Category Archives: entertainment

More Windows 11 News

by

0

Hey there, I’ve run into another article you may want to read. Hope it helps.

https://www.theverge.com/22644194/microsoft-windows-11-minimum-system-requirements-processors-changes

A Review of “Utopia for Realists”

by

2

Hey everyone, a fellow blogger just posted a great read, and I thought you may enjoy it too. I don’t know how many of you know this blogger, he is intelligent, writes well and worth your time.

hankrules2011

Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal WorldUtopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World by Rutger Bregman
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Yeah. Utopia for anything, any reason or topic always sounds good. Do you know how many descriptions like the one this book has here I’ve read over many decades from authors dating back centuries? Do you know how many were right or proven right? Yeah, I do. The answer would be NONE! Why? Cause no matter how brilliant they may seem or even be, these concepts and theories are little but pipe dreams. Fantasy. Let’s give the kids of the world some hope, some premise and promise, something to dedicate their lives too … and then not deliver. Again and again. Over and over.

An obvious example or two. One of the most obvious: Marx and Engels’ semi-brilliant (in theory) deconstruction of economic and political systems to even the playing field…

View original post 2,569 more words

Starlink review: dreams, not reality – The Verge

by

0

Hey y’all. I found another interesting article, and I’m going to pass it on to you. This article sounds more like what we all would expect from new tech, and tells us of some of the problems we might expect.

https://www.theverge.com/22435030/starlink-satellite-internet-spacex-review

Starlink review (hands on): How good is Elon Musk’s satellite internet service? | Tom’s Guide

by

0

https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/starlink

Hey y’all. Here is an opinion of the startlink internet service I found in my news feeds. Maybe it will be the service you’re looking for.

Ace In The Hole

by

3

In 1976 I decided to buy a piece of property, instead of buying a truckload of dope. I was tired of meeting up with people that would gladly stab me in the back, for better deals. I was tired of dealing with shady people. I was tired of people.

I had decided I needed an ace in the hole, a get away place. I was living in California at the time, and it was always getting more crowded. I looked at various properties, and usually found a reason not to invest in them. Little lakes in the Sierra’s, and larger ones in the valleys.

Waterfront property is the ticket, but always has a significantly higher price tag. My only problem with that was, waterfront property would always go up in value, meaning taxes would go up, and popularity of water sports would keep a quiet little lake, noisy, crowded and polluted.

I looked on the outskirts of little towns, for possible property, but realized the little places would grow, and end up forcing me out. I really don’t do crowds. It became apparent to me, that a piece of property would have to be far from the usual beaten path.

15 miles east of Winnemucca Nevada, is a backwater place called Golconda. It was almost a place once, and even boasted a hot spring / resort in the early 20th century. There was a lot of gold mining around those parts. In fact, 20 miles north of Golconda is one of the last underground gold mines, still in operation.

photo-Map of Nevada

Map of Nevada

5 miles south of that mine, The Twin Creeks Mine, sits a chunk of ground, that had been looked at, and left behind as useless. Core samples showed the property had no real wealth, and was sold as parcels as small as ten acres. This section was right against the Osgood Mountains, and looked out to the south-east at the Humboldt River, and Battle Mountain Nevada.

In May of ’76, I walked around out there and determined, that this place would never grow. No one would ever really do anything out there, and it would always look pretty much the same. That was 39 years ago, and a person did build a place a half of a mile from there. That is all that changed in that amount of time.

A section of land is one mile square, and that is broken down to 640 acres per section. In Nevada, every other section ( checker board ) is Public Land, with the Bureau of Land Management, overseeing it’s use. Most of the land out there is open range, meaning local ranchers have livestock running around.

The property just north of the one I bought, is public land. There is an operating spring that spills about a gallon a minute of pure fresh clean water. For years the spring has fed a couple of water troughs, and spilled out to cause a greener place in all of that dryness out there.

I bought that property because of the spring. My research had shown the local water table was at 400 feet, and would be costly for a well to be drilled. The spring was only 600 feet from my property, and is considered public property, so I would be allowed to get water there.

I wasn’t ready to actually live out there, I just wanted to know that if ever I needed a place, it was already paid for, and I could go there. There was nothing to go to there. The local town type place, Golconda was a thriving gas station, bar, general store and post office, all in the same building!

I stopped in there when I bought the 10 acres, in May of ’76. The people weren’t impressed with me, and I wasn’t impressed with them either. We all mumbled under our breaths, and parted ways. I’ve been back there many times over the years, and it’s mostly been the same.

The local store is a joke, and you would have done better shopping in Winnemucca, 15 miles farther west. The local everything’s don’t cater to folks. They have what they have, and if you don’t like it, that’s okay with them. It seems most of the people out there got trapped, and finally accepted that fact.

Horny Toad Ranch is still there, and was supposed to be the place I was going to be living at now. It wasn’t going to be easy, dealing with the challenges there, but I had some ideas that may have worked out. It seems politics, always get in the way of people just being able to live. I’ll describe that later for you in Winnemucca Sucks!

Murphy All The Way

by

4

Some of what you’re about to read is actual science, and some is actually just me. You may decide for yourselves, if it even matters in the least.

The laws of the universe are mostly beyond all of us. String Theory tries to explain how quantum mechanics, and astrophysics can be molded into a universal field of everything. The nature of space / time seem to be simple laws, that we still can’t figure out. And it would seem Murphy’s law, plays it’s part in all of the theoretical fields too.

Murphy’s law at it’s simplest form states anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. No matter how you plan for the unknown variable, something is always missed. Murphy’s law is kin to Chaos theory, and helps to predict how a butterfly beating it’s wings in the Amazon, can spawn a hurricane on the east coast.

When we get to String Theory, and Quantum mechanics, it seems Murphy gets in the way again. The closer we can get to discovering how a particle reacts to a stimuli, we get in the way of the results, by altering the shape of space, trying to make better measurements.

It also seems a particle can occupy two places in the universe at the same time. That seems to put a little wrinkle in the previous theories. Also we can only measure quantum length down to a Planck length. and we can’t get a better resolution, as we are limited by our equipment

It also turns out that the universe acts one way, on a cosmic scale, and acts quite differently at Planck length scales. Einstein also had a problem with this very nature. Space / Time seems to be predictable over great distance and time, and incoherent at infinitesimal lengths, and the closer we come to an absolute measurement, the more we screw up the results.

Murphy’s law will not allow us to learn more from our limited perspectives. We will have to stand outside of the universe making measurements, with gear that can view the instance, without altering the space being measured. We are probably still a hundred years behind that spot, and Murphy wins again.

The Planck length? What is that? The “Planck length” is the unit of length in Planck units, and it’s \ell_P = \sqrt{\frac{\hbar G}{c^3}} = 1.616\times 10^{-35} meters. Which is small. I don’t even have a remotely useful way of describing how small that is. Think of anything at all: that’s way, way, way bigger. A hydrogen atom is about 10 trillion trillion Planck lengths across (which, in the pantheon of worldly facts, ranks among the most useless).

That last little scientific bit was brought to you from https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome-psyapi2&rlz=1C1TSNF_enUS433US437&ion=1&espv=2&es_th=1&ie=UTF-8&q=planck%20length

So, thanks to our foe Murphy, we can’t go very much farther with all of the newer ideas on String Theory. It seems to be too difficult for the testing and measuring tools we have currently at our disposal. It’s another case of us not being able to get there from here.

Almost 100 years ago physicists Werner Heisenberg, Max Born und Erwin Schrödinger created a new field of physics: quantum mechanics. Objects of the quantum world – according to quantum theory – no longer move along a single well-defined path. Rather, they can simultaneously take different paths and end up at different places at once. Physicists speak of quantum superposition of different paths.

At the level of atoms, it looks as if objects indeed obey quantum mechanical laws. Over the years, many experiments have confirmed quantum mechanical predictions. In our macroscopic daily experience, however, we witness a football flying along exactly one path; it never strikes the goal and misses at the same time. Why is that so?

“There are two different interpretations,” says Dr. Andrea Alberti of the Institute of Applied Physics of the University of Bonn. “Quantum mechanics allows superposition states of large, macroscopic objects. But these states are very fragile, even following the football with our eyes is enough to destroy the superposition and makes it follow a definite trajectory.”
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-01-atoms.html#jCp

The Long Goodbye – Squatch Spotted Heading For The Woods !

by

2

photo squatch

squatch

Well I guess this is it. I got the golden ticket, I found the brass ring, I am leaving for home. ( In the vain of Robin Williams, GOODBYE RENO, NEVADA! ) It will be a long drive. Traveling in a twenty foot motor home, towing the Nissan Pathfinder. I’ll go N. on 395, to Alturas Ca. and veer west to Interstate 97, and follow that North to Interstate 90. In America odd numbered highways are North – South, and even numbered ones are East – West. So at I-90 I’ll go east down through the Columbia River Gorge, via Vantage, and continue on to George Washington. There I can get on a cutoff that will take me to Wenatchee, missing Blewett pass, which is a miserable mountain pass, full of deer, and twisty corners.

Rawhide – The Blues Brothers (5/9) Movie CLIP (1980) HD
Uploaded on May 27, 2011
The Blues Brothers movie clips: http://j.mp/1J9zzxj
BUY THE MOVIE: http://amzn.to/vWCH7u
Don’t miss the HOTTEST NEW TRAILERS: http://bit.ly/1u2y6pr

At Wenatchee it’s 130 miles North to Oroville WA. The rigs ( American slang for vehicles ) will be filled with all our junk including, Libby / libetha my wife, Memphis, a tiger stripped tabby, still sporting full equipment, and Warf and Sammy, the dogs. Squealer, the 1995 Geo Metro has to be left behind at this time. It never got to tell you what happened after it got us down to Redding. I’m sure you’ll love to hear about that! Butch, this is something you could relate too…I’ll ask Squealer to post that story for you, while I’m on the road, as there is Internet where it’s parked and there won’t be any, where we’re going.

Marty Casey – Creep

Libby hasn’t been home since October 12th, and she’s really looking forward to getting to her garden. We have ten thousand things to deal with when we get home. I was last there in December, and got back here on the 22nd. News is, the snows were light last winter and it will be another year of drought. That means water will be scarce, but also, I probably only have minor wind damage at home. That’s what happens when you live in travel trailers, and tents.

The dogs got a lot fatter in Reno, as they spent a lot of time eating and sleeping. They only got to get up in the hills a few times while we were here. They’ll like getting home. They have our 20 acres to play on, plus about 50 square miles of hills and ponds, and stuff to sniff out. We don’t have to worry about leash laws or animal control. There are bear, cougar, lynx, deer, rabbits, coyotes, and nearly all open range. That means in early May, or maybe even late April, the local ranchers will run their steer up around our place.

The cows! They are the critters that make it so you have to have fences around everything. They stomp your garden up, eating all of the good stuff, and crap on everything else. We allow the dogs to keep the cows away from the house, and the dogs love that. They seem to recognize a boundary that seems acceptable for all. You, or at least I, can’t even think of fencing off twenty acres, so the dogs do their part, and I only need to worry about keeping whatever out of the gardens.

Libby wants more ground tore up for all kinds of stuff. The herb spot, and veggies, goards, for all manner of projects, and more fruit trees if we can get some. We also are moving over to the hardest place to get to, when we get there. There is a great place to build on the knoll, across the yard, with a 360* view. It will get windy there, and it’s just as exposed to view as where we are ( I would like to be tucked away in the draw ) but I know I would regret, not building for the view. We will set up a temporary site, with the trailer and motor home up on the knoll, and a large covered room affair, between them. Eventually we will build partly underground.

I’ll see just how often I can get near a web signal, and do some more blogging. Libby will be happier with my non-blog-divided attention, and I am going to fret about it, full time. I already let most of you know I was leaving, so I won’t get all teary this time. I am going to miss this great community. Thanks for all of the kindness, and support you’ve given me over the last 3 months.

Jordis Unga – The Man Who Sold The World

In my perfect world, I have a power system, and Internet at home, and I won’t have to leave it for a long long time. I hope to get back in touch with y’all soon, Just know, I do have feelings for all of my special blogging community. You have been great friends…..

While I am driving North, Squealer will tell you what happened the last time we traveled together. Please pardon Squealer’s way with words. It does tend to run on a bit, and recounts travels at 60 miles per hour, generally non-stop. Talk to y’all soon : -(   Feel FREE TO DROP YOUR LINK AND ANOTHER LINK TO SOME GREAT BLOGS! XXOO

Animator vs. Animation

by

7

I found some fun videos at YouYube and thought maybe everybody should just take it easy and kick back. I stashed some booze and whatever around the place, make your self comfy, and I’ll be back later to sweep up, and pack my stuff up…..

Animator vs. Animation (original)
Uploaded on May 14, 2007
Originally made in 2006, entirely with Adobe Flash.
visit my website! http://www.alanbecker.net

Animator vs. Animation II (original)
Uploaded on May 14, 2007
The animator, looking for a challenge, decides to make the stick figure harder to beat. Little does he know exactly how much power he is giving to the little guy. Long live The Chosen One!

Animator vs. Animation III (original)
Uploaded on Oct 2, 2011
The third episode of the Animator vs. Animation series.
“The Chosen One” from episode two is trapped inside the Animator’s internet explorer in forced labor as a pop-up blocker. This segment follows his eventual escape onto Microsoft Word, Solitaire, Minesweeper, and the desktop.

Animator vs. Animation IV (original)
Published on Oct 2, 2014
BEHIND THE SCENES: http://youtu.be/ptc7rGXp284

The struggle between a stick figure and its creator, a computer animator. In this fourth installment, the animator is finally shown in real life interacting with his computer monitor. The stick figure, resisting his tormentor, attacks his social life by hacking his Facebook account, traveling onto his iPhone via USB cord, and drawing animations of his own to dismantle the

Stick Texting – iPhone App with animations by Alan Becker

Published on Aug 8, 2012
***THE STICK FIGURE LEAPING OUT OF THE BOX IS MERELY A DRAMATIZATION. In the App, he is confined to the text box. ***
I worked with Mitch Robiner to make short stick animations that you can insert in your iPhone text messages in place of emoticons. It’s a brand new app so please help make it super popular!! $1 for a limited time!

More Intelligently Made Objects ! Opportunity ~Sol 3954 ~

by

2

I have a bunch of stuff to take care of today, so feel free to watch a couple of videos and make some popcorn. I just swept the place out, and caught all of the spiders that were running around in here.

Today we all can just space out! Are the new plans to go to Mars because too many anomalies have been found? Is any of this stuff for real? If there are intelligent beings on the Red Planet, does it make a difference to you?
One of these videos would suggest the video was actually shot here on “the pretty blue planet” Earth.

Some of the things shown are definitely not to be believed, so as usual you can watch and just try to be entertained. Y’all have a great day.

Opportunity ~Sol 3954 ~ More Intelligently Made Objects !
MARS Anomalies
Subscribed
This is really long, more than 30 minutes.

Tiny excavator shovel And machine carved metal. Mars msl 817
Published on Mar 2, 2015
Is this a part of a shovel or maybe a teeth from a “shovel wheel” ??
Look also at the anomaly at the end of the video that looks like a foot and machine carved metal.
NASA link.:

Martian skull ?? Msl 378

Published on Mar 7, 2015
Did Mars anomaly hunter Rory o´brien find a skull on this Msl 378 image from Curiosity.
As usual you decide what you see.
NASA link

Mars curiosity rover 2015- Persons are in rover picture
realitychange