The older I get the more things I find about which I just don’t give a rat’s ass.
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.
I’m sure it’s just me…
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.)
No, That’s Not What Bothers Me
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.
OK, So Do I Get a Choice?
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.
Well, It Ain’t Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder
In answer to Aggie’s “assignment” (which I found out about here), submitted late because the Damned Dog ate my homework:
“That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It”
I am an Olde Pharte, the embodiment of the stereotypical irascible curmudgeon with a heart of antimony. When I do have to interact with people, I enjoy most twisting their tiny little brains into knots and leaving them thinking we were having fun, when in fact I was having fun mocking them.
Almost no one catches wise.
And then…
It was a typical Thursday evening, and I was out, walking the Damned Dog. (I refuse to call my wife’s animated mop by the anthropomorphic name she gave it; as much as I despise people, it’s an insult to most of even the self-lobotomized among humanity to use a name one might in the phone book to describe this creature.) As usual, the Damned Dog was taking its damned time voiding its bladder and bowels—a necessity at night if I want to avoid stepping in “presents” deposited on my path to paying the mid-nightly water bill.
Well, it was a typical Thursday evening until, “Psst! Hey, mister! Can ya gimme a hand?” came at me in a whistling, oddly mechanical sotto voce from the shadows beside old lady McIntyre’s garage.
WTF? Whoever it was looked to be really short and sounded almost as though he were whispering through some sort of brass musical instrument. Well, even though I only had The Animated Mop as my great defender, I didn’t feel threatened by a midget whispering through a trumpet. If he (she-it?–couldn’t tell) had a whole brass band with him (she-it?), that could be a different situation, though. Oh, well, “Who are you? What do you want?”
“I’m kinda stuck here.”
OK, button on my cap light. WTF?!? No, seriously, WTF?!?
Yeh, it was apparently an “it” and… and shiny, with what appeared to be tentacles. And its head? Stuck. In the hole it appeared to have poked through the side of the garage.
“How’d ya get stuck?”
“Ate too much, I guess.”
“Too much what?”
“Too much hydrocarbon.”
“What?”
“The vehicle inside this building was just full of bunches ‘n’ bunches of hydrocarbons, and I gorged on the stuff until I’m just too full to get out by the hole I came in by. Can ya gimme a hand?”
“What do I get out of it?”
“Interstellar goodwill?”
I considered the situation. I had a good knee brace on my right knee, and my left leg and hip hadn’t been acting up all that much recently, so I figured I could handle a little physical exercise.
“OK, hold still,” and I hauled off and booted the nasty lil bugger’s head into old lady McIntyre’s back yard. So maybe I didn’t consider what the lil critter had been eating and maybe its head did draw a spark off a trash can on its way to the back yard. These things happen. My eyebrows will probably grow back, old lady McIntyre’s insurance will replace her garage and car and the Damned Dog looks better with no fur.
That’s my story and I’m sticking with it. Stop laughing at me, or I’ll hit you with my cane. (The knee brace wasn’t quite as good as I thought.)
Sometimes Fast… Isn’t
Sometimes reading one to three lines of text at once (scanning and “absorbing” is how I tend to think of it) isn’t really as fast as it might seem. Recently, I had to back up and “re-read” (mentally review) “mixed martial artist” which I had “read” as “mixed martini artist”.
*heh*
How I scanned those two letters as “ni” instead of “al” I really don’t know. The occurrence gives me a little more reason to exercise patience with OCR software, though. In my case, though, I’m blaming coffee deprivation.
At times, though, it’s just not my fault that my reading simply MUSt slow down. *heh* Take for example the inexcusable,
“…those interactions surpass in quantity and complexity the human brains ability to comprehend them.”
Oh, heck, “those interactions” apparently even “surpass… the human brains [sic] ability” to write about them grammatically. *heh* If the author of that ungrammatical comment isn’t able to comprehend the possessive form “brain’s” (and whatever editor might have passed that abortion of English doesn’t even have brains enough to correct it), then I just have to slow down and gripe about the stupidity and poor ethics it reveals. “[P]oor ethics”? Yeh, the author of that comment accepted payment for furthering illiteracy. Evil troglodyte. *heh*
(Worse, the moronic thief–yes, “thief” for taking pay to utter crap–repeated nearly the same ingrammatical crap with, “The world’s complexity may simply outrun our brains [sic] capacity to understand it.” There, the proper formulation ought rightly to have been “brains'”.)
But, of course, this sort of stupidity is common among our “betters” who presume to be able to tell us how to think. To show I’m evenhanded, I’ll even class the WSJ’s James Taranto as among the stupid bright people. Take this Taranto’s piece of stupidity as an example:
“Understand, I don’t want the Obama’s [sic] $81 steaks.”
In an otherwise fairly on target piece about Dhimmicrappic hypocrisy, Taranto loses sight of how to create a possessive form of a plural. Since he was referring to the Obamas (The Zero and Moochelle), what any literate person would have written in his place would have been “Obamas'” with the apostrophe following the plural “s”. Some might have written “Obamas’s” although that formation is non-standard. As Taranto wrote it (and his lazy, subliterate editor(s) approved) he refers to ONE “Obama” (THE) and makes of the ONE “Obama” a possessive referencing the $81 steaks (big appetite for ONE Obama, but then we knew the Obamas have big appetites, for various things).
Gripes me off that people like that don’t have their pay docked for doing such things.
Nicely Spicy Snakkerel
Simple snack; a tasty accompaniment to some meals. Cheesy peppers. A kind of chips-n-queso dish without the chips. *heh*
Take some serano, jalapeno, habanero peppers: whatever you have on hand that suit your taste and preferred level of spiciness. Wash, slice lengthwise and place on a parchment-covered broiling pan. Cover well with shredded cheeses. I like a mix of Monterrey Jack, cheddar and Romano cheeses. Add spices and herbs to taste. (This is one of the few times the acrid flavor of garlic powder doesn’t put me off.)
Place under the broiler for 20-30 minutes. Depends on your peppers and your broiler, really; experiment.
Nom-nom. Make a bunch. Even if you cannot or do not plan to eat ’em all at once, leftovers wrap nicely in the parchment paper for keeping in the fridge for a short while and microwave up to tasty nom-nominess in a flash. DO watch out for outgassing from the microwaving, though. It can sting mucus membranes–eyes, lungs.
I’d include pictures, but the batches I make don’t usually seem last long enough for me to remember to get a camera out.
Lucky, Lucky Me, Me*
*A close cousin of “Happy, happy joy, joy.” 😉
So, I ran across an easily adaptable waffle recipe (aren’t they all?) and had a go at it. Lucky, lucky me, me. I even recalled we had some waffle plates to go in a little electric grill.
Dry ingredients:
1.75C flour (my modification: amaranth flour with a bit of vanilla flavored protein powder)
1Tsp baking powder
0.25Tsp salt
Wet ingredients:
2 egg yolks
1.75C milk (my modification: cream!)
0.50C oil
Separate:
2 egg whites, whipped to stiff peaks. I added a tablespoon of powdered sucralose and about 0.25Tsp of vanilla extract.
Mix dry ingredients. Mix wet ingredients. Mix the two together. Fold in the egg white mixture. Apply to hot waffle iron. Serve topped with butter and syrup of some kind or with berries or whatever. Enjoy.
Other ingredients: I also added a bit of ground flax seed and some chia seeds.
Even with my mods, the waffles came out very light, tasty and toasty, and served as a good “nuncheon” or afternoon tea (without the tea, TYVM :-)).
No, no pictures. The waffles didn’t last long enough to allow picture taking.
Someone may wonder why the substitutions. Continue reading “Lucky, Lucky Me, Me*”
Another Baby Step In the Kitchen Stuff
Ordered a couple of these last Friday. They arrived today. Nice.
All-in-all, I’m rather pleased with the stools (chairs?). There were a couple of assembly speed bumps that might throw some folks off, but nothing that I feel strongly detracts from the purchase/assembly experience. Some of the holes for the upper side supports/step stool guides were difficult to insert the side support bars into, making screwing the bolts in a potentially frustrating experience. The problem was that those four holes (on each unit) had simply been rather crudely punched, and needed to be deburred in order to insert the parts. Notaproblem.
More difficult was installing the back on the second chair I assembled. The right back support simply would not fit closely enough to allow the bolts to mate with the legs. No problem. Turned it upside down, very, very slightly bent the part, detached the upper back support and installed the thing, then reinstalled the upper back support. Added maybe five minutes time, what with determining the problem and effecting the solution.
Now that the chairs are assembled, they feel quite sturdy and comfortable (that’s my coffee cup in the picture; sat at the counter drinking from it while reading a bit from the Kindle Fire).