If You Can’t Buy it, Mod it

God keeps giving Rhodah and me lots of revelation, and it gets hard to keep up with and document, so I write about beer instead.

I now have two beers fermenting, and I plan to brew another tomorrow or the day after. I am tired of fooling around. I have to put myself in a position where production is much faster than consumption and loss, or else I will always have idle faucets and frustration.

It appears the stout I brewed over a week ago still hasn’t given up. An occasional bubble still pops out of the airlock. Unbelievable. I checked the specific gravity last night, and it looks like it’s around 1.015, only .002 down from a couple of days back. I was thinking it would end up around 1.012. Am I asking too much?

On the one hand, it’s taking forever, but on the other, it’s still active, so I must be doing the right thing, waiting for it to die. It’s no good kegging a beer while there is still sugar in it.

My other beer may be a Belgian IPA. I learned this the other day. Before that, I didn’t know what it was.

I brew whatever I want, whether it fits a known style or not. Most guys choose a particular factory beer or style they want to brew, and they create or borrow a recipe within established guidelines. I think, “I’ll bet it would taste good if I did THIS,” and then I put together ingredients that sound like they would work. It annoys some people. I don’t know why. What business is it of theirs what I put in my beer? I can’t imagine getting upset at other people for creating recipes.

The grain bill I used is a lot like an IPA, only I added a little table sugar for some reason. Sugar increases alcohol without changing flavor much. I used Crystal hops for the finish. For IPA, you pretty much have to use something like Cascade or Centennial or people wonder what’s wrong with you. These are citrusy hops. To me, Crystal tastes very spicy. Somewhere in the realm of cinnamon and allspice.

For IPA, you’re supposed to use an IPA yeast like Wyeast 1056, and you ferment at 68 degrees. I use Belgian ale yeast. The stuff they use in tripels. I ferment at room temperature. Right now, the bucket is in my kitchen, burping away at 75 degrees, threatening to generate all sorts of aromatic chemicals and hangover-inducing heavy alcohols.

The other day, someone on a forum mentioned Belgian IPA, and I realized it sounded a lot like what I was making.

I pitched my yeast last night, and now the beer is burping like crazy. It may be done in 4 days. That’s how long the last batch took.

I don’t want an IPA. I feel like I’m drowning in IPA every time I go to the store. But BELGIAN IPA…that may be different. Because it’s not IPA.

Maybe it’s BPA.

My next beer will be either an amber lager or a very heavy Belgiany beer with some similarities to the one I just described. If Belgiany, it will be different from the quasi-IPA because of the weight and high alcohol content, not to mention several pounds of wheat. Also, I decided to use Sabro hops. This is a new hop which is said to generate creamy, coconutty flavors. Perfect for a sweet, heavy, aromatic ale. I hope. I don’t know.

My sense of smell goes in and out. A few minutes ago, I was able to smell Vick’s Vaporub. Maybe I can enjoy a beer tonight.

I am working on some cowboy mods to my Speidel Braumeister brewing machine. It’s great, but the user interface is garbage. The maker wants $400 for a wifi module so I can join their website, store my recipes there, and download them into the machine. That’s insane. I want a program on my PC or phone. I want to use wifi or Bluetooth like a sane person, for a few dollars. I do not want to join a manufacturer’s cult.

I have to be honest. The Germans are still a little scary. They seem to think customers should fall in line with the herd and do as they’re told. I’m an American. I eat things that travel in herds.

I guess Europeans think we’re nuts. They’re all standing at the government trough, eating that sheep feed and thinking how wonderful it is to be taken care of, have the government do their thinking, and to be just like everyone else, and many of us see it and want to throw up. It looks like a living death. My country isn’t my family. I don’t belong to it. I want to NOT fit in. I don’t want to melt into it. I just live here because God won’t let me move to heaven.

I spent a lot of the day looking at the Braumeister and the Internet.

I learned that the Braumeister only has three electrical connections other than AC in. It has a temperature probe, a heater, and a small pump. Simple. All I need is a bit of hardware that can run these things and connect to a PC. It has to have storage, like an SD card. A small SD card would give my machine millions of times as much storage as the manufacturer did.

I need a microcomputer that will operate two relays that turn the pump and heater on and off. I need it to listen to the temperature probe, because the temperature will guide the use of the heater. I need it to have a timer. I need it to be able to run programs I wrote. I need to be able to run the pump and heater manually.

I looked all over the place. I found what looks like a solution: Craftbeerpi. This is a program that hooks a Raspberry Pi up to a brewing system. You should be able to connect it to any system that has a pump and heater.

My heater, pump, and probe are modular. Among them, they use two types of connections. German and hard to source, of course. Stupid. Anyway, I can disconnect the Braumeister’s controller and rig up new cables coming from a new controller built by me. The Raspberry Pi will talk to a couple of big relays. The relays will turn the pump and heater on and off. The temperature probe will talk to the Raspberry Pi.

Craftbeerpi will let me use a program to store a limitless number of brewing schedules somewhere. On an SD card on the board, I guess. No more, “Drei zchedules iss all you get. If you have nussing to hide, ziss iss all you need.”

The only question is whether it will work. I guess it will.

I have some inquiries out.

I am convinced Germanness is the problem with Speidel, the outfit that made the Braumeister. I think these guys believe they know better than their customers. That’s almost never true. There are companies that have thousands of engineers but billions of customers. No matter which company you’re talking about, somewhere out there, there are a bunch of customers that make its engineers look like monkeys.

If an American company had made it, it would have Bluetooth built in. It would have a PC app and a phone app. The connectors would be mainstream. It would have gigs of storage, not bytes. If it needed wifi, it would include it, or it would use a $9 adaptor. If it needed a firmware update, you would use a $4 USB cable to connect it to your computer.

I think Germans may be overconfident when it comes to building things. There is a myth that says they do it better than anyone, but it’s a lie. Their cars are unreliable and impossible to work on. Their tools are overpriced and not the best. Their beer is very polished, but it tends to be boring and low on flavor and imagination. And anyone can make beer with finesse. It’s not like they figured out nuclear fusion.

They seem to make things in an overthought way, and that creates the illusion of superiority while making things worse for everyone concerned.

Doing things differently without a good reason is incompetence in the tech world. It causes a lot of unnecessary expense and suffering. Ask anyone who ever needed an Apple cable in the middle of the night.

I will digress.

The other day, I asked some Internet beer people if they were their own favorite brewers. Did they like their own beer better than anyone else’s? One guy responded, “I live in Germany.” That was a stupid remark. He was saying German factory beer had to be better than anything he could make, because all German factory beer is perfect. Not true. And what he said would have been closer to true in the US than Germany. We make the best factory beer on Earth now. We have almost 5,000 breweries, competing hard to innovate and make the best beer possible. Germany has about 1500, and they crank out the same things they cranked out in 1800. Germany is a beer backwater. We’re the leaders now.

There are several companies that make small brewing machines for hobbyists, and as far as I know, they all have problems. Some have build issues. Speidel’s products work very well, and the construction is good, but they have serious user interface deficiencies. It’s like marrying a beautiful woman in a titanium chastity belt.

If Toyota had made this brewing machine, I would never have had a problem with it. Everything would have been worked out before I bought it. They would never have let it out the door with a user interface like this.

I hope to hear back about the Raspberry Pi solution tomorrow. If it looks good, I’ll go for it. Can’t be very hard. Two relays, a Raspberry Pi, a screen, a mouse, a keyboard, and some cables and connectors. If it works, I’ll kiss Speidel’s support team good bye, and maybe next time I’ll build my own machine. A lot of people do.

Pv=nRT

Today I went through what remains of my beer gas equipment from the Coral Gables days. It’s not all that pretty.

When I quit brewing, I kept the expensive stuff. I held onto it until I left the area. When I moved, I had to throw a lot of things out. I kept my gas tanks and regulators. Things like that can be useful even for people who don’t brew.

When I started rooting through this stuff, I didn’t remember exactly what I had done in Miami. I knew I had had a 4-keg keezer with 4 taps on lid-mounted towers. I knew I had a CO2 tank with a regulator and fittings for 4 kegs. I also knew I had a beer gas tank with a regulator, set up for one keg. I didn’t remember anything beyond that.

Beer gas is a combination of nitrogen and CO2. It’s commonly used to dispense stout. If you’ve ever seen a nice stout with pretty bubbles moving up the inside of the glass, you’ve had nitrogen beer.

Today, I found I had 4 tanks and three regulators. It appears I bought two CO2 tanks and two beer gas tanks. One regulator was for beer gas only and had a single out line attached. Both of the others had manifolds and multiple lines.

I guess I must have put kegs in my garage freezer at some point, because there is no other reason to have a second CO2 regulator and manifold.

When I got tired of brewing back in Coral Gables, I neglected my keezer, and one day it stopped working. It had always been quiet, so I had no reason to think anything was wrong. Eventually, I opened it and found a sea of stale beer inside. It had died on me, and the heat had caused pressure to develop and blow beer out of one or more kegs. One of my regulators was soaked.

I went over the regulators today. The one that was soaked seems to be functional except that at least one gauge may not be working. That can be replaced. I have to test it to be sure what’s going on. Another one had two bad gauges, so I yanked them off and ordered new ones.

As things stand now, I can definitely run 4 CO2 kegs, and I will be able to run an additional stout keg when my gauges arrive.

The great thing I’ve discovered is that I’ll be able to put 4 tall kegs and one short one in the keezer, so I’m getting a 5th faucet. When I thought I would only have 4 kegs, I ordered 3 very nice beer faucets plus a stout faucet, and today, one of the beer faucets arrived with a broken part. I told the seller, and he’s sending another one. Thing is, I can probably replace the part. So he’ll get paid by the Postal Service, as he should, and I ought to be able to put a $90 faucet together for the price of one part.

It’s too bad I threw out my old faucets. They were really good. The company that made them has apparently been sued to death, so they aren’t available now.

I can’t get small beer gas tanks filled or swapped here. I can get CO2, but if I want beer gas, I have to buy a big tank or drive to Orlando to fill my little ones. If I get a big tank, I can either put it in the keezer and forget the small ones, or I can use it to fill the small ones. I’m thinking of putting it in the keezer and keeping a small one as a spare in case I get a leak or something. At all depends on whether the big one will fit in there with kegs. If it will, it would be stupid to drive to Orlando over and over.

To sum up, things have worked out well. I have all the CO2 storage I need. If I have to invest in regulators, I will only have to buy one. I can get beer gas locally. I’ll be able to have 5 kegs instead of 4.

I have to go buy wood for the keezer. Then I’ll slap it together, and a week from today, I should have a truly exceptional beer center. By then, I should have gas and one keg installed, and the temperature control should have arrived. I may even weld up a mobile base for the keezer so I can move it and clean under it. Lifting it on casters will also give it more air, so I should be able to put it closer to the wall.

I’ll be brewing again by the weekend, so wheat beer should be in my glass in less than 10 days.

I’ll post a photo when that happens.

Getting Ready for Next Year’s Christmas Party

Twelve days ago, I had nothing but a twinkle in my eye and a computer mouse in my hand, and now I have an AIO (All-in-One brewing machine), a fermenting freezer, a future keezer (freezer modified to hold kegs and dispense beer), and two fermenters, not to mention an ale in the keg.

Making this ale has been a fascinating experience. Tumultuous. Touch-and-go. I made several bad mistakes, and every time, I had to come up with a solution, like a paratrooper trying to splice cords on the way to the ground.

I put way too little water in the brew machine at first, so I had to bulk the wort up with extract. Because the machine was too dry, it burned the insulating jacket that helps it heat. I had problems using my new refractometer, so I kept opening and closing the fermenter, and that made me think I had let too much CO2 out, so I tried to solve the problem with a pellet gun cartridge.

A lot of pellet guns use tiny CO2 tanks the size of your finger, and they are called cartridges. They are also used in things like seltzer bottles.

Among homebrewers, there is a lot of mythology. Things that are known facts often prove to be fantasies propagated by the ignorant. There have long been questions about gas.

Homebrewers use tanks of CO2 and nitrogen to pressurize beer systems and carbonate beer. For years, people have argued about whether industrial gas from welding shops is the same as gas from beverage-gas shops.

In case you’re wondering, yes, it’s the same. Airgas, one of the leading gas suppliers for welders, confirms it.

I thought the fuss about welding gas was stupid, so I assumed the same was true about the cartridge controversy. Some people said cartridges for guns contained oil that would contaminate beer and possible poison people.

Yesterday, I decided to try using a cartridge to shoot beer into my fermenting bucket. I had a bunch of Crosman cartridges for pellet guns, and I had a little keg-charging device that used cartridges. I wanted to see if it would work. I shot gas into the fermenter, and then I shot some into a two-liter bottle of Coke that had gone flat.

Later, the Coke tasted gross. The gas stank.

I was not pleased. The Coke was worthless, but the beer cost money to make, and it also required a lot of work and time. I opened the fermenter, and sure enough, it smelled off. I thought I would have to throw the beer out.

I decided to use a CO2 tank to blow new CO2 in and displace the cartridge gas. I also shot a whole cartride into my utility sink with the charger held against the side. I did this to see if oil came out. To my relief, there was no residue on the sink after the cartridge emptied. That means the gas can’t poison me. A little gas floating above beer could conceivably flavor it, but unless oil got into the beer, it wouldn’t harm me.

I tasted a little bit of the beer, and I couldn’t taste anything unusual.

Today I kegged the beer, and it seems okay. I shot CO2 into the keg, and now it’s chilling to 38°. By tomorrow night, it should be carbonated, and then I can have a beer and see if it’s worth keeping.

Ordinarily, I would use tall, skinny Cornelius soda kegs to hold my beer, but when I got ready to brew this time, I decided to start out with a Megamouth Torpedo keg. This is a keg made for homebrewers. It’s short and wide. I bought it because I hoped it would be short enough to fit in my spare fridge.

I must have been confused about the measurements, because it’s not even close to short enough. I am keeping it, however, because it has another benefit. It will allow me to get more beer into my keezer (beer freezer), and it will probably let me keep one keg a little warmer than the others.

Chest freezers have steps or platforms inside them because compressors have to go somewhere. These steps, commonly called “humps,” reduce the floor space. That means tall kegs can only fit in the areas beside the humps.

A shorter keg can sit on the hump next to a CO2 or nitrogen tank. In my case, this should make it possible for me to have 4 Cornelius kegs plus a short keg. Humps generally give off a little heat in spite of being insulated, so a keg sitting on a hump may be slightly warmer than the other kegs in the keezer.

Different beers like different temperatures. I like lagers coldest. After that, most ales. After that, stouts. I should be able to have 5 gallons of stout at a warmer temperature than the beers around it. Even if it’s the same temperature, I’ll have a total of 5 beer varieties, not 4.

If I can pull this off, I’ll be the king of small keezers.

I have 4 used Corny kegs on the way, along with 4 beer faucets and 1 stout faucet. If the kegs will work with the Torpedo, nitrogen, and CO2 in the keezer, I’ll need to buy faucet number 5 and incorporate it in the design of the keezer.

Generally, a keezer will have a wooden collar between the body and lid. The collar is a frame made from things like 2×6’s on their sides. It sits on top of the keezer, and instead of having the lid rest on the keezer, it rests on the collar. This gives you additional internal height and lets you install your faucets, which people like to call “taps,” through the wood. If you do things this way, you don’t have to install taps on top of the lid or drill holes through the side of the chest.

I’ll need one hole per tap. I’ll also need a drip tray I can fasten to the front of the keezer. I can’t undrill holes, and I probably can’t make a drip tray longer or shorter, so I have to wait for the Corny’s to decide how to make the collar and which tray to buy.

Once all this is decided, I have to decide how to attach the collar to the top of the keezer.

I know a lot of people use Liquid Nails. I’m wondering if silicone is better, mainly because silicone will come off when you want it to.

I used to have a regular appliance repair guy, and I always pick tradesmen’s brains when they do work for me, so I peppered him with questions. I asked who made reliable refrigerators. He worked on everything from Haiers to Sub-Zeros. He said they were ALL junk, so I should buy whatever was cheapest. And there wasn’t a whole lot he could do when they went bad. They were all Chinese, and once the systems started leaking, they had to be replaced.

Back when the world was sane, freezers were made in Caucasian countries by skilled workers, and they were expensive. They ran forever, and when they broke down, they could be fixed. My grand mother got her deep freezes in the Sixties as far as I know, and they were running when she died in 2003. I suppose commercial freezers are still like that. Things are different now. If you get 10 years out of a refrigerator or freezer, you’ve hit a home run.

If what the repairman said was true, then it seems like a bad idea to fasten a collar to a freezer permanently. If I use something I can undo, and the keezer dies, I can take the collar off and put it right on the same model. 

I had an idea about using Velcro. I could rout shallow pockets in the underside of the collar, just high enough to keep the Velcro from lifting the collar off the keezer. Then I could run silicone around the joints. The Velcro would be invisible, and if the keezer expired, I would be able to get the collar off.

But maybe it’s a stupid idea.

I don’t like the idea of using silicone all by itself because it’s not much of an adhesive.

UPDATE: I consulted some people who had already built keezers, and their ideas are much better than mine. Really excellent. I think I’ll listen to them and adapt their concepts.

I would guess that by Wednesday night, I should know what to do. I should be able to have my second beer fermenting before then, too.

Again, I wonder why I felt moved to do all this. I truly think God is in it.

I wonder if it’s connected to the rapture, or at least to celebrating it. The rapture will be the second real Christmas. Jesus will be coming to Earth for us one more time. Recently, I got that revelation from God, and it made me feel like celebrating. Maybe when the rapture comes, it won’t be instantaneous, and we will have a little time to get together and vent our joy. A beer or two would certainly be in order.

Beer With Me

My brewing system arrived yesterday, so today I’m brewing beer again!

No, I’m not. Of course I’m not. It’s never that simple.

Some poor guy had to give up brewing, so he sold me his 20-liter Speidel Braumeister for a small fraction of the original cost. It arrived yesterday. Since then, I’ve been working on getting it going.

The Braumeister line is German, so all of it runs on 220V. Guess what kind of power I have in my kitchen? Yes, 120V, not including hardwired 220V appliances. I really wanted to brew in my strangely enormous and comfortable kitchen, so I had to find a way to get 220V juice into it.

Yesterday, I bought a 14-gauge 50-foot extension cord, a NEMA 6-15R connector, and a NEMA 14-30/50P plug. I cut the ends off the cord and attached the connectors. I configured the plug for my 30-amp dryer socket.

Various online sources insist I need 12-gauge wire. Yada yada yada blah blah blah. Not listening. This is not my first rodeo. Those sources always seem to be written by lawyers and insurance companies, not engineers. I’m not paying $100 for one extension cord.

Today, I sat the machine on my counter, plugged it in, and added about 5.5 gallons of water. Right now, it’s running. It thinks it’s making beer. I wanted to make sure the electronics worked, and I wanted to see if the cord would burst into flames, so I’m running it with plain water.

The electronics are remarkable. It has wifi. I have not looked into the reasons for this. It stores beer recipes, too. You turn it on, choose your recipe, add your water and malt, and tell it to start.

Because it’s German, it has some annoying features. It keeps asking me to confirm things I’ve already chosen.

Braumeister: “YOU WILL TELL ME WHETHER YOU WISH THE MASH TO START NOW PLEASE.”

Me: “Yes.”

Braumeister: “YOU WILL TELL ME THE MASH TO START NOW PLEASE.”

Me: “I just did.”

Braumeister: “DO YOU WANT TO INVADE POLAND?”

Me: “No.”

Braumeister: “ARE YOU SURE? POLAND VERY NICE IS THIS TIME OF YEAR.”

The manual says you have to contact the German government and let them know every time you brew beer. I am not kidding. It even has a form you can use. Obviously, this does not apply to Americans. I’m pretty sure.

There is something different about the Germans. That’s all there is to it.

I do not understand why they would pass this law. It makes no sense. They have laws that prevent Germans from making bad beer for money, and I guess that is understandable given their mistaken belief that they make the best beer on Earth, but why they need to know about some guy brewing a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone in his living room is beyond me.

I can brew whatever I want without telling anyone, and from time to time, I open my bedroom sliding door and shoot squirrels with unregistered semi-automatic weapons while still inside the house. Go, America!

While the Braumeister is somewhat controlling, it is also very well made, and it does lots of stuff automatically. It’s sort of like a BMW or a Panzer tank, except it’s not hopelessly unreliable. As far as I know.

It looks like there is no problem with the cord I made. The 14-gauge part I added stays cool when the Braumeister is running, and the original cord, which is probably 18-gauge, gets slightly warm. That’s the Germans’ fault. I may replace it with a fatter cord. The original cord is like the cord you have on your PC, except it has a different plug. The female end is called C13, and you can get C13 cords in 14-gauge.

The cord I made is rated for 13 amps, and the Braumeister’s manual says it draws 10. Not a huge margin of safety, but enough. The manual also says not to use a cord more than three meters long. Okay, sure. If you use a scrawny German cord instead of a properly-sized cord.

Well, guess what? I just learned the above paragraph is wrong. The manual says the Braumeister calls for a 10A fuse, so it draws less than 10 amps. I didn’t notice this because when I looked at the manual, which was all serious and stuff, I chose not to pay much attention. Most of the time, this pays off for me.

Anyway, more reason to buy a cheap cord.

I made a yeast starter night before last. I paid $8 for exotic liquid yeast, and I added it to a malt extract solution in an Ehrlenmeyer flask. I put the flask on my laboratory stir plate and stirred it for about 36 hours. This created a huge quantity of new yeast. Now it’s sitting on the counter, waiting for me to use it.

The flask is a bad idea. It has a narrow opening so you can put a cork in it, along with a valve that makes the CO2 bubbles go out through water. This valve, or airlock, is supposed to keep bacteria out.

The instructions for the starter kit say to heat water in the flask in the microwave. As far as I know, there is no microwave oven on Earth that will hold a 2-liter flask in an upright position. It also says to add the malt extract to the water when it gets hot.

Malt extract is almost 100% sugar, and it’s very fine and gummy. When you get it near a flask full of steaming water, it turns to gum instantly and sticks to your funnel or spoon or whatever.

I had quite a time getting MOST of the malt extract, or DME, into the flask.

I have decided it’s stupid to use a flask and airlock. It’s overkill. Bacteria are a problem, but they aren’t Navy SEAL’s. You don’t need an airlock to keep them out. Anything that covers the fermenting vessel will work. I’m going to get a beaker and cover the top with sanitized aluminum foil when I make starters.

I think I’ll be okay from here on out. I just have to brew, pour the wort into my fermenting bucket, cool the bucket in the pool, add the yeast, and put the bucket in my new fermenting freezer. Then when my new keg arrives, I’ll stick it in there and move the keg to my spare fridge.

So far, I think the Braumeister is wunderbar. I am not brewing today, but if I were, I would already have saved myself considerable aggravation, and later on, the Braumeister would have saved me a lot of work. I kid the Germans, which is something history teaches us not to do, but I think they hit a home run with this thing.

A home run is a goal. In baseball. Which is a sport. Where you hit and throw a ball. “Throwing” means you hold something in your hand and…

Oh, forget it.

Hack Chef Bests Pros Again

My wife loves creme brulee, so I decided to try to make it. It came out fine, but I learned a few things later.

I used the New York Times recipe, which you can find online. I’ll give the ingredient list.

2 cups heavy or light cream, or half-and-half
1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise, or 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/8 teaspoon salt
5 egg yolks
½ cup sugar, more for topping

It doesn’t take a genius. Beat the eggs and sugar together. Forget the bean unless you’re a cork-sniffer. Combine with the cream and salt. Cook. Sprinkle the top with sugar and burn it with a torch.

Now I’ll add my criticisms.

The NYT says to cook at 325°, which is stupid. I did it, and the top of the custard came out with a brown skin. I made some more at 275°, and they looked perfect. Do not cook at 325°. I’m not recommending 275° either, though. See below.

Why do professional cooks publish dumb recipes? So frustrating. Whoever wrote this recipe must have tried it, and if they did, they saw that brown skin. Then they published it anyway.

The NYT says to use a water bath, as you would when making flan. I did this, but it sounded stupid to me. I checked around, and I found a French chef who worked at Le Cirque, saying to cook at 205°. He says to use shallow dishes at a low temperature. A bath is used to prevent uneven heating and curdling, and these things don’t happen with shallow dishes at low temperatures. I plan to take his advice.

My guess is that the high temperature recommendation comes from restaurants where they have to get things done fast. In your home, it doesn’t matter if creme brulee takes a while, so you can do it right.

A lot of recipes say creme brulee should be between 1″ and 2″ deep. This sounds stupid to me. I have had wonderful creme brulee in restaurants, and it was never that deep. If it’s too deep, it overpowers the caramel. The French guy says to keep it shallow so it will cook evenly. I say go for 3/4″.

If restaurants have served me creme brulee in shallow dishes, then clearly, they did not use water baths. It’s nearly impossible to create a big water bath for a whole bunch of shallow dishes and not have water get into everything. Why doesn’t the NYT’s writer know this? Probably does and did not care.

People who publish about food generally care about delivering content and getting checks more than helping people. It reminds me of something Sergei Rachmaninoff said. Someone asked him what one of his pieces was about, and he said something like, “Two hundred dollars.”

I have never been to cooking school, I have never made creme brulee before, and I have already corrected the NYT recipe very substantially. What does that tell you about their standards?

The NYT says to beat the eggs and sugar until they are light. Again, stupid. My creme brulee was nice, but it was too light. Not everything should be light.

Creme brulee has to have a little weight to it. Next time, I will just mix until the sugar dissolves.

Apart from being lighter than I liked, the texture of my creme brulee was flawless. More than I can say for the lumpy creme brulee at Lawry’s in Singapore.

I believe the recipe uses too little egg yolk, too little vanilla, and not enough sugar. Next time, I will use 5/8 cup sugar, 6 yolks, and 1.5 tsp. vanilla.

This recipe makes a ton of creme brulee, by the way. Too much for a normal creme brulee set of 6 dishes. I suggest halving it or even quartering it. I have eaten 6 creme brulees today, and I still have a giant overflow creme brulee in the laundry room fridge.

I used fake vanilla. Taste tests show that most people prefer it to expensive vanilla. I am fooling with it to see what I think. The price difference is unreal.

Fake vanilla supposedly comes from glands on a beaver’s crotch, so that’s the down side. Try not to think about it.

Beaver glands. In your food. Put it out of your mind.

Oh, wait.

WARNING! BLOG POST CONTAINS DISGUSTING INFORMATION ABOUT FOOD YOU EAT. READ WITH CAUTION.

There; that fixed it.

What about burning the sugar? I used a Bernzomatic TS8000, which turns out to be exactly what chefs recommend. I found it clumsy, though. I may get a small butane torch or do what the French guy says to do. He likes to use a heated cast iron disk. I found you can’t pour caramel onto creme brulee from a saucepan. I tried, and you get too much caramel.

Amazon sells creme brulee kits, which are pans with racks that hold little, narrow ramekins in a water bath. Stupid. The ramekins are too narrow, and I don’t want a water bath. I found 8-ounce ceramic dishes about like the ones at Ruth’s Chris. There are a lot of creme brulee dishes out there that hold 4 ounces or 6 ounces. Be real. Nobody wants less than a cup of creme brulee.

Creme brulee is easy, especially if you do it the French way and not the hard way. I guess I’ll make it again tomorrow, confirm that my way is perfect, and then file it away for the future when my wife is here.

Be Absent-Minded and Be Your Own Secret Santa

Should you buy yourself Christmas presents?

When I got out of law school, I was a disgrace. I only owned one pistol! It’s embarrassing to admit it. I owned a Glock I bought in case I had to kill one of my sister’s friends. This is true. I’m not trying to be funny.

She was enraged about something I did to help her, so she threatened to send some male junkie friends to take care of me. I got myself a Glock 22 and put my worries behind me. Fortunately for her low-life friends, none of them ever showed up to test my marksmanship, and I never had to go through the trauma of putting bullets into a human being. After that buy, I let myself down by letting maybe 9 years pass without another pistol purchase.

A Glock 22 is not a .22, by the way.

When I left school, I got myself a graduation gift. I went to Garcia’s National Gun in Little Havana and picked up a Smith & Wesson 686+ 7-shot, 6″ revolver in .357 Magnum. Very nice. Satin stainless with Hogue grips.

I frequented Garcia’s because I had bought into the myth that one should support local gun dealers. I bought several more guns from this place, and every time I showed up, they treated me like a stranger, perhaps because I wasn’t a Cuban. After that, I learned to love Internet shopping.

Yelp says Garcia’s is gone, which is not a surprise. Here is a quotation from a review a lady wrote:

“If you are not a 50+ year old Cuban guy you are invisible to these people. Terrible service. They treat you like you’re not there to spend money. I will take my business elsewhere.”

That is exactly how I felt. I would stand in the store while they talked to their pals en espanol, waiting to for my existence to be noticed so I could give them $700 or $1300 or whatever. It looks like their customer base decided to say, “Hasta la vista, baby.”

I think the revolver is the only present I’ve ever bought myself. I have certainly bought things for myself, but I don’t think I’ve bought myself anything for a special occasion.

Actually, I just remembered one, so I’m wrong. I bought a 2003 Ford Thunderbird and took delivery the day after my birthday. It was a silly, frivolous car, but I really enjoyed it.

I guess that counts. Sort of. I mean, I had to buy some kind of car, and I would have done it even if it had been during a different month.

Okay. It doesn’t count

Rhodah and I went to Singapore recently, and of course, I bought her stuff. She is still catching up from a lifetime of poverty. We bought clothes. We bought a nice Bric’s suitcase. There were other things. She managed to squeeze a big perfume donation out of me while she was on her way to her flight and the duty-free shops.

During our trip, I got myself a Singapore ball cap in the Bugis Street bazaar, and I also got a Levi’s-brand belt because I left my own belt in Florida. The belt does not count. In the airport on the way home, I realized I had nearly nothing to show for my trip, so I spent 22 USD on a Singapore shirt.

In Ireland, I got myself a Dublin hoodie I will never wear. I would have gotten a T-shirt, but the Irish sell incredibly cheap shirts that can’t possibly last a year. In Turkey, I got a hat. In Egypt, nothing.

It’s hard to buy anything in Egypt that is not related to idolatry.

Egypt is not the greatest tourist destination. If you go, stay in a very nice hotel in Cairo and get guides to take you to the sights. Then take a Nile cruise with guides. Then go home. You won’t be able to drive, and there is nothing to do except look at pyramids and temples anyway. See the old stuff and enjoy a cruise. If you limit your trip to these things, you’ll love Egypt. Don’t do anything else.

I feel like getting myself something, but I am not doing well at finding gifts for myself.

When I got the idea of getting myself a present, I immediately thought of a trailer with a gas-powered leaf vacuum on it. That is not a Christmas gift. It’s a tool for yard maintenance. A CNC mill I don’t need would be a good gift. Something I really need so I can do chores would not.

I’m not blowing $8000 on a mill.

I looked at my Amazon lists. They’re full of things I need. There are also things I merely want, but those things are too cheap for Christmas.

I bought myself two Shark vacuums this month. Cordless and corded. Spent over $600. Changed my life. Absolutely worth every penny. Recommended without reservation. But cleaning tools are not gifts. And Rhodah will probably be the one who uses them most.

I feel like I’ve turned into the aunt who used to give me socks.

How about another firearm buy?

The other day I was on the phone, and I saw an unopened flat rate box. I opened it up, and it contained a new Wilson rifle cartridge trimmer. The invoice was from August of 2020. This thing cost me over $130, and I had forgotten I owned it. Obviously, I have not used it. I haven’t fired a gun in maybe 6 months. I have enough ammo supplies backed up to keep me busy for a couple of months. I built a rifle I have not fired yet. I finished it months ago. I probably have 15,000 rounds of .22 ammunition. I don’t think this is the time to buy gun stuff.

Maybe a nice bottle of XO brandy. I barely drink, but a really nice brandy would be pleasant to have on hand. I have not had a really good brandy since before I left Miami.

How about a water-cooled TIG torch? Practicing TIG is no fun when you’re holding a hot torch. A new one would cost a few pennies, but it would encourage me to practice.

I would love to have a Langmuir Arcflat welding table, three feet by four feet. My Northern Tool table is astounding for the money, but it has about half the square footage of a Langmuir. I’m doing a project which is not going to fit on my table. It would hang off the ends and sides of a Langmuir, but I think I could make it work.

It would be great to have a table 6 feet long. You can weld nearly anything on a table like that.

A Langmuir fixturing table 4 feet long would cost more than I want to spend, sadly. It would be $1800, including tax. Cut that figure in thirds, and I might do it.

Like a leaf vaccum, a welding table is useful for necessary jobs, but you can also use one to make fun things like a shooting bench or a mobile base for a big table saw you don’t really need. I don’t think I’d put it in the same class as a leaf vacuum.

I’m going to try to get by without a vacuum. Today I took my giant blower and made a 10-foot-wide pile of leaves at the side of the front yard. I plan to burn them as soon as I can get a permit. In the past, I was determined to move leaves out of the yard before burning them, and that’s why I never got anywhere. Moving them an eighth of a mile to the burn pile is extremely work-intensive. If I am willing to have a black spot in my yard, I should be able to get rid of them without extraordinary effort.

I guess I’ve already bought myself nearly everything that would make a good present. I have a drawer full of nice knives. I have a Ruger RPR with a Vortex Viper scope. I have an ice cream machine with its own compressor. I have a 16″ lathe. Years ago, I got myself musical instruments.

To some men, or women who have a lot of jewelry, this stuff may seem insignificant, especially when spread out over decades, but I don’t live on a grand scale. I drive a Ford Explorer with 60,000 miles on it, and I plan to keep it for 10 more years. I use a cell phone made in 2017. I own a Rolex, but if my late father had not owned it, I would not have one. If I spend $500 on something, I feel like it’s a big deal.

A home waterjet would be nice. Really nice. Let’s see. A Wazer, the best-known small waterjet, would only set me back maybe 12 grand.

Dang it.

How about a plasma table? Let’s see. Over $1500. Geez.

I may as well clean up the brandy snifters.

Trump NFT’s: I Miss Out on the Ground Floor Again

I know virtually nothing about nonfungible tokens, but I wish I had bought a Trump NFT this week. I think they’re hilarious.

If you haven’t heard about these tokens, it’s partly because the big announcement was made on Truth Social, where information goes to die.

For people with even less knowledge than I, if any exist, I will impart the few facts I know. An NFT is a piece of digital currency, so I suppose that means it only exists as a piece of code. A method of authenticating these things has been created, and I won’t tell you what it is because I don’t care enough to find out for myself. My understanding is that if you store your money in NFT’s, you can prevent the IRS from finding out you have it. I’m not sure, though.

I don’t like NFT’s because my feeling is that they can evaporate without notice, leaving you with FN, or fungible nothing.

Stocks can also evaporate, and the dollar can, too, except for dollars made of silver and gold. Most dollars have no physical existence. Only a tiny percentage have been turned into bills and coins. The rest are imaginary, stored as numbers in computers all over the world. I don’t see how that can work, but it’s the truth. The dollar can plummet, but I think it’s less likely to do so than an imaginary coin with a dog’s picture on it.

I don’t know how NFT offerings go. Based on my knowledge of the unfairness of the world, I would guess they go like stock offerings. In a stock offering, a company sells shares to the public, and brokerages see to it that only people who are already rich can buy them. Then the prices skyrocket overnight, and the rest of us get to come in, buy shares, and watch the prices collapse.

A quick scan of the web suggests that nearly all of the people who make money from NFT’s are the ones who create or sell them. That is exactly what I would have predicted. Completely consistent with my view of the world. So probably, there are a few thousand lucky consumers who got rich buying NFT’s before they became trendy, and now the only way to profit is to be in the creation and sales business. And the whole business is propped up by suckers who buy NFT’s that generally don’t work out.

By the time suckers find out about things that make money, the money has usually gotten a lot harder to make.

Sounds like the whole thing eventually becomes a Ponzi scheme.

I’ve probably already said things that aren’t correct, so I guess I’ll stop “explaining.”

This week, Donald Trump (PBUH) issued his own NFT, and it is making leftists boiling mad. Like they weren’t already. I Googled to try to find out what it was and where to get one, but it looks like the leftweb has ganged up to make this information very hard to find. Google “buy Trump NFT,” and believe it or not, you won’t get much useful input at all. If somebody were selling a Hunter Biden NFT or an NFT with Obama’s dog on it, similar Googling would produce useful results immediately, so I’m not sure what’s going on.

If Obama issued an NFT with a grainy picture of his butt on it, Google would be drowning in positive content, the NFT would be all over every news site, and news stories would tell people where to get them. TV shows would be full of segments about them, disguised as entertainment or news but intended to boost sales.

Instead of getting information about the NFT and where to get it, I was inundated with links and excerpts excoriating Trump, ridiculing his NFT, and insisting its release was a failure.

I didn’t see any stories about the tokens being “dangerous” or “violence,” but I’m sure they are out there. I’m sure there are people claiming they’ve sustained terrible emotional damage.

Conversing with the leftist world about Trump is like stabbing a rabid dog with a red-hot fork. You can’t even have a conversation about harmless facts.

Was the release a failure? Doesn’t look that way to me. The web admits the NFT’s sold out instantly, and sources suggest $230 is a typical price for an NFT that sold initially for $99. The cheapest ones I’m seeing run almost $500. Some of the tokens are unusual, and they have sold for $24,000. How is this a failure?

There are 45,000 Trumpcoins (“Trumpcoin”?) out there, and their value is probably in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It will probably increase, because Trump is a fleeting phenomenon, and people like me would love to have these NFT’s just to remember him.

If I bought a ton of manure sculpted into a bust of Joe Biden for $99 and sold it immediately for $230, I would be thrilled. If I bought Apple for $99 and sold it the next day for $230, I would be thrilled. Why would I feel bad about selling a $99 Trump token for $230?

After several minutes of Googling, I learned that there is a website called Opensea, and you can buy various NFT’s there. I took a look at it, and it appears to be a useless site for anyone who isn’t in the game already. The prices are listed in Ethereums. An Ethereum is an NFT, so how do I buy the Trump NFT or an Ethereum if I don’t already have an NFT? I assume there is some way around it, but I haven’t looked yet and probably won’t.

That’s some catch, that catch-22.

CNN says, “Donald Trump’s NFT superhero trading cards timed the market all wrong.” So a 130% profit is what you get in one day if you time the market wrong. Timing the market right must turn you into Jeff Bezos in a week.

The Washington Post says, “Trump NFTs are not art. Unless you consider grifting an art form.” That’s a weird comment. The cards feature a funny painting (digital or whatever) of Trump, defiantly facing the viewer. Some cards feature him in cowboy hats. Others show him in a sort of Iron Man suit. Who claimed this was serious art? I’m sure no one ever did. Even if it happened, who cares? The purpose of the issue isn’t to distribute digital art. It’s to make money.

Is the Dogecoin fine art? Was that the purpose? Is any NFT fine art? I know I’ve missed nearly all the memos, but selling anything digital as fine art makes no sense at all. What good is it for me to create and sell a digital Mona Lisa if you can copy it to your hard drive in a hundred-thousandth of a second and email a million copies around the world? Maybe those copies won’t be authorized, but any idiot will still be able to view them and use them as his Windows home screen.

Even if an NFT featuring art is collectible because it’s unique, the quality of the art is irrelevant. The scarcity is what makes it valuable.

Opensea features photos of available Trumpcoins. Can’t you just download those photos? Okay, they may not be high-resolution, but does that matter when you’re looking at a photo of a picture of Trump dressed like a Marvel character?

Here’s a Trumpcoin that just sold for 15 Ethere…ae? Ums? That’s nearly $18,000. Keith Olbermann must be under sedation today.

Why call it grifting? Grifting is fraud. Why is Trump’s NFT any more fraudulent than all the other NFT’s? They’re all digital Beanie Babies and tulip bulbs. People issue them because they know they can spend nearly nothing creating something collectors will snap up and turn into a valuable asset. The whole thing is based on a desire to make money, but how is it dishonest? Everyone knows how it works.

Rolling Stone, the stoner rag that still contends Hunter Thompson was a real journalist, which is about like claiming Charlie Sheen is a journalist, says, “‘I Can’t Watch This’: Even Die-Hard Trump Allies Think His NFTs Are Cringe.”

“Cringe” is not an adjective. Grow up. Don’t you have editors? As for Trump allies, he surrounded himself with a lot of opportunistic people of fragile loyalty, and they have been subjected to insane pressure to turn on him. Naturally, some of them have flipped. What about all the Trump allies who think the NFT is funny and harmless? Count me in that group, not that I make any effort to promote Trump these days.

This is Trump. He has always been a showman. He has always loved fun. He has always loved controversy. He likes money. What did people expect?

What really angers the leftists? Probably the knowledge that the NFT’s, which they can’t trace, tax, or take away, will be worth tons of money soon. They’ll probably go into the billions at some point, and Trump will get some of that. This retards the left’s berserk efforts to starve him and his children.

Surely Trump bought some of these things. He would have to be nuts not to.

If there is anyone who needs concealable assets and money to pay armed security, it’s the Trump family. American leftists are determined to do them the way their predecessors did Czar Nicholas II and his children.

Leftists lie awake every night, tormented by visions of an improbable 2024 Trump victory. Their 2024 campaign started on the day Biden won. They will not stop reviling this man and everything he is associated with, ever. They’ll probably slow down a little when he fails to get the nomination, but they will never quit. Mental illness doesn’t go away by itself.

Trump isn’t coming back. He will be too old to run, and the GOP will see to it that he isn’t nominated. They’re already working on it. People need to quit worrying about it. Personally, I want to see DeSantis run. He’s like Trump with most of the problems filtered out.

TDS comes from the spirit world. Satan sees Trump as a friend of the church and Israel, not to mention the unborn, so he stirs up the vulnerable people he can control. Reasonable dialogue will not change anything. If leftists were reasonable, they wouldn’t run around claiming disagreeing with them is violence. Lunacy has been mainstreamed.

It’s too late for me to get my own Trumpcoin, so I guess I’ll forget about it. They have no physical existence anyway, so I couldn’t display one on my workshop wall or otherwise enjoy it.

I hope they become insanely valuable. I hope they start selling for seven figures each. I hope Trump kept a thousand of the best ones for himself. Of course, I also hope God reaches him and his enemies and helps bring agreement in Him to whoever is willing to receive it.

More

An hour into my career as a crypto expert of global standing, I have already discovered a major flaw in my grasp of the topic. Evidently, an NFT is not the same thing as cryptocurrency.

It looks like Dogecoin, as an example, is just currency, whereas an NFT is a unique digital object, and you can pay for an NFT with cryptocurrency. So I guess NFT’s are digital Beanie Babies and cryptocurrencies are sort of like stocks that aren’t backed by companies with income and assets. So when you buy a digital coin, you’re buying stock in nothing.

In the case of Trumpcoin, the asset is the digital file representing the funny picture.

On the whole, I would say give me commercial real estate.

Garbage Doesn’t Get Better With Time

I keep doing things to improve the house.

Today, I’m looking for ways to get rid of the trash compactor.

I’ll tell you right off; if you use a trash compactor, I have no respect for your trash standards. There are lots of reasons to avoid them, and there is only one reason for having one: laziness.

Garbage compactors attract and feed roaches, ants, mice, and rats. Anything that can squeeze in there will stuff itself on your garbage and then pee and poop all over your kitchen.

Garbage compactors stink. You can’t keep unrefrigerated garbage in your kitchen for days without growing bacteria and fungus.

Garbage compactors turn what should be light, fresh, manageable bags of garbage into heavy bags of rotten garbage.

Garbage compactors encourage dirty, low-class habits.

I used the compactor in this house for a while because the people who built it seemed to know what they were doing. There is no garbage collection, so I drive my garbage to the dump. I thought the previous owners, as longtime farm residents, knew something I did not, so for a time, I tried to do whatever they did.

Eventually, I quit. I could not see any virtues in the compactor. It smelled, the bugs loved it, the bags were heavy, and it didn’t actually save me much work.

At some point, I decided I would no longer tolerate having edible garbage in the house overnight. I started putting all trash that had food in it in the garage in a sealed can before bedtime. I abandoned the garbage compactor, cleaned it as well as I could, and hosed it with pesticide.

Now the kitchen never smells like rotten food, and the bugs and mice are out of luck.

I go to the dump three times a week. Twice if I forget. I buy cheap 30-gallon plastic bags for 10 cents each online, I use them for garbage and lining Marvin’s cage, and I end up spending something like $120 per year. If that sounds like a lot, find out what you spend on expensive bags from the store. A cheap store bag runs 25 cents. Big-name brands cost a lot more. If you’re buying store bags, you’re probably paying more than 2.5 times what I pay.

Last time I bought cheap bags online, I bought a box of 1500. I don’t play. Next time, I’ll try Ebay and see if China has anything cheaper.

Bag makers like Hefty love to talk about how tough their bags are. Know why? They’re trying to appeal to dirty, lazy people. “We know you only take the trash out once a month, so here’s a bag you can jam 50 pounds into. Go ahead and jam your foot in there. Pack it down good. Our bag won’t split. Comes with free cotton to shove up your nose.”

You don’t need tough bags. You need to get your butt to the curb or the dump more often.

What do professionals use, in places where letting trash sit can lead to big fines? They use exactly what I use. You’ve seen them beside highways, waiting to be picked up. You’ve seen them on the backs of utility carts at stadiums and malls. Hefty bags are for people who let garbage rot in their houses.

If your trash is moving out of your house in a timely way, you don’t need a bag that can contain a rabid wolverine. It just has to survive long enough to make it to the can or the dumpster.

I’m naturally lazy myself, so anything that helps me improve is welcome.

When I was looking after my dad, I was lazy with the garbage. Usually, I didn’t do all that bad, but often I made dump visits a week apart, which was disgraceful. There were times when the bed of the pickup was pretty full.

When you have a dementia patient in your house, garbage piles up fast. You need to stay on top of it. I did a poor job. Since then, by God’s grace, I have repented. In the time since I turned over a new leaf, there have been days when I simply forgot to go, and I ended up with little ecosystems developing in the bags, but overall, I love going to the dump, and it’s unusual for me to miss visits.

When I go, I see horrendous scenes that take me back, except many are a lot worse than the scenes I caused. Many people show up with pickups entirely full of bags. I see people walking quickly to the dumpsters, holding dripping bags as far from themselves as they can. I’ve seen utility trailers covered with bags.

When I go to the dump, I look carefully at the people in front of me. Here’s a tip for dump users: never get behind a trailer, a pickup, or a van if you can help it. There is a reason people bring vehicles like that. Clean people generally drive passenger cars and only have a few bags.

Now that I have better habits, I am disturbed by other people’s practices. I pray for them. I look at their beat-up cars, their mountains of maggot-ridden trash, their tasteless, ill-fitting, stained, worn-out clothes, their tattoos, their obesity, and even their bad posture, and I realize they have problems going far beyond poor trash standards. I know demons are involved. They need to know God. I am being improved, and they need the same help I’m getting.

I want to get rid of the trash compactor and fill the space with some kind of storage, but I don’t know if there is any way to do it without ruining the way the kitchen looks. Maybe a handyman could find a matching set of drawers.

I also want to get rid of my terrible sink.

The lady who designed the kitchen was no cook. I can tell, because she did things a good cook would not do. First, the compactor. Second, she bought a 4-burner electric stove with a useless electric grill taking up space in the middle. Third, she put her wall oven at knee height. Fourth, she gave a microwave priority, installing it above the oven. And the oven the house came with had no warming drawer.

The worst thing she did was to install a two-basin sink.

My sink has a gigantic basin on the left, and it has a small basin on the right with a garbage disposal. The big basin is too small to wash cookie sheets. Unforgivable. The small basin is not much good for anything.

I tried to find out why people get two-basin sinks, since it’s clearly a stupid design. It turns out one answer is laziness. People want to be able to hide dirty dishes in one basin.

Okay, so your dishwasher is a foot from the sink, and you want a place to hide dirty dishes instead of, at the very least, putting them in the dishwasher to wait.

You already have a roach feeder full of old garbage, and you want to add a roach buffet to the sink area.

What?

I remember a time when I was too lazy to put dishes in the machine. I would say it ended about 25 years ago. If you can’t find it in yourself to put a dish on a dishwasher rack and push a button, you have a very serious problem. As I did, for half of my life.

I want to put a new sink in, but the old one is in a stone counter, and they cut the stone so you can’t put a rectangular sink in it. You have to find a sink that’s bigger on the left side. Turns out they exist. I guess a lot of people got tired of their ill-conceived two-basin sinks and had them replaced. If you’re in my shoes, you may be able to buy a one-basin offset sink that will fit your hole. “Offset” is the Google term you need.

You may also be able to use an apron sink. These things rest on top of counters, covering up a lot of the stone. If your counter has weird cuts in it, you may be able to put an apron sink on it.

I think I am headed for an apron sink. The likelihood that a one-basin offset sink will fit the cutout I have now is not high, and I don’t believe I can make my cutout fit a new sink without ruining the cutout’s appearance. An apron sink doesn’t need a perfect cutout because the edges of the cutout would be covered. I should be able to open my cutout up with an angle grinder and make an apron sink fit.

My advice is to avoid garbage compactors and two-basin sinks. Sooner or later, you will know you made big mistakes.

I want a new faucet to go with the sink. The existing faucet is very low, which is extremely bad design. You want to be able to get things between the faucet and the sink. Big things, like 3-gallon pots. The faucet I have is in the way all the time, and it dribbles water back onto the stone, where a calcium crust forms.

I plan to get what is known as a pot-filler faucet. It will arch up over the sink, and it will have a built-in sprayer on a hose.

I don’t know how the original owner’s wife managed to do anything in the kitchen. Maybe she didn’t.

I’ve talked to Rhodah about these things, and she says I should wait until she moves here. That never occurred to me. I’m so used to the single mindset. Having someone to help me is a new experience.

Storm Update

God, as always, has been extremely gracious, and the corpse of Hurricane Nicole has done no damage here. The putative center of the former storm is now as close to me as it will get. It’s breezy, and there is a little rain, but even the Weather Channel’s trained actors couldn’t make this look like a real tropical storm. At least not so far.

I am now seeing one outlet predicting stronger winds later today. That is new. I hope it’s just the usual over-reaction. If not, I’ll be moving to the Red Roof Inn.

My prediction, which is worth what I paid for my meteorology diploma: things will get better, not worse. As the storm moves to the west, winds will have to go over most of the lower half of the state to get here, and that should cut their speed. Also, the storm is getting weaker with time.

I guess this theory won’t work if the winds in the bottom half of Nicole are stronger than they are up north. This doesn’t appear to be true, though, because if it were, Sarasota and Orlando would be having high winds now, and they are not.

Winds can’t just materialize magically in the middle of dry land. The storm circulates. Before the winds get here, they have to be somewhere else.

The same site that says we’ll have 33 mph base winds 45 minutes from now says we’re at 15. So an 18 mph increase in 45 minutes? Doubt it.

A friend in the northern part of the county says she lost power, which is surprising, but the properties where she live are maintained pretty badly. Maybe that’s the explanation.

She also managed to get a broken window, which is a bigger surprise. It’s a good idea to protect windows during hurricanes, but even if you don’t, the odds of losing one are low. And this is no hurricane. It was barely a hurricane when it WAS a hurricane.

My power company, which is one of two in this county, reports 489 customers with no electricity, county-wide. Not bad. Duke Energy, the other company, reports around 6 times as many, which is much worse but still nothing compared to Irma.

Maybe Duke Energy doesn’t manage trees well. My company went on a trimming binge last year.

In other news, I am very happy with the batch of Texas trash I made. I’ll post the recipe.

INGREDIENTS

1/4 cup butter, melted
1 teaspoon celery seed
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 tbsp. brown sugar
1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
1 tbsp. A1 sauce
1 teaspoon chipotle powder
4 tablespoons Crystal sauce
10 cups cheddar Chex Mix
2 cups Spanish peanuts

You just mix it up, spread it in a pan, and bake it at 250° until it drys out. I stir it every 20 minutes for the first hour, and then I quit.

MSG might make it better. MSG is the reason it’s so hard to eat only one Dorito.

For some reason, idleness sets in during a storm, so you do trivial things to kill time. Yesterday I put a new diode in my Ronco Showtime rotisserie oven. I installed one a year or two ago, but I did a bad job, and it pooped out.

These ovens have 120V AC wires going straight to the heating element, and there is no way to adjust the heat. A clever guy realized he could reduce the heat by cutting off half the AC signal.

AC is positive half the time and negative the rest of the time. A diode will only permit current to flow one way. If you cut off either the positive or negative part of an AC signal, you reduce the power by half.

I stuffed a questionable diode in there, and it was great until it frizzled due to lack of heat sinking. This time, I used the same diode as the guy who came up with the concept. It’s enormous and should require no heat sinking.

I had to cut wires and put in spade connectors, a selector switch, and shrink tubing. I had to find a way to cram the giant diode into the oven. Now it’s done, so I should be able to slow-cook rotisserie meat.

These ovens are wonderful. It’s hard to believe a TV huckster could invent something that really benefits mankind, but Popeil did it. My only big complaint was the lack of adjustability. If you don’t like things browned well, or you want certain things to cook very slowly, you have to wrap them in foil or try other tricks. Now that my oven is modified (again), I can throw a glazed pork roast in it, slow-cook it for a couple of hours, and then turn the heat up to brown the glaze.

The newer ovens are made in China, and there are complaints. Mine is Korean, and there is really nothing wrong with it. I’ve been through every part of it, so I know how it’s built. It’s not the toughest oven ever made, but it’s not junk, either.

Starlink is working fine, except for one thing. We had a one-second power flicker, and the system had to reboot. Starlink can take a very long time to start working after an outage. I put a battery backup on it, so I should be okay now.

The verdict is in: I’ve decided I’m a big Starlink fan. There are little annoyances, but it works, and it’s a great deal better than my old system. Once it becomes more mainstream, there will be more help available for users, so maybe people like me will not have to crawl around in their attics and drill holes in their walls. Tradesmen will be ready to help.

I also like my VPN, but it isn’t perfect. I get a lot of security puzzles now, and sometimes a site will refuse to load because it’s convinced I’m a hacker.

Hmm. We just got a couple of pretty decent gusts. Hello? Am I still here?

Guess I’ll post this using my mobile hotspot. Come on, Starlink. Get it together for daddy.

MORE

It’s 4 hours later. We are supposed to have winds of around 50 mph. It’s not happening. I’d call it 10 mph.

Never trust a weatherman.

Blazing Internet Speeds Take me Back to 2005

I guess anyone who still reads my blog is pretty bored with the Starlink stuff by now, but here I am with more.

Today I finalized my dish location efforts.

The dish was originally on a short J-mount that used to hold up a Dish dish, and the mount was on the first-story roof about 8 feet from a second-story wall that runs north to south. The wall cut off a big percentage of the dish’s view of the southern horizon.

When you get your Starlink dish, which Starlink whimsically identifies as Dishy McFlatface, the app tells you all kinds of needlessly alarming things. It rants about the necessity for a clear view of the horizon.

Nobody has a clear view of the horizon. Maybe if you live in the desert or on a ship. Or on top of a mountain or skyscraper. Other than that, no.

I learned about Starlink’s somewhat neurotic horizon obsession when I opened the Starlink box for the first time. Prior to that, I had no idea. I just assumed Elon Musk, or “M,” as I like to call him, had some idea what he was doing. If the dish were hard to use in a normal location, he would have told me before sending it to me, right?

Yeah, okay.

It was because of the horizon obsession that I was reluctant to do a serious installation to begin with. I thought I might have to send the dish back in a week. I couldn’t believe it would work here in the woods.

Starlink needs to see the northern sky, and I have tall trees to my north.

When I did my preliminary installation, I got okay performance compared to my old cellular link, but I thought there was probably room for improvement. After all, in addition to the tree problem, there was a vertical wall at a bearing of around 330° (west of north), so my horizon was far from perfect. It was because of this concern that I started moving the dish around and ultimately got a new mount.

I decided to put the new mount on the edge of the second-story roof. This idea was based on some misconceptions. I thought it would be fairly easy to run a wire through the second story wall into the attic from the dish, and from there to another part of the attic where I could get access to a stretch of hallway wall near my desired router location.

I had this ridiculous idea that the southern edge of the upper roof terminated abruptly above a wall, so it would be easy to install the mount on the edge and run the cable a couple of feet down past the eave and into the attic. In reality, and I have no idea why I didn’t check this first, the upper roof slopes down toward the south, so to put the mount on the highest part, I would have to climb up the slope.

Ordinarily, I am not afraid of roofs, but mine is covered with gritty shingles, and the grit comes off under your shoes when you walk on the roof. I can walk up a slope that doesn’t have grit on it, but when you add loose grit to the equation, it’s a different story. I’m not sure how roofers do it.

I walked part of the way up the slope, and I decided it was time for plan B. I was not going to risk rolling off a roof.

I ended up putting the new mount near the old one, a couple of feet farther from the vertical wall and a couple of feet higher. The new mount is around 20″ longer than the new one, so I would say the dish is maybe 4 feet higher than it was yesterday.

Here’s the really irritating part: I turned on the app to see what it thought, and it declared my dish was free from obstructions. So as far as Starlink is concerned, my location is perfect.

If I can get an A+ in a location which is partially blocked, why make so much fuss about obstructions? For all I know, the old location was fine.

I would have checked the old location using the app, but even though I had used the app before, I was not aware it had an obstruction-check feature. I can’t explain this. Maybe the app looks different the first time you turn it on.

So I failed to scout my own roof properly, and I failed to use the app correctly.

Anyway, now I have a dish location that is beyond reproach.

I thought I would have to cut a new hole in my house, but I found I could shove the Starlink cable through a grommet from the old Dish installation.

I pulled the cable through the grommet into an attic space. Then I drilled a hole from the hallway into the attic. I ran the cable over some trusses to the hole, shoved it out of the hole, put a new RJ45 jack on the end, and hooked the router back up. A while later, after Starlink stopped pouting over my impudent interruption, I had the web again. Starlink likes to shut down for a while after you fiddle with it. Perhaps M’s way of wagging his finger at us.

I still don’t have my shielded jacks from Amazon, so I was not able to install a wall plate. I want to have a grounded dish, and without a shielded jack, that means using a jumper to connect the cable’s grounding wire to the shielded plug from the router. I can’t run a jumper through a wall plate without mangling it.

Now I have a router sitting on the hall floor next to a little pile of drywall dust, with a cable hanging out of an unfinished hole. I will fix everything up in three days when the jack arrives.

Here is the big takeaway for other confused Starlink people: YOU DO NOT HAVE TO HAVE AN UNOBSTRUCTED HORIZON. Pay no attention to the nonsense Starlink tells you. Put your dish in the best location you can find without a lot of effort and expense and let the app tell you what it thinks. If the app likes it, leave it alone. If not, move it to different locations in increasing order of installation expense and difficulty. When you get one that works, leave the dish there.

Another important lesson: DO NOT BOTHER WITH THE STARLINK APP’S LOCATION-SCOUTING FEATURE. I mean the one that tells you to point your camera at the sky and stand there like an idiot. It is unnecessary, hard to use, and worthless. It will just discourage you. Set your dish up, turn it on, and rely on the app to tell you how the dish feels. The feature you want to use is called “Visibility.”

Right now, Ookla says I am getting download and upload speeds of 83 and 6, and Starlink’s app says it’s 42 and 12. I’m sure both of these results are wrong, because past experience says both tests are stupid and unreliable, but I think they work for comparison purposes. My old cell connection ran around 12 and 1 on Ookla, so whatever I am actually getting now from Starlink is a lot better.

Why do I say the tests are stupid and unreliable? Well, I just got 83/6 and 42/12 about a minute apart. How can that happen if the tests work?

Being able to use the web 20% as well as a normal person in, say, Bangladesh or Malawi is a heady experience. It’s weird, seeing so little of the swirly Youtube waiting symbol while I try to watch videos. I can’t imagine what real Internet speed is like, though. You people with 300 Mbps must live in a different world.

My next Starlink project will be a cable running under the yard to the shop. I have the Starlink ethernet connector, which should have been built into the router. Elon. I just need to install another wall jack, find the path the old cable used to get out of the house, run a new cable through it, dig a slit in the yard, bury the new cable in it, run it into the pipe leading into the shop, put in a wall jack, and hook up the PC.

In other Musk news, my wife tells me Kathy Griffin and some other celebrities and demi-celebrities have decided to SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER. They are fighting the system. They are determined not to pay him $8 per month for their identity-verifying blue checks. Some are threatening to leave.

There are problems with this movement. Apart from the obvious triviality of the dispute.

First of all, if you leave Twitter, no one will care, and you won’t have a voice any more, so no one will hear you if you continue to criticize. A lot of celebrities are basically washed up, and Twitter helps people realize they still exist, thereby helping them get jobs. If it weren’t for Twitter, who would know people like Kathy Griffin and Valerie Bertinelli were still alive? Until today, I thought Griffin, a cancer victim, was probably dead.

Griffin and Bertinelli changed their Twitter names to Elon Musk and put up tweets supporting left-wing political candidates. They said they did this to prove the blue check process is flawed. Seems to me they proved Musk was right.

Bertinelli says the blue check makes it harder for criminals to impersonate celebrities. So she’s saying the system she describes as flawed works. What? So how does charging for the check make impersonation easier? Is she saying she can’t scrape up $96 per year? Is she saying criminals will pay but celebrities won’t?

If the system works, how come she was able to call herself Elon Musk without losing her blue check? It was still there when she pulled her prank. Shouldn’t blue-checkers be prevented from changing their handles? After all, the check is supposed to be proof they’re who they say they are.

Maybe I don’t understand her argument. She says the system is flawed, and then she says it works. Somehow, charging makes it less likely to work? Maybe I missed a vital tweet that reconciles these claims.

Okay, I’ll clear things up for everyone. First, a disclaimer: I don’t care what happens to Twitter. Second, blue checks should be screened well, and screening should be continuous so blue-checkers can’t change their handles. Third, everyone with any self-respect should get off Twitter and try to regain some dignity.

Who really cares? It’s all junior high to me. It’s amazing that human beings are willing to hiss and claw at each other like this in public. Over $96 per year.

Maybe they do it because celebrities aren’t busy. They have long periods (sometimes multiple decades) of inactivity. What better to do than caper and prance for attention on a free service that brings them attention from lots of people?

I like what Dave Chappelle said about Twitter, but for the profanity: “Apparently they dragged me on Twitter. I don’t give a ___, because Twitter is not a real place.”

What is the other problem with celebrities SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER? Well, they ARE power. Liberals are the establishment. Conservatives and Christians are the counterculture. Elon Musk is an insurgent who just happened to get very rich. Musk is the rebel and protestor. Griffin and Bertinelli are establishment stooges. They’re on the side that slaps down the little people. They’re organs of the military-industrial-entertainment complex. Insiders. Swamp creatures. They’re sith lords. Musk is Luke Skywalker.

I had a thought recently. What if Instagram starts increasing its word limit and giving people checks for nothing? Instagram is a leftist organization, very much in favor of ending free political speech, and it already has a big base. I wonder if Instagram could kill Twitter.

I can’t predict the future, but I know what’s happening right now. Liberals all over America are calling each other and meeting, trying to find a way to end the existential threats of free speech and blue check fees. They really think these phenomena are disastrous for the world. Satan has convinced them up is down and down is up.

Projection. That’s what it is. I was talking to my wife about this the other day. Controlling, abusive people who can’t tolerate dissent project. A delusion comes over them, and they think they people they hurt are the real oppressors. They think they’re victims. When you manage to prevent them from abusing them, they think what you’ve done is abuse.

My dad and sister had this problem. It is truly a mental illness. A state of bona fide delusion. Not far from psychosis.

My sister used to accuse me of having her own faults all the time. It was bizarre. I’ll give you the weirdest example. She used to walk around the house in her underwear. It was trashy and very rude. She would do it in our house and even my grandparents’ house. She would spend the entire day that way. It was normal for her.

One day she was abusing me for some imagined offense, and while she was listing my crimes, she said I walked around in my grandparents’ house in my underwear all the time. Never, ever, EVER happened. I would have been mortified if I had accidentally walked through the house like that. It’s something white trash people do. Decent people have the courtesy to wear clothes.

I think this was the moment when I understood how crazy projection is.

It made me realize why my sister hated other people so much. She thought they were like her. And even more unbelievably, she thought she had their good qualities and the moral high ground.

Maybe that’s why she loved and admired herself so much. I wonder.

Projection is slander and accusation, so no wonder Satan’s children do it. He is the devil, and “devil” means “accuser” and “slanderer.” Look up the Greek.

Sometimes they know they’re slandering, but a lot of the time, they really believe the insane things they say about the people they’re abusing. They hate us because they think we’re like them.

It’s an important thing to understand. It’s a big mistake to treat a crazy person as though he were sane. You waste a lot of time. Reasoning with them is like reasoning with a stump.

It’s so weird, seeing the people who run the world acting like they’re the French Resistance. So brave, agreeing with all the people around them. Agreeing with the people who pay them. Agreeing with most people in our government. What kind of rebellion is that? What kind of revolutionary props up the ruling regime?

The Nazis shot resistors without trials. Here, the people who think they’re rebels get to go to the Oscars.

It’s all incredibly interesting to watch.

The Twitter squabble. Not the Oscars. They’re ridiculous. A bunch of insanely wealthy people, patting each other on the back for playing make-believe.

As of Thursday, I should have a real Internet wall jack, and by next week, I hope to have Starlink in the shop. You can keep Twitter, though.

New Tools and Spending Money are Always the Answers

I feel like posting information for other Starlink Junior users.

First of all, what I have isn’t called “Starlink Junior.” It’s “Best Effort” Starlink. Mr. Musk apparently wanted to reach customers and build a base as soon as possible even though he might not be able to give them the full Starlink treatment, so “Best Effort” is what he offered.

It’s kind of sad, because it makes it sound like they’re really trying, and here I am, calling it “Starlink Junior.”

On the other hand, Mr. Musk has rolled out a new surprise that makes me feel less bad. He is going to throttle everyone. EVERYONE.

By that I mean everyone will be given a data limit. Actual throttling will not occur until you pass it.

I got an email saying anyone who uses more than one terabyte per month will be throttled. This is called the “Fair Use” policy, which is unfortunate, because “Fair Use” is a legal term applied to copyrighted material.

I think it would be more accurate to call it the “Backpedaling to Save Starlink Money” policy, but I am not on the board, so there you go.

I have no idea whether I will use a terabyte per month. Let’s see. That’s around 33 gigs per day, right? Seems a little heavy. I know from using Verizon’s severely-limited “Unlimited” plan that it takes considerable surfing to break through Verizon’s 15 GB cap. That’s how much I get in a month, and during the months when I’ve had to use Verizon because of problems with my ISP, it has taken at least a couple of days to get in trouble.

Mr. Musk says fewer than 10% of users will be affected. My guess: that means about 9.9%. If it had been 8%, to choose a lower number at random, he would have said 8% to make it sound better.

The obvious problem is that web designers are constantly trying to pump up the data they send us. Websites are full of ridiculous garbage we don’t want or need, and it jacks up our consumption. This will probably continue, because when has it not continued? So Starlink’s cap may look a lot less generous in a year or two.

Nerds like to redefine words. I really hate what they’ve done to “unlimited.” Words are not their specialty. They should stay out of the definition business.

Second thing…I got my Starlink cable spliced.

I have to splice my cable because Mr. Musk, or “M,” as I like to call him suddenly, because he is the world’s M, no…wait, he’s the world’s Q. Dang. Well, I’ll call him M anyway. He’s kind of like M. He calls a lot of shots. M has decided to put proprietary plugs on his ordinary Cat5 shielded cables. Starlink cables look all mysterious, but they’re just like the ones you have in your house, only harder to work on.

The plugs are enormous, so in order to put a cable through a wall, you have to cut a 1″ hole. And you can’t decide how long your cable will be. M only sells them in certain lengths. Splicing is the obvious answer. If you can cut your cable and splice it, you can run your cable through a 5/16″ hole instead of an unsightly 1″ hole which is likely to leak and let bugs in even if you try to seal it.

Yesterday, I put an ordinary RJ45 plug on the side of the cable that goes to the router, and I put an RJ45 jack on the other side, intending to mount it to a wall plate later. The idea is dish -> hole in exterior wall -> attic -> rear of interior wall -> RJ45 jack -> wall plate -> RJ45 plug -> cable -> router.

I got okay download speeds after installing the jack and plug, but my uploads were, for practical purposes, motionless, and I got a lot of download errors.

I started researching and asking around.

The Cat5 cable M uses is shielded. It contains 8 conducting wires that do the data stuff, and it also has a bare wire and some foil shielding that goes around all the wires. The bare wire is supposed to be in direct contact with the foil. The foil and bare wire are ground conductors.

Most RJ45 plugs and jacks are not shielded. I can get shielded plugs locally (Lowe’s), but jacks have to come from Cyberia.

I tried to find out whether the shielding and ground had to be intact in order for the system to work. Some guy claimed they did, but he’s a guy who put Starlink in a truck, so who knows whether he knows anything?

I was afraid one or more of the following things were causing a problem: a) failure to reconnect the ground wires on my new ends after splicing, b) failure to reconnect the shielding on my new ends after splicing, and c) a really bad job of putting my new unshielded RJ45 plug on the cable.

I did a bad job with the plug because I did not have the right tool.

Putting Catx plugs and jacks on cables is much more complicated than it has to be. The tools you use for plugs don’t do the same things jack tools use, and different brands of plugs and jacks don’t work with every tool made by every company.

You can put a jack on a cable using a simple tool called a punch down tool. These range in price from $10 to at least $60. You can also use a screwdriver and knife, but don’t. Just do not.

You can also use a special crimping tool which is sort of like pliers. These things appear to start at about $50, unless you want to take a chance with low-end Chinese.

Plugs require crimping tools, period. You can try faking it with whatever you have on your bench, but it’s a bad idea.

When it comes to things you can find today near your house, you are probably limited to Ideal and Klein. Klein makes a crazy-complicated tool that will do jacks and plugs, but it only works with Klein stuff. Ideal’s plug tools only do Ideal plugs, and they don’t do jacks.

You can see what a mess it is.

Want some help? Here you go. Buy a package of Ideal shielded plugs. Buy an Ideal FT-45 crimping tool. These things will run you over $80, but it beats hiring some slacker who will charge a lot more and not care how much he damages your house.

Now you can do plugs.

For a wall jack, buy a trueCABLE Cat6 toolless keystone jack from Amazon. These things are shielded. I have not been able to find shielded jacks locally. I don’t know what “keystone” means, but I know that local stores sell wall plates that fit keystone jacks.

You can get a pack of two jacks for $13. I don’t know how to buy a single jack, or I would have.

Now you can do jacks.

When you attach your jack and plug, use the T-568B wiring standard. The wires in your cable are colored, and the standard tells you which wire goes where. There is also a T-568A standard, which only the government uses, because the government has to be an idiot.

The good news: you only need shielded stuff on the cable that goes from the router to the dish. In your walls, if you choose to have hardwiring, you can use plain old plastic jacks and plugs. I only need one shielded jack and one shielded plug. I’m going to use shielded plugs all over the place anyway because I had to buy a bag of 10.

What is shielding? It’s a conductive barrier that reduces the amount of electrmagnetic interference your cables pick up. When your cable tries to pick up the local rap station instead of your data, it feels like you when you use a cell phone in an elevator. It gets nowhere, so your precious data, which could, ironically, be rap MP3’s, passes through unmolested.

Why isn’t all Catx cable shielded? I don’t know. I guess it doesn’t need it.

The cable that Starlink uses doesn’t just carry 1’s and 0’s. It carries power to move the dish. This, I have learned, is called PoE, or “power over ethernet.” Why the mixed-case letters? Because nerds have no verbal aptitude; they don’t know it’s wrong. Is the juice the reason your cable is shielded? Is M running the juice through the foil and grounding wire? No idea, but why take a chance?

Will using unshielded stuff really let bad interference in? Again, no idea. My guess: not. My connection is still unshielded for about an inch, and it seems to be working fine. The ground is continuous, but the shielding is interrupted.

Today I used an Ideal FT-45 tool to install a shielded Ideal RJ45 plug on my cable. I left my unshielded jack alone. I ran a jumper from the ground on the jack to the ground on the plug, just in case. Now everything works. And I’m stuck with a $50 tool.

Will M void your warranty if you splice your cable? No idea, but it sounds like something he would do. I do not care. I was willing to bet the $600 cost of the router and dish that I could splice my cable without ruining anything.

Today my wife was laughing like crazy because M was trying to charge people to use Twitter. I don’t look at the news, but I will make an exception to comment on this story.

As you probably know, but I barely do, Twitter has a caste system. There are verified users who have blue check marks next to their handles, and there are the lowly, unwashed users who have no check marks. My understanding is that people are so stupid and immature, they actually look down on folks who have no check marks. Junior high never really ends.

M said he wanted to charge Twitter brahmins $20 per month for check marks, which is reasonable, since a lot of them get paid, and they also feel like they’re cooler than everyone else. Kim Kardashian is said to receive seven figures for every slutty, vacuous tweet.

My wife says there has been a hilarious tweet battle between a bemused M and his sincerely enraged brahmins. They are saying M should be paying them to tweet. Hello? Who said this about Huffto about a billion years ago? Me. Ariana Huffington, in an action harking back to Tom Sawyer’s ploy to get his friends to paint the fence, got people to write content for nothing, and they thought it was a privilege.

Anyway, it sounds like billionaires and the nearly so, like Stephen King, are losing their minds over eight smackers a month.

I think M is making a mistake. Social giants can push conservatives, Christians, and other decent people around, because we don’t run the Internet or Silicon Valley. When Facebook or Twitter pushes us around, we can bluster and leave and form pathetic, doomed alternatives like MeWe. Truth, and Parler, but they never go anywhere. Liberals, on the other hand, created Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Instagram, Youtube, and the good Lord only knows what else, and they can create new giants. And Twitter isn’t going to be around forever. Social giants fail.

The conservative giants, or, more accurately, anemic midgets with peanut allergies, will all fail completely or remain unimportant. This is my bold prediction, which isn’t all that bold, because it’s already happening.

A new leftist giant might make it.

Some think Trump is the troll king, but M is on a far higher level.

Anyway, I can totally see M voiding my warranty over a splice. Go see what he has done to Tesla owners.

If you take my advice, you can splice your cable and avoid buying new proprietary cables and cutting large holes. And maybe your router will explode. I’m not an engineer. Anyway, I hope my advice helps.

Honey Doing

Starlink Junior, my slow version of Starlink, has worked out so well, I have dumped my old Internet provider.

I suppose I would have had the courage to make the break sooner had Starlink felt like including real instructions and some kind of user support. I didn’t know how to install the dish. I didn’t know how to rout the cable. I didn’t know how to tell if the dish was pointed the right way or located where it should be. Starlink gives you cartoon instructions and a terse app, but you have to figure a lot out by yourself.

Starlink is one of those companies that causes its customers to work harder by trying to shut them out of the technical side of things. It’s a bad approach. Real black boxes that do everything perfectly the second you pop them out of the UPS package are rare. My feeling is that Elon Musk thinks he has done all the thinking for us already, and frankly, he’s not that good. There are a lot of things he and his team have not thought of.

I had a Dish Network dish on my roof, so I put the Starlink dish on it, and I added an 8-foot pole from Ace Hardware. Starlink insisted I needed extremely clear horizons, so I thought I was going to have to get the dish as high as possible. My roof is irregular, and I’m surrounded by trees.

Today I took the pole out of the system and left the Starlink dish in the Dish dish mount, and it seems to work about the same. I don’t know what to make of it, but stabilizing the long pole will take some metalworking and carpentry, and I don’t want to continue working on these things if they’re a waste of time.

I decided to order a new J-mount (this is what you call a thing that holds a dish or antenna) and put it on my topmost roof section. Because of the geometry of my roof, this is actually a very easy place to install a J-mount. I don’t want to use the old J-mount because I would have to move it, and removing it could tear up the roof.

The new mount will go on the roof next to the edge. The cable will go over the edge and through a hole in the wall below the soffit, into the attic, unless I decide to put it through the roof. Going through the roof could be a problem, because I would have to seal the new hole, and it would see a lot of rain. A hole in the wall under the eave would never get wet, so caulk and a coax grommet should fix it easily.

I was not very familiar with the part of my attic where the cable will go, so I took a look. I had put it off because I was afraid of what I would see. Roof rot? A horrible space to work in? Dead roaches and rats? It turned out to be in great shape, well organized, with hardwired lighting and a convenient switch.

When my new mount comes, I’ll have to go up in there, work my way 30 feet to the south, grab the cable, and feed it to the location where the router will go.

My house has ethernet cables, but I have never used them. I have been able to get along without them, and also, I had my wireless router in a place where there was no port. Now that situation is changing. I want to connect my TV’s and computers to the wiring, and I want to revive the long-destroyed Cat5 wire to the workshop. I have a computer there, but I have to use my phone as a hotspot in order to get a connection.

I have to find out where the ethernet cables originally joined. There had to be a router somewhere. Then I can use an adaptor (I will resist “adapter” until people start writing, ‘rapter,’ ‘capter,’ ‘recepter,’ and ‘intercepter.”) to hook my dish up to the house wiring. This will give me the best possible speeds.

I don’t have to have perfection. If I could get 20 Mbps down and 10 real Mbps up every minute of the day, I’d be the happiest person on Earth.

Right now, speed tests say I get 6-120 Mbps down, but when I actually download things, the best I see is about 1.6. I suspect Musk is secretly throttling me because I’m not one of the cool kids in a real Starlink coverage area. If the router can get 100 Mbps, I ought to be able to do a lot better than 1.6 when I download a file. I don’t think the connection is the problem.

Starlink told me it wouldn’t have satellites set up for my area until next year, but apparently, that’s deceptive. They made it sound like they couldn’t give me high speeds without new satellites, but it looks like they can give me lots of speed, and they just don’t want to. Maybe speeding me up will slow the cool kids down.

Starlink isn’t the only thing I’m working on here. I’m getting a ton of stuff done. Jobs that used to intimidate me are falling like dominoes. I started out by fixing my shop, but now order is spreading to the house, as I almost didn’t dare hope it would.

I got my keychain rack made, and it’s a much bigger help than you would think. I cleaned out the freezer where ginger ale exploded. I put my bedroom in order. I started moving things from the dining room workshop to the real workshop. I blasted the house, including all the attics I can get to, with pesticide. For a long time, I couldn’t get the filters out of the range hood, and they were getting nasty, but yesterday, they came right out, and they went in the dishwasher. The laundry room and its closet are nearly in order. I got the burglar alarm upgraded to 4G. I’m getting flu and shingles vaccines tomorrow. Today I mixed salt and garlic into 5 pounds of ground chuck and turned it into patties, so now I have lunch waiting for me for the next 12 days.

I’ve taken a lot of annoying things to the dump. I started converting my storage room fluorescents to LED’s. I got a wireless printer.

I can’t remember all the other things I’ve done, but I can sure tell when I walk around the house.

Disorder bothers me now. I take pleasure in straightening things sitting on tables and counters, even though it doesn’t matter.

A few days ago, I was praying, and I heard, “Order my life,” over and over. I asked for it, of course. I’ve been praying prayers similar to that for years. It looks like the words came from God, because I can’t stop ordering this place.

My mother went through something similar when she was several years younger than I am. She started telling me how great it was to have everything in its place. She organized things for the first time in her life. Then she learned she had cancer, and she died.

The ordering I’m doing makes me wonder if God is preparing what I have for my wife’s arrival or for my departure. In April, I’ll be as old as my mother was when she died.

It’s wonderful to find out that things you think you heard from God really came from Him. It means you can trust what you hear in the future. It also helps you to be unified with Him.

In June, my wife had two visions, and one came true when Queen Elizabeth died. In the other vision, she saw Russia bombing Japan. I wonder if it will happen. A quick Google says Japan just expelled Russia’s ambassador, and relations are at a new low. Russia and Japan are still hashing out World War Two, and Russia has just abandoned peace talks. I don’t know much about Russia’s relationship with Japan, but things sound bad.

I love having order in my life. It’s not completely pleasant, finding yourself compelled to do things you used to put off luxuriously, but overall, it’s exciting. I hope it continues. I always say good habits are like slaves. They get things done for you, and they don’t cost anything.

Speaking of habits, I also heard, “Your habits are important.” I think about that when I’m about to put something off or do it badly. I feel that if I give in and let things slide, I’m spitting on something God gave me; a treasure. How many people get express advice from God? That’s not something to take for granted. Elon Musk and Bill Gates don’t get it. The president of the United States doesn’t get it. Famous musicians and Hollywood stars don’t get it. Nobel prize winners don’t get it. I get something only a tiny percentage of people get, and it’s something you can’t buy. If you could, the price would be astronomical. I have to take it seriously.

I believe whether I can hold onto my gifts and receive more depends a lot on how much my actions show how much I value them.

Tomorrow another big load goes to the dump, and I’m sure I’ll find several other fossilized obligations to move out of my own way.

Because I keep getting bogged down in things Rhodah could do if she were here, what I’m going through reminds me how good God’s plan for marriages is. The man handles certain things, and the woman handles others. I can take care of the shop and grounds, but I keep getting pulled backward by problems in the house. If Rhodah were here, she would deal with those things, and I would get my own work done much better, in much less time. She can’t wait to get here to run the house.

Feminism is filthy. It destroys our potential as couples and families. The benefits we get from women pursuing careers is trivial compared to what we lose by having God’s order in our homes destroyed. Thank God my wife has no interest in feminism. I look forward to the day when I don’t have to concern myself with housewife responsibilities.

Rising to the Occasion

The workshop is becoming more and more orderly and less dysfunctional every week. Can the rest of my life be far behind? The other day, I was praying, and I heard myself saying, “Order my life,” over and over. Yesterday or the day before, I heard, “Your habits are important.” Little words and phrases that come from God can make big changes in your life.

I bought myself a big ice cream maker with built-in refrigeration, and I also got a deep fryer and a Ronco rotisserie. As a result, my counters look like Fred Sanford’s yard. I started building a kitchen cart to hold these things, but I got distracted, possibly by the unexpected courtship that led to me marrying my wonderful wife. I had built most of the frame of the cart, but it sat and rusted after that.

Rust was never a problem in Miami. I was led to believe that things rusted quickly in warm, humid places, but the opposite is true.

Rust is caused by condensation more than above-average humidity. When you have sudden temperature swings, things that are cold collect water until they warm up. Then they rust. Sudden swings happen all the time in most of America, but the closer you get to the tropics, the rarer they are.

Where I live now, I have to cover bare iron up or spray it with greasy concoctions unless I want rust.

This week, I started working on the cart again, and I had to begin with about an hour of knocking rust off with an angle grinder and a paint-stripping wheel.

As of last night, I had the frame nearly done. I have to weld one more piece of tubing into it, and I also have to add two attachments to set one pair of wheels farther apart than the other two.

When I started working on this thing, I was under the impression it had to be very square. I was planning on welding 4 plate casters on the bottom, and if you have 4 wheels on a rigid object, and they’re not in exactly the same plane, the object will rock or one caster won’t touch the floor. I welded it up carefully, but it’s still off by almost 1/8″. Since starting the project, I have realized the answer isn’t perfect fabrication; it’s casters with stems.

A lot of products have casters or feet on threaded stems. The reason is that you can adjust their height to make up for small errors in the construction of the products.

Yesterday, I made three little pucks of steel, and I drilled and tapped them. I’m going to weld them into the bottom of the cart and use stem casters.

I have also learned that every 4-wheeled object should have one set of wheels that are farther apart than the others. Or closer together, if you look at it that way. A trapezoidal footprint makes it impossible for an object to rock. It can fall over, but it can’t rock back and forth, and rocking can lead to tipping. Also, increasing the length of one axle will make tipping harder even without considering rocking. It puts the center of gravity farther inboard from the wheels.

To increase the width of one set of wheels, I made these things out of 1″ by 3″ tubing:

I will weld them onto one pair of vertical tubes on the cart, and I’ll put the caster nuts I made in them, as far out as possible.

I have also replaced all the lights in my shop. LED’s are improving at a furious pace.

Where I used to have two relatively expensive 4000-lumen fixtures that were built in, I now have 4 3000-lumen jobs from Home Depot, wired to trusses. They cost me $17 each. They don’t have tubes, so they cost less. I can’t replace dead tubes when they go out, but the fixtures cost about the same amount of money as two tubes, so it doesn’t matter. I hardwired them pretty easily.

I had two somewhat dim 4-foot LED lights over three areas in the shop. I went to Harbor Freight and got three 5000-lumen replacements for $17 each. The quality appears to be about the same. China is China.

I bought my self 16 feet of white LED strip lighting, and I put it in my shelf complex.

These things come with an adaptor that plugs into one end. This is a problem if you want to have the adaptor and switch in the middle, along with a stretch that doesn’t give off light. If you run a strip through two cabinets, you don’t want light between the cabinets. I figured there had to be a way to splice them.

Turned out I was right. I put 42″ of wire between two 8-foot sections. Now the switch is where I want it to be, and I don’t have a useless strip of light running across the wall.

You can splice them with a soldering iron and shrink tubing. Look it up if you’re interested. It’s simple. They also make clips to splice LED strips, but people say they are unreliable.

I got the strip lights as a lark. They’re not a permanent solution. LED strips are pretty tacky if you can see them, and I can see mine. They’re best for indirect light, so the strips are concealed. They’ll do for now, though.

I got my smallest leaf blower running. It’s a tiny Husqvarna I’ve had since Miami. It would be worthless for cleaning up a yard, but it’s perfect for a workshop with big doors. At the end of a session, you vacuum up anything that can damage concrete (steel filings=rust stains), you fire the blower up, and you blow everything else out into the yard. My big electric blower would actually be better, but the Husqvarna is light and convenient, and it’s important to run small engines frequently because leftists have ruined the world with ethanol gas that kills carburetors and other parts.

I was thinking of putting up a second building, and I got an estimate. Now I want to make the most of my existing building first. To that end, I am considering building a loft and an elevator.

You would think putting an elevator in a workshop would cost thousands of dollars, but it doesn’t. An OSHA-approved elevator with all the bells and whistles would probably cost as much as a Cadillac, but you don’t need that kind of equipment in a home shop. You just need a platform that goes up and down without killing anyone.

Somebody came up with a way to combine a cheap winch, steel struts from Home Depot, rollers, and plywood to make an elevator that will move a person and maybe 350 pounds of stuff, depending on how fat the person is. I’ll embed a video chosen at random.

I had thought about building a loft, but a loft usually means stairs or a ladder. I am not going to carry things up a ladder, and stairs would take up maybe 30 square feet and make it hard to get around the shop. With an elevator, I can put things like a pressure washer or generator on the platform, get on with them, and ride up in comfort. An elevator would only take up maybe 12 square feet, and it would be against a wall, out of the way.

The added bonus of an elevator is that you can leave it about three feet from the floor and use it as a workbench.

If I had a loft, I could get some big things off the floor. I have a portable table saw, a pressure washer, and a sliding miter saw. I could also put shelves in the loft and use them for things that are rarely used but too good to throw out. Big jugs of machinery oil, for example.

My walls are only 12 feet high, so in order to get a reasonable height under the loft, I would have to make do with around 5 feet between the loft and the ceiling, but that’s a whole lot better than nothing, and I wouldn’t be playing basketball up there.

I would have to add a built-in ladder in case the power went out while I was up there, but that would take up almost no room.

It can be done. It has been done.

The only question is how big to make it. I’m thinking maybe 6 feet by 16. I don’t want to put a whole wall in the shade. If I change my mind, adding more loft space would be simple.

There are a lot of Youtube videos featuring shopmade elevators, and there is a lot of negativity in the comments. “Kids will hurt themselves.” “You’ll get your foot caught between the elevator and the stuff beside it.” “The cable will break, and you’ll fall.” A smart person put up the obvious response, saying shops are already full of dangerous things. A band saw can take a finger off in a hurry. Grinders can kill in an instant. A lathe can roll an arm up like a sock. Somehow these things are okay, but an elevator is too perilous? Not listening.

The fall hazard can be negated pretty easily. They make contraptions that catch things when they start to fall.

It looks like an elevator can be installed for well under a grand, and it’s not a really big job.

I may also build a shed. I can buy a little one for $600, but I would like to have one big enough to put the utility cart and garden tractor in when I’m using the shop. Just to keep the rain off. I think it would be a simple matter of installing 6 four-by-four poles with concrete slugs and running boards between them, with steel roof panels above.

When the loft and elevator are done, I can put in a split AC unit. I have until about mid-April to get that done. The weather should be acceptable until then. I’ll want a drywall ceiling with insulation, as well as an new insulated roll-up door and insulation for the conventional garage door.

That’s about all the shop news. If I go through with the loft plan, of course I’ll post photos.

Think I’ll go Fire up the 8-Track

I’m so old, I am even behind the times when it comes to hanging pictures on the wall. Technology has left me in the dust again.

The people who built this house put a coat rack in the entrance beside the door to the garage, but they were not smart enough to put up a keychain rack. I have three gates, several vehicles, two tractors, and a bunch of locking tool chests. I also have door openers and gate openers. I was not happy with the mess and the time I lost looking for things. I decided to make a rack.

I thought I would just go to Amazon and order a Chinese rack, but Amazon’s racks are not very good. Generally, they have 4 or 6 hooks. That wouldn’t even get me through my vehicles.

Back when I was in Miami, one of the few perks was free mahogany. Mahogany is native to South Florida. It was not introduced. The wood looks very good. There are tons of mahogany trees along the roads, and they fall over a lot, so it’s not unusual to find free logs in trash piles. This happened to me. I found a bunch of logs and cut short boards from them. I had no choice about the length. Tree trimmers don’t leave long logs.

I brought a few of the boards with me when I moved. I thought they would be nice for making boxes. A pretty box doesn’t need sturdy, uniform wood. It needs figured wood with lots of colors in it. That’s what I got.

I rummaged through the boards looking for something I could use to make a key rack, and I found an oddly-shaped piece that was highly figured and partially spalted. Spalting is rot, but it’s rot that doesn’t completely destroy the strength of the wood. It is often used in things like boxes.

I planed and jointed the board down to about 3/8″ in thickness, and I decided to use it as it was instead of cutting it up and using it in a fancy rack. As much as I hate Miami, I felt the board had history just as it was.

Ordinarily, I don’t like wood projects that are described as “rustic” or having “live edges.” I think these terms are excuses for laziness and lack of skill. But sometimes something looks better left alone.

I sanded it, applied Danish oil, and put 15 brass-plated hooks in it. Rack. All that was left was to hang it.

I didn’t want loops of wire sticking out above it where they could be seen, and I needed the rack to be held firmly to the wall. When you hang a picture, it doesn’t have to be held rigidly, but you don’t hang things on pictures. You have to touch a key rack, and if it moves while you’re fiddling with keys, it’s annoying, and it will swing and scratch the wall.

I decided to try Velcro. It would be hidden. It would hold the board firmly. I could put pieces up high and down low so the board would not be able to rock against the wall.

I put 4 little pieces of Velcro on the back, put the rack on the wall, and got to work redoing my keychains. While I was doing this, I heard a noise. The board had come loose. I tried pressing it against the wall harder, but a few minutes later it came loose completely and fell, knocking a chunk of spalted wood off.

Back to the shop.

I realized Velcro’s adhesive would not stick to Danish oil. It stuck to the wall just fine, to the point where I damaged the paint pulling Velcro off. On a board finished with Danish oil, it was a disaster waiting to happen.

I glued the missing chunk in, and it looked like it had never come loose. I went to the web and asked woodworkers for help.

Their answers were really bad. I think most of them were older than I am, and they had no idea how picture-hanging technology had changed.

One said to rout pockets in the back of the board and put little nail receptacles in them. This would hold the board up, but it would move around every time I touched the board.

Someone else suggested using a special router bit to cut keyhole-shaped recesses. These are hard to describe, but basically, one end of the recess is wide enough to let a nail’s head in, and the other end is skinny. You put the nail’s head in the big hole, and when your picture slides down due to gravity, the head is captured in the skinny end of the hole. Google it if you want to understand.

This would have been hard to do on a 3/8″ board, and I would have had to locate the nails in the wall very precisely, which is not easy. Then I would have had a relatively flimsy attachment which would have let the board move.

I started Googling, and I found out there are a bunch of new hanging systems. The 3M company has one called the Claw. It’s a flat piece of metal with two sharp points behind it. You push the sharp bits into the wall and hang your picture on the flat part. There are also tiny metal French cleats now. Look it up. It’s hard to explain. There is also a special Velcro system.

I decided to do it my own way. The problem was that the Velcro came off the board. I could fix that. I took the board and used acetone to remove the finish from parts of the back. Then I applied Velcro in 4 places. Then I stapled the Velcro to the board. Good luck peeling off now, Velcro.

The impact of my staple gun knocked another big piece of spalted wood off the board, bringing me close to cardiac arrest, but I found it and glued it back in.

The key rack is now back on the wall, loaded with keychains. I think it will be there when the sun dies. It’s easy to peel Velcro off if you pull perpendicularly to the surface it’s on, but peeling it by moving it sideways is basically impossible. The force on the Velcro is all parallel to the wall.

If you have stuff to hang on your walls, don’t do whatever you did 40 years ago. You are older and less hip than you think. Things you think happened three years ago happened during the last century. Certain shoes you think of as new are older than law school graduates. Go look up the new hanging technology. I didn’t use it, exactly, but I did something similar to it, and the old methods would have been unsatisfactory.

I hope the rack doesn’t fall off during the night, forcing me to come back and admit failure.

Of course, if I never told you, you would never find out.

It’s looking good right now.

God has helped me bring order to my shop, and I have been hoping it would spread to the house. Maybe it will.

How to Make an $800 Product Cost $1000 and Fail Sooner

Today I’m here to roast Bosch.

The Bosch company makes a lot of nice stuff, and I should know, because I own a lot of it. Big router. Hammer drill. Demo hammer. Bits. Two angle grinders. Sometimes, though, they really blow it.

My first angle grinder was a small Bosch, around 4 amps. It ran fine, and they gave it a nice long cord the way tool manufacturers should. The problem is that the cord disintegrated.

I don’t know what kind of faux rubber they put on the cord, but it started cracking at the boot next to the tool, and latitudinal cracks eventually appeared from one end to the other.

I bought a new Bosch cord, which was surely a mistake. It’s probably as bad as the old one. I didn’t install it for a long time because the old one was hanging in there. And because Bosch, in its wisdom, used a combination of Phillips screws and Torxes.

Torxes fall into the category of tamper-proof fasteners. Tamper-proof fasteners are used on things like Coke machines to keep people from getting into them. Here’s the thing, Bosch: REPAIRING MY OWN TOOLS ISN’T TAMPERING.

At least it wasn’t a second-tier tamper-resistant Torx.

A Torx is bad enough, because you have to buy bits or drivers to turn it. A second-tier tamper-resistant Torx is worse because the fastener has a little nipple in the bottom of the hole, and it pushes your driver out every time you push it in. The other day, I took apart a DeWalt product that had these things in it.

People like to make excuses for companies that use Torxes. They say they’re for ease of assembly. No, they’re really not. At least not the tamper-resistant kind. They don’t stick to a driver any better than a regular Torx. Companies use them to discourage people like you and me from fixing our products. They want us to throw them out or pay for repairs.

I now have just about every known type of tamper-resistant fastener bit. I have so many, the cops should have me on a list. I can open an iPhone, a tablet, a Dewalt battery charger…don’t try me. Companies that use these things didn’t stop me. They just made me waste money. And they made me more dangerous.

I can’t even guess what it would have cost me to send the angle grinder to a repair center. Probably more than I paid for it.

I finally stuck the new cord in there, and if it falls apart, too, I’ll go to Home Depot, buy a quality extension cord that will last 100 years, and stuff it into the angle grinder.

Second Bosch fail: my dishwasher. Overall, it’s okay, except that Bosch has decided I’m not supposed to have dishes or pots over a certain size. Ziss is not necessary, ja? My old Whirlpool or whatever it was would let you wash an ottoman if you felt like it. To use the Bosch, I had to buy a set of new plates. You can probably guess what brand my next dishwasher won’t be.

Anyway, plates: $40 at Bed Bath & Beyond. Dishwasher: $800. No contest.

Good dishwashers have latches. They have hinged handles. To open a good dishwasher, you pull the handle up, the latch opens, and you’re in. My Bosch has a motionless handle built into the top panel that runs across the door. You pull the handle, putting lots of strain on the panel, until something in the dishwasher gives.

A couple of years back, the handle started to rip from the tremendous force I had to apply to it. The plastic was about two millimeters thick, so no wonder it gave.

I could not buy a handle by itself. It was molded into the control panel. I looked the part up, and the best I could do was well over a hundred dollars. This part probably costs 5 dollars to make.

No, probably less. You can buy much heavier plastic products for $7, retail. This panel probably cost less than two bucks to make.

I got myself a type of JB Weld made for structural repairs to plastic. This stuff sticks to plastic very well, and it’s hard and tough. I took the panel off the dishwasher, pried off everything that was in my way, pressed the torn part back together, and pumped in a bunch of JB Weld to make it impossible for the rip to get bigger. I’ll post a photo.

This worked great until this summer. Then the panel ripped in three other places. Parts came completely loose and fell off.

This is the problem with strengthening bad products. When you reinforce an area that has failed, often, you’re just sending the problem to another area that hasn’t been reinforced. The reinforced area will hold up just great, so the flimsy bits will yield. Put a stiff boot on to protect your ankle, and when you stumble, you’ll rip your knee apart because your ankle can’t move. That’s the principle.

I managed to find a new panel for $80. Today I took the old one out, found the places where it ripped, and applied globs of JB Weld to the new one in the same areas. I have the toughest Bosch dishwasher control panel on Earth. It’s probably the only one which is really adequate.

I knew the new panel would be garbage, and it would fail just like the old one. I fixed it so it would fail much, much later.

I have a Hercules angle grinder from Harbor Freight. This is not a snooty Germany company like Bosch. Harbor Freight is a budget tool seller, and Hercules is its top line of budget tools. The grinder is magnificent. If you open it up, you will find very thick glass-reinforced plastic. I think I paid $59. Why can’t Bosch put 3/16″-thick plastic in an expensive dishwasher? Why is there no glass in the dishwasher panel?

I think I paid $78 for the Bosch grinder with the bad cord. It had a motor, heavy steel gears, a tough case, a complicated switch, a guard…how can a crummy, embarrassingly bad dishwasher panel cost the same amount?

The Hercules grinder’s case will last forever. It is nearly indestructible. Same thing goes for a lot of my power tools. Probably even Bosch tools. The Bosch angle grinder looked very tough inside.

The Hercules grinder has a really nice cord, Bosch. I will probably never be able to buy a replacement cord, because it’s Harbor Freight, but then I won’t need one.

Bosch can make a drill with a tough case, but somehow they can’t make a dishwasher with a glass-reinforced handle thicker than two millimeters. No, they made a choice, and the choice looks like an obvious effort to limit the lifespan of an otherwise-durable product.

Meanwhile, they’re probably playing the green game in their ads and on their website. Yes, I’m looking at it now. “Carbon neutral” since 2020. As if it were really possible to be carbon neutral. The whole idea is a farce. Fly your private jet to St. Bart’s for the weekend, but plant two banana trees in Madagascar. No, sorry. The correct thing, if you actually care about carbon, is to plant the trees and skip St. Bart’s.

Making dishwashers that last 5 years instead of 15 years is not green, Bosch. Throwing out a perfectly good dishwasher with a bad handle is not green.

I guess all the big manufacturers are hypocrites. I just bought a new washer for a tenant because the company that made the old one decided to quit making timers. The company is Hotpoint, which is General Electric, which is Haier, which is Chinese. The Chinese own General Electric now. Nice. I’ll know the end is here when they buy Coca-Cola and Harley-Davidson.

Haier has a bunch of stuff on its site about how it loves the environment. I’m totally convinced. The environment loves it when you stop making a $20 timer so you can sell a new $600 washer.

I guess I’m blowing the lid off major stories here. “Blogger Learns Company Makes Bad Products Intentionally.” “Florida Man Shocked to Find Hypocrisy Among Green Corporations.” I’ll probably be contacted by major news organizations. No one saw these scoops coming.

Don’t be afraid to improve products you own. You may be a better engineer than you think. There are lots of really bad engineers out there, and there are lots of products that are bad because of accounting decisions. Sometimes a tube of glue or a couple of new wires can make a product way better than it was when it left the factory.

I’m not afraid to wash dishes now. Fear is gone. Now I’m back to plain old laziness. Hooray.