Don Lancaster's What's New 2020 Blog

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

December 31, 2020
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There does not yet seem to be any simple or obvious way to use PostScript's super powerful run command inside stock Google Drive.

A likely cure might end up to be to be able to run url's as well as the original host sourced files. Attempting to run url's presently generates ioerrors. PostScript, of course, significantly predated web anything.

Meanwhile, two workarounds are to excerpt only what is necessary from the intended run file. With sourcecode here. Or to tow along everything in a complete copy of the intended run file. With sourcecode here.

When using our Gonzo Utilities and their tutorial. a full copy would add around 84K to your file length. But possibly only a few K for excerpts.

With everybody skipping the terabyte revolution to go on to the petabyte one, an extra 84K here or there might not seem that big a deal anymore.

Many more triply Distiller-Ghost-GoogleDrive compatible files here.

December 30, 2020
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Our free Gonzo Utilities ( code here, tutorial here ) include a PostScript dictionary chock full of tools to (1) create amazingly short fully human readable code, (2) do outstanding typography, (3) build up superb tech illustrations, (4) dramatically improve bitmaps, and (5) provide assorted utility routines.

Here's a 10x grid example...

 %!PS
 %10X Gonzo layout grid
 (C:/Users/Don/Desktop/gonzo.psl) run
 50 50 10 setgrid
 45 65 showgrid
 showpage
 %EOF

Be sure you correctly host link your Gonzo copy! Run this in Distiller via your secret command line incantation of //acrodist /F, directly in GhostScript, or in Google Drive by towing along either all of 85K Gonzo or just its 1200 or so bytes worth of setgrid, showgrid, and all of its fatterborder, fat5, fatter10 and thingridline supporting operators.

Find free Gonzo here, its tutorial here, the reference manual here, and a video here. Many more triply compatible Google Drive examples can be found here. More on PostScript here, more Beginner's Projects here, and a great heaping bunch of PS apps here.

December 29, 2020
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Time for our usual end-of-year predictions...

 Arrogant and abysmal herd stupidity
 clearly making covid much worse and
 dragging its kicking and screaming out
 much longer.

 Legislation to spank errant politicians and
 send them to bed without any supper to
 continue remaining stuck in legislative
 committee.

 A temporary stalling of pv price drops due
 to its finally beginning to approach long
 term renewability and sustainability. But to
 be dramatically decreased "real soon now"
 by emerging Perovskite technology.

 Stunning advances in drone sizes and
 costs rendering border walls utterly
 ludicrous. Especially for F150 tethered
 drones.

 The sudden elimination of the unintended
 consequence federal marijuana subsidies
 and farm price supports reducing prices
 down under the 59 cents per pound range.
 With tax revenues dropping a tad, perhaps
 only by four or five orders of magnitude.

 Cotton and marijuana farmers standardizing
 on 500 pound bales. With anything less
 being "personal use".

 Advancing conversion of coal fired power
 plants into singles bars.

 Stunning breakthroughs in quantum
 computing making highly disrupting
 cryptocurrency value generation nearly
 free and mind boggling fast.

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

 Hangnails 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.

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

December 28, 2020
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Yesterday's exploration of N 32.84634 W 109.81887 added significant credibility to it being a genuine and valid prehistoric canal.

But its proposed long and potentially spectacular route all the way from Cluff Ponds has some glaring and unsolved "holes" in it. As does its unknown destination. Despite dozens of research visits.

Your participation welcome.

Much more on all of our prehistoric hanging canals can be found  here, here, here, here, and a video here.

December 27, 2020
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Managed to make an update of our Word Frequency Analyzer triply Distiller-GhostScript-GoogleDrive compatible. Find the new sourcecode here, a demo here, and the older original tutorial here.

The main issues were redefining print commands that output to the .log file with printx ones that output to the main .pdf page. And, because of some unexplained odd behavior with Null Encode, replacing it with a friendlier but cruder routine.

A bunch of additional recently triply compatible programs appear here.

December 26, 2020
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I was under the impression that I had completely ran out of credible new places to put our prehistoric Bajada hanging canal discoveries. But the Quail Canal #108 study area just cropped up on Acme Mapper.

This is an artesian driven ( in, of all places, Artesia Arizona ) mile long plus class canal. It seems to have dried up, but once went from an artesian well northeast to a decent sized pond. As with many of the historic canals, this one credibly seems to have "stole the plans" from a prehistoric origin.

The origin of which is suggested but not yet proven. It is on posted private land, so I was unable as yet to get any images or contact the landowners or their family historians. Your input welcome.

More on all of our prehistoric hanging canals can be found  here, here, here, here, and a video here.

December 25, 2020
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Apparently GhostScript and Google Drive treat PostScript's Null Encode filter somewhat differently from Distiller. At least they were returning odd lower random counts in our ongoing word frequency code explorations.

So, this "Golly Gee Mister Science" mind bogglingly cute and exotic code to convert an array to a string...

 /makestring {dup length string dup
 /NullEncode filter3 -1 roll {1 index exch
  write} forall pop} def

...got replaced with this crude version that works here just fine...

 /makestring {/arr exch store arr length
 string /target exch store 0 1 arr length 1 sub
 { /posn exch store arr posn get /curval exch
 store target posn curval put } for target} store

Much more on PostScript's string and array manipulation here.

December 24, 2020
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Updated our whtnu15 blog to become more mobile friendly and rechecked most of its links and spelling. Please report any remaining problems.

Particularly important content were the early expansion of our Classic Reprints files and earlier major hanging canal discoveries and descriptions.

More on all of our prehistoric hanging canals can be found  here, here, here, here, and a video here.

December 23, 2020
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So, where are these canals? The majority of the denser and more sophisticated ones lie to Mount Graham's Northeast, exploiting streams from Stockton, Jacobson, Marijilda, Deadman, Frye, Ash, Shingle Mill, Lefthand, Nuttall, and Carter. Plus some artesian springs.

While most of these source on Coronado National Forest streams, the majority of their reaches are usually on BLM, state, and some private locations. Many are exceptionally well preserved, and a few even flow to this day. Some have been historically "steal the plans" rebuilt.

These are detailed on our other website resources with three useful mapping utilities being Acme Mapper, Google Earth, and Zoom Earth.

At present, the westernmost known canals are in Taylor and Tripp Canyons. Near the enigmatic UFO Fish Fillets. Plus an apparently isolated artesian Klondyke Road resource. The easternmost would presently be Jennings and a rumored companion. Southeastern most would be Veech in the P Ranch area.

South of Mount Graham would be understudied Hog Canyon, Grant Creek, and some possible Aravaiipa canals that may likely have prehistoric origins.

Reasonable and independent proofs that these are in fact canals and in fact prehistoric can be found here and elsewhere. With a video here.

December 22, 2020
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Present bajada hanging canal research is woefully understudied and under researched. We desperately need mentorable and especially younger researchers.

Ongoing goals are to add to the horrifically lacking field note documentation, Create a superb "flyable" KML map of the entire system, complete the image file editing, building up a library of drone videos, encourage archaeological field camps, and stir up more interest in the usual suspects.

You are most welcome to participate in this ongoing world class research.

Particularly if your vehicle already has Arizona Pinstriping,, you are a gonzo hiker who brings along your own catclaw and shin daggers, or are fast becoming a drone research expert.

Some existing catalog study areas can be found here..

Some independent projects you can work on you own appear here, here,here, and here.

Your feedback welcome. Please dump all of your excess drones in our driveway.

December 21, 2020
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Thought we might summarize where we are on the bajada hanging canals...

Mount Graham is unique in that it is the highest mountain in Arizona when measured from its base. It has a significant number of preannual streams, especially to the northeast.

In the CE 1350's, the safford basin attracted a "melting pot" of Native American individuals from Hohokam, Mimbres, Salado, Sinagua, Ancient Pueblo Peoples, and others.

It was recently discovered that these folks decided to successfully and completely exploit nearly every drop of Mount Graham water through a uniquely elaborate series of mountain stream derived canals.

Canals that exhibited exceptional engineering and were often "hung" on the sheer edges of bajada remnant mesas to brilliantly make their slope independent of terrain. Other exceptional features included watershed crossings (!), contra flowing, and aqueducts.

There are currently over one hundred study areas that are likely to reduce to several dozen canals serving a dozen or more watersheds. The present length is approaching 150 miles (!) and construction times are presently estimated at 250 man years.

Not only are the hanging structures of this scope and magnitude unique to the Southwest, they are apparently unknown elsewhere except on the island of Madeira

An earlier catalog of many of the canals can be found here. With its Wikipedia story here..

Much more on all of our prehistoric hanging canals can be found  here, here, here, here, and a video here. We'll look at these further in our next few posts.

December 20, 2020
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A reminder that an easy fix to .JPG edge "ghosting" is to use a mottled background. This confuses the ghosting algorithm with only a modest increase in file size.

Here are some knockout.bmp candidates. You are welcome to copy this file, but please do not link to our site as wallpaper!

A fancier vignetting solution that also does mottling can be found here. With zillions of examples here.

December 19, 2020
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It sure would be nice to use Google Drive as a free alternative to Acrobat Distiller. But very few PostScript programs will work out of the box without extensive modifications. Many initially appear to not be possible at all. Most especially ones not already Distiller debugged.

An ongoing collection of triply compatible Distiller-GhostScript-GoogleDrive Drive programs can be found here.

Some of the compatibility issues that need addressed are...

1. PostScript .log files are not immediately readable. Although there is apparently a method for admin users to view logs from other programs sent to Google Drive. PS log files are extremely useful to output ==, print, and pstack info. At the least, the log access needs much better documented. A crude and temporary sledgehammer workaround alternative can be found as #16 and #17 here.

2. PostScript files must start with something like %!ps and have no leading spaces. This is just easily attended to by plain old common sense.

3. I'd like my .psl files to behave the same as their .ps. Something vaguely akin to htaccess might do the job. At present, the .psl trailer was originally PostScript intended to identify the code as "me" with .psl routing to an editor, while .ps routes to real Distiller.

4. Error messages are unreadable. This is a variant on #1 above and can have a somewhat similar sledgehammer workaround. Correction is essential. Again, a crude and temporary sledgehammer workaround alternative can be found here as #16 and #17 here

5. The run command must be implemented for fancier PostScript programs. One key issue is telling Google Drive where to find the program to be run. This is especially important when PostScript is to access disk files or read and write in another language. Or when modifying bitmaps. Yeah, this does raise malware issues, but I feel the selective run access benefits utterly overwhelm.

6. Similarly, the disk file read and readline and write and write and writestring and various file commands need restored. This is particularly needed when modifying bitmaps or working around PostScript's 64K string limit.

7. Adobe and GhostScript seem to live in different font worlds. A"standard" set of baseline fonts should be agreed upon, combined with cross linked conversion directories of the more popular fonts.

8. I seem to be getting different responses to a NullEncode filter with Distiller and Drive. Substitute aversion code worked for one ap.

9. On GhostScript, long log output files are often truncated. A command line means to make a log file buffer longer without truncation should be much better documented.

10. Extending the run command to accept URL's might prove useful.

Your thoughts and ( especially ) solutions welcome.

December 18, 2020
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Prehistoric bajada hanging canals are hard to spot on web resources. But zoom earth has revealed this segment of the Jernigan Canal that was not nearly as obvious on Google Earth or Acme Mapper.

Note that the canal runs mid screen at a 45 degree bearing. The more obvious nearly vertical track is an apparently disused jeep trail.

Much more on all of our prehistoric hanging canals can be found  here, here, here, here, and a video here.

December 17, 2020
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In answer to an ever diminishing number of requests, here is my patent and my thesis.

The latter was an elaborate scam to con an aerospace company to pay a university to convince me to write a treasure hunter story for cash. Per the "reverse cash flow" concept elaborated upon here.

Much more on "let others pay you for your fun" here. And on the utter ludicrosity of patents for individuals and small scale startups here.

December 16, 2020
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A reminder that stack overflow is an outstanding forum to get instant solutions to most any software problem.

December 15, 2020
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Haven't mentioned our Word Frequency Analysis as an Authoring Tool for a while. Find the tutorial here, the tutorial sourcecode here, the utility sourcecode here, and a utility demo here.

This is really useful for an author to find out if they have gotten into a rut and reused certain words or phrases more than they normally would be reasonably expected.

The code is swift enough to actually read and process "raw" .psl sourcecode. Commands get eliminated by isolating strings and trapping them out. It should be modifiable to work with most any text situation.

As usual, send the .psl file to Distiller via the secret Windows command line incantation of //acrodist /F. The present version can be used with GhostScript.

The easiest way to use a modified version on most .pdf files is to output the file as text first.

Sourcecode has been newly rewritten to tow along yesterday's mergestr routine. In this specific case, eliminating the need for running the Gonzo utilities.

The code should be easily modified for Google Drive compatibility. And is is presently limited to a 65K max input string. Yes, we are working on both of these issues and both should be solvable. .

December 14, 2020
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Here's the PostScript code... 

/mergestr {2 copy length exch length add string dup dup 4 3 roll 4 index length exch putinterval 3 1 roll exch 0 exch putinterval} store

...which merges the two top strings on the stack. Its part of our Gonzo Utilities or Gonzo Tutorial. Needed a handy copy for tomorrow's post

December 13, 2020
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There's a new drink made from beer and nitrous oxide.

It is called a brew ha ha.

December 12, 2020
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One of the "features" of out-of-the-box GhostScript is that .log files are often truncated to several hundred lines total.

Which is usually fine for error messages, but if you are purposely creating intentional log output with == or print or pstack, this may end up throwing the baby away and forcing you to drink the washwater.

I suspect there is a simple command line workaround to lengthen the size of a GhostScript .log buffer, but I have not yet found it.

Perhaps the answer lies here. Please email me your solution.

December 11, 2020
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The phone responsive revisions to whtnu15.shtml are taking a lot longer than I expected. We are just over halfway there. But you can follow its progress here. With the wide original archived here.

Hallmarks of the 2015 blog were expanding major discoveries for our hanging canals and major reprint additions.

Much more on all of our prehistoric hanging canals can now be found here,here, here, here, and a video here. More on the reprints here.

December 10, 2020
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How to tell an extroverted engineer: They stare at your shoes rather than at their own.

More here. And especially here.

December 9, 2020
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A fourth free, secret, and "heavy" program is our log_an1.psl example that uses PostScript to read and detailed analyze files generated by another language! Find the code here and an example here.

This specific program works closely with the /stats directory reports of Fatcow. Who daily report your response. These are normally .FTP downloaded with Filezilla. And then decoded with Winzip into a moo.tinajacom or similar file.

As with yesterday's post, the log_an1.psl gets sent to Acrobat Distiller via a command line secret incantation of  //acrodist /F. This program makes heavy use of PostScript's ability to read disk files and to write .log files.

Our program reads the decompressed moo.tinajacom and extracts useful data arrays. From there it does a detailed analysis that goes far beyond normally ISP stats. Including full group sorting and detailed malware analysis.

Such as this sample.

December 8, 2020
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A third free, secret, and "heavy" program is our ps_writes_SHTML example that uses PostScript to write code modules in another language! Find the code here and an example here.

This specific example creates new .SHTML boiler plate when updating old blogs to newly become mobile responsive. Such as this before and after that is dramatically shortening the total rework time of dozens of blog files needing revisions.

As with yesterday's post, the PS_Writes_SHTML gets sent to Acrobat Distiller via a command line secret incantation of  //acrodist /F.

This code should also be both GhostScript and Google Drive compatible. Some font changes may be needed with these alternate programs. More Google Drive compatible PostScript programs can be found here.

The concept is quite simple: A zillion programmed show statements are created for a new log file. These are then copied and pasted into the new .SHTML blog revisions.

There are three parts to the generation: The previous December, the current year January to December, and the next year's January. All of the print statements are routine low level code. The code can get revised for different years with Wordpad or most any other word processor.

One gotcha: The two character (< sequence is reserved in PostScript. Use ( < instead. So is >). Replace it with > ). SHTML, of course, is very heavily carat oriented.

Note that the "extra" commands in each entry are a lot more easier to delete than they are to enter typing by hand or cutting and pasting..

December 7, 2020
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A second free, secret, and "heavy" program is our Vignetting Auto Backgrounder. Find the PostScript code here and use examples here.

This takes an already retouched, perspective corrected, cropped, multi exposure compensated, and otherwise niceified .BMP bitmap and knocks out its background. At the same time mottling the background to dramatically reduce any later .JPG edge artifacts, significantly sharpening edge focus and alignment, improving perspective correction, and optionally adding an "old fashioned" edge vignette background. Again, many examples here.

As with yesterday's post, the vignetting autobackgrounder is designed to be used exclusively with .BMP bitmaps and is sent to Acrobat Distiller via a command line secret incantation of  //acrodist /F. The /F is particularly important since disk files are being read and written.

Rule #1 of its use is that all red=255 colors must be initially and ruthlessly stomped out. This is most easily done with free Imageviewer 32 and backing off one red click of color balance. Failure to do this can cause "punchthru" and similar uglies. It is also super important you make no further contrast or color or scale changes until the backgrounding is complete. Paint's brushes are also a no-no.

You then pick a red=255 color for outline and fill. As any value of blue or green is allowed, your stock Paint yellow should works just fine.

You then carefully outline your subject. Only the innermost outline pixel counts, so variable outline width is allowed. Rule #2 is that your outline must be complete and unbroken and there must not be any red=255 pixels outside of the outline space. Such as wayward pixels or white space from any size change.

The algorithm works by starting at the left edge, heading east, and replacing line pixels with chosen and randomly mottled values until it reaches the first occurrence of its last contiguous red=255 value.

It then goes to the right edge, heading west. Then from the top heading south, and, finally, from the bottom edge, heading north.

A gotcha leads to Rule #3. The algorithm has no way to reach undercuts or internal fills. So any of these often rare incidents have to be custom filled with "extra" red=255 values.

Forcing "pixel perfect" horizontal and vertical lines can both improve the perceived sharpness and otherwise complete any "not quite there" perspective correction.

Vignetting gets optionally done by using the "real" electric fields math we found here and here.

After completion, your image can be converted to .JPG after resizing and adjusting gamma, contrast, and brightness. One click of sharpening can sometimes improve text, but a little of this goes a very long way.

The mottling dramatically reduces .jpg edge artifacts by eliminating any repetitive background code. Done with only a slight increase in file size.

As before, you make a new copy of the program and then tell it the names of your input .BMP and the new name to be backgrounded. You also pick a color for the randomized mottling to center on. From these choices.

December 6, 2020
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Architects 2D Perspective is one of our free, secret, and "heavy" programs that is especially suited for eBay photography. But also doubles at straightening out leaning telephone poles or building sides.

Its intended purpose is making lines that are intended to be vertical truly so. Find the PostScript sourcecode here and its many use examples here.

It is designed to be used exclusively with .BMP bitmaps and is sent to Acrobat Distiller via a command line secret incantation of  //acrodist /F. The /F is particularly important since disk files are being read and written.

Our eBay photos often start out being shot with a high megapixel and tripod mounted camera outdoors in highly diffused moderate shade. Sometimes helped along with a white reflector on the "darker" side.

The image is then cropped to slightly over its intended final size and rotated so its mid image is vertical and there is a balance between the "lean" on the left and right hand subject sides. I use free Imageviewer 32 for this.

A new copy of our Architects 2D Perspective is made and renamed. Wordpad or most any text editor is then used to tell the program the host based name and location of your .BMP sourcefile and your intended tilt free .BMP destination file. Be sure these file names are different!

You also tell the program where your neutral vertical axis is to be, with /htiltaxis 0.5 as a default. You tell the program /howmuchtilt correction you want, with values in the .05 to .15 range being reasonable. Several other parameters are also adjustable from their default values.

The program expands the bottom horizontal bitmap lines and compresses the upper ones for positive /howmuchtilt values. Instead, negative values can be used if you want to compress the bottom lines and expand the upper ones.

The expansion and compression is on horizontal  lines only. Optionally ( and rarely ) you can rotate your bitmap 90 degrees, correct the other axis, and then rotate back to get nearly perfect alignment both in the horizontal and vertical direction on appropriately rectangular subjects..

December 5, 2020
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I still use good old paint for our eBay photo processing. I particularly like its second order curve feature ( that "sideways s" in shapes ) as a fast and convenient alternative to full cubic splines.

There is one tiny infuriating detail that you might pick up on: When you use the box or free-form selection, sometimes it changes its size, and sometimes it moves. How can you tell them apart?

It turns out that your cursor is highly mouse position sensitive. The up down arrow will let you change the box or closed curve size, as will the left right arrow. The four diagonal arrows will let you expand or compress the full box.

But only the "crossed right arrows" will let you tow the box around!

Using the crossed right arrows by themselves tows the box around . With the control key down, the box gets copied instead.

It is super important to mouse around inside the selection to make sure you get the cursor option you need. A very few small selections may not give you all options and may need retried as a different shape.

There's a newer and updated paint version available per details here, but I still like the plain old original version.

December 4, 2020
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Here a reminder of what semilog plots are used for in the first place:

 A*B is a product in linear space, while
 logA+logB is a sum in semilog space.

You can verify this on your K&E duplex decitrig.

December 3, 2020
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Here's where the magic semilog number of 1.0471296 came from a few days back.

 In a linear system, steps are constant width.
 In a semilog system, steps are constant percent

We thus seek a solution of .100* x^100 with a goal of a 10.000 answer.

The 10 because the first decade here goes from 0.1 to 1 and the second from 1 to 10. You can check your work if step 50 here gets you exactly 1.0000.

Fancy log math can be used to find this value for x, but plain old trial and error is more intuitive. Start with a guess of, perhaps, 1.04. Get your answer to accurately converge on 10.000.

Different magic numbers will be needed for more or fewer decades. Or for more or fewer data increments.

More math stuff in this work-in-progress here

December 2, 2020
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A suddenly erratic mouse scroll wheel is more likely electrical or mechanical, rather than being malware or a virus.

 1. Try replacing the battery.
 2. Try blowing on the wheel.
 3. Try no-residue contact cleaner.
 4. Clean and reseat wireless USB receiver.
 5. Try replacing mouse with same model.
 6. You may have to replace the keyboard
  as well if it shares the USB receiver.

December 1, 2020
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Portions of our Jernigan Canal explorations do remain a mystery after dozens of exploratory trips. I sure could use your help on this.

Things start off just fine with its branch from the Mud Springs canal at N 32.82786 W 109.81962 and continue easily traced to the "yellow sign" track intercept at N 32.83689 W 109.81497.

From there to the Layton Crossing at N 32.82953 W 109.81868, hard evidence is sorely lacking although it seems likely that much of the route used a largely unmodified natural drainage. Photo evidence hints at N 32.83123 W 109.81620  and N 32.83173 W 109.81698 don't seem to make much sense.

The Layton Waterbar credibly overrides the canal north until is resumes easily traced portions at N 32.83789 W 109.81520. This continues north to a mysterious western branch at N 32.83912 W 109.81516 that may or may not be historic and might not even be related.

A well defined segment centers immediately west of Layton Road at N 32.84011 W 109.81276 and there may in fact be two unverified parallel channels in this area. The next well defined area appears to be a northern branch at N 32.84232 W 109.81396 whose destination appears unknown after it vanishes after a hundred or so feet further north.

The main route has both a well defined hanging portion and a large tree mid channel around N 32.84184 W 109.81424 It vanishes for a hundred feet or so, possibly explained as wash flood damage. Only to resume as a very obvious and highly traceable hanging portion that ends in a possible French Drain somewhere near N 32.83991 W 109.81737.

The destination seems likely to be some flat fields in the area and, while still unproven, seems more credible than most of the other canals.

In its spare time, this canal makes four "U" turns and includes at least one counterflowing wash crossing. In incredibly hostile terrain.

The CE 1350's engineering on this utterly boggles the mind. Even neglecting it is only a secondary branch in a system that may end up exceeding 150 miles or more and completely surrounding Mount Graham..

Here are some hanging canal projects you can run on through in your spare time. The entire area is woefully understudied and underfunded. Please drop any spare drones in my driveway.

Much more on all of our prehistoric hanging canals can now be found here, here, here, here, and a video here.

November 30, 2020
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I still need a scanned copy of  the Hexadecimal Chronicles so we can offer it as a free ebook.

Yeah, something had to end up at the bottom of the pile. But the text is historically significant as it was one of the very first to be completely authored and typeset by an Apple IIe using AppleWriter.

Helped along by a Diablo 630.

Untouched by human hands and ridiculously cheaper, faster, and more accurate than previous prepress book methods involving major tabular data!

November 29, 2020
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Many of our eBooks are available for free download here.

The six most popular are...

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

Some of these are also available via World Radio History.

Autographed hard copies of a few of these are still available here.

November 28, 2020
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A reminder that we have great heaping bunches of hard-to-find items on eBay. Many of which involve older or vintage electronics and related components.

We have very fast and optionally combined shipping. Along with a perfect feedback rating.

Check out our "kiss your onager goodbye" nuclear holocaust fashion accessories in particular. We believe we have the entire world's remaining supply of these. All of which do remain in absolutely mint condition.

November 27, 2020
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Here is how to relate two decades of semilog data when plotting a graph...

/setfreqlist {
mark
0.1 100 { dup 1.0471296 mul } repeat ]
/freqlist exch store
   } store

...and here is how you get the semilog input value for linear data point #47...

freqlist 47 get

... and here is how you scale to 40 pixels of total width...

/posn 47 2.5 div store

Note that the semilog data is linearly presented in graph space.

Code, of course, is written in PostScript. And should be Google Drive compatible. For other languages create an appropriate array.

Values are shown for 100 data points from 0.1 to 10. To raise or lower the number of points, change the loop value. To change the number of decades, change the magic number. Trial and error works good here.

We have some heavy duty examples of this work in progress here. A tutorial on log plots can be found here. With many other topics here.

November 26, 2020
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Our .psl PostScript files are intended to be run by sending them to Acrobat Distiller via a command line secret incantation of //acrodist /F. The /F is particularly important whenever files are being read or written.

Running .psl and similar files on Google Drive is tricky and sometimes may not be possible. We have pre modified and carefully tested these files for triple Distiller-Ghost-Google compatibility.

Here are some things to explore when you try to run postscript code on Google Drive...

 0 - Try it to see if it works.
 1. - File must have either a .ps or .psl trailer.
 2. - File must start with %! or similar.
 3. - File must have no leading spaces!
 4. - Avoid all new log file generation
 5. - Avoid all print, pstack and = = commands.
 5.-  Make sure the code works on Distiller!
 6. - Excerpt or copy Gonzo rather than run.
 7. - Work around all disk reads or writes.
 8. - Try a simpler or pretested file.

Here is a work in progress practice file. It should run on Google Drive just fine displayed as PDF and drop back to .psl when you click on Anyfile Notepad.

Several heavy duty compatibility issues are addressed here as #5, #8, #15, #16, #17, and #26.

November 25, 2020
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Made some progress in our new lowpass filter study. More details should hopefully show up in a few days.

One rude surprise: The 3 Decibel Chebycheff filter requires a second order section with some excess "headroom" of 15 db or so!. This could easily limit your dynamic range. At the very least, make sure the low damped second order section follows rather than leads. This also may raise component sensitivity issues.

A "good" fourth order lowpass is the "slight dips" one. No extra lumps, no headroom issues, reasonable tolerances, and reasonably close falldown. I predict the "best" one is a "gentle rise" variant that will only end up only negligibly better.

A reminder that free Active Filter Cookbooks can be downloaded here with autographed for sale hard copies here.

November 24, 2020
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Little known insider secrets of totally trashing vehicle electrolysizers can be found here.

November 23, 2020
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Those awful pun punchlines are found here, the very first origin of WTF here, the 1:1 scale outdoor model railroad layout here, Bruno here, New Mexico port of entry solutions here, federal spam elimination here, and four pawing enameled groundswill here.

Plus, of course, Marcia Swampfelder here.

November 22, 2020
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 The Bitmap File Format details are found here.

November 21, 2020
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Are there any "lost" or "undiscovered" active filter shapes?

Our free Active Filter Cookbook download tells us a fourth order lowpass filter consists of a cascaded pair of second order sections. These are sent four of an infinitely possible number of data values. Two frequency and two damping.

Often, these values are found by factoring a fourth order polynomial. Only a very few polynomials are popular out of the infinite possibilities. Can we do better? Or even just different?

Consider this revised older plot.  A new fat blue lowpass response shape we might call "gentle rise" was found by splitting the difference between Lagrange and Slight Dips.

"Shake the box" and "Throw another million calculations at it" can be used to find anything hidden or new. And then optimized by randomized jittering.

November 20, 2020
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Science magazine for  November 13, 2020 has some significant new papers on alternatives to vapor driven HVAC systems.

Dramatic efficiency improvements and new alternatives here would seem the next big things.

November 19, 2020
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A video on the back story on World Radio History can be newly found here.

November 18, 2020
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Updated and expanded our Gila Valley Dayhikes page. We now have 584 main entries.

Be sure to catch the 1:1 scale outdoor model railroad layout. The level of detail here is utterly astonishing. You can't tell it from the real thing. Yet it still allows pointlessly running around in circles.

Visitors are unlikely to be welcome.

November 17, 2020
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My unauthorized autobiography can be found here.

November 16, 2020
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The key "horse's mouths" paper on Active filters is Sallen and Key. Find a free link here and yet another here.

This paper was the basis for my Active Filter Cookbook. Found here with Manny of our other free eBooks. And other free reprints here.

Autographed Active Filter copies here. Some other sources will remove the autograph for you with a mere $68.35 surcharge.

November 15, 2020
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Enlarged and colorized our main menu selector, expanded its coverage, and made it an include.

So far, I've only got it on blog 20. We will ripple it through to all the other sites after some dust settles. And as other revisions get made.

Your comments welcome.

November 14, 2020
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Books on GhostScript seem few and far between. Here are some alternate resources...

 Main GhostScript web site
 GhostScript Readme
 GhostScript Overview
 GhostScript at the PostScript language
 Command Line Incantations
 Hidden GhostScript PS Commands
 Artifex info Profile
 Reporting Available Fonts
 Archival Docs
 FAQ's
 GS Man Page
 GhostScript User Manual
 Finding PostScript Fonts
 GhostScript Coding Guidelines

November 13, 2020
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Mount Graham Aerial Tramway info is included in our newly revised tinaja questing web page

November 12, 2020
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Here's an updated list of our recent triply compatible Distiller-GoogleDrive-GhostScript utilities and apps...

 #30 - Grid Gonzo Excerpt   source  •  demo

 #29 - Grid Gonzo Full      source  •  demo
 #28 - Binary k of n ones  source • demo • log
 #27 - Simple Sinewave Gen    source • demo
 #26 - PS Writes SHTML!     source • demo

 #25 - Marbelous 333              source • demo
 #24 - The ultimate bagel          source • demo
 #23 - Rope-a-Dope                source • demo
 #22 - Spherical Transforms     source • demo
 #21 - Poison Ivy Spray Can    source • demo 

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

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

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

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

As always, these work best by sending a command line //acrodist /F to Acrobat Distiller.

November 11, 2020
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I may have a solution to those infuriating lower right big malware ads that don't even work...

 1.  Click Chrome upper right three dots.
 2.  Click on Settings.
 3.  Scroll down and click on Advanced.
 4. View Privacy and Security
 5. Click on Site Settings
 6. Click on Notifications
 7. Scroll down to Allow.
 8. Remove any non-embedded allows.

If that does not work, try dragging and dropping the ad to exit stage right. Sometimes that is all you need. Other times you'll have to click through dozens of times till you get a new ad screen. But beware exiting that new screen as it may also take out your previous work.

Its too early to tell for sure, and your mileage may vary. Please report any feedback.

November 10, 2020
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The .shtml answer to subroutines are called includes. They are particularly useful when one include file automatically updates many different web pages.

The usual format is...

 <!-- begin main menu -->
 <!--#include virtual="/includes/file.shtml"-->
 <!-- end main menu -->

One warning: If you use includes, what you upload will be different from what your viewers download. A bug hidden in an include often might end up non obvious and hard to find.

November 9, 2020
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Here are four of our .psl "Golly Gee Mister Science" heavy lifters...

Architects 2D Perspective Correction --
 Modifies a bitmap for eBay or elsewhere and
 makes all intended vertical lines truly vertical.
 Many result examples here.

Vignetting Auto Backgrounder --
 Masks an eBay bitmap or elsewhere to an
 outline, and substitutes mottled backgrounds.
 Also significantly eases .jpg artifacts. Many
 result examples here.

WebSite Logfile Detailed Analyzer --
 Takes a daily web status report such such as
  moo.tinajacom derived from ???date.gz in
 the fatcow stats folder and does a thorough
 study of trends, users, files, and even malware
 attempts such as this sample output.

PostScript to Write in Another Language --
 In this case, directly writes .shtml code that can
 greatly simplify updating and making older
 web pages more responsive. Example here.

You will need to edit these files for suitable links or options and then send your.psl code to Acrobat Distiller via a command line secret incantation of //acrodist /F.

Note that Acrobat is newly available at low monthly rental rates in several cloud offers.

November 8, 2020
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     Engineering Ratholes.

November 7, 2020
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These days, there are at least three ways to use PostScript as a general purpose computer language: You can send your code to Acrobat Distiller via a command line of //acrodist /F. Or you can use GhostScript. Or you can use Google Drive.

The latter two are free but are very fussy over what they consider acceptable PostScript code. I've been trying to rework at least some of our free PostScript programs to upgrade for triple compatibility. Including these.

Here is how yesterday's /showbits proc can be modified for triple compatibility....

 /Helvetica findfont 10 scalefont setfont
 /xleft 10 store /ytop 700 store
 /stepswide 8 store /yinc 12 store
 /xpos xleft store /ypos ytop store
 /posn 0 store /usingGoogleDrive true
 store  xpos ypos moveto

 /showbits {
  usingGoogleDrive not {dup == } if
  show ( ) show  /posn posn 1 add store
  posn stepswide ge {/xpos xleft store
  /posn 0 store /ypos ypos yinc sub store
  xpos ypos moveto } if} store

Use our Gonzo Utilities and Tutorials instead for serious apps. As found here, its tutorial here, a video here, secret insider stuff here, and much more on PostScript here.

And the primary reference document here.

The new "k ones in word n" can be found here, with its .pdf file here, and (when available) its log file here.

November 6, 2020
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Here is a revised program that finds all binary numbers of length n that have k ones in it...

 /onesinword 5 store
 /wordsize 10 store
 /maxsize 2 wordsize exp cvi store
 /counter 0 store

 /showbits {==} store  % enhance or edit

 maxsize 1 maxsize 2 mul 1 sub {
  2 20 string cvrs 1 wordsize getinterval
  /cur exch store mark 0 cur {48 sub} forall ]
  /ar1 exch store  0 ar1 {add} forall
 onesinword eq {cur showbits /counter
 counter 1 add store} if } for

( Binomial Count Total:) showbits
counter 10 string cvs showbits showpage

It is far faster, simpler, ridiculously shorter, and much more intuitively obvious than the original. As shown, it takes "real" PostScript sent to Acrobat Distiller.

But the next post will show us how easy it is to make it triply Distiller-GhostScript-GoogleDrive compatible.

For comparison, the ancient old original can still be found here.

And, of course, the new version is based on our mantra of "throw another million calculations at it". More math stuff in this work-in-progress here

November 5, 2020
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There is one easily fixed detail when creating PostScript binary strings: Leading zeros may be suppressed.

The workaround non-obvious and sneaky stunt is is to make sure you have an "extra" leading one and then remove it later. Such as this example which generates all the binary strings from decimal 0 to 1023...

 0 1024 add 1 1023 1024 add {
 2 20 string cvrs
 1 10 getinterval
 ==
 } for

November 4, 2020
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The cvrs PostScript operator makes it trivially easy to create and use binary strings...

 659 2 10 string cvrs ---> (1010010011)

November 3, 2020
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Overheard some alternate energy enthusiasts who were lavishly praising Sterling Engines as the ultimate solution to low delta-t energy recovery.

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

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

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

    Efficiency Matters --As efficiency goes down,
    the size and complexity of the energy recovery
    device will disproportionately increase in a
    hyperbolic or worse manner for a given set of
    recovery values. Which is why absolutely free
    pv solar panels of less than 6% efficiency are
    totally commercially useless.

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

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

Much more in our Energy Fundamentals tutorial.
and on our newer Energy Webpage.

November 2, 2020
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Outside of that Missus Lincoln, how was the play?

November 1, 2020
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An almost complete list of all our PostScript programs can be found here.

October 31, 2020
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Insider info on converting between PostScript strings, integers, arrays, and dictionaries can be found here.

And our PostScript show and tell here. And the beginner stuff here. And all our "secrets" columns here.

October 30, 2020
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Our Gonzo utilities can be found here, its tutorial here, a video here, secret insider stuff here, and much more on PostScript here.

And the primary reference document here.

October 29, 2020
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Several users have reported a strange bug in onesword.psl that is driving me up the wall.

Procs 0 8k0 down to 0 3k0 seem to work just fine, but proc 2k0 leaves its last 6 of 70 report strings partially unprocessed and incomplete.

Bizarre reporting includes = = barfing on undefined string characters, but /bitsinword (zzzzzzzzzz) store only masks the  real problem.

Which is likely some re-entrant code bug. Or reuse of a variable. Or the usual maddeningly subtle string dereferencing insidious bug.

This could be a major test of your PostScript skills. Can you help?

October 28, 2020
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A review of binomial coefficients can be found here.

The "colorizer" in the same story is pretty much out of date and is best replaced with our Web Friendly PostScript and CSS colors.

October 27, 2020
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Rewrote and recycled our ancient onesword.psl that generates all binary words of length "n" that have "k" ones in them. Find the sourcecode here and the generated log file here.

October 26, 2020
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Discovered a whole new class of low end triangle digital sinewaves. Sadly, these new candidates are pretty much plowed ground that do not give us much in the way of additional interesting results.

Consider our previously "best in class" winning cosine ...

[14 13 11 8 4 0 -4 -8 -11 -13 -14 -14 -13 -11 -8 -4 0 4 8 11 13 14]

Note that it exactly hits zero twice. You can alternately "bridge" your zeros and still avoid a dc term thusly...

[12 11 9 6 2 -2 -6 -9 -11 -12 -12 -11 -9 -6 -2 2 6 9 11 12]

This is slightly faster but missing an exact hit on a cosine's zeros might not be a very good idea. Further, no lower distortions were discovered, but one new zero third was.

An internal exploratory sourcecode and generated log can be found here.

More details on the "unsplit" original can be found here. With its sourcecode here and a supplemental log file here.

October 25, 2020
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Zoom.Earth is an interesting alternative to Google.Earth or Acme.Mapper.

Several of our yet unexplored bajada hanging canal candidate segments ( such as Allen, North Taylor, or Tripp ) seem a lot more obvious. Others appear larger and more complex ( such as the UFO Fish Fillets ). But yet others ( such as the Grids shown here with Acme Mapper ) appear uselessly almost invisible.

Meanwhile, your help is needed in finding some directories of Lidar maps. Such as the Reay Canal which likely runs vertically diagonally mid image here.

Much more on all of our prehistoric hanging canals can be found  here, here, here, here, and a video here.

October 24, 2020
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Our latest Math Stuff page update isn't quite finished, but enough of it is finished that you can preview it here.

Please report any errors or omissions.

October 23, 2020
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Here's a summary of Oregon Rural Property Zoning.

A reminder that we have a steep to sloping last available developable 20 acre outstanding Gold Hill view property listed here and on Craig's List.

October 22, 2020
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A corrected link to the Arizona Highway Mile Markers can be found here.

A most curious glitch: Ten miles are "missing" just outside Pima. The cause was when US 70 was rerouted from the Calva Road to straight across the res and across the new Gila bridge..

Much more on Arizona Hikes here and here. And the ultimate hike ( for gonzo canyoneering and swimmer TEAMS only! ) here. You can't get there from here.

October 21, 2020
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Six more low end digital sinewaves...

     (32-34-06) can be doubled to (64-34-06)
     (32-34-06) can be tripled to (96-34-06)
     (33-34-06) can be doubled to (66-34-06)
     (33-34-06) can be tripled to (96-34-06)
     (59-46-08) can be doubled to (118-46-08)
     (60-46-08) can be doubled to (120-46-08)

More details can be found here. With sourcecode here and a supplemental log file here.

It is not clear how many candidates are still hiding, but any new major improvements are deemed unlikely.

October 20, 2020
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The next "really big thing" appears likely to be major improvements in HVAC efficiency.

Modern vapor 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.

The latest October 2, 2020 issue of Science Magazine includes two papers on what appear to be major new discoveries in electrocalorics.

Yeah, breakthroughs of the week tend to have a half life of 6.99 days. But these papers appear to challenge vapor HVAC on their own turf.

At the very least, electrocalorics should make a sure fire winning student paper. There's also magnetocalorics, but these seem presently stuck in a rut.

October 19, 2020
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A reminder that an unexpected "improved" bubble sort can be found here.

What it does is terminate loops if no change takes place. Naturally, there is no way to beat the worst case performance, but in your typical ap where data is already partially sorted, the improvement can end up most worthwhile.

October 18, 2020
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Another Jim Neely paper has been newly uploaded here.

Much more on our prehistoric hanging canals here, here, here, here, and a video here.

October 17, 2020
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A demo of our latest catalog and directory of our Triangle Series low end digital sinewaves can be found here. With its sourcecode here and a supplemental log file here.

Earlier work can be found here, here, and here. Again with each having .pdf, .psl, and .log variants.

October 16, 2020
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Just because it is there, I guess.

Visitors are unlikely to be welcome at this 1:1 Scale Outdoor Model Railroad layout.

The level of detail is so utterly astonishing on this 100 percent authentic site that you flat out can't tell it from the real thing.

October 15, 2020
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Complete single file indexes of several versions of Popular Electronics, Radio Electronics, and a few others newly appear here.

These are useful to find historic long term author contributions.

October 14, 2020
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Then there's this third party Son of Bride of Cheap Video update here.

With free downloads of our Cheap Video Cookbook and Son of Cheap Video here. Plus the TV Typewriter Cookbook and rest of the gang.

And the original TV Typewriter story here.

October 13, 2020
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A little known and seldom used triangle series forms the basis of the original Byte generators as well as our tools for exploring fancier new candidates of low end digital sinewaves.. It is somewhat similar to but different from a Fibonacci Series|.

The triangle series consists of the sum of its two previous terms. As in...

  0 1 3 6 10 15 21 28 36 45 55 66 78....

It is called a triangular series in that each successive "n" can be arranged into an equilateral triangle. The most common use is finding the total number of connections between n objects. And usually expressed as n(n+1)/2.

We looked at this as Column #85 here..

The neat thing about a triangle series for cosine approximation is that it puts the "little pieces" on the "more bent" portions of the curve|, and vice versa. And thus has enormous potential for minimizing distortion.

Much more here.

October 12, 2020
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Here is a corrected revision to our updated and modified newly altered improved repurposed extension to our GuruGram main library directory...

  #118 -- Some New"Fat Tail Arrow" Utilities
  #119 -- Web Friendly PS & CSS Colors
  #120 -- Apple Assembly Cookbook I and II
  #121 -- Little Known Gila Valley Dayhikes
  #122 -- Saga of the Magic Lamp
  #123 -- Magic Lamp Original Bogus Paper
  #124 -- Prehistoric Bajada Canals of SE AZ
  #125 -- Glyphs Hanging Canal Summary
  #126 -- Enameled Groundswill Fourpaws
  #127 -- JFA Bajada hanging canal preprint
  #128 -- My ARA Video
  #129 -- Simplified Fourier Analyzer
  #130 -- Heavy Duty Fourier Analyzer
  #131 -- Hanging Canal Image Directory
  #132 -- Low End Digital Sinewaves

October 11, 2020
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Enameled Dealing with Four Paws and Groundswill.

October 10, 2020
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Was there ever a Thatcher train depot and where was it?

This eBay postcard suggests so, while this one tells us this Pima terminal ( once south across from Bush and Shurtz ) was clearly a similar but obviously different structure. And, by default, no Arizona town could exist in the early 1900's without a train station. For this is around which all of the merchandise, mail, and travel took place.

Wikipedia tells us the train was originally Southern Pacific until 1924 to later become the Arizona Eastern. And this obscure "map" variant on acme.com tells us all the Gila Valley depot sidings were labeled as SP while the main line was labeled Arizona Eastern.

This would put the terminal at Fertizona, near N 32.84801 W 109.77076 where the siding apparently still sees minor use today. No traces of the depot seem to remain.

I'd like to add this to our Gila Hikes, but I feel a little more independent and solid evidence might be appropriate. Can you help?

October 9, 2020
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Here's a collection of "magnified" low end digital sinewave generators, presented as size-speed-sinclip 3H THD3-9...

 [14-22-04 0.0 0.39]   % ZERO 3rd 1x mag
 [28-22-04 0.0 0.39]   % ZERO 3rd 2x mag
 [32-22-04 0.0 0.39]   % ZERO 3rd 3x mag
 [56-22-04 0.0 0.39]   % ZERO 3rd 4x mag
 [70-22-04 0.0 0.39]   % ZERO 3rd 5x mag
 [84-22-04 0.0 0.39]   % ZERO 3rd 6x mag
 [98-22-04 0.0 0.39]   % ZERO 3rd 7x mag
 [112-22-04 0.0 0.39] % ZERO 3rd 8x mag
 [126-22-04 0.0 0.39] % ZERO 3rd 9x mag

The latest version of our low end digital sinewave generator that uses either triangle series or table lookup can be found here with its sourcecode here and a supplemental logfile here.

And, of course, more on PostScript here and our unique high end digital sinewave generators here. With its fast calculator here.

October 8, 2020
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Yes, there seem to be a very few Hohokam hanging canals, so they do in fact exist. But only coincidentally and not in any manner as a major engineering concept or world class unique design feature.

One Phoenix hanging canal can be found here and an important Neil Judd paper on his aerial canal surveys can be found here. In the Safford area, the San Jose hanging canal seems somewhat more Hohokam oriented and Gila River derived. Per details here  and here.

Much more on our prehistoric hanging canals here, here, here, here, and a video here.

October 7, 2020
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Just uploaded a copy of the new Brad Hodges TV Typewriter video to our website.

I believe this is Creative Commons, but please contact Brad directly for any intended reuse.

Meanwhile, our Hanging Canal Video can be found here and our Introduction to PostScript Video here.

Three recommended third party videos are this First use of WTF, the "must watch" Xylophone Duet, and, of course, the Tuboencabulator.

October 6, 2020
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Some hints of a possible extension of the Allen Prehistoric Hanging Canal can be found at N 32.84228 W 109.80207.

This has yet to be field checked and remains up for grabs. A much earlier set of field notes appears here.

Access would be via a two mile class hike or an ATV. Or send your drone instead.

Much more on our prehistoric hanging canals here, here, here, here, and a video here.

Your help welcome here. Papers, talks, and tours available subject to CoVid considerations.

October 5, 2020
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How to totally trash a vehicle electrolysizer here. With bunches more on other hydrogen stupidities here.

The key summary on hydrogen: It ain't gonna happen.

October 4, 2020
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The latest version of our low end digital sinewave generator that uses either triangle series or table lookup can be found here with its demo here and a supplemental logfile here.

Older versions of the above files still appear as -a or -b.

And, of course, more on PostScript here and our unique high end digital sinewave generators here. With its fast calculator here.

October 3, 2020
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Golly Gee Mister Science!

Just found yet another low end digital sinewave generator. This one is exceptionally clean, fast, and compact. And may be unique and previously unknown.

Consider this digital "cosine" wave..

 [ 14 13 11 8 4 0 -4 -8 -11 -13 -14
  -14 -13 -11 -8 -4 0 4 8 11 13 14 ]

Integrated from this internal digital quarter of this triangle series"sine" wave...

  [ -1 -2 -3 -4 -4 .... ]

Or directly extracted from an astonishingly short table lookup. Or the reuse of an even shorter quarter table.

Amazingly, there is a ZERO third and ninth harmonics and a very weak fifth harmonic. Much of the distortion is an easily filtered seventh. There's also a 21st and 23rd harmonic, but these should be easily dealt with.

Yeah, the amplitude sucks. But you can multiply every integer by 2 through 9 without changing the harmonic content.

The original size is 14 and the unchanging speed is 22.

Since the sample rate is a very crude 16.3 degrees, this is more suitable for generating analog sinewaves after a simple filtering.

October 2, 2020
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A prediction: The imminent elimination of all of those traditionally outrageous "unintended consequence" federal farm subsidies and price supports dropping marijuana pricing into the 59 cents per pound range.

Present unintended subsidies are and have long been, of course, ridiculously higher than on any other agricultural or farm commodity.

With tax revenue estimates off a tad, but perhaps only by four or five orders of magnitude.

Due to similarities with cotton farming, standardization can be anticipated on 500 pound bales. With anything less clearly being "personal use".

October 1, 2020
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Every now and then, Adobe Acrobat returns a "You don't have access to this file" error.

One possible reason for this apparent error is your Windows Temp file. Make sure you have total access to this folder. Other suggestions appear online.

September 29, 2020
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The latest version of our Magic Sinewave calculator can be found here. With more on magic sinewaves here.

Note that our triangle series digital sinewaves are ultra low end, while our Magic Sinewaves are ultra high end.

September 28, 2020
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A review of some image pixel interpolations algorithms can be found here.

Along with hundreds more GuruGrams here.

September 27, 2020
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Tips on extending PostScript numeric accuracy by nearly two decimal places can be found here with a demo here.

And bunches more on PostScript here. And a video here.

September 26, 2020
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Our original Psyctone project can be found here, while a new third party web JavaScript emulation demo can be found here.

And some thoughts on recapturing the original circuit boards here.

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

Partial tutorials here and here, with lots more on pseudorandom here, here, and elsewhere.

And more construction projects here.

September 25, 2020
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Just made a stunning "new" triangle series class discovery of this digital sinewave...

 [ 92 91 89 86 82 77 71 64 56 48 39 30 20 10
     0 -10 -20 -30 -39 -48 -56 -64 -71 -77 -82
    -86 -89 -91 -92 -92 -91 -89 -86 -82 -77
   -71 -64 -56 -48 -39 -30 -20 -10 0 10 20
     30 39 48 56 64 71 77 82 86 89 91 92 ]

This has an astounding unfiltered third harmonic distortion of 0.109 percent and a total distortion 3H-9H of 0.142 percent! Size is 92 peak and speed is 58.

The sneaky trick is to use a double soft clipping. On top of a double triangle series peak.

This can be done with our previous triangle series methods ( plus a few bytes ), as table lookup, or as a quad folded table lookup. Find the plots here, their sourcecode here, and a stand alone harmonic-only Fourier analysis here...

signal ==
findfourier
intf3 ==
intf5 ==
intf7 ==
intf9 ==
totaldist ==

PostScript, of course. A very few comparable sinewaves appear to be possible but still unexplored.

September 24, 2020
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There is more hydrogen in a gallon of gasoline than there is in a gallon of liquid hydrogen.

Mole fractions and all. It depends on the octane rating, but typically around eleven percent more.

Additional hydrogen ludicrosities can be found here.

September 23, 2020
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Our rework of the new triangle series digital sinewave generators is taking ridiculously longer than anticipated.

Find the latest progress .pdf here, the sourcecode .psl here, and the optional logfile here.

Sorry for the delay

September 22, 2020
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We did a major energy tutorial way back when with its .pdf file here and its sourcecode here.

While most of the info remains accurate, the solar pv stuff definitely needs revisions and updates.

At the time, solar pv was a horrendously inefficient net destroyer of gasoline. And any claims that solar pv was renewable or sustainable ( or in any manner "green" ) were flat out lies. Yes, project breakeven could be had by stealing subsidies, but solar itself was a humongous energy sink.

Especially if you factor in the true costs of subsidy generation and their lost involved energy..

Since then, solar pv prices have plummeted to the point where which many installations can now end up renewable and sustainable. Paying for all the previous lost energy will, of course, take many years to recover.

But projecting time to breakeven further forward more than a year or two is fraught with peril, since vastly better pv solutions ( especially those using perovskites ) lie imminently developable. The situation is the same as projecting future breakeven times for, say, cathode ray tubes.

Or eight track tapes.

The question is not how long current panels will last, but rather how soon ridiculously better solutions will be readily available.

You can find weekly pv pricing here and here, usually updated Wednesday mornings. Present pricing is about six cents per peak cell watt.

Should the long term price drops continue, it would seem reasonable to project four cents per peak cell watt as eliminating all net metering and subsidies. And two cents per peak cell watt as being the "bye bye nukes" point. As in poof. gone.

Much more on energy topics here.

September 21, 2020
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Progress in the rapid conversion of coal fired power plants into singles bars can be followed here.

September 20, 2020
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What appears to be a genuinely significant advance in lithium batteries can be followed here.

September 19, 2020
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Most of the reaches of our prehistoric hanging canals were carefully constructed by hand, exactly maintaining critical constant slopes. But a very few examples exist where natural drainages seem to have been included or adapted.

These ( among possible others ) include...
 Mud Springs at N 32.83334 W 109.81637
 Sand Canal at N 32.83096 W 109.92974
 Allen Canal at N 32.77485 W 109.84093
 Robinson at N 32.79156 W 109.78999
 Deadman East N 32.75859 W 109.77339
 High Marijilda N 32.74127 W 109.74663

And a reach at N 32.83308 W 109.82568 and at N 32.83933 W 109.81908 that may or may not yet prove to be part of a weakly evident Central Dump canal system.

Much more on our prehistoric hanging canals are here, here, here, here, and a video here.

Tours and talks are available and your assistance on these new world class discoveries is more than welcome. Particularly needed are drone capable and/or gonzo hiking enthusiasts.

An unresolved project list can be found here.

September 18, 2020
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A deli operator was unable to collect their aviary bill.

So they took a tern for the wurst.

September 17, 2020
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Thanks to Diane Drobka for these "new" photos of the long lost Mule Creek Tunnel...

 Needle's Eye #1
 Needle's Eye #2
 Needle's Eye #3
 Needle's Eye #4
 Needle's Eye #5
 Needle's Eye #6
 Needle's Eye #7

This probably was one of the shortest tunnels anytime ever. It is long gone, a victim of road paving.

More tunnel stuff here.

September 16, 2020
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Several locals have been lavishly praising electric bicycles. But to me, the numbers do not seem to add up.

One of our energy tutorials can be found here. With bunches more here.

A lithium battery has an energy density of 200 watthours per kilogram. A horsepower is 746 watts. A traditional gas bicycle uses gasoline with an energy density of 9600 watthours per kilogram.

I'd predict the real world range of most ebikes to end up highly disappointing. Especially with any elevation gain.

In general, I would also expect downhill energy recovery to also usually end up a small fraction of expectations.

September 15, 2020
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I am in the process of adding the "new" Mule Creek tunnel photos to our Gila Valley DayHikes.

September 14, 2020
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My Hanging Canal video can be found here. And my Introduction to PostScript video here.

And some third party recommended vids include...

 The Xylophone Duet
 Probable first origin of "WTF"
 The Turbo Encabulator
 TV Typewriter Reconstruction

September 13, 2020
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Two of the third party projects that got me started on color organs can be recently found here and here.

Which led to this sequence of my designs...

 Solid State 3 Channel Color Organ
 Simplified Solid-State Color Organ
 Low Cost Color Organ
 Hi Fi a Go Go
 Musette
 Cologan
 Psychedelia

Interest in home or low end color organs has largely fallen by the wayside.

Some of their problems never fully solved included severe RFI caused by badly filtered SCR or Triac mid cycle phase switching, limited dynamic range, poor or no automatic level controls, restricted or uncorrected linearity, lack of saturated colors, sleazy low end copies, heat and safety issues, and, ultimately, a limited or boring and vibes-lacking display.

These days, use of a modern monitor or a smart tv would be an obviously better display choice. What would be interesting would be a totally digital solution ( especially filtering and AVC ), and an AI artificial intelligence approach to analyzing music and attempting to reconstruct unique channels for most or all of the original instruments.

As in a purple clarinet.

More on our historic construction projects here. Your thoughts welcome.

September 12, 2020
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Alexander Graham Kernatski was the first telephone pole.

September 11, 2020
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One tip on generating desktop shortcuts that does not seem very well known:

Simply drag and drop the filename onto the desktop!

September 10, 2020
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Two Texans bragging about how big their lands were..
.
"Why, my spread is so big, I could drive all morning and not get half way across it."

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

September 9, 2020
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Brad Hodge has a new TV Typewriter restoration video.

September 8, 2020
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A classic example of what those French Veterinarians call a "four paw":

A leading newscaster recently confused the words "cannabis" and "cannibal" in describing a tasting tour.

September 7, 2020
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I've long been a fan of bashing pseudoscience and promoting real science. But there is a phenomenon that seems to be stuck in the middle, neither fish nor fowl. This is the hum on the desert.

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

 "HUM ON THE DESERT" -- Enigmatic "lopeing generator" sounds are heard by some in the Desert Southwest. Myself included. With no generally acceptable explanation. These  could be real or variations on tinnitus or individuals that have exceptional infrasonic capabilities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 6, 2020
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The math behind cubic splines can be found here. With bunches more here 

September 5, 2020
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And here's a temporary stash of some of our older Book to eBook Conversion stuff.

With all of the eBooks themselves here.

September 4, 2020
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Here are the "best" of our recent new digital sinewaves. In a size-speed-clip soft peak 3harm THD3-9 format...

56-44-8 hard single 0.56% 0.75%
55-44-8 soft single 0.38% 0.41%
85-56-10 hard single 0.45% 0.73%
84-56-10 soft single 0.36% 0.48%
95-60-10 hard single 0.44% 0.87%
94-60-10 soft single 0.43% 0.66%

33-32-6 hard double 0.00% 0.55%
48-40-7 soft double 0.60% 0.64%
60-44-8 hard double 0.00% 0.62%
59-44-8 soft double 0.07% 0.25%
95-56-10 hard double 0.00% 0.67%
94-56-10 soft double 0.036% 0.41%

Distortions are before filtering! You can find the demo here, the sourcecode here, and a supplemental log file here.

September 3, 2020
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Solar PV pricing continues to be available here and here with their usual Wednesday morning updates.

Pricing has recently been flat with cells weighing in around six cents per peak watt. Possible reasons for the flatness include strong new demand with pv finally showing promise of long term renewability and sustainability, woefully ill advised tariff games, and rising raw polysilicon costs.

Waiting in the pv wings are perovskites with bunches of YouTube hits here. These use much less and cheaper and simpler materials of higher efficiency.

Projecting continuing long term price drops, at four cents per peak watt, any subsidies and net metering can obviously be eliminated, and at two cents per peak watt you can finally say bye bye to all nukes.

Poof, gone.

September 2, 2020
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There's a new web speed reading course that lets you read War and Peace in twelve minutes flat.

Its about Russia.

September 1, 2020
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Most of the "winners" in our triangle series digital sinewave generators so far seem to demand double peaks, especially if there are to be zero ( or quite low when soft clipped ) third harmonics.

Such as "33-34-8" that provides a zero third and 0.55% thd with this internal sinval....

[-1 -2 -3 -4 -5 -6 -7 -8 -8 -7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1
   0  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0]

Which gets hard clipped into...

[-1 -2 -3 -4 -5 -6 -6 -6 -6 -6 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1
   0  1 2 3 4 5 6 6 6 6 6 6 5 4 3 2 1 0]

To integrate into this output cosval...

[ 33 32 30 27 23 18 12 6 0 -6 -12 -18 -23
-27 -30 -32 -33 -33 -32 -30 -27 -23 -18
-12 -6 0 6 12 18 23 27 30 32 33 ]

Note that unique cosval zeros occur precisely where each second peak is needed. We saw some fancy plots and solutions with a demo here, the sourcecode here, and a supplemental log file here.

But this approach should end up more compatible with and translatable to low end microcomputer code...

/incrementx {
/sinval sinval cosval 0 gt {-1}{+1}ifelse
cosval 0 eq {pop 0} if
add store

/cosval cosval sinval
sinval 6 ge {pop 6} if
sinval -6 lt {pop -6} if
add store  } store

Note that the double peak adds +2 to speed. Repeat speed times for each cycle.

August 31, 2020
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Thought I'd start a list of the "bottom 60" of our web pages. Older or not currently active or less popular stuff that is mostly of historic interest...

 aafont01.shtml Fonts and Bitmaps
 acrob01.shtml Acrobat .PDF and SVG
 advt01.shtml Banner Advertisers
 amlink01.shtml Book Access
 ansamp1.shtml Assorted Neat Stuff
 aucres01.shtml Regional Auction Finder
 barg01.shtml Surplus Bargains
 nutour01.pdf Gallery Bargain Tour
 nutour02.pdf Gallery Bargain Tour
 bebsamp1.shtml eBook Conversions *
 beewb01.shtml Bee's Websites
 bksamp01.shtml Recommended Books
 bmfont01.shtml Old Bitmapped Fonts Page
 bod01.shtml Book on Demand Publishing *
 bodsamp1.shtml BOD Sampler *
 capvid01.shtml Captain Video Secret Lab
 catsamp1.shtml Older catalog by file types
 golly01.shtml Golly Gee Mister Science
 image01.shtml Image PostProc Graphics *

and, of course...

 solbagx.shtml Water soluble swimsuits

Most of our web pages can be found here, along with our .PSL files here.

August 30, 2020
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A group of New Mexico hikers were suddenly caught in an unexpected storm. They managed to find a tree with a major horizontal branch and a bunch of old boards and quickly built an "A" Frame shelter.

The little rainware they had was used to cover the cracks and they managed to stay quite dry...

... in their poncho villa.

August 29 2020
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Here's a link to an "adequate supply" of Pittsburgh Streetcar Photos

And more than you could possibly want to know about ancient car stop locations here.

WARNING: Attempting to view all of these in one session will result in yunz guys pronouncing "beer" as "airn". Or makin a mill outta a chopaam sammitch and Olde Frothingslosh Pale Stale Ale in Sliberty.

Fortunately, in regards to this matter, a desert rat like me is immune.
Skooze me while I redd up the website.

August 28, 2020
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My very first perpetual motion machine can be found here with more details here.

More on bashing pseudoscience here.

August 27, 2020
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We looked at some of the fundamental factors underlying technical innovation here.

August 26, 2020
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A reminder that we have the very last developable 20 acre view property immediately north of Gold Hill Oregon available per these details. By owner. With financing available.

August 25, 2020
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Much more on our prehistoric hanging canals are here, here, here, here, and a video here.

August 25, 2020
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With all of our fine tuning of the triangle series digital sinewave generators, it just occurred to me that a similar stunt might not end up half bad as plain old table lookup.

Ferinstance, this sequence accessed by a forall loop offers zero third and ninth harmonics (!) and 0.55 percent total fifth and seventh...

 [ 33 32 30 27 23 18 12 6 0 -6 -12 -18 -23
  -27 -30 -32 -33 -33 -32 -30 -27 -23 -18
  -12 -6 0 6 12 18 23 27 30 32 33 ]

That would be before filtering. And you might even be able to cut the size in half or quarter using symmetry.

August 25, 2020
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Public Surplus is a good source for online auction items from colleges, towns, utilities, and such.

I've found this bidding strategy to work for me: Enter your high proxy bid once sometime around the six minutes before the five minute auto extension trip.

Get as close to 5 minutes and 1 second as you dare, leaving barely enough room for a fumble fingered bid login or whatever. Proxy bid around double what you are willing to pay for the item. Chances are you will either win for a lot less or lose for zero. Always bid odd penny amounts above a resistance threshold such as $20 or $100.

Keep track of your wins and loses such that your excessively high proxies get paid for by your ongoing lower wins. Adjust the margin accordingly.

Do not ever get into auto-extension pissing contests! Do not ever telegraph your bidding intent or participation earlier!

Be especially aware of oddball closing times. Be sure to verify your password ahead of time!

Much more auction stuff here. Be sure to check out the eight columns in the Enhancing your Auction Skills box.

August 24, 2020
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Reprising our recent sinewave stuff: A spectacular elegant simplicity digital sinewave generator for low end micros appeared in the December 1994 Byte magazine on pages 217 and 218. With a reprint here.

It was super fast and ultra compact and ultra friendly. Here in PostScript was its code that is easily translatable to most any low end 8-bit micros's machine language...

 /size peakcosvalue store
    /speed 0 store

 /speed speed size 0 gt {-1}{+1}
 ifelse add store
 /size size speed adjustsin
 add store

 /adjustsin {   % later for clip
         } store

This is basically a double integration differential equation sinewave solver. Repeat the main loop speed times per cycle. The code is swift enough to know its own unique speed, given its size.

A hidden secret to its impressive behavior was that an integrator is also a low pass filter. But in exchange for its astonishing brevity and speed, they cheated a little and used a triangle wave instead of an internal first stage sinewave integrator. Which resulted in a distortion of three to four percent.

This was far too good to leave alone, So I came up with some simple ways here ( in #85 ) to morph a copy of the triangle wave into a clipped triangle wave. The morphing code approaches 0.2 percent distortion ( before filtering! ) and went something like this hard clipper...

 /adjustsin {   % for a hard clip
     dup 10 ge {pop 10} if
     dup -10 lt {pop -10} if
         } store

Or even somewhat better ( but slightly slower and longer ) soft clipper...

 /adjustsin {   % for a soft clip
  dup 10 eq {pop 9} if
  dup -10 eq {pop -9} if
  dup 10 ge {pop 10} if
  dup -10 lt {pop -10} if
     } store

After spending far too much time on this, I found that you could even sometimes eliminate the third and ninth harmonics by morphing into a triangle waveform whose flattened peak was an even number of pixels wide.

It turns out there are two distinct sets of solutions depending on an even or odd number of pixels in the top and bottom flat portions of the triangle clip

Note that the main algorithm still uses an unmodified triangle wave, while the clipped ones are closer to a real sinewave.

Find the demo here, the sourcecode here, and a supplemental log file here.

Application assistance available.

August 23, 2020
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It is still only partial and has a glitch or two, but here is the latest update on our super low end digital sinewave generator. It now includes solutions with zero third ( or ninth ) harmonics!

Find the demo here, the sourcecode here, and a supplemental log file here.

August 22, 2020
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The era of  "web friendly colors" seems to have passed, but they often can still simplify things for you. In which you have six reds, six greens, and six blues for a total of 215 colors. But, sadly, only four useful color space grays.

Our take on web friendly colors can be found here in both 0-215 for PostScript or $000 to $FFF for the web.

For a much fancier color picking web utility that is particularly useful in properly matching titled boxes with their contents, check here.

August 21, 2020
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Did you know that the word "gullible" does not appear in any major dictionary or spell checker?

August 20, 2020
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The Hazmat rule of thumb: Hold your arm extended with your thumb up. Close one eye. If you can still see the scene, you are too close!

August 19, 2020
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Here's some of the Resource Bin files that seem at least somewhat still relevant...

 FTL dowsing for Brown's Gas in Roswell
 How to scam a student paper
 Injection molding and plastic prototyping
 PostScript PIC Flutterwumpers
 The best hardware parts of all time (See #35)
 The furry with the syringe on top (See #18)
 Perils of patents and patenting (See #13)

August 18, 2020
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Just upgraded our Resource Bin and Ask the Guru columns to phone friendly responsiveness. Find the combined file here.

And a recent list of our newly 31 phone friendly pages here.

August 17, 2020
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A really cute happenstance in our ongoing quest for low end micro friendly digital sinewaves with zero or low third harmonics...

Consider the top of this sequential single peaked integer triangle wave ...

  X
 XX
XXX

This would seem to always have some third harmonic present, and the best you could hope for is a partial 3H cancellation by the rest of the waveform. Best found so far was an 10 soft clipped 89 with an 0.36 % third harmonic and a 0.48% THD 3-9.

But, instead consider the top of this sequential double peaked integer triangle wave ...

     XX
   XXXX
XXXXXX

The third harmonic here of this waveform portion will always be zero! As will the ninth. And the best of the five double peaked zero third harmonics found so far was a THD of 0.55%. And a "best in class" of an 0.18% third and 0.25% thd. Before filtering!

Sourcecode and results on request. Your input welcome.

More on our compact low distortion sinewave generators for low end microcomputers that we looked at a few days ago can be found here with its sourcecode here and its logfile here.

August 16, 2020
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My PostScript video can be found here. And my hanging canal video here.

August 15, 2020
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More of our Circuit Cellar reprints can be found as...

Nonlinear Graphics
Vector to Step Conversion
PostScript Flutterwumpers
Quest for Magic Sinewaves
Steplocked Magic Sinewaves

And many of our similar reprints here. And most of our eBooks here.

August 14, 2020
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The original Bresenham’s algorithm can be found here with my take on vector to step conversions here 

August 13, 2020
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And yet another reminder about our Gila Valley Day Hikes library page. And its companion Tinaja Questing library page. And another companion Little Known Gila Hikes having more individual details.

August 12, 2020
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Another reminder that we have a new "lite" Fourier Series analyzer that you can find here with a demo here and its PostScript sourcecode here.

This was stolen from this superb historical source. At present, it is only 32-bit and finds cosine only harmonics 3,5,7, and 9 and their combined distortion.. Other terms are easily added.

This is most accurately used with more than 100 samples per cycle. Up to 65,000 terms are allowed in their PostScript input full cycle array.

For a super heavy duty 64-bit Fourier analyzer instead, check out our Magic Sinewave Calculator that accurately includes Fourier terms up to the 177th harmonic. Or, you can adapt it from this JavaScript source.

August 11, 2020
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A reminder that we have lots of hard-to-find stuff on eBay, especially bunches of apparently unused superb quality microwave switches at pennies on the dollar.

Previous successes that we long ago sold out of included our water soluble swimsuits and our Cho-seal tinfoil hat liners.

On the latter, it was super important to place the liners on the outside to prevent them from activating your implants. But place the liners on the inside of the tinfoil to stop them from reading your brainwaves.

We also are now down to our very last mint Stadia Computer circular slide rule. Grab this quickly to get in ahead of the hoarders.

And we genuinely believe we have the world's entire only remaining supply of absolutely mint "kiss your Onager goodbye" nuclear holocaust fashion accessories.

August 10, 2020
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One of the "hidden" secret reasons the initial digital sinewave generator and its coverage here in #85 and its recent reincarnations here are so spectacular is simply this little know fact: An integrator is also a low pass filter!

Thus, if you are approximating a sinewave with a triangle wave and an eleven percent third harmonic error, if you integrate the triangle you end up with a cosine wave with only a three percent 3H error.

The two cascaded integrations further reduce the distortion.

August 9, 2020
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Life elsewhere in the universe? Check out snottites for a sure fire winning student paper.

Mostly more on winning papers ( One gets you an F; the rest are fully guaranteed A's. ) here.

No, I am not making any of this up.

Or this WTF likely initial first source origin.  Or this. Or this.  Or this.  Or this. Or, of course, this.

August 8, 2020
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So, what are the most astonishingly short, jaw dropping, and mind blowingly effective "do more with less" software sequences of all time?

My votes would obviously include the utterly horrific abuse of the PostScript setdash operator in our brick walls found here, here, and here.

With more on PostScript here.

A second vote would be the compact low distortion sinewave generators for low end microcomputers we just looked at a few days ago and found here with its sourcecode here and logfile here.

The third, of course, would be our marbelous stacks of distorted pancakes. Whose hallmark is that they do not at all look like they were done on a computer. And, if you want to get obtuse enough, can be done in less than 200 bytes of code!

And the fourth, also of course, is the fractal fern. With its source here and demo here. Characterized by 28 data bytes!

I guess our avuncular sleezoids would just barely miss as a third assistant runner up best boy.

Much more on elegant simplicity here.

What are your suggestions for other qualifying "do more with less" candidates?

August 7, 2020
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Some other sneaky PostScript tricks to get between integers, reals, strings, arrays, and such can be found here.

My favorite for utter obtustosity gets you from an array of positive integers to a string...

/makestring {dup length string dup /NullEncode filter 3 -1 roll
{1 index exch write} forall pop} def

[72 105 32 116 104 101 114 101] makestring ---> (Hi there!)

The positive integers do not necessarily have to represent ASCII characters.

Much more here.

August 6, 2020
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Needed to revive our initially missing and somewhat buried PostScript arccos and arcsine routines for our recent work...

 /acos {2 copy dup mul exch dup mul sub
 abs sqrt exch pop exch atan} def
  % - xside hypotenuse acos

 /asin {2 copy dup mul exch dup mul sub
 abs sqrt exch pop atan} def
   % - yside hypotenuse asin -

 /trig.acos {1 acos} def
   % acos from trig value input

 /trig.asin {1 asin} def
   % asin from trig value input

August 5, 2020
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Managed to post a copy of the original Byte triangle series sinewave generators here. With my earlier interpretation here as column #85.

August 4, 2020
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So far, I have been unable to verify any low end digital solution to our short and simple low end micro friendly sinewaves that has either a zero or negligible third harmonic.

Yet, the lead plots here suggest otherwise. The key issue appears to be that integer math severely limits exact clipping values. As does staying in the -127 to +127 amplitude range permitted by low end microcomputers..

Can you either find a solution or prove that one is unlikely to exist?

Please respond here.

August 3, 2020
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And here are the low distortion and compact sinewave winners so far...

  10 soft 89 is best at a 0.36% 3rd Harmonic
   8 soft 55 is best at a 0.38% 3rd Harmonic
  10 soft 99 is best at a 0.43% 3rd Harmonic

  10 hard 100 is good at a 0.44% 3rd Harmonic
  10 hard  90 is good at a 0.45% 3rd Harmonic

  8 soft 63 is ok at a 0.53% 3rd Harmonic
  8 hard 56 is ok at a 0.56% 3rd Harmonic
  8 hard 64 is ok at a 0.55% 3rd Harmonic

Typical original triangle series sines are in the 3% to 4% distortion range.

Once again, these values are before filtering! Also once gain, a few very high frequency harmonics may separately need dealt with. These often can be ignored.

Note that these are best viewed and interpreted at extreme Acrobat magnifications.

Our latest on this can be found here with its sourcecode here and logfile here

August 2, 2020
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An early important triangle series task is to find valid size entries along with their unique speed companions. Maximum size is likely to be a +127, -127 and no dc sinewave for a low end 8-bit system.

A single cycle can be held in an array that is speed long and uniquely starts and ends with size. Further and very restrictive, the array and its included sinewave usually must not have an internal dc term. This usually disqualifies around 7/8ths of your candidates.

To guarantee no dc term, the sum of all the array elements must be zero. Put another way, the single full cycle integral of the sinewave must be zero.

Per details here with its sourcecode here and logfile here. Involving a snoop command.

August 1, 2020
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What are the simple and short adjustments needed to reduce your triangle synthesis sinewave generator distortion look like?

For the unmodified triangles, this null routine...

 /adjustsin {   % no modification
                     } store

For the hard clipped triangles...

 /adjustsin {   % for a hard clip
     dup 10 ge {pop 10} if
     dup -10 lt {pop -10} if
         } store

For the soft clipped triangles...

 /adjustsin { % for a soft clip
     dup 14 eq {pop 13} if
     dup -14 eq {pop -13} if
      dup 14 ge {pop 14} if
     dup -14 lt {pop -14} if
      } store

Alternate values are 6, 8,10,12, and 14 for different clipping levels.. As was shown here.

These are shown above in the PostScript language. They should be easily and simply transformable to most any low end microcomputer's machine language. Or end up usable by most any assembler.

/adjustsin must, of course, be reset before each and every new use sequence.

Our latest on this can be found here with its sourcecode here and logfile here.

July 31, 2020
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So how do we optimally clip a triangle wave?

This problem was newly analyzed here with its sourcecode here and its logfile here. Where the predicted best "hard" clipped triangle wave has a THD harmonic distortion 3-9 near 0.4%. If you "soften" the clipping edges, you can somewhat reduce this further. Perhaps ultimately approaching 0.2%.

Tantalizing, the plots found here suggest that a zero third harmonic is in theory sometimes possible. But so far, this seems to run afoul of having to use only small integers on a low end micro. A catalog of the best available results to date appears here.

These plots in the catalog are BEFORE FILTERING! There will, of course, be some very high frequency harmonics to be dealt with as well. Perhaps the 49th and 51st, bracketing your chosen speed.

An unrelated method of dealing with extremely high harmonics can be found in this newly improved calculator. And an expandable new Fourier synthesizer and analyzer can be found here. Which was stolen from this original Skilling's Fourier Series worksheet.

July 30, 2020
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The original triangle code is remarkably fast and simple. But note that its sin integration produces a triangle wave instead of a cosine one!

The net result is that the final cosine wave typically will have around a three to four percent distortion. Following the integration of a triangle wave with its inherent eleven percent distortion.

If we can replace the triangle wave with a top and bottom clipped one, we should be able to reduce the distortion down into the 0.4 percent range.

And if we "soften" the clipped trapezoid, we should theoretically be able to get near 0.25 percent. At a usually acceptable price of a few extra code bytes and a somewhat lower maximum speed.

Our latest improvements on this can be found here with its sourcecode here and logfile here.

July 29, 2020
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The original triangle series code is stunningly simple. We'll show it in PostScript here, but it is easily customized for most any low end micro...

Initialize...
 /sinval 0 store
 /cosval size store

Then loop "speed" times per cycle...
 /sinval sinval cosval 0 gt {-1}{+1} ifelse add
 store
 /cosval cosval sinval add store} store
  ( output in some manner here )

Each size value will have one specific associated speed value. Equal to the number of counts for one full cycle.

Only a few size values are valid, with most adding a dc term or creating some other problems. Typically, only one in eight is useful.

Considerable skulduggery is involved in finding the valid speed and their unique size candidates.

As has been detailed here with its sourcecode here with its Sourcecode here and logfile here.

We'll see later that an "improved" /cosval calculator looks like this..

 /cosval cosval sinval adjustsin add store} store

July 28, 2020
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A mathematical series is simply a string of numbers that follows some set of rule or rules. The linear series is simply 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ....

An obscure and little know triangle series forms the ongoing sum of the linear series. Or...

  1 3 6 10 15 21 28 36 45 55 66 78 91 106 ...

The nth series term is  n(n+1)/2. Approaches n^2/2 for high n.

This is called by some to be a triangle series because each involved item or object can be piled up with all of the others as a equilateral triangle.

The most common use of the triangle series is connecting all possible paths between n objects. We looked at this here with its sourcecode here.

An aside: The triangular series clearly shows why adding a few individuals to an organization can disproportionately cause all sorts of problems.

Yeah, there is a somewhat similar Fibonacci Series we looked at here, but it is not quite the same and apparently not of immediate interest here.

The triangle series is the key to the triangle method digital sinewave synthesis.

Our latest improvements on this can be found here with its sourcecode here and logfile here.

July 27, 2020
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One popular and useful method of synthesizing a sinewave might be called the double integration method. In which the fundamental differential equations involving sines and cosines is called out.

Integration is a math term for "finding the area under a curve". It turns out that the integral of a sine is minus the cosine. And the integral of a cosine is a sine. Cascade these two, and feed its inverted output back to the input and you have the very definition of what a sine or cosine is.

Wait. Not so fast. Done with analog techniques, if your loop gain is too low, you end up with a bell or gong. Too high and you eventually saturate into a high distortion square wave. Hewlett and Packard first fixed this way back when with a dimly lit nonlinear light bulb. Thus elegantly forcing their needed unity gain.

If you are working digitally with integers, it is a simple matter to force unity gain and keeping a nice sinewaveish shape.

In a tradeoff for its stunningly short and simple code, the triangle series method does a good job in integrating its cosine but a not so good one in integrating its sine. Which leaves it with a fairly high but easily improvable distortion.

Our latest improvements on this can be found here with its sourcecode here and logfile here.

July 26, 2020
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I've long been overly enameled with digital ( and analog ) sinewave generators. The real biggie, of course, has been our Magic Sinewaves and their latest Calculator. And we reviewed lots of digital sinewave options here.

But I am even more impressed and obsessed by what we might call the triangle series method.

This mostly applies to the lowest of low end microcomputers and produces stunningly compact code and amazingly good looking results. But does so by using rather obtuse math.

The third party original apparently first appeared in the December 1994 Byte magazine on pages 217 and 218. I have a reprint newly available.

I first did a story on this on my Column 85 found here. I am currently working on a major update here with its Sourcecode here and logfile here.

I thought we might do a group of mini intros and tutorials on the triangle series method in our next few blogs.

July 25, 2020
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Managed to replace the "lost" copy of Resource Bin #76.

More Resource Bins here. And the rest of the gang here.

July 24, 2020
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An ordinary dinner fork is a superb way of dealing with those infuriating plastic rivets on the ends of integrated circuit tubes.

July 23, 2020
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Here's some obscure links I often visit...

 Broken Link Checker.
 Online Language Translator.
 Dilbert.
 Slashdot.
 PV Pricing #1.
 PV Pricing #2..
 MJ Farm subsidy elimination.
  ... plus its "must watch" video
 Public Surplus
 The Far Side.
 Coal power plant conversions to singles bars.
 Acme Mapper
 Political Cartoons
 Phone Responsiveness
 World Radio History
 Jeff Duntemann
 Gila Herald
 URL Link Repair
 Covid #1
 Covid #2

I've got many of these on my Chrome Speed Dial.

July 22, 2020
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A daily collection of political polls can be found here.

July 21, 2020
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An intermittent muffled yowling inside a laser
printer can sometimes be cured by opening the
lid and letting the cat out.

July 20, 2020
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A possible yet unexplored prehistoric bajada hanging canal can be found here and further researched here. Elevations measured from this second link via Google Earth Pro are of remarkably uniform slope along a significant length.

But pieces of the potential source canal ( Possibly from the Smith Canal far away in the Cluff Ranch area ) range from vague to sketchy to ambiguous to missing entirely. Note the hillock in the nearby road.

More stunning prehistoric bajada "hanging" canal discoveries from here, here, here, and here.

Your help is welcome.

July 19, 2020
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Then there was the agnostic dyslectic
insomniac who stayed up all night wondering
if there was a dog. .

July 18, 2020
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Here is a reprint of Skilling's original Fourier Series worksheet.

You will also need a K&E Log Log Decitrig Duplex slide rule. Plus, of course, its belt carrier and your pocket protector.

As an undergraduate electrical engineer, you should be able to whip through one of these in around two weeks. To almost ten percent accuaray and only a few dozen errors. Compared to the 0.317 seconds of our still unoptimized PostScript version.

July 17, 2020
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Three useful sources for oddball components and related electronics include OEM's Trade, Radwell, and  Online Components. The latter offers student discounts.

An older list of similar robotics resources can newly be found here.

July 16, 2020
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Have not mentioned this Product Liability Label for a while.

Much more here.

July 15, 2020
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A very good Fourier Series tutorial appears in Skillings classic 1957 Electrical Engineering Circuits. I stole his numeric analysis approach from page 443 and reworked it into PostScript.

Thus managing to pick up a modest 3,628,800:1 speedup. Find the file as fourier1.psl and a simple demo as fourier1.log.

Normally, you would use this code as a module inside a larger program, feeding it a numeric array of values representing 360 degrees of a function.

The present code only finds the cosine terms of the fundamental and odd harmonics 3, 5, 7, and 9.  THD is calculated as a percent. It is easily expanded.

At least 100 values are recommended in your signal array for reasonable accuracy. Max limit is near 65,000.

July 14, 2020
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Fancier flutterwumpers might use G Code per details here. Or M-Code. Or one of their many other variants.

July 13, 2020
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Our latest phone responsive upgrade is to our Flutterwumper Library

Flutterwumpers are low end robotic devices that spit or chomp.

The superb general purpose PostScript language can serve as a front end document generator allowing flutterwumpers with extremely low end and low cost and very simple Microcontrollers.

Obvious benefits include bringing circles, curves, and high quality fonts to devices otherwise having very limited positioning and imaging and math capabilities. Or doing very exotic coordinate transforms.

Included are newly revised updates to the little known hexapods and Stewart Platforms. The older historic wide flutterwumper version can still be found here.

July 12, 2020
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The Barbie Index is a new method of measuring math understanding and competence.

Ferinstance, an individual with a BI of 0.7 would have seventy percent of the math capabilities of a Barbie doll.

More math stuff here. Yeah, this is overdue for a mobile friendly update. Current mobile friendly files are found here.

July 11, 2020
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Um, There seems to be a glitch in yesterday's potential digital sinewave generator 118-56-14. Can you find and fix it?

July 10, 2020
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Managed to find several more digital sinewave algorithms that can give you astonishingly compact and minimal low harmonic distortion sinewaves for low end micros...

nusin23c sourcecode and demo
nusin35c sourcecode and demo
nusin55c sourcecode and demo
nusin74c sourcecode and demo

Expanded upon an earlier tutorial found here in column 85.

July 9, 2020
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  https://www.thefarside.com/

July 8, 2020
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A newly revised list of .psl and .pdf programs verified as GhostScript and Google Drive compatible ( besides the highly recommended Acrobat Distiller ) can be found here.

July 7, 2020
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Some ultra compact low end digital sinewave generators were described in Column 85 of https://www.tinaja.com/glib/hackar4.pdf

It appears that better performance and lower distortion can be had by making the initial triangle approximation look more like a true cosine wave. This can be done by adding adjustments beyond a simple clipping. At a penalty of only a few bytes extra.

This file is https://www.tinaja.com/psutils/nusine53.psl It is normally run by sending the file to Distiller by way of command line //acrodist /F. It should also be GhostScript or Google Drive compatible.

The companion demo for this can be newly found at https://www.tinaja.com/psutils/nusine53.pdf

Do be sure to view this image in a reader that allows
high magnification!

This example shows how to create a 53 amplitude 44 frequency 8 modified triangle height sinewave usable by a low end microprocessor.

It appears that dozens of similar low distortion sinewaves of different amplitudes are possible. Each amplitude appears to need its own custom code.

Development services available via don@tinaja.com.

July 6, 2020
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Many thanks to Science Magazine for recently giving me a free lifetime subscription!

I'd be even happier if they did a news mention of our stunning prehistoric bajada "hanging" canal discoveries from here, here, here, and here.

Their 19 June 2020 issues appears exceptional even for them. Inside are potential cures for cancer and covid, ultra strong steels, newly cheap and more reliable solar cells, and bunches of forest stuff.

July 5, 2020
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Snow White has reported some serious issues with Sneezy.

July 4, 2020
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Yesterday's upgrade of mssamp1.shtml brings our present total of new or improved phone compatible upgrades ( both .shtml and .pdf ) to 30.

Find the newly updated latest compatibility list here.

July 3, 2020
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Our latest phone responsive upgrade is to our Magic Sinewave Library.

Lower frequency Magic Sinewaves are repeating very long sequences of ones and zeros. They can get created from ordinary but extremely carefully chosen and delivered digitally switched pulses.

The key feature of of magic sinewaves is they let you force any desired number of low harmonics precisely to zero in theory and to astonishingly low levels in practice.

While allowing you to do so at the highest possible efficiency. By using the fewest possible number of switching events.

July 2, 2020
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Note that the Clock Quant variable in our Magic Sinewave Calculators sets the frequency by its value and both the amplitude and the distortion by the ratio of the pulse and inter pulse values.

Using a log spacing for your frequency and amplitude values can get you by with significantly shorter data files. As well as a possible more uniform dynamic response.

Please note further that allowing frequency and amplitude values that are "close" or "near" to the frequency or amplitude you really want can significantly improve distortion. Often by as much as 2 to 10 decibels.

"Shake the box" techniques ( throw another million calculations at it! ) thus can end up most useful.

July 1, 2020
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Here's a pile of our "other" and more conventional sinewave resources...

PIC Minimalist Sinewaves ( col 85 )
Create Sinewaves Using Digital IC's
Bezier Sinewave Approximation
Timbre & Voicing for Electronic Music
Build this IC Function Generator
Build the Bit Boffer
Understanding Incremental Encoders
Introduction to Electronic Music
Six CMOS Circuits for Experimenters
Integrated Circuits for Electronic Music
Introduction to Electronic Music
Understanding Active Filters

Build the Psyctone

Plus, of course...

Active Filter Cookbook
CMOS Cookbook
TTL Cookbook
RTL Cookbook

Of these, the most stunning, most compact, fastest, most "Golly Gee Mister Science!", and by far the most elegantly simplistic one is found here as part of column #85.

June 30, 2020
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Yesterday's upgrade of tinaja01.shtml brings our present total of new or improved phone compatible upgrades ( both .shtml and .pdf ) to 29.

Find the newly updated latest compatibility list here.

June 29, 2020
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Our latest phone responsive upgrade is to our Tinaja Questing Library.

This features mostly "outdoorsey" stuff such as our Gila Day Hikes, more detailed but lesser known hikes, summary links to our Bajada Hanging Canals, Arizona cave access, some wellness links, other outside "things to do" items, and the newly revised Mount Graham Tramway files.

The ultimate tinaja anywhere ever, of course, is this one. You can't get there from here, and its access demands advanced team canyoneering rope and swimming skills. Rope number five is shown on the left.

Nearest local tinajas are Frye Mesa Falls. The "best" close in ones are in Marijilda Canyon just below the Round the Mountain crossing. Whose trail of which has recently renamed as part of the Sky Island Traverse.

June 28, 2020
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Added an Allen clan history to our newly revised and updated Mount Graham Aerial Tramway info. Find it in this latest release.

June 27, 2020
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It is interesting to review how much technical writing has changed in the last few decades. The key rule these days is to think like a cartoonist. Frugal. Compact. Succinct.

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

Writing is also insanely more competitive than it once was. Instead of half a dozen other authors in a magazine, you have at least half a million or more on the web. Over half of which are often bogus or fake or scams. Or "not even wrong".

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

"Bite Size" short paragraphs dominate. Each separated by once excessive ledding. Fill justification is long gone. Hanging punctuation generates a blank stare. Bolding and color changes have replaced underlining and italics.

And fonts are no longer a big deal. They are just "there". 

Full color is the norm with a zero cost  penalty. There are fewer size restrictions and any figures can be placed exactly where you want them rather than any excessive forward or back referencing. 

Post Justification editing overwhelmingly and utterly dominates.

Most significantly, the author now can be in total control of what goes where on the page. Or even what the concept of a page "is". A practice utterly unthinkable back in the days of hot lead.

Proofs? Sorry, but the deadline was too close.

Vertical scrolling is trivial, but horizontal scrolling or  multiple columns have become extremely annoying and will no longer be tolerated. Column widths now must be phone compatible. And flexibly viewport assignable.

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

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

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

June 26, 2020
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Yesterday's upgrade of whtnu16.shtml brings our present total of new or improved upgrades ( both .shtml and .pdf ) to 28.

Find the newly updated latest list here.

June 25 2020
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Our latest phone responsive upgrade is to our 2016 What's New Blog.

June 24 2020
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One of the other eBay items we once did quite well on were our tinfoil hat liners. Which were second only to our water soluble swimsuits.

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

And they flew on outta here.

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

Each layer provides up to 120 decibels of attenuation.

We used the same stuff years ago when we were first exploring low cost keyboards.

June 23 2020
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In a stunning genetics breakthrough, they have discovered that socks are the larval form of the coat hanger.

A dark closet is apparently required for metamorphosis. More on similar topics here.

June 22, 2020
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Ah, the law of the unintended consequence.

A case can be made that the ONLY positive benefit of years of federal, state, and local mj lawmaking has been stunning mj farm subsidies and price supports. Price supports outrageously higher than any other ag commodity anytime ever.

Since these subsidies are obviously about to be eliminated completely, it is reasonable to ask what a mj baseline price might be in the absence of outrageous federal supports.

Cotton is sort of a comparable crop except that its ginning is somewhat more involved. With cotton now near 62 cents a pound, the unsupported mj pricing can reasonably be expected to come in somewhere around 59 cents a pound.

And reasonably could be standardized at a similar industrial 500 pound bale. With anything less personal use.

Several side effects could reasonably be expected. The banking issues would largely vanish, and any mj crime could reasonably be expected to end up largely comparable in size to, say, the heinous problems with cotton theft issues. Black market mj could likewise be expected to end up somewhat smaller than the cotton black market.

One other likely side effect: state and local tax income projections could end up somewhat shy of expectations. But perhaps only by five  or six orders of magnitude.

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

June 21, 2020
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With the demise of Keelynet's founder, nobody to date seems to have yet emerged to take over this once highest profile pseudoscience "resource".

Bits and pieces do appear on the web, with an older blog archive here. The namesake Keely himself was an early blatant scammer.

My own pseudoscience views appear here in our recently updated and phone responsive download.

June 20, 2020
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Our newest phone responsive version of our Magic Sinewave Calculator still demands a 64 bit math Javascript companion of xxxx.js.

This JavaScript code presently remains the same as that used in the older calculator versions.

It is super important that a copy of xxxx.js is present in the same directory as holds your calculator. This has been done on our website, but if you move your calculator elsewhere, you will have to tow a copy of .xxxx.js along and place it in the same new directory.

Or else merge the two files.

The JavaScript routines can be viewed in most any text editor. Portions of them can be debugged from inside the calculator by using a F12 key from inside of Chrome.

Much more on Magic Sinewaves here.

June 19, 2020
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The latest mobile friendly version of our Magic Sinewave Calculators can newly be found here.

This still uses the original JavaScript code. Please note that this code must be placed in the same directory if you move away from the above link.

Much more on Magic Sinewaves here.

Yeah, it should now look a lot better on a phone, but you still may want to use a "real" keyboard for any serious analysis.

Please report any bugs or comments.

June 18, 2020
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A midget fortune teller broke out of jail.

Leaving a small medium at large.

June 17, 2020
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Several of our spring Hanging Canal tours got canceled over the CoVid crisis. We probably can resume them shortly with some precautions.

Find the video here, the tutorial here, and the JFA preprint here.

Paper presentations are also available. As is your active participation.

June 16, 2020
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A list of our mobile friendly updated web pages can be found here.

A list of our Google Drive compatible PostScript code can be found here. With great heaping bunches more on PostScript here. And a video here..

June 15, 2020
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I've found the following mostly free dev tools useful here and elsewhere...

 www.responsivedesignchecker.com/checker.php
 The JavaScript debugging F12 key in Chrome.
 Markup validation at https://validator.w3.org/.
 URL validation https://validator.w3.org/checklink
 Spell checker shift-F7 in Dreamweaver.
 w3schools.com/css/css_rwd_viewport.asp
 Sitemap Optimizer at https://pro-sitemaps.com/

June 14, 2020
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When it comes to Italian food, you can't be both anti pasto and pro volone.

June 13, 2020
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The bottom line on thermoelectric modules: Their efficiency is so utterly and mesmerizingly awful that they are presently and strictly limited to "Uh, compared to what?" aps that only need to move tiny amounts of heat under very expensive circumstances..

Even for those few qualifying aps, strictly following the rules ( especially super insulating the cold side and water cooling the hot side ) must be strictly and rigorously followed.

Again, a tutorial here on reality learned the hard way long ago.

June 12, 2020
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Boo. Hiss.

There seems to be a groundswill of popular demand for personal air conditioners. Here is the reality...

0. All a thermoelectric "cooler" can do is significantly raise the heat energy present nearby.

1. Thermoelectric devices have not improved their abysmal room temperature performance over many decades.

2. "Best" typical efficiencies have a COP of less than 0.33. Compared to typical mechanical AC values of 15 or better.

3. Any practical thermoelectric ap demands extreme super insulation of the cold side.

4. Extreme measures must be taken to minimize any temperature differential between hot side and ambient. Typically involved are forced water cooling. Otherwise the heatsink temperature rise can easily and grossly exceed the net cooling of the module itself.

Find a tutorial here.

June 11, 2020
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There were great heaping bunches of radio servicing correspondence schools opened under the GI Bill after world war II. Their thinly veiled purpose were to buy veterans free you-build-it tv sets at government expense.

I guess I got started on all this in the seventh grade by discovering lesson one of a National Schools variant on these courses unused and scunging away dusty and unopened in our attic.

Amazingly, the somewhat similar course details can still be found here.

I guess the single most influential electronic component for me of all time was the 35Z5. The course covered such essentials as putting two copper wires in a potato and then applying dc to have one of them foam and the other turn green.

And the way you lit up a lone 35Z5 was to put a 25 watt light bulb in series with its filament.

June 10, 2020
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The top secret arcane incantation to turn on the Chrome JavaScript Debugger is key --> F12.

June 9, 2020
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Shocking.

Nearly 50 percent of all North Dakota school children are below average!

June 8, 2020
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Newly posted a phone responsive update to our Pseudoscience Library.

A list of tour newly phone responsive pages can be found here.

June 7, 2020
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Here's a sneaky trick to improve a CSS title keystone justify...

<span style="font-size: 105%">Science</span>

You can usually get away with per-line size changes from 94 to 106 percent staying pretty much non-obvious.

A much more elaborate PostScript keystone justify can be found here as #41. With many examples of its use here.

June 6, 2020
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Our Saga of the Magic Lamp apparently is not yet presently properly listed in our GuruGram Library,

The intended sequence should look like this...

 #121 -- Little Known Gila Valley Dayhikes
 #122 -- Saga of the Magic Lamp
 #123 -- Prehistoric Bajada Canals of SE AZ
 #124 -- Glyphs Hanging Canal Summary

The Magic Lamp Sourcecode can be found here, and its underlying bogus paper here.

June 5, 2020
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American Radio History has renamed themselves World Radio History.

More accurately reflecting their ongoing international expansion, especially England and Australia.

Many of my eBooks and classic reprints can also be found there.

June 4, 2020
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Find our many Gila Valley Dayhikes here, and more details on some of the lesser known ones here.

And the ultimate "You can't get there from here" one here. And a pair of "also rans" here.

And the Gila Valley Hiking Club here.

June 3, 2020
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Newly posted a phone responsive update to our PostScript Library.

This one has extensive corrections and modifications. Some files do still remain to be added.

A list of the newly phone responsive pages can be found here.

June 2, 2020
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A reminder here that we have newly posted our For Low Cost, Count on RTL paper in our classic reprints page.

There's some minor glitches, but more pressing matters prevent a Director's Cut at this time.

The tan edges can be overwritten with horizontal or vertical white rectangles. Either just the top or the entire incandescent image can be improved.

And the mailing label can obviously be made less of an invasion of privacy.

June 1, 2020
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A Review of Some Image Pixel Interpolation Algorithms can be found here with its sourcecode here.

May 30, 2020
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A reminder that our CMOS Cookbook has recently been made available as one of our free eBooks.

Its popularity is presently pretty much tied in third place with the TV Typewriter Cookbook but remains behind the TTL Cookbook and the ISMM Incredible Secret Money Machine.

Our Classic Reprint papers can be found here.

May 29, 2020
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The price of pv cells remains in free fall, as monitored here and here.

Best price per peak cell watt is now at 5.7 cents, which is well below what is needed for eventual renewability and sustainability.

Next goal is a nickel per peak cell watt, which should completely eliminate any and all needs for subsidies or net metering.

And three cents per peak pv cell watt likely should be the "bye bye nukes" cliff. Poof. Gone.

Meanwhile, here are the insider secrets to the ongoing conversions of coal power plants into singles bars.

May 28, 2020
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Just upgraded our Case Against Patents page to phone friendly status.

May 27, 2020
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New ideas are like pancakes or children. You should always throw the first one away.

Much more here.

May 26, 2020
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Just upgraded our 2018 Blog to phone friendly status.

Presently repaired are 2017, 2018, 2019 and our ongoing 2020.
Older style years can be found here and on most newer pages.

In general, they should have a "w" in the filename. As in "wide".

May 25, 2020
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Also on our wish list of scans needed to enlarge our present free eBook collection...

Micro Cookbook Volume I
Hexadecimal Chronicles
Manual De Circuitos Integrados TTL
Pacific Rim TTL Cookbook

I'm not even sure of the correct title of the latter. It was written in Chinese or Japanese, and may be extinct. Your help needed.

May 24, 2020
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A nearly complete collection of our .psl PostScript files can be found here,

While the short start of a more ambitious and somewhat stalled rebuilding project can be found here.

May 23, 2020
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Finally got a classic reprint copy of my For Low Cost, Count on RTL paper uploaded.

Many thanks to David Gleason of American Radio History for his help on this.

I was literally thrown out of Electronics Magazine over a coincidental situation that was utterly and totally beyond my control.

It seems that the Popular Electronics art director and the Electronics art director's personal choices inadvertently and without collusion created the illusion of Electronics stealing a current Popular Electronics cover.

Boy, were they ever pissed.

More free classic reprints here.

May 22, 2020
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A new full set of links to our PostScript Beginner Projects can be found here. These use our Gonzo Utilities whose tutorial can be found here.

They work best with a command line of //acrodist /F sent to Acrobat Distiller. Alternately, they can be sent to GhostScript.

Some mods will likely be needed for Google Drive. Most likely towing all 85K of Gonzo ( or at least selected excerpts ) into each file.

May 21, 2020
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Two useful Corona Virus monitoring sites can be found here and here.

May 20, 2020
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Here's a summary of our ongoing upgrades to phone responsive web pages. But please note that many of our pages remain best viewed and printed on laptops or pcs. Our calculators work best with real keyboards.

CSS --
 Guru's Lair home page .
 What's New 2020 .
 What's New 2019.
 What's New 2018.
 What's New 2017.
 What's New 2016.
 What's New Blogs
 Free Ebooks.
 Classic Reprints.
 Ask the Guru
 Resource Bin
 Magic Sinewaves
 Magic Sinewave Calculator
 Gila Hikes.
 Pseudoscience.
 PostScript.
 Auction Help.
 Cubic Splines.
 Flutterwumpers.
 Tinaja Questing
  Patent Avoidance.
  Hydrogen Fallacies.
  Energy Tutorials.
  Marbelous Pancakes.
  Allen Canal Image.
  Hardware Hacker.
  Tech Musings.
  Blatant Opportunist .
  GuruGram Library .

JPG and PDF and PSL --
 Hanging Canal images
 Worst of Marcia Swampfelder
 .xml to .pdf all files
 .xml to .pdf .psl files

The secret to making .pdf files more phone friendly appears here.

May 19, 2020
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Just upgraded our 2017 Blog to phone friendly status.

Presently repaired are 2017, 2019, and our ongoing 2020.
Older style years can be found here and on most newer pages..

May 18, 2020
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Here's an updated list of our recent triply compatible
Distiller-GoogleDrive-GhostScript utilities and apps...

As always, these work best by sending a command line //acrodist /F to Acrobat Distiller.

May 17, 2020
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A reminder that we likely have the world's entire remaining supply of "kiss your onager goodbye" nuclear holocaust fashion accessories here.

These are an absolutely mint and exceptionally rare collectible..

May 16, 2020
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There's a new toned down video version of "Debbie Does  Dallas" out. It is titled "Doris Does Des Moines".

May 15, 2020
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A reminder of the two essential elements to make your text automatically adjust to the viewer's device width:

First, add this line very near to the <head> of your .shtml file...

<meta name="viewport"
content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

Then, when appropriate in a <style>, add...

 max-width: 450px;

May 14, 2020
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Here's some companion <style> code to go with our PostScript-program-that-writes-.shtml demo and sourcecode:

This one does a responsive width adjusting text box along with tightened between-paragraph ledding. The latter done with negative pixels.

p.text { margin-top: -7px;
max-width: 450px;
color: black;
padding-left: 0px;
font-weight: normal; }

And this one does a table- free "phone floating" dated title box...

p.subtitle { width: 240px;
border-color: Purple;
background-color: #fc9;
border-width: 3px;
border-style: solid;
margin-left: 38px;
padding-top: 4px;
padding-bottom: 4px;
color:#833;
font-weight: bold;
text-align: center; }

The aim here is to be as self-sufficient as possible with minimal need for <style> elements. It seems particularly suited to a yearly blog.

Such as this current example. Or this newly redone older one.

May 13, 2020
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When using one language to emulate another, you do have to be especially careful to not run amok over special characters.

In yesterday's example, PostScript reserves "(<" for exotic hex and hex ASCII 85 strings, and you might often need this when generating .SHTML.

Use "( <) instead.

May 12, 2020
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One of the more subtle features of the PostScript language lies in its abilities to read or write-code snippets for most any other computer language.

Here is an example and some sourcecode of PostScript writing key blocks of code extractable for .SHTML. This saved many hours of time when updating older blogs into phone responsiveness. All done in a 10K file executing in one second.

To use, send the .psl file to Acrobat Distiller by way of a command line secret incantation of //acrodist /F.

This "faking a .log file with .pdf" approach also works with GhostScript and Google Drive. Which otherwise cause issues with PostScript .log file outputs.

Similarly, it is quite easy for PostScript to modify bitmaps. Particularly for Architect's Perspective and Auto Vignetting Backgrounders. With many examples here.

May 11, 2020
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A user asked what the spectrum for a half wave rectifier looks like.

Details here and elsewhere. The normalized dc term amplitude is 0.318.
The normalized sine fundamental is 0.5. The normalized cosine second harmonic  is 0.48. The normalized cosine fourth harmonic is 0.183. The normalized cosine sixth harmonic is 0.111. Other even cosine harmonics progressively diminish.

There is no cosine fundamental, are no odd harmonics, and are no even harmonic sine terms.

May 10, 2020
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One of the handier "rules of thumb" that sometimes apply some of the time and can be enormously useful is this:

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

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

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

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

May 9, 2020
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Just added a phone responsive upgrade to our What's New Blogs page. The old original has been renamed here.

This gives you a second and "alternate access" to our blogs. Over and above the magenta boxes usually found on typical web pages.

And here is the latest list of our phone friendly pages. Several of these still need some adjustment to the latest format.

May 8, 2020
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Our latest marbelous pancake can newly be found here. With its sourcecode here.

The sourcecode is 975 bytes long, But its excessive bloat can easily be minimized down into the 200 byte range! Execution time should be well under 3 seconds.

The best way to run a .psl file is to send it to Acrobat Distiller from the command line via a //acrodist /F.

This file is also GhostScript and Google Drive compatible, but note that special commands are needed to exit the stock lower resolution image output. Note also that a .psl file can be run by these only if its leading first space free line is %!PS

More on the marbelous pancakes, including links to its obtuse math can be found here.

A summary: We have a stack of pancakes, smaller to the top. They repeat in a pallet ( perhaps six ) of filled colors. Their outside circumferential edge gets initially defined by a Minsky Circle or the usual PostScript sin and cos commands.

Before filling, though, each x,y edge point gets nonlinearly transformed by adding or removing locally calculated values from them. The transformed "F" values might involve linking a trig interpreted y into x. Or might exponentially related carefully chosen ( "closer = stronger") fixed points.

Or might do additional weird stuff, depending on your goals. More math details can be found here.

The original author was mostly interested in creating effects that look similar to ( but are in reality wildly different from ) the "floating oil" flyleafs of traditional books.

But marbelosities open up utterly different new opportunities for stuff that does not at all look like it was done by a computer. Often by using astonishingly short sourcecode.

Instead of the "self similar" of Mandelbrot and friends, we clearly have a whole new world of "self UNsiminilarities".

Your input welcome.

May 7, 2020
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Just added a phone responsive upgrade to our GuruGram Library page. The old original has been renamed here. And here is the latest list of our phone friendly pages. Several of these still need some adjustment to the latest format.

May 6, 2020
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   Exploring the .BMP data format.

May 5, 2020
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Just added a phone responsive upgrade to our Blatant Opportunist page. The old original has been renamed here.

May 4, 2020
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Two sources for picking effective colors: Ours works both with PostScript and CSS.. And theirs gives you some fancier .shtml options.

May 3, 2020
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We have long had a fancy JavaScript banner rotator available. It randomly selects banners out of a list and does so without inadvertent repeats. It uses a "real" shuffling algorithm.

A new collection is often shown on each refresh. The approach is also rather resistant to ad blockers. Especially if you label your source directory "Kittens in a sink" and name the ads Puss, Kitty, etc.

You can view some examples near the bottom of this file. You can similarly view or collect the sourcecode with a view page source.

May 2, 2020
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Made some changes to our new responsive phone friendly pages that include an expanded main menu and a less cluttered first screen. This is one of them and another can be found here.

Your comments and suggestions welcome. An updated list of current phone friendly files can be found here. It will take a while to let the new features ripple on back through.

May 1, 2020
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At one time way back when we were experimenting with Book-on-Demand publishing, we made a bunch of archive reprints available. Here are the classic originals....

Hardware Hacker Archive I
Hardware Hacker Archive II
Hardware Hacker Archive III
Hardware Hacker Archive IV
Resource Bin Archive I
Resource Bin Archive II
PostScript Secrets Archive
Blatant Opportunist 1-5
Case Against Patents Archive
Ask the Guru Archive I
Ask the Guru Archive II
Ask the Guru Archive III
All Guru's web files
All Guru's web .psl files

Certain files may not have ever been upgraded and may otherwise be somewhat "lost".

April 30 2020
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Just added a phone responsive upgrade to our Hardware Hacker page. The old original has been renamed here.

April 29, 2020
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Just added a phone responsive upgrade to our Tech Musings page. The old original has been renamed here.

April 28, 2020
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A possibly lost and long forgotten elegant simplicity approach to generating absolutely minimalist digital sinewaves can be found here in column #85.

A precaution: Use the sin variable only! The "cosine" channel is really just a triangular wave! Unless you really need a triangle wave.

For some strange reason, this never got updated from its archive original.

April 27, 2020
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Just added a phone responsive upgrade to our Marbelous Pancakes page. The old original has been renamed here.

A list of our phone responsive pages can be found here.

April 26, 2020
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Some new sourcecodes and a demo should clarify the behavior of some of our other pseudo marbling examples.

April 25, 2020
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Here's yet another photo of what may be part of the Golf Course Canal. Located near N 32.80278 W 109.77889.

Much more here and lots of photos here.

April 24, 2020
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Just added a phone responsive upgrade to our Energy Tutorials page. The old original has been renamed here.

A list of our phone responsive pages can be found here.

April 23, 2020
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Improved the access to parafit1.psl, a math routine that finds the minimum ( or maximum ) of a parabola, given any three of its data points. A sample output can be found as parafit.log.

Send it via the command line to Distiller's //acrodist /F.

The math is easily transposed to most any language. The routine can often be used near the peak or minimum of a fancier function, provided it has a strong quadratic term. Several iterations normally should converge.

More math stuff here.

April 22, 2020
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Here's a summary of our ongoing upgrades to phone responsive web pages. But please note that many of our pages remain best viewed and printed on laptops or pcs. Our calculators work best with real keyboards.

CSS --
 Guru's Lair home page
 What's New 2020
 What's New 2019
 Free Ebooks
 Classic Reprints
 Gila Hikes
 Auction Help
 Cubic Splines
 Hydrogen Fallacies
 Energy Tutorials
 Marbelous Pancakes
 Allen Canal Image
 Hardware Hacker
 Tech Musings
 Blatant Opportunist
 GuruGram Library

JPG and PSL --
 Hanging Canal images
 Worst of Marcia Swampfelder
 .xml to .pdf all files
 .xml to .pdf .psl files

The secret to making .pdf files more phone friendly appears here.

April 21, 2020
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Completed our phone responsiveness blog upgrade to whtnu19.shtml.

The original full width version remains as whtnu19w.shtml.

April 20, 2020
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Found a rather tall armless Saguaro Cactus here.

April 19, 2020
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Truth in advertising: Like when an eBay seller posted...

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

April 18, 2020
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The price of pv cells remains in free fall, as monitored here and here.

Best price per panel watt is now at 6.5 cents, which is well below what is needed for renewability and sustainability. Next goal is a nickel per peak panel watt, which should eliminate any and all needs for subsidies.

April 17, 2020
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Lindsay of Lindsay Publications retired a few years back. His big thing was restoring and reprinting out-of-print ( and public domain ) "lost" technology books.

Many of these titles remain available at YOTB at very low prices. At least while supplies last.

These titles scream to be moved over as eBooks to a site similar to American Radio History. But how this would be sponsored and paid for by who remains unknown.

Our own eBooks here and classic reprints here.

April 16, 2020
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Despite its being partially plowed by the CCC and its pipeline reuse by CNF, the hanging canal segments along the middle reaches of Frye Mesa in and around N 32.76009 W 109.81132 do appear to have initially been clearly prehistoric and well preserved.

A likely but unproven water source would be the spring in Spring Canyon. Possibly ( but still infuriatingly unproven ) helped along by a watershed crossing from Frye Creek above the falls. No other sourcing presently appears even remotely credible. And ignoring Frye Creek water would seem highly improbable.

The exact routing remains unknown, but the water almost certainly would have had to go through an obvious pinch point at. N 32.74726 W 109.83893.

Where to from there? The two choices are "under the road"and "over the ridge". The latter lacks any obvious hints of a "climb" up an unfriendly cliff, although there are other higher canal hints. Either way, you have to end up at N 32.75513 W 109.83548.

The Frye Falls road does appear to have a most useful and quite constant slope over an exceptionally long distance. Which seems suggestive of a "steal the plans" from an underlying ditch.

Possibly contacting CNF over their "stole the plans" pipeline history may help. Your assistance welcome.

April 15, 2020
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But a lesser appreciated stunningly engineered feature of our prehistoric bajada hanging canals is the concept of pinch points.

A pinch point is a location where the canal absolutely must go through. Otherwise their essential constant slope gets violated big time. Such as a mesa knife edge or a saddle forming a watershed crossing.

So, not only did they build these utterly spectacular water management features, they also put them "connect the dots" fashioned in their ONLY (!) possible locations.

One of many dozens of examples ( in this case a mesa knife edge here.

Much more on our prehistoric hanging canals here, here, here, here, and a video here.

April 14, 2020
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Certainly one of the most spectacular engineering examples of our Bajada Hanging Canals is the intentional use of watershed crossings. The one where a canal starts in Ash Creek and climbs "up" and "over" to Mud Springs is especially well documented and noteworthy.

The largely unexplored Tripp Canal seems to have a similar watershed crossing, while a possible candidate in Nuttall Canyon seems to have been intentionally bypassed by a somewhat better Sand Canal route.

A dilemma: A proven watershed crossing is sorely needed in Frye Canyon! Otherwise a major stream source would appear to have been "ain't likely" ignored, while the flow rate of the Spring in Spring Canyon would appear unreasonable excessive. And, with the spectacular HS canal segment, they went to an awful lot of trouble to return water to Frye Creek. Especially if they never took it out in the first place.

There is apparently one and only one even remotely possible location for a Frye Creek watershed crossing. This would be above the falls in and around  N 32.74452 W 109.83837. The route is presently mostly followed by an old wagon road. Slopes are exactly and precisely as expected.

Your help is needed to either prove or discredit this.

April 13, 2020
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The usual two first steps to becoming .shtml phone responsive is to add a

  <meta name="viewport"
  content="width=device-width,
  initial-scale=1">

as your second header line and a max-width entry to automatically adjust text to fit phone and other screens.

Acrobat .pdf files do not yet seem to have an obvious internal way of dynamically adjusting text width to match the viewer available screen size. But what you can do to your PostScript source code is set the width to 325 pixels...

  [/CropBox [0 0 325 792]
  /PAGES pdfmark

This should be good enough for most phones. If needed, a second "click thru" doc and back again can be created for printing and full width displays.

Examples here and here. More on pdfmark here and here.

April 12, 2020
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Reworked two of our .xml to .pdf converters to be more phone responsive.

Find this sourcecode and this demo to convert xml to an Acrobat list of all of our available website files.

Find this sourcecode and this demo to convert .xml to an Acrobat list of all of our .psl files. The code is easily modified to generate most any postfix list.

I've kept the original filenames. The old versions can be "back derived" from the new ones if needed. This seems unlikely.

April 11, 2020
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Here, here, and here are our three latest Bajada Hanging Canal photos.

These are found in and around N 32.80493 W 109.77640 and are believed ( but not yet proven ) to be Golf Course Canal related.

On some rethinking, Golf Course Canal itself may in fact be a part of the Robinson Ditch. Less than half of this projected 13 mile (!) supercanal is unambiguous and reasonably proven. Significant unproven gaps remain.

Speaking of Golf Course, its projected northern Reay Canal end seems to be newly endangered since it underlies a rapidly expanding housing development.

More photos here.

April 10, 2020
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A news anchor recently gained even more than their usual fame by confusing cannabis and cannibal tasting tours.

HINT: Only one of these is vegetarian!

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

April 9, 2020
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To review, PostScript is a totally general purpose computer language that is especially adept at reading or writing most any code in most any file or most any language. Find its reference manual here and bunches of apps here.

At present, we have some 545 Postscript-as-langauge apps and you can find a complete list here. These are pretty much standard text files that have a .psl or "PostScript-Lancaster" file trailer.

The files are normally sent to Acrobat Distiller using their magic secret command line incantation of //acrodist /F. The /F is particularly important if your .psl file has to be able to read or write disk files. 

I've long ago written a bunch of Gonzo PostScript utilities. These are just a dictionary of new and useful definitions. Find the utilities here and their tutorial here. The utilities are particularly good at highly sophisticated text justification and creating electronic schematics and technical illustrations, along with doing fancier bitmap manipulations.

The utilities can be prepended or excerpted to any .psl file. They also can be more conveniently run inside your .psl program provided (1) you have a copy of gonzo.psl reachable on your machine and (2) you remembered the Distiller /F postfix needed to allow reading or writing disk files.

The utilities are around 85K long. Using the run command shortens this to under a hundred bytes. Making for stunningly short sourcecode.

Start with our PostScript Beginner Stuff, followed up with our PostScript Secrets. Or, for GhostScript and Google Cloud compatible stuff, you can start here.

April 8, 2020
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We recently saw here and here how to use PostScript to read most any file in most any language. In this previous example, we read a sitemap.xml file (gotten from PRO_Sitemaps.com or similar) and create a .pdf Acrobat file that lists each and every file on a selected website.

A simple extension to this .psl code lets you filter for any selected file extension. As shown, it gives you an Acrobat clickable list of all of the .psl ( "PostScript-Lancaster" ) files on our website. Find the code here and an example here.

The code is easily modified to find a complete and clickable list of any file extension on any website.

As usual, you send this .psl file to Acrobat Distiller using the magic secret incantation of //acrodist /F from the command line. Be sure to rename the files and file prefixes in your .psl code to match your new local use!

April 7, 2020
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 How to Trash a Vehicle Hydrogen Electrolysizer

April 6, 2020
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Can you pass this energy quiz?

Here's some more energy stuff you may find to be of interest...

Energy Intro and Summary
PV Panel Intro and Summary
Assorted Energy Links
Some Energy Fundamentals
More Energy Fundamentals
Fundamentals of Electrolysis
Trashing Auto Electrolysizers
How to Bash Pseudoscience
Technical Innovation Secrets
Debunking the Water Powered Car  
Debunking Brown's Gas
Supraluminal dowsing Brown’s Gas
"Its a gas" Hydrogen Library

April 5, 2020
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The Curious Saga of the Magic Lamp

April 4, 2020
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Several of you have asked about Bruno.

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

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

Norfolk & Waay in a Kilgore Trout sort of focus are not me and not my website. I have no idea who their webmaster is.

The Bruno pallets may occasionally include an odd body part or two. Naturally, this is normal and expected.

More details here.

April 3, 2020
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Fundamental Factors Underlying Recent Technological Innovation. You can find the sourcecode here.

April 2, 2020
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Just released a "phone friendly" and responsive version of our Hydrogen Library. The older original can still be viewed here.

We now have twelve phone compatible pages: the Home Page, one blog at What's New 2020, our Free Ebooks page, the Classic Reprints page, our Gila Hikes, our Auction Help, the Cubic Spline page, this Hydrogen Page, our Canal Images, The Worst of Marcia Swampfelder, a partial What's New 2019 and the first of our image access pages. 

And one more time: If you do not understand exergy, you should not be pissing around with hydrogen. If you do understand exergy, you will not be pissing around with hydrogen.

April 1, 2020
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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.

March 31, 2020
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Reworked our older Ultimate Bagel, earlier found here and here.
Find the sourcecode here and the .pdf file here.

This should also be more or less GhostScript and Google Drive compatible as well. Much more on PostScript can be found here.

March 30, 2020
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May have found a previously unexplored reach of the Golf Course Canal here. With two photos here and here.

Much more on our prehistoric hanging canals here, here, here, here, and a video here.

March 29, 2020
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Just released a "phone friendly" and responsive version of our Bezier Cubic Spline Library. The older original can still be viewed here.

We now have eight phone compatible pages: the Home Page, one blog at What's New 2020, our Free Ebooks page, the Classic Reprints page, our Gila Hikes, our Auction Help, this Cubic Spline page, and the first of our image access pages. 

March 28, 2020
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In response to an ever diminishing groundswill of popular demand, here is an upload of my one and only patent.

Recent Nebraska research seems to demonstrate that framing your patent and placing it on an east facing wall eliminates outright or significantly reduces the severity of walrus attacks. This is its only credible use.

And here is more on what I think of patents and patenting in general.

March 27, 2020
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Here's an example of using PostScript to write .SVG code, particularly for scrapbooking uses.

Find the .psl code here for this .pdf and this .svg.

March 26, 2020
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The only Gonzo code or Gonzo Utilities we really needed yesterday was this mergestring routine...

/mergestr {2 copy length exch length add string dup dup 4 3 roll 4 index length exch putinterval 3 1 roll exch 0 exch putinterval} def

 ...which merges the two top strings on the stack.

March 25, 2020
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I've long been overly enameled over using PostScript to generate pretty near any source code in pretty near any language. The trick is to use its .log file output and then ( as a browser workaraound ) rename it as a .txt file.

Here is how to use PostScript to generate CSS: Find the sourcecode here and the ready-to-drop-in text here. This code helps make our blogs responsive.

Note that you throw out the baby and drink the washwater by ignoring any .pdf output and using only the .log output when writing another language.

March 24, 2020
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Enameled dealing with four paws and groundswill.
Find some more Gurugrams here.

March 23, 2020
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Just upgraded our Classic Reprints page to full responsive phone  compatibility!

We now have six phone compatible pages: the Home Page, this blog at What's New 2020, our Free Ebooks page, this Classic Reprints page, our Gila Hikes, and the first of our image access pages.  

The first two examples of our Acrobat .PDF phone responsiveness include Marcia Swampfelder ( sourceocde here and "full width" pc and printer version here) and our main imenu page ( sourcecode here and "full width" pc and printer version here ).

Please report any and all suggestions and requests.

March 22, 2020
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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 resource for generating your own greatly improved sitemap1.pdf or ".xsl eliminator" files.

March 21, 2020
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Here's a validation checklist for any new pages to go on your website...

 ( ) Spell check using suitable software.
 ( ) Verify Web compatibility here.
 ( ) Verify Link compatibility here.
 ( ) Verify CSS compatibility here.
 ( ) Verify Responsiveness here.
 ( ) Third Party proof and reverify
 ( ) Save any previous code versions!
 ( ) Upload then repeat all the above.
 ( ) Invite user feedback.

March 20, 2020
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Did something bad happen to Wesrch? This superb alternate open source tech publishing resource seems to have utterly vanished from either itself or any website mentions.

Your comments welcome.

March 19, 2020
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One more time on hovering a table cell background color: This is normally done with a header <style> command of...

 td:hover {background-color: #ccc;}

Note that any newer cell background-color change will stop that cell's hovering action!

If you purposely do not want a hover to show up on, say, a table title, then change the <td> background color of that cell. Even trivially will do.

If you want the cell to hover and want to change its background color, then change all of the <tr> row color instead. But do not change the individual <td> cell color.

March 18, 2020
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If you do not understand exergy, you should not be pissing around with hydrogen.

If you do understand exergy, you will not be pissing around with hydrogen.

There is more hydrogen in a gallon of gasoline than there is in a gallon of liquid hydrogen. Varies with octane, but typically 11 percent more.

Electrolysis from high value solar pv, wind, or alternator sources is "not even wrong" and is much worse than 1:1 exchanging US Dollars for Mexican Pesos.

Much more on hydrogen stupidities here.

March 17, 2020
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Here is a spiral related kind of thingy along with its sourcecode.

It is sort of based on some web related art, but with all new sourcecode. As usual, send it to Distiller via the Windows Command mode with the top secret incantation of "//acrodist /F"

Curiously, its animated sideshow only appears once for any given amount of Acrobat PDF magnification. The animation seems totally absent on Chrome, so be sure to view it via Acrobat on a local copy.

Alike but different somehow would be our avuncular sleezoid or the Spirograph stuff found here and here

Plus our recent Fractal Fern here and here, and our Sierpinski Triangles here and here.

And the marbelous stacks of pancakes here.

A PostScript manual here, my personal utilities here, and an intro tutorial here.

March 16, 2020
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Some rethinking ( but a continuing lack of solid proof ) suggests that the Robinson and the Golf Course hanging prehistoric canals may be one in the same. With a still missing portion between N 32.79107 W 109.79147 and N 32.79830 W 109.78275.

The original proposed Robinson route was suggested by a topo drainage line past Thorp and Stowe tanks. But no convincing support evidence was ever found north of the above obvious washout or French Drain.

Similarly, the Golf Course Canal has yielded no credible proof to date of its suggested obvious route straight down Frye Creek.

It turns out that most of the larger canals have a mid-reach split into two or more sub canal routes! Making their engineering even more complex than before.

A 13 mile (!) Gonzo supercanal is now believed to include an upper reach of the Frye Watershed Diversion, the spring in Spring Canyon, upper Frye Mesa, Lower Frye Mesa and a small ponding area.

It then is believed to split, with the northern branch forming Robinson Canal, Golf Course Canal and Reay Canal. And the southern branch forming the HS Canal, the Lower Frye Complex, the Blue Ponds Rework, and the Freeman Canal.

Your help as a field mouse, drone specialist, or with financing is more than welcome on this world class research project. An immediate need is to get this into creative commons.

March 15, 2020
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Contrary to all the dire warnings, tables remain highly useful and are easily included in CSS compatible web docs.

Dozens of examples can be found here and here. Click on view page source for details.

The tables presently use internal styling, meaning that very little header style content is needed. Internal styling also can later be converted into includes for multiple "subroutine" uses.

The menu selections, title, URL links, and link names will, of course, all need changed to adapt for your own use.

March 14, 2020
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Just uploaded a new and mobile friendly version of The Worst of Marcia Swampfelder.

Find the file here and its sourcecode here. You can click through to its old renamed full width printer version here with its sourcecode here.

This is a second example of how to make Acrobat .PDF files mobile friendly. Instead of CSS trying to fit each and every display, a "narrow" version of 360 pixels width gets combined with the "wide" old style full width. With easy click through options in both directions.

Advantages of PDF over CSS include preserving pagination and often much better overall quality. Combined with the power of raw PostScript.

March 13, 2020
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There are several different methods of dealing with PostScript variables with my Gonzo Sourcecode and my Gonzo Tutorial.

With an immediate definition, the task gets done right away, such as /variable snorf def. In this case, whatever snorf is gets done right now. Note the missing brackets.

With a normal definition, the task takes place anytime in the future that it is called. Such as /variable {snorf} def. In this case, whatever snorf happens to be gets executed when it is called. Note the brackets.

One big features of my Gonzo utilities lies in their ability to take a long block of text, isolate individual lines, and then do fancy justification stuff and autotracking URL's on them by building up a printlist of tasks. It is super important to note that whatever happens at print time can end in wildly different positions than the initial code suggests. Particularly on center, right, or fill justification. Or on autotracking.

Most any carefully crafted PS command can get entered into your long text block if it is  preceded by a vertical line. As in text here |/psroutine  more text. What happens is the Gonzo temporarily stops its text operations, executes the embedded proc, and then ( hopefully ) continues with its text evaluation.

It is important to note that the embedded proc is executed immediately. Also note that a space must follow the embedded command. It is also important, of course, that the inserted command be well behaved.

Instead, you often might want to wait till print time to execute something like an auto-tracking url or a one word color change. Or even so little as one point of kerning.

To do this, your embedded command definition must end with this magic printlist stuffing command: printlist exch 3 index exch put exch 1 add exch.

Also your printlist deferred command must not include any executables! Instead, you use names followed by cvx inside an array which is also followed by cvx. Note that names are preceded by a forward slash.

Many examples here and in this tutorial.

March 12, 2020
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Acrobat Distiller is usually pretty good at reporting exactly where and how a PostScript error happens. But sometimes you may not have the faintest clue where the problem lies. Especially in a long or fancy document.

The solution is to introduce an intentional error as a breakpoint. And find out if it is above or below the initial error. Keep narrowing the "us" versus "them" space till their error no longer has any place to hide.

There are two ways to do this. A meow1 can be inserted directly into normal PS code. Or, if you are inside a Gonzo text block, you can enter a |/meow2  with a trailing space. Or force a text exit with a ) cl meow2 to drop back down into raw PostScript.

March 11, 2020
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My profound apologies for Google Adsence Auto Ads recently and repeatedly trashing most of our Guru's Lair website pages.

I certainly never asked them to force feed zillions of huge ads all over hell and gone on our website.

I think I finally got Auto Ads disabled. Enabling them as a default seems to me to be a really, really dumb thing to do. Even their "up to an hour" cancellation seems to be enough to permanently piss off some viewers.

Cancellation details appear online.

Again, I am sorry.

March 10, 2020
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 Patently Horrible.

March 9, 2020
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Spell checkers do not appear to be readily available for Acrobat .PDF files. Instead, you have been traditionally advised to go to the underlying source code for editing.

Here is one possible useful workaround: Use Acrobat to select File --> Export to --> Text (plain). Then send the file to Microsoft Word via a command line prompt of winword. Then spell check. Then fix any problems with the underlying PostScript code.

Directly spell checking one of our Gonzo .psl files can be awkward because of the embedded commands. More here.

On web code, Dreamweaver has a fairly good spell checker reached by shift-F7.

March 8, 2020
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Did I ever reveal my top secret hyphenation algorithm? See an example here.

The key rule is to NEVER hyphenate anything, anyplace, ever.

Yeah, your initial results may seem spacey. But assuming you are an original author and assuming you are not dealing with an "must be exact text" historic or legal document, you should spend the time and effort to change the wording slightly to optimize your text lines for the best overall appearance.

With practice, it is fairly easy to rearrange, change, lengthen, or shorten any "low impact" words. Or change their sequence. Or change "I will" to "I'll" or use similar stunts.

Naturally, you should not in any manner change the overall tone, intent, meaning, or formality of the text.

Yeah, three or four passes might be needed, along with some third party proofing and intervention. But I strongly feel this is definitely most often worth the effort nearly all of the time..

Many hundreds of examples on our website.

March 7, 2020
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A reminder that hover changing the color of a table cell will stop working if there is any background-color changing command in a <td> cell.

The workaround is to make any background-color change as a style in <tr> instead.

Working examples here.

March 6, 2020
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Did yet another kaizen go round here and here. These should sort of "standardize" our approach to future responsive web friendly pages.

You can view the code with the usual right click of view page source.

March 5, 2020
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Our "sample" files are mostly recent, but many are not yet mobile responsive. Many are rework candidates for phone compatibility, but we are not remotely near there yet. Even some of these still do not yet exist.

Here's the present active sample file list...

  ahsamp1.shtml - for Auction Help
  ansamp1.shtml - for Neat Stuff
  bcsamp1.shtml - for Bezier Splines
  bebsamp1.shtml - for Book to eBook
  bksamp1.shtml - for Recommended Books
  blsamp1.shtml - for the Yearly Blogs
  bodsamp1.shtml - for  Book on Demand
  bosamp1.shtml - for  Blatant Opportunist
  catsamp1.shtml - for  File Directory
  crsamp1.shtml - for  Classic Reprints
  ebksamp1.shtml - for eBook Reprints 
  ebsamp1.shtml - for  eBay Secrets 
  etsamp1.shtml - for  Energy Tutorials
  ggsamp1.shtml - for  Gurugrams
  hhsamp1.shtml - for  Hardware Hacker
  issamp1.shtml - for  ISMM
  lasamp1.shtml - for Latest Additions
  lbsamp1.shtml - for Library Subjects
  matsamp1.shtml - for Math Stuff
  mbsamp1.shtml - for Marbelous Pancakes
  mssamp1.shtml - for Magic Sinewave
  orsamp1.shtml - for Other Reprints
  pasamp1.shtml - for Patent Avoidance
  pssamp1.shtml - for PostScript Resources
  psusamp1.shtml - for Pseudoscience Bashing
  rbsamp1.shtml - for Resource Bin
  scsamp1.shtml - for Santa Claus Machines
  spsamp1.shtml - for Service Pages
  tinsamp1.shtml - for Tinaja Questing

You can extract more file info here.

March 4, 2020
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Here and here are a pair of examples of how to make .PDF files ( or your own PostScript-as-Language ) somewhat mobile phone friendly. You can use .psl trailers to access the sourcecode.

These remain fully .PDF compatible, preserving all of the usual superb image quality, full and proper pagination, detail, and whatever. The trick is to make two .pdf files where one was before. One that is "narrow" and mostly mobile phone compatible. And one that is "wide" printable, and full quality.

Each file gives you the option of clicking into the other one.

A 360 pixel width can be assumed for the "narrow" .pdf. This should be "right on" for some Galaxy phones, and "close enough" for other mobiles.

The .pdf file will need cropped to appropriate width. Note that you have to double click inside the clipping box to access "clip all pages" and such. Also be sure to use their reduce file size option.

March 3, 2020
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Acrobat .pdf files have many advantages for technical presentation. Not the least of which are unbeatable image quality, extreme detail, and full pagination capability.

At present, though, .pdf has no way to access <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> of CSS and thus no way to do the "usual" approach to becoming responsively phone friendly.

The "usual" solution is to transfer the .pdf content into CSS. Which often drops the quality, becomes hard to attractively print, trashes page numbers, and creates other problems.

Instead, a sneaky trick called "creating two .pdf files" can give you one file superb for PC's and printing, and a second that "more or less" matches
the responsive phone needed. A width of 360 pixels should be perfect for many phones, and "close enough" for others.

Each .pdf file, of course, has the option of clicking through the other one.

Please view tomorrow's examples.

March 2, 2020
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We are presently in the long and painful process to make our Guru's Lair mobile friendly. But have barely just begun.

First and foremost, we strongly recommend you use a full size computer and printer to preserve our image quality, effective pagination, and full .pdf file compatibility.

Here is the "backing up for a good start" status of our present mobile phone friendly files...

  Gila Dayhikes - up to new version
  Whatnu 20 - up to new version
  HC000 Allen - up to new standard

  imenu1w - preserved clickable .pdf
  imenu1 - new "narrow" clickable .pdf

  Home Page - needs modest adjustment
  Free eBooks - needs modest adjustment

Only a mere 2300 or so pages to go. Your comments welcome.

March 1, 2020
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A few older degubbing yarns can be found here.

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

This single wire network supported dozens to hundreds of IP addresses, had automatic packet switching, self-addressing, error detection and correction, diagnostic options and even failure mode analysis and alternate routing. All done with a handfull of fist sized wind up clockworks. And it even had a baud rate.

Yup - ONE BAUD!

February 29, 2020
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When they marionette shrimp. how do they tie all those little strings on?

February 28, 2020
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Things just got very, very wrong with our use of Google Adsense.
We are sorry, but they have been utterly and completely trashing our website for the last few hours.

We have at least temporarily completely canceled Adsense.

Please note you can support the Guru's Lair through our eBay sales.

Separately, our autographed Active Filter Cookbook and Micro Cookbook I, a very few TTL Cookbooks, our All We Have USB and our Hanging Canal USB are all available by way of our free eBooks page.

And, of course, grants are welcome for our hanging canal research.
As are drones and, most importantly, field mice.

Plus our usual ongoing consulting services.

We can also include you in our banner rotator feature, but only and strictly if we truly and genuinely believe in your product. Details here.

Adsense apparently has no pause feature. You can add your own by using an includes "subroutine". To pause, make the include text empty
or else completely comment it. Alternately, you can cancel and then later may be prompted to reset.

In light of this morning's debacle, I very strongly suggest you add your own pause feature if you are using adsense!

Adsense sorely needs a live chat feature similar to the superb Fatcow one and others. To date, their service for us has been highly disappointing and simply not worth their self-induced annoyances and hassles.

February 27, 2020
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Assume you are an intern working on a SETI program at a somewhat advanced civilization on Iota Rectuli IV. Strong evidence of rocky planets have recently been discovered nearby in a minor arm of your own second rate galaxy sometimes called the "Milky Way". A mere seventy light years or so away.

Amazingly, one of these planets suddenly and recently became a "radio star" with substantial output at the VHF frequency range. Your recent careful analysis has shown detailed comb structure with strong harmonics related to both 60 Hertz and 15.750 kilohertz.

Between the latest of advanced signal processing algorithms and some exceptionally rare viewing conditions, out pops a perfectly lucid and clear ten second video clip of ROLLER DERBY!

As the sum total of everything known about human civilization. We can assume that"Captain Video" and "Kukla, Fran, and Ollie" are yet to be discovered. What report, if any, would you submit to your supervisor?

February 26, 2020
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Some minor adjustments seem needed to get our hanging canal image log files to be phone responsive. Here is an example of where we are likely to go with this.

Hundreds of these need updated, with hundreds more even further behind. Your comments welcome.

February 25, 2020
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Here's an access list to our earlier series of Emerging Technical Opportunities...

  Emerging Technical Opportunities I
  Emerging Technical Opportunities II
  Emerging Technical Opportunities III
  Emerging Technical Opportunities IV
  Emerging Technical Opportunities VI
  Emerging Technical Opportunities VII
  Emerging Technical Opportunities VIII

Find the rest of our Blat series here.

February 24, 2020
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Did a kaizen number on whtnu20.shtml, our current blog. It should also now have a mobile friendly layout with simplified inline programming.

Again, please report any issues here.

February 23, 2020
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Just did a kaizen number on our Gila Day Hikes, with many hundreds of minor adjustments made. We now should be fully mobile friendly, more uniform, and have most of the links verified and the typos repaired. Please report any further issues.

More details on some of the more obscure and lesser known day hikes appear here. Yeah, this postscript powerpoint clone still needs a lot of work to become mobile friendly. Adding locations ( which you can find here ) and notes should also go on the list.

February 22, 2020
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CSS Hint - Web denizens report a number of issues getting CSS to hover properly. Most especially on table rows or cells.

On hover links, it is super important to use this exact style sequence:

  a:link {color: blue;}
  a:visited {color: #060;}
  a:hover {color: red;}
  a:active {color: green;}

A web acronym of "love-hate" as in "L", "V", "H", "A" has been suggested elsewhere to remember this demanded sequence.

Meanwhile, these style lines only seem to work sometimes...

 td:hover { background-color : #ccc; }
 tr:hover { background-color : #c9c; }

The best explanation I have found is that any further style changes in <td> or <tr> seem to trash this hovering ability!

Hovering on table cells or rows in addition to link color changes can very much improve mobile selection. I am not yet sure what workarounds are available, if any.

Please report your observations.

February 21, 2020
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After dozens of trips, I've still been unable to "close" a missing portion in the middle of the Jernigan Canal. But I think I finally proved that the missing part can only be ninety feet or so wide. And likely caused by a major drainage flood event.

Much more on our prehistoric hanging canals here, here, here, here, and a video here.

February 20, 2020
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CSS Hint - A CSS presentation is normally split into two pieces, the style part in the <head> and the content part in the <body>. This normally makes for compact and minimalist reuse of resources. But, with creative use of <span> commands, it is also often possible to do a single module "inline" layout.

Inline layouts debug easier and lend themselves to "include" subroutines. There are also fewer rude surprises when porting to a new file destination lacking needed or wrong <head> commands.

Here is an example of an "inline" layout...

You can extract the actual code with a right mouse view page source command or via Dreamweaver or similar. Many more examples extractable here.

February 19, 2020
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As seen here and here, pv pricing continues its dramatic decline, with the best price now under a low of seven cents per peak cell watt.

We've recently seen it blast on through eight cents and becoming the proximate cause of the recent conversions of coal power plants into singles bars.

The next blast thru threshold can be anticipated at a nickel per peak cell watt. At this point, the highly restrictive pv subsidies and net metering likely might both become history.

February 18, 2020
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Note that there are many different formats to GPS data. This can cause complications if several people are on a hike or working on a research project. The most common formats are degrees-minutes-seconds and degrees and fractions.

One of many web conversion sites is Earthpoint. Or Acme Mapper can also indirectly do conversions for you.

But it makes the most sense to make sure everybody is on the same page ahead of time. My personal preference is degrees and fractions.

February 17, 2020
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There is more hydrogen in a gallon of gasoline than there is in a gallon of liquid hydrogen.

More hydrogen ludicrosities here.

February 16, 2020
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I've always considered PowerPoint to be mesmerizingly awful, so I wrote my own emulator using my Gonzo Utilities to generate Acrobat .PDF equivalents. Per this tutorial. And this sourcecode.

These files are much more compact, can be totally device independent, load much faster, and offer significantly better graphics.  It is not even close.

A newly revised Gila High Tech slide can be found here with its improved sourcecode here. Other available Powerpoint emulation resources and emulations now include...

 A Gonzo Tutorial and Directory
 Gonzo PostScript PowerPoint Emulator
 Gonzo Utilities ( .psl sourcecode )

 High Tech Gila Valley Features 
 Successful eBay Buying Strategies
 Successful eBay Selling Strategies
 Little known Gila Valley Dayhikes
 Prehistoric Hanging Canal Lecture
 Energy Fundamentals Intro
 PV Panel Intro & Summary
 Mt Graham Aerial Lumber Tramway
 Introduction to Magic Sinewaves
 Three Phase Magic Sinewaves
 Alternate Lores Magic Sinewaves

For the sourcecode on most of these, you can substitute .psl trailers for .pdf. The present new issue, of course, is to make the process more mobile friendly. This can be done by resizing text and click to magnify image processing.

Consulting, custom design, and training services available.

February 15, 2020
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Here's a mobile responsive and phone friendly and otherwise revised new version of our Gila Valley Dayhikes!

Other mobile responsive and phone friendly web pages now include our Home Page, Whatnu20, and Free eBooks. But we still strongly recommend larger displays for most of our resources.

Should you need it for anything, the old Dayhike page has been backed up here.

Please report any and all typos and suggestions. Yeah, a few adjustments are still needed.

February14, 2020
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Well, maybe just the punch lines.

February13, 2020
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Few people realize how primitive the hardware options were at the time the TV Typewriter was first designed.

Microprocessors were theoretical beasts that were outrageously expensive and undeliverable with key peripheral chips not even on the drawing board. Magnetic core memory had just dropped to a nickel a bit, and there were only rumors that solid state memory might sometime be able to compete in the dark distant future.

A controversial quantum leap in baud rates from 110 to 150 had just been announced. The only dynamic RAM was the 1103 that drove a whole generation of engineers insane with its 20 nanosecond wide temperature dependent timing window.

Static RAM was outrageously expensive and pretty much limited to 64 bits or less per package. Which left me with bucket brigade shift registers as the only viable route to an on-screen tv text display. These were cheap enough and fast enough at 1 microsecond, and big enough at 525 bits, but you had to continuously refresh them.

These were not in any manner random access, as you had to
wait for the bit you were after to come out the end of the pipe. Their dropout specs did not permit the several milliseconds needed for vertical retrace, but fortunately, most all of the tested chips managed to just barely coast through. We had to have seven milliseconds of delay and they only would guarantee two.

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

Also unappreciated today was the utter hostility and ridicule heaped on why anyone could possibly want to put words and letters on a tv set. And how shabbily they were treated. "They" just did not get it.

Find the free TVT Cookbook here and the original story here. With some modern web replications here. And lots more eBooks here.

February 12, 2020
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Our latest mobile responsive Gila Hikes update is taking a little longer than I expected. Here is a temporary 2/3rds finished preview sample of where we are heading on this.

So far, we have three mobile pages, one each for the home page, this What's New column #20, and our Free eBooks download pages. After Gila Hikes, we would like to do a major new hanging canal page, possibly followed by an auction library update.

As usual, please email me any suggestions or corrections.

February 11, 2020
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CSS Hint - The normal use of adding commands to a paragraph or a table cell is to put a class into your header. This is especially useful if you are going to reuse the code, but it can initially get awkward and can enormousify your header as well.

Alternately, you can use inline code commands that are appropriately built into your <body> code. These are especially useful when debugging or used only once or when you are, say, changing only the color of otherwise repeating tables.

An inline example...

 <span style="{
 margin-top: -6px;
 padding-left: 35px;
 max-width: 400px;}
  ( Your text paragraph goes here. )
 </span></p>

In this example, we are asking automatic paragraph width adjustments for mobile responsiveness, a left tab, and shrinking space between paragraphs. Alternately, <div> can be used.

February10, 2020
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Amazing. About six months ago, this miniature bantam chicken moved into our Lanai. The first thing it did was eat an entire box of zucchini. And its second task was to beat the living crap out of all the neighborhood cats. Including Nimbus, who was ( and still is ) notorious for hauling in prey.

The cackling and egging on went on for half a year, until the official chicken owner finally decided to foreclose. The survivability here seemed utterly incredible.

February 9, 2020
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Just picked up a bunch of thermostats we will be offering on our eBay store. I thought that testing them might be a good idea, but I had no 24 volt ac transformer handy. But I did have a 110/220/440 industrial control transformer in stock. I simply used it backwards, applying the 110 vac line to the 440 side and it worked like a champ.

You can use this stunt only for lighter-than-rated loads, though.

February 8, 2020
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As we've seen this resource is great for testing your web pages for errors. Of which you likely have great heaping bunches if it is an older or pre-responsive page.

Of the hundreds or even thousands of errors this service reports, though, many may be caused by a previous error trashing the rest of the site "below" itself.

Thus, it is super important to always fix the top and earliest error first. After the errors are all fixed, you can check its mobile responsiveness with this utility.

Because of their error finding algorithms, their earliest problem may not be the one on the top one reported their list.

February 7, 2020
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Had a user ask me when sines and cosines could be equal. There seems to be some web traffic on this topic, but any potential use utterly evades me.

At any rate, the obvious answer is 45 degrees. Formally...

  sin = cos
  sin / cos = 1
  tan = 1
  arctan (1) = 45 degrees

Also in the running would be any +180 or -180 degree multiples.

February 6, 2020
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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 hidden 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.

February 5, 2020
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CSS Hint - Let's review several fundamental steps towards making a website mobile or phone friendly.

First and foremost, you need to add a <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" near the very top of your doc <head>.

Secondly, you need to use a style of max-width: 450px; or similar. This sets your widest width of a text paragraph on wider displays. The CSS formatting will thus automatically rearrange for lower resolution displays. Thus word-by-word making the paragraph narrower and higher as needed.

Thirdly, you need a way of second guessing what your webpage will look like on arbitrary or random lower resolution displays. Of several web resources, I've found this free Responsive Design Checker to be most useful.

February 4, 2020
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  Fibonacci's Sunflowers.

February 3, 2020
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Thanks to the Stack Overflow folks, our free RTL Cookbook downloads have just gone mini-viral.

Stack Overflow is a great resource to get most any programming question resolved.

Somebody did report that RTL has two missing pages and two duplicate ones. It likely will be a while before I can fix this.

To go with our recently available new What's New? and new Free eBooks pages.

Next upcoming on the list are updates to Gila Hikes and an all new Bajada Hanging Canals page. Please report any and all errors, suggestions, and requests.

Once again, we are adding as much mobile responsiveness as when and where we can. But most of the site demands the largest possible displays.

February 2, 2020
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We have a brand new and mobile friendly Guru's Lair Home Page! To go with our recently available new What's New? and new Free eBooks pages.

Next upcoming on the list are updates to Gila Hikes and an all new Bajada Hanging Canals page. Please report any and all errors, suggestions, and requests.

Once again, we are adding as much mobile responsiveness as when and where we can. But most of our site demands the largest possible displays.

February 1, 2020
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What ever happened to individual one-off Book-on-Demand publishing? I once spent a lot of time and effort on this only to have it end up largely still born.

Yeah, there are $100,000 plus BOD machines from Espresso and others. And there are all sorts of short run publisher services such as Blurb, CreateSpace, Lightning Source, and Lulu. That share issues of amortization, yield, volume, third party involvement, shipping, and learning curves,

Typical charges might be ten dollars per book in lots of 100, plus shipping.

The obvious big reason BOD failed is that books themselves are in the process of failing spectacularly. eBooks have ridiculously cheaper and faster distribution, not to mention their many obvious other advantages.

But the second reason for personal, one-off BOD failure is that nobody so much as addressed, rather than ever solved the need for a $90 "pop it in the microwave" integrated shearing, binding, and heavy cover printing solution.

We looked at part of this way back here.

January 31, 2020
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CSS Hint - Hover effects can end up quite simple. Just put these in the <style> section of your <head>...

 :link {color: blue;}
 a:visited {color: #060;}
 a:hover {color: red;}
 a:active {color: green;}

 td:hover { background-color : #ccc; }
 tr:hover { background-color : #c9c; }

Two gotchas: The a: links must be in the order shown! And the td: or tr: hover may not work if thee are other table style changes!

The 215 web friendly "short form" color codes can be found here.

January 30, 2020
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A new free eBooks web page that should be much more mobile friendly is now available for download.

The old version can still be viewed here. Please report any typo, link, or viewability issues.

This is the second mobile release in which may become an ongoing series. The first was this file as our whtnu20.shtml.

January 29, 2020
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Several online sealed bid routines are now including a rank feature that reveals how many bidders are ahead of you.

This can be a useful tool if you early enter a lowball bid. A few minutes before any auto-extension, you can then ratchet up your bid over and over again.

One downside is that re-entries can get awkward if you have several lots closing at the same time. A second is that your competitors can play the same game.

Much more auction stuff here.

But please note that (a) eBay sales are in free fall and (b) shipping charges ( except from China or Amazon ) are newly outrageous. Which drives home the key rule that your SBR sell buy ratio should be a minimum of 30:1.

January 28, 2020
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Here's a re-entry of our Computer Pioneers Photo that seemed to got lost or have some access issues.

Uh, that's the other right.

January 27, 2020
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Key web page testing tools...

  here for mobile compatibility
  here to check URI's
  here to check URL's
  here to verify CSS
  here for web friendly colors

January 26, 2020
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CSS Hint - Apparently CSS table cells do not officially recognize text max-width. The workaround is to place the text inside the cell inside a <p>... stuff ... </p> container which should let max-width work just fine.

The important use of max-width is to automatically resize text blocks for mobile or other display formats. Your text blocks should not have any <br> returns in them if the resizing is to work.

A demo should shortly be available here. Right click on View Page Source.

Note that text positioning inside the cell can be adjusted with your margin commands. Further please note that margin-top is allowed to have negative values!

January 25, 2020
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All about flutterwumpers here, here, and here.

January 24, 2020
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Secrets of nonlinear graphics transforms.

January 23, 2020
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Sorry for the recent delays. We have just dramatically improved our whtnu20.pdf daily blog by making it mobile and phone friendly!

Please report any and all typos or use experiences. The last issue of the old format blog can still be found here.

Detailed internals can be viewed by right clicking on View Page Source.

Sadly, only a small fraction of our 2200+ Guru's Lair files can be made mobile friendly as many of them are .pdf multi columns or reprints of highly detailed Linotype era originals. The "retro look" of the website is also purposeful and intentional.

Please use your largest available display size and screen resolutions when viewing the Guru's Lair!

January 22, 2020
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How to draw a Bezier cubic spline through four points.

How to approximate a circle with a Bezier Cubic Spline.

Note that the usually published magic incantation for a four spline fit is 0.55228475. Little known is that 0.551784. is some 24 percent better in that it alternates positive and negative errors. It is also correct every 30 degrees rather than every 45.

A four spline circle approximation is "good enough" for nearly all display uses. An eight spline circle approximation exceeds that needed for most machine shop applications.

Much more in our Cubic Spline library.

January 21, 2020
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How to tell an extroverted engineer: They stare at your shoes instead of their own.

January 20, 2020
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A tutorial on the Bitmap Data Format can be found here.

And three use examples are our Architect's Perspective routine, our Vignetting Auto-Backgrounder, and our Bitmap Typewriter.

January 19, 2020
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Frustrating. Evidence for the overwhelming majority of our prehistoric bajada hanging canals varies from rather likely to utterly overwhelming.

And moderate to strong evidence exists that most of the historic canals were in fact "steal the plans" or "borrow the blueprints" adaptions of prehistoric originals. The usual evidence being that only part of the original channels were unmodified and some still exist to prehistoric standards. Besides all the good routes already having been taken.

One distinct exception is the Roper Lake canal which appears
to have first existed in the 1950's. Besides being concrete lined and portions cardinal, rather steep and modern sourced, it directly conflicts with the known prehistoric Henry's Canal. Coming close to crossing it at right angles!

But a recent dozen trips to a Central Dump candidate canal remains highly ambiguous. Various portions suggestive of prehistoric canals include wildly different architectures.

In particular a thousand feet of route centered on  N 32.83863 W 109.82005 appears to be entirely missing and includes slope contradictions. Yeah, Google Earth elevations are notoriously bad, but this seems to be the only area this distinctive.

Your help in studying this dilemma is more than welcome.

January 18, 2020
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Most of our free eBooks can now be found here.

The top five are CMOS, TTL, ISMM, ACTIVE, and TVT.

Still could use your help in getting my RTL story from Electronics 41, 1978, pages 74++; from Micro Cookbook volume one; and the Hexadecimal Chronicles.

January 17, 2020
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Our bajada hanging canal image menu can be found here and is now around half finished.

January 16, 2020
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A tutorial on the Bitmap Data Format can be found here.

And three use examples are our Architect's Perspective routine, our Vignetting Auto-Backgrounder, and our Bitmap Typewriter.

January 15, 2020
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Just did a hazmat drill for TFD. Reviewing some key points:

The Hazmat rule of thumb: Hold your arm extended with your thumb up. Close one eye. If you can still see the scene, you are too close! The two most important hazmat tools are a strong pair of binoculars and a good set of running shoes.

A fascinating hazmat story can be found here.

Traditionally, each fireman was encouraged to have their own personal copy of the "orange book" aka the DOT Emergency Respond guidebook. But these days, you can simply use your smart phone to instantly grab a free copy most anywhere.

Two other key hazmat docs are the DOT Placarding Guide for trucks or trains and the NFPA Fire Diamond for buildings or sheds. Useful help is often available via Chemtrek.

January 14, 2020
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CSS Hint -The CSS hover command is useful to make mouseovers more attractive.

To change the text color of a url mouseover, use a style of a:hover {color: red;}

To change the background color of a table cell mouseover, use a style of td: hover {background-color: #96C;}

Web friendly colors can be found here.

January 13, 2020
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CSS Hint -Normal table processing does such fancy stuff as making each column best match its needed widths. This can ending up looking awful for a horizontal row of buttons. Besides slowing you down.

One workaround is first to include a style of  table-layout: fixed; and width: 400px; ( or as appropriate ) or your table styles.

And secondly, to set each td to a magic value. The magic value depends on the number of horizontal cells and might be width: 25% for four buttons. Or width: 20%; for five buttons. As in 1/(number of buttons) * 100 percent.

More help here. See an eight button example here near the screen top. Then mouse right click on view page source.

January 12, 2020
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CSS Hint -Yet another obscure CSS command is @media as documented here and here.

In this example, the command is used to change the background color depending on whether it is viewed on a mobile or full sized device.

January 11, 2020
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CSS Hint - Here is a Javascript routine to find the width of your current device screen.

January 10, 2020
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CSS Hint - One of the lesser known CSS features is that it can do simple calculations with its <calc> command. While limited to plain old add, subtract, multiply, or divide in the usual order, it does accept such variables as 30px, 15%, 1.2em or a few others.

As a simple and off-the-wall example, here is how to make a 240 pixel wide box automatically center itself horizontally on most any device, phone or pc or laptop...

  margin-left: calc(100% / 2 - 120px);

What this does is set the left margin to half the display width minus half the box width.

BTW, a good response width tester for many devices can be found here. Or you often can simply adjust your browser's right margin to get the same effect, at least for some mobile widths.