Category: FYI

Posted on

We R Rural

Pretty much, here in America’s Third World County, yep: rural, all right. Purdue University has applied an “Index of Relative Rurality” to stats from American counties that illustrates the point pretty well.

A recently introduced, continuous, multidimensional measure of rurality, the Index of Relative Rurality (IRR), avoids the confusing effects of inclusion in metro boundaries. (2) It does not answer the question “Is a county rural or urban?” but instead addresses the question “What is a county’s degree of rurality?”

The IRR is based on four dimensions of rurality: population, population density, extent of urbanized area and distance to the nearest metro area. These dimensions are unquestioned in terms of their contribution to rurality and are incorporated implicitly in many existing rurality definitions. The index is scaled from 0 to 1, with 0 representing the most urban place and 1 representing the most rural place

(CLEEK to Embeegan, as TWC’s–relatively–vast alien invasion population might say *sigh*)

See that color code next to the bottom? That’s us. We’re not completely devoid of human habitation, and we do have access to–sort of–“urban” areas, but da “piney woods” is our “back yard” (and for many their front yard too), and there are parts of the county where YOU DO NOT GO even if you aren’t a terminally stupid “revenooer”.

A good place for a “bug out location”. Just sayin’.

Oh, you’ll notice I gave no further indication of which of those counties color-coded with the next-to-most-rural coding is America’s Third World County. Long time readers of this blog can pick it out right away, anyway.

Posted on

This Stuff Is Simply the Best

I used to use another product that’s almost as good to clean post n pans, coffee and hard water “stained” glasses and mugs, etc., but this stuff is less expensive and better:

While I mostly use it nowadays to shine up my “stainless” steel pots and pans, it has tons more uses. Gottaloveit. Just sayin’.

Posted on

A Lil “Notahowto”

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.

Posted on

RTFM

Or at least the warning label printed on the bottle. Just sayin’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The warning reads,

Use this product one drop at a time. Keep away from eyes, pets and small children. Not for people with heart or respiratory problems.

I’ve spent a lifetime enjoying increasingly spicy foods and find jalapeno, serano and habanero peppers to be tasty lil tidbits, although jalapenos are, IMO, more for children and delicate flowers with “the vapors” who faint at the mere sight of black peppercorns. This stuff, while tasty, is HOT. No, not the very hottest thing around, if Scoville measurements are on target, but very, very close.

Use with respect. 🙂

Note: Recent college graduates may need to have someone who’s literate to translate the label for them, so if you’re in this category (and having someone read this blog post to you), please seek help.

Posted on

Fun On the Road

So, went out of town (out of county by a couple) this a.m. with Son&Heir. On the way back, about 6 miles out of town, saw the gas gauge go from nearly full to almost empty, really quickly, lost power, coasted off an exit (the one I’d planned on taking anyway) and about 400 feet on down the road.

Weird. Popped the hood. Gas fumes. Gas dripping from the fuel rail. *sigh* Under car? Sure enough, gas “streamed” from engine compartment all the way to the back of the car, beside, around and apparently evaporated off hot exhaust components. How no fire, I don’t know, but no fire. (Yeh, yeh, I know: no sparks :-))

Plastic clip on fuel rail failed. Had no tools and no clip… and no gas anyway. Called our mechanic. He sent his son&heir with their small tow truck and he dropped us off at the house.

Now, the guys had installed a new fuel pump several months back and gone ahead and also installed the new fuel filter with integrated fuel rail that I’d had a short while but not gotten around to installing myself.

Get that: my part; they installed. If it’d been a faulty installation, it’d given out long before now, so it had to be a faulty part. My hook. Got a call that the car was good to go, but… Asked ’em to double check (“Tug on that thing REAL hard, ‘K?” ;-)) make SURE the part–especially the clip–was good before I picked it up.

I hate fuel leaks.

Sure, I could’ve had the guy drop it here and torn into the thing, but it’s colder outside than my “old bones” like for doing mechanicking, so better to have it done than do it.

Oh, well. 🙂

*heh* Picked the car up. Drove off, on a windy country road, no shoulder, very few turn-offs. Three miles to filling station. Got a mile. Called the guys. It took three of them *heh* to bring me a gallon of gas. 😉

Fun on the road, indeed.

Posted on

Baby Steps…

A few additions and improvements to the new “Coffee Shrine” in the last week. The bamboo plate rack is installed and holds all the (unbroken *heh*) salad plates, which we normally treat as dinner plates, allowing the open storage of the dinner plates on the counter, using a different, horizontal storage, bamboo plate rack. The “fun” coffee cups are now hanging on the wall for quick access/use, and a bit more trim work is done, leaving just a few bits and pieces of trim, molding and some flooring work to finish things out. My Wonder Woman likes it, which is the single criterion that counts. 🙂

UPDATE: Painted “bowl” shelf and the part of the new (furniture-grade) plywood facing to the cabinet next to it last night. Primed some trim for painting and then application tonight. It’s coming. Still have the soffit above the sink/west wall cabinets to finish (plastering/painting), but it’s all coming along.

Posted on

In Answer to Overwhelming Demand…

(Well, Nicole did ask *heh*)

The back splash and countertop are essentially finished. The things left on that part of a long list of kitchen projects are minuscule tiny lil nanobits (redundancy> I can do that!).

Note lil things left (not back splash or countertop) in the pic below. The former “coffee shrine” (new one being built off camera) next to dishwasher is undergoing rehab. Reworked the shelves, which now need only more sanding and then treatment like the countertop, while the rest simply needs painting… which is awaiting the purchase of new paint. The color on the wall above the former “coffee shrine” is almost right, just not quite, and the new color will carry throughout the kitchen. Yeh, I know I just5 repainted the cabinets, but so? *heh*

Other things like finishing the window treatment and suchlike will also get a touch of my hand as things progress–and they are.

I do like the massive “trivets” made from marble left over from the backsplash. They total 1′ X 3′ area when slid together. Will make for nice holiday buffet serving and other hot stuff placement.

Of course, I ought to have cleaned up the messy sink, shut the “sponge drawer” and at least cleared out the mess in the former “coffee shrine” area, but, eh, had the camera handy, hot iron, striking and all that.

*sigh* Had the table saw in use yesterday and forgot to cut some trim. It’s cold out there where the saw is today, and time? Notsomuch. Oh, well. Lots still to do in the kitchen… before I can finish some projects in the living room, the master bedroom area and other things, so I’ll have my downtime hours pretty well full for the next bit and a piece.

Better to wear out than to rust out, right? 😉

Posted on

*sigh* eWeek Can’t Issue a Simple Warning About Malware Without Screwing Up the Lede

FBI Issues Warning about Phishing Attack. That’s a good thing to pass around, but eWeek’s Fahmida Y. Rashid needs to take some remedial English classes. Note the lede:

“FBI warned of a new spear-phishing campaign that tricks users into downloading Zeus malware and then looting their bank accounts.”

While one can infer that the author meant to say that the malware seeks to loot users’ bank accounts, that’s not what the sentence says. The lil “and” indicates the two linked phrases are equivalents referring to the phishing campaign” that “tricks users” into two actions: “downloading” and “looting”. While that’s obviously not what the author intended to say, it’d help promote literacy if the author would say what she means, viz.,

“FBI warned of a new spear-phishing campaign that tricks users into downloading Zeus malware which then attempts to loot their bank accounts.”

But, in terms of the warning, only very (very) stupid people will be fooled by this phishing malware attempt. Would YOU click on a link in a (SPAM!) message that purports to come from “the National Automated Clearing House Assocation (NACHA)” and tells you the link is to reset your banking credentials? If so, I have some great ocean front property in New Mexico I’d like to sell you and a bridge located in Brooklyn I just know would interest you.

Oh, and this absolutely stupid comment from another eWeek article by the same author really takes the cake:

It’s difficult for the savviest Internet user to identify some of the latest scams.

That was in the context of email inbox filtering to filter out dangerous attachments and other email. Really? It’s difficult for anyone with more active brain cells than a 10-year-old cracked crock of spoiled kimchi to identify some of the latest scams? Really? Ocean front property and a bridge in Brooklyn…

And the author follows that statement, in a paragraph “debunking” the idea that training users will enhance network security, with this:

While technology can be patched, the human brain can’t.

OK, I may have to give him that one. In fact, I’ll admit that he’s a good data point in support of the assertion.

Posted on

Super Thanksgiving

Double Celebration. It’s usually pretty easy to remember our wedding anniversary, since we were married the day after Thanksgiving (the rehearsal dinner even doubled as a Family Reunion Thanksgiving meal, served in the poshest of posh settings at my fav aunt & uncle’s home :-)).

This year, Thanksgiving falls on THE day, so it’s a double celebration.

33 years, 13 years on “second chance” (October 1998 was when my Wonder Woman “died” three times in one day and I got to practice CPR on a Not Dummy).

I’m a lucky, lucky guy, and proof of that old law of nature that states that the uglier the guy the better the woman he’ll end up with. *heh*

Son & Heir will be here. Lovely Daughter and her Estimable Spouse will be visiting his relations in Alabama this year. We’ll see them on Sunday. Heck, by then I may even have started assembling my Grolsh beer bottle Christmas “tree”. Or not, since the bay window’s full of my Wonder Woman’s plants this year.

Posted on

Micro-Mini Health Tip

First, a couple of disclaimers: This is just a single data point (me), and I’m not all that certain how really important some of the factors are, anyway. I mean, after all, health professionals can’t keep straight what they think is healthy from one decade to the next, anyway, so take this all with a grain of salt*.

At my checkup this year (yes, in the last four years I’ve actually had annual checkups, something very new in my life *heh*), the Dr was shocked (yes, shocked, I say) to see that I’d lost 25#. So? It’d been a year. Moving on. Continue reading “Micro-Mini Health Tip”