Don Lancaster's What's New 2022 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.

January 6, 2022
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Again, it should be possible to cheaply build a raspberry pi pico based TV Typewriter emulator. Use a VGA output, crippled down to black and white and possibly double or triple pixelated. A stock keyboard makes the most sense. Possibly with a cosmetic 3D printed key emulated sheet overlay to fake the blue buttons.

More here and here. And you can find a previous third party emulator video here.

January 5, 2022
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      Tic Tac Tronix

January 4, 2022
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An obscure "magic" spline to unity circle converter tension value of 0.55061 has an interesting property: Its full spline error integral is zero! Which means that it neither adds nor removes full cycle errors. So the emulated circle stays exactly the same size that it was.

This at a maximum error peak around 0.00026. This is somewhat worse than the best "balanced peak error" value of .00019. Previous sourcecode sourcecode here and a demo here. You can email me for the latest info.

January 3, 2022
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An interesting situation that made yesterday's code discovery difficult: During its execution, a cubic spline sometimes gets ahead or behind of where you think it is, with internally self-correcting "errors" that are far larger than the actual spline errors. A variant on Newton's Method I call iterate does the task.

A reminder that a version of PDF with a full 6400% magnification is recommended.

January 2, 2022
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Managed to do yet more analysis on using 4 Bezier curves to approximate a circle. Find the sourcecode here and a demo here.

Curiously, the best unity circle error approximates a 6X sinewave of amplitude 0.0002. Subtracting this out would put you well beyond that needed for machine shop accuracy. But the usual reason for a cubic spline is to eliminate trig, so an 8 spline approximation might still be the best solution.

This is mostly an internal document that still needs some cleaning up.

January 1, 2022
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The malware detecting feature of our improved logfile analysis demo and sourcecode is usable but not yet finalized. First, of course, you should aggressively and continuously stomp out any and all of your own 404 errors. This ap can be extremely useful for 404 repairs. Any third party broken links might be removed or updated as needed.

After cleaning, there are likely to still be hundreds to thousands of 404 errors. These are often caused by malware phishing events. And any visitor with, say, eight or more 404's is probably looking for filenames that you never had nor never will.

At present, you can simply search for "404" in the log visitor report area. Any excessive group of them is likely to be malware.

December 31 2022
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Some improved isp logfile reporting code can be found here as a demo and here as sourcecode. While modifiable, it presently is intended to work with FatCow reports out of their stats file in a GZ compressed format daily file similar to Access_Log_2023... of a chosen date.

Decompression on your site can be done with winzip or the free 7Z program, typically ending in an open file similar to moo.tinajacom. Our .psl code is intended to be sent to Acrobat Distiller via an Acrodist /F command. The ability to read PostScript diskfiles is essential.

The code greatly improves your logfile viewability. Arranged by visitors, formats, postfixes, errors, popularity, and even malware detection. And extendable to much more. It is best stashed on an USB whose full and relative filenames in our ap you will have to custom modify. Results can be viewed as a .log textfile.

December 30, 2022
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    Dealing with product liability.
        More here.

December 29, 2022
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So, how bad is a spline error of one part in 2000? This would be a one pixel error on a full high def 1920 pixel wide screen. And thus should be no big a deal for most graphic apps. On the other hand, this might push what is acceptable in a precision machine shop. If needed, the obvious solution is to go to an eight spline fit that zeros every fifteen degrees.

Per this. More on splines here.

December 28, 2022
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Actually plotting spline errors gets tricky because a spline being built sometimes temporarily gets ahead or behind of where you think it should be.

Positioning errors could end up a fraction of a degree, which is often large and nowhere near the minimum reach needed for the actual error. One solution approach appears here and we will have more after further testing.

December 27, 2022
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Please double check our preliminary results from our ongoing study of approximately building a circle or ellipse out of four cubic splines...

Traditional solutions for a unity circle are "magic" tension values of 0.55228475. And are otherwise known as four thirds of one less than the square root of two. Maximum peak error is 0.000285 and is everywhere 100% positive.

The "best" unity circle solution has a slightly lower tension value of 0.551984 with a maximum peak error of 0.000218. Errors here are 67% positive with peaks 24 percent better than traditional. Zero error is found every 30 degrees. Peak positive and negative errors are equal. The error function sort of ( but not quite ) looks like a 6x frequency sinewave of 0.000218 peak value.

The "average balanced" solution of 0.551784 has 50 percent positive errors but a much worse peak of 0.00038. It is not clear why balanced positive and negative errors would be useful for what purpose.

December 26, 2022
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PV cell costs may be resuming a gradual decline, approaching a cell's ten cents per peak watt. Only this time they appear to be renewable and sustainable yielding genuine net energy producers You can view current pricing every Wednesday here and here.

December 25, 2022
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Before I got overly enameled on the Bajada Hanging canals, I did quite a bit of research on the Mount Graham Aerial Tramway. Which was a spectacularly engineered circa 1923 abysmal failure.

This mile elevated, 13 mile long project largely failed to deliverer lumber from Mount Graham to Pima. Little remains today. Access is extremely difficult. Even the once accessible Weech Toll Road is now impassible in six places. Here are some resources...

 Aerial Lumber Tramway slideshow
 Mt. Graham Aerial Tramway Story
 Partial History of the Gila Lumber Company
 McEniry Tunnel Scam
 Allen Dam Failure Analysis Docs

More tinaja stuff here.

December 24, 2022
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Here are many of our bajada hanging canal papers and videos...

  Our Journal of Field Archaeology publication.
  Our Author's Preprint of the above
  Hanging Canal menu and directory.
  Hanging Canal images
  Prehistoric bajada hanging canals
  USA Today story
  Lafayette College hanging canal story
  Wikipedia hanging canal story
  Grant archaeological bajada paper.
  Glyphs bajada hanging canals
  Some older and third party papers
  ARA web video
  ARA .3gp video
  ARA MP4 downloadable video
  Latest "hanging canals" updates

December 23, 2022
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But there is a Newton's Method alternative that might sometimes end up useful. Which we might call the Scanning Method. Again, start with a good guess. then repeatedly increment in the right direction by an appropriate value, say an 0.001 sub loop. Exit the loop when it goes too far. Then back off the "too far" last step. Next, rinse and repeat with 0.0001, 0.00001, and any finer steps as needed for your final accuracy.

I should have a cubic spline example up shortly.

December 22 2022
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I've long been a fan of Newton's Method, especially for our Magic Sinewaves and finding the distance from a point to a cubic spline.

When appropriate, this is a way of solving any possibly ugly polynomial by the use of repeated approximations. What you do is get as close as you can to a zero with your best guess. And then repeatedly try to improve things by...

December 21 2022
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Time for our usual new year's predictions...

Raspberry Pi pico single handedly causing a
literally earth shattering rebirth of traditional
hardware hacking.

The sudden elimination of the unintended
consequence federal marijuana subsidies and
farm price supports reducing prices down under
the 59 cents per pound range.

A disastrous crypto crash and burn.

Axial flux motors revolutionizing ev technology.

Canine AI artificial intelligence.

Profound expansion of new Lidar apps.

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

Ongoing conversion of coal power plants into
singles bars.

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

Snottities adding a new perspective to evaluating
extraterrestrial life.

Profound new alternates to scientific publication
that are much closer to open source.

Single grain thermoluminescence. Exciting stuff
separately happening with graphene.

Skipping the terabyte revolution entirely and
going directly to the petabyte revolution.

Capacitive energy coupling greatly simplifying
and range extending wireless charging.

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

December 20, 2022
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Here's how PS can throw another log on the fire...

200 300 translate 0 setlinewidth 0 setgray 10
dup scale 1 1 10 {log 10 mul 0 moveto 0 10
rlineto stroke} for 10 10 100 {log 10 mul 0
moveto 0 10 rlineto stroke} for 1 1 10 {log 10
mul 0 exch moveto 20 0 rlineto stroke} for
showpage

December 19, 2022
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This PS routine is handy to generate simple spirals and several other rather useful art effects…

/spiral {gsave /pitch exch def exch dup
/startangle exch def 360 div add 360 mul
/endangle exch def /radius exch def translate
radius startangle cos mul radius startangle
sin mul moveto startangle res endangle
{/posn exch def radius posn cos mul radius
posn sin mul lineto currentpoint stroke moveto
/radius radius pitch 360 div res mul add def}
for grestore} def

1 setlinecap 2 setlinewidth /res 5
def 300 400 8 0 6.5 4 spiral showpage

December 18, 2022
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Here’s an unusual PS random screen for special effects...

/random {rand 32768 div 65536 div mul floor}
def /randscreen {gsave patnum srand 300 mul
72 div /rndhigh exch def 300 mul 72 div
/rndwide exch def 72 300 div dup scale 1
setlinecap 1 setlinewidth rndhigh rndwide mul
density mul cvi{rndwide random rndhigh random
moveto 0.01 0 rlineto stroke} repeat grestore}
def

/patnum 12345678 def /density 0.2 def 72 72
randscreen showpage quit

December 17, 2022
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Finding the Minimum Distance between a point and a Cubic Spline.

December 16, 2022
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A partial director's cut of the MLP Cookbook can be found here. With other director's cuts here.

December 15, 2022
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Our Machine Language Programming Cookbook seems to be the second of our most popular ebook downloads. Much of it remains quite useful for the fundamentals concepts of even the latest of available microcomputers. More ebooks here. And numero uno here.

December 14, 2022
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The reason for the second spline study is that both it and the first one has revealed that a curveto implementation sometimes gets ahead or behind itself compared to a linearly timed solution progression. To a significant "error" of up to a fraction of a degree. Which it eventually fixes by completing its mapping. Apparently it never misses anything; instead it just temporarily gets somewhat ahead or slightly behind of a misperceived expectation of a linear interpretation.

In hindsight, this speedup and slowdown during imaging now seems reasonably expected. With splines, it is fairly easy to find x as a function of t. But accurately finding t as a function of x is usually enormously difficult. Same goes for y. Please review this math to make sure the above explanation is valid.

December 13, 2022
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I just did a second alternate study of our fitting four cubic splines to a circle or ellipse. You can find the sourcecode here and a demo here.

Summary here. The bottom line: The magic tension for a unit circle is classically 0.55228475 which gives us a one part in 1000 peak error and 1 part in 2000 average error and is accurate every 45 degrees. This can be improved with a 24% better tension value of 0.551784 which is accurate every 30 degrees.

If you need machine shop accuracy, eight splines are recommended instead. A reminder that PDF versions that offer the full 6400% magnification are required to resolve and fully interpret these files.

December 12, 2022
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Some of our other PostScript resources are...

 Postscript language reference manual.
 Our main PostScript library page.
 A PostScript .psl file directory.
 Gonzo Justification procs
 Gonzo tutorial use directory
 Our PostScript video
 PostScript secrets
 PostScript Beginner Stuff
 PostScript show and tell
 Hundreds of imaging examples

December 11, 2022
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An earlier PostScript Secrets publication can be found here. Yeah, this was mostly laser printer oriented, but there is bunches of stuff remaining that remains highly usable today. Especially when using Distiller, GhostScript, and Google Drive.

December 10, 2022
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I had once been a great fan of BOD or low end Book-on-Demand publishing. We still have a web page on this, but it is pretty much outdated.

Except for some outrageously pricey high end machines, home BOD is largely a total failure. First and foremost because ebooks totally stomp out "real" books six ways from Sunday. Most notably for cost, for search ability, access ease, instant availability, sane author's royalties, handicapped accessibility, and linkability.

But I think the real reasons for BOD failure are much simpler and far more subtle. These involve the utter and total lack of practical cheap low end shearing and binding solutions. Which we sort of looked at here.

December 9, 2022
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An intermittent muffled yowling inside a printer can sometimes be cured by opening the lid and letting the cat out.

December 8, 2022
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Few people realize that PostScript accuracy has been purposely crippled and limited to a reporting 6 decimal places! With the reasoning that not doing this would only make font files longer. It turns out that nearly two entire additional decimal points can be trivially picked up.

With this 8 Decimal Place PostScript Real Numeric Reporting Utility demo and sourcecode.

December 7, 2022
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Two features I'd like to see in an "improved" PostScript would be 64 bit math and the ability to deal with relative filenames. Plus the ability for Google Drive to run ps code and create log files. Some already Google drive compatible code of ours can be found here.

December 6, 2022
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Sourcecode for an early version of "real" genuine PostScript is newly available here.

December 5, 2022
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We saw how to "reasonably" approximate a PostScript circle or ellipse here, here, and here by using four Bezier cubic splines. A new exploration check file is shown here with its sourcecode here. Which pretty much verifies the magic tension numbers involved. At an average error around one part in 2000.

The green line is "real" trig for one quadrant, while the red line uses a curveto. To see these differences, you will need a version of Acrobat that allows 6400% magnification. Note that some Chrome .PDF readers only go to 500%.

There is a surprise awaiting you if you use this info for anything but complete circles or ellipses. It turns out that the curveto rendering sometimes goes faster around the circle and sometimes goes slower than real trig. The speedup error or slowdown error can approach a half degree, which is often a lot more than your "best" fit. Fortunately, these should cancel out once you completely fit a full 90 degrees.

Yes, corrections can be made, but so far, they seem to cause more problems than they fix. Machine shop needs would seem better used with an eight spline fit. Your comments welcome.

December 4, 2022
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It seems there are a few TVT replicators out there. Some parts have started to approach unobtanium. Even the once ubiquitous but now long gone analog channel 3 rf display television sets.

But, seeing all the other Raspberry Pi zero stuff flooding YouTube, it should now be trivial, simple, fast, and ultra cheap for you to build a functionally equivalent TV typewriter emulation replica. Find the original story here and free ebook book here.

I'd suggest a VGA output degraded to black and white and double or triple size pixelated. I'd also suggest using a stock keyboard instead of scratch building. individual keys and their ASCII encoding.

December 3, 2022
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I've long been a fan of Pro-Sitemaps.com. Particularly for fighting web 404 errors. Thanks to them, we usually have gotten nearly all of our controllable 404's eliminated. But the bunches of them that are left are apparently undealable phishing tempts.

Here's some recent links to their Guru's Lair reports. These are useful to explore oddball buried stuff...

 XML sitemap
 Text sitemap
 HTML sitemap
 Images sitemap 
 Video sitemap 
 RSS feed

December 2, 2022
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   The worst of Marcia Swampfelder.

December 1, 2022
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This demo and this sourcecode shows you how to switch font names between "real" Acrobat distiller and GhostScript and/or Artifex on Google Drive.

At present, you do have to manually tell this code which you are using! The chances are you could automate the switchover by adding the known command seeking out a variable in one ap but not the other.

Some triply compatible PostScript routines can be found here. Several may need this font adjustment made to them. Please email me with your automated fix.

November 30 2022
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"Real" acrobat distiller and GhostScript or Artifex on Google Drive have different ways of naming the same or similar fonts. An unavailable font may substitute as Courier.

The windows 10 Acrobat fonts can be viewed in Acrobat Distiller via (*) {= =} 256 string /Font resourceforall. Additional fonts can be added via Distiller's Settings/Font Locations. Default GhostScript fonts can be seen at C:\Program Files\gs\GS10.00.0\Resource\Font or similar. Note that the alternate reverse slash is used to avoid PostScript's double slash escape issues.

It may be a good idea to give your readers the option of using Distiller or GhostScript. One way to do this is with a /using_gs true store flag during font selection.

November 29, 2022
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Should you have a space inside a Gonzo link or other click through, justification very rarely may split it between two lines. The end of the first and the start of the second. Besides editing, one workaround is to provide two repeating links, one for each line. of your final text.

November 28, 2022
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URL Links may occasionally require special treatment. A Gonzo link is normally done as /surl (my web page) /tinaja. It is super important that there is no justification linefeed forced between the /surl and the string url label!

The workaround is editing or else adding enough end-of-line spaces before /surl so it has to begin on the next line. But, once again, make sure there are no responsive design issues.

November 27, 2022
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Similarly, Gonzo usually ignores trailing spaces. You can add enough extra spaces to force whatever happens next to go at the start of a new line. But, once again, make sure that responsive design does not annoy some of your readers.

November 26, 2022
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The gonzo cl and cf justification modes usually ignore leading spaces. Should you really need leading spaces, prefix them with some kerning. Such as a |k, a |j, or to really get fancy, use both of them.

November 25, 2022
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That's not a bug; it is a feature. Our Gonzo Justification Utilities ( found here, here, and here ) do not yet have a non breaking space similar to  

But there are several workarounds. Simplest is to edit by adding or removing a word or two so the problem goes away. In these days of responsive design ( here and here ), though, you do have to make sure that what works for one reader may not look awful for another.

November 24, 2022
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Uh, oops. Gotcha. Only some versions of Acrobat PDF readers reach the full 6400% magnification. The usual Chrome version does not let you to get any bigger than 500%. So, you may have to download and then view with "real" Acrobat. Sorry about that.

November 23, 2022
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I decided to do an error analysis of yesterday's four cubic spline circle approximation. Which you will find here with its sourcecode here.

The error is barely visible at 6400% magnification and zero linewidth. And thus is "good enough" for most graphics uses, but not nearly usable for machine shop or optics apps. The latter can be dealt with an eight curve approximation, as seen in yesterday's link.

The fit is exact near 0, 30, 60, and 90 degrees. And varies from "over" to "under" back to "over" again.

November 22, 2022
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    Approximating a circle or ellipse.

November 21, 2022
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And some bashees...

 Saga of the Magic Lamp
 Trashing auto electrolisizers
 Brown's Gas
 Hydrogen absurdities
 Tesla turbines
 Peltier uncoolers
 Supraaluminal dowsing
 Water powered cars
 Engineering ratholes
 Measuring power
 Understanding RMS

November 20, 2022
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November 19, 2022
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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 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.

November 18, 2022
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While Magic Sinewaves are clearly PWM related, most of them have fewer energy robbing transitions than classic PWM. And thus can often be more efficient. Sometimes significantly so.

It turns out that each and every transition also indirectly has a purpose of zeroing out some low harmonic. Which implies a maximum possible efficiency for the task at hand.

November 17, 2022
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A raspberry Pi Zero emulation of a TV Typewriter certainly seems possible, given that Commodore and 6502 emulators have already been YouTube published. Which would completely eliminate the need for unobtainable parts, circuit boards, and oddball crystals.

But something other than a channel 3 rf analog tv ( gone since 2009 ) might be more appropriate. And ready-to-go USB wireless keyboards would certainly be cheaper and easier than than scanning the original individual key array. Your thoughts welcome.

Perhaps a "crippled" VGA might work, limited to black and white and a centered 192 live pixels horizontally by 128 live pixels vertically. With additional black pixels faking the centering. Or "doubling" each pixel to a 2x2 array. Or (gasp) even 3x3.

November 16, 2022
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Our Guru's Lair web and host backup USB chips are now 128GB! We encourage you to archive these to the widest possible audience under Creative Commons guidelines.

November 15, 2022
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    The way things were.

November 14, 2022
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As this third party Magic Sinewaves are now trivially simple compared to the way they once were. And that higher "n" ratios are now feasible to possibly trade off filter needs against efficiency.

Particularly stunning is the new PIO availability making a new frequency a simple variable change instead having to use our calculator, development time, and bunches of storage to generate any new frequency. Sweeping now appears feasible as well.

The whole n=23 waveform would look something like this n=7 BBE example.

November 13, 2022
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Among those of us that were there at the time, it was absolutely and unquestionably clear that "something" was happening. We did not have the faintest clue what that something was, and we referred to it simply as "IT".

In which it did not matter in the least "what good" something was or whether it had any use whatsoever or was ultimately capable of being profitable.

Two key events here were the sudden drop of memory costs to a nickle a bit. Along with the shift from 110 baud to a staggering 150 baud.

"Stuff" was now possible that never could be done before. To be followed shortly and inevitably by infinitely better stuff. The tasks simply had to be done. And the very best of today absolutely had to be done in by a better tomorrow.

November 12, 2022
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One of the things I still do not understand to this day is the vehemence which the concept of putting letters onto a TV set was attacked. Many, many individuals in many different fields clearly wanted the concept to fail.

At the time, nobody said anything bad about someone who wanted to piss around with toy trains, while everybody and his brother clearly ridiculed the dual concepts of computing for the sake of computing and putting text on video displays.

The first clue that "they" were dead wrong were the walk in orders for the TVT docs. Until that time, Radio Electronics never had a walk in order and did not have the faintest clue what one was.

While the spotlight eventually had to be shared with the Mark 8 and the Altair, and later the KIM 1 and Apple I, the TVT when first published was by far the most popular hobby electronic construction project of all time.

And is considered by some to be the opening shot fired in the personal computer revolution.

November 11 , 2022
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Never store carbide in a non-locking carabiner.

November 10, 2022
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Well, maybe just the punch lines...

  "The koala tea of Mercy is not strained".
  "The thong has ended, but the malady
    lingers on".
  "Pardon me Roy, is that the cat that chewed
    your new shoes?"
  Its a Hickory Daiquiri, Doc."
  "Rudolph the Red knows rain, dear".
  "Poncho Villa" is an emergency rain shelter
    for NM hikers.
  "It's a knick knack, Patti Whack. Give the
    frog a loan".
  "Its the only trick I know, Sis."
  "People in grass houses should not stow
    thrones"
  "Couldn't hit the barn side of a broad"
  Geologists can recognize sedentary,
    metaphoric, and ingenious rocks.
  "The Old MacDonald Farm computer
    interface is now an EIE I/O".
  "Tarzan stripes forever"
  A furry with a syringe on top.
  ... handle so long no insect can "Fly
    above Cayuga's swatter"
  "The vet had to charge for the cat scan
    and the lab tests"
  "Crossing a state lion with a gull for
    immortal porpoises"
  "Opporknockity tunes but once."

Plus, of course...

  "The squaw on the hippopotamus hide equals
    the sum of the squaws on the other two hides."

November 9, 2022
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A very obnoxious and obscene parrot gets put in a freezer for punishment. On release, parrot profusely apologizes for errant past behavior and asks...

"May I inquire what the chicken did?"

November 8, 2022
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I remain utterly impressed with the new $4 Raspberry Pi pico with its dual threads and eight PIO machine level micro controllers. Already, things like VGA drivers and Commodore 64 emulators have been shown, some optional $2 extra wifi, and all along with bunches more of really impressive stuff. Open and free.

This could easily return to classic hardware hacking, single handedly and all by itself. Your best way of getting started is via YouTube where you will find dozens ( and most likely soon many hundreds ) of detailed ready-to-go examples.

November 7, 2022
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November 6, 2022
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Some tips on high Gigabyte downloads...

 Download to main memory rather than USB.
 Use "more details" map seldom if at all.
 Download at night to minimize throttling.
 Transfer to USB via copy and paste.
 Allow no other computer use during download.

November 5, 2022
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Web home pages can usually be directly saved to Chrome or Dreamweaver. But FTP file transfers through Filezilla may end up a little subtle.

The usual home page url often begins as homepage/index.shtml and typically gets renamed as homepage/default.

November 4, 2022
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     Some Gila Valley day hikes.

November 3, 2022
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How to spot an extroverted engineer: They stare at your shoes rather than their own.

November 2, 2022
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Curve fitting cubic splines to circles & ellipses.

November 1, 2022
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One of the limitations of widespread use of magic sinewaves is that filtering must be provided to make any load for unwanted higher harmonics as high an impedance as possible. A motor's inductance and load mass provide a good starting point. Goals include maximizing efficiency and reducing audio whine as much as is reasonably feasible.

Use of the latest micro controllers such as the PIO features of the Raspberry pi should ease the filtering problem somewhat in that higher "N" values should now be feasible. But higher "N" by itself adds to switching transition losses.

Apparently PWM motor drives also have filter issues. There are numerous online resources, especially for integrated filters.

October 31, 2022
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Ferinstance, here is a third party proof of concept of one of our magic sinewaves dramatically simplified by using Pico PIO. The first significant non-fundamental harmonic here should be the 29th!

Changing frequencies is now an utterly trivial single command, rather than needing fancy recoding and recalculating for each value. Even swept frequencies would now appear possible. Find our Magic Sinewave website here and its high speed calculator here.

October 30, 2022
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But the biggest "reset to zero" features of the Pico is its PIO or programmable input/output. It turns out there are four smaller "baby" microcomputers also present. While their 32 state program counter and 9 instructions might not seem like much, these utterly and totally demolish any and all previous methods of manipulating I/O pins! Anytime, ever.

October 29, 2022
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The Raspberry Pi Pico is an incredibly mind blowing device. $4 each unless you need wireless, then $2 more. One of the more trivial demos is a 3 x 4 inch full emulation of a Commodore 64! Complete with monitor and keyboard, of course. Pico also can do VGA!

There is a stunningly steep learning curve and it is already attracting zillions of "smarter than you" competitors. In your spare time, you will have to learn machine language, assembler, microPython , Thonny, and C++. Your best way to get started would appear to be snarfing the many dozens of You Tube examples and getting their exact copies to work.

October 28, 2022
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Our latest Smith Extension prehistoric canal field note can be found here with its sourcecode here and lots of other links.

October 27, 2022
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Then there was the dyslexic agnostic insomniac who stayed up all night wondering if there was a dog.

October 26, 2022
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Never touch a laptop screen! They are trivially easy to damage, easily go out of warranty, and are pricey to repair. I made the mistake of scratching a fly spec that instantly became inches of apparently permanent dark gray.

October 25, 2022
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Among other uses, this free spell checker can work with copied .PDF text content.

October 24, 2022
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   A low end digital sinewave generator.

October 23, 2022
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October 22, 2022
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  Fun with fields

October 21, 2022
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An associate reports that the new $6 Raspberry Pi Pico 6040 seems eminently suitable for Magic Sinewave development. The key new feature is called PIO or Programmable Input Output. View our calculator here and main web page here.

October 20, 2022
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Discmaster is huge new archive of early CD Rom and floppy disc resources.

October 19, 2022
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A mostly internal new tutorial on converting .jpeg images into psl images and eventually .pdf files demo can be found here with its sourcecode here.

October 18, 2022
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Note that there are at least two different ways of dealing with jpeg conversions depending on whether you also need a "click to make it bigger" live web link. Examples here and here. In particular, extract our /jpegimageprocwithlink .psl code modules for any live links.

October 17, 2022
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Made some changes in our Tripp Canal field notes to make use of our .psl sourcecode files easier for you to use on other hosts. Per this demo and this sourcecode.

While I have long been a fan of the Stone family of fonts, I've substituted the Calibri font since it should be more freely available to you. Slight layout differences may occasionally be noted. With Gonzo, extra spaces forcing newlines might sometimes be need added or removed.

October 16, 2022
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Since PostScript has no known obvious way to deal with relative filenames ( except by switching to GhostScript ), it would be up to you to manually enter correct full filenames specific to your machine.

Forward slashes are permitted in Windows filenames, but the more usual reverses slashes should be substituted by double reverse slashes per a .psl Gonzo utilities quirk. Use of USB's can very much simplify full filename hassles.

October 15, 2022
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A reminder that little known Windows keyboard commands of ctrl-z for delete and ctrl-y for undelete.

October 14, 2022
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Here is a simple "out the door" method to spelling check most any PDF document. From which "backfilling" can be used to correct any underlying .psl file: Grab the largest blocks of .PDF text you can one block at a time and send it to this free website: https://myassignmenthelp.com/spell-checker.html

October 13, 2022
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I try to be prompt, no matter how long it takes. A carriage return was apparently missing from our older jpeg2pdf.html file that prevented Bits per Component from getting entered. I've fixed this along with some new updates we will look at shorty

October 12, 2022
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An extremely interesting history of Southwestern fire lookout towers and trees appears here. I personally worked Gentry, Barfoot, Monte Vista, and Miller Peak. And climbed many more. Besides using the names of many others in our Marcia Swampfelder spoofs.

One day an untrained relief lookout worked a neighboring tower. "Dispatcher Dispatcher there's a fire!". Showing extreme restraint over blatant radio protocol violations, Dispatch asks where the fire is. "Right over there in those trees!".

October 11, 2022
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A reminder that we have archival backup USB's of our website, my Tinaja personal computer, and most of our hanging canal stuff readily available. We invite you to copy and preserve these to the widest possible audience. 32 Gigs or more under Creative Commons terms. More of our eBay stuff here.

October 10, 2022
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The latest versions of our Bajada hanging canal field notes now include links to most of our and third party papers.

October 9, 2022
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The word "gullible" is not in any major dictionary or spell checker.

October 8, 2022
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They are just not getting the message. One more time: electrolysis from high value sources ( such as grid, pv, wind, or alternator ) for bulk hydrogen production is totally worthless and utterly useless!

Except for scamming members of the church of the latter day crackpots. Tesla, of course, is their patron saint. And electrocity is their watchword. Here's some starting resources...

Energy Fundamentals Intro Summary
Energy Fundamentals
More Energy Fundamentals
Trashing Auto Electrolysizers
Electrolysis Fundamentals
"Its a Gas" Hydrogen Library
PV Panel Intro and Summary

Summarizing the key points: Electrolysis is the process of stupidly converting very high value kilowatt hours energy into very low value kilowatt hours of energy. A fundamental thermodynamic principle of exergy guarantees that the process is pretty much the same as 1:1 converting US dollars into Mexican Pesos.

Faraday's Law ain't broke. Continuous direct current is guaranteed to be more efficient than any possible pulse scheme. All the pulse schemes do is make "not even wrong" deceptive measurements ridiculously easier to do.

Electrolysis is a current driven process. All older current sources are inherently inefficient by definition. Only when exotic switchmode techniques are used can reasonably efficiencies ( at destroying value ) be created. Stainless steel is utterly useless for efficient electrolysis because of the hydrogen overvoltage of iron found in any intro electrochem book. If you must do serious electrolysis, platinized platinum electrodes are a must.

An ordinary car alternator is only around 45 percent efficient and the maximum available excess power that can be sent through an ordinary fan belt is a few hundred watts at most. Thus, the primary product of onboard vehicle electrolysis is trivial quantities of useless low grade heat. And is exactly the same as running with your emergency brake partially on.

The bottom line is this: If you do not understand exergy, you should not be pissing around with electrolysis. If you do understand exergy, you will not be pissing around with electrolysis. Either way, the outcome is not the least in doubt.

October 7, 2022
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A wind turbine efficiency claim of 85% is obviously bogus bullshit and can be dismissed out of hand. It turns out there is a fundamental law of windmills and wind turbines called Betz' Law. Which says that you ain't gonna get 60% under perfect conditions. The absolute limit is apparently 59.3 percent.

The law is also fairly intuitively obvious. A 100% efficient windmill would require zero exit velocity and thus no air flow through the device. Amazingly, the original Aermotor Windmills are still available. They remain outrageously expensive and their top secret efficiency is best described as mesmerizingly awful.

October 6, 2022
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Chemistry 101: If you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the precipitate.

October 5, 2022
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October 4, 2022
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October 3, 2022
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The newer Gateway laptops use dual mode keys on their upper row. Traditional control keys are now blue and activated by simultaneously pressing ctrl, the blue Fn key, and the chosen top row key. Ferinstance, in Dreamweaver, the properties panel is activated or deactivated by simultaneously pressing Control, Blue Fn, and Blue F3 keys.

To active the Dreamweaver spell checker, view the full design mode, then enter Shift, Blue Fn, and the Blue F7 keys. Do note that he spell checker is only active in the Design Mode.

October 2, 2022
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One way to turn a laptop precision touchpad back on again is to use an attached and working wireless mouse. A second method is to enter the start key, type touchpad and use the space bar to toggle the precision touchpad on or off. You may want to normally leave the touchpad off while using a working mouse. This avoids accidental hits and bad scenes.

October 1, 2022
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A wireless mouse can be a useful addition to a laptop, especially if you do not like touchpads. But note that on a USB 3.0 laptop, the mouse transmitter has to go directly to a USB 3.0 port or must use a 3.0 powered expander. Older or unpowered expanders may not work.

Magic Sinewaves are a carefully crafted new and very long series of digital ones and zeros that have the remarkable property that any chosen number of lower harmonics can be forced to zero in theory and to very low values in practice. They are most suitable for low frequency uses such as electric cars, industrial motor controls, solar or wind apps, and alternate energy. Find the web page here and the calculator here.

September 30, 2022
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Magic Sinewaves are a carefully crafted new and very long series of digital ones and zeros that have the remarkable property that any chosen number of lower harmonics can be forced to zero in theory and to very low values in practice. They are most suitable for low frequency uses such as electric cars, industrial motor controls, solar or wind apps, and alternate energy. Find the web page here and the calculator here.

September 29, 2022
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A significant advance in Gila Valley firefighting is about to begin. It is called carded dispatch or automatic mutual aide. This on top of very good ISO ratings, increasing female memberships, and plans for a major community training facility. Meanwhile, TFD is accepting new volunteer members. Stop by any Tuesday night for details.

September 28, 2022
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   Most recent Magic Sinewave Calculator.

September 27, 2022
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   An economical flash flood warning.

September 26, 2022
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Managed to find a third party Lorenz chaotic attractor "Owl's Mask" written in PostScript. I've cloned the pdf output here and the sourcecode here. Somewhat alike but different would be our avuncular sleezoid or the Spirograph stuff found here and here

September 25, 2022
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Several of you have once again asked about Bruno. Bruno is the attitude relralization facilitator for a major newsgroup. One of his major specialties is reconfiguring top posters. In a related endeavor, Bruno is also a product durability tester for a major baseball bat manufacturer.

Bruno also does trucking for Norfolk & Waay. Who, in a Kilgore Trout sort of way are not  me and not my website. I have no idea who their webmaster is.

September 24, 2022
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Along with our recently fasterized Fractal Fern here and here, and our Sierpinski Triangle here and here.

And, of course, all those marbelous stacks of pancakes here, a PostScript manual here, my personal utilities here, and  an intro tutorial here. A math library link page here and one each of everything here

September 23, 2022
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Gila Valley dayhikes can be found here with along with a few expanded details here. If I were to pick the two most challenging and wildly obscure hikes, they would be the Little Blue Box and the Oak Flat tinajas. A distant third would be the Blue River Fish Barrier.

But you can't get to any of them from here.

September 22, 2022
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The Golf Course Canal older field note can be found here. It is a curious mix of well defined and non ambiguous sections combined with large and frustrating unexplained segments. It almost certainly is fed from the Frye Mesa ponding area at N 32.76011 W 109.81131 and ends up as the highly endangered Reay Canal at N 32.8198477388. W 109. An interesting hanging portion can be found around N 32.79950 W 109.78059 and is fairly 4WD accessible. It is almost certainly associated with other cultural resources and appears quite significant.

A key unresolved question is whether this is a branch of the Robinson canal at N 32.79108 W 109.79153 or routes through the gap west of Riggs mesa at N 32.78261 W 109.78712. The former via a French Drain would seem to suggest some USGS label errors or historical rework, while the latter is rather dim with huge unexplained and unvisited gaps.

Your help in resolving these is more than welcome.

September 21, 2022
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   Theremin emulators

September 20, 2022
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    Enhancing your eBay Skills I
    Enhancing your eBay Skills II
    Enhancing your eBay Skills III
    Enhancing your eBay Skills IV
    Enhancing your eBay Skills V
    Enhancing your eBay Skills VI
    Enhancing your eBay Skills VII
    Enhancing your eBay Skills VIII

September 19, 2022
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    Emerging Technical Opportunities I
    Emerging Technical Opportunities II
    Emerging Technical Opportunities III
    Emerging Technical Opportunities IV
    Emerging Technical Opportunities V
    Emerging Technical Opportunities VI
    Emerging Technical Opportunities VII

September 18, 2022
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Some of my columns appeared as  Ask the Guru in Computer Shopper. These were in a mixed bag "question and answer" format and ran for several years.

I had just completed joining the Guru's and Swamis Union local #243, but because of Marcia Swampfelder's restraining order from the Tapioca Pudding Institute over her cross-genre classic of Godzilla versus the Night Nurses, I had to switch to local #475. And the flick had to be pulled from theatric release and instead sent directly to eight track...

  ATG1 -- Columns 1 to 32
  ATG2 -- Columns 33 to 58
  ATG3 -- Columns 59 to 70

September 17, 2022
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  The case against patents
  Patent horror stories
  Busting a $650 patent
  When to Patent
  Older patent collection
  Patently horrible website

September 16, 2022
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A reminder that PV pricing can be found any Wednesday here or here. The days of PV pricing free fall are clearly long gone and remain either stable or slowly increasing. But are long last within the bounds of being truly renewable and sustainable.

September 15. 2022
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A superb third party analysis of the TV Typewriter can be found here. With its original construction project here. And my cookbook here.

September 14, 2022
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Secrets to finding the length of a cubic spline can be found here. With some improved web third party solutions here.

September 13, 2022
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Some people will do anything to save the environment. Except take a science course.

September 12, 2022
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A new web Psych Tone web posting can be found here. With a Javascript software emulation here and the original construction project here.

September 11, 2022
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    Understanding nonlinear graphic transforms.

September 10, 2022
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    Understanding Vector to Step conversion.

September 9, 2022
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Continuing along our proposed Smith Extension Canal, the next reach along N 32.82701 W 109.83217 is quite weak but barely acceptable with a credible slope. This sequence ends up with a long and an enigmatic "triple trail" near  N 32.83326 W 109.82557. One of which could have reasonably but not conclusively once been a slope correct prehistoric canal. Segments immediately further north have not yet been identified. But alternate routings presently seem quite unlikely.

A big and obvious easily followed canal segment ranges from N 32.83904 W 109.81875 to N 32.84403 W 101741 and even has an ASM ruin associated with it. A tenth mile to the west reveals another obvious but clearly parallel canal segment ranging through N 32.84454 W 109.81933. Albeit of much lesser size and depth but with painted potsherds in association. The up channel feeder route varies from dim to its missing entirely. The central dump pond destination is wildly speculative but suggested by "Uh - compared to what?".

Two other very short and unconnected potential area canal segments can be found at N 32.83911 W 109.81522 and N 32.83534 W 109.81212 . Despite sourcing via Jernigan Canal connectivity, the former remains age unproven and lacks depth.. There may have been a potential very short aqueduct in association.

September 8, 2022
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Started a field note on the Smith Extension canal. Which may or may not run from Ash Creek at Cluff Ranch Ponds clear to the pond near the Central Dump. Only tiny portions of this canal seem to unquestionably exist at present. But one major discovery seems to be its unambiguous and clearly prehistoric northern extension from our previously described Smith Canal.

The Smith canal was clearly improved to historic standards of size and construct. The clear portion of the Smith Extension from N 32.81970 W 109.84108 to N 32.82379 W 109.83864 would seem to strongly support the belief in an underlying and "steal the plans" prehistoric canal.

September 7, 2022
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Goals for our new field note format include being phone friendly, providing page nav and adding links to many of the other field notes and hanging canal papers. Many dozens of field notes remain to be either created or updated.

September 6, 2022
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Our latest Tripp Canyon Hanging Canal field note can be found here with its sourcecode here..

September 5, 2022
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Avuncular Sleezoids and Marbelous Pancakes.

September 4, 2022
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Here's how to insert URL links into my Gonzo Utilities: Firs, group create your URL definitions...

<<
/images (https://www.tinaja.com/imenu1.pdf)
/prehist (https://www.tinaja.com/hang01.shtml)
>> {mark exch /eurl cvx ] cvx def} forall

20 30
(...and then|/surl insert|/prehist  per this example.)
cl

At present, Gonzo url insertion works only with cl and cf but not cc or cr. Note the extra following space delimiting /prehist. The secret insider stuff involves /eurl and /makeurl that accesses ANN per the PDF Reference Manual. You can directly view these via gonzo.psl

September 3, 2022
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A solution to the "Hi Grandma" phone scam: Ask them for their middle name!

September 2, 2022
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Some possible gotchas: Traditionally, PostScript defaults any 0 setlinewidth or any "too small" linewidths to a one pixel wide rendering. But the new Chrome Adobe Acrobat PDF edit extension instead seems to me to now be defaulting to a zero linewidth and causing major dropouts. Especially at reduced sizes. Workarounds might include avoiding any 0 setlinewidth or similar. Or simply do not use this extension.

Chrome also tries to reuse any previous data cache. If you are debugging code, what you see is not what you expect, because you may end up viewing your previous version. Thus during any debug, be sure to enter History from the upper right three dots and clear any previously similar code.

Curiously, if you download any dropped out Chrome .PDF and view it on your own machine with your own "real" acrobat reader, it usually seems to repair itself.

September 1, 2022
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Way back when in our Gonzo Utilities, sneaky tricks were used to force single dot renderings on 300 DPI printers. These involved dtransform and itransform and these dangerous commands are best eliminated from most modern code.

August 30 2022
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I intend using yesterday's code for future updates to the bajada canal field notes. It should be width compatible with most phones, and uses a .pdf 100 percent page height of 1080 pixels so that each PDF page exactly occupies a full screen on larger systems. Apparently there are some yet to be resolved browser issues.

August 29 2022
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Software for a simplified four page pdfmark navigation demo can be found here with a demo here. Note that this is automatic, invisible, and pre Distiller! The code tows along the full Gonzo Utilities. Pages are set on a 10x grid for layout convenience. You do have to predefine Lastpagenum Intended for "real" Adobe Distiller via //acrodist /F.

Another older nav example can be found here.

August 28 2022
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Many of the secret insider tricks of Adobe Distiller PostScript Acrobat processing can be found in their PDF Mark Reference Manual.

Ferinstance, you can create a nav button with something like...

  [ /Rect [3 0 5 2]
  /Border [0 0 .35 ]
  /Color [.7 .7 .7]
  /Page /Prev
  /View [/XYZ null null null ]
  /Subtype /Link
  /ANN pdfmark

In which /Rect sets the size and position of the button, /Border its current page offset and edge width , and /Color its color.  /Page sets your destination, which can be a number, or strings /Prev, or /Next. The /View shown makes the position and magnification of the destination page, with values here "keep it like it was". And finally /Subtype and /ANN complete the needed pdfmark array. This example assumes a 10x grid.

The pdfmark code is Adobe specific and often may not work properly on GhostScript or Google Drive. Normal access is by routing your .psl code to //acrodist /F in Distiller.

August 27 2022
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Progress of the Duncan flood can be followed here. The Duncan gauge is currently the lower and rightmost white circle on the Arizona map, while the Solomon gauge is the nearest black or blue circle to its northwest. There should be some way to get these phone friendly. Several gauges elsewhere are currently endangered. Apparently a failed levee was a major factor in the seriousness of the Duncan incident. As was a more minor Eden incident.

August 26, 2022
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There's a huge glut of Cisco Air Cap wireless broadcasters now on eBay. Note that these demand either Power over Ethernet POE or a special and highly unusual 48VDC wall wart. I have a few of these wireless units only available. Please contact me if you have any interest. Our other eBay items can be found here.

August 25, 2022
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There's a sometimes trick called reverse geocoding that lets you convert satellite GPS values from Acme Mapper or Google Earth into street addresses. From there you can often get the owner or company name involved. Your mileage may vary.

August 24, 2022
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So, how many nearby bajada canals are there? An exact count gets tricky. Firstoff, do you include artesian and riverine lower technology versions? At present, we have some 115 canal study areas. As most of the "good" locations have already been accounted for, only a few new "undiscovered" canal locations might still seem likely. Yet there is some unexplored Aravapia valley potential.

The count is otherwise inflated by purposely retaining a few discredited losers that clearly should stay as part of the record. As well as non canal interests such as the UFO fillets or the troll house.

Further, several current study areas might end up as the same canal once the missing segments are resolved. The biggest example would be the Frye Watershed crossing, Upper Frye, HS Canal, lower Frye complex, blue ponds, and freeman likely ending up as one canal. An additional complication would be several canals with more than one branch.

Meanwhile, we have a well documented 22 canal field study reports of varying age and quality. When completed, these likely would represent something like one third of the ultimate total. The present wild ass guess of 150 miles of passage would likely remain a very conservative estimate.

August 23, 2022
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Here are some of our bajada canal field notes....

These are in various states of disrepair and completeness. It is estimated that only one third of the potential major canal reports are in the above list.

August 22, 2022
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A reminder that this is one workaround to frustrating mouse text capture: Click on the first ( or last ) character. Then use shift -> right arrow or shift ->left arrow to capture your desired text.

August 21, 2022
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The key paper explaining our ultra fast magic Sinewave calculators can be found here. And its sourcecode here. With a development backgrounder here and its sourcecode here.

Sadly, we had to go to 64 bit JavaScript for the math, because the 32 bit PostScript math ( even with this sneaky accuracy enhancement ) couldn't remotely hack the needed accuracy.

August 20, 2022
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Magic Sinewaves are a new class of mathematical functions that allow the synthesis of digital power sinewaves with any arbitrary number of lower harmonics efficiently forced to precisely zero in theory and to astonishingly low levels ( -65 decibels or better ) in practice.

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

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

But there are otherwise overwhelming advantages...

 Amplitude and frequency now combined.
 Real world harmonics can now be even lower.
 One memory card holds zillions of sinewaves.
 Filtering simplifications now possible.
 More of solution can now be standard hardware.
 Research tools now more readily available.
 Reduction of pinch points by delay resolution.
 Cleaner and more simplified coding.

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

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

loop:
# quadrant 1 (0 through 90 degrees)
str r2,[r4]
ldr r1,=96040
bl wait
str r6,[r3]
ldr r1,=11658
bl wait
str r2,[r4]
ldr r1,=84625
bl wait
str r2,[r3]
ldr r1,=23113
bl wait
str r2,[r4]
ldr r1,=73662
bl wait
str r2,[r3]
ldr r1,=34160
bl wait
str r2,[r4]
ldr r1,=63361
bl wait
str r2,[r3]
ldr r1,=44596
bl wait
str r2,[r4]
ldr r1,=53934
bl wait
str r2,[r3]
ldr r1,=54215
bl wait
str r2,[r4]
ldr r1,=45596
bl wait
str r2,[r3]
ldr r1,=62801
bl wait
str r2,[r4]
ldr r1,=38560
bl wait
str r2,[r3]
ldr r1,=70106
bl wait
str r2,[r4]
ldr r1,=33034
bl wait
str r2,[r3]
ldr r1,=75813
bl wait
str r2,[r4]
ldr r1,=29213
bl wait
str r2,[r3]
ldr r1,=79518
bl wait
str r2,[r4]
ldr r1,=27255
bl wait
str r2,[r3]
ldr r1,=40407
bl wait

# more quadrants go here

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

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

Consulting and seminars available.

August 19, 2022
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The tinfoil hat liners were genuine Chomerics and normally were outrageously expensive if not picked up as then military surplus bargains. You did, of course, have to remember to place the liners on the outside of the hat tinfoil to block them from reading your thoughts and on the inside to prevent them from controlling your actions. Typical attenuation approached 120 decibels.

August 18, 2022
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I was recently re-asked what our best selling eBay products of all time were. These would be our water soluble swimsuits, our tinfoil hat liners, dimpled chad ( scooped up, of course, by amateur astronomers ), and, of course, our nuclear holocaust fashion accessories.

Only a few of the latter remain available while the others totally and quickly sold out. All of them do clearly drive home the eBay urgency of strictly offering unique products not available elsewhere. More eBay secrets here.

August 17, 2022
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A reminder about our Gila Day Hikes page and its more detailed supplement.

If I were to pick the two most challenging and wildly obscure hikes, they would be the Little Blue Box and the Oak Flat tinajas. A distant third would be the Blue River Fish Barrier. You can't get there from here

August 16, 2022
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      Nuclear holocaust fashion accessories.

August 15, 2022
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An alternate approach to our Magic Sinewaves can be found here.

August 14, 2022
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Way before Craig's List and most swap meets, they had hamfests. Where, besides boatanchors, all sorts of technical stuff got flea market sold, often at outstanding prices. And non hams were and still are welcome. A national listing of hamfests can be found here and an Arizona one here.

August 13, 2022
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Note that there are two "modern" flavors of digital video connectors, DisplayPort and HDMI. While appearing almost identical at first glance, the two are not interchangeable and can only be converted with special cables or adapters.

DisplayPort is often used with HP and competitive laptops. It can be identified by having only one "slanty" narrow edge. While HDMI is common on smart tv's and such. And can be identified by having two narrow "slanty" edges. Conversion cables and adapters are readily web available.

August 12, 2022
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When discounted, Advanced SystemRepair Pro seems to me to be reasonably priced, highly useful and quite effective. It managed to find and repair over 15,000 issues on my previously unrepaired pc. But, since it intimately tampers with your pc, you probably do not want to make any of their actual repairs all that often.

August 11, 2022
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Here are some of our PostScript routines that have been tested for triple Distiller - Ghostscript - Google Drive compatibility...

 #37 - Semilog Freq Plot         source •  demo
 #36 - Tinaja Image Menu      source •  demo

#35 - Canal Image Menu       source •  demo
#33 - USB Label printer        source •  demo
#32 - Wolfvision Conns         source •  demo
#31 - Word Freq      source • demo • tutorial
#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

Many of these use our Gonzo utilities. A nearly complete list of available .psl programs appears here.

August 10, 2022
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At least for me, the erratic mouse problem may have suddenly fixed itself. Which suggests it might have been a Windows Update problem all along. I am not yet sure if the repair is full or permanent or usable elsewhere.

August 9, 2022
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Our latest triply compatible PostScript program and demo does a log frequency plot useful for active filters and such. It can be used with Acrobat Distiller via the usual //acrodist /F and with both GhostScript and Google Drive.

This internally tows along the gonzo utilities whose tutorial can be found here. Sadly, very few of the better PostScript programs are currently Google Drive compatible, but this one seems to be.

August 8, 2022
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We are phasing out much of our classic electronics inventory. Especially historical technical books. Free for Thatcher pickup. Please let me know if you are interested.

August 7, 2022
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   Magic Sinewave Calculator. More here.
     And a much simpler sinewave generator here.

August 6, 2022
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I Just got hit with the infuriating Windows 10 erratic mouse syndrome. None of these proposed web cures seemed to make any difference at all...

  Cold Reboot
  Heavy duty site Repair
  New Mouse Driver
  New mouse battery
  De-selecting fast boot
  Unplug and reconnect USB
  Changing USB port
  Malware sweep
  Mouse location
  Wireless interference
  Better surface
  Mouse Speed changes
  Block acceleration
  New mouse
  New mouse USB

But this temporarily annoying workaround seems to be useful...

  Mark the start or end of the mouse target
  text. Then extend with shift right arrow or
  shift left arrow.

I have not tried a windows 11 upgrade. This may not be possible on certain older computers. Please report any official corrections. This seems to be a major problem. It may be either windows or Logitech related.

August 5, 2022
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I think I may have found the very first incidence of WTF. As in here

As to my current Guru status, I do still remain a high profile lifetime card carrying member of the Innterational Brotherhood of Guru's and Swamis Hulapai County Local #357. And have just been newly recertified under MIL-TFD-41. More here.

August 4, 2022
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Have a brand new and phone friendly third party library page. It is not quite where I want it to be, but it is much better than previous. Two very rare entries are the original Sallen and Key active filter paper and the first paper on pseudorandom sequences.

August 3, 2022
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At one time, self resetting clocks were an expensive, complex, and really big deal. But these days, everybody has access to many different "pretty good" time displays such as personal computers, GPS, the web, and similar resources. I've long been overly enameled with station WWVB. Per my older Experiments with WWVB analog paper.

Originally WWVB used analog modulation which provided poor Eastern US coverage and extreme noise interference susceptibility. In 2012 they added an independent phase modulation that was vastly better. But may have been far too little far too late. And the station has even been recommended for defending.

These days, $6 WWVB receivers are readily available on eBay. But other solutions would now seem more than highly competitive alternatives. Especially when extreme accuracy is not a crucial priority.

August 2, 2022
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Here are the methods for vetting and entering our .shtml web pages: We usually start with Adobe Dreamweaver gotten from their Cloud service. Spell checking is done with their internal process of shift-7. Their "add to personal" selection is used for anything unusual.

The file is then temporarily uploaded via Filezilla with a few extra marker characters. It then gets checked for ".shtml cleanliness" by using https://validator.w3.org/ and occasionally double verified with https://validator.w3.org/checklink and https://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/.

If relevant, "phone friendliness" is checked with https://responsivedesignchecker.com/checker.php Rather than trying to check each and everybody, only Samsung Galaxy S5/S6/S7 is verified. The usual problem involves annoyingly short lines in mid paragraph. These can often be cured by editing or rewording.

Note that phone use demands <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> in your header!

If you are updating a previous file, a backup date gets renamed inside it and the excess characters are eliminated from the new version. I then like to use reasonably fee based https://pro-sitemaps.com/ to find any remaining 404's of our own causing as well as generating lists of website content.

Despite all these measures, errors still happen. Nearly all of the remaining 404's are fishing attempts that can be reported by https:/www.tinaja.com/psutils/log_an1.psl  Your help in proofing and finding any remaining errors is more than welcome.

August 1, 2022
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In answer to an ever diminishing number of requests, I've been asked how I got started in electronics. This was caused in the seventh grade by a WWII National Schools correspondence course found utterly unopened, unused, abandoned and scunging away in the attic. Amazingly, a similar course is still available here, along with great heaping bunches of other radio stuff.

Key features of the lesson were the 35Z5 vacuum tube and a potato that turned green when you applied a current from a copper wire.

July 31, 2022
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Our third party library entries are pretty much in disarray and sorely in need of update and rework. The original much older third01.shtml is still listed and linked on the main nav block...

     Non-adobe Acro Info
     VCR Plus Codes
     Bicubic Interpolation Tutorial
     Bezier Curve Real Length!
     Binary Chain Codes
     Magic Sinewave High Harmonics
     Bezier Recursive Midpoint Rule
     Bezier Curve Through 4 Points (old)
     Bezier Circular Arc Approximation
     Fitting Points to a Bezier Curve
     Fast Bezier Curve Evaluation
     Connecting Two Bezier Curves
     Alternate View of a Bezier Curve
     Bezier Curve Sinewave Approximation

And our newer /third/ directory includes...

     Accuracy of PostScript Circles
     Lagrange Calculations
     Byte Sinewaves
     Lidar Tutorial
     Lorenz Attractor Sourcecode
     Lorenz Attractor Demo
     Original Pseudorandom Paper (!)
     Sallen and Key (!)
     ES100 wwvb User Guide

Robert Ackermann is a contributing consultant that has made very significant website additions that include independently verifying our Magic Sinewave math and generating Marbelous Pancakes. I seem to have temporarily misplaced much of his work, but some do include...

     Comparing 4th order Low Pass Filters
     Corrected Pseudorandom
     Four Point Demos
     Lagrange Bezier Fit #1
     Lagrange Bezier Fit #2
     Lagrange Bezier Four Points
     Lagrange Bezier PostScript Code
     Lagrange Bezier Text Code
     Lagrange Polynomials
     Marbelous 4
     Shortest Bez 4pts Blog
     Stoner Synthesis
     Stoner No Wiggles

While some canal specific third party papers include...

    USA Today story
    Lafayette College hanging canal story
    Wikipedia hanging canal story
    Grant archaeological bajada paper.
    Glyphs bajada hanging canals
    ASM Arizona State Museum story
    AZCentral story
    Some older and third party papers
    ARA web video
    ARA .3gp video
    ARA MP4 downloadable video
    Latest "hanging canals" updates

Plans are to rework these into our newer phone format. Your support welcome.

July 30, 2022
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      A Lidar tutorial including LAS format details.

July 29, 2022
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              binary chain codes

July 28, 2022
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Lidar is surprisingly good at measuring elevations and approaches centimeter accuracy. I'm wondering if a canal can be traced by plotting only the terrain that nearly follows a two percent slope. Or, even better, a slope exactly needed to get between two known canal reaches. This might take some tricky software. But when combined with creative use of pinch points, could prove most effective.

July 27, 2022
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And somewhat related companion sourcecode provides for architects perspective correction, making lines intended to be viewed vertical truly so. Per these numerous examples.

Both routines are normally sent to Distiller via //acrodist /F. They also work with GhostScript, but are not Google Drive compatible due to their need to read and write disk files.

July 26, 2022
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A reminder that .jpg edge artifacts can be dramatically reduced by knocking out to a mottled background rather than a fixed color one. Such as these many examples. Or these often used selections. Or this automatic background knockout sourcecode. Yes, the image size gets larger, but usually only negligibly so.

July 25, 2022
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Tracing canals is significantly different than most drone uses. In that we are dealing with an linear feature rather than an area one. Real time position awareness feedback would seem crucial, but as this has a major impact on battery life, it would seem to be seldom offered.

July 24, 2022
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One feature of the hanging canals is their nearly unwavering and totally continuous slope just under two percent. Most of the canals most of the time also do not include sudden direction changes. A long term goal might be scalable and flyable maps of each and every canal that includes Lidar, false color, GPS, and infrared. I'd predict the heresy that the optimum drone canal survey elevation would best be four feet!

July 23, 2022
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Yesterday's Embry Riddle hanging canal Lidar class appeared to be a spectacular success. It focused mostly on easily accessible West Layton Road canal reaches. Papers and details when and as they become available as Lidar generates enormous amounts of tricky to process data. Several ravens showed up that were more than curious over their new friends. Before deciding they were too noisy.

July 22, 2022
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        Exploring the Bitmap file format

July 21, 2022
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Some additional hanging canal images here. But, while certainly welcome, these are somewhat "secondary" in that they may lack provenience, relevance, or accurate locations. They do clearly give the flavor of the highly difficult terrain challenging the prehistoric canal engineering.

Additional highly useful images with documentation here. And much more on the canals here.

July 20, 2022
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My original thermoluminescence paper here. But big things are newly happening here with the latest incantation called single grain thermoluminescence.

July 19, 2022
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Director's Cuts are our reworking of classic "Linotype Era" papers. Picking up full color, web links, improved layouts, creative commons availability, and bunches of other bells and whistles that were once difficult or impossible with the originals.

  Meowrrr Pussycat
  AACB1 "Level II" Rework
  Applewriter Cookbook and sourcecode
  Fasterized Fractal Fern and sourcecode
  MLPCI "Level II" Rework and sourcecode
  Archaeomag, Paloeonag and sourcecode
  Poison Ivy in a Spray Can and sourcecode
  SigForth Intro to PostScript and sourceocde
  Superclock Rework
  TVT Image Rework
  Tearing Method and sourcecode
  Thermoluminescence and sourcecode
  Winning the Micro Game and sourcecode

Some of these are complete, while others are partial samplers. The originals are found elsewhere on our website. More can be added with your outside funding

July 18, 2022
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Archaeomagnetism and Paleomagnetism. As a student archaeological dating assignment, I was given a "D" on this paper that was further scathingly labeled "unpublishable". This happened three weeks after it appeared in a major national magazine. Sigh.

July 17, 2022
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Here are many of our bajada hanging canal papers and videos...

  Our Journal of Field Archaeology publication.
  Our Author's Preprint of the above
  Hanging Canal menu and directory.
  Hanging Canal images
  Prehistoric bajada hanging canals
  USA Today story
  Lafayette College hanging canal story
  Wikipedia hanging canal story
  Grant archaeological bajada paper.
  Glyphs bajada hanging canals
  Some older and third party papers
  ARA web video
  ARA .3gp video
  ARA MP4 downloadable video
  Latest "hanging canals" updates

July 16, 2022
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Larger colored first caps are less difficult and lend themselves to more modern layouts. Define a larger font. Then predefine two color changes with...

 /tint {mark exch /setwebtint cvx] cvx printlist
  exch 3 index exch put exch 1 add exch} def
  /ta {156 tint font6} store % aqua
  /tb {0 tint font6} store % black

Then 3 33 (|/ta |0A|/tb |jncient hydrological...
The |j "unkerning" is optional. Note that /tint
executes at print time and not immediately...

July 15, 2022
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While a really big deal in medieval manuscripts, drop caps have fallen in popularity with the declining interest in fill justification.

Our Gonzo tutorial tells us we have a |i to activate a drop cap by defining a large subsetted color font, setting /dropcap to true, picking a suitable value for /dropcount and a suitable distance spacing for /dropindent.

July 14, 2022
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Our improved bubble sorts can be significantly faster for most users most of the time in that they exit their loops if there was no previous change made. Results might now be two seconds for 2000 sorts.

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

/bubsort3a {/curmat1 exch store
curmat1 length 1 sub -1 1            
{/done true store                          
/maxposition exch store
0 1 maxposition 1 sub
{/posn exch store                           
curmat1 posn get                          
curmat1 posn 1 add get                
gt{curmat1 posn get                       
curmat1 posn 1 add get
curmat1 exch posn exch put
curmat1 exch posn 1 add exch put
/done false store                             
}if
} for                                                  
done {exit} if % stop on no swaps
} for                                                   
curmat1                                             
} bind store

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

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

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

July 13, 2022
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Did I ever reveal how I cracked Adobe's eexec copy protection? Actually, because of a tiny flaw, most any patient 7th grader could easily have done the same. As in "oops"

The secret was to insert an intentional additional "wrong" character into the eexec data stream. And then challenging your PostScript interpreter to find your mistake. Typically, you should get an error message and a stack printout that newly contains dozens to hundreds of decrypted plaintext characters. Rinse and repeat.

Sort of like a safe that tells you "Try three clicks to the left". I elected to not mention this to Adobe or anyone else at the time so as to not further inflame the thankfully now long lost copy protection wars. It took Adobe several years before they strangely decided to quietly downgrade their use of eexec.

July 12, 2022
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We've shown a somewhat ( and surprisingly ) improved bubble sort here along with a variation that sorts on a subarray.

Better yet, we have a heap sort tutorial here, and source code in our various .psl files. This ends up insanely faster for longer sorts but is tricky to understand.

By way of comparison, a heap sort can be much faster than a print or == of comparable size. So, other factors often dominate in program speed. The subarray sorts are comparable to the bubble approach.

July 11, 2022
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As we've just seen, the overall majority of fancier PostScript aps do not work properly or at all with Google Drive. But repeated here again are seventy or so of our routines that are triply Distiller - GhostScript - Google compatible ...

  #36 - Tinaja Image Menu      source •  demo

 #35 - Canal Image Menu       source •  demo
 #33 - USB Label printer        source •  demo
 #32 - Wolfvision Conns         source •  demo
 #31 - Word Frequency source • demo • tutor
  #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.

Find free Gonzo here, its tutorial here, the reference manual here, and a video here. More on PostScript here, more Beginner's Projects here, and a great heaping bunch of PS apps here.

July 10, 2022
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There is apparently a significant breakthrough in this "Physicists discover a 'family' of robust, superconducting graphene structures." found on Slashdot.

July 9, 2022
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This same sourcecode and its Acrobat .pdf output also gives us a modern update to our Gonzo Utilities In which nearly the entire Gonzo routines are towed along internally. This improves GhostScript use and often may sometimes allow significant Google Drive operation.

Also included are our /surl routines that allow you to embed live web links. And  our /jpegimageprocwithlink collection that converts .jpg images into compacted .pdf images that feature clickthroughs to the originals as well. But /jpegimageprocwithlink is not yet Google compatible. Sorry about that.

Internal Gonzo does add as much as 91K to a .psl program size. This is no big deal these days, and it does allow at least some PostScript routines to be used with Google Drive

July 8, 2022
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And here is the sourcecode. Sadly, the /jpegimageprocwithlink image routine seems to prevent use on Google Drive. As do most of the more powerful PostScript routines. Especially those involving disk reads.

July 7, 2022
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Here is my rework of a paper and its sourcecode from the Grant County Archaeological Society that is a nice summary of our bajada hanging canals. I did make a few minor updates and corrections.

July 6, 2022
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When somebody on the phone asks you "How are you today?", they are almost certainly a scam. Respond with "Terrible" so they loose their place in their script. This gains you total control. But never bait them further or they will start a vendetta against you.

More useful eBay and auction related sales tips can be found here.

July 5, 2022
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We'll spend at few blog entries with a directory of our older Gurugrams...

 #132 -- Low End Digital Sinewaves
 #131 -- Hanging Canal Image Directory
 #130 -- Heavy Duty Fourier Analyzer
 #129 -- Simplified Fourier Analyzer
 #128 -- My ARA Hanging Canal Video
 #127 -- JFA Bajada hanging canal preprint
 #126 -- Enameled Groundswill Fourpaws
 #125 -- Glyphs Hanging Canal Summary
 #124 -- Prehistoric Bajada Canals of SE AZ
 #123 -- Magic Lamp Original Bogus Paper
 #122 -- Saga of the Magic Lamp
 #121 -- Little Known Gila Valley Dayhikes

July 4, 2022
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 #120 -- Apple Assembly Cookbook I and II
 #119 -- Web Friendly PS & CSS Colors
 #118 -- Some "Fat Tail Arrow" Utilities
 #117 -- Level II Precyber eBook Conversions
 #116 -- Restoring Faded or Scuffed Text
 #115 -- "Unhalftoning" to improve eBooks
 #114 -- Remastering a Technical Book
 #113 -- Allen Reservoir Failure Docs
 #112 -- Hanging Canal slide show
 #111 -- Thesis for IC67 Metal Locater
 #110 -- Remastering video for web use
 #109 -- Gauss-Jordan stability issues
 #108 -- Prehistoric hanging canals
 #107 -- Magic Sinewave Developments 
 #106 -- Enhancing your eBay Skills VIII
 #105 -- Some Link Checking Utilities
 #104 -- UV lamp ballast debugging
 #103 -- Book Scanning "Gutter Math"
 #102 -- PS Web validation utilities
 #101 -- The magic "brick wall"

July 3, 2022
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 #100 -- Energy Intro and Summary
 #99 -- Filterless magic sinewaves?
 #98-- Mt. Grahame Aerial tramway
 #97-- GGMS magic sinewaves
 #96 -- Enhancing eBay skills VII
 #95 -- Spread Spectrum Magsines?
 #94 -- New Magic Sinewave calculator
 #93 -- Trashing Auto Electrolysizers
 #92 -- Bitmap circular lettering
 #91 -- Bitmap perspective lettering
 #90 -- Architect's perspective utilities
 #89 -- Mt. Graham lumber tram history
 #88 -- Image post processing tools
 #87 -- A digital airbrushing algorithm
 #86 -- More energy fundamentals
 #85 -- Inverse Graphics Transforms
 #84 -- Bitmap to PS array conversions
 #83 -- Pixel interpolation algorithms
 #82 -- False color & rainbow mods
 #81 -- 2-way HTML & PDF linkings

July 2, 2022
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 #80 -- Cubic spline min point distance
 #79 -- Gonzo PostScript utilities guide
 #78 -- Enhancing your eBay skills VI
 #77 -- Gauss Jordan equation solver
 #76 -- PostScript numeric reporter
 #75 -- Acrobat PDF post doc editing
 #74 -- What is the best eBay price?
 #73 -- Ultra fast magsine calculator
 #72 -- Deterministic Magsine solutions
 #71 -- Enhancing your eBay skills V
 #70 -- Enhancing your eBay skills IV
 #69 -- Cubic spline catenary approximation
 #68 -- Tech innovation secrets
 #67 -- Solving puzzles with PostScript
 #66 -- A newbies intro to the web
 #65 -- A Magic Sinewave Executive Summary
 #64 -- Some Gonzo utility log plots
 #63 -- Two phase magic sinewaves
 #62 -- A Enhancing your eBay skills III
 #61 -- Book Cover Layout Utilities

July 1, 2022
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 #60 -- Cubic spline length & subdivision
 #59 -- Cubic Spline through 4 points & sub div
 #58 -- The Math behind cubic splines
 #57 -- Cubic Spline Circles & Ellipses
 #56 -- Universal bitmap manipulator
 #55 -- Improved keystone corrector
 #54 -- Perspective lettering utilities
 #53 -- Revised bitmap typewriter
 #52 -- Raw PostScript full transparency!
 #51 -- Raw Ongoing Refurb Log
 #50 -- Extreme display legibility secrets
 #49 -- Enhancing your eBay skills II
 #48 -- Flashing Text in Acrobat
 #47 -- Real time Acrobat Animation
 #46 -- Acrobat PDF Content Extraction
 #45 -- Word Frequency Analysis Tools
 #44 -- Arizona Auction Resource Guide
 #43 -- Simple new EM field solutions
 #42 -- PS Array-to-Image Conversion
 #41 -- PS Enhancing your eBay skills I

June 31, 2022
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 #40 -- Magsin PIC Sourcecode
 #39 -- Fun with fields
 #38 -- Magic Sinewave Eval Chips
 >#37 -- New High legibility fonts tutorial
 #36 -- Logfile Reporter History Addon
 #35 -- Saga of the dripping stalactites
 #34 -- SigViewing of Magic Sinewaves
 #33 -- Magic Sinewave demo hardware
 #32 -- A Heap Sort for PostScript
 #31 -- Efficient PostScript Sorts
 #30 -- PostScript String & Array Hacks
 #29 -- Using Distiller to run PostScript
 #28 -- Logfile reader & eBay analyzer
 #27 -- Magic Sinewave Quantizations
 #26 -- Successful eBay buyer strategies
 #25 -- Successful eBay seller strategies
 #24 -- Magic Sinewave Visualizations
 #23 -- Fancy .JPG to .PDF Conversions
 #22 -- My eBay photo secrets
 #21 -- Website video fades & wipes

June 30, 2022
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 #20 -- Gonzo PS PowerPoint Emulator!
 #19 -- Reducing 8-bit Magsin Distortion
 #18 -- Fitting power curve data points
 #17 -- Dodge & Burn tutorial & utility
 #16 -- PS Runtime Speedup secrets
 #15 -- Digital camera swings & tilts
 #14 -- Exploring the .BMP data format
 #13 -- PS Disk Access Tutorial
 #12 -- PS Search & Replace Utility
 #11 -- Exploring the Acrobat 5 SDK
 #10 -- Internaldict & pdfmark Commands
 #9 -- PostScript Transparency!
 #8 -- Flate Compression Viewer
 #7 -- Overunity Batteries
 #6 -- Acrobat "Galley Slave" layouts
 #5 -- Auto-tracking PDF web links
 #4 -- Cubic spline image interpolation
 #3 -- Magic Sinewave Fourier checkplot
 #2 -- Magic Sinewave Harmonic spectra
 #1 -- Intro to steplocked magic sinewaves

June 29, 2022
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Let's skip the terabyte revolution and instead go directly to the petabyte revolution. One usb for all movies anytime ever. And one for all books anytime ever. Including somewhat disruptive IP results.

June 28, 2022
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    Pseudoscience bashing.

June 27, 2022
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     Our eBay store. 

June 26, 2022
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     Gila Hikes and more details.

June 25, 2022
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There is a new series of HP printer drivers called HP Smart that vastly simplifies wifi driver setups. All that may be needed is your wifi password and an easily read PIN internal to the printer. The ap can be used either with a phone or a traditional computer.

June 24, 2022
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The older HP 8600 OfficeJet printer apparently has a serious bug in that it occasionally hangs up with combined improper shutdown and paper jam errors. This is thoroughly discussed here along with partial hard reset corrections.

The bizarre problem is that if these corrections do not work, you have to get an email patch directly from HP and not web available. Apparently part of the secret is to hit a hidden icon four times to reach three different reset menus. And brand new ink cartridges must be provided. Even then, an
actual fix may not happen or be possible. And this is really, really bad.

Sometimes comp a newer model printer if under warranty and if you persistently jump through enough painful hoops.

So far, my 8600 remains stuck, so I welcome your repairs. I like this older printer in that it has larger ink cartridges and lower per page costs.

June 23, 2022
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There is a new development in capacitive energy couplers with a tutorial here. Compared to the more traditional inductive couplers, they have better range and efficiency. More importantly, they can link wireless recharging energy to multiple destinations of significantly different size and position.

June 22, 2022
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A reminder that the cheaper HP printers are much more expensive than the more expensive HP printers. Especially when it comes to per-page inkjet costs, refillibility restrictions, labor, and feature limits. Some individuals might find their "pretend" duplexing offensive as well. At the very least, it is incredibly labor intensive.

June 21, 2022
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The "typical" Lidar use reprograms a rectangular flight path. Each sample of which overlaps its neighbors by 40 percent or so. Usually returning gathered data via a memory card rather than in real time. And creating an area map.

The bajada canal Lidar would be wildly different in that it attempts to continuously trace the canal's direction. Steerable real time flight feedback is demanded. The whole point is to follow the canal to see where it goes rather than flying in any particular direction.

June 20, 2022
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Most of our classic ebooks are available free here. One unscanned exception is our Micro Cookbook Volume I. Autographed hard copies of which are available here and here. I'd be happy to ebook this if you would assist me with the scanning. The fundamentals here do remain of significant value for later generation microprocessors.

Separately, we did split Micro Cookbook Volume II out into two eBooks which we retitled as Machine Language Programming Cookbook volume I and Machine Language Programming Cookbook volume II. We also redid part of volume I as a still incomplete Director's Cut

June 19, 2022
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Emory Riddle is scheduled to do a Lidar field school on our prehistoric bajada hanging canals next month. Here's a report on some of their earlier projects.

June 18, 2022
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A reminder that the current state of our bajada hanging canals image directory should now be complete here and welcomes your proofing and critical comments on all the details files.

June 17, 2022
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While first invented by bats and later "discovered" by military aerospace, I've long been fascinated with chirp radar. In which a swept frequency is transmitted and then post processed with a linear delay versus frequency network. The benefits are tremendous improvements in resolution  and peak power reductions.

June 16, 2022
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Lidar doesn't yet quite use chirp, but may include several frequencies to which crops and terrain may respond significantly differently. An obvious question: What happens when you apply true chirp to Lidar?

June 15, 2022
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Somebody did a video on exploring a live Psyctone here

June 14, 2022
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The biggie pseudorandom construction project was the Psyctone, who a third party contributor recently did a superb and free Javascript browser emulation here.

The original resulted from a bet with an aerospace cellmate that I could get a pseudorandom sequence to squawk. At the time, pseudorandom sequences were exclusively the subject of multi million dollar classified research projects.

June 13, 2022
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My original attempts at explaining pseudorandom stuff appeared in the CMOS Cookbook starting on page 372 and in Ask The Guru Volume I Column 1. The KFC virus appeared here, and a partial tutorial here.

Please if you can find them, scan and email me the missing pages 41 and 42 from the April 75 Radio Electronics.

June 12, 2022
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Here's another of those "lets not rush things". The long lost horse's mouth original paper showing the hairy and obscure math behind pseudorandom sequences here was E .J. Watson's American Mathematical Society coverage found here. And I've added a copy here.

June 11, 2022
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Just added a copy of our bajada hanging canal image directory to Research Gate.

Sadly, our newly highly touted PostScript navigation aide only partially works here because of how they split off page one on their .PDF files. To see the nav stuff is supposed to work in its full glory, try here.

June 10, 2022
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One detail on using the .psl sourcecode for our bajada image details: The initial .PDF file size ends up rather outrageously high, so you will have to manually do a   PDF --> Tools --> Optimize PDF to get down to a reasonable 5 Meg file size.

June 9, 2022
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       Our classic reprints.

June 8, 2022
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It's been a long time since we last looked at the Magnetocoloric Effect. Turns out this amazing technology now has at least one commercial room temperature vendor and might finally be about to turn the corner on economic viability.

Some metals, and most especially Gadolinium will get warm in a magnetic field and then release this heat when the field is removed. Letting you move heat from point A to Point B. Such as in an air conditioner or a refrigerator.

The theoretical limits of the technology are potentially much more efficient than conventional vapor compression and expansion, and Global Warming issues seem far lower.

Since HVAC is obviously due for some major and significant energy breakthroughs, this may be a game changer.

June 7, 2022
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     Flutterwumpers

June 6, 2022
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June 5, 2022
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I think our new hanging canal "details" files in our image directories may be at least temporarily complete and ready for prime time. There are presently 317 images. Please view and proof them here.

June 4, 2022
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Did I ever tell you my top secret fire lookout's gourmet recipe for boiled can? The trick is the 24 hour prep time, as you boil it in last night's dishwater.

Since the label usually falls off, the original can contents do not matter in the least.

June 3, 2022
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Just realized I had not mentioned my Elegant Simplicity paper for a while.

June 2, 2022
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My earliest exposure to anything remotely resembling a computer was an utterly useless IBM beastie and some analog non-starters at otherwise superb Lafayette College. Followed by some BASIC timesharing.

But I guess my first foray into original and hands-on programming took place on an Olivetti Programma 101. Followed later by an Interdata 1 with a whopping 2K of system RAM. And of course, the quantum leap in going to the personal and incomparably stupendous KIM-1. 

The first Olivetti project was a simple mortgage calculator. At that time, nobody knew the deep dark secret that by tripling or quintupling up on utterly small early principal  payments, you could ridiculously shorten the loan time and the amount of total interest paid.

The second project directly led to our Musician's Pitch  Reference in PE. The question to be asked was "What is  the best possible 8-bit sequence to synthesize an equally tempered top octave music scale?

The subtle and non trivial answer was 116 123 130 138 146 155 164 174 184 195 207 219 232. Equally tempered musical notes are separated by the highly irrational factor of 1.05946309 in frequency. Known to its many friends as the twelfth root of two.  AKA six percent if you ignore any sour notes.

At the time, I thought I was doing unique and original research. But MOS Technology had to be working on something similar leading up to their MK50240. Which had the unspeakable luxury of using a 239 253 269... nine bit sequence instead. While the JAES paper apparently appeared much later.

June 1, 2022
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Please note that current papers on our bajada hanging canals can be gotten here by clicking through to any details page and scrolling down to the blue box.

May 31, 2022
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Reasonable continuing directions for our Magic Sinewaves might include exploring EV vehicle compatibility, use of larger memory space Raspberry Pi or Android microcomputers, providing many simultaneous amplitude and frequencies in a single device, improving calculators, and using "shake the box" techniques to significantly improve quantized distortions.

And, as we have seen yesterday, switching to log rather than linear steps. Consulting services available.

May 30, 2022
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The fencepost problem strikes again. It does take ELEVEN fenceposts spaced by TEN feet to cover a hundred feet!

If they are uniformly internally spaced, data storage in a  Magic Sinewave may not be optimal. Instead, a "log" approach where each value is some percentage of its neighbor might be more effective.

Ferinstance, 40 log spaced amplitudes and 40 log spaced frequencies might end up just as good as 100 linear of  each. But only need 0.16 times the storage Besides producing more uniform changes for system stability.

Note that 10^(1/39) is 1.06081836  and that 100^(1/39) is 1.12533558.Note also that these are nominally six and twelve percent changes. 

Thirty nine trips plus your starting point is forty.  With these sequences generated on repeat exponentiation for a 10:1 and 100:1 range... 

1.00000 1.06082 1.12534 1.19378 1.26638
1.34340 1.42510 1.51177 1.60372 1.70125
1.80472 1.91448 2.03092 2.15443 2.28546
2.42446 2.57191 2.72833 2.89426 3.07029
3.25702 3.45511 3.66524 3.88815 4.12462
4.37547 4.64158 4.92388 5.22334 5.54101
5.87801 6.23551 6.61473 7.01703 7.44379
7.89651 8.37676 8.88622 9.42667 10.0000

1.00000 1.12534 1.26638 1.42511 1.60372
1.80472 2.03092 2.28546 2.57191 2.89427
3.25702 3.66524 4.12463 4.64159 5.22334
5.87802 6.61474 7.44381 8.37677 9.42668
10.6082 11.9378 13.4341 15.1177 17.0125
19.1448 21.5443 24.2446 27.2833 30.7029
34.5511 38.8815 43.7548 49.2388 55.4102
62.3551 70.1704 78.9652 88.8624 100.000

Consulting services available.

May 29, 2022
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Fractal Fern sourcecode, demo, and image. With some background here.
Bunches more on PostScript here. A video here. And a files listing here.

May 28, 2022
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A PostScript Fourier Series analysis routine to verify the page 382, n=5 digital sinewave generator math from the CMOS Cookbook returns...

  1.0
  6.45507e-07
  -6.60566e-08
  1.5057e-07
  2.00513e-07
  1.03733e-07
  4.19712e-07
  4.61555e-07
  -0.111111
  -8.8879e-08
  -0.0909088
  -4.83204e-07

There is obviously some 32 bit math roundoff and sampling noise here in this logfile printout which needs thrown out by truncation...

  1.0
  0
  0
  0
  0
  0
  0
  0
  -0.111111
  0
  -0.0909088
  0

...leaving us with a fundamental and two harmonics. In the case of our Magic Sinewaves, we needed many small answers to many high harmonics, so we had to substitute Java Script 64 bit math instead.

Usually it will be more than obvious whether 32 bit math ends up acceptable for any particular Fourier Series analyses tasks.

May 27, 2022
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An ancient reminder that walking ring counters have disallowed states that can end up doing wildly wrong things for you. Always preset to 00000 or 11111 before use!

On n=3, 2 sates are disallowed. On n=4 8 states are disallowed. On n=5, 22 states are disallowed. And its downhill from there.

May 26, 2022
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Alternate solutions for high end digital sinewaves are found here and here, while our brand new low end solutions can be found here.

May 25, 2022
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Again for n=10 and per the "n" bottom line on new page 383, the current ratio would be 1  [ sin (72) / sin (36 )]    [ sin (72) / sin (36 )]  1.

While the resistance ratio would be 1  [ sin (36) / sin (72 )]    [ sin (36) / sin (72 ) ]  1. Note that the highest currents are in the middle as would be the lowest resistance values.

Or 1 1.61803 1.61803 1 for current. Or a ratio of 1 0.61804 0.61804 1 for resistance.

May 24, 2022
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Don't want to rush these things. There are apparently some errors on page 383 of my CMOS Cookbook. The corrected version is found here.

The problem was confusing current ratios with resistance ratios which in fact have to be inverses of each other. Ferinstance, for n=10 the current ratios left to right would be 1 1.61803 1.61803 1 while the resistance ratios would be 1 0.61804 0.61804 1.

May 23, 2022
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Some new variations on molten salt based energy storage can be found here.

May 22, 2022
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          The future ain't what it used to be.

May 21, 2022
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Outside of that Missus Lincoln, how was the play?

May 20, 2022
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One of the key secrets to your dealing with pseudoscience is being able to separate the useful adjuncts to porcine whole body cleanliness from the total hogwash. More details here.

May 19, 2022
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As any chemist will tell you, if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the precipitate.

May 18, 2022
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While I try to have a new and eclectic blog entry every day, it is usually easier and more creative to do several entries at once and "backfill" the list.

Please always look back a week or so to pick up anything you may have missed.

May 17, 2022
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We still get asked all the time why we have no foreign sales. The short answer is that they are not remotely worth the grief and hassles that will inevitably result.

I guess I am still pissed over the Canadian post office refusing to accept 45,00 pieces of my first class mail several decades back. Separately, several of our suppliers contractually demand that we permit no foreign sales.

The bottom line is this: If you are a success with your domestic sales, you have no need for foreign ones. And if you are not a success domestically, foreign sales will only compound your problems.

More on eBay and other small scale high tech marketing here.

May 16, 2022
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Several of our hanging canals still have unresolved gaping holes in them. And Ockhams Razor can only go so far in dealing with them.

Ferinstance, the Lower Frye complex needs a downstream portion going from N 32.76825 to W 109.79177 to upstream from N 32.75770 to W 109.81494 to approach completion.

The Upper Frye Complex needs its watershed crossing proven from N 32.74459 W 109.83839 to N 32.74561 W 109.84011. And its initial downstream reach from  N 32.74696 W 109.83891 to N 32.75331 W 109.83724.  Presumably it lies under a historic "steal the plans" pipeline.

A crucial piece of the Golf Course canal is missing in action. It may connect N 32.78082 W 109.78690 west of Riggs Mesa or link to a possible French Drain at N 32.79116 W 109.79140 on the Robinson Canal.

And the only known portion of the Tripp Canyon canal goes from N 32.80505 W 110.05038 to N 32.81187 W 110.04628.

Similarly, it is not clear how the Reay Canal at N 32.81522 W  109.77569 connects to either Golf Course or Robinson.

Your help is welcome in resolving these via ATV or foot hiking dilemmas.

May 15, 2022
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A video of San Carlos Falls. Res permit required. Similar stuff here.

May 14, 2022
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Our latest Magic Sinewave calculator can be found here. With more on Magic Sinewaves here. And a low end alternate here.

May 13, 2022
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And even neater is 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.

May 12, 2022
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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, 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.

The rule is surprisingly accurate with Covid. A recent haul was 250,000 - 2500 - 25. There are a million fire persons nationally, 10,000 in Arizona, and 100 here.

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 11, 2022
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Picked up a bunch of HDMI format converters and placed them on our eBay store.

May 10, 2022
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How many mathematicians does it take to change a light bulb?

Only one. Who hands a bulb to five Californians, thus reducing the problem to a previously solved riddle.

May 9, 2022
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One of the most maddeningly infuriating happenings in all of PostScript occurs when the contents of old strings mysteriously change later on in unexpected ways.

The usual problem is failing to understand that PostScript does not place strings into arrays or other data structures! All it places are pointers to those strings! Thus, if you reuse a string ( such as a disk reading work string), much if not all of your previous string storage can get corrupted. Note further that PostScript string contents are not preserved or protected by saves and restores!

The subtle but simple cure for these hassles is called string dereferencing. Any time you are about to use a string that may change later in your program, you take a "snapshot" that creates a new and unique string that will not change…

  (oldstring) dup length string cvs -->
  (safestring)

Pointers to your dereferenced "safe string" can now be placed in an array or whatever. (safestring) will stay exactly the way you created it. And your (oldstring) is free to go on to other tasks. There are speed and vm penalties for string deferencing, but these are usually fairly modest. Other sneaky tricks involving PostScript strings, arrays, integers,procs, and dictionaries can be found here.

May 8, 2022
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Our curious factoid of the day: The Canary Islands were named after a large dog.

May 7, 2022
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The entire remaining world's supply of avuncular sleezoids can be found here. Please do not confuse these with the marbelous pancakes.

We also have the world's entire remaining supply of absolutely mint nuclear holocaust fashion accessories here. But we long ago ran out of the water soluble swimsuits and the tinfoil hat liners.

Place these liners on the OUTSIDE to prevent them from activating your implants. Place the liners on the INSIDE of the tinfoil to stop them from reading your brainwaves.

May 6, 2022
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Some of the details that make our bajada hanging canals world class unique include...

  Hung high on steep mesa edges
  Over 150 miles known to date!
  Includes watershed crossings!
  Completely surrounds Mt. Graham
  Exploits every available water drop.
  Slope often independent of local terrain.
  Superb engineering unknown elsewhere.
  Includes an aqueduct.
  Riverine canals conflicted.
  Canals as long as 13 miles!
  Often along highest available terrain.
  Includes U Turns where needed.
  Portions exceptionally preserved.
  Trees and cacti mid channel.
  Underlies cemeteries.
  Strong "Water flows uphill" illusions.
  Artesian interactions.
  Often historic "stole the plans".
  Precise preserving of 2% grade
  Counterflowing where needed.
  Some severely endangered.
  No apparent errors or unfinished.
  Thousands of grids in area.
  Woefully understudied.

May 5, 2022
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A reminder to keep checking the progress on our new "details" files on our bajada hanging canals images.

May 4, 2022
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The ACM or Association for Computer Machinery has just made most of their earlier papers before 2000 readily and freely available. Hopefully, other scientific institutions and other offensive paywalls will soon do likewise.

May 3, 2022
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An earlier project before the bajada hanging canals was the Mount Graham Aerial Tramway.

May 2, 2022
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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. Additional "aunt gonna happen" hydrogen ludicrosities here.

May 1, 2022
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I continue to be fascinated by the local  McEniry Tunnel scam. Where all you had to do was scape the gold off the ceiling directly into your ore car. A neat trick for a Precambrian and intrusive free mountain range.

BTW, this is the correct spelling directly from his signature. Many local sources continue to get it wrong. Even street name signs. Similar hike related projects can be found here and here.

April 30, 2022
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Sincerity is everything. Once you have that faked, all else follows.

April 29, 2022
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These days, LED lights can easily beat out incandescent efficiency by a factor of ten. On the other hand, "real" air conditioners still have SEER ratings that are as bad as one tenth theoretical. So, the next big thing we can reasonably expect is some major and radical improvements in AC.

Not sure exactly where and how this is gonna happen. But the incentives are clearly there.

April 28, 2022
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I'm saddened that low pressure hobby pneumatics never took off. In spite of there being scads of thirty cent three way pneumatic EGR valves scunging away in many surplus houses and most any junk yard. Last major story I did on this was waay back here.

April 27, 2022
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As anyone from Phoenix can tell you, swamp coolers suck. Besides not working above 20 percent humidity, they dramatically slash your productivity, generally make life more than unpleasant, and have maint and mold issues.

Yet there are zillions of new web mini swamp coolers that, fortunately, are getting trashed by the usual web anti scam specialists.

But there is one place where swamp coolers sort of  work, and that is as a precooling for a real air conditioner. Which can modestly improve efficiency and can be cost effective. Years ago, I build one of these and it seemed to perform ok. But they never made it mainstream. Since they are unpopular low interest devices, they cost extra than they should. And these days, anything that wastes water likely should be avoided.

April 26, 2022
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Have gotten halfway through our new details image pages. Just finished A through L. Please report any problems.

April 25, 2022
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      My unauthorized autobiography.

April 24, 2022
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Just realized we do not have Eden Hot Spring in our directory of prehistoric hanging canals. Yet it surely was unlikely to be ignored.

Some info in this story. As far as I known, this is presently posted private property that may sometimes be available for large group lease. Sorry, but I have no further contact info.

Hundreds of other nearby things to do here.

April 23, 2022
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Most auctioneers are missing a sure bet by not providing economical in house shipping of smaller or reasonable items. This should be in very high demand by distant bidders.

More eBay and auction stuff here.

April 22, 2022
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Traditionally, pv prices have been in free fall. Mostly because they weren't remotely near being a subsidy free net energy source. But, now that pv is in fact available to generate competitive true net energy, prices have been pretty much flat. Best cell price is now just over ten cents per watt.

You can find two weekly pv price sources here and here. More energy stuff here.

April 21, 2022
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Very few of our bajada hanging canals still flow to this day. Mostly they are full of silt, washed out, or have been run over by historic or modern reuse.

But four still flowing candidates do still include...

  Marijilda Canal
  Deadman Canal
  Ledford Canal
  Goat Canal

Paper here. Images here. Videos here.

A few artesian canals should also be included, but they are considerably shorter and a lot less sophisticated. Ultimately, these likely should end up in a class by themselves.

April 20, 2022
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Many of our prehistoric hanging canals involved moving a lot of rocks and dirt. Five leading examples far and away in their own class do include...

  HS Canal
  Lower Frye Complex
  Cuelbra Cut
  Sand Canal Takein
  High Lebanon

Paper here. Images here. Videos here.

April 19, 2022
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Some little known Windows tricks: ctrl + magnifies while ctrl - reduces. And winkey period gives you three pages of emojis accessible to most programs. Includes Ω for resistance

April 18, 2022
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     Magic Sinewave  calculator
     Magic Sinewave  Web Page
      Low end Digital Sinewaves

April 17, 2022
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Not sure if it is just me, but I seem to have found a bug in Adobe Dreamweaver. If you try to use a bogus url for a href and then correct it, the original "stays stuck". Like as if there was an internal cache not swift enough to pick up the change.

The only workarounds I have found were (1) Make sure the url is valid ahead of time, or (2) completely close and reopen Dreamweaver.

April 16, 2022
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My first paper on Class D ( switch mode ) audio amplifiers this can be found here. The magazine did not believe it would work, so they added a rather rude disclaimer. More classic papers here.

In a new Class G variant of Class D audio amplifiers, class AB gets used for the low amplitudes and the power supply voltage is temporarily raised only for the high amplitudes. Efficiency is claimed intermediate with lower distortion. Intended use is for car audio

April 15, 2022
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Few people realize that the word "gullible" does not appear in any major spell checker or dictionary.

April 14, 2022
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At one time long ago and far away, hardware hacking meant "pushing the limits of technical excellence". Preferably by using elegant simplicity to leave all of the supposed experts shaking their heads in stunned disbelief.

Sadly, all of those media epsilon minuses suffering from severe rectocranial inversion ( clearly both chronic and acute ) and many law enforcement officials stupidly trashed and subverted a once proud name. Because I got tired of calls from felon wannabes and all those men in black camped on my doorstop, I changed my Hardware Hacker column name in 1995 to Tech Musings

Surprising, at least one modern website found here still religiously sticks to the old hardware hacking definition. Some of my better "old definition" hacks included...

   TV Typewriter
   Solid State Color Organ
   Magic Sinewaves
   Cracking eexec!
   Brick walls
   ISMM
   Cubic Spline Library
   Fractal Ferns
   Tearing Method!
   Decimal Counting Unit
   Low end sinewaves
   Nonlinear Graphics Transforms
   Powerpoint Emulation
   Gonzo Utilities
   Applewriter tear down
   Active Filter Cookbook
   Flutterwumpers
   Fun with fields
   Marbelous pancakes
   Avuncular sleezoids
   Some Other Classics

And, of course...

   Bajada Hanging Canals.

April 13, 2022
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 Sourcecode for our new canal image directory.

April 12, 2022
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    The saga of the dripping stalactite.

April 11, 2022
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A third party history of the TV Typewriter can be found here. One minor issue: That cropped photo is of Les Solomon, not me. I was at the "other left" of the original Durango saloon image.

TVT Related free ebooks here. And the original construction project here.

April 10, 2022
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Enough of our improved hanging canal image directory is complete for mainstream access and your comments. Find the newly renamed versions here and access to the older one here.

A staggering amount of work remains to be done on the image details files. Please keep checking back for our daily upgrades.

April 9, 2022
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A reminder that some of our older PostScript Reference Manual links are apparently broken. But replaced by a newer one here.

April 8, 2022
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Certainly the two most stunning engineering feats on our prehistoric bajada hanging canals involved a thorough understanding of watershed crossings and pinch points.

These both have been unquestionably verified elsewhere in the system, notably where the Mud Springs Canal goes "up" out of Ash Creek and "down" into Mud Springs Canyon, all the while maintaining a perfectly optimal and an exactly constant slope of just under two percent. All run through a single uniquely possible pinch location.

But serious questions remain in Frye Creek. It would be unthinkable for them to have omitted this water resource. There is only one remotely possible watershed crossing above the falls. And downstream, they went to an awful lot of trouble with the HS Canal to return the water for further use. .

Your help in verifying the Fry Creek to Spring Canyon watershed crossing is urgently needed. Major hiking is required.

April 7, 2022
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Evidence has been anywhere from "suggestive" to "overwhelming" that most area historic canals were "steal the plans", or "borrow the blueprints" from underlying prehistoric originals.

First because all the good sites were already taken. And second because it is infinitely easier to "dig out an old ditch" than to correctly engineer a new canal from scratch. And thirdly, because only a fraction of the original route was often adapted. Such as the wrongly named Hawk Hollow cow tank overlaying the Allen Canal.

One exception seems to have been the Roper Lake Canal from the 1950's. Another highly unusual example was the Sunny Flat canal. One that included flumes and even a tunnel, but apparently never had any legal water in it. Some obscure historic details here, here, and here.

A paper on the prehistoric bajada hanging canals here and several videos here.

April 6, 2022
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Word has it that there may not be a PostScript update 4. But if there was, here are some features I'd like to see included...

  64 bit math (essential for Magic Sinewaves)
  Relative Windows run file addressing
  Web URL run addressing
  Higher profile run documentation
  Display PostScript with live interaction
  Many Gonzo features upgraded.
  Improved Google Drive compatibility

April 5, 2022
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I've long had a Fundamental Factors Underlying Recent Technical Innovation paper.

But I guess with a great heaping bunch of hindsight that, these days, I do strongly feel that nothing but nothing matters more than the staggering and unprecedented anytime anyplace drop in the price of memory.

Fer instance, our "all we have" USB offer now uses one million times the Apple IIe memory.

All else follows.

April 4, 2022
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The good news is that we've lowered a bunch of our unit prices on eBay.

But, since it no longer makes any sense to have to pay $30 shipping on a $9 order, we've been forced to raise our opening bids to somewhat higher levels. Sorry about that.

April 3, 2022
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           The Tearing Method

April 2, 2022
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My favorite PostScript "Golly Gee Mister Science" stunt involves brick walls. In which a few dozen bytes of code can perfectly and instantly draw thousands of perspectively correct and math free bricks.

Find the code here, a demo here as #4 , and a more elaborate #19 image here. The secret? Use a pair of setdash operators! Whoodathunkit?

April 1, 2022
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Shocking.

I just found out that many of the New Mexico subastas are  now 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 all of the New Mexico truck  tires are 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, 2022
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                            Don't Get Sick
                         Fitness Awareness 
                       Aerobic Pulse Rates

March 30, 2022
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         Simply Marbelous.

March 29, 2022
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When somebody on the phone asks you "How are you today?", they are almost certainly a scam. Respond with "Terrible" so they loose their place in their script. But never bait them further or they will start a vendetta against you.

More useful eBay and auction related sales tips can be found here.

March 28, 2022
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An interesting web story on the first video titling machine can be found here. And also here.

This Vidifont apparently predated my TV Typewriter by two years or so. I was unaware of this at the time,  because its adoption seemed initially strictly limited to major tv networks. It was also almost certainly outrageously complex and expensive. It did offer highly sophisticated font capabilities.

It was also apparently one of the earliest devices to use proportional video typography. It also still used magnetic core memory.

March 27, 2022
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Work is slowly progressing on our new bajada hanging canal image tutorial update with the first thirty or so Details pages ready here for your review.

The older original can still be found here.

March 26, 2022
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Our classic usb archive offer has exceeded a 32 Gigabyte limit, so we are now newly shipping with 64 Gig hardware. It is interesting to note that this is one million times the memory capacity of the usual Apple IIe computer.

March 25, 2022
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USB 3.0 devices are identifiable by a blue insulator in the connector. They are much faster than the earlier USB 2.0 devices.

March 24, 2022
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The Incredible Secret Money Machine free eBook. The plant on the cover is, of course, a false aralia. AKA Plerandra_elegantissima.

March 23, 2022
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    Some patent horror stories. More here.

March 22, 2022
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Testing and verification follow a different path on out PostScript to .PDF files. These are initially created in plain old Wordpad and usually saved under a .psl trailer. The .psl is preferred to .ps as .ps goes directly to distiller, while .psl goes to text edit.

The .psl file is usually converted to Acrobat by way of Adobe Distiller, typically reached via //acrodist /F. The /F is especially important if the PostScript code needs to read or write disk files.

A new feature of many of our .psl files is creating pre-Disiller navigation with some details here. And a major example here. Alternates to Distiller include free GhostScript and Google Drive. But the latter only typically works on a very small subset of available PostScript programs.

Once in .PDF format, you often can dramatically reduce your file sizes with the optimization tools in full Acrobat.

A reminder here that some older links to the PostScript Reference Manual III seem to be broken, with this link likely to still work. Much more in our PostScript library.

March 21, 2022
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Here's the testing procedure we usually go through for any new .shtml posts: First, we spell check internally to Adobe's Dreamweaver with a shift-F7. But I do like to still use Lancasterism non-words per our Enameled Dealing with Four Paws and Groundswill.

Any .shtml files are next moved to our website with a temporary name. They are then checked with this responsive design checker. Adjustments are made on any short lines or other layout issues. This Markup Validator then looks for any web error related issues. After posting, the superb PRO-Sitemaps service is used to find broken links and create related directories. Finally, this code and this demo are used to investigate and, if needed, modify our web logfile reports.

Nonetheless, errors remain and can be enormously difficult to pin down. So, please report any you find.

March 20, 2022
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   The worst of Marcia Swampfelder.

This is the newer phone friendly version. The older version can be found here. More Blatant Opportunist columns are located here.

March 19, 2022
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A newer PostScript Reference Manual eBook here. Some of our older links may remain 404 broken. Our PostScript library here. Video here.

These days, you simply send your .psl code to Acrobat Distiller using the magic incantation of  //acrodist /F. Or use free GhostScript. For conversion to Acrobat .PDF files or ( wildly underused ) to generate log files that can read or write in any language.

You also might be able to use free Google Drive for a limited and simplified subset of PostScript routines. Per these many examples.

Our older master directory of PostScript programs can be found here. With newer additions here.

March 18, 2022
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Finding your Chrome passwords can be a hassle, owing to the depth of the required clicks.

Get in Chrome, then click on the three upper right dots. Then click on settings. You should get a leftmost Settings drop down. Click on the  upper left three bars if you do not. Then click on Autofill then on Passwords.

To actually view a password, click on its "eye" than enter your computer's User Name and Password.

March 17, 2022
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I thought I might have been wrong once, but it turned out I was mistaken..

March 16, 2022
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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. More insanity here.

Which presently seems to be our second most popular free eBook download. Behind only the TV Typewriter Cookbook.

March 15, 2022
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For most individuals and small scale startups, any use of patents in any way, shape or form is virtually guaranteed to end up a net loss of time, energy, money, and sanity.

The Case Against Patents here and the rest of the related gang here.

March 14, 2022
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Speaking of which, Acme has this suggestion of an unexplored part of the Allen bajada hanging canal at N 32.79318 W 109.82577 and  N 32.79503 W 109.82388.

This is just south of an unusually deep canal stretch. Apparently used to maintain a critical slope just under two percent. The skills involved here boggle the mind. Although use of static water levels might have played an important role.

March 13, 2022
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Many of our hanging canal examples involve the use of Acme Mapper. If our "red arrow" markers are to be correct and as intended, it is super important to Delete All your personalized markers beforehand.

Note also that any Acme page can be placed on your clipboard ( for fixed image jpg conversion or whatever ) by clicking on the upper right "chain" of the green Acme title.

Sadly, Acme's resolution dropped a year or two back owing to their changing satellite resources. We are currently exploring Lidar and Drone options for improved detection and mapping.

March 12, 2022
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Our magic sinewave calculator can be found here and its website here.

Digitally generated magic sinewaves can force any number (!) of low harmonics to zero in theory and to astonishingly low values when quantized in the real world. And that is before most filtering.

Next steps in the research would be a Raspberry Pi demo of 100 log amplitudes and 100 log frequencies. Similar to here. Followed by "shake the box"demo techniques to reduce any quantization errors.

Your participation welcome.

March 11, 2022
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Curious. The latest of $30 shavers demand use of a $300 computer. In that they recharge only via USB. No power hassles or custom chargers. Be aware of this detail.

March 10, 2022
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We are woefully behind in our updating a new master hanging canal image index. Find the incomplete older directory here and the bare beginning start of a new improved one here.

March 9, 2022
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Fitting a parabola to three data points code. Also finding the minimum of a parabola given three points.

March 8, 2022
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Here is one eBook currently downloadable version of the PostScript Reference Manual. We are working on finding a more recent version.

March 7, 2022
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What are the strangest and most bizarre features of the Gila Valley? Besides cataloging these "usual suspects" hikes and these "little known" ones, here's some that remain rather mystifying...

Trincheras?
N 32.66797 W 109.18891
  Up to four precisely aligned nested equilateral
  triangles seem unlikely to be natural yet not
  good enough for prehistoric human constructs.

Nancy's Rockpiles
N 32.95124 W 109.80712
  Old oil cans strongly suggest CCC origins of
  these high walls that seemingly have no obvious
  purpose beyond utterly pointless busywork

UFO Fish Fillets
N 32.81582 W 109.96957
  Water management structures that are strange
  enough and different enough that they are not yet
  obvious whether they are of CCC or prehistoric
  origins. Lichen edge alignments may give a clue.

Impact Crater
N 32.88474, W 109.88960
  This may or may not be what it looks like or
  may or may not be a visual artifact. Fairly
  difficult hiking or ATV access. Several "almost
  but not quite" whatevers are also in the area.

Best Tinaja - Near
N 33.25670 W 111.02294
  A little out of range, but utterly spectacular.
  Strictly for rope trained canyoneering teams.
  Otherwise, you cannot get there from here.
  Severely endangered. Fifth rope is shown.

Watershed Crossovers (!)
N 32.79153 W 109.85380
  Spectacular 1350's prehistoric water management
  techniques illustrate many exceptional world class
  engineering skills. A paper here, a summary here,
  and video here. The Frye crossover found at
  N 32.74503 W 109.83903 still needs proven.

Hot Dog Formations Near
N 32.66340 W 109.69462
  While there are many thousands of CCC builds
  here, these hard to find bunkers exhibit unique
  stone masonry work edges. About 3 feet wide
  by 20 feet long by 3 feet high. But no apparent
  purpose. One guess is that each may hold a
  dead horse.

The Grids
N 32.93719 W 109.80258.
  Many thousands of these are north of the Gila
  with scattered dozens to the south. Believed to
  be huge Southeastern Arizona booze factories.
  Or possibly the prototype Dilbert cubicles. A
  book here.

Zeolite Mines
N 32.46976 W 109.41021
 Thin layers of minerals with an incredible variety
 of catalytic, filtering, and similar uses. Several
 different sites in intermittent use south of Hot
 Wells Dunes and north of Bowie.

March 6, 2022
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Existing techniques for subsurface mapping pretty much remain rather dismal. My own attempts at this with the IC-67can be found here.

But an exciting brand new method that involves quantum gravity gradiometer techniques was just published in Nature and offers exciting new "breakthrough" opportunities.

Sadly, because it involves lasers and low temperatures and similar exotic lab stuff, you are not likely to quickly knock one of these out in your garage. Or find one on eBay. At lease not quite yet.

March 5, 2022
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As we've just seen, the overall majority of fancier PostScript aps do not work properly or at all with Google Drive. But here again are seventy or so of our routines that are triply Distiller - GhostScript - Google compatible ..

  #36 - Tinaja Image Menu      source •  demo

 #35 - Canal Image Menu       source •  demo
 #33 - USB Label printer        source •  demo
 #32 - Wolfvision Conns         source •  demo
 #31 - Word Frequency source • demo • tutor
 #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.

Find free Gonzo here, its tutorial here, the reference manual here, and a video here. More on PostScript here, more Beginner's Projects here, and a great heaping bunch of PS apps here.

March 4, 2022
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A reminder that we have PostScript pre Distiller nav routines available with their sourcecode here and its demo here. These are vastly simpler, more usable, and much more convenient than the post PDF navs featured elsewhere.

Sadly, these seem to not work properly with Google Drive. Apparently their interpretation of the ANN operator does not generate live links. Both files do seem to upload properly but still end up link free. Please email me if you have a workaround.

Thus these nav aids are best used with "real" Adobe Distiller. They should be fully Ghostscript compatible, but I have yet to verify this for sure.

March 3, 2022
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When it comes to Italian food, you can't be both anti pasto and pro volone.

March 2, 2022
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My link to an Adobe PostScript Reference Manual ebook seems to be broken. Not yet sure if this is a glitch or a policy change. Even their /content/ main subdirectory seems to be blowing up.

The actual book is long out of print as Addison Wesley was bought out by Pearson long ago. At least for now, there are a few copies up on eBay, typically at $6 each. The third edition is very much preferred.

Please advise me if you find any alternate eBook solutions.

March 1, 2022
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Here is  ( dangerously! ) how to purposely intercept one known type of PostScript error for your own redirected use...

  save /snap exch store
  errordict begin /undefined
  {(\ngrabbing redefined error) print }
  store end
  glotz pop
  snap restore
  (\n resuming normal operation as if
   the error never happened) print

And here is how to snoop the entire errordict...

  errordict {== ==} forall

One use might be trying to guess where a USB is plugged into a Windows machine. Thus possibly faking relative file addressing.

February 28, 2022
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Many acrobat .PDF files can end up much larger than necessary. Most especially those you Distill yourself from raw PostScript. The workaround is to get into full Acrobat ( now also separately available for cloud lease ), select Tools, then Optimize PDF, then Reduce File Size, then  Reduce Single File.

Be sure to save as a different filename. In one of our current projects, file size got reduced from 42 Megs down to 3.6 Megs. Which, among other advantages, gets you below the 40M or similar email file inclusion limits.

February 27, 2022
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The CIA has changed their World Factbook links.

February 26, 2022
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Did I ever tell you how I cracked Adobe's eexec copy protection? Actually, because of a tiny flaw, most any patient 7th grader could easily have done the same. As in "oops".

The secret was to insert an intentional additional "wrong" character into the eexec data stream. And then challenging your PostScript interpreter to find your mistake. Typically, you should get an error message and a stack printout that newly contains dozens to hundreds of decrypted plaintext characters. Rinse and repeat.

Sort of like a safe that tells you "Try three clicks to the left". I elected to not mention this to Adobe or anyone else at the time so as to not further inflame the thankfully now long lost copy protection wars. It took Adobe several years before they strangely decided to quietly downgrade their use of eexec.

February 25, 2022
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February 24, 2022
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Did you know that Paul McCartney had a group before Wings?

February 23, 2022
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Boo. Hiss. The web perpetual motion enthusiasts seem to be coming out of the woodwork. They are, of course, not even wrong. For openers, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. And, as always, that evidence must come from the claimants themselves rather than from any critics. For you can't prove a negative.

The three laws of thermodynamics are verified zillions of times each and every day. Paraphrased, these are (1) you cannot win, (2) you cannot break even, and (3) everything eventually goes to hell in a hand basket.

Central to at least some of these devices is connecting a 50% efficient low voltage DC device absurdly incorrectly to a 90 percent efficient high voltage AC device. The obvious way to fake free energy here is to gut one of the devices and stuff batteries and an inverter in them.

Finding a free energy device would, of course, be one of the most unimaginably heinous crimes against humanity as it would turn the planet into a cinder and make Hitler look like Mother Teresa.

How to bash pseudoscience is found here, Supraluminal dowsing for Brown's Gas in Roswell here, debunking water powered cars here, trashing auto electrolyzes here, hydrogen stupidity here, and our pseudoscience refuting web page here. And, of course, the saga of the magic lamp is found here.

February 22, 2022
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The MODERN CANALS - Built from scratch versions do seem relatively rare as many were derived from historic or prehistoric intermediates. Especially for any riverine expansions. One differing example is the Roper Lake Canal which was specifically purpose built in the 1950's for the then new state park. These are often concrete lined with controlling headgates. Most are riverine sourced.

Use of  DRIP IRRIGATION - By specifically delivering precisely controlled amounts of water to each and every individual cotton plant, the total water needed can be dramatically reduced. Typically from six acre feet per acre traditionally down to two acre feet per acre drip

February 21, 2022
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The HISTORIC CANALS - Most, if not all of these appear to be "steal the plans" or "borrow the blueprints" adaptations of prehistoric originals. First because all the good canal sites had already been taken, and second because it was much easier to "dig out an old ditch" than to engineer a new properly working canal from scratch. These are generally larger and, because of their different use goals, often ended up shorter than the originals. They typically include Gradeall expanded sections and concrete headgates. Most of these were and remain riverine based.

The CIVIL CONSERVATION CORE -- This 1930's busywork boondoggle created many thousands of local rock structures, purportedly as water spreaders to minimize erosion. Hindsight has revealed their intended purpose to be totally useless. In some cases, their constructs overlaid and severely damaged prehistoric originals. Unlike earlier constructs, CCC work tended to be cardinal, extensively transported, and multiple rocks high. Lichens tended to reveal the recent rock rotations.

February 20, 2022
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The ARTESIAN CANALS -- Less than a dozen or so of the prehistoric canals are artesian sourced rather than using Mount Graham or Riverine water. These tend to be shorter and simpler with fewer and rather minor hanging portions. Their terrain is often much less challenging as well. At present, the bajada hanging canals have been grouped together for study with the artesian versions.

The RIVERINE CANALS - These are believed prehistoric and of Hohokam influence. They are all Gila River sourced by definition. They tend to be of larger size, much more easily constructed, and of vastly simpler engineering than the Bajada Hanging Canals. They represent the basis of most modern Safford area ag.

February 19, 2022
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The GRIDS - World class rectangular rock arrays typically 12 by 20 feet with many thousands (!) found north of the Gila River and dozens to hundreds to the south. Might have been used as Agave booze factories. Apparently rainwater would be collected and retained under the rocks. Plants were likely grown in the rock areas. Does not appear to be associated with any canals. The definitive text can be found here.

The BAJADA HANGING CANALS - These world class "hanging" canals appear to have exploited every reasonably available drop of Mount Graham water. There are now approximately 120 canal study areas with a total combined length well over 150 miles. Many canals were literally "hung" on the edges of remnant bajadas mesas. Sometimes as much as 200 feet above nearby basins. The brilliant apparent purpose was to make the canal routing independent of local terrain. Thus vastly simplifying and easing construction. And allowing construction to take place across rather than along the planned route. While most common to the Northwest, examples can be found on any and all Mount Graham orientations

February 18, 2022
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There are not less than ten distinct water managing technologies of high interest in the Gila Valley. The Bajada Hanging Canals and The Grids represent stunningly world class prehistoric engineering and both still remain woefully understudied and highly endangered.

I thought I might summarize these technologies in the next few blogs...

The MULCH RINGS -- These are possibly the oldest. Single high filled circles of rocks two feet in diameter and often grouped together in lots. Rain makes its way under the rocks and thus lowers its evaporation rate. Others call these "Cairns" which I feel should only apply to the original definition of taller rock piles.

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

February 17, 2022
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Here's some details on how our .pdf pre-Disiller /addpagenav works...

First, four <<, <, >, and >> buttons are defined. There are three different button page patterns.. aaaa page one uses << and >. cccc last page uses << and <. while bbbb for all other pages use <<, <, >,<, and >>.

Links are defined using ANN out of the PDFMark Reference manual. Specifically...

   [ /Rect [ 0 74 2 76 ]
    /Page 1
   /View [ /XYZ null null null ]
   /Border [0 0 0 ]
   /Subtype /Link
   /ANN pdfmark

Last page buttons are only permitted if you already know your total page count! They are controlled by  /lastpagenum and flag /lastpage. If you do not already know your page count, go ahead and Distill anyway, re-enter these new defs and then redistill.

In this example, only a few of our Gonzo Utilities are excerpted. A tutorial here. Code should be triply Distiller, GhostScript, and Google Drive compatible. You may want to change your font.

February 16, 2022
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Our new addpagenav code can be used two ways: Either with or without any last page buttons. You must know the number of pages for last button nav to work.

If you do not know your number of pages, simply Distill, observe the .pdf result and reenter values for lastpagenum and  /numpages known true store and then redistill a second time. Sneaky, huh?

Last page buttons are also not needed from docs of 3 or fewer pages.

February 15, 2022
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As suggested here, there's a number of ways to add navigation buttons to any PDF file. These all have a big disadvantage of having to dink around and modify your final .PDF file. Some may need JavaScript or other special support.

Instead, to me it makes much more sense to put a nav button generator into pre-Disiller PostScript. Thus allowing invisible and hassle free buttons
to automatically get generated during distillation.

Our latest demo appears here and some PostScript code you can extract /addpagenav from here.

February 14, 2022
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Our usual superb source for radio magazines and ebooks is American Radio History. But their Radio Electronics for April 1975 seems to be missing pages 41 and 42. And thus severely impacting this Pseudorandom Sequences story of mine.

Any chance one of you can scan these pages or send me a magazine copy? More of my classic reprints can be found here. And free eBooks here. And newly downloadable and USB compatible videos here.

February 13, 2022
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A third party software emulation of our Psyctone can be found here. And one of my earliest KFC Virus pseudorandom projects is found on page 47.1 here.

February 12, 2022
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Plans are underfoot to explore Lidar mapping of our prehistoric bajada hanging canals. Methods are sorely needed to explore presently unknown extensions and mid routes.

Our only older Lidar image to date appears here and it seems not all that helpful. But the Reay Canal pretty much has to go ssw to nne mid here and here only.

Interestingly, the latest of Lidar includes vaguely Chirp-like features in that several frequency bands can be explored at once. And that vegetation interacts differently to these frequencies.

You can email me if you have any specific Lidar interests or capabilities.

February 11, 2022
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A wild ass guess over the status of our bajada hanging canals exploration would be that one-third of the canal lengths are now well identified but still sorely in need of field notes, indexing, mapping, and further documentation.

A second third remains unknown, but Ockham's Razor makes them believable as they lie between well observed and documented segments. The concept of pinch points further restricts exactly where and how the missing segments might be located. The key, of course, is strictly maintaining an exact slope just under two percent.

And a "third" third remains totally unexplored and utterly unknown. We have pretty much run out of credible unknown water sources to expect very much in the way of major new finds or system extensions.

Best guesses at present are 120 Mount Graham canal study areas that eventually should reduce themselves into 30 to 40 complete canals of a total length likely exceeding 150 miles.

Your participation is more than welcome. And we are sorely in need of individuals and institutions to mentor. Not to mention funding.

February 10, 2022
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Our own video options...

 ARA Bajada Hanging Canals...
  viewable via the web
  .3gp compact
  .MP4 for download

 Intro to PostScript..
  viewable via the web
  .3gp compact
     .MP4 for download

You are welcome to further distribute the .MP4 vids under Creative Commons. While these MP4's are newly short enough for USB storage, actual downloading might take an hour or more that depends on your comm rates and web traffic.

A third party TVT vid here, and three other rather bizarre third party vids can be found here, here, and here. The first of these three may have been the original birthplace of "WTF"!

February 9, 2022
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Enameled dealing with four paws and groundswill.

February 8, 2022
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Absolutely nobody, archaeologist or not, who actually has visited our prehistoric bajada hanging canals has not been convinced that these are totally and unambiguously world class genuine.

We presently have nearly 120 canal study areas and something like 150 miles or more of passage.

Sadly, there have been some skeptics at a distance who apparently refuse to believe that this is a world class prehistoric engineering discovery that significantly and profoundly impacts all of southwestern archaeology.

Part of the reason is that the Gila Valley has forever been wrongly perceived as some sort of a backwater rather than a major prehistoric ag center. A second factor might be ethnocentricity in which the prehistoric peoples have not been given remotely enough credit for the utterly and profoundly spectacular engineering and energy awareness they clearly and unquestionably have exhibited.

The key point is this: Unlike any other construct, a canal simply MUST rigorously follow a constant precise slope in the two percent range range over long distances. With zero exceptions.

No other construct such as a trail or a cow path or a wash, a game path, or a bike route or a 4WD track or a wagon road, or random typography, or whatever EVER comes even remotely close.

February 7, 2022
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The usual way of doing video editing is with Adobe Premier. Which is super powerful but has a rather steep learning curve. You can now rent this program via several Creative Cloud options.

February 6, 2022
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Our earlier PostScript video had an "if anything can go wrong it will" history. For openers, this was in a Betacam format and pre Video Toaster era. We could not afford more than a video production house that specialized in people falling off horses. A "B camera" was an unavailable luxury.

Somehow, they failed to send out the computer club invitations, so most of the shoot only had an audience of three! We ended up hijacking an entire community college English class afterwards to utterly cluelessly fill in the blanks.

Later on and much worse, the master tape was lost and we had to work with poor third generation VHS copies.

The next rude surprise was finding out that YouTube normally did not allow media downloads. And then much later on learning you could not easily store files longer than 4 Gigs on any USB FAT format..

February 5, 2022
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Newly upgraded our aravideo2.mp4 and psvideo2.mp4 videos. These are now fully downloadable under creative commons terms within reasonable fully credited bounds. We strongly encourage you to distribute them to the widest possible audience.

File sizes have also now been modified to stay under the strict 4 Gig limit of most FAT USB files.

Note that downloading a vid is vastly different than watching one. Typically, the process may take up to an hour or more depending on your comm rates and traffic. Normally, your vid first goes to a download subdirectory. It can be run from there or appropriately moved.

February 4, 2022
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Besides Amazon and Pacific Rim shipping subsidies, one of the reasons for the dramatic decline of eBay sales is the skyrocketing costs of shipping and increasingly enforced taxations. A $9 sale can easily rack up $30 in delivery costs..

One ploy that "sort of" helps is to sell in lots, rather than by item. This also encourages buyer upgrading by "mixing and matching". More eBay and auction secrets can be found here.

February 3, 2022
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A photographer was the only other person on the set when a world famous actor ended up hanging by one hand from a fast failing vine above a thousand foot deep canyon. He had only scant seconds to make a gut wrenching decision.

Sixty or ninety millimeter lens?

February 2, 2022
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    Fibonacci's Golden Sunflower

February 1, 2022
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Shocking.

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

January 31, 2022
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Restored some "lost"" spiral art here, here, here, and here.

Meanwhile, our approaches to "Spirograph style emulations" can be found here and here.

January 30, 2022
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 A Sierpinski triangle demo and sourcecode.

January 29, 2022
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A reminder that we have USB's available on nearly everything here. And that you are welcome and encouraged to further distribute them.

January 28, 2022
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Links to our files and videos are nearly all open source. You are welcome to further distribute them within reasonable fully credited bounds.

Our YouTube vids include one on PostScript you'll find here and one on our ARA bajada hanging canals can be found here. While you are not supposed to download YouTube vids to access source code, there are some web solutions in various shades of a more than murky gray.

We also have an extremely compact version of the ARA bajada vid on Google Drive you'll find here. This is easily placed on USB as it is only a 61 meg file! But, sadly is somewhat fuzzy.

Details on the .3GP format can be found here. Apparently the reason for the extreme compaction in this particular ARA file is that most of the background does not change much from field to field most of the time.

January 27, 2022
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It sure wold be nice to make all of the Guru's Lair and all of our Bajada Hanging canals Fully USB compatible and independent of any particular ISP. While we now offer some USB's on eBay, there's some details that need attended to.

Firstoff, it would be nice if everything could use relative addressing. This appears to be a problem for Distiller's PostScript and further gets restricted by Google Drives present inability to read and write PostScript disk files.

Secondly, much more of our website needs made phone friendly. While this program and this one and this one makes testing easier, much remains to be done and it is not clear where the time and funding will come from.

Thirdly, older USB's have a maximum file size limit of only 4 Gigs. Which can be much less than a video. Vids also have a nasty habit of racking up total storage needs. And many services may limit you downloading sourcecode.

Fourthly, a lot of development work leaves many earlier versions and it is not clear which are trash and can be removed.

January 26, 2022
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Here's a summary of our bajada hanging canal stuff...

    preprint-bcsb1.pdf
    imenu1.pdf
    menu1a.shtml
    our ARA Video
    hang01.shtml
    https://www.tinaja.com/

    2022 Blog Updates
    Click here for earlier Blogs.

    Archaeology Southwest I
    Archaeology Southwest II
    AZ Archaeological Society
    AZ Central Story
    AZ Republic Story
    Gila Watershed Paper I
    Gila Watershed Paper II
    Glyphs Paper
    Lafayette Magazine Story
    Lair Mt. Graham Survey
    Safford Valley Grids
    USA Today Canal Story
    Wikipedia Story

January 25, 2022
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As these examples show you, truly rectangular images can be useful, especially for electronic test equipment.

Start off by carefully aligning the camera in medium shade. The "film plane" should be precisely centered on and parallel to the x-y midpoints on your subject front panel. Spend extra time getting this detail correct!

If you need lots of rectangular images, consider making a copy stand that fixes the relative camera and subject position alignments.

Normally, you should be able to get by with a vertical only architect's perspective correction. If not, rotate your image 90 degrees, do an old horizontal perspective correction, and then rotate back for a final vertical correction. .

Should a needed correction be narrower at top and wider at bottom, use a negative value for howmuchtilt. Best values are often 0.05 to 0.07.

Some rotation may be handy to "trapezoidal balance" the image before corrections. But this is also a "no correction" htiltaxis adjustment internal setting in the Architect's Perspective. Rotation by full degrees is normally enough; this feature is available in Imageviewer 32.

Its usually a good idea to use the software to only get fairly close to a true rectangle. Final perfection can be achieved by isolating a good edge area and chasing it all the way around. This also eliminates any edge teeth.

January 24, 2022
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     Catastrophically Stupid.

January 23, 2022
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It is interesting to note that the Gila Valley has many different agricultural structures. Apparently hosted at vastly different times by vastly different peoples...

 Mulch Rings
 The Grids
 Bajada Hanging Canals
 Artesian Derived Canals
 Prehistoric Riverine Canals
 Historic "Steal the Plans" Canals
 Unique Modern Canals
 Drip Irrigation Systems

January 22, 2022
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We are closing out our Tektronix TM series plug ins, both on eBay and "local pickup only" for lot offers that can greatly reduce your unit pricing, your shipping costs and eliminate fancy packing needs. The entire lot ( that includes several mainframes of various sizes ) easily fits a SUV.

These are mostly fairly clean in that they have been in internal storage since our getting them as little used community college surplus.

Rather than doing our own test and refurb, we offer them all as "believed restorable" or "parts only". Many of our perfect record eBay offers are multiple lots that should simplify your getting these fully functional. All are at least 92 percent complete.

Debug of these superbly engineered Tek products usually involve two obvious and leaky large electrolytic capacitors that sometimes may take out a socketed 741 power supply opamp. Amazingly, 741's are available at Wal-Mart! Full service info should be available from many web sources.

You can email me with your interests. Inspection welcome.

January 21, 2022
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I've always considered PowerPoint to be mesmerizingly awful. Our Gonzo Power Point Emulator can be found here with its sourcecode here. And a summary here. Several examples...

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

For sourcecode on many of the above files, please substitute .psl for .pdf

January 20, 2022
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There are a number of ways to add Acrobat .PDF navigation buttons to a document. Such as here or here. But these are all post .pdf generation and can end up somewhat of a hassle.

Instead, pre-Disiller navigation buttons can be entered directly into PostScript and generated invisibly and automatically. You can extract the needed page navigation utilities code from here. And then simply placing addpagenav to the bottom of each page of your document's code.

January 19, 2022
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Our Magic Sinewave calculator here. And the rest of the story here.

January 18, 2022
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     USA Today Canal Story
     Wikipedia Story

...and some other older third party pubs.

     Archaeology Southwest I
     Archaeology Southwest II
     AZ Archaeological Society
     AZ Central Story
     AZ Republic Story
     Gila Watershed Paper I
     Gila Watershed Paper II
     Glyphs Paper
     Lafayette Magazine Story
     Lair Mt. Graham Survey
     Safford Valley Grids
     USA Today Canal Story

January 17, 2022
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  Golly Gee Mister Science With more details here

January 16, 2022
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Our Gray Code tutorial appears here and a video here. And an earlier Chain Code here.

Gray Codes will only change one bit at a time, greatly reducing noise and positioning errors. Chain Codes let you find the exact position in a 2^n code with only a n byte sample The above link includes ready-to-use codes from n=2 to n=16.

January 15, 2022
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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.

January 14, 2022
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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 be somehow able to compete in the dark distant future.

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

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

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

Which left me with bucket brigade digital 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.

They were not in any manner random access, as you had to wait for the bit you were after had to take its turn coming out the end of the pipe.

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

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

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

"They" just did not get it.

January 13, 2022
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    The math behind cubic splines.

January 12, 2022
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Here's some guidelines on how to get to the four portions of prehistoric bajada canals we feel are most appropriate for Lidar drone survey work.

We have had to back waay off on  field work because of retirement related health issues. Your participation is welcome. We definitely need folks to mentor.

January 11, 2022
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We try to test our website daily for 404 errors and for phone responsive design when and when appropriate.

We use https://validator.w3.org/ and https://pro-sitemaps.com/ and Dream weaver's spell checking shift F7 via Adobe Cloud to use for shopping for 404's and responsive design checker for phone appropriate files.

But many of our historic paper original files remain best viewed in larger formats. We also purposely aim for a "retro" look for the entire website.

Please report anything that can be improved upon.

January 10, 2022
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My personal theory on why mixing up average power and rms power becoming not even wrong Beginning EE Student Blunder 001-A will go something like this...

With virtually all low end power measurement instruments using average power measurements instead of correct rms power.

The average power measurement instruments simply painted a red fixed 11 percent scale on their devices. Making it easier for users to wrongly believe that this was some sort of immutable physical constant. Rather that being only true on pure sinewaves. With any other waveform having errors higher to very much higher.

Ferinstance, a late cycle half wave dimmer format has around a 300 percent error!

January 9, 2022
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The saga of the magic lamp is my favorite pseudoscience yarn. Find it here, an extracted original here, and technical power papers here and here.

Fable key is confusing errors of measurement between average and true rms power. Only the latter is legit. And differences of which can become utterly outrageous on very low duty cycle waveforms.

More pseudoscience bashing here.

January 8, 2022
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Speaking of which, we only recently added a few includes to our blog selector. Years 2015 through 2022 should now provide yearly updated includes.

Earlier clickthroughs still have our pre phone responsive design and are sorely in need of updating. But are pretty much near the bottom of the pile. Funding welcome.

January 7, 2022
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Most computer languages provide for subroutines one way or another. These simplify and compact code. More importantly subroutines let you make one change that can appear in many places at once.

Should the language have a run or include or similar feature, this allows one code module to simultaneously update many different programs at once. Such as this .shtml example which needs yearly updated over many hundreds of files...

The activating code looks like this...

<!--# include virtual="/includes/yourcode.shtml"-->

Uh, we had to include some skulduggery in the above include listing so it would print rather than activate. When you actually use it, remove the space between the # and the includes.

January 6, 2022
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Our JPEG Mottling Colors give another method to manually knock out background colors. These have an interesting advantage in that they can significantly eliminate .JPG background ghosting artifacts.

All done at only a slight increase in file size and response time. Simply cut and paste.

January 5, 2022
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Our Vignetting Auto Backgrounder starts by backing off the reds just barely enough that there are no intentional red=255's left anywhere. Then new red=255's are carefully added to outline the borders of the images you want to keep.

It is important that the entire outline is continuous!

The code starts west and heads east to just past the last continuous red=255, replacing every pixel with a chosen randomly mottled background. Scanning starts from the top and works its way down.

It then starts east and replaces west. Then north and heads south. And finally south and heads north. Typical results appear here.

Should a vignetting flag be set, the replacement pixels darken towards the edges. This actually uses a genuinely real field theory as detailed here and here.

The mottling also performs a secondary role by minimizing .JPG ghosting artifacts.

Should you have any undercuts or embarrassing bolt holes, these can be optionally scanned and replaced to prevent punch through. Because of execution slowness, this is kept as an option

January 4, 2022
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Heavy image lifting can be done by combining under appreciated Microsoft Paint and free ImageViewer32. Obvious tasks are making vertical and horizontal edges truly vertical and horizontal. And "chasing edges" for much better uniformity by towing things along. Or improving background fills.

Or carefully outlining edges to be knocked out with complete and exact red=255 markers or comparable yellows or others that include a red=255 component.

Be sure to check out ImageViewer32's pulldown image directory. Other useful tasks include cropping to final size and resolution, converting to final .JPG or other compressed format, and possibly a very slight sharpening.

ImageViewer32 offers rotations within one degree, while Microsoft Paint includes a little known quadratic spline ( second pen choice to the right ) that is most useful for corner rounding and cubic spline approximations.

Paint's somewhat limited topography is "good enough" for many text relettering tasks, while such tasks as relettering an entire oscilloscope can be handled by our Bitmap Typewriter.

January 3, 2022
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Going to "web friendly" colors can often simplify. With these, you end up with 215 colors consisting of 5 reds, 5 greens, 5 blues, and, coincidentally, 5 "free" grays.

The code appears here and a demo here, with codings suitable both for PostScript and CSS. For instance, 192 setwebtint is a nice PostScript URL blue equal to a CSS 0CF.

January 2, 2022
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Finished the 2021 blog and started the 2022 one.

January 1, 2021
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Architect's Perspective using our.PSL correction routine is often a useful choice for eBay Display. This is a 2-1/2 dimensional format in which all vertical and horizontal edges are made truly so. Per these many examples.

An inputfilename is predefined, as is a tiltoutfilename destination. A filenameprefix is properly set as a PostScript source. howmuchtilt determines the amount of correction, with 0.075 often being a typical value.

Yeah, there is a steep learning curve to getting acceptable PostScript filenames. But with some reasonable practice this can end up simple and routine.

As usual, an //acrodist /F is needed to activate Distiller's allowing file manipulations. The code should also work in Ghostscript, but no Google Drive solution is presently known.

Normally, you will want to shorten the upper image lines and lengthen the lower ones. If needed, a negative -0.075 correction can do the opposite. While east-west corrections are often avoidable with your initial camera work, these can be dealt with by rotating 90 degrees, correcting, and rotating back.

The "neutral" uncorrected location, while normally in the middle, can be adjusted with vtiltaxis and htiltaxis. See the internal program notes.

December 31, 2021
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Actually taking the picture is an utterly negligible portion of the image postproc process. Always allow two hours or so for the really important stuff in creating world class photos. Always preclean the subject and the camera lens as much as possible.

Start with a tripod mounted, second battery backed up Nikon class camera of fifteen Megapixels or more and always work in .BMP format for each and every step before your final image compression.

Shoot outdoors flash free in medium to heavy shade. Initially crop somewhat oversize. Rotate oversize with Imageview32 to initially "balance" any right or left leaning.

December 30, 2021
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I've long labored under the delusion that we have by far the finest eBay images any place anytime .Made possible by these software routines...

  Microsoft Paint
  ImageViewer32
  Web Friendly Color Code
  Web Friendly Color Printout
  Bitmap Typewriter
  Architect's Perspective Correction
  Vignetting Auto Backgrounder
  Knockout JPEG Mottling Colors

Yeah, they are oddball, often waaay out of mainstream, and have extremely steep learning curves. And initially getting filenames to work can be extremely frustrating. All of these are open source.

But once you are on board, they are fast and easy to use and give very impressively superb results. I thought we might spend the next few blog entries reviewing just what these routines do and how to use them.

An older tutorial can be found here.

December 29, 2021
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The Stack Overflow site can be most useful for programming help in most any language. But some of the denizens may end up a tad arrogant or tedious.

December 28, 2021
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PostScript files can be extremely tricky to use, but once controlled, they can leap tall buildings in a single bound. They are extremely useful to retouch bitmaps, do perspective correction, perform auto backgrounding and vignetting, , photo relettering, convert .JPG images into PDF, or generate code for any other computer language. 

File instructions have to be specifically activated by sending //acrodist /F to Distiller. Demanded by Adobe to reduce abuse potential. Since reverse slashes are a reserved escape character in PostScript, you will have to use TWO reverse slashes in a PostScript string every time you want a single reverse slash in a Windows filename! Alternately, you can apparently use one forward filename slash which Windows seems to accept.

As near as I can tell, windows relative filenames and web URL's are presently prohibited. Full absolute filenames are required and usually are restricted to Distiller or GhostScript.

I presently know of no way to use PS files with Google Drive. But here are a bunch of unique PS routines that are triply Distiller - GhostScript - Google Drive compatible.

December 27, 2021
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Thermodynamics of hell...

  If exothermic, all hell eventually breaks loose.
  If endothermic, all hell eventually freezes over.

December 26, 2021
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Time for our usual new year's predictions...

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

 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.

    PV pricing finally allowing subsidy free
   renewable and sustainable genuine net
   energy production As per this and this
    weekly reporting.

   "Chirp" like broadband Lidar offering
   several frequency bands to which plants
   and terrain respond differently

   A new and "for real" treatment for wood
   that makes it stronger, cheaper, and more
   energy efficient than aluminum..

 Advancing conversion of coal fired power
 plants into singles bars.

 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.

 Snottities adding a new perspective to
 evaluating extraterrestrial life.

 New alternates to archaeological publication
 that are much closer to open source.

 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.

 Paints "so white" that they actually can do
 modest cooling via night sky radiation.

 Canine AI artificial intelligence.

 Concrete smart enough to repair itself.

      Uh, that's all folks. To continue, please...

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