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.

I Get It

I have more input on Starlink Junior, my new ISP.

I put the dish up last week, and I have been doing speed tests. I put the dish in my old Dish dish mount, and then I rigged up a dubious pole to raise the dish another 8 feet.

Sometimes my download speed goes up to around 60 megs. Usually, it’s closer to 10. It has tested as low as three. The high figures are way better than anything I get from AT&T, the company from which my old connection was bought. The low figures aren’t much worse than the performance AT&T provides when things aren’t going well. AT&T doesn’t seem to like heavy rain.

Uploads with Starlink are pretty bad. I have seen 15 Mbps, but I think three is more typical.

I still think I’ll hold onto Starlink. It should improve, and the more time I spend online, the more it seems smoother and more reliable than AT&T. The old upload speeds I got were pathetic, so Starlink uploading doesn’t seem like a downgrade.

Musk needs to provide more help with locating dishes. They should send people out to look around. I have to guess where to put the dish. The phone app that detects obstructions doesn’t really work.

Should I turn my dish a little to the right or left? I don’t know. Should I put it on the other side of the house? Should I buy a 50-foot tower?

The Starlink stuff is like the monoliths in 2001. You can’t ask it questions. It just sits there and does what it wants. No explanations. No manual.

I feel like I bought an Apple product or a German car. “SHUT UP! We do the thinking for you! It’s good enough for you!”

Starlink somehow relies on cell networks to do uploads. I can’t find good information on how this works. At first, I thought maybe it was downloading straight from satellites and uploading to local cell towers, but that can’t be right, because Speedtest tells me it’s uploading to places like Gainesville and Atlanta. It appears I am sending uploads to space, and from there they go to ground stations. If this is true, then why are uploads so slow?

Is my little dish too weak to shoot a good signal up to the motherships, or are the motherships slow when they shoot my data down to the ground stations? No idea.

Speaking of German cars, my friend Mike continues to have fun with the Mercedes lemon he bought.

This thing has been going into “limp mode” for something like a year, for no discernible reason. Mercedes dealerships can’t figure it out. He has spend a lot of money on parts. Right now, he’s visiting New Hampshire, and he has no car because the wiring caught fire.

They’re telling him he may need a new wiring harness, and the cost would be $20,000. For wires. The car only cost him $27,000. He doesn’t know the whole story, because the dealership that has the car won’t get to it until Tuesday. Is it possible to get a wiring harness during Biden’s reign of inflation and shortages? No idea. What if they have to keep the car a month?

He took a trailer with him. He was going to fill it with his belongings and bring it down here. If the work takes a month, what happens to the trailer? And where is he supposed to stay?

I do not like German cars. They are as overrated as Wonder Woman and The Black Panther. They are very unreliable, working on them is a nightmare, and parts are astoundingly expensive.

I don’t know why people think the Germans are good at engineering. They’re not. They do a very good job of making things that don’t work. Making things cute and clever and pretty is only part of engineering. The primary goal is to make them practical, so German engineers are not very good, regardless of how impressive their products are when they work.

This is not new. Porsche lost the contract for the Tiger tank. Another company built a competing prototype, and Porsche’s prototype–a hybrid (seriously)–broke down and got stuck during the trials. The competitor offered to use its tank to pull the Porsche free.

Oh, yeah. There is no substitute.

Daimler-Benz made the Panzer, and it helped lose the war for the Germans because it was always in the shop. I’m not kidding. Look it up. When Panzers broke down, they were a nightmare to fix, but a tank crew could replace a Sherman engine in the field in a few hours. Shermans ran. The disparity is one reason we were able to field more tanks. People say the Panzer was better than the Sherman, but Shermans obliterated a whole lot of Panzers, as did Soviet T-34’s. Allied tanks proved better in terms of winning wars.

Incidentally, it’s not true that Shermans burned easily. It’s a myth. And the crew of a burning Sherman could escape in less than 5 seconds. To get out of a burning Panzer, you had to fill out forms, have them stamped by the local burgermeister, mail them to Berlin…well, not really, but it took a very long time, so you were just about certain to be burned to death.

The Japanese do better than the Germans. The Germans will never be able to match Toyota engineering. A Porsche can go around the Nurburgring faster, but the Toyota will go around it 23,000 times with basic maintenance, and the Porsche will be lucky to complete 5 laps.

Mike’s battery died the other day, and I helped him replace it. Guess where they put it? Under the passenger seat. You can’t fully expose the battery hole without removing the seat. Mercedes didn’t put a strap on the battery to lift it out of the hole, so there was no way to grip it. We had to cut slits in the carpet to move it. No joke.

I replaced two batteries in my big Dodge in less time.

Maybe I’ve written about the Mercedes before. Can’t recall. I really do not like German cars.

Another friend of mine bought a used Mercedes, and she liked it because it was cheap. Then it needed a trivial repair, and she couldn’t afford it. The parts cost too much.

This, incidentally, is why you don’t buy a $5000 vintage Bentley.

Or any BMW Mini Cooper.

If German cars were any good, they would hold their value, and they don’t. Mike’s car had low miles when he bought it, and his $70,000 vehicle only cost $27,000. What does that tell you? I can get most of what I paid for my diesel Dodge, and I bought it in 2009, 13 years ago. It has three times the mileage it came with. Doesn’t matter.

It’s worth a lot more than Mike’s $70,000 2014 diesel Mercedes with lower mileage. Think about that.

Musk needs to communicate with customers. Oddly, by making Starlink a product that does everything itself, he has made it necessary for customers to do things they shouldn’t have to do.

I found out about splicing the Starlink cable. It’s just standard Cat5 data cable, covered in a rubber sheath and imprisoned in Musk’s cruel proprietary connectors.

It’s really dumb. If Musk had done things right, he would have used plain old Cat5 connectors and made things easier for everyone. No, in a quest for needless control, he made his own connectors, which are probably patented so no one can sell them cheaper except the Chinese.

Because of what he did, running a cable through a wall requires a 1″ hole instead of a 1/4″ hole.

Or does it?

Being a clever person, I am not afraid to cut Musk’s cable and splice it myself. You just sever it and put your own Cat5 connectors on the cut ends. You can’t connect it to the dish or router without modifying them, but you can run it right through a 1/4″ hole, and you can add all the length you want. You can even cut into existing cables already present in your house.

Take that, Tesla Boy.

If you want to know how to splice Starlink cable, go to Youtube and find out.

I already have the things I need to do my splicing, so I’m going to cut the cable and run it through my obsolete cable TV hole.

I don’t know of any way to hardwire the router to my existing Ethernet wiring, but I’ll be looking into it. Wireless everything is inferior to hardwired everything. Wireless connections are a downgrading concession to reality. If hardwiring were always practical, no one whose data and speed were important would have any interest in wireless.

If you could put a wire on your phone, your calls would never drop, and your speeds would be incredible.

I installed my first wireless printer yesterday, which is why I posted a crabby rant about new tech products. The installation should have taken 10 minutes, but Brother turned it into a painful ordeal lasting over an hour.

Anyway, one less cable to deal with, and now I can scan things without going to my office.

Brother put a ridiculous password on my printer, and I had to use it more than once. I had to turn the printer over, put on my reading glasses, read the tiny password label, and transcribe the password to a file so I wouldn’t have to turn the printer over any more.

Here is my printer password: password. Want to hack it? Knock yourselves out. I wanted to forgo a password or use “1,” but [Big] Brother wouldn’t let me.

If you can get close enough to my house to get a printer signal, you can print whatever you want, but don’t forget that wireless range is a lot smaller than rifle or pistol range, and you will be well within Florida’s open-season-on-trespassers radius.

I can bury you in 10 minutes. I have a tractor.

It’s time to go ahead and do the splice so I can shut my upstairs window and run the Starlink cable through a hole. Then I’ll probably find out I put the dish on the wrong side of the house.

So Let it be Written, so Let it be Done

I do not want to sign up for your cool updates and offers, especially when you sign me up without permission. When I am forced to opt out, I do not want to be asked why I left. Please don’t tell me you’re sorry to see me go. No human being was ever aware I was there in the first place.

I do not want to be part of your cool new community, or worse, “family,” and neither does anyone else. I do not want to interact with you or other users. I do not want other users to know I exist.

If people wanted to associate with you, they would have talked to you when you were in high school, which they did not, because you are nerds.

I do not want a password on the hardware you sold me. I do not care if someone hacks into my Gopro or wireless printer. If your stupid software insists on a password, do not tell me what kind of password it has to be. Allow me to use “1,” which is my all-time favorite. Please do not put a long, complicated initial password with a lot of numbers and capital letters on the product you sold me and then put the password on a tiny label on the bottom of the product in microprint.

Please do not print your serial numbers in fonts only an ant can read.

Please put your software on disks (in the box) AND online, don’t even think about charging me for downloading it, do not put a bunch of junk in it no one wants, and do not make me fill out any forms in order to get it.

Include all the necessary cables. Seriously, what’s wrong with you?

Do not force me to upgrade my firmware or software before using the product. I don’t care if it understands the latest emojis or gets along well with Tiktok. Last year’s stuff is fine.

If your product is a printer, do not write your software so it tries to sell me your toner cartridges and lies and says they’re better than the other ones. I do not want the $100 cartridges. I want the $17 cartridges from China which work just as well, and I am willing to hack your printer in able to use them, because using someone else’s toner isn’t stealing.

Do not include “lite” software which does not work but hits me with ads for the real software I have to pay extra for.

Do not cover your package with ridiculous bragging about how green it is. I do not care. It’s going to the same dumpster, where I will mingle the plastic, styrofoam, cardboard and staples without remorse. For all I care, you can spray your boxes with dioxin and use plutonium staples along with cellophane that has been rubbed all over Ebola patients. Just get your product to me without damage.

Just knock it off, okay? Just sell me what I want, make it quick to start using it, and buzz off.

Dishing on Starlink

I feel like updating my Starlink experience.

Today my dish arrived, and as I wrote earlier, I was not as thrilled as I hoped to be when I first gave Elon Musk my deposit. The price had gone up, the promised speed had gone way down, the arrival of faster speeds had been pushed way back, and the installation turned out to be a pain.

Since then, I have fired Starlink up, and I believe I will keep it. I’m not sure yet, but it looks like Starlink Junior, the version I have, is somewhat better than my old wireless system, and it’s cheaper.

When you open the Starlink box, you get two things that matter. The dish and the router. The dish has a cord 75 feet long, and it has molded-in plugs on both ends, so you can forget about splicing it. I think. You plug your router into the wall, plug the dish into the router, and wait.

The only instructions are 4 cartoons on the packaging material, so if you think I’m oversimplifying the instructions, you are wrong. When I say “cartoons,” I mean one-panel cartoons. And there is no text to speak of.

Before you choose a location for the dish, you’re supposed to start the phone app and use it to take video of the sky above. How this is supposed to tell Starlink anything useful, I don’t know. I moved the phone around a lot while I was doing it. I can’t imagine what Starlink thought. The purpose of the exercise is to determine whether you have too many obstructions for the signal to get through.

Using the phone takes a long time, and Starlink doesn’t tell you how you’re supposed to hold the phone over your head without getting tired. It also doesn’t tell you how to know when you’re done without holding the phone over your head. The camera has to point at the sky, so you have to be under the phone to read the app, and the app is what tells you you’re finished.

I stuck the dish next to the pool. I had read that it would want a desert-like location with no features other than flat horizons. Figuring that was BS, I decided to try the worst but most convenient location first. If it worked well enough by the pool, I would leave it there.

Of course, it worked poorly, so I climbed out an upstairs window, removed my Dish dish with primitive tools, and hurled it down into the yard. I stuck the Starlink dish in the pole it had occupied, with no real attachment. If a bird sits on it, it will move.

When I went inside and turned on the PC to see if I had a new network showing up, Starlink sort of took over and sent me to a page that did what the phone app was supposed to do, except for the video stuff. I learned I had a new network named “Stinky.”

Really? Is that a good joke, coming from a man named Musk?

I changed the name of the network to something like Trump-o-rama and started trying to use the web.

Since then, I have used an Internet speed test a few times, and my downloads are ranging between 8 and 55 megs. That means they’re way better than my old system when they’re fast, and they’re about the same when they’re bad.

Uploads are not quite as exciting. Sometimes they’re a lot better than they used to be, but I have gotten figures as low as 0.25 megs. Maybe I’ll only be able to upload Youtubes when the wind is blowing the right way.

We are having wonderful dry weather, but fortunately, it rained today, and I was still able to use Starlink, so there’s one question answered.

I went to Ace Hardware and got eight feet of galvanized tubing. For some reason, tubing for fences costs $30 at Home Depot and $17 at Ace. I modified it so it could be attached to my old Dish dish mount, and I’m in the process of painting it with truck bed coating. That will look marginally better than bare zinc. I plan to add 8 feet to the height of the dish, and I’ll fasten it to the pole with hose clamps.

Elon, or as I call him, Stinky, decided not to make his cables spliceable, so it looks like running them into the house will require holes as big as the plugs. I haven’t found a way to cut a cable, thread it through a small hole, and reattach it. Right now, the plan is to try to use the old Dish hole. I haven’t seen it yet because I don’t want to lie on my back on the roof in the rain, but I’m hoping it’s big enough to take Stinky’s plug.

All in all, things look promising. If upload speeds can be improved by raising the dish, I will be all set.

What Stinky has done is extremely impressive, regardless of the little issues. A lot of people around the world can now open a box, run an app, and have acceptable or possibly excellent Internet coverage in an hour or two. This is now possible in places where Internet coverage didn’t exist before Stinky. If you don’t think it’s impressive, consider all the huge corporations that have utterly failed where he has succeeded. They didn’t even see the need for his kind of system.

He’s going to murder Hughes. Their systems don’t perform as well, and getting help from the their customer service has been compared to trying to text the pope.

He should make a better effort to communicate with customers. That would be helpful.

I’m not sure about the non-spliceability of the cables. I’m checking it out. If it turns out splicing is possible, the odds I will return my dish will go down like Stinky’s estimates of my download speeds.

Nearly Almost not Exactly

I thought my enthusiasm for blogging was over, but I still feel the urge to amuse myself sometimes, so here I am.

Today’s big news: my Starlink transceiver thing is supposed to arrive today, and I already want to send it back. Tesla’s reputation for customer sensitivity is already proving true.

I know Tesla isn’t Starlink, but it’s a different arm of the same squid.

When I heard about Starlink, I got all excited. When I moved here, my Internet speeds went down to about 1.5 megs. No joke. Then I got a wireless hookup and went to around 9 megs, which seemed like a dream come true. The cost is $149 per month, which is insane, but consider what cable and a landline would cost. It amazes me that anyone would pay more than $50 for cable. I wouldn’t have it if it were free. I think my dad used to pay over $200 per month. So he could see the last 15 minutes of every bad movie over and over on 8 different channels that played the exact same things.

Starlink promised very fast speed for $99 per month, with a setup fee that was, I think, $400. And it was right around the corner. Elon was working, working, working, like a busy little techno-bee, trying to get Starlink to my area. It would be there in 2022. No question.

I put down my deposit and waited.

So far, every promise has proven to be false.

With no prior notice or consent, Starlink raised the monthly price to $110. I believe they charged me a new, increased price for the setup kit, but I’m not sure. I am too lazy to check. It doesn’t matter, because they have a monopoly. I have to pay.

They said the stuff would get here yesterday. It’s arriving today.

Why is it here? Because they sent me an email letting me know they had broken another promise. Starlink’s promised speeds will not be available until mid-2023, which really means early 2024 in the Muskverse. The email said I could opt into a program for people who were willing to pay the full price for Starlink Junior. Having no choice, I opted in. I will have Starlink, but speeds will be lower, and there may be throttling. An act that came to mind when I read that Starlink was going to be a year late.

Starlink’s website doesn’t tell you anything about setting the service up. They just tell you to pay up and wait.

With the kit on the way, I have been Googling for Starlink installation information, and the news I have gotten has been uniformly bad.

Like Dish and Hughes, Starlink uses satellites, so you get a dish. It has motors on it, and you set it outside and tell it to look for satellites. The problem is that Starlink’s dish is kind of a snowflake. Even though my dish will probably decide to point north, it supposedly needs a clear horizon all around it. This is something I, and many other rural people, will never have.

It has to be outdoors. They didn’t mention that. It may have to be on a pole. I may have to drill a hole in my house.

I live in a tropical storm area, so you can imagine the confidence I have in a satellite dish on a tall, skinny pole. Which I didn’t know I was supposed to buy.

I have an old Dish dish. The people who built the house left it. I told a roofer to remove it twice, and they screwed up both times. I was not happy about this, but it may turn out to be a blessing, because it’s on the south side of a roof, and it already has a hole for a cable. I should be able to rip the Dish dish off the little pole and put the Starlink dish on it. The big question is whether it will pick up a signal.

Guess I’ll find out.

If the Dish dish pole doesn’t work, I may send the Starlink dish back. My Internet service is bad, but it’s tolerable. It beats doing a major construction project to find a place where I can get a signal. My nearest big, flat area is over 100 yards away. I would have to fence the dish in to keep the cattle out, and how would I get the signal from the dish to the house?

Here’s a question. If Starlink can increase the price by $11 per month before I even get started, what will it be 6 months from now? There is no contract, and there is no price guarantee.

The whole thing reminds me of Tesla and Apple. You want to be one of the cool kids, you pay the price, and you defend the mothership. Tesla actually punishes people who disparage its products and practices. Maybe they’ll go after me if they see this blog post.

I hope it works. Other people who have Starlink Junior are saying it’s still worlds better than what they used to have.

The system will pay for the change in under two years if it works. Well, that doesn’t include installation costs, but anyway, it will eventually pay off. I don’t know what Starlink gives you if you send the dish back. Something, I hope. The Muskoids do as they please.

In other news, my wife and I have to go to Singapore and Hong Kong. The Czech Republic won’t even look at our visa application.

We provided them with more information than I have ever given anyone in my life, except for other unreasonable governments trying to keep Africans out. They had our bank statements. They had Rhodah’s wedding ring appraisal. They had our marriage license and certificate. Previous visas. You name it.

They turned us down because they insist on having Rhodah’s original marriage certificate, which is in a pile of papers somewhere upstairs. In America.

The implication is that if we could have provided the certificate, they would have let her in. I’ll go out on a very sturdy limb and call that a lie. They know we’re married. They can contact the court clerk and get proof. They’re just looking for a way to keep an African out. If I spent $160 to send her the certificate, which is about what it costs to mail anything to Zambia, they would reject her application for another reason.

I don’t want to go to the Far East. I don’t like Far Eastern culture. In some of the better-known countries, it’s cruel and mechanical compared to Western culture.

Starlink is here. Time to see what’s what.

If You Can See Your Floor, You’re Okay

Looks like today will be a day of waiting and preparation. Waiting for my burglar alarm company to show up and give me 4G. Waiting for the wife to call after some errands. I was also supposed to be waiting for Elon Musk to show up with a package from Starlink, his rural Internet company, but it looks like he will be dropping by tomorrow. I assume he drives the trucks personally.

Non-Tesla gasoline- and diesel-powered trucks, but let’s not go there.

While I’m sitting here, I’m admiring my new Doyle precision pliers and thinking about admitting I’m a tool collector.

I have a drawer full of pliers and other hinged tools. Side cutters. Scissors. A tool for making fishing leaders with heavy mono and cable. Stuff like that.

I have two shops. Obviously, there is the big one in the detached building. I also put a bench, a table, shelves, and a fair assortment of tools in my former dining room. Who wants to walk to the big shop every time something needs fixing?

I am forcing myself to confront the fact that the dining room needs to be reclaimed. As great as it is to have a dining room full of tools, I am duplicating things more than I should, and I have difficulty deciding which tool goes in which shop. I guess I should also mention the fact that my wife will probably want a dining room.

Should I put the second-tier stuff indoors, or should I put the good stuff there because it will never rust? Should I put all the electronics stuff indoors because doing electronics indoors just feels right, or should I put it in the big shop because sometimes electronics work involves tools I don’t want to put in the house?

I have to figure out what to do with my small pliers.

Around 28 years ago, I started buying a few tools, and I assumed Craftsman and Stanley had to be wonderful because I had heard the names so often. I got myself two pairs of Stanley needle nose pliers. I got a small pair and a tiny pair.

Tool people like me are always looking for the best manufacturers. It’s hard to resist becoming a snob. I now know that Stanley wasn’t always making great tools back when I got my pliers. I have looked for better ones. But the tiny Stanleys are wonderful. The jaws meet up correctly, I have never managed to damage them, they cut whatever I want to cut, and because the jaws are very long and skinny, they will do stuff a lot of pliers won’t do.

I wanted a similar pair so I could have the same great experience in both shops. I couldn’t get old Stanleys, and I don’t trust the new ones.

I found out it’s not simple buying needle nose precision pliers. A lot of them come without cutters or jaw serrations. Smooth jaws are supposed to avoid marring work. Needle nose pliers without cutters seem inadequate to me, but once I learned they existed, I figured they had to exist for a reason, therefore I needed them.

What did I end up buying? One pair of Pro American pliers. Three pairs of Harbor Freight Doyle pliers. Two pairs of Engineer pliers from Japan. So I have 6 new pairs of small pliers now. This does not include my larger Channellock, DeWalt, Icon, and Stanley long nose pliers. It doesn’t include my water pump pliers, my Knipex adjustable pliers, my Engineer and DeWalt dikes, my non-marring Japanese pliers…

Engineer makes Vampliers which are sold in America at inflated prices. The Japanese versions are exactly the same except for labeling and colors, and they cost a lot less.

Vampliers are made to pull and turn fasteners that are hard to grip. They have weird jaws full of edges and points, and they will grab nearly anything. You may have seen them in TV commercials. They really work, but there is no point in paying the American price.

I bought Engineer needle nose plies with smooth jaws as well as long nose pliers with cutters and serrations. The long nose pliers aren’t as needly.

I decided to try the Doyle pliers because Harbor Freight now makes some really excellent tools, and many are pretty cheap. I wanted to see if Doyle products were any good.

It’s not accurate to say Harbor Freight makes them. I don’t think they make anything. At least in some cases, when you buy Harbor Freight pliers with different names on them, you’re buying things made by different companies. In a way, then, Doyle may be a completely legitimate brand, as is Quinn, their next step down.

Harbor Freight sells Icon now, and Icon is supposed to be their answer to Snap-On. I decided to buy myself two big pairs of extended pliers to see what they were like. I’m not all that impressed. They seem sturdier than Chinese pliers from Home Depot, but the metal finishing is somewhat clumsy. Snap-On gets a lot of mileage out of the appearance of its tools, so to compete with Snap-On, you should make tools with nice finishes.

The Doyle pliers are a nice surprise. The fit and finish are very nice. They seem reasonably hard. The steel doesn’t scratch easily. They work smoothly. They have springs. The cutters close correctly.

One pair has one jaw that seems a little larger than the other, as though a grinding procedure wasn’t completed as well as it could have been, but it doesn’t affect the way the pliers work.

For 12 bucks or whatever, the set seems like a real bargain. One pair of Engineer pliers runs around 17 dollars. Engineer pliers are meticulously finished, but I don’t think they will work better.

I ordered an old pair of 5″ Pro-America pliers from Ebay just to see what they were like. Pro-America is supposedly a company that has done most of its business with the government, so most people don’t see their tools often. It’s also called Kal Tool. People say their tools are very nice. I thought a tool from a company like that would be an interesting curiosity.

I have quit trying to justify my pliers and other hand tool buys. The truth is, I just like having them. People collect a lot of stupid things, so why not collect tools, which are useful? I plan to keep buying whatever seems interesting, whether I really need it or not.

I can’t figure out what to do with my electronics stuff. If I move it to the workshop, I will have to find a way to store it. I have a power source, a powered breadboard, a couple of meters, two soldering irons, a bunch of leads, a ton of components, surgical clamps, two oscilloscopes, and probably other things I can’t think of right now.

This leads to an inevitable question: do I buy a SEVENTH rolling tool chest?

I’ve been watching shop organization videos, and I learned something interesting: storing things on walls or in the open is stupid.

This is heresy in tool circles. People love putting up pegboard and hanging their tools on it. They like drawing little tool outlines to show them where to put things. They like French cleats. I don’t care. It’s stupid.

If you hang things on your wall, you end up with several problems.

1. You take up many times as much space as you would if you used boxes.
2. You kill your wall space, so kiss shelves goodbye.
3. Your stuff gets dirty and rusty because it has no protection.
4. You have to do a lot of walking to get to things.
5. You can forget about moving your tools when you want to. You can’t roll a wall around.

My shop has two great big walls and 4 smaller ones. The doors eliminate a lot of wall space. If I were to take the stuff from one box and try to put it on the walls, I would lose an entire large wall. That’s dumb. Walls are the best places for shelves.

If I used the wall, A lot of my tools would be 20 feet or more away from my main bench. That makes no sense.

It’s also dumb to put things right where you can grab them, uncovered, unless you really need to. Dust and crud will fall on them. They may get damaged when things fly around the shop. They make the shop look disorderly. If you have 10 tools you use over and over, having them out all the time is great, but the rest should be in boxes.

Boxes and shelves are the skyscrapers of workshops. They multiply what you can do with limited square footage.

Right now, I have two boxes full of my most useful tools within 5 feet of my bench. If I need a tool, I turn around, open a drawer, and take it out. No walking. No getting on a stool to reach something 8 feet up on the wall. No reaching around the chests or freestanding tools to get at things behind them.

Resist the urge to cover your walls with tools. If you own more than 20 pounds of hand tools, you will regret putting them on the wall.

I have some things on my walls, and I have some other things hanging on the fronts of shelves, but I am determined to minimize that stuff.

Here’s another helpful suggestion: use drawer organizers, but don’t buy the ones they sell in stores. They cost a lot, they take up a lot of room, they weigh a lot, and they force you to do things their way.

I found a great video about organizing wrenches. Many wrenches come with special plastic trays that have little arms that hang onto them. The trays put the wrenches an inch or so apart, and you can’t put additional spots in the trays. Bad. The video showed how you can buy solid wire and turn it into wrench organizers that will take any configuration you like. I’ll post it.

I put 17 wrenches in a wire loop organizer I made, and suddenly, a drawer that had been full of wrenches was more like 1/3 full. The wrenches were arranged by size, making them easy to find, and unlike plastic organizers, the loops didn’t force me to yank wrenches loose. They come right out.

Wire is not cheap right now, but it’s not prohibitively expensive, either, and you can save money by buying romex, stripping it, and using the individual wires. I’ve spent $30, and I don’t think I’ll need to spend more soon.

Ever wondered why tool chest drawers can hold 100 pounds each? Now you know. If you organize, you can get a lot of mass into a drawer.

Now, what about tool chest drawer liners?

This is a sore spot with me.

Tool chests have to have liners. Period. Tools slide around on metal, and they remove the paint and cause rust. Then you have dirty rusty tools in your hands all day. You need liner material that provides cushioning, wears well, doesn’t accumulate debris, and won’t eat plastic.

Yes, some tool drawer liners eat plastic. One of the most popular liner materials is a foam product that looks sort of like a mat woven from 3/16″ black rubber cords. Like many rubbery products, it’s made with one or more solvent. When you put certain types of plastic on it, the solvent or solvents dissolves the surface of the plastic and leave a picture of the pattern of the liner material.

You should be able to line a typical 26″-wide chest for a few dollars, but companies that sell liner material jack the price up. They will take a material which is sold cheaply for other purposes and multiply the price by three or 4.

I found some solutions. Some people buy cheap yoga mats and cut them up. They’re actually better than many liners. One guy uses astro turf, which works very well. Treadmill and exercise mats work.

I turned a Harbor Freight chest into a welding cart a year or two back, and then I left a drawer open, not knowing how mice think. They moved in and starting eating drawer liners. Not knowing they were in there, I closed the drawer one day, causing them to die of thirst, rot, and stink up the chest and my tools. They also used the chest as a toilet, to a copious degree.

I bought myself a new roll of Harbor Freight liner, thinking that and some serious cleaning would fix the problem. Well, it didn’t. The drawers are about 20″ deep, and Harbor Freight’s rolls of liner are 16″ wide. I was not happy to find that out.

Here’s what I learned later: Lowe’s sells Kobalt liner rolls something like 20″ wide. Perfect. And they impregnate it with Zerust, a chemical which will discourage rust for a few years. The price isn’t bad, either. I got a big roll that solved my problem for $20. Actually, I bought two rolls, thinking they weren’t as big as they were.

You could also paint the inside of your drawers with truck bed coating.

To get back to electronics, I have to come up with the answer. I can’t just dump all my things on shelves and hope for the best. Maybe one more US General chest is needed.

Speaking of shelves, I am still contemplating welding some up. I was discouraged when I found out what 1″ steel tubing costs now, but it’s not like spending $500 on a permanent major shop improvement is extravagant. A couple of days ago I blew $600 on a washing machine for a tenant, and I thought nothing of it. Why feel bad about spending on my home?

I think shelves would open up more space, making me feel more comfortable with buying another chest.

When the physical improvements are done, I may make some improvements involving data. I may make an inventory so I’ll know what I have. It sounds awful, but I could do it in two days. I have all sorts of screws and washers. I never know what’s here. Sometimes I buy things and then find out I already have them. Also, I need an inventory for insurance.

If I could go to my computer and look things up instead of walking around confused, it would be tremendous.

I’m also using a Brother label maker now. I hope to be able to stop opening and closing things so much. Just scan the labels and reach.

Today I watched an Adam Savage video about shop organization. I think his ideas are bad, because his shop is a rat’s nest. Tons of things are out in the open. He has a whole wall of movie memorabilia in illuminated IKEA cases. Why would you fill your shop with space-killing things that have little or nothing to do with tools? He has at least one rack of nerdy costumes he has made for himself. He goes to nerd conventions dressed as comic and movie characters. Costumes are not tools.

His problem is that he’s like me. He’s not really building a shop. He’s building a neat place to hang out. And he loves the tools and the shop more than he loves getting things done.

Anyway, he said something he thought was brilliant. He said that when you choose a location for something, you should pick the place you thought it was in the first place. If you want your PVC cutter, and the first place you look is the third shelf to the left of your drill press, when you finally find the PVC cutter, you should put it on that shelf. You will instinctively look for it there.

This is good advice, but it’s not that original. I’ve been doing this for years. Not that it has helped much, what with all the counterproductive things I’ve also been doing. Anyway, I’ll toss it out there as a good tip.

These are my thoughts on shop organization at the moment. I hope they age well.

And another pair of Engineer pliers is arriving Saturday.

Truth is a Terms of Service Violation

God keeps showing me how the willfully-triggered belong to Satan. They are slanderers, just like their dad.

Before I go on, I should mention gaslighting, which is a type of slander Satan’s children love.

The term “gaslighting” comes from a movie called Gaslight. In that movie, a man murders a woman for her jewels but leaves them behind. He then marries her heir, a niece, in order to get access to what he wants. He takes measures to get the jewels. As she starts to notice strange things happening, he convinces her she is imagining things, trying to make her think she is going insane. Of course, the things she imagines are actually happening.

A gaslighter may tell a cuckold he is jealous, delusional, and possessive. A gaslighter may tell a battered wife she brings beatings on herself with her bad behavior. Gaslighters love causing problems and blaming them on the victims.

The purpose of gaslighting is to enslave others and make them take the punishment for the evil you do, while seeing to it you are neither blamed nor punished. A good gaslighter gets people to reward him for doing evil.

Before my dad accepted Jesus, he was a big gaslighter. My sister is a horrible gaslighter.

BLM and Antifa are gaslighting organizations. The perpetually-offended are gaslighters. They do evil constantly, and they thrive financially and socially by slandering the innocent.

Our new leftist rulers are racists, sexists, and ageists. They openly hate white people and men. They condemn older, wiser people, claiming they ruined the world. They tell their victims innocent things the victims say and do are proof of their wickedness.

Against convenience abortion? You’re a white supremacist. Got a Bass Pro Shops hat? Racist. You can be convicted of racism now for words and deeds totally unrelated to race. Making an “OK” sign with your hand. Complaining about illegal immigration. Saying a person who claims to be a US citizen should identify himself properly when he votes.

I still can’t figure out how opposing the killing of the unborn makes you a racist, but it doesn’t matter, because leftists can construct whatever insane theories they like, and anyone who points out the insanity can’t have a voice, because to oppose leftists is to be so evil society is obligated to silence you. For the children.

They’re like Hitler’s theorists and “scientists.” And Stalin’s. They can say any nutty thing they want, and the government will back them.

Leftists have decided only white people can be racist, which is a racist claim on its face, but you can’t be taken seriously if you disagree, because you have white privilege, which is the privilege of being muzzled because of your skin color.

Today I learned something chilling, and it helped me to realize how close to the rapture we are. Youtube has banned RT.

RT is a news organization sponsored by the Russian government. Predictably, it pushes Russian viewpoints. Much of what RT used to put on Youtube was informative and entertaining, a lot of it was unrelated to politics, and they did some very good journalism, but RT was not always honest. So it was a lot like CNN, the network of Chris Cuomo.

Now, we don’t have to worry about having our minds corrupted by RT’s Youtube channel. It’s gone. The Google kidz took it away because of the lies RT was telling about Ukraine. Well, actually, we never got to see those lies, because RT vanished before they could be told. But they were really bad. Or would have been, had they been allowed to exist. Mommy Google knows best. We are not intelligent enough to look at RT videos and then other sources and decide what the truth is.

Mommy Google decided Russia was 100% wrong and Ukraine was completely innocent. She looked out for us. She made it unnecessary for us to do the hard work of thinking, which could have led to disagreement with Mommy. Who was right. She always is.

Now Mommy and her friends have decided Russia blew up its own gas pipeline, and we are not supposed to question it. Russia can’t defend itself on Youtube, but that’s okay, because Russia is wrong, as Mommy concluded for us a long time ago. Letting a wrong person make a defense is wrong. If you disagree with my last sentence, you should be deplatformed so you can’t say so.

Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline carries Russian gas to Europe, and it mysteriously ruptured a while back. It was deliberately breached. We know that, because gas pipelines don’t just rupture. What we don’t know is who blew it up.

If you ask Mommy and her friends why Russia would blow the pipeline up when Russia needs money, they don’t have an explanation. Presumably, the idea is to get sympathy for the Ukraine war. To believe that, you have to think Putin is not merely malevolent, but extremely, astonishingly stupid. Supposedly a guy who runs Russia with a bunch of oligarchs is in favor of cutting off oligarch wealth in order to strengthen his support. Okay. Sure.

It’s kind of like the idiotic claim that FDR sacrificed half of the Pacific Fleet in order to get us into a war…in the Pacific. Which we would need a fleet to fight.

Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson is in Mommy’s penalty box because he thinks the theory is silly. He quoted Joe Biden, who threatened to sever the pipeline on record. So let’s see. Putin and his friends and his country need money. Putin’s enemies don’t want them to get it. So Putin cut the pipeline, and we, his enemy, had nothing to do with it. After our president threatened to do it.

Our government says we didn’t do it. Thank goodness. That clears that up. Our government has never lied to us about anything.

Am I supporting Russia? No. I don’t know what happened. But it would sure be nice to see what the Russians say on their own Youtube channel, because as our founding FATHERS (not sperm-providing mothers) believed, the accused should be allowed to make defenses. Maybe Russia has some valid information to provide.

RT should be allowed to publish on Youtube. If they lie, other people should respond with correction. That’s how America is supposed to work. Or was supposed to. Those days are gone. We now live in the age of sanctioned prior restraint.

“Prior restraint” is a legal term for censorship. It is used in discussion of the right to freedom of expression. In discussions of government censorship, it means the government reviews things prior to publication and decides whether they can be released. Prior restraint is very, very, VERY strongly disfavored by our laws.

Now that speech is controlled by a small number of millennial punks, the government has a wonderful, legal tool it can use to perform prior restraint. It gets the tech punks to agree with it, and the tech punks do the restraining.

This is like the police sending a civilian to break into your house to steal evidence of a crime. The punks are not government employees, but they are agents of the government.

A week or two back, we saw emails proving the government is using the punks to do prior restraint. The White House got Facebook (Meta) to take down things it didn’t like. Not plans for nuclear weapons. Not the new names and locations of federal informants. A parody Instagram account making fun of Anthony Fauci. The request and obedient response took place within a few seconds of each other.

We used to understand that prior restraint was very bad. The punks don’t believe this. They are exasperated with sane people and our inconvenient truths. They have had enough. They are tired of reasoning, arguing, and voting. They believe the answer is to strangle us so we can’t speak. We are so bad, merely hearing our words is harmful. Our words are violence.

We have become like China and Cuba, where people have no idea what’s going on in the world. People who disagree with Mommy are banned or shadow-banned, which is just as bad. Ignorant, conceited morons who spew the party line are promoted and paid.

Things aren’t as bad here as they are in China, where Mommy also helps a government censor important speech, but we are in the same boat, because we have unelected entities exercising tremendous power over what we see, hear, and believe. And it will get worse, because it works. The longer the punks do their work, the more Americans will agree with them. America will gratefully hand the work of forming conclusions over to the punks and the government, and we will go blissfully to sleep with visions of Kardashians dancing in our heads.

To get back to gaslighting, yesterday I stirred up trouble on a forum I use. I asked a question, and an obnoxious person gave a nonresponsive answer and, in the process, suggested I was a bad guy for thinking countries like Georgia and Tanzania were “bad” travel destinations. The implication was that I was prejudiced, which I am not. These really are bad travel destinations. Read reviews. And I was standing up for Africans, not slandering residents of poor countries. I was doing the opposite of the thing I was accused of.

Anyway, I try not to fuss with people these days, and I ask God to help me not to be angry with people, but last night, I made an exception. I made a fool of this person. I was also very critical of nations and embassy employees that have a shadow-ban policy of encouraging Africans to apply for tourist visas and then denying them without considering them. I complained about an employee who denied my wife’s application based on the delusion that we were not actually married. We gave these people a marriage certificate, a link to the clerk’s site so she could check it out, proof of the assets I had given my wife, and even an appraisal for her nice, big wedding ring. We gave them copies of visa stamps showing we had gone to other countries.

I said the employee apparently thought I gave money, trips, and jewelry to all my prostitutes. That was a reasonable thing to say, because the employee didn’t think Rhodah was my wife, and she knew I was giving her money, possessions, and trips, and she knew we traveled together, so the only rational explanation, once the actual explanation was discounted, had to be that I was paying for sex.

Of course, the moderators locked the thread, claiming violations of all sorts of Terms of Service.

I felt kind of bad about all this today. I talked to God about it, apologetically. To my surprise, the response was that I had done right.

I have been gaslighted to the point where I feel bad about speaking bluntly in response to false accusations. That’s a dangerous way to feel.

I will continue to offend people for the rest of my time here on Earth, not because I’m a mean guy, but because I feel compelled to be truthful, and people choose to be offended by it. Choosing to be offended gives them power over people. It puts people who are correct on the defensive when they should be conquering. Now that choosing to be triggered is the way of the world, offense will never stop. It will only increase. That’s not my fault or God’s. It’s the fault of the gaslighters and their father Satan.

If you choose to wet your pants every time someone makes an “OK” sign or uses a plastic straw, that’s on you. Go ahead and cry. Suffer. You’re doing it to yourself.

Appeasement won’t help, because the end goal is to get rid of truthful people. You won’t be spared because you agreed to disagree or made concessions. Move the goalposts to make the enemy happy, and he will keep advancing, because he wants everything. He wants an end of you.

Look at Israel. They have been moving their borders inward for decades. Has it helped? Are their enemies happy with them now? Of course not. They keep advancing.

The goal isn’t a two-state solution. It’s a no-Jewish-state solution. A no-Jews-anywhere solution. What happens in Israel should tell you all you need to know about appeasement.

It’s a good lesson. It reminds me of something I already know: I should be at peace with myself, because I can’t fix anything. If I speak the truth, I will be attacked. If I keep quiet but refuse to parrot lies, I will be attacked. That I will be attacked is a certainty, so I should speak the truth and be blameless. The world gives me little incentive to be quiet.

Satan was the first leftist. Like all leftists, he challenged rightful authority that had been set over him. Leftists are his children. They take after their dad. Satan gets what he wants partly through slander, so we will be slandered and slandered and slandered by his children. And the wicked will be praised, because there is always symmetry in the supernatural.

Jesus is the Prince of Peace, but he also said he didn’t come to bring peace but a sword. The world will have peace after the tribulation, when leftists are gone, but Jesus isn’t going to make the world peaceful during this age. Right now, individuals who love Jesus can have peace and protection. The world as a whole can’t.

Jesus is dividing people, as he said he would. His children say and do certain things, and Satan’s children can’t stand it, so they will continue trying to destroy us.

Don’t make your life a popularity contest. You can’t be popular unless you’re lost. Be glad you’re unpopular, because you can’t be right without being unpopular. If you’re popular, try to find out what the problem is and ask God to fix it. Jesus said we would be unpopular and that we should rejoice because of it. He said a friend of the world is an enemy of God. He meant these things.

It looks like our senile president is doing his best to start a nuclear war. I miss Trump and his hopes of kicking other countries out of the nest and making them fight their own battles. I still haven’t seen any compelling reason for getting into the battle between two corrupt nations that have been unfriendly to us.

I wonder what will happen. My wife had a waking vision of Russians bombing Japan, of all places. It came in a package with another vision that has already come true. I wonder if the war will spread soon.

I see Elon Musk is being forced to buy Twitter after all. Big step for free speech? I kind of doubt it. Musk rules with a heavy hand, so I am skeptical of his plans to free Twitter. Of course, if he does free Twitter, it could help Satan because it will push us closer to civil war. Meta could be the Union’s platform, and Twitter could belong to the Confederacy.

I want off this planet. It’s far crazier than I realized 20 years ago. Mainstream America is truly vile now. The trend is very strongly negative, and there is no reason to think it won’t continue and accelerate. The biggest disappointment I face every day is knowing the rapture hasn’t happened.

How Much of That Cheese is Real?

This morning, I watched Youtube with breakfast. As time passes, seems like there is less and less content I like. I decided to watch Adam Savage’s channel.

Savage is the nerdy store clerk from the old Charmin commercials. He and Mr. Whipple amused America with their clever banter. You probably know him as one of the hosts of the show Mythbusters.

He has some tool skills. He has worked in special effects, and he has built various things for movies and, I would guess, TV shows.

Wikipedia says:

Savage has worked as an animator, graphic designer, carpenter, projectionist, film developer, television presenter, set designer, toy designer, and gallery owner. He worked as a model maker on the films Galaxy Quest, Bicentennial Man, Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, The Mummy, The Matrix Reloaded, and Space Cowboys, among others.

I’ll go out on a limb and opine that he wrote that himself. It looks like something you would put on a resume. The language is vague, and the writer is trying to puff him up.

If you, personally, design the CGI software used in a groundbreaking project like The Abyss, you will put that in your list of accomplishments. You will say, “I designed that.” You won’t say, “I worked in the production of the special effects for The Abyss.” If you are vague about what you did, it means you didn’t do all that much. Maybe you fetched doughnuts for the people who did the real work on a movie. Maybe they sent you to Radio Shack when they needed resistors. Maybe you held things while they welded them. Savage, or some other Wikiperson, says he has “worked as an animator, graphic designer,” et cetera, but he doesn’t tell you what he did.

I don’t know why I’m inconsistent with my use of Italics. I just am.

I can write a Wikipedia and call myself a patent attorney whose work has appeared before the federal courts, the Patent and Trademark Office, and the Library of Congress. I can call myself an experienced litigator. I can say I’m a fabricator, and that I have designed and created a number of useful and somewhat complicated weldments. I can say I’m a composer. A writer. But should I really say those things?

I don’t practice law any more, and I would want to brush up before handling new cases. I have litigated, but not in a long time. I really am a fabricator, but I can barely TIG, I don’t know much about sheet metal, and I’m not very good at stick welding. I have composed a bunch of tunes, but no one has paid me for them. I got some books and articles published, but I don’t live on writing income.

I could say I taught physics in one of the world’s leading university departments, but I was a teaching assistant, not a Ph.D.

Reading people’s lists of accomplishments is like reading grocery labels. For example, “Key West lime juice” means the juice of Persian limes, not key limes, but “key lime juice” means it’s the real thing.

Persian limes are the normal limes you are familiar with. People in South Florida call them Persian limes in order to set them apart from key limes, also known as Mexican limes.

Little tip for the yankees.

People who write food labels and copy are very deceptive. Guess what “made with 100% real cheese” means. It means, “Some of the cheese is real, but the rest is fake.” The real cheese is 100% real, but less than 100% of the cheese is real.

I enjoy Savage’s videos, because he’s a tool guy, and he tells interesting stories about showbiz. He makes a lot of stuff. On the other hand, I have noticed that he does a lot of bad and mediocre work. A person who has been doing his kind of work for three decades should be better.

He does projects he calls one-day builds. One project was a brass nut and bolt. The bolt was supposed to be around 1.5″ thick, so you can imagine how big the nut was supposed to be. These objects served no purpose except to give him something to do.

He made lots of mistakes. He butchered the bolt, which should have been a simple project. He made a blank for it and held the head in his lathe’s chuck, unsupported at the tail end, and he tried to thread it using a carbide tool pushed straight in. He pushed the bolt out of the chuck several times, resulting in a lot of damage.

No real machinist, and no decent amateur, would have done these things. You make your blank. You center-drill the small end. You chuck the head and put a live center in the cavity you just drilled. This keeps the bolt from flying away when you apply pressure.

You don’t push your cutting tool straight into the work to thread it unless you know you can get away with it. You push it in at an angle so only one side of the tool is cutting. This reduces the pressure and gives a cleaner result. Carbide is a bad idea unless it’s really sharp. Steel is easy to put a good edge on.

Savage ended up with a nut and bolt, but they were not what he originally planned. He had to cut out a lot of brass in order to remove his mistakes.

He made a little cabinet for metal tooling. I guess it was around 10″ deep. It had drawers. He didn’t use drawer slides. Just grooves that slid on strips of wood. Of course, it didn’t work well, and it should have been obvious the design was bad. He ended up buying drawer slides and doing it over.

His shop is miniscule, and there isn’t much stuff in it. Maybe it’s small because it’s in San Francisco where real estate is expensive. He has a mill about like mine, the same table saw I have, a cheap Chinese lathe that looks to be a 14″ job, a hipster woodworking table which is unnecessarily pretty and clever, and a billion small tools stored in storage doodads he made. He also has a gas welding rig.

I am pretty sure my amateur shop is better than his pro shop. I have plasma, TIG, MIG, stick, a hydraulic press with an air jack, a heavy-duty finger brake, a bunch of woodworking tools…if I had to do a project with tools, I would take my shop over his without hesitation.

I considered these things today, and it made me think about impostor syndrome. Here’s what Wikipedia says about it: “a psychological occurrence in which an individual doubts their skills, talents, or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud.”

Many people have impostor syndrome. On the other hand, there is Dunning-Kruger syndrome, which convinces stupid or inept people they’re much more capable than the rest of us.

I guess there are shades in between these extremes.

A lot of successful people seem closer to the Dunning-Kruger end. They create wondrous resumes they can’t really live up to. I don’t think they’re true Dunning-Kruger types, because they know they’re exaggerating, whereas a true Dunning-Kruger really believes he’s a genius.

It looks like I can do anything Savage can do, plus a bunch of things he can’t. He must be better at some things than I am, but I doubt he can do anything of which I am completely incapable. So, do I have impostor syndrome because I would never hold myself out as a real tool guru?

If I’m better than a recognized Hollywood special effects technician, maybe I’m closer to the real thing than I admit to myself.

Hollywood is an interesting place. It’s full of self-promoters. People show up there and claim they can do this and that, and they get hired whether they’re telling the truth or not.

A law school friend of mine decided she didn’t like law, so she asked my advice about a career change. She wanted to become a talent agent in Hollywood. Not long after, she showed up at the offices of Endeavor, then called the Endeavor Talent Agency. They represented lots of big names. They took her on, and she succeeded. She ended up working at Fox as some kind of executive. She has worked as a producer on 4 TV shows. She had no training for any of this.

She told me something about Hollywood. She said she heard it from other people there. They said, “No one here knows what they’re doing.” To make it there, people simply arrived and showed their willingness to take on projects. People who needed projects taken on, and who knew nothing about completing them, hired them. Eventually, things got done, and I suppose skills developed.

I guess that’s how Adam Savage got where he is.

There are lots of people on Youtube who can do things he will never be able to do. They make all sorts of stunning projects. But they’re not in Hollywood, telling people how great they are, so he has a Hollywood business and a name, and they don’t.

Some of these people develop skills and businesses extremely quickly. Over maybe 5 years, they’ll go from tiny machine tools in apartments to big shops with CNC stations. Adam Savage has not done that. He is probably not much better today than he was in 2000. I don’t think he has a gift for what he does. Just tremendous enthusiasm.

It’s all very interesting to me.

I’m not knocking him. Just assessing his real place in the food chain. I like his work, even if his projects aren’t always good. I’m also thinking about myself. I’m not great, but maybe I’m better than I think I am.

Today I have go to out and get back to work on my tractor brush fork attachment. I feel a little better about it. If Adam Savage can get Hollywood studios to pay him, I should be able to design and assemble a tractor attachment.

Expected Giant; Received Midget

The hurricane news today is generally good. If you live where I do. In Fort Myers, it’s a colossal disaster. It’s hitting the Fort Myers area right now. It will not be great for Tampa or Orlando, either. Assuming the predictions aren’t hype.

The NHC thought the storm would weaken before hitting the coast and come in at Category 2 or so, but the official measurement looks more like Category 4 or 5, so the pessimists are winning that battle. At least it’s not hitting Tampa, a large city, directly.

For me, the good news is that they are predicting maximum sustained winds of 29 mph where I live, and the winds will be from directions that are not favorable to a lot of property damage. If the predictions pan out, I probably won’t even lose my electricity. That would mean I could continue bathing. With hot water. Not pool water.

The storm is nearly as close to Tampa as it will ever get to me, give or take, and the winds in Tampa are not terrible: 44 mph. When the storm makes its closest approach to me, it will be a lot weaker, so the winds SHOULD be lower. But as the storm’s history shows, hurricanes like to change directions.

One source says 44 mph. Another says 9 with 14 mph gusts. How can that be?

It’s hard to tell what’s really happening. Cape Coral is about as close to the eye of Ian as Florida gets, and they are reporting 31 mph winds with gusts to 43. Can that be right? I would have expected something like 140 based on the maps. Cape Coral is well within the NHC’s hurricane-force band, meaning Cape Coral is inside the hurricane, so the sustained winds should be no lower than 75 mph.

I haven’t been able to find the Weather Channel’s usual hysterical, dishonest coverage. I have been trying to find videos of raincoated reporters pretending to have a hard time standing up in light winds, or reporters standing on their knees in 6 inches of water to make it look deeper, but I haven’t seen them yet. Maybe you have to have cable to get that kind of helpful informational edutainment.

It should be possible to get good, solid information instantly using the web, but it’s not.

I just checked the Weather Channel’s site, and they have privately-hosted videos. One features a guy named Mike Seidel, broadcasting live from Fort Myers. Supposedly the eye wall is coming ashore, and the storm has maximum winds of 155 mph. The little meter in the corner of the screen says 31 mph with gusts to 58. What?

When I saw his name, it rang a bell, so I Googled “‘mike seidel’ fake news.” Yes, I remembered him for a reason. He got caught lying during another hurricane, pretending to struggle to stand. I’ll embed a video.

He didn’t lie verbally. He lied with his body. As my friend Mike points out, he leaned the wrong way. He leaned to leeward. That’s not how it works.

Today Seidel, who still, incredibly, has a job, is standing and walking normally. I guess he learned something.

Here’s another classic:

I can’t stand it:

The Anderson Cooper video reminds me of Baghdad Bob. Remember him? “There are no enemy tanks in Baghdad, and our victorious army of Islamic holy warriors [boom] @*$^@(*@^$#!!! ALLAH SAVE ME!!!”

I have been praying for God to keep the storm from harming Christians and their property, and I am still okay with it leveling Walt Disney World.

Things are looking very good for me and most of the state, but now I have a giant stockpile of junk food to deal with, and I may no longer have an excuse to eat it. This morning I ate a big bowl of Sugar Smacks (now called Honey Smacks, which is no better) with milk and cream, and then I followed it up with Cape Cod potato chips and onion dip. And three Pepperidge Farm cookies. Lunch will be more like actual food. I’m planning to have a delicious half-pound cheeseburger.

I am seriously wondering if local charities take pretzels and chips.

Ordinarily, I would have had a normal breakfast, but you know how it is when you’ve been fasting.

There is really nothing to do here except wait for NHC updates and think about food. And, of course, pray.

The storm still poses a hazard for me. It will probably cause a mosquito explosion. The water it leaves behind may be here for a couple of weeks.

Time to make sure all my portable power banks are charged, just in case. I need to have cell power so I can talk to my wife.

More: 2:23 P.M.

Things still look pretty good here. The projected path of the storm has moved slightly to the north, but it’s still favorable for my county.

Here is the weird thing: the Internet says the wind speed here, right now, is 26 mph. When I look outside, I see a pleasant breeze. The trees are moving a little. Doesn’t look like 26 mph to me. I would guess it’s between 10 and 15.

Hope it continues this way. The forecast says we are looking at another 7 mph, tops.

Sitrep: 6:15 P.M.

I always tell people you can often predict hurricane behavior better than the pros if you look at the rawest data you can get. This has turned out to be true with Ian. Of course, prayer is the main reason every good thing has happened.

At around 3:25, I found a radar loop and checked it out. It showed that the eye of the storm was moving more to the east than the official reports were saying. I thought that was good news, because it was likely to move the whole cone of future misery eastward later.

Lo and behold, the cone has obliged me. The 5 p.m. cone indicated that the storm was projected to veer eastward from the previous cone. This increases the length of time it will have before it makes its closest approach to the compound, and it also makes that approach farther off. Time will weaken the storm, and distance is obviously helpful, as people in Wyoming and Australia could tell you right now.

The storm has moved so far eastward, it’s actually slightly to the east of me. The center is about 120 miles south of me, which is close by hurricane standards, the maximum sustained winds are at around 130 mph, and virtually nothing is happening here. The center is forecast to get within maybe 60 miles of me, but that will be after the storm passes over a lot of real estate very slowly, so it should be much weaker. NOAA says it will be at about 65 mph at that time, so people 60 miles away shouldn’t get much wind.

Tampa is way closer than I will ever be (twice as close as I am now), and it’s getting the best Ian has to offer. Its current wind figure is 32 mph. I talked to a potential tenant today, and he said his relatives in Tampa were saying not a lot was happening. Tampa was supposed to get a good beating.

Of course, if a storm can move east, it can move west, too, but the experts and models say that won’t happen. They have a consensus, and as we all know, when it comes to science, a consensus is always right.

What a burden off my mind.

The wife and I will keep praying for others. I hope you will, too. No prayers for Disney World, though. It ought to be obliterated. I don’t want to see homes or businesses that don’t promote evil harmed, but if Ian wiped Disney World and Universal out without harming anyone around them, I would be content.

Ten O’Clock Update: Ian Now Weak Category 2

Hurricane Ian continues to puzzle me. The Weather Channel says the wind here is moving at 38 mph, but when I go outside, I don’t see it. The trees are bouncing around a little, but it’s not unpleasant.

Tampa is in a much worse location, but the Weather Channel says its winds will top out shortly at a mere 52 mph. After that, Tampa is expected to wind down. For Tampa, Ian is at its peak right now.

I am still trying to understand what’s happening. I had to dig to find information on Irma, which made a mess here. I relearned a few things.

Irma was Category 3 when it landed in Florida. It came ashore on Marco Island. This is nearly the same place where Ian landed today. Marco supposedly had 155 mph winds when it landed, and Irma’s winds were clocked at 120, so much lower.

Irma was huge, though. People are calling Ian big storm, but Irma was about twice as wide, so being 100 miles from the center of Irma, at a given maximum sustained wind speed, would be like being 50 miles from the center of Ian. In other words, Ian has to be twice as close to give you the same wind speed. That means Ian is much less dangerous to me than a storm like Irma.

Irma moved about 1.5 times as fast as Ian, however, so it spent less time wherever it went. A fast-moving storm does less damage in any one area. So Ian’s strong winds will hit less of Florida, but they will spend more time in every location than they would were Ian traveling at Irma’s speed. On the other hand, the smaller diameter of Ian reduces the destructive impact of its lower speed. It’s not a simple picture. The destructive power of storms depends on a number of variables.

Irma traveled a long way before it dropped to tropical storm speed. When it knocked my trees over, it was close to where it crossed the threshold. And the center was close to me. Probably 30 miles away.

Ian is now dropping 5-10 mph of wind speed per hour, and it will be maybe 10 hours before it gets close to its nearest approach to the compound. I don’t know if it will keep dropping speed as fast as it is now, but it will probably be a tropical storm in 10 hours. Weather Underground thinks it will be Category 1 in less than 4.

Category 1 runs from 75 to 95 mph, and Ian is now at 100, so it should cross the line quickly.

So, weak storm. Twice as far away as Irma. Half as wide as Irma, so it will be as though it were 4 times as far away.

Irma also rained like crazy, and Ian may not match it. Rain helps trees fall over because it loosens the roots. They are predicting 4″-6″, but my feeling, based on observation, is that it will be less.

Irma didn’t do all that much damage here. The house was untouched. So was the workshop. I lost trees in the woods, but no one cares about those. I wasted a lot of time cutting them, but I should have let them rot on their own.

I believe I had two trees that landed on fences between me and the neighbors, and only one tree was large. I had one large tree land on my own fence between my house and pasture. I had another big tree land on a fence between my parcels. I would not want to go through Irma again, and Irma caused me a lot of work, but it was no Andrew.

I think very little will happen here. A much worse storm than Ian wasn’t all that bad.

Hope I don’t seem self-obsessed because I am not writing much about the problems in Southwest Florida and Cuba. I am well aware that many other people are suffering very badly. I can’t do anything to help them except pray, and I have done that, so I am studying the storm for my own benefit.

Let Disney Drink my Mickey

The practice of trying to figure hurricanes out is not simple. Lots of factors have to be considered. How strong are the winds expected to be? Where is the storm supposed to go? How fast is it moving? How wide is it? Are the people giving you information complete liars, or are they relatively impartial?

Today I saw some liar saying Ian was expected to land in Florida as a Category 4 storm. Not true at all, so why scare people?

Back when Andrew hit, a homosexual meteorologist named Bryan Norcross became a big celebrity in South Florida. His TV channel was able to keep broadcasting after the storm, and the others were off the air, so people came to rely on him. Women fell in love with him and mailed him marriage proposals and their dirty underwear. They didn’t know he was a homosexual because he hid it. He became Florida’s hurricane guru, and for some years, he rode the wave.

I think he is the biggest reason the press lies about storms. They have the baseless, irrational feeling that if he could do it, they can do it, even though the circumstances are different. They all seem to be shouting, “PICK ME!”, and it will never work, because there is competition. There will never be another big hurricane guru.

I’m just guessing.

Why are so many weathermen homosexuals? It’s strange.

Anyway, my primary answer to the Hurricane Ian problem is to fast and pray. Everything else is less important.

We get a lot of information from the National Hurricance Center. The difficult thing is deciding what it means.

We are used to seeing predictive cones that try to show how a storm’s direction will change. Thing is, there is another level of predictions. The storm’s direction changes, and so do the cones. They themselves trend, which goes to show how unreliable they are. If my prediction concerning what will happen on Friday changes between Monday and Tuesday, it’s not a very solid prediction, and a clever person could decide to try to predict how the predictions will change. Second-order predictions.

The NHC is now saying the cones themselves are trending eastward. Ian’s cone was centered over the area of Tarpon Springs, north of Tampa. Now the cone and models suggest it will land south of Tampa and head for Disney World.

This would be a very big break for my county. It might mean winds that are 25 mph lower, and that would probably be the difference between lots of downed trees and a few downed trees.

If the cones keep moving southward, our farm might escape damage entirely.

I have prayed for God to keep the storm off of his people and their property, and I also asked him to prevent the ungodly from having worse problems than is necessary. Today, I changed that a little. I thought about Cuba and Disney World.

Cuba just legalized homosexual marriage by a wide margin, which is just one more indication that Cuban culture is depraved. The storm hit Cuba the next day. It occurred to me that Disney promotes the daylights out of homosexuality and the occult. They now have a show about a demon-worshiping girl who is supposedly the Antichrist, and people are saying how nice it is that paganism is getting positive coverage.

It’s so absurd, it’s hard to comment effectively.

Anyway, I wondered if Cuba’s error was connected to the weather. With that in mind, I told God that if the storm had to go somewhere, he might consider Disney World. Just drown it. No one will be there because it will be closed. It’s fine with me if he shows the world what he thinks of Disney. When storms hit places like my county, it just provides fuel for trolls who say God hates Christians or conservatives or that he doesn’t exist.

My wife and I had similar revelations yesterday and today.

Yesterday, I started wondering whether God is still primarily interested in adding new souls to his family. Maybe he is more interested in holding onto the ones he has so as many as possible will make it in the rapture and avoid the tribulation and hell. The world is an extremely filthy place now, and the constant temptation, which is increasing fast, is very dangerous because under its influence, Christians are losing their salvation. I asked him about it.

As I was praying, I started thinking about my sister.

My sister treated my mother terribly. My mother used to pay her rent so she wouldn’t be on the street, and in order to avoid trouble with my grandparents, who owned the apartment, my mother used to go there on occasion and clean it, carrying out bag after bag of filthy garbage and dog manure. When my sister was in law school, my mother was thrilled she might amount to something, so she supported her financially. My sister showed her gratitude by parking in a handicapped space over and over at a cost of $250 per ticket, and my mother paid the fines. I could go on and on.

When my mother was dying, my sister continued treating her badly and neglected her. My mother wrote a journal for the first time in her life, and in the journal, according to what I have been told, she wrote about how she loved me and how badly my sister had treated her. After my mother died, my sister told me she had stolen the journal and thrown it out so I would never see it. She said it with a big grin on her face, glowing with the pleasure of sadism. She told me because she thought it would hurt me, and the thought of my suffering and the evil she had done made her light up with pleasure.

Not long before my mother died, she told me she was going to disinherit my sister. I talked her out of it, but she insisted on giving me her brokerage account, and she said it was a drop in the bucket compared to what she had spent on my sister.

After she died, my sister, as an heir, was heavily involved in my mother’s estate and my grandparents’ estates, and she made all of us extremely miserable. She offended many people to the point where they refused to do business with us. It was a very bad experience.

If I had not talked my mother out of disinheriting her, these things would not have happened. A lot of people would have been spared a lot of pain. I made a big mistake.

Years later, when my dad started talking about disinheriting her, I kept my mouth shut, not because I wanted the money but because I didn’t want to be chained to my sister again. That decision led to one of the biggest blessings of my life. I don’t have to have any contact with my sister. And because I’m married, she can never inherit from me, so there is no point in her trying to involve herself in my business.

I am the reason my sister was disinherited. I could have saved her, but I minded my own business and respected my father’s decision.

A few years ago, God gave me a phrase: “The whole world is like my sister.” I took it to mean the whole world was like a person who loved evil and could not be helped because of it.

Yesterday, I thought about these things, and I realized God had prepared me for the future. He showed me what my sister was like and that even though I was a Christian, I was supposed to quit chasing her and trying to help her. In doing that, he showed me what the world was becoming: a place so rotten there was no point in chasing people and trying to start revivals.

Sometimes I have felt bad because I have reached so few people for God. Yesterday, I thought about that. I really tried to reach people. I joined churches and ministries. Fools were promoted over me, my efforts to help were swatted down, and the pastors came to consider me their enemy. I tried to help the people they were looting, and the victims themselves persecuted me, saying I was touching God’s anointed and so forth. I was rejected soundly, over and over.

I was very enthusiastic, but Christians wanted nothing to do with me. I would guess I have reached maybe 20 people.

Maybe I’m not the problem.

During the last century, there was a huge revival. Millions of people all over the world were baptized with the Holy Spirit. Things like that don’t happen any more. Not like they did then. And the preachers who still draw big crowds are generally money-worshiping pigs. They want us to think they’ve brought millions into the kingdom of heaven, but in reality, they’ve helped keep them out. They teach people they can be saved permanently by raising their hands once in church, and that they can go home and continue living sinful lives.

Now I suspect God is preparing a small percentage of Christians for the rapture instead of focusing on evangelism. Maybe the next wave of evangelism will be the tribulation itself, in which people will be suffering so terribly, and God and Satan will be so open about their existence, that a few more grains of barley will find their way into the harvest.

The tribulation is all about evangelism. Most people don’t know that. “Tribulation” is a process that separates stubborn grain from its husk. You drive nails into a board called a tribulum, you stand on the board with the nails protruding toward the ground, and you have an animal pull you around so the nails ride over the grain and break the husks. In the Bible, harvest represents saving souls. The tribulation will be God’s last attempt to win souls before the Messianic Age.

I don’t think I should continue feeling bad about reaching so few people. I said what I believed. I didn’t hold anything back. I made myself available. I provided financial support and my own labor. I submitted to the leadership of ghetto people and crooked, half-bright pastors. I prayed a great deal, alone and with others. I was there. The fish just didn’t want the bait.

I am in good company. Jesus himself is only known to have reached 120 people even though he drew large crowds. The Jews of his time generally died unsaved.

I hope I’m right about these things and that the rapture comes soon, because I am fatigued with this place. I don’t want to raise children in a world where perversion and pride and hate are pervasive and they, as Christians, will be treated like demons.

Let’s Let Those Who Hate us Guard our Freedoms

A certain number of leftists are losing their minds because the Fifth Circuit upheld a law preventing big social media companies from performing certain types of censorship.

I’ll show you Wikipedia’s description of the law. A footnote is omitted, but you can find it on Wikipedia.

The law applies to social media companies with “more than 50 million active users” in the U.S. each month, that operate in Texas. The law also bars social media companies from labeling posts with warnings or impeding “the transmission of an unsolicited or commercial electronic mail message.” The law also has a “prohibition on discriminating against Texans based on their geographic location”.

Here is what Governor Abbott’s site says:

House Bill 20 prevents social media companies with more than 50 million monthly users banning users simply based on their political viewpoints. The law also requires several consumer protection disclosures and processes related to content management on the social media sites to which the bill applies. These sites must disclose their content management and moderation policies and implement a complaint and appeals process for content they remove, providing a reason for the removal and a review of their decision. They also must review and remove illegal content within 48 hours. House Bill 20 also prohibits email service providers from impeding the transmission of email messages based on content.

The law itself is very long and boring. A lot of it is taken up with the wonderful, satisfying requirements that companies disclose just about everything they do as censors and that they provide real mechanisms for complaining and getting relief. Here is the money part which leftists hate:

Sec. 143A.002. CENSORSHIP PROHIBITED. (a) A social media
platform may not censor a user, a user’s expression, or a user’s
ability to receive the expression of another person based on:
(1) the viewpoint of the user or another person;
(2) the viewpoint represented in the user’s expression or another person’s expression; or
(3) a user’s geographic location in this state or any part of this state.

The state’s power to regulate Facebook, Twitter, et alia comes from the fact that social media companies are “common carriers.” This phrase is what lawyers call a “term of art,” which means it has a specific legal meaning which is not necessarily its plain meaning as laymen might use it. The Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit explains this in its decision:

[T]he common carrier doctrine is a body of common law dating back long before our Founding. It vests States with the power to impose nondiscrimination obligations on communication and transportation providers that hold themselves out to serve all members of the public without individualized bargaining.

If you sell handmade pottery at a table on the sidewalk, you can discriminate against buyers for all sorts of silly reasons, because no one cares about your pottery or has concerns that anyone will be substantially hindered in their enjoyment of privileges common to all of us if they can’t buy it. On the other hand, if you open a motel on an interstate highway, you are appealing to a big customer base and offering an essential service, so you can’t turn customers away because they’re ugly or you suspect they don’t like the Beatles.

I am a retired lawyer and not a great legal scholar, but the common carrier argument makes complete sense to me. If thousands of socialists are allowed to buy airline tickets to go to a riot political event, and the airlines refuse to sell tickets to conservatives, it’s pretty clear that it’s a huge problem even though 1) the airlines are not government entities and, 2) it’s hard to find a constitutional problem with banning conservatives. Similarly, if the social giants work hard to amplify the voices of far-left nuts and annihilate or diminish the voices of conservatives, which they do every second of every day, in order to function as a sort of shadow government, it’s also a huge problem.

I have been muzzled so often, I now expect it, and I don’t think a lot about it. For example, Yahoo News keeps putting up lewd pictures of old, fat, and/or unattractive women, and I have said things like, “Why is Yahoo News trying to make men find unattractive women attractive? It doesn’t work that way. Old women and homely women will always be less attractive. Young women will always be less attractive than old ones.” These comments always got deleted. I remember saying simply, “Gross,” in response to a supposedly provocative story about poor old Madonna or the very elderly Jane Fonda, and Yahoo deleted me.

I think the kids at Yahoo seriously believe 1) the natural sexual inclinations of men are somehow an important problem, perhaps caused by greenhouse gases, and 2) these inclinations can be changed by Yahoo News stories. This is how insane leftists have become. They should run stories telling us liver tastes better than strawberry ice cream.

Old women are liver. Young women are strawberry ice cream. That’s just how it works. Being tall is better than being short. Dumb people are worse off than smart people. Having hair is better than being bald. Some things can’t be changed.

Were my comments hateful or dangerous? No. Were they subject to government censorship based on First Amendment case law? No. Were they libelous? No. They weren’t even untrue. They were just expressions of opinions held by perhaps 95% of normal males.

My friend Mike can’t share funny or critical content about Joe Biden and the hopeless dunce Kamala Harris. Facebook either deletes it or restricts republication so no one or virtually no one sees it. He’s not putting up deepfake videos of the Bidens being shot to death. He’s not making false claims. He’s just putting up critical posts. What happens when people post critical things about Trump and DeSantis? They go live and many people see them.

Youtube is somewhat different. It appears you can post a lot of controversial material there, and they will leave it up. But will they leave it up if a lot of people see it? Probably not. Will they recommend it to people the way they recommend things they approve of? I wonder.

Youtube takes down popular Christians who criticize the abomination of sodomy. That much is certain.

I think the complaint-procedure requirements will cause the giants more agony than anything else. They will have to hire a lot more employees, and they will have to hire a lot of lawyers. They will have to provide explanations for what they do, and if the Texas AG doesn’t like them, they will have to defend themselves in court.

Of course, unlike the faceless censors of Big Tech, the AG is accountable. Wonder if leftist see the irony. They’re suing him, but they don’t want users to have the power sue them. Why? Because they’re right! They’re leftists! This has already been decided.

As it stands now in most of the country, nameless giant employees with no accountability whatsoever can delete or shadowban all they like. They are accountable to no one. They can censor people for laughs. They can censor their ex-boyfriends or teachers who gave them bad grades.

There is no way to complain or get relief unless you have a gigantic number of followers, and even then, your groveling may not help you. Somehow, leftists think that’s okay and that it doesn’t cause abuse. Now the cockroaches will have to operate in the sunlight, and that won’t be pleasant for them. It’s not their natural environment.

They also have a problem because they will have to know which posters live in Texas. And people in Texas will be able to post just about anything they want, and it will be seen by other users all over the world. The law is from Texas, but it allows Texans to speak to people in every single nation where the giants operate.

Smart pundits will establish businesses in Texas. What will Facebook do then?

The remedies aren’t very good. I don’t see anything about damages for users or fines. That should be changed.

The giants and their supporters are complaining, saying the law opens the doors to things like Holocaust denial and racist propaganda. Know what I say? Good.

Right now, I can go to Amazon and buy books by Holocaust deniers who openly say they are denying the Holocaust. I can buy racist, lie-filled books written by leftists who hate whites. I can buy tons of sexist, lie-filled leftist screeds aimed at males. I can buy Mein Kampf. So what?

If the book and periodical industry is full of dishonest and inflammatory material, why shouldn’t the giants publish the same kind of things? Historically, the American remedy for disinformation and misinformation has been correct information. You don’t censor. You supplement. You counter. Do I really have to explain this in America?

Mein Kampf has probably been in print continuously since it was written around a century ago. It hasn’t led to a global Fourth Reich. Holocaust deniers have been in business since before the Holocaust ended. Nuts have published books claiming the CIA knocked down the World Trade Center. Very few people take these authors seriously. On the other hand, the danger of letting elite, untouchable, hidden leftists decide what we can say and read is very, very obvious.

Let’s go ahead and let racists post on Facebook. Let’s let people say what they want about coronavirus. Then those of us who disagree can have their say. That’s how we’ve always done things. It works. Have we forgotten Skokie?

The idea that the giants are private companies that should be left alone is ludicrous. Had they existed in the 1770’s, the Constitution would have language pretty much like that in the Texas law. In 2022, free speech that can’t be seen on the Internet has as much impact as talking to yourself at the bottom of a mineshaft. The Founding Fathers (not “non-birthing persons”) didn’t simply intend to allow us to speak; the Germans had that privilege under Hitler. They could go into their basements alone and say what they wanted. The Founding Fathers intended to make sure our speech could have an impact on other people; that it would reach them.

It’s amazing that this has to be explained, but Americans have become idiots. Mike Judge saw the future. Well, he saw the stupidity and coarseness, but he didn’t anticipate the censorship.

Political discrimination is actually much more harmful than racial or sexual discrimination, but somehow people don’t understand this.

We have laws that allow us to break up monopolies because private companies can have too much power. Leftists argue that inheritance taxes are important because they prevent oligarchs from getting too strong. Somehow, though, half of our population thinks it’s okay to have our speech censored by pimply pierced kids who think a man with a fake vagina is a woman.

I don’t know what will happen to laws like the one in Texas in the future. I believe they will be repealed and struck down, however, because Satan is very angry these days because his time is short. He really needs to control what we see and hear, and he controls the vast majority of Americans.

When China Fails, Cambodia Comes Through

Once again, Harbor Freight’s army of Chinese factory workers has come to my rescue. Or has it?

Some years back, I decided to turn a mini lathe into a CNC lathe. I bought a set of plans and went to work, and I got it to work, sort of.

I highly recommend not doing what I did. The plans I bought said to use a long piece of a peculiar type of threaded rod instead of a ball screw, and I ended up with a great deal of backlash. They say you can program it out, but I moved on to other things before I did that. I have considered putting a ball screw in it, but I haven’t done it.

It is possible to make one of these project lathes work, but it may not be worth the effort once you get done. Depends on what you want to do. Lathes are inferior to mills, regardless of what most hobby machinists believe, and this is the reason why CNC mills are much, much more popular than lathes. If you absolutely have to make your own CNC machine, it should be a mill.

Anyway, I brought the lathe up here from Miami either 5 years ago or 3 years ago, and I plopped it on the same Black & Decker Workmate it occupied in Miami. And as it did in Miami, it collected dust and sat in the way.

I considered building a wheeled cart for the lathe, but I never did it. I also considered selling it, but it seems like I always have a hard time drawing people who will pay reasonable prices for things. And I kept thinking the lathe might be worth keeping if I put a good screw in it and learned how to program it better.

Okay, I hate selling tools. There. Now I’m being honest. Happy?

I’m glad I didn’t build a cart, because I just put a new acquisition under it. I bought me a FOURTH Harbor Freight tool chest.

My first two chests are the small US General kind, and they’re Taiwanese. They are holding up my welders now while sitting on custom welded bases I made. The third chest is a bigger US General. It’s Chinese, even though it looks like it was made in the same factory as the other ones. Only the wheels are different. The one I bought today turned out to be from Cambodia, of all places.

I didn’t know the Cambodians made anything. Harbor Freight is certainly playing the field these days. I wonder if the Chinese know they sell Taiwanese products.

The line my new chest belongs to is called Yukon, and it’s supposed to be one tier lower than US General, which produces very, very good chests at excellent prices. I looked the new one over, and my verdict is that there is very little difference in quality, if any. I would say the sheet metal is slightly wavier in places, and the chest is only 18″ deep, whereas the US Generals are 22″ deep.

I wanted a chest that took up less room and consumed less cash than US General, so Yukon’s chest fit the bill perfectly.

The nice thing about Yukon chests is that they have solid hardwood tops, which US General doesn’t provide. It’s easy to screw stuff to hardwood, it’s more ridgid, and it’s easier to replace than steel.

The neat thing about this story is that I used another Harbor Freight tool to get the chest out of my car. Ordinarily, I would have drafted my friend Mike, but he’s out of town.

The employees at my local store assumed doubtful expressions when I told them I had an SUV with no trailer outside, but I had measured the car, so I thought I had a good chance. By way of encouragement, I told them they could just refund the money and take it back if it wouldn’t fit. That didn’t seem to excite them much.

Anyway, the Harbor Freight guy and I shoved the chest into my car, and when I got home, I removed it by pushing it onto my Harbor Freight Central Machinery hydraulic cart. This thing will lift 500 pounds from about 9″ from the ground to maybe 30″.

Everyone needs one of these. Or the bigger one, which lifts 1000 pounds. They are unbelievably handy. And they can be modified. You can put a big table top on one and use it for a workbench. You can attach ramps to one and push or drive mowers and so on onto it. I have repaired and installed wall ovens singlehandedly with one.

I got one end of the chest on the cart, and then I put a $17 Gorilla collapsible aluminum bench behind my bumper. I got the box out so one end was on the cart and the other was on the bench. Then I managed to lower one end onto the floor by myself. The box weighed about 170 pounds according to Harbor Freight’s site, so handling one end was not impossible.

Putting the casters on a heavy tool chest by yourself is an interesting experience, but I came up with tactics that worked, and I didn’t put a scratch or dent on anything.

Getting the lathe off the Workmate was a joy. I didn’t enjoy lifting it, because with the stepper motors, it probably weighs over 100 pounds, but I was glad to put it onto a wheeled platform so I could move it around instead of killing workshop space permanently with it. Also, a lot of junk and crud had accumulated in its part of the shop, and I got to clean it all out. The filth was amazing.

Now I have good access to the lathe, and I can put all my mini-lathe tooling and parts in handy, spacious drawers instead of using the ridiculous toolbox I bought years ago. Toolboxes tend to cling tenaciously to shelves and the floor and discourage the use of whatever is in them. Chests are warm and giving. They practically throw their contents into your arms. In other words, they’re convenient, and convenience is at least a third of getting any job done.

I now think I need to get a ball screw, and I should also think about putting Mach 3, the CNC program I used, on my ancient 2005 laptop. I have never been able to make myself throw this laptop out, and now I have a valid use for it which it is well able to perform.

The big controller box I made for the lathe fits in the chest’s bottom drawer, which is fantastic. It won’t be able to collect any more crud there.

I am now up to…let’s see…SIX tool chests. And I regret nothing. Storage is extremely important if you actually want to get anything done in a shop. Without it, things get damaged and lost, and the things that aren’t lost are impossible to find. Instead of working, you spend half your time walking in circles looking for what you need.

As the photo shows, the chest I bought is blue. I am making a real effort to add color to the shop.

I am now planning to put in a split unit for cooling, and I will have to add a ceiling and insulate the doors. Once these things are done, there will be nearly no reason for me to ever go in the house.

I credit God with my success. When you can’t get things done, there is usually a supernatural reason. Rhodah and I have started seeing things returned and restored.

Now I have to finish putting my tractor back together. That’s easy now that I managed to put it in my shop. It seems like we have torrential rain here every day now. Well…we DO, actually. But now that the tractor is indoors, it’s no big deal.

In other news, I got trolled after my last post. I wrote about the vision my wife had, in which God said the royals would have a funeral soon. The vision occurred on June 22, and I wrote about it a couple of days later. Some guy showed up and made fun of us, and he also ridiculed the gift of tongues and the vision, so he blasphemed the Holy Spirit Himself.

I decided to publish the comment because sometimes when someone does something they will later be embarrassed about, it’s best to see to it they get the exposure they wanted at the time. What he said will not age well.

It’s strange that he ridiculed a documented vision that clearly came true, but I guess he wasn’t concerned with being analytical. I can understand ridiculing people whose predictions fail, especially when they insist they didn’t fail. I’m thinking of the people who still predict a 2020 Trump win. I don’t understand ridiculing someone whose prediction came true, especially when that person’s husband revealed the prediction without making any claims about the source and without asking for money or a new jet.

Anyway, we have prayed for him. As I heard a preacher say recently, everyone will believe in God eventually. Here’s hoping my commenter comes to believe before it’s too late.

Little Shop of Horrors no More

While my wife and I wait to be permitted to see each other in Ireland, and while what we hope are the last days of our wait for a green card pass, I continue to work on my shop.

I finished my belt grinder cart. Photo below. It’s almost as great as it looks.

Is any project ever really finished? I still want to put some kind of arm on it to hold a shallow container of water below the 2″ by 72″ belt. It will catch sparks and keep crud out of the drawers.

Today I have been emptying boxes that have been on the floor since 2019, when I moved my big tools up here. I am also getting stuff ready to throw out. As I work, the shop gets bigger and bigger, and my ideas about building a new shop seem more and more ridiculous.

My next project will probably be shelves.

I have a huge 4-tier 4′ by 8′ set of shelves against one wall. I am not happy with it. It used to have the long side against the wall, making it very difficult to use because of the reach. Now both long sides are exposed. It’s still not great, because it juts out into the garage and takes up too much room.

I figure it has almost 128 square feet of storage, not including the floor. I would like to create a similar amount of shelving on the walls. This would open up the center of the shop.

I got an idea from Jamie Hyneman from Mythbusters. You would think a person like me would be a big fan of the show, because it’s all about tools and a sort of engineering, but I’m not. I don’t have the attention span for it. It drags a lot while they’re building things and explaining. I’m always thinking, “Come on man. Blow something up.”

Also, the chemistry of the hosts is somewhat off-putting. Everyone knows they don’t like each other, and it shows. When I watch, I always feel like Hyneman is trying hard not to sock Adam Savage in the mouth, and while I can see how Savage would get on a person’s nerves, I think most people would get along with him better. Just a guess.

Anyway, Hyneman’s primary business is in a terrible building which is about 100 feet long and 12 feet wide. I assume he must have gotten a great price. To cope with the shape of the building, he created his own shelves. They cover one wall. He could have gone out and bought prefab shelves and attached them, but they would have been expensive, and I don’t know if anyone sells appropriate shelves. His ceiling is very high.

He got himself some 1″-square tubing and welded it into a system of shelf supports. It’s brilliant. He has vertical tubes which appear to be about three feet apart, and he welded horizontal tubes to them to hold the shelf material. I don’t know what the material is. Probably plywood.

As he pointed out, welding is extremely fast compared to drilling and screwing, and square tubes are very easy to weld together because they have a lot of flat surfaces. I don’t know what tubing costs right now, but steel prices have been dropping, so it may be possible to get 12 feet of tubing for around $10. If that’s true, I could put up a framework for maybe $120. Two shelf units 9 feet long with 4 shelves each would give me 108 square feet of shelf. It would be better to use 6 shelves per unit, because shelves that are too far apart are wasteful. This would give me 162 square feet.

Plywood is expensive, but not like it used to be, and I could cannibalize the plywood in my existing unit.

As part of the project, I would like to get a small shed for materials. Then I could keep more tubing and plate and so on. Grabbing stuff you already have is always better than driving to buy more.

The shop has gotten so much bigger, I am once again able to park my garden tractor and utility cart in it. The big tractor is too much to ask for, but with all the new space, I should be able to forgo a new shop and put up a smaller shelter for the tractor and a few implements.

Guess I better get back out there. Those dead roaches aren’t going to sweep themselves out into the yard.

I am the Grid

I’m not sure, but I think I’ve debunked the “sealed attic” craze as a scam, at least for existing houses that need new roofs.

My roof is 22 years old, and it’s time to say goodbye. When I got an estimate, the roofer suggested a solar roof. This is a roof with “solar shingles,” which are not actually shingles. Solar shingles come in prefab arrays, and they lie pretty flat on your roof instead of standing above it like panels.

They don’t really look like shingles. I’m talking about the product GAF offers. Others are somewhat different. Tesla offers a whole roof made from little solar panels that look like shiny black shingles. There is no point in discussing Tesla, however, because their system is wildly overpriced, and it’s unavailable until the Tesla fanbois who are backing up the system get their roofs.

Anyway, if I get a solar roof, most of the additional cost will be covered by a huge tax break. That’s nice. Also, the roofers say my power bills will go to zero. A roof can produce more power than I need. The excess power goes back to the power company, and they have to pay me for it, at full price, for the life of the system. I may actually make some money every month. Yes, I have checked.

At current prices, the roof would save me at least $60,000 over 20 years. That doesn’t include potential income.

I was thinking about this, and I also started thinking about improving my insulation.

My attic is designed well by 2000 standards, because the house was built in 2000. That means it’s way more efficient than a 1950 house, but it’s not as good as a 2022 house. It has vented attics with complicated shapes that don’t lend themselves well to modifications.

These days, many houses have sealed attics. They shoot spray foam onto the undersides of the roofs, and they don’t put insulation on top of the ceilings. They don’t put air conditioning ducts and air handlers in the attics, because these things lose energy by heat exchange.

My ducts are in my attics. Nothing I can do about that. Moving them would probably cost a hundred grand, and it would deface the interior of the house severely.

A lot of my attic space can’t be foamed at all, and the rest has ducts that can’t be moved. On top of that, if you foam your roof, you will probably lose your shingle warranty, because your shingles will be hot all the time. Also, if your foamed roof leaks, the foam will conceal the leak until it gets really bad. Foam people deny these things, but GAF, the big dog in the shingle business, believes them and will not give full warranties to homeowners with foamed roofs.

Another problem with hot shingles: heat reduces the output of solar cells. If I had a solar roof and foam, my roof would generate less power.

I have seen people brag that they cut their AC bills by a third using foam. Whoopee. For me, that would not be much money. Even if my entire power bill, not just the AC part, were cut by a third, it would only run around $1000 per year. That’s not a great return in exchange for losing solar power and your shingle warranty.

It seems to me that if I decide to get solar power, efficiency shouldn’t matter to me at all. If my power bill is zero, what do I care about efficiency? It doesn’t help me, and it doesn’t help Mother Gaia, who is just a ball of dirt anyway.

Even if there were some tiny environmental benefit, I wouldn’t care. Environmental problems have to be significant in order to matter to me. I’m not going to inconvenience myself over miniscule improvements. When it comes to a choice between me and the environment, the environment will have to take the hit every time. Like I always tell my wife, the environment can drop dead.

There is another option: solar panels that sit just above the roof. I could get these and also fix my insulation, and the output would be somewhat better than shingle output. Problem: they are incredibly expensive compared to solar shingles. It looks like I would have to spend around $20,000 more up front.

Experts (who are trying to sell things) say panels are much cheaper, but that’s only true if you compare 1) adding a panel to an old roof and 2) buying a new solar roof. Obviously, the added cost of fixing the rest of the roof makes a big difference.

In my case, panels would cost exactly as much as a conventional shingle roof, all by themselves. I would have to pay twice the cost of a roof in order to get panels and a new roof, and I would get no tax break on the roof.

If your roof is already kaput, you’re going to pay to replace it anyway. You can’t factor that cost in. The intelligent comparison is between a new roof plus shingles and a new roof plus panels. A roof plus shingles is cheaper, and you get a tax break on the entire cost, not just the cost of the panel.

This is how things look to me now. Of course, I have only had about 10 days to become an expert.

What about batteries? I am looking into it. If I go solar, I want my house to be wired for batteries. I want to be ready if I ever need them. I don’t know if I want a battery right now. I think they will get cheaper, and they wear out with age.

The big plus of having a battery is that it will allow me to have power during outages. Solar alone won’t work during outages, because it shuts down to keep power workers safe. Also, it dies at night. You have to have a battery if you want power while you sleep.

A serious battery system that will run more than a toaster costs tens of thousands of dollars, and the batteries have to be replaced eventually. It’s like buying a car.

The roof is a given. Solar shingles seem to be the only intelligent choice. That leaves me with the battery question. For the cost of a car, I could forget about outages, and if Biden really wrecks the world and everything goes dark, I would have full power for the life of the batteries.

How long do batteries live? The web says that depends on how many charging cycles they endure and how deeply you discharge them. If I go off-grid and use them every day, 5 years is the lower limit. If I only used them when needed, they would last at least 10 years and presumably longer, since virtually nothing would be going on inside them while the grid was working.

If I had a solar roof, I would have no reason to rely on the batteries until Biden succeeded in destroying civilization and the power grid became useless. I would just use the grid at night and make my own juice during the day to save money.

A diesel or propane generator would get me through short outages, but they are completely useless for prolonged energy starvation. The cost of running them is astronomical and would get worse during a crisis. Fuel would increase in price and perhaps become unavailable. And a month is over 700 hours long, so a generator would wear out fast. A tractor with 3,000 hours is old.

It’s a shame so many people think diesel and propane will fix their apocalypse problems. It makes no sense at all. Electricity from free sources is the only answer.

Imagine spending $20000 on a new diesel generator and feeling smug, only to learn you had to rebuild it after a few months.

Anyway, solar is looking good, thanks to the tax break and the income from generation. Foam will never work. A diesel or propane generator will only be good for occasional use. Batteries are the best choice for zombie scenarios. These are my conclusions as of today. We’ll see how they age.

Shop Growing Less Chaotic

My newest metal fab project is taking shape. I’m making a cart for my belt grinders, and the basis is a Harbor Freight 44″ US General tool chest.

Here is what I have so far.

The more experience you get with fabricating, the faster things go. I think I got all the metal together around a week ago.

When you have a 2×72 grinder, you have long metal arms holding various types of tooling. As of now, I only have a flat platen and a small wheel holder. A platen is a flat thing that sits behind the belt so you can grind things straight, flat, and true. You can do a lot of other things with it. A small wheel holder holds several different wheels that allow you to grind small semicircular recesses into projects.

I should buy a large wheel and a medium-sized wheel as well. Each of these will need its own arm.

The two main features of the cart are the arm holder and the platform the grinders will sit on. The holder is done. The platform will be a piece of 3/4″ plywood, and both grinders will be screwed to it. It will sit on top of the cart.

I was considering buying a dustproof variable frequency drive (VFD) to replace my old VFD and the big shopmade enclosure I made for it. In the end, I thought I should avoid spending $430 for nearly nothing. When you can fabricate, you don’t have a lot of excuses for refusing to improvise and save money.

I had a piece of 11-gauge steel plate which was scrapped because I made some mistakes altering it for another project, so I cut a 6″ by 10.5″ piece out of it and made a little shelf for the enclosure to sit on. I welded it to the lower horizontal bar on the cart attachment. The box seemed floppy when I bolted it on, so I welded a little arm onto the vertical part of the attachment and ran a bolt through it into the enclosure. Now it’s rigid.

A $430 dustproof VFD would look better, but it wouldn’t do anything this one won’t do.

Wood prices are crazy. They went up, and then they crashed. Some things are getting cheap. Others are still expensive. I found I could buy excellent hardwood plywood, precut to 2′ by 4′, for not much more than low-grade plywood, so I bought it. I could have bought an entire sheet and saved a little, but I am tired of keeping large pieces of material around for no purpose, and bringing a big sheet here would have meant a certain amount of exertion.

If I had bought cheap plywood, I would have had to spend time filling in voids and sanding it to prevent splinters.

I usually paint my workshop creations with black truck bed coating, but this time I decided to go with tractor paint in John Deere green. Tractor paint is not as tough as truck bed coating, but it’s very tough by paint standards, and the cart will look nice with a green attachment. I may paint the wood green, too. And the enclosure.

Drab colors are customary for tools, but I am moving away from that. I guess it’s because I have three Harbor Freight tool chests, and they come in vivid colors. A little color makes a shop look less like an archvillain’s lair. Also, when you get old, color helps you see what you’re working on.

After this, I have to finish the rolling kitchen island I started. I also need to paint two tool stands and a mobile base, all fabricated by yours truly. Then I should put a real mobile base on the Powermatic 66 and get rid of the one I bought.

With those jobs behind me, I should get rid of the silly 4′ by 8′ shelves in the shop. The previous owner used them to hold materials and so on. Shelves that big are stupid. It’s hard to reach the middle, especially on higher shelves. They kill a quarter of the shop and don’t provide a good return. I think I may buy steel tubing and make cheap, strong shelves for the south wall. Jamie Hyneman, the Mythbusters guy, did this in his shop, and it works well.

I thought I needed to build a new shop, but the more I get this one in order, the more I think I should wait. This shop is now so efficiently arranged, I can get the lawn tractor and utility cart inside. I should probably get a cheap shed for materials and certain outdoor tools, since they don’t need to be in the shop, and then add a pole barn for the tractor and pickup.

The real dream is air conditioning. I already have enough power. I just need insulation on the doors and roof. One of my doors is a roll-up, and that’s a problem. It’s not possible to insulate an old roll-up. You have to buy a new one with insulation built in. That would run about $4000.

If I had air conditioning, I would never leave the shop.

Maybe later today I’ll put primer on the cart attachment and cut the plywood and prime it. Paint takes forever to dry properly, so I will be lucky if I can get this project truly over with in two days.

I feel like God is helping me get this place together. I’m making progress much faster than before.