"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
Who, me? Watch the State of the (Dys)Union Lies? Nah. The lies will be much easier to spot reading a transcript. For one thing, confronting the lies that way is less likely to result in vomit on the floor and a RCOB* evening.
*RCOB=”red curtain of blood” referring to what would likely descend over my eyes as I went berserker. Just sayin’. I am able to be a wee tad more dispassionately analytical–or at least able to almost fake the dispassion–when confronted with lies in print.
I saw an article on building a Linux-controlled “Corretto” coffee roaster and thought, “Cool, but where would I put everything in our kitchen? I’d have to build on an addition!”
*heh*
Still, one of the things that gives Henry Ward Beecher a claim to historical immortality that rival’s his sister’s is his appreciation of good coffee:
“A cup of coffee – real coffee – home-browned, home ground, home made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick, tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java: such a cup of coffee is a match for twenty blue devils and will exorcise them all.” – Henry Ward Beecher
And, after reading the above paean to a good cuppa joe and singing a few verses of O Blessed Holy Caffeine Tree i9n appreciation of The Holy Brew (#1) myself, almost the article cited above persuadeth me to do a “Linux Coffee Roaster” build of my own… Almost. I’d still need to build that addition onto the house.
I can recall a time well over half a century ago (OK, I was four years old) when I went around “touching” things with an imaginary eleven foot pole that I “wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole”.
And then I read recently,
They’d be fools to touch it with a 40 foot pole.
*sigh*
I commented the other day on how handy it is to use a stylus with the Kindle Fire, how easy it is to make styli and even briefly described a couple I made for use on the Fire (see update below).
Yep, they all work very well, but… the very (very) nice leather case my Wonder Woman got for me (yes, she was in cahoots with Son&Heir) for the Fire had no good place to store any of he styli I have. Darn. Oh, well, a rubber band sort of “solved” the issue, even if it did look kinda kuldgey. But wait! What’s this? A faux leather zipper case for a mini “legal pad” note pad? Let’s see…
Yep, the notepad switches over to the left side OK. Five lil hook-and-loop (Velcro-type) adhesive-backed “dot” fasteners and… Kindle Fire installed, the nicest of the pen/styli in the storage loop for a pen. Zip up. Secure. Open. Shake the contraption (over my lap). Secure.
Removed the Fire. The hook fastener dots stayed where they should (inside the lil zipper case), as did the loop fastener dots on the Fire, and the Fire reinstalled in the slightly more compact leather case w/o any problems.
Now, I have two different padded cases for the device, each of which work very well. Oh, the cost of the lil faux leather zipper case? $1.00, including the notepad, plus maybe $0.50 for the lil hook-and-loop dots used.
It’s coming together. So far, I use the Fire for
reading eBooks (of course)
watching videos (TV shows, movies)
listening to mp3s
browsing the web (light use)
reading and answering email (light use)
carpentry (!–the lil android bubble level app!)
And a few other things. I’ve not yet used it as I used to use my old Palm M500, for note taking, shopping and to-do lists, and as an addressbook simply because, while it is a small form factor, it’s not small enough to fit in any pockets except on one heavy winter coat I own. That might change if I find a convenient way to safely carry it around with me, but then again it might not. we’ll see.
UPDATE: “easy to make”? Way easy. Just now made another one from an old Saitek lighted stylus (dead batteries) for my (now dead) Palm M500. Removed the plastic point. Cut a thin strip of conductive foam padding. Folded the foam strip and sorta screwed it in where the tip once went. Cut a piece of aluminum tape and wrapped a small portion of the foam strip and the metal body of the stylus together and… new stylus for my capacitive touchscreen. Very nice. Smaller tip than any of the others so far, too, which makes hitting the lil tools icon all the easier.
🙂
In case the source of the post title or the King James English is a puzzle to some, here’s a quote (and reference to the context) and brief commentary before I get to the substance–whatever there may be–of this post:
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. From 1Corinthians 13
Of course, the “glass” seen “through… darkly” referred to above is a mirror. The “through” instead of “in” (as we would have it today) reflects both changes in language and a particular view of the world–and mirrors ion particular–common for millennia up through at least the time of the court of King James, a view common enough even in the 19th Century to make Lewis Carroll’s use of it immediately accessible to his readers. The “darkly” is a common (in the day) reference to a cloudy mirror whose silvering has become delaminated or tarnished, reflecting *cough* the Greek passage’s reference to a tarnished mirror made of polished metal.
So, “Through a glass darkly” refers to an imperfect reflection of reality.
Simple, right? It ought to be obvious from context, but many people seem today to make the silly assumption that it refers to looking through a window in some manner.
Sidebar: I view anyone who cannot read and grasp the language of the KJV Bible or Shakespeare’s plays and poems in (close to*) Shakespeare’s language to be at best semi-literate. At best. These two bodies of work are simply the best literature in the English language and worthy of being grasped on their own terms.
Now, to whatever scraps of meat there may be in this post.
I was treated this AM to a brief glimpse–on two levels, which led to more that aren’t germane to this post–into the meaning of this excerpt from the famous Pauline passage. First, from this post at Ann Althouse’s blog (go ahead and read it for context if you will), two comments:
Oh, and by the way, as you sit at your COMPUTER to read this, remember what conditions it was produced under & think again about those evil, slave-holding, cotton producing, antebellum Southerners.
That’s you in the mirror.
And
Your computer comes with a mirror?
Strangely, the computer I was sitting at when I read the second comment was–dimmly–acting as a mirror. A 15.6″ glossy notebook screen in a room well-lit by direct sunlight? Mirror. *sigh*
And yes, I could see the semi-validity of the first comment, although the commenter’s analogy was seriously flawed. I’m more in the position of those (often British and Northern) consumers who wore cotton clothing made from slave-produced cotton exported for manufacture into other goods than the position of a slave-owning Antebellum Southerner (of whom the South had relatively few compared to its general population of free persons).
Yes, I benefit from the “Made by slave labor in China” effect, though the computer I was having my face reflected by was not produced with very many “made in China” parts and pretty much contained only a few materials derived from Chinese slave labor–mostly the rare earths materials exported by China and used in products used in America primarily because the “feddle gummint” makes mining and refining our own resources prohibitively expensive.
Still, what are my choices?
Well, at least I won’t be buying any Apple products. *heh*
*OK, so what’s the deal with “Shakespeare’s plays and poems in (close to*) Shakespeare’s language”? Simple. We have editions of Shakespeare’s plays which may or may not reflect accurately what was originally written, and though we have substantial evidence of Shakespeare’s work to go by, even less evidence of his actual work than we have textual evidence concerning differing versions of biblical works. “Close to” is good enough, though, to let us benefit from the richness of Shakespeare’s work, regardless of who the author was (another can of worms that doesn’t matter any more than it matters “which” Homer–if any–wrote Odysseus *heh*).
The older I get the more things I find about which I just don’t give a rat’s ass.
This is not a “How to” as much as it is a pointer about styli for capacitive touch screens. (Love the pun or don’t. I DGARA :-))
Love the Kindle Fire. I use it far, far too much. I’m almost back to the average numbers of books per week read that I indulged myself in for decades before I discovered the Internet in ’93, and I have watched more movies and obscure (mainly foreign) TV shows since Christmas than I care to count.
But I had a small bone to pick with the device. While I have relatively small hands (a curse when I was trying to play piano or guitar), using my fingers to navigate–and especially to type on the onscreen virtual keyboard–was something of a pain at times.
Enter the stylus I received with my matte-finish screen protector from HandHeldItems. Yes, it was the company’s low-end, throwaway stylus, but it worked a charm. Soon, though, I missed being able to store it easily. Oh, it had a lil thingy to plug into the headphone jack, but that was clearly sub-optimal. What to do?
A quick search on the web for “DIY Stylus for Kindle Fire” turned up a raft of possibilities, but the one that suggested using the conductive foam padding used in packing electronic parts seemed ideal, so… dig around in parts to find some that’s easily sacrificed, look around for some pens or other “stylus materials” that can be modified, a lil shade tree mechanicking and…
A couple of styli that work great for my purposes. One is from a nice, heafty-weight metal-bodied “gimme” pen that had a built in laser pointer with dead batteries. It offered a way to embed some conductive foam padding in the top of the pen, just above the clip, once the tiny lil laser pointer was removed. A sized Q-Tip holds the foam in place, jutting from the top of the pen, nicely rounded. Nice, sturdy clip. I even had an ink refill for the pen. Excellent stylus!
Another as a backup for the lil 2″ (though extensible to 3″) HandHeldItems throwaway stylus? Sure. A small metal screwdriver (removed the bit end), a piece of conductive foam padding secured with wire and live rubber tape and, voilà! Nice lil 2.5″ mini-stylus. Works just as well as the other two.
No, really.
OK, I can understand and accept execrable grammar in dialog. Heck, I write in a way I find nearly inexcusable myself pretty regularly here, for effect. But when ALL David Weber’s characters in ALL his books have difficulty properly using adverbs… (almost) ALL the time (and always when forming adverbs from adjectives or using adjectives in an adverbial position, if you’d rather), it grates a wee tad.
Just sayin’.
(I keep wanting to send Weber–or his editors/proofreaders–a link to this page. *heh*)), it grates a wee tad.)
Fake iPad 2s made of clay have been sold at a couple of Canadian electronics stores.
Fake iPads made of clay were sold to as many as 10 people in Vancouver, Canada, CTV News reports. The fake iPads were sold at Best Buy and Future Shop, after scam artists bought a real iPad with cash, and replaced the device with modeling clay.
The scammers then brought the fake iPad back to the store and returned it for a full refund. Future Shop and Best Buy put the returned devices directly back onto the shelf, where other customers bought it. Mark Sandhu bought his wife, Sundeep, what he thought was an iPad 2 for Christmas. Instead, they both got a surprise when they opened the box.
Whoop-de-do. *yawn* So? They were tablets, weren’t they? *heh* No, what bothers me, really bothers me, is this sentence in the FoxBusiness report:
Future Shop and Best Buy put the returned devices directly back onto the shelf, where other customers bought it [sic].
Someone want to parse that for me? The dumbass who wrote the report really should be fired.
Lunch time. Hey, here’s an idea, kiddies! While munchy-lunchy and all that jazz, let’s check the weather!
Well, all right! Te temp seems reasonable, doesn’t it boys n girls? But… what’s that with that “Hi: 70 °F” thingy there in the upper right-hand corner? Hmmm, seems a bit anomalous, eh?
Let’s look at the forecast, mmm-K?
*huh* Seems the forecasters are having a tiff. Must be some Anthropogenic Global Warmistas projecting fantasy or something, eh? On the “current conditions page” temps at noon-thirty-ish are ~78% of the projected high for the day, as noted on this page (current temps as reported at the local high school weather station, on a hill 1/4 mile away from another weather station–local electric utility company–which always, consistently, regularly reports temps 2-3 degrees cooler). Well, maybe things’ll warm up 15-16 degrees by day’s end.
…Or maybe not, as, according to the same weather site’s 7-day forecast page for this locale, the forecast high for today is… 48 °F.
*huh?!?*
Yep, one page says 70 °F and another–same site and supposedly same forecasters using same data–says 48 °F high… just 68% of the other forecast number from the same people and 12% less than the actual, current reported temp.
Once again, if meteorologists who rely on massive data sets, compared to the time frame, etc., from the best available sources can’t even agree with themselves on a forecast one day in advance, or get within 10% of the actual temp with even one of two forecast temps, how is it that the Cult of Anthropogenic Global Warmistas can confidently predict temperatures to tenths of a degree 5 or ten years down the pike, especially when they have such a minuscule data set compared to the problem they’ve set themselves?
Well, they can’t, especially when they deliberately, obdurately, stupidly ignore, lie about and discard data they find inconvenient to their fantastical claims.