides with good old ( x1 +x2 ) / 2
and ( y1 + y2 ) / 2.

Actually, this won't quite be right, but nobody is likely
to notice. And the "real" math is way beyond gruesome.

Second, you next find the midpoint angle by using
( y2 - y1 ) (x2-x1) atan. The PostScript atan operator is
swift enough to figure our which quadrant you are in
and avoid div0 hassles.

Then you Gonzo curvetrace...

[  x0 y0 ang0   x1 y1 ang1
   x2 y2 ang2   x3 y3 and 3
   x0 y0 ang0  ] curvetrace

Usually, the default "best circle" tension of
2.83301 will work just fine. But you can
adjust it downward if there are any hints of
"squareness" or upward if there are any
hints of "diamondness".

One of the problems of Bajada Hanging Canal
research is that very few destination fields are
yet verified. The Mud Springs Canal in particular
has taken many dozens of trips to date without
being able to reveal its destination.  

Could an ancient canal act as a precision inclinometer?

It certainly demands an optimal slope. And "they"
sure have consistently come close to optimization. The
canals all  tend to route in straight lines, unless there
is some compelling reason not to.

Draw two Google Earth circles centered on the known
canal end at N 32.84791 W 109.81105. Make the first
circle radius go back to a ten foot canal elevation rise.
Make the second circle radius go back to a twenty foot
elevation rise.

At a two percent grade, we are talking 500 and 1000 feet.
Mark many possible locations on these Google paths.

Compare their optimal elevation against their actual
elevation. Which directions remain suggestive of
a feasible canal route? Obviously, the canal must
not go uphill and likely will continue at its previous
slope without sudden turns or drops.

Note that two drainages seem to discourage trending
to the northwest or southeast. And that the Central
Dump would appear to be a rather weaker candidate.

Mapping strengthens the premise that the Mud Springs
destination lies under the present Central Cemetery.

Note that two drainages discourage trending to the
northwest or southeast. And historic reuse has many
verified instances of "steal the plans" or "borrow the
blueprints". "Hey, here's a flat and rock free area with
lots of loose dirt for our new cemetery."

There's also no evidence so far of the bajada canals
merging with the riverine ones. Not to mention the cliff
between the two. And significant apparent flow rates
combined with wildly different engineering .

A second weak but independent factor: Very often the
canals route goes along the highest possible terrain, owing
to such routes often being the most engineeringly efficient.
The modern power line is orthogonal to a possible canal
route and clearly crosses it at its potential highest point!

And yet another consideration: West Layton road
consistently has nearly the correct slope. Curiously,
orthogonal transects to it place the road at the
highest possible elevation, dropping to either side.

But the evidence to date clearly remains far shy of
proof. Your assistance welcome.

Sometimes, you might instead want to trace one .JPG
image into another. Particularly for an eBay sale.

.PDF easily lets you output .JPG. As these before
and after images show us.

Why work with a 10X grid? Normalizing your space to
a nominal font size of "1" or a schematic's space between
wires or integrated circuit pins of "1" has a number of
advantages.

Many of the numbers involved may only need one or
two digits, thus shortening and cleaning up your code.

The scale of the project is simply and easily changed,
and the grid itself can sometimes become a design
element.  

To activate a 10X grid in Gonzo...

50 50 10 setgrid   % xpos ypos scale

Note that setgrid leaves an "open" gsave on your
stack. If you ever want to leave the grid, provide
an ending grestore.

To view a portion of the grid...

40 60 showgrid     % hblocks vblocks

More details here.

The latest version of Gonzo Gridding appears here
and includes optional positional callouts.

Sourcecode for a new .JPG tracing utility can be found
here with its original .JPG image here and its demo
here.

There are three layers to the code. The bottom most
is the .JPG image you are trying to compact or sharpen
or .PDF capture or otherwise modify or improve.

The next layer is a 10X layout grid with new optional
numeric callouts. And finally, your top layer is your
"raw" PostScript tracing.  Note that any fills might
need commented out if you temporarily need the local
underlying grid info.

At present the code can be sent to Distiller via the
usual command line secret incantation of  //acrodist /F.
While your final .psl code should usually be Google Drive
compatible, our jpegimageprocwithlink still needs
a compatible solution.

Please email any suggestions.

One of the big features of jpegimageprocwithlink is
that a smaller and more compact image gets entered
into your .PDF file while you can optionally click
through to the full size one that is located elsewhere.

Some extensive examples here.

When you change your .JPG file, be sure to modify
your filenames and the hpixels and vpixels values!

Here's a new "Poison Ivy in a Spray Can" demo of
combining a .JPG image, a grid, and traceable new
code that does actual nonlinear transforms.

Find the .PSL code here and its demo here.

One caution: Be sure the nozzle is pointed forward
before use!

Send the code to Acrobat Distiller via the secret
command line incantation of //acrodist /F.

More on nonlinear transforms here. And many
more examples here and here.

The key secret is to use a Fonts charapath
operator and then redefine moveto, lineto,
curveto, and closepath to transform each
and every point onto an apparent new surface.

Just made a curious observation on one of our prehistoric
hanging canals: There can be significant moisture retention
subsurface in the fill! As shown by darkening or even
actual moisture.

It would seem unlikely that the canals are still flowing
subsurface, so what is more likely is that rare rains
go through the permeable sand and are blocked against
further depth penetration by the impermeable canal
bottom.

Evaporation would "clear" the surface but take
much longer to reach deeper.

So far, there is only one sample and this one days
after a rainfall. Further survey requires permits
and funding.

This might be a "gotcha" for yesterday's OSL in
that the process is extremely water sensitive.

A newer and improved substitute for thermoluminescence
is Optically Stimulated Luminescence, or OSL.

Single grains of sand include slight amounts of uranium
or other radioactive sources. They also have "traps"
that can accumulate and save this energy over time.

The trap energy can be released by sunlight or other
strong radiation and its captured energy can then be
measured.

Which literally lets you measure when the grain of
sand last saw the light of day! Giving superb new
tools for geologic and archaeological dating.

One lab is found here, and others here. Processing
usually costs $500 to $1000 per sample and the
process can take months.

OSL would seem useful to date our prehistoric canals.
It might even be useful to prove enigmatic segments
of canal are are not connected.

Also a superb subject for student papers.

Made some minor corrections to our .rss page.

Please report any remaining issues.

Just added a highly improved "Director's Cut"
end cover to our CMOS Cookbook free ebook
download.

With sourcecode here, its demo here, all of
CMOS here, and the rest of the gang here.

As usual, this uses our Gonzo Utilities which
feature superb quality fancy text justification,
electronic schematics, .jpg capture, total
programmable control, and astonishingly
short file sizes.

Gonzo is normally edited with any old word
processor and then sent to Distiller via a
secret command line //acrodist /F incantation.

I am working on making Gonzo compatible
with Google Drive, but a seemingly endless
number of hoops apparently need jumped
through.

As done here, I'd sure like to use a -run-
command rather than towing much or all
87K of Gonzo along each and every time.

Some progress here and ongoing here, but
I sure could use your help.

My most favoritist technical book of all time remains
the Radiotron Designers Handbook.

Find several versions of it here.

Plan Nine from Outer Space is newly available on
Youtube. This had been widely regarded as by far
the worst movie of all time, but its sheer ineptitude
has long since made it a cult classic.

My own two videos here and here.

A reminder that our ACTIVE FILTER COOKBOOK is
also recently available as a free eBook.

Find lots more eBooks here, classic reprints here, and
a very few remaining autographed hard copies here.

And USB's of nearly one each of everything here.

Our free CMOS COOKBOOK eBook is newly available
here!

I could still use your help in finding scans of Micro
Cookbook I, the Spanish and the Pacific Rim versions
of the TTL cookbook, and the Hexadecimal Chronicles.

The Raspberry Pi and friends have once again made
Micro I newly and highly relevant.

Yeah, the Hexadecimal Chronicles was not all that
great a seller, and it was mostly a useful internal
personal tool. But it was  significant in that it was
completely authored and typeset and produced by
an Apple IIe!

With utterly negligible production costs. Error free!

A major lateral arabesque!

The key to understanding Google Drive full and partial
directory path names is that they don't have any!

Instead, id links are available ( when allowed ) that act
as most any other web url. Just pick a file and right
click on Get Sharable Link for a copyable url.

Our first example here is some simple Distiller compatible
PostScript code that lets you click through on your choice
of a Google Drive id or a main web link.

Find the code here and a demo here.

Uh, this routine has been kept simple, so it only works on
unenhanced left justification. More elegant code is found
in our Gonzo Utilities that uses deferred "printlist" execution
to deal with fancier text justifications where your initial and
final currentpoints may differ wildly.

The code is swift enough, though, to have its active area
autotrack any later text size or positioning edits!

Uh, this still is not Google Drive compatible in that the
links are shown but do not work. Stay tuned.

We are slowly making some progress in getting more
PostScript programs fully compatible with Google Drive.

The goal being finding a free and full performing alternate
to Acrobat Distiller. /F and all!

We found out that it is essential that any .ps or .psl
programs have zero leading spaces and starts with
%!PS-Adobe-3.1 or similar!

No direct method of viewing PostScript error messages
and log files has yet been found. However, an often
useful workaround is to define new operators to append
error, log info, debug commands, and any intentional text
output to the end of your .PDF file being generated.

Adding, ferinstance, a red page for the first error that
you find, and yellow ones for each intended log page
diversion. A side benefit of this technique is that you
often can view the intended .PDF output up to the
point of the first error.

Sourcecode and a demo to do this are found here.
As part of our new triply compatible program examples.

A next logical step would be to find out how Google Drive
deals with filenames. Possibly leading up to including .JPG
files in a generated .PDF using something like our highly
useful /jpegimageprocwithlink proc. Or eventually, --gasp--
being able to run subroutines such as our Gonzo Utilities.

It turns out that Google Drive does not use filenames,
directories, or subdirectories! Instead, each and every file
from each and every user has a unique cloud-wide id.

Thus, completely bypassing issues with full and relative
filenames!

You can easily extract or read this id for everything sharable
by finding the file and right clicking on get sharable link. The
id can then be isolated from this link.

I don't yet have the faintest clue yet to relate the links to
/jpegimageprocwithlink. But resolving this would be a really
major step forward to full compatibility.

Your participation and help welcome.

Deeply buried in our Guru's Lair is some medical
stuff, mostly oriented towards a wellness lifestyle
and aerobic exercise. I still use these occasionally
for fire department fitness drill training exercises.

The big three are...

Don't Get Sick
A wellness Lifestyle Quiz
Aerobic Pulse Rate Chart

A review by a real doctor here...

Bee's Website

And these also rans...

Understanding Pulse Monitors
Recording Aerobic Exercise Sessions 
Aerobic Fitness PostScript Sourcecode

The leading web medical resource is Medline.
You normally search this with PubMed.

Also check out Healthy.Net.  And one collection of 
the top 25 web medical resources can be found here.

Some older alternate medical book resources here.

Insider secrets of approximating a circle or an ellipse
with cubic splines can be found here.

A four spline approximation gives an average error
of one part in one thousand. The "official" normalized
tension magic number is 0.55228475 , but the little
known "best" nearby 0.551784 beats it by 24 percent.

The "official" magic number is also known as 4/3rds
of 1 less than the square root of two.

A four spline approximation seems acceptable for
most ordinary display and graphics uses, but is
clearly inappropriate for machine shop or optical
needs.

Results for two through eight spline approximations
are also shown.

Three older third party PostScript dictionary snooping
tools can be newly found here.

The tools include...

/wherevalue - find dictionary and key for value
/ dicttrace - print dictstack using names
/ dict== - recursively print dictionary contents

These work around the problem of there being no apparent
simple or obvious way of relating a -dict- report to its name.

Many thanks to Luser Droog for their assistance here

A very intriguing YouTube paper on prehistoric
Southwest Canals can be newly found here.

Their premise is that rectangular tank similarities
might suggest a strong Mesoamerican presence.  

I'll note here that the Scientific Method demands
(a) independent corroboration and (b) falsifiability.

My initial response is that the term "not even wrong"
may come to mind.   Per here and here.

Triply compatible Distiller-GoogleDrive-GhostScript
updates to one or our Fractal Ferns can be found here
for the sourcecode and here for the .PDF result.

Example #19. Earlier stuff here.

Amazingly, the Google Drive execution time on
this is blindingly and unbelievably fast! So much so
that higher resolutions and larger images are now
more than feasible.

Some fern background here. The image is fully
defined with only 28 data values!

The overwhelming majority of all more sophisticated
PostScript programs will --not-- run on Google Drive!

At least not without modification. I am working on
finding ( and have already found ) possible solutions
or workarounds to many of these problems.

A series of newly compatible programs can be found
here. And likely in future entries of this blog.

The most infuriating and easiest to fix compatibility
issue is simply this: The program MUST start with
%!PS-Adobe-3.1 or similar!

ANY LEADING SPACES DIVERT TO OTHER
LANGUAGES AND TRASH YOUR RESULTS!

The usual hint of this is a "preview not available"
screen message.

Apparently there is no simple or direct way to find
the actual name of a PostScript --dict--.

I am working on a full named dictmap and have
probably gotten halfway through.

Here are two alternate approaches: We have
a PostScript snooper's sourcecode here and
its demo here. The only gotcha is that you'll
need to know dictionary names ahead of time.

And here is a possible stunt...

countdictstack array dictstack
{dup {pop == exit} forall
length ==} forall

This returns the length and the first entry of
everything on the dictionary stack. If the -dict-
is mainstream, chances are you can refer back
to the snooper and quickly find its name.

More new good stuff here. And our latest free
Active Filter Cookbook (!) ebook here. With
autographed hard copies here.

And our newest video here. And our oldest
vid here.

After asking around on the incredible stack overflow
web resource, it appears unlikely there is any direct
and simple way to get the name of a top-of-stack
PostScript dictionary.

The present approach ( which will likely take more
time and money than it is worth ) is to create a new
master dictionary info array.

Each element might include...

   [ /hostdictname /childdictname /firstdef length]

You would then work by tiers to build up a new master
directory. Given the length and first entry name
for the dictionary you are after, and then extracting
the target dictionary name.

Thus finding which --dict-- that == or ==d is referring to.

Cloud funding welcome.

Here's the sourcecode and demo of an improved
triply compatible Distiller-GoogleDrive-GhostScript
print diverter.

Example #18 in this ongoing series.

Newly included is an error trapper with a stack
dumper. The involved commands are printd,
==d, and pstackd . Used only when and where
you want them and with no server side mods.

It is based on adding new .log pages to the end of
your existing PostScript doc. A red page for errors and
as many yellow ones as you need for reports and to
output most any code in most any language .

This technique greatly improves and expands what you
can and cannot do with GoogleDrive. But a better
official .LOG file solution obviously remains needed
or documented .

This code does sneaky stuff in sneaky ways, so
please report any problems you find with it.

What is the ultimate off-the-wall unbelievable PostScript
hack involving horrific abuse of one or more commands?

Here's the sourcecode for my unbelievable on-the-wall
one. And its demo.

Amazingly, it does not matter in the least how many
bricks are involved. Nor what the size of each and every
properly transformed perspective brick is. The code
stays short and simple. And fast.

Here's an older Example #19 high brick demo.

Can you bottom this?

I am still looking for an "official" way for Google Drive
to deal with display PostScript .LOG files.

Log files are super important to report errors, to do
diagnostics, or simply to let PostScript write most
any code in most any computer language.

We saw sourcecode for a tentative way to report errors
here with its demo here. And sourcecode of an example
of how PostScript can learn to speak HTML here with
its demo here. And more examples of triply compatible
Distiller-GoogleDrive-GhostScript here.

Here is a new example of our compatibility workarounds.
It is a print diverter that adds ( usually ) yellow gridded
pages to the end of your .PDF file. Added are three new
"diversion" commands of printd, ==d, and pstackd.

Find the sourcecode here and a demo here.

printd works like print, except it prints on the end pages
of your .PDF being generated. ==d works like == in that
it intelligently formats internal commands so you can
tell what their purpose is from their format. And pstackd
outputs an intelligent copy of your stack contents, again
to the end of your .PDF file.

Only a simple and short text formatter is used here.
Substitute our Gonzo Utilities for anything really fancy.

Run this by sending it to Google Drive or activating
Distiller with the usual command line of //acrodist /F.

Your inputs on Google Drive insider secret stuff are
desperately needed. So far, there are major and obvious
apparent severe limitations. Some of which may simply
be not looking in the right places, some of which can be
fixed by creative programming, and some of which may
end up as fundamental gotchas.

Next order of business is combining the above stack dumper
with the error reporter. Followed by learning absolute and
relative filenames. Followed by a JPG to linkable PS image
solution. Followed by "/F" running Gonzo.

Shocking.

I just found out that many of the New Mexico subastas
are going to be sold at auction!

Even worse, "slippery slope" issues may also endanger 
a large number of the licitacions and even the almonedas! 

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

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

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

More details at your nearest New Mexico embassy.

A second reminder that our Active Filter Cookbook is newly
available in free ebook form here. Seventeenth printing!

More free ebooks here. Autographed hard copies here.

Raytheon is one of the very few remaining sources of
auctions for useful military surplus electronic parts and
instruments.

But they suddenly just made a giant change in how you
can participate. You have to sign up for a free online
service called Exostar if you want to bid.

The bids are much simpler and easier to place online
now. Their link is called Raytheon Source. Links
to listings and photos and bidding sheets are provided.

New features include access to your own Excel, advising
when you have been outbid, and, if outbid, your priority.

Exostar's sign in may end up frustratingly obtuse, but
they seem to have outstanding free online service.

Much more auction stuff here and our eBay stuff here.