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January 02, 2012 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Seems to be the time of year for WAG predictions.
Here's my current assortment...

While pv solar still remains a gasoline destroying
net energy sink that is in no manner renewable
nor sustainable, it is in the process of turning
around and ultimately becoming viable. In
part because of CIGS and the new quantum dot
developments, improvements in high frequency
efficiency, and ( thankfully ) to the elimination of
obscenely counterproductive subsidies.


Goldilocks and other exoplanets are now being reported
at a one per day rate and soon will become common
as dirt. We will be in deep trouble the ( reasonably soon )
day that one of them receives a lucid ten second clip
of Roller Derby as the sum total of our culture. The
alternatives, of course, are Captain Video or Kukla,
Fran, and Ollie
.

HVAC ( heating, ventillating, air conditioning ) is
obviously due for a major efficiency upgrade.
Brought about by MEMS and nanotechnology.

One obvious product crying to become reasonably
priced: hot tub heat pumps.


Your website is unlikely to just keep growing in
popularity like it did in the past. Brought about by
the "eyeball siphoning" by the social networking sites,
the upsurge in online video, and the norm now being
full HDTV video as a web experience.

Things that no longer make any sense whatsoever are
the US Post Office, "Big 3" network Television, over-
the-air tv transmission, public libraries ( unless totally
and immediately reporposed ), or any tax funded
Public Broadcasting. Also utterly useless is any
tv set that does not include unstricted web access
or does not provide at least full HDTV resolution .

Santa Claus machines are about to drop dramatically
in price and greatly expand in availablity. Brought
about in part by low end open source examples
such as this one, this one, or this one.

Word will finally get out over exergy being the reason that
the hydrogen economy flat out ain't gonna happen. In
particular, electrolysis from high value sources such as
grid, pv, or alternator is pretty much the same as 1;1
exchanging US dollars for Mexican Pesos. A kilowatt
hour of most electricity is ridiculously more valuable
than a kilowatt hour of unstored hydrogen gas.

Printed industrial trade journals can be expected to vanish
enritrely. Their useful content has been long since gone
and their economic model has become laughingly pointless.

Drug legalization should soon dramatically turn around as
governments and municipalities will no longer be able
to ignore it as a major income source.

Dot matrix printers can be ridiculously improved by going
to a pair of duplexing full width printheads. The mechanisms
become ridiculously simpler, the paper path totally direct,
and speeds insanely faster. Reliability and the cost learning
curve will be the key issues here.

The latest of light emitting diodes now include warnings
not to look at them
because they are too bright. Efficiencies
are getting totally offscale, with 150 Lumens per watt
production and 250 in the lab.

January 01, 2012 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Closed out the 2011 Archive and started this 2012 one.

December 31, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Per the serial arson flap in Los Angeles: At least here in Arizona,
torching a car is no big deal.

But torching a car in a carport is arson of an occupied structure.
And has the same penalties and enthusiastic conviction as Murder One.

December 30, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Finally got some distortion correction in our Architect's Perspective
that looks like it is complete and accurate. This sample shows
vertical, horizontal, and major diagonals straight. Intermediate
angles are also likely fully corrected, although this is not yet
proven.

The algorithm goes something like this: After "untilting" a
vertical subject edge, that line's scaling is remembered and
a correction gets mad by elevating row content, sort of in a
somewhat parabolic manner.
This
leaves verticals and horizontals
straight, and "unbends" the
diagonals.

Starting with the top row, the scale factor needed for the initial
correction is found. This is applied to the rightmost diagonal
and its vertical position error is found. The line is then repositioned
upwards as needed to
compensate.

An occasional missed line is filled in by a double repositioning.

I'll try to work up some further code and testing whenever.

December 29, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Had a caller ask about finding geranium transistors for
guitar stomp boxes. Naturally, in this day and age, if you
want to add noise, hum, or distortion, you use a decent
DSP algorithm
rather than vacuum tubes, primitive solid
state devices, or other performance limiting and highly
unpredictable components.

But to answer the specific question: One good info source for
older semiconductor secret sources in the sci.electronics.design
newsgroup. And eBay has bunches of older semis readily
available. Both on our own auction store and elsewhere.


A surprisingly high number of older components still remain available
at major distributors. A very good place to check is OEM's Trade.
A second often useful resource is PLC Center.

Meanwhile, there are firms that specialize in obsolete smis. And, if
all else fails, they will even custom build new ones for you. Two
examples include Rochester Electronics and 4 Star Electronics.

4 Star seems be down to their very last 28,525 NKT275's. Which
remain enormously popular with the stomp box revivers.

The neat thing about germaniums was that they were so leaky that
you didn't really have to bias them.
Provided, of course, that you only
ran them at one temperature.

December 28, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

The math behind the distortion in Architect's Perspective
is a tad obtuse, but easily resolved using a first principle
of "make it worse" and seeing what a simple polynomial tells us.

Consider this extreme case of a fifty percent correction. We apply
the usual "progressively shorten each line" for this intermediate result.

Where we see that our vertical lines are now straight and vertical, and
our horizontal lines remain straight and horizontal. But, sadly, our principle

diagonals are badly distorted and bent.
As will be much of the rest of the
image.


It looks like a repair can be made by raising the intermediate rows. Perhaps by
one sixth in the middle.
Normalize the right diagonal so it goes from 0,0 to 1,1.
Assume this bent curve can at least be approximated by a polynominal of
y = ax^2 + bx + c.
Since y=0 at x=0, c will also be 0 and can be ignored.


y = 1 at x = 1, so we have our first equation of a + b = 1. Assume from measurement
of the figure that y = 1/3 at x = 1/2. Which gives a second equation of a = 2b .
And a tentative solution of a = 2/3 and b = 1/3.

The desired "curve" should be the linear y = x, so our error function will be
x - 2/3*x^2 - 1/3*x    Or 2/3x*(1-x).


Per this plot, the approximation correction appears "close enough" But not
a true correction. Looks like a further small sinusoidal adjustment may help. Or
finding the actual "real" math.

More testing soon.
And code eventually.

December 27, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Some amazingly clean "nearest neighbor" interpolation code
seems to have evolved from our distortion correction
explorations.

Our usual array-of-strings will contain a pixel line in the
typical Bitmap   .....bgrbgrbgr...  sequence. A desired left
shift or right shift could end us anywhere in the sequence.

Which clearly is ungood, because blue has to stay blue
and the starting point of each pixel triad must be an
integer as well.

This repositioning does it all...

1.5 add cvi 3 idiv 3 mul

More on sneaky PostScript stuff here.

December 26, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Piher has an interesting N-15 position sensor available
through Mouser at as little as a dime each. This is basically
a continuously rotating potentiometer without stops that
is electrically active over at least 340 degrees. It has
a mechanical rating of at least 100,000 cycles.

What could get cute in a hurry is if you stacked two of
these offset by 90 degrees. With some reasonable
microcomputer smarts, you should be able to directly
output either full angles or sine/cosine quadratures.

December 25, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

It can be real easy to lose track of the fact that storage
units should be emptied at the same rate they are filled
.

Otherwise you end up needing more and more space with
worse and worse junk hiding the stuff you really need.

Otherwise known as "shit floats to the top".

There is an optimal rate at which stuff should end up on
eBay. For us, this rate is often a twenty eight day cashout
and a fifteen month hang time.

Thus, ideally, stuff should be listed within a very few days
of acquisition
and never should need stored more than two
years. Most espeically if not listed.

Sooooo, we are long overdue in making a dramatic cutback in
our stored inventory items
. These will be flushed to a
third party and should become available at ridiculously
bargain prices. By the truckload.

You can email me for further details.


More on eBay tips and techniques here.

December 24, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A new video of San Carlos falls can be found here.
And other unusual local dayhikes here and here.

December 23, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A reminder that our original Introduction to PostScript
video has been totally reworked and split into two
You Tube pieces. Find them here and here.

December 22, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A reader asked about .PDF files for some handheld geneology
apps. I was not sure if what level of response was needed.

For many uses, Adobe Acrobat .PDF is an ideal way of presenting
technical information. Especially when the exact layout format is
important and when high quality integrated graphics is a must.


There are three flavors of .PDF. The Acrobat reader is free but largely
prevents you from creating yoxur own material. Commercial or educational
versions of Acrobat
can accept a wide variety of input content for conversion.


And alternate versions such as GhostScript give you open source options.

Acrobat .PDF is based on the PostScript language, of which you'll find lots more
here. But because of the extreme power of PostScript, Adobe has restricted its
ability to do most of its more useful tasks involving unlimited disk access. The
SX workaround is to run "acrodist-F" from the SX command line for full use.

But Adobe has qotten quite secretive about this access option recently, especially
on other or newer computer systems.

I remain an overly enameled fan of PostScript and .PDF. But with newer
small screen or low resolution devices, there are emerging alternatives that
reasonably should be explored.

In particular, check out the Android 3 version of Java. With some help from
Linux and C+. Microchip has a new Android Development Kit as well.

December 21, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Something that could be between an interesting development
and a major pv panel solar breakthrough can be found here.

At present, the efficiency of a conventional solar cell is abysmal.
You would be extremely fortunate to get nine percent efficiency at
the terminals of your synchronous inverter.

There is a fundamental technical reason for the bad efficiency.

Any wavelength of light has an energy level associated with it.
For e equals h nu and all that.

If you have a conventional single workfunction photoconverter,
any light whose wavelength is too long can not knock any electrons
loose, and is lost as heat.

If the light's wavelength ( and thus its energy ) is just right, you can
knock one electron loose with quite high efficiency.

If the light's wavelength is too high, all of the "spare change" energy
is also lost as heat. Thus, only one magic wavelength of light can
be efficiently converted. Too high or too low, and you burn up the
leftovers.

Previous proposed workarounds have included cells with several
workfunctions, quantum dots, or light frequency downconverters
involving phosphors and similar stunts. None have proven economically
or engineeringly viable to date.

The proposed new method apparently can knock two or more electrons
loose when fed light of a high enough frequency.
And does initially
seem eminently workable.

The Science paper can be found here.

Some pv panel economics can be found here, an industry trade journal
here, a pv solar tutorial here, and general energy stuff here.

December 20, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Expanded and improved our Gila Day Hikes library page. Besides
adding the Unusual Hikes Slide Show, we are now only 22 entries
shy of our goal of
offering 365 unique things to do. Enough to keep
you busy for the next year. Please email me with any locations that
I may have missed.

Updated and expanded our Auction Help library page and our
Arizona Auction Resources links. Your own custom regional auction
finder can be created specifically for you per these details.


Our Incredible Secret Money Machine library page remains sorely in
need of an update and rework. But I did manage to add a link to our
newly available free ISMM eBook. And we also have a new
ISMM fast nav directory.

December 19, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Uh, whoops. Part of the distortion observed in our Architects
Perspective tilt eliminator
was simple operator error.  

On any subject with slanty dominent lines, it is crucial that the
neutral tiltaxis be "at the base of the vee". If needed, the entire
image can be rotated to make sure the base of the vee is at
a neutral vertical axis requiring zero correction..


Distortion can be further minimized by shooting at as low an
elevation as feasiible and keeping the dominant slanty line as
near horizontal as reasonable.


I was also surprised that the Nikon Coopix lens distortion was not
totally negligible
. At times, it can approach one fifth to one quarter of
the total distortion.


At any rate, with reasonable care and a possible second pass or two,
the distortion can end up pretty much negligible. Especially for eBay.

It can be further minimized by a distortion corrector I am working on
that provides programmable vertical shifts in the low pixel range.
Centering the horizontal tilt axis may also end up worthwhile, but has
issues yet to be resolved.

December 18, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Many years ago, I was attending a folk concert. The opening act
was a single and an unknown flute player, performing in front of the
closed stage curtains. His job was to warm up the audience for the
high priced help that was soon to follow.

He was good. Very good.

But as he went along, the music started getting strange and finally
downright weird. He was playing chords on his flute, along with notes
with unbelievably strong tonal structures. Eventually, the music turned
into bunches of impossible sounding and god-awful squawks.

Almost all of the audience got bored and restless as the music
seemed to deteriorate. Just then, I happened to notice a friend beside
me who had played in and had taught concert band. He was literally
on the edge of his chair with his mouth open.

He briefly turned to me and said very slowly, ''You can't do that with
a flute
. It is not possible."

Of the thousands of people in the audience, at the most only five
realized they were now witnessing a once-in-a-lifetlme performance
involving the absolute mastery of a very difficult musical instrument. To
nearly everyone else, It sounded like a bunch of god-awful squawks.

Always play for those five.

December 17, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Turns out there still is some minor distortion in our new Architects
Perspective tilt eliminator
. The effect shows up as very minor barrel
distortion on subjects with exceptionally long diagonal elements.


The effect is negligibly minor on eBay image style resolutions and may
in fact be partially caused by the camera lens itself. You can view the
effect here by coming up in Paint and addiding red rules to the
diagonal lines.

The underlying problems are that both X and Y pixel shifts would be needed
for a more exact correction.
And that much better pixel interpolation
techniques would be required. And that speed is likely to become an issue.
And that near perfect corrrection might demand a true ray tracing or
end up highly subject dependent.  

The simplest cure, of course, is to ignore it. Or to avoid compositions
with huge diagonal elements. Alternately, the code could be rewritten
so its tilt is vertically centered ( or even programmable ). That way the
least alteration would be made to the centralmost pixels.

Alternately, the center pixels could be raised in a slightly parabolic manner.

It does turn out that you can buy lenses that fake those wonderful view
camera swings and tilts
. For a mere $2200 each. I'd tend to prefer using free
software and post processing tools instead.

December 16, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Just received the one zillionth email of "I am an inventor.
How do I keep others from stealing my ideas?"

Sorry, but the reality is as follows:

1. If your idea is any good, it WILL be stolen.
 
2. Prior art almost certainly exists.

3. Chances are you don't have the faintest clue
     over the device marketing realities.

For the overwhelming majority of individuals and small scale
startups, patents are ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN to end up
as a net loss of time, energy, money, and sanity.

Thus, the mindset involved in the paranoia of "protecting my idea"
is not even wrong. Time and effort should instead be focused
on developing and improving the actual product.

Much more here and here.

And, of course, never, NEVER, NEVER call yourself an inventor!

December 15, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Turns out the "reverse tilt" feature of our new Architect's
Perspective tilt eliminator
works just fine.

Just enter a negative value for howmuchtilt. This will
compress the bottom, leaving the top the way it is.

A nonlinear process is applied to properly correct lines
intended to be vertical. Should a wildly wrong image be
input, the distortion can appear to become worse. This is
simply the math doing what it is intended to do.

Modifying the code to tilt center rather than tilt top or bottom
might minimize some of these effects. But this could raise
issues with needing a second array of strings or with needing
better interpolation algorithms.

December 14, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I was apalled by the casualness with which an assistant of
ours dismissed the "only 4 Gigs" of memory in their latest
handheld toy.

For I was present that glorious day at Goodyear Aerospace
when the price of solid state memory finally dropped to an
astonishing and utterly unheard-of low of a nickel a bit.

Which was sort of cost parity with magnetic core.

At long last, it could be theoretically possible to do solid state
Fourier dechirping tricks to eliminate the horrendous optics of
side looking radar correllation . And have intelligent video displays
that could -- gasp -- recalculate what they are showing!

A nickel a bit would be a mere piddling forty cents per 8 bit word!

And someday in the dark distant future, it might even be possible to
build a suitcase sized device that could multiply as well as add or subtract.

Why, 4 Gigs of memory would only cost a trifling 1.6 billion dollars.
Say seven or eight billion with a B allowing for inflation.

Sigh.

December 13, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Some preliminary code on our new Architect's Perspective
tilt eliminator can be found here.


This completely eliminates the distortion problem of the previous
versions. It is also quite fast, doing a 2K x 2K bitmap correctiion in
seven seconds.


There is still a bug in the reverse tilt option. Operation is presently
from bottom rather than center of screen. Several passes of
speedup have been completed.


Please email me with any problems, enhancements, or suggestions.

December 12, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Managed to visit yet another mile of prehistoric hanging
canal yesterday. This one was a "more of the same"
western feeder to the Twin Boobs ponding area. And
had been previously surveyed by others.


Included was a fairly distinctive "S" turn to get across a
wash. Very similar to several others. The present score
is something like eighteen canals for a total of over
sixty miles.


Field mice and funding are definitely needed to give these
new and stunning world class rediscoveries the attention they
surely deserve.

Its source could be the three way switch on Deadman
Mesa via Lower Deadman tank. But this remains to
be proven.


Much more here.

December 11, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Expanded and updated our Gila Valley Day Hikes page.

Newly included is a link to our Unusual Dayhikes Slide Show.

Whose sourcecode can be found here.

December 10, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Science Magazine for December 2, 2011 describes some new
catalysts for hydrogen  electrolysis. On pages 1256 to 1260.

But (1) all a catalyist can do is speed up or slow down an existing
process
, and (2) the system can only reduce excessive losses in
alkaline systems.


As I seem to have mentioned a time or two before, there is a
profound and fundamental thermodynamic principle that
ABSOLUTELY GUARANTEES that bulk hydrogen energy
electrolysis from high value sources ( such as grid, pv, or
alternator ) flat out ain't gonna happen.

Ever.

Because of exergy, a kilowatt hour of electricity is ridiculously
more valuable than a kilowatt hour of unstored hydrogen gas.


The process of electrolysis is thus similar to 1:1 exchanging
US Dollars for Mexican Pesos.

Much more on related topics here.

December 09, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

While I remain extremely impressed with the new Garmin
eTrex-30 GPS handheld with barometric altimeter, I have
not yet been able to resolve some slope direction issues
in our prehistoric hanging canals.

Yes, the display gooes up on foot on a one foot rise and
down one foot on a one foot drop from belt level. But
some of the longer term drift seems disconcerting.

Altitude performance can be greatly improved by setting
the unit stationary and flat in the shade and waithing a minute or
so for a reading. And by noting any pre- or post- longer term
drift caused by barometric variations.

Returning to the initial point should give you a reliability
check on the readings. Averaging can be useful, but only if
your time out equals your time back.

December 08, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Picked up some interesting mirror style mounted beam splitters
and some "raw" 1x1x3 CM Lithium Niobate electro-optic single
crystals that we have placed on our eBay auction site.

We think our pricing on these aerospace surplus items is
exceptionally low, but it it tricky to find either data or pricing
on either of these intriguing items.

December 07, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

PostScript can be more than fast enough for reasonable
large bitmap image post processing. Provided some obvious
guidelines are strictly followed.

An array of strings seems to be a useful data structure, with
each string representing one horizontal line of the original
bitmap. As much as possible, tasks should be "along the
grain"
involving only one string, rather than "across the grain"
in which many strings have to be seequentially accessed.

PostScript garbage collection can take an inordinate amount of
time, especially with Acrobat Distiller. A -2 vmreclaim can make
an amazing speedup in certain circumstances.

In any large loop within a loop, the inner loop will overwhelmingly
dominate your system timing. Thus, minimizing the total number of
commands
in the inner loop is of crucial importance.

Conditional tests should be eliminated when and wherever possible.

Ferinstance, if overflows or underflows might happen, it is far
better to precalculate and prevent
, rather than retest every time.

Stack manipulations are generally much faster than external lookups.
But a 7 index is slower than a zorch lookup, owing to the second
needed command. In general, multiplies, trig, and rand will be rather
slow
and should be avoided. A sneaky rand speedup can be found
here. A small random pattern array can be ridiculously faster than some
"on the fly" techniques.


The minimum acceptable pixel interpolation technique should be used.
"Nearest neighbor" is considerably faster than quadratic or bicubic
interpolation. And may be all that is needed if the image size is
being reduced. Especially if routine bicubic reductions can be done
later by more conventional programs.


Timing measurements can be done using the stopwatch routines in our
Gonzo Utilities. In general, code should be gotten to work properly
first, and then sped up later. Several speedup passes may be needed
for optimal results. But avoid obsessive rework.

The bind command is often good for a modest speedup.

Two of our latest PostScript bitmap manipulation examples are found
here and here. Plus the whole gang here and here.

Consulting services available.

December 06, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Yorg.

I've long been a fan of Architect's 3D perspective in which any
vertical lines appear truly vertical. Especially for our eBay images.


Our Swings and Tilts routine has long had a bug in it where corrections
above 15 percent would end up noticably curved. Up to the point of being
unusable above 20 percent. It turns out some super subtle math is
involved when you are trying to emulate the distortion free swings and
tilts of a view camera.


Consider an extreme case of a 50 percent correction and being 100 pixels
to the right of a neutral axis at screen bottom and 200 pixels at the top.
No correction and unity gain are needed at the bottom. A 100 pixel
correction and 0.5 gain are needed at the top. So far, so good.


You might ( as I did ) wrongly guess that an 0.75 gain would be needed
mid screen. Not so. Mid screen, our row would be 150 pixels wide. The
correct gain would be the inverse of 150/100 or 0.667!

A huge error!

The math, while simple, is amazingly subtle. Fortunately, it can all be
done only once per line, so it can actually be faster than the original.


Given a pc percentage correction and a sv line fraction, the fsf final
row scale factor is ...

1 dup pc sub div 1 sub sv mul 1 add 1 exch div

... and plots something like this.

I'll try to post the revised code in a day or two.

December 05, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

It pretty much pays to use a "last in, first out" strategy with
auction acquisitions for eBay resale. Otherwise, unlisted junk
tends to accumulate forever.

And made worse by the immutable fundamental storage principle of
"shit floats to the top".


Reasonable goals are a 30:1 SBR sell-buy ratio, a 21 day cashout
time and a 15 month hang time. Anything left unprocessed after two
years should clearly be flushed.


Much more here and here.

December 04, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

An update to pv panel pricing can be found here.

At $2.43 panel
per peak watt, this is a mere TEN TIMES the
cost demanded for displacable renewability or sustainability.

But the gap is rapidly closing.

It can be useful to once again reveal where the holy grail
of "a dollar per peak watt" total installed cost comes from.

Assume a 1000 watt peak panel in a workable location. It
typically will generate 5 kilowatt hours of electricity per day with
a typical utility value of ten cents a kilowatt hour or 50 cents
total. Fifty cents a day is fifteen dollars a month.

Per this amortiztion schedule, an investment of $1135 for ten
years at 10 percent amortizes to fifteen dollars per month. Or
slightly over one dollar per peak watt.


But note several gotchas: First, that is the complete system cost.
Panel cost is typically 35 to 40 percent of the fully burdened
installed system cost. Second, subsidies are a scam that should
be treated as a 3:1 liability
rather than as an asset, when all of
their true collection and distribution costs are fully and properly
accounted for
.

Third, matching utility rates does not give much incentive for
displacing conventional energy sources.  All you have is a
"paint it green" feelgood going. A reasonable expectation for
everybody to jump on the pv solar bandwagon would thus be
twenty five cents per peak panel watt.
With there being a
reasonable changeover profit incentive.


Finally, once a quarter per peak panel watt is achieved, things will
get a lot worse
, owing to the zillions of new bucks ( at an exchange
rate of ten kilowatt hours per dollar ) being thrown at it for future
gain.

Today, pv panels remain in no manner renewable nor sustainable.

A reasonable expectation would be for true energy breakeven eight
to ten years after the peak panel price drops under twenty five cents
per watt.


Additional resources and analysis here.

December 03, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

GuruGram #121 is newly released on Some Little Known Gila
Valley Day Hikes.


I'll also be doing a talk on this Saturday December 10th in
Safford's
EAC Discovery Park at 6:30 PM.

Additional GuruGrams can be found here and here.

December 02, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Let me make sure I've got this straight: The US Post Office's
response to losing customers is going to be to reduce the quality
and timeliness of their service.


Loss of customers is certain to accellerate. Netflix wants to bail
in the worst sort of way. Outrageously expensive printed catalogs
make no sense whatsoever in the era of instant 24/7 sales and
situational pricing. Newspapers are clearly the walking dead.
And magazines lack timeliness, customizability, and searchibility.
Not to mention inconvenient and ungainly storage.


Do we really need a bureaucratic quasi-government solution at all?
And for what? How does this differ from slide rule manufacturers or
purveyors of printed circuit tape and dots?

To me, any solution would come about from a fundamental "reset to zero"
rethinking. And the essential key core to any possible solution would
be to immediatly repeal the Private Express Statutes.

 

December 01, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

The "terabyte era" is utterly and totally pointless. Why
don't we just skip it entirely and go directly on to petabytes?


In which you would have one thumb drive called "movies" with
all of them on it. And one thumb drive called "songs" with
all available music on it. And, of course, similar drives called
"magazines", "tech papers", "news", and such.

All attractively gift boxed for, say $19.85 for the set.

This would also once and for all completely resolve DRM issues.

November 30, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

It turns out that rectocranial inversion cen end up both
chronic and acute at the same time.

November 29, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

We have a winner!

The first Goldilocks exoplanet has recently been found and
verified by the Keck Observatory.

Other exoplanets are apparently being cataloged at nearly a
one a day rate
. And it seems that many terms in the Drake Equation
were initially grossly underestimated.

I feel the number of Goldilocks candidates is essentially unlimited.
And that many thousands will be known in a remarkably short time.

November 28, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

When they marionate shrimp, how do they tie all those
little strings on?

November 27, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Stanford University has apparently decided to join MIT in
offering free online courses.

I'm presently going through their Fourier Series course. I also
recently found MIT's Solid State Circuits course of interest.
Especially their Pythagorian Circuit which builds up an
analog
square-root-of-the-sums of squares out of seven transistors
arranged as a pair of current sources and a differential amplifier.

Additional free online course links can be found here.

November 26, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A caller aasked me about dies for a cardboard recycling app they
were exploring.


Some limited dies are available through scrapbooking sources,
while Di-Acro ( now Acrotech ) and Roper-Whitney are leading
sources for low end industrial punch and die sets. For years and
years, I've been particularly partial to the Roper XX punch.

But there's an entire converting industry based on modifying raw
paper and cardboard products and converting them into such things
as labels, tags, tickets, badges, bumperstickers, point-of-purchase
displays and such. Three of their remaining free trade journals include
Paper, Film, and Foil Converter, Converting Today, and
Converting Quarterly.


The usual way of dealing with the caller's problem is called a
steel rule die. These are far cheaper than industrial die sets and
extremely flexible. Typically, a better grade piece of plywood is
laser cut with a desired pattern and a steel strip similar to
strapping material is pressed into it. Rubber is usually added as an
eject mechanism.

November 25, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

One of the hardest and most crucial product development
development rules is simply "know when to stop".

I have an associate who, decades ago, started developing a
bleeding edge hand crafted product of extreme ruggedness
and reliability. Each time they were about to go into
production, they saw a "new" and "better" approach and
kept redesigning and redeveloping, over and over again.


Eventually, China caught up with them, and the competition now has
these wall to wall in Wal-Mart for unprofitable pennies. Quite
simply, the opportunity window slammed shut.


More to the point, I spent the last week trying to improve and
speed up our automatic background mottling utility. Despite its
taking two seconds to replace over an hour's manual image post
processing time. And any further speedups being utterly and
totally pointless.


I sure was proud of my new ultra subtle PostScript code of...

false 2 redmap curvpos get
{ 255 eq { exch pop true exch }
{1 index { exit } if } ifelse 3 add } forall

to scan a bitmap line from its border to just beyond its last red
( or white ) white outline pixel. Until I found out it was actually
slower than the earlier simpler and more obvious "for" loops.
Turns out that anything that gets executed millions of times is
extremely sensitive to the number of procs in
volved. Further,
a newly needed "prep proc" added to the speed penalty.

In my own case, ultra obsession with continuing development can
usually be traced to avoiding other tasks that are far more urgent and
definitely need done now.
Such as our eBay listing backlog of nearly
a thousand items.

Speaking of which, our first "real" demottling app appears here.

November 24, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I guess I have become overly enameled with the concept of
"throw another million calculations at it". Simple math repeated
over and over again a ridiculous number of times now becomes
a routine new ( but previously unthinkable ) solution tool.


We have lots of examples of this in our Magic Sinewaves, and
especially in our new ultra fast Magic Sinewave Calculator.

More recently, the present vingetting corners in our auto
bagkground mottler
seemed to be to be usuful, but very
slightly rough looking.

So, I decided to treat them as a full electromagnetic field problem
and use a zillion calculations to improve their smoothness. And
all done within a very few seconds at most.

The general concepts appear here and here. You exactly define
the edges of your rounded corner. Directly for the straight parts
and using the magical PostScript infill operator for the curved.
The rest of the corner map array gets filled with any old number,
preferably midrange.


You then use a classic field technique called relaxation. But made trivially
easy here. Each internal luminescence point gets replaced with an average
of its four nearest neighbors.
After many dozens to a few hundred repeats,
the accuracy gets good enough that any errors are unnoticably small.


I'll try to post the updated code shortly.

November 23, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Added a greatly improved optional vignetting capability
to our new auto background mottling code. Here's a
typical example. Both the autobackgrounder and the
vignette together take less than four seconds total on a
1000x1600 bitmap! With further speedups possible.

Besides giving a "richer" background" and obviously
sharpening subject edges, mottling also dramatically
reduces JPEG edge artifacts.
A subject bitmap gets white
or red fully outlined and the filenames and directories are
changed in the mottbk1 .psl utility. The utility is then sent
to Acrobat Distiller. being sure to use acrodist-F from the
command line to permit disk work. And using double reverse
slashes in any Windows filenames.

I chose to use a "redscreen" rather than the more comon
bluescreen. Either will also respond to 255-255-255 true white.
A PostScript array-of-strings makes a very useful data structure
that is both compact and powerful. Each string row is kept in a
bgrbgrbgr... bottom up format rather than separating the color
planes.

The mottling algorithm begins by starting at the west margin and
replacing all pixels up to and including one or more of a
continguous series of red 255 pixels. Replacement consists of
a pseudorandom start of a pseudorandom mottling sequence.

The algorithm then similarly continues from the east margin but
rejecting any full lines already mottled for speedup. A data array
is then created that keeps track of the start and end of each
processed line. This dramatically reduces the number of "across
the grain" pixel manipulations required by the north and south
sequences. Again for a significant speedup.

South to north column and then north to south processing follows,
working only with essential remaining pixels. After the background
knockout is complete, a separate module scans for any remaining
true red or white pixels as might be present from preprocessed
undercuts, bolt holes, or subject gaps. These are similarly replaced
with a suitable pseudorandom mottled background.

The optional vignetting begins with a corner map of appropriate size,
generated manually, by scaling the others, or by using our unique
field mapping techniques. Each map element sets the luminance scaling
for its underlying rgb pixels. The four corners are placed, followed by
the remaining vertical or horizontal edge elements.

Additional image post processing info here.
Consulting services available

November 22, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

There's a bizarre collection of "castellated" CCC dam projects
in a seldom visited area an eighth of a mile northwest of the
Discovery Park turnoff. Such as this example.

There's at least six of these. Typically, they consist of an
earthen dam about six feet high and dozens to hundreds of
feet long. Each end will often have a hand laid stone "tower"
protecting the dam ends.

From either end, a cable runs many hundreds of feet. Tied
into short chunks of vertically driven railroad track. And
supporting a mostly buried two foot high steel fence.

Apparently the goal was to spread and slow flood waters.
For no apparent rhyme or reason.

To me, these appear almost ( but not quite ) as monumentally
stupid as more modern economic stimulus spending.
At least
some Texan young men got their first pair of shoes out
of the deal.

November 21, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Here's some of the improvements I'd like to see in eBay...

First and foremost, drop any and all restrictions to having
email addresses in listings or discouraging direct contact
between buyers and sellers
. The perceived occasional lost
listing fee ( which they probably are not entitled to anyway )
is largely mythical. And utterly overwhelmed by the bad vibes
of discouraging and complicating personal contact.

Second, eliminate any hassles over placing "do not bid" or
words to that effect in any listing.
Many items ( especially
industrial ones ) might have severe safety issues or require
special expertise to even understand what they are, let alone
intelligently use them. In these cases, a warning to the clueless
is essential to head off the bad vibes of returns or refunds.
Or worse.

Third, add a new optional twenty five cent autosnipe feature.
After auction close, all the autosnipe bids would be viewed,
and the highest that exceeds the auction bids wins by an
increment. This converts eBay into much more of a
Vickrey Auction
and very much benefits all of the buyers.
Especially since the
buyer now has to reveal nothing to his
competitors and the
value of their time ( or having to be in
a certain place at a
certain time ) is much more fully
respected. As is the ability to deal with multiple closures.

Fourth, the abuse potential of eBay Bucks is off the wall.
A number of scamsters are sending out eBay looking bulk
mailings that suggest the receiver has several hundred dollars
of cash benefits that must be spent immediately. Fix it or
flush it.

More here.

November 20, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

It is usually difficult to get excited about any new math
book. While there may be a great cast of characters, the
plot development is usually rather thin and the story arc
is often somewhat predictable.

Not so with Mathematics 1001. Which I literally could not
put down and promptly ran out and bought two copies of
after the second time the library copy was overdue.

What you have here is basically a summary of everything
mathematics
. All in concise and bite sized chunks.

There's also a Science 1001 which I have yet to look at.

November 19, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Beware of eBay Bucks scamsters.

The original and legit eBay Bucks program seems to be a copy
of the usual VISA/MC rebates The scam comes about when you
receive a bogus email saying you have a few hundred dollars of
credit that you must immediately spend


Your first clue is usually that you would have had to have spent
$3000 online for each $100 credit. In our case in two separate
scams, we were not remotely near that.


A second clue is that your credit is about to immediately expire,
rather than giving you the month or so for a valid claim.

I'm not sure exactly how this becomes a scam, but it almost
certainly involves your submitting sensitive or credit card info
when you respond. .

Be sure to send a copy to spoof@ebay.com if you get hit.

November 18, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

This seems "too good to be true". But it appears legit.

I seem to have found a way to speed up all of our image
postprocessing utilities ( especially motbk1.psl ) by a factor
of five! Automottling a 1500x1000 bitmap background now
takes three seconds, rather than fifteen!


Apparently Acrobat Distiller will spend as much as 80 percent
of its processing time reclaiming vm
if your program has great
heaping bunches of stores and lots of array or string reuse
.

This is likely done to minimize memory leaks and to place as few
demands on the host system as possible. And "they" do warn you
to disable vm if you are timing a proc.

At any rate, a -2 vmreclaim will temporarily disable any garbage
collection.  A 0 vmreclaim will restore it, and a 2 vmreclaim will
force an immediate use.

You do want to have lots and lots of available system RAM and
few competing active programs if you try this stunt.

November 17, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Our new mottled autobackground utility now seems good
enough to release. You can find the preliminary code here
and a sample input bitmap here.

The code replaces hours of manual bitmap retouching with a
few seconds or less of fully automatic operation.
It accepts a bitmap
that initially had no unwanted true red 255 or true white pixels
but has otherwise been carefully outlined in red 255 or true white.

Optionally, any interior areas can also be true red or white filled
if they have undercuts or need boltholes or whatever.

Any unwanted background or desired punchthru is then replaced
with an attractive mottled background of your choice. Besides
looking quite good, mottling also dramatically eliminates any
later JPEG distribution artifacts.


Many mottled background examples appear here.

The bitmap is then placed in an accessible location and motbk1.psl
is renamed and edited to have the proper filename and filename prefix.
And then saved as an ordinary textfile, albeit with a .psl posfix

A chosen color is then entered in a [123] ( for 216 web friendly PostScript
or [36 179 205] ( for all available bitmap colors ) format. motbk1.psl
is then sent to Acrobat Distiller, preferably from Acrobat X or higher.

It is super important to run Distiller from your command line, using
an acrobat-F command. This is required to permit the disk access essential
to the b
ackground mottling operation. More on this detail here.

It is also super important that there are absolutely no breaks in the true
red or white outline
. The slightest gap will cause row background lines to
appear in the portions of the image you wish to preserve.

Mottling "depth" or variability can be adjusted with a /mv variable. A mv
of 25 gives a ten percent color range from a scale of 255. Note that
mottling decreases slightly on any later image downsizing.


More on PostScript here. And our older image post processing utilities here.
Consulting services available.

November 16, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

An early heads up...
================================================
"Gila Valley Day Hikes" subject of Saturday December 10th Free
Discovery Park Talk
================================================

Local author and researcher Don Lancaster returns to Discovery
Park this Saturday December 10th at 6:30 PM in the Jupiter Room.
As part of director Paul Anger's ongoing fall lecture series.

The presentation will zero in on some of the "secret" little known
insider exciting things to do within or near the Greater Bonita-
Eden-Sanchez metropolitan area. Such as the 60 miles (!) of newly
rediscovered prehistoric hanging mountain stream fed canals. Or
our own El Capitan slot canyon. Or the impressive cliffs of
Fisherman's Point. Or the phyically challenging San Carlos Falls.

Or the UFO "fish fillets" of Taylor Canyon.

Other topics might include the Montez and Weech toll roads, the
loops and tunnels of the former Morenci Southern Railway, the
tens of thousands of our prehistoric agricultural grids, seldom
visited Oak Grove Canyon, extremely remote Hanna Hot Spring,
and, of course, the Mount Graham Aerial Tramway.

Many of these dayhikes can now be easily previewed at Don's
< https://www.tinaja.com/gilahike.shtml > web page.  More than
365 intriguing destinations are listed, so there should be enough
here to keep you busy for at least the next year. Additional details
can be found at  < https://www.tinaja.com/tinsamp1.shtml >

There is no charge and families with children are welcome.
Discovery Park is located at the corner of Safford's Discovery
Park Boulevard ( formerly 32nd street ) and 20th avenue.
You can get more info by calling Paul or Jackie at (928)428-6260
or visiting their < discoverypark@eac.edu > website

November 15, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Per this Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, the number of known
and verified extrasolar planets now number 704. While the
present reports are averaging two per week, these are shortly
expected to start arriving daily or faster.

This suggests that the unavoidable and inevitable discovery
of life elsewhere in the universe is likely to occur much, much
sooner, than many people suspect.

November 14, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A reminder that several years ago, I published an incredibly
heretic and ridiculously simple approach to solving electromagnetic
and similar fields. One that completely eliminates virtually all
of the messy math.

Per this tutorial and this one. And this animated demo.


Uh, you may have to download the demo before you can run it.
There may be issues with the new pseudo PDF readers in some
browsers.

November 13, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Expanded and updated our Gila Valley Dayhikes library page.

November 12, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I remain fully convinced that the E-cat fiasco will remain
forever just that. The longer a "looks like a duck, quacks
like a duck" ludicrosity continues without strong and
independent verification, the greater the probability of
it ending up something between a scam, a hoax, or plain old
rotten labwork.

Much more on spotting pseudoscience here.

To me, finding a low cost unlimited source of free energy
would be one of the most unimaginibly henious crimes
against humanity. Making Hitler look like Mother Teresa.

For it would convert the planet into a cinder. Global warming
would likely be measured in days, rather than centuries.


It seems to me that the overwhelming benefit of solar derived
energy ( such as upcoming anticipated pv developments ) is
that it minimizes upsetting the heat flux balance of the planet.


Much more here.

November 11, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Know when to walk away, know when to run.

I frustratingly decided to pass up an intriguing auction
opportunity involving a fascinating item. A local auction
had hundreds of automatic lubricators scunging away in
obviously long stored but original packages. Which
likely could have been stolen for pocket change.

These were basically a "slow airbag" that pressurizes a
fist sized grease container in response to a programmable
current off of two AA cells
.
The current activates an
electrolytic azide cell to generate nitrogen gas which pushes
against a bellows, delivering long term grease to a bearing
or whatever.

Problem #1 was that despite web data, nobody but nobody
would tell me how much these cost
. Apparently you have to
prespecify what grease you want in the unit at time of
manufacture. The electronics involved was rather trivial,
consisting of a dollar's worth of DIP switch, transistors,
and diodes. There was no obvious repurposing potential
that I could see.
And it wasn't clear whether our usual rule
of "one sixth
list price" would be worthwhile.

Problem #2 was there is a specified shelf life of one year.
Several units had obviously corroded batteries and these
were obviously ancient. A key question is whether there
were lifetime factors for the electrolytic azide cell as well as
the batteries. Thus, even with new batteries, the units may
or may not work.
With no guarantee for how long.

Problem #3 are the hazmat warnings. Activated units can
have and retain up to 50 psi of nitrogen pressure. Which
is comparable to puncturing a paint spray can. Opening
the top to replace the batteries could inadvertently spray
grease all over hell and gone.


Problem #4 is that the demands of automatic lubrication are
rather customer specific.
Bottom line is that there ain't much
demand, and what demand there is would be unlikely to buy
from anything but a known reliable and proven source.


And, of course, Problem #5 would be that a customer might end
up mightily pissed
if their $50,000 machine froze because its
bearing lubricator failed to work properly.


Sigh.

More on auction stuff here.

November 10, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Expanded and updated our Auction Help Library.

Your own custom auction finder can be creasted for you
per these details
.

November 09, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Curious factoid of the day: The Canary Islands were
named after a large dog.

November 08, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

One of the most maddingly infuriating happenings in all of
PostScript occurs when the contents of old strings mysteriously
change later on in unexpected ways.

The usual problem is failing to understand that PostScipt does
NOT place strings into arrays or other data structures!
All it
places are POINTERS to those strings!

Thus, if you reuse a string ( such as a disk reading workstring),
much if not all of your previous string storage can get corrupted.

Note further that PostScript string contents are NOT preserved
or protected by saves and restores!


The subtle but simple cure for these hassles is called string
dereferencing
. Any time you are about to use a string that may
change later in your program, you take a "snapshot" that
creates a new and unique string that will not change…

(oldstring) dup length string cvs --> (safestring)

Pointers to your dereferenced "safe string" can now be placed
in an array or whatever. (safestring) will stay exactly the way you
created it. And your (oldstring) is free to go on to other tasks.


There are speed and vm penalties for string deferencing, but
these are usually fairly modest.


Othere sneaky tricks involving PostScript strings, arrays, integers,
procs, and dictionaries can be found here.

November 07, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Beware of clean new original boxes at any auction.

Many times, these are just a convenient stash for a
upgrade or a broken item that got replaced. One
immediate clue is some or all of the original packaging
is missing.


A second is any disparity between the box description and
what is stashed inside.

In an older example, many boxes of slot machine replacement
wheel assemblies were older units needing refurb and repair.

Or in yesterday's auction, bunches of squeaky clean new
monochrome laser printer boxes held older and worn
color units from an obvious upgrade. Units with very little
current demand.

More secret auction insiders stuff here.

November 06, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I'm trying to work up an automatic mottled background
filler-inner for our eBay photos.Vaguely similar to our
white knockout routine.

The algorithms end up nontrivial because of speed restrictions.
The goal is to be reasonably fast on a 1300x1300 bitmap and to
fill in at least 98 percent  that is outside of a red or white
unbroken outline.


The PostScript array-of-strings structure seems to be a good
starting point. It is a very compact way of representing an
array of 0-255 integers. And quite good and fast with "along
the grain row putintervals and such. But "across the grain"
column modifications ( where, say, column 43 of 1300 different
array strings needs work ) should clearly be avoided.


Generating a random mottle for each pixel is clearly ungood, so
a small 5000 entry mottle array string can be used instead. Access
for getintervals can be randomized to eliminate any unwanted
patterns. There are two reasons for mottling. First, it looks good,
and second, it dramatically reduces JPEG edge artifacts.


An EWNS strategy can be used. First, each row is scanned
from the left until a red ( or white) pixel is reached. Scan continues
until no continiguous red or white pixels are found. A suitably
selected subrow of mottle can then be substituted all at once.


Then the same line is scanned from the right until either a full red
or a white pixel is incountered If no hits are found, the scan stops
at the limit already handled by the EW scan.
This can eliminate
entirely as many as one half of the EW scans
.

Now for a tricky detail. A two array map of the scan widths is saved
as well as the maximum full east and the minimum full west column values.

These can be used to dramatically restrict the needed column manipulations.
Perhaps by a 100:1 reduction in the number of column pixels involved.


If an easternmost or westernmost column is already filled top to bottom, it is
not NS scanned at all.
A suitable starting point for a NS or a SN scan is found
based on values derived from the two map arrays.


I'll try to post some code shortly. Other image postproc tools here.

November 05, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

There are incredible new opportunities for amateur astronomers
to make significant world class contributions. A number of services
now offer "instant" web based time rentals on quality instruments with
charges starting near the hundred dollar per night range.


Examples include pioneer Tenagra Observatories, Plus newer
LightBuckets, Global Rent a Scope.

If you are local and have more casual astronomy interests, winter
tours of the Mount Grahm International Observatory are offered
by Discovery Park. While the Desert Skygazers can give you personal
and unlimited free access to a 24 inch professional telescope. You can
even become a docent or group tour telescope operator by taking an
easy EAC course.

Or check out the smaller hands on instruments available at
Casitas De Gila. Their real time planetarium simulator above
the hot tub is especially impressive.

Other local or nearby things to do here.

November 04, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

In another major step towards freeing up older technical
information from the outrageously overpriced and restricted
Scientific Journal Mafia, The British Royal
Society has
freely posted 60,000 older papers, making them all
permanantly free online.

Now, if the IEEE would only take the hint...

The one that really pisses me off is the unavailability of
Sallen and Key's seminal 1955 active filter paper.

November 03, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Three words when it comes to dealing with auction
pallets, "contents of cabinent" or "contents of room":

Triage
Triage
Triage

November 02, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A fascinating free reprint of the older Navy Electronics
Training Series can be found online.


Much of the content is dated beyond the point of being quaint. But
interesting reading nonetheless.

November 01, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Did yet another revision and update to our Bitmap Typewriter.
The new code can be found here and the old tutorial here.

The new commands appear in the program listing.

New is a much faster random number generator for the
mottled background options. Plus a combined color
selector that lets you pick rgb or 216 color inputs.

A convenient array listing of all available fonts is
included, but you will have to revise this for your own
machine. Getting a combined list of all PostScript and
other fonts seems tricky, and I am still seeking a good
solution or utility for this.  

October 31, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

How many mathematicians does it take to change a
light bulb?

Only one. Who hands the bulb to five Californians, thus
reducing the problem to a previously solved riddle.

October 30, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A second local restaurant just totally trashed their buffet,
eliminating the salad bar part entirely. While doing an
ultra spartan ( and obviously MacDonaldsesque ) stark
remodel that
totally ruined their overall vibes.

About as sharp as five pounds of raw liver.

October 29, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Here's a revised and updated summary of our ongoing Safford
Basin prehistoric hanging mountain stream fed canal research to date.

A total of 17
canals are reasonably known or believed to exist
with an estimated  total distance exceeding 60 miles!
With
engineering clearly
beyond world class.

From east to west...

0. - P Ranch - remains speculative with only a short
V section of canal, favorable terrain, and persistent
rumors.
Not included in totals.

1 - Ledford - total length of 3 miles. Difficult access.
Initial hanging portion from Smith Dam.
Needs
further exploration.
Studied and reported on by Neely.

2 Henry's - Recently visited portions end in modern
stock tank. Connection to Marijilda unproven. The
known length is 2 miles, likely length is 4 miles.


3 Lebanon - A modern canal that likely closely follows a
prehistoric origin. Marijilda fed east from Lebanon
Reservoir #2. Possible length is 2 miles. Prehistoric
origins not yet conclusively proven.


4. Marijilda - Well researched with spectacular hanging
portion
. Historic rework flows to this day. 5 miles long.

Includes "aquaduct" portion a meter high by a hundred long.
Studied and reported on by Neely.

5a. Twin Boobs West- Fields area appears to be fed by two
distinct canals. Western "clockwise" feeder may be derived
from Marijilda via Rincon Canyon. 3 miles estimated length.
Parallel feeders newly discovered in the Twin Boobs area.
Extensive rock alignments, grids, mulch rings, field houses,
and similar ag development.

5b. Twin Boobs East- Apparently sources in the Lebanon
Resorvoir #2 area, then climbs "up" and "under" the Labanon
Cemetary leading to a terrain following spectacular "S" turn.
Strong hanging portion seems to end up feeding the Twin
Boobs area from the east in a "counterclockwise" direction.
Length at least 2 miles. Slope remains to be proven.

6. Tranquility- Amazingly close to 5b, approaching within
30 feet easterly and vertically. Might be artesian sourced.

Somewhat over one mile long. Apparently routes water to
fields in the Cooks Reservoir area. Portions rebuilt to
puddled high aggregate concrete similar to the Marijilda
rebuild. A strong candidate for proving "stole the plans".

Significant hanging portions.

7a . Deadman - Initial hanging portion speculatively covered
by modern pipeline. Possible 3-way switch mid channel.
At least 5 miles with possible extensions into Longview area.
Original canal flows to this day.

7b Longview - Hints of canal structures in the Freeman Flat
area below Longview Ruin. Which could have been Deadman
fed via switching. Highly speculative. Not included in totals.

8. Robinson - Reworked to feed cattle tanks by anglo
pioneers. Excellent topo traces, well hung. Destination
not currently known, but likely Robinson Flat.. At least
3 miles long.

9. Allen
- Sources from Spring canyon, runs under Allen
resevoir to an unknown destination. Several key but
small segments unproven and unexplored. Exceptionally
large "Culebra" cut two meters deep and a hundred long.
At least 6 miles long.

10. Mud Springs - Sources in upper Ash Creek and impressively
climbs "up" the Mud Springs bajada. Some impressive hanging
portions and a companion structure. Several pieces missing.
Believed to source the Jernigan Canal. Final destination
unknown. At least 7 miles long. Ten inch diameter mesquite
tree midstream and overrun by SCS dam strongly supports
prehistoric origins.

11. Jernigan - Apparent branch of Mud Springs seems to terminate
in the Central Dump area. Has a triple "U" turn to maintain
slope. Small but crucial portions missing and unexplored.
Possibly 3 miles long. Possible branch with short aquaduct.

12 Shingle Mill -
Newest "rediscovery" appears to source
in Shingle Mill canyon and deliver to the Cluff Ponds area.
While only a few hundred feet have been visited to date,
projected length is 3 miles.
Still under active exploration.
Modern rebuild as the Minor Webster Ditch System. Prehistoric
origins remain unproven, but in a compelling location for total
Mount Graham stream water recovery.

13. Lefthand - Studied and reported on by Neely. Includes
plant nurseries and other intensive ag. Projected length is
2 miles. Possible associated canal feeding Lamb Tank.

14. Carter/Nuttall - Possible continuum with other
hanging canals remains largely unproven and unexplored.
Includes Taylor Terraces which likely are CCC
but may have prehistoric origins

More hanging canal info here.

October 28, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Expanded and updated our Gila Valley Day Hikes web
page.

We are now only 28 listings short of our goal of having
365 major entries and over 500 things to do.

Please email me with anything I missed or any
corrections or suggestions.

October 27, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Water electrolysis for bulk energy apps seems to be once again
rearing its ugly head in the energy and electronics newsgroups.

One more time: There is a fundamental thermodynamic reason
why electrolysis for bulk hydrogen is absolutely guaranteed to
ain't gonna happen.


Because of a profound limitation called "exergy", a kilowatt hour
of electricity is ridiculously more valuable than a kilowatt hour of
unstored hydrogen gas.

Thus, the process of conventional electrolysis is pretty much
equivalent to 1:1 exchanging US Dollars for Mexican Pesos.

Nobody could possibly be that stupid.


Much more here and here.

October 26, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A reasonably unbiased analysis of the e-Cat fiasco
can be found here. My own view, of course, is that
this is utterly and totally and ludicrously bogus.


Based on "Looks like a duck, quacks like a duct" with
the same lameB-movie wannabe actors appearing over
and over again.


ANY free energy scheme demands that extraordinary
evidence is required for extraordinary claims
.

AND that the claimants should be spending exceptional
effort to prove themselves wrong.

But on the basis of "once bitten, twice shy" proof
of cold fusion related anything wiould absolutely
have to go orders of magnitude beyond utterly,
unambiguously, unquestionable, and totally convincing.


Anything less than Walmart Aisle #13 being sold out
guarantees a lack of credibility.

More on bashing pseudoscience here.

October 25, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Rediscovered yet another of our prehistoric mountain stream
fed hanging canals. Depending upon who is keeping score, this
makes Canal #17 for a total length over sixty miles!

We might call it the Tranquility Canal. It may be artesian sourced
and likely delivered water to prehistoric fields in the Cook's
Resevoir area. It seems a little over a mile long. Portions have
apparently been "steal the plans" rebuilt with a puddled high
aggregate concrete lining remarkably similar to ( and likely
contemporaneous with ) the Marijilda rebuild.

There are hints of an old canal beside the rebuild, and this
instance may be a useful route to proving that nearly all of
the pioneer mountain canals were "steal the plans" rebuilt by
digging out an old ditch. Such evidence is sorely needed in
the Minor Webster Ditch Systen refind.

Curiously, the canal comes within thirty feet (!) easterly and
vertically to the Twin Boobs eastern feeder canal. But the
two appear totally unrelated. There are several other instances
where nearby canals only differ by a few feet elevation, yet
may take miles to build up the needed elevation offset.

October 24, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A major and apparntly new and free source of user and
repair manuals can be found here.

And some HP specific sites that seems to be filling the void of
"discontinued but not ancient" info can be found here
and here.
  And here. And here.

A number of years ago, both HP and Tektronix released all of
their older manuals to the public domain. You are thus free
to scan and publish them.

October 23, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

How can you prove if an old canal is prehistoric?

My own belief is that virtually all of the pioneer hanging canal
activities simply "stole the plans" and just "dug out an old ditch
."

Especially if only a fraction of the canal was "repurposed" by
feeding a new cattle tank or irrigation reservoir or becoming
part of a city water system. And since evidence supports the
premise that the prehistoric populations was much, much higher
than the few hundred pioneers in the area.


It certainly helps if there are large cacti or ten inch mesquite
trees repeatedly growning mid channel. Or that 1930's dams
and similar projects ran roughshod over the canal routes without
any accomodation whatsoever
. Same goes for obviously older
roads or fences.

Desert varnish, patina, caliche, and lichens also reveal distinctly different
patterns with their age of disturbance.


Under certain circumstances, fingerprints can last a rather long time.
But certainly not multiple centuries. Could new forensics find
fingerprints under rocks that the CCC could have left but clearly
could not have been prehistoric?


The goals and purposes of the canals also seem to me to much
better support prehistoric goals of small dispersed fields,
rather than
the modern ones of cattle wattering or large linear ag areas. And
with thusands of Gila River acre feet safely available to modern users,
there did not seem to be all that much point in exploiting every drop
of water from minor mountain streams. Unless the canal was already
there and nearly ready to reuse.


Even the earliest anglo pioneers had access to concrete, iron, wheelbarrows,
winches, prybars, mules, and, of course, picks and shovels. Many portions of
many canal routes do not seem to support even the slightest evidence
that such tools were being used in any manner.


But I very strongly feel that the canal architecture itself can strongly
support a prehistoric origin.
The canals are often hung on mesa sides
to make their slope independent of terrain. There is a conspicuous
absence of long linear segments.

Most of all, the prehistoric population had no horses or other means
of conveying rock or dirt moderate distances with a reasonable
energy expense.
And certainly no wheelbarrows, scrapers, or
Gradealls. Many of the canals also have a conspicuous absence
of any companion service road or maintainence trail.

Thus, most construction activity went ACROSS the canal rather than
along it
. With cuts and fills avoided when and where possible.
And an obvious major goal being maximizing the energy efficiency
of construction
.


The canals thus tended to follow an "optimal terrain" and "minimal
energy" routing rather than a "shortest distance" one.


Even if it meant adding a mile of canal simply to gain or lose a few feet
of elevation. There are also several instances of very elaborte
"U turn" or even "S turn" routes
that could easily have been avoided
with more modern ( but far more energy intensive ) tools and techniques.

October 22, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Found a curious happenstance in my new Garmin eTrex 30.
Not sure if it is a bug or a feature.

On a supposedly turned off unit, the display flashes for a
fed milliseconds every ten minutes or so.
Very disconcerting
the first few times it happens.

This could be an emergency locator beacon for a dropped or
lost unit. But only works if it fell rightside up and is not
covered.

October 21, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Here's a cute variation on the random command in our
Gonzo Utilities that is much faster and simpler but has a
curious glitch that may need dealt with.

It is well suited for such tasks as mottling the background
of a bitmap...

/wantedrandnumber 15 store

/randfact 2 31 exp 1 sub wantedrandomnumber div
floor cvi store

/fastrandom {rand randfact idiv} store

The glitch is this: Doing a 15 fastrandom will return fifteen
equiprobable digits in the 0 to 14 range. But it also may
exceptionally rarely and highly unlikely instead deliver a 15.

Perhaps something around seven times in 2^31. Do not
use this speedup anywhere this could create problems.

October 20, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Added another Dr. Neely paper to our Tinaja Questing
Library.

This one is on the Gila Valley lowland canals.

October 19, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

The Garmin eTrex-30 can in fact real time register a one foot
altitude display change for a one foot raising or lowering of the
device.

You do have to preset the Barometer Mode to Variable
elevation and be in the Trip Computer mode.

I am still not sure whether this will be good enough to
resolve some crucial prehistoric canal slope issues.

Its user manual can be found here.

October 18, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

How much resolution is "enough" for an eBay image photo?

We pride ourselves in having the best eBay images bar none, so
here are some of the guidelines that we use...

I stongly feel that at least an hour should be spent in image
postproc,
and that the majority of your creative effort should
be spent after the image is captured. Naturally, everything
up to your final out-the-door image should remain in the
bitmap format.

If a scanner is appropriate, we scan to 200 DPI for larger items
or to 600 DPI for integrated circuits. The latter gives us about a
6X magnification and leads to superb lettering during posproc.
With or without use of our Bitmap Typewriter.


With a camera source, we use multi-step resolution that depends
on what the current postproc step needs. We start with a ten or a
twelve megapixel image. This allows significant cropping while
keeping useful results.


After a preliminary and somewhat oversize crop an image in the
2400 pixel wide range results. If multiple exposures ( such as to adjust
side lighting or improve a nameplate appearance ) are needed,
they are done at this time. The reason being that any distortion
correction ( and its consequent resizing ) is best done only once.

We are very big on correction to Architects 2-1/2 D perspective in
which every line intended to be vertical ends up exactly that way.
This takes considerable resolution. We use my custom swings and
tilts
routine and Imageviewer32.

After tilt correction, we reduce the image to something around 1300
pixels wide. Which is a good compromise between good background
knockout and taking forever. While we have several automated
background procs, we usually end up doing this step manually,
starting with our knockout.bmp patterns
.

After a high quality bitmap is exactly the way we want it, we
recrop then reduce it to 700 pixels wide, adjust the gamma and brightness,
and possibly do a color correction and a very slight sharpening.
And then convert to JPEG for smaller file size distribution.

We have a superb vignetting option, but have not used it much
lately.

eBay will then resize to 200 pixels or so but still allow magnification to
the 700 pixels needed for most industrial products. Such things as
test equipment font panel details are instead made much larger.

Consulting, seminars, and custom services available.

October 17, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Adobe's Acrobat X offers a fairly easy way to "tour" all of
the fonts available on your machine. Move any PDF file with
a large line of text into Acrobat X, select Tools > Edit Text
& Objects > Edit Document Text
.


Then highlight the large text line and right click on properties.
As you change the font name, the displayed line should change.

The only little problem is that I have not found any fast and
easy way to cut and paste the font selections. Hand keying or
screen grabbing gets old if hundreds of fonts are involved.

I'm working on a font sampler utility and a way to include
it in our Bitmap Typewriter.

October 16, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A reasonable question is that "If I am having so much
difficulty measuring the slope of a prehistoric canal,
how did they do it?"


No obvious instruments seem to survive, but it seems to
me that there is
a possibility that the canal itself couold
form a water level.

Assume a one percent slope is desirable. Cut or find a
stick 25 inch equivalents long. Make a mark or notch.
at 3 inch equivalents. Use this as your canal standard
.

Assume a properly sloped canal segment is being extended.
Measure off twelve stick lengths and dig the new 25 foot
channel. Chances are a very good slope guess can be made
based on the previously completed 25 feet through simple
sighting.


Just to be sure, run just enough water into the new portion
so it just barely overflows at the far end. The water level
at the start end of the new portion should be three inches
lower in 25 feet. Or one notch short of overflow.

If needed, adjust the slope accordingly.

October 15, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A fascinating and highly eclectic collection of magazine
article reprint listings can be found here.
Bunches of ham
radio and hobby electronics stuff is hidden in the listings.

It would be even better if there was a "directory or everything"
for anything that ever appeared in print
. Full text, fully searchible
Acrobat PDF of course.

Especially in hobby electronics, any remaining copyrights are
ambiguous if they still exist at all.

The "directory of everything" might print their intent to list
something 30 days in advance, allowing any legitimate
copyright holder to block publication. That same holder
could also withdraw the reprint at any time.

Alternately, a micropayment scheme could be set up
for any legitimate copyright holders.

I remain apalled that legitimate electronic papers cannot be
found on the web with reasonable access.

October 14, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

We seem to be still getting our email return address hijacked
by some Romanians. If you are in this loop, we are sorry but
it definitely ain't us.
Nor our ISP.

Whatever system is doing the actual spam generation apparently
shuts down on Saturdays and Sundays. And their lead list seems
super worthless, judging by the hundreds to thousands of those
returned undeliverables we have to muck out of our email.

It is unusual for a hassle of this sort to continue for this long.

October 13, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

The "Tesla Turbine" nonsense is infesting the newsgroups again.

One more time: Bladeless turbines and pumps DEMAND a
thermodynamic irreversibility for their FUNDAMENTAL operation

of maintaining a lossy shear force in a viscous medium. And are
thus useless when high efficiency is a factor.

They, of course, do not work at all if the fluid has zero viscosity.
I'd expect them to be far less efficient in vapor rather than liquid.

These devices ~are~ superb as shit pumps or when pumping frozen
chickens or live fish. As the now defunct leading supplier
tells us, blades have to be added if higher efficiency is needed.

Most of these problems would go away if they were simply called
"shit pumps" rather than naming them after the patron saint of the
church of the latter day crackpots. More in our Tech Musings library.


Particularly here and here.

October 12, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

We are trying to dramatically reduce our inventory to make
room for some upcoming SMT auctions. As a result, we throw
away hundreds to thousands of dollars worth of quality
electronics each week that do not meet our eBay goals.


Thoroughly mixed in, of course, with utterly worthless grunge.

Please let me know if you want any of this at no charge. The
only rule is "take any, take all." Typically a small pickup or
medium SUV worth each week.

You can email me for details.

October 11, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I'm saddened by the best buffet restaurant for 80 miles
around folding because of a franchise flap. And got
replaced by yet another "me too" overpriced steak
house. Whose ambience not quite qualifies as
mesmerizingly awful.

Meanwhile, Pima now has a new and wildly improbable Copper
Town Bistro
. Not sure if the town can support a seventh
food service outlet.

October 10, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

There seems to be a major eBay flap over free shipping.

Naturally, there is no such thing as free shipping. The
customer always pays, one way or another.


While we always attempt to combine a customer's shipping
for the best possible rate, we feel that there are major
problems with free shipping.

The overwhelming majority of ebay items sell for less than $24.
Which means that shipping is often a significant fraction of
the total.


If you offer free shipping, your opening price will thus
have to be much higher than otherwise
, giving you a
competitive disadvantage.

Further, free shipping usually penalize your best customers
in that there is no obvious or reasonable way to reduce the
per-unit charges on multiple simultaneous orders.


If the shipping is distance related, free shipping also subsidizes
those further from you
at the penalty of nearby customers
who are more likely to become repeat customers.

More eBay related stuff here.

October 09, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

One of the most important things I learned in college was
that the key secret to writing thick lab reports was to use
thick paper.


More on similar topics here and here.

October 08, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Finally got my new Garmin eTrex 30 today. It is
smaller and significantly better performing than the
original eTrex. I am generally very impressed.

The barometric elevation display seems fairly stable short
term and displays to one foot resolution.

But it apparently can not resolve the difference in a three
foot vertical shift
. Which I was sorely ( and likely
unreasonably ) hoping for to resolve some prehistoric
canal issues.

Back to the Brunton.

October 07, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A reminder that my favorite bed and breakfast of all
time remains the Black Range Lodge, cleverly hidden
in the part of New Mexico that you cannot get to.

Their Kingston Frisbee Festival runs from January 1st
to December 31st this year. And the Percha Creek
Salmon run remains as spectacular as ever.

Two other places of interest are Casitas De Gila outside
of Cliff ( Check out their real time planetarium simulator
above the hot tub. And the art gallery. )


And the Snowy Mountain Inn, which seems to have fully
survived the Wallow fire disaster.
But was recently sold
at auction.

October 06, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

There's another possible reason why newer microprocessors with
enormous amounts of Flash Memory might prove very useful for
variable speed or variable frequency Magic Sinewaves: The
filtering can possibly be dramatically simplified if larger values of
"n" are used for lower output frequencies.

Because the first unwanted harmonic frequency could thus be
held pretty much the same.


Yeah, higher "n" would be less efficient owing to more switching
transients. But lower frequencies in a motor ap are likely to be
associated with significantly lower load energy for a net gain.


More on this whenever.

October 5, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Just came back from a New Mexico trip and discovered a major
new wind energy facility in a dead calm area with zero net generation.

The wind all the rest of the way home was blowing just fine.

Thinking this somewhat strange, I dug up this New Mexico wind potential
October 4, 2011
nal, and Poor. This site seems to me to weigh in at Fair.

Thus suggesting that 100 percent of all Superb, Outstanding, Excellent,
and Good New Mexico sites are already fully in use.
News to me.

I'm wondering if some county commisioners got greedy, or if
this is an outright scam, or a ploy to steal federal founds. At the very least,
somebody seems to be confusing the nameplate capability of a windmill
with its actual long term net amortitized energy potential.


More on similar topics here.

October 4, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

We've been so busy with current stuff that several back
burner long term projects look like they may never get
cleared. You are welcome to make offers on the following...

Five fairly recent "as new" Dell Servers with many
internal drives that need performance checked
before they can be sold.


A heavy duty industrial programmed wire cutter
that has been 90 percent carefully refurbed but
still needs an on-hand stepper ic replaced.


Great heaping bunches of premium quality alarm
panels that have yet to be sorted and tested.

A pair of eminently restorable 1908 (!) Eastman
commercial 35 mm movie projectors. These
are presently disassembled and UPS shippable

The last remaining developable property on the
north boundary of Gold Hill, Oregon. 20 acres.
Easments and power now in place.

An absolutely spectacular survivalist property on
the East Fork of the Gila River adjacent to
a NM wilderness boundary. 5 acres with access
highly restricted. Taxes are $2.70 per year.

Plese email me with your interests.

October 3, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

At least two of our prehistoric hanging canals ( Twin Boobs
and Jernigan ) now clearly have multiple sharp "U" turns
in them forming major "S" shaped routes.

The apparent goal was to be able to cross a wash or drainage
at grade.
The "backwards" and "uphill" parts are certainly
counterintuitive and have beeen very hard to find.

Both the engineering and the societal infrastructure involved
are clearly world class and utterly mind boggling.

October 2, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Several viewers have requested additional photos
of the professional dimmers we have up on eBay. The new
photo can be found both here and in our eBay offer.


We pride ourselves in having the best photos on eBay,
bar none. This particular image was shot in an area with
skylights, CCFL fluorescents and additional key lighting.

We firmly believe in heavy image post processing, ending
up in a combination photo and characture that accurately and
favorably represents the item being offered.


Some of the steps involved include distortion correction to
Architect's perspective. knockout to a mottled background
with minimum JPEG artifacts, and internal enhancement or
clarification of any murky areas.

Many of the secret insider details appear in our GuruGram
and eBay libraries.
And especially in this tutorial.

October 1, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Princeton has just placed the scholarly pub scamsters on
notice that copyrights will no longer be assigned on any
government funded work. Other schools are likely to
quickly follow suit.

It is waay past time that this happy horseshit has ceased.

Any and all research pubs older than three years should
be freely available to anyone who wants or needs them
at zero or negligible cost.


Wesrch is An example of how things should be.

Many of my own freely accessible papers appear here.

September 30, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Somebody in Rumania has apparently hijacked our return
email address and has been sending tons of spam to worthless
addresses. We seem to be getting many hundreds of undeliverable
messages per day and the problem is not going away.

We were reasonably certain it ain't us, and an overnight shutdown
of all our computers did not change the volume in the least.

These problems usually go away in a day or so, but this one
seems unusually persistent.

We are sorry if this is causing any problems, but there seems to be
little we can do at this end.
Our ISP is aware of the problem.

September 29, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Several viewers have asked about making foreign sales to
New Mexico, Besides the language barrier and the hassles
at customs, another traditional problem was that their truck
tires were a different size and spacing
, requiring everything
to be reloaded at the border crossings .


Fortunately, new reversible truck tires have been developed that
can simply be insided out at the inspection stations.

Additional details here.
And here.

September 28, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Made a subtle and difficult find of more feeder for the Twin
Boobs hanging canal area. In a crucial area right where it
had to be. Subtle but almost certainly definite. In an unexpected
"S turn route" reminiscent of the Jernigan Canal. Hidden in
dense cactus and similar grunge.

One present premise is that the Boobs themselves are a water
use area,
rather than part of a "move it elsewhere" water
delivery system.


Evidence seems to me to point to a pair of "normal" two walled
hanging canals feeding the area from both the southeast and
the southwest. Quite a world class find.

The Boobs area itself seems to have far too little slope for
long distance water delivery. There also appears to be
parallel canal channels, and the single walled structures
more suggest "ponding" rather than delivery areas.


No truely single walled structures are known along any
of the other long distance mountain stream delivery canals.
In addition, the Boobs area has grids, rock alignments,
and mulch rings common to use areas but exceptionally
rare in delivery areas.

Curiouser and curiouser.

September 27, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Salvex seems to have just listed 23 truckloads of Napalm.
Seems somebody at Home Depot discontinued stocking the
product after that they discovered that the stuff burns.
 

September 26, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

But a maximum output frequency limit on Magic Sinewaves
definitely still exists. The techniques are best suited for
solutions in the 60 Hertz area
, and even 400 Hertz might
be pushing it.

The reason being that, in order to zero out any arbitrarily
chosen number of low harmonics, a clock to output frequency
ratio of 44,000:1 or higher is required.
In a PIC system, a
clock frequency of 10 MHz can give you a 60 Hertz output.

Thus, magic sinewaves are superb for power apps but unsuited
as a general purpose higher frequency approach
to effieient
digital sinewave synthesis.

September 25, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A website visitor asked what the frequency resolution of our
Magic Sinewaves can be. The glib answer is "anything you
want it to be".

It depends on whether you are using a fixed or a variable rate
clock. In the earlier designs, a PIC or similar microprocessor
had its clock frequency varied to set the output frequency.

This got done with a VCO or whatever and easily could hit
an 0.01 Hertz resolution. But took a "two stage" solution
where the frequency circuit was separate from the amplitude
circuit.


In newer microprocessors with huge amounts of flash memory, the
frequency and amplitude can be internalized into one larger data
file.
For instance, if one hundred frequencies and one hundred
amplitudes are needed with eight data bytes per Magic Sinewave,
about 80K of flash data memory would be needed for table
lookup storage.

September 24, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Did another revision and update to our Bitmap Typewriter.
You'll find the new code here, the older tutorial here
and general details on using PostScript routines here .

The code additions let you have a mottled background.
This looks generally better and "richer". It also further
minimizes any eventual JPEG edge artifacts.

The new commands are...

/mv - set mottle variability ( 25 recommended )
/mw - set mottle width ( 256 for speedup )
/ma - mottle existing background "A"
/mb - mottle existing background "B"
/mc - mottle existing background "C"
/md - mottle existing background "D"

Mottling the entire background can add about ten seconds
to the processing time. You can reduce this 4X by using only
A, B, C, or D. You can further reduce this 4X by setting the
mottle width to 256 rather than the full 1024. Speed penalty
becomes negligible with these combined speedups.


Much more here and here.

September 23, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Further updated and expanded our Gila Valley Day Hikes.
We are now only 28 entries short of our goal of 365 unique
recommendations. 

Please email me with anything I may have missed, or with
suggestions for further expansion.

September 22, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Here's an update on the prehistoric hanging canal status:

Some spectacular recent finds have newly identified a
stunning group of mountain stream fed hanging canals
in the Gila Valley. Over a dozen examples are now
known whose total length is approaching fifty miles!

Funding and ( especially ) field mice are needed to diccover,
map, and document this unique world class discovery of
utterly mind boggling prehistoric engineering. Whose
goal appeared to be to literally exploit every available
drop of Mount Graham water.

A present problem is picking up some precision elevation
measurement capability
. Besides a good old Brunton
compass
, we now have an automatic level that needs
a tripod or adaptor, and a Garmin eTrex-30 which has
yet to be delivered.


Some current issues...

TWIN BOOBS CANAL - This now appears to be a use rather
than a delivery area, owing to parallel channels and rock
alignments. Several exact key locations remain unresolved,
although the area appears to be fed both from the east and
the west.

ALLEN CANAL - Several reaches remain unexplored, as
does its ultimate termination. The mesa to dam segment remains
particularly frustrating. The "Culebra Cut" is spectacular.

JERNIGAN CANAL - Two large holes are conspicuous
in the probable route. In addition, there is a not yet interpreted
possible aquaduct and a possible prehistoric headgate that
still need extensively studied.

MUD SPRINGS CANAL - A key early crossover portion has been
located after several false starts. The exact Ash Creek supply
point remains to be found, and an obvious mile remains
unexplored. There is also the 3000 foot "Black Hole of Central"
and determination of just where this whole work is headed.


SHINGLE MILL CANAL - Extensive historical rework has
pretty much been established as fact. The issue is whether
the plans were stolen from a prehistoric original. The
location, slope and overall plan strongly suggest so.

Please email me if you want any part of this.

September 21, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Another fireground issue that needs a modern high tech
solution: Accurately identifying individual fire hoses.

A typical department might hand stamp a numeric id
into each hose and then hand read and hand log them
during repacking. Instead, the system cries for rfid.


It sure would be nice to push a button on a hand held
remote that gives a full inventory of an entire packed
hose bed at once.

The id tags, of course, have to be exceptionally rugged
and withstand being drug down the street without
coming loose or failing to respond. After years of abuse.


The market should be huge if an economic and
reliable solution can be found.

September 20, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I'm wondering if some opportunities exist in updating fire
sprinkler heads
from nineteenth century technology.

Two problems are the long time delay betweeen the time the
sprinkler trips and the time a system pressure alarm can
respond. Plus the flood damage during the Keystone Kops
activities between the time the sprinkler needs shut
down and the time the entire system can be drained of water.

Yeah, there are wedges, and wedges on poles. But they are
quite awkward to use, especially fifteen feet or more in the air.

Instead, a new sprinkler head might immediately report its
being tripped. And then might either automatically shut down after
a time delay. Or else have a convenient lever or whatever style
shutoff.

Reliability and cost and approval issues might be severe, but
some high tech solutions seem long overdue to me.

September 19, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

We just picked up a bunch of power utility surplus
instrumentation and similarquality items and should shortly
be listing them as eBay auction or stores.

Much more on eBay here.

September 18, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Something vaguely akin to dollar cost averaging can prove
useful at an industrial or other auction.

Say you see a dozen pallets you want that you value just above
a currency resistance threshold at $55 each. Say futther that
you end up stealing the first two pallets for $5 each.

This frees up $100 in funds you can use to more aggressively bid
on the other pallets
. Or can use to lowball bid on other pallets
you normally would ignore. Just make sure your expanded bidding
does not trip any shipping or loading issues.

Much more here.

September 17, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I am mightily displeased with the Salvex auction site
whose policies seem to overwhelmingly favor sellers.
Seems I "won" an auction with a fair and reasonable
bid, only to have the seller try to slap a totally unconscionable
and utterly ridiculous $15,000 reserve on me after the sale
was complete.

Salvex does clearly state that the seller can accept or reject
any or all offers. Or can add or change a reserve at any time.

All bids are usually kept invisible and your bids are absolute
rather than proxy.
But bids that are under any stated reserve
are accepted anyway and get ranked.

Here's my current thinking on a useful bidder strategy on this
site: First and foremost, spend little time with them and do
not expect to win.  Make sure you know where the items are
located and verify a local shipping service ahead of time.

And, of course, never bid foreign.

Should you still find something of interest, wait exactly
until thirteen minutes before auction closing, and then bid
60 percent of your maximum
. If you become the high
bidder, sit back and watch for any vile and despicable
10 minute autoextensions. If you do not become the high
bidder, rebid immediately at 80 percent and then at 100 percent.

If someone else still outbids you, extend the auction
yourself in the last minute, first with an 80 percent maximum
bid, (if needed) and then with your 100 percent maximum.


But these turkeys are best avoided entirely.

More on useful auction strategy here. Your own custom auction
finder can be created for you per these details.

September 16, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

This site seems to offer custom rechargable battery
package solutions for reasonable prices that typically
range from $25 to $50.

While intended for robotics and R/C model enthuasiasts,
they can nicely solve repairing the unrepairable in the
way of old or obsolete electronic test equipment.


In general, their packs will usually extend the initial
device life, owing to improved modern cells.

September 15, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Secret "hobo marks" to the rescue.

Industrial auctions may not have lot numbers on a
confusing number of pallets. Or they may be a choice
auction where you pick what you want. Keeping track
of what is what in the middle of hectic bidding can be
a problem.


Assuming the packaging on the pallet is of little value,
it may pay to make "secret marks" on them to seperate the
gotta-haves from the sort-of-oks from the poisioned-lots.

Possibilities might be to use a square for something you want to
bid on, a triangle for something you want to pass unless you can
steal the item, or a circle for something to avoid.


Alternates might be to use small color coded stickers or
to press color coded push pins into the pallet bases.

Naturally, you should not get caught doing any of this
and you should not degrade the value of the lot in any manner.
Chances are it is good to use two marks just in case
somebody else stirs the pallet contents.


It is, of course, essential that the meaning of your
markings are not obvious to anyone else.


More auction tips here.

September 14, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Let me be sure I've got this straight: The primary
function of the US post office today is to delay the
delivery of information or content. And their solution
to their present financial problems is to further delay
the delivery of information or content .

While making the process more inconvenient.

My solution instead is wildly counterintuitive: Immediately
repeal the
private express statues. And the problems should
automatically take care of themselves.

September 13, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

In hindsight, the random convenience operator in our
Gonzo Utilities seems rather clunky. In that it involves
two divisions, a multiplication, and conversions from
integer to floating point back to integer.


Which is not quite as bad as it sounds, because the
underlying PostScipt rand operatior is rather slow. In
its present form, random gives something less than a
2:1 slowdown.

Here is another approach that runs at nearly the full rand
speed. It requires a precalculation and thus is usable mostly
when you want to generate identical random integers many
times in a row. Such as mottling a bitmap background...

/randint 7 store
/randdiv 2 31 exp 1 sub randint div store
/newrandom {rand randdiv round cvi} store

September 12, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Three highly useful sources of industrial pricing info include
McMaster Carr, PLC Center, and OEM's Trade.

Additional pricing research tips here.

September 11, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Many integrated circuit manufacturers have or shortly will
cancel their ceramic packaged products intended for Military
883
and similar protocols.

These packages typically sold for ten times or more the
price of plastic or industrial packages.
Their prices are
now certain to skyrocket. When and if they can be
found at all.

I've just posted a bunch of these to our eBay auction and
store sites. Mostly the more popular items and usually
priced much less than their commercial package pricing.


All guaranteed functional and available for immediate delivery.

September 10, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Except for the Cottage Bakery, the local bakeshop scene
is, to say the least, rather grim. But two outstanding locations
elsewhere are more than worth  the effort to travel the long
distances to them.

Especially as part of a daytrip.

Check out the Roundup Bakery ( formerly the Bakery
House ) in Elfrida for just about anything. Or the
Breadbasket in Sierra Vista for superb and unique
pretzel rolls
. Which usually sell out by 8 am.

September 09, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I consider automatic online auction extensions to be both
vile and despicable. They grossly undervalue the bidder's
time, reward the terminally stupid, force you to reveal your
presence,
and make realistic bidding horribly inconvenient.

Public Surplus is a typical example.

My strategy in dealing with extendable auctions goes something
like this: First you avoid them because they are a gross insult
to the value of your time. Secondly, if you must bid, select a
price that is the absolute maximum you are willing to pay. I've
found that a price "a step above a step above" a currency
resistance threshold works well for me.

Such as $126.53.

Finally, you enter your price once and do so one minute before
the trip point of any extensions
. Then you sit back and watch,
responding in no manner to the other bidders.

The best possible type of auction for a buyer is called a Vickrey
Auction
. And, indirectly, also is the best possible type of
auction for the sellers. eBay could become much more of
a Vickrey auction by offering a twenty five cent autosnipe
service. After the auction is complete, your invisible proxy
is entered and you then win or lose.

September 08, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I've just done yet another update and expansion of our
Gila Valley Day Hikes. The goal is to end up with
365 positive entries, and we seem to be at 337.

Which really represent over 500 unusual or interesting
things to do.
Because of multiple topics in some entries.

I seriously doubt there is anywhere else in the world where
there is so much to do so close in in so many ways. All
centered on the greater Bonita-Eden-Sanchez metropolitan
area.

Did you know about the Renarium? Or where the
Shingle Mill really was? Or that the largest local
catfish weighed in at a "fair to middlin" 71 pounds?
Have you seen the UFO fish filet at the Taylor Terrace?


Finding valuable new stuff is getting tricky. Please
email me over anything I may have missed.

Additional similar topics here.

September 07a, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Win a few, loose a few. The apparent reason the Shingle Mill
Canal
lo11inor Webster Ditch System. Many thanks to Cluff Ponds
historian George Hayes for clarifying this for me.

It still remains a fascinating entry for our Gila Valley Day Hikes.

A second anglo project called the Robinson Ditch very clearly had
solid prehistoric origins. Judging by its location, its "hanging canal"
orientation, and its stunning similarities to adjacent known prehistoric
water projects. Clearly, they "stole the plans".

Does the Minor Webster system also have prehistoric origins?
It certainly is in an expected place and not having a canal
here would leave a glaring and obvious gap if "their" goal was
to exploit every drop of Mt. Graham water.

There are a few potsherds there and there and an apparent
mono fragment or two present, but these can be reasonably
expected most anywhere in the Gila Valley.

Proving this one way or another might be tricky. Due to the
extensive rework and heavy brush.

September 07, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I've got a whole pile of my classic books and articles that
I soon want to add to our free ebook archive and free classic
reprints archive.


One of the problems I've been having is finding updatable copies of
my Modern Electronics stories. Especially those involving Marcia
Swampfelder
.

Please email me if you can get me copies of any of these or have
the original magazines for sale
.

September 06, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I've still got a pair of genuine Eastman 1908 commercial 35 mm
movie projectors for sale that I would like to clear out.

Their provenance was the original Cliffton, AZ movie theater. They
are presently disassembled and can be shippid in multiple UPS
boxes. They are eminently restorable and fairly complete.

Please email me if you have any interest in these extremely rare
collectibles.

September 05, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

For years, I've been creating what, for a better name, we might
call Lancasterisms. These are intentional but apparent
topographical errors intended to reveal a higher or greater truth.


Such as a groundswill of popular demand. Or what those French
Veternarians call a "four paw". Or being overly enameled on some
idea. Or ending up a few bricks shy of a full deck. Frosting the lily or
guilding the cake. Or not being able to hit the barn side of a broad.
Or the mythinterpretiation of something.

Or sources close to an associate of the barber of a usually reliable
spokesperson. New uses for Chebycheff Polynomials would take
the Cheby to the Leby. 
Many of the web perpetual motion schemes
and those electrolysis fantasies seem to involve electrocity.

All in one swell foop. Provided there's no oint in the flyment
An unauthorized autobiography. A jerk of all trades. The
local hysterical society.  

Letting the cows come home to roost. So long as they are
elected by acrimination. That little dip between the winter slump
and the spring slack period. Sort of the qualm before the scorn.
Geranium transistors.

Plays a mean eclectic guitar. Pioneers new methods of animal
husbandry. Speaks Esperanto like a native. Bruno's attitude
relateralization facillitation. Or the long lost oriental martial art
of Tai Wun Oun. Will be persecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Thus reaching a new millstone.

Geologists, of course, classify rocks as sedentary, ingeneous, or
metaphoric. And New Mexico hikers might call an emergency
rain shelter a Poncho Villa. The illegal aliens in the Alabama
Grits Harvest, will, of course, be used for flavor only.

These are somehow related to the Yogi Berra's of others, such as
"Nobody goes there because it is too crowded", "Deja Vu all over
again", or "Let's keep the Status Quo right where it is. Or "When
you come to a fork in the road, take it".

Or Ed Abbey's classic "Androgynous Ammonia". Which might
even involve an engendered species.

I have a hollow feeling I've lost some of the better ones of these
somewhere along the way. As you go through some of my older
books and stories, please report any that may be missing in
action.

Because Opporknockity tunes but once.

September 04, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

GPS Receivers have gotten amazingly compact and low in cost.
Such as this latest example.

A good GPS free trade journal can be found here.

September 03, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Once again, I've updated and expanded our Arizona Auction
Resources. An older survey of what is where appears here,
and bunches of additional support here. And a directory here.

Your own custom regional auction finder service can be
created for you per these details. These can be prime sources
to base your eBay business on. More here.

September 02, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I was very surprised to see that barometric pressure for
many specific regions has strong diurnal components whose
slope and shape tend to repeat from day to day, even
over months or years.

In the basin and range southwest are earth tides and
canyon winds. The classic wind patterns are upcanyon
during the day and downcanyon at night.

This suggests measuring the average slopes and then
making your altitude measurements at appropriate
times. Locally, this seems to translate to a zero slope
between 8 and 9 am.

This site can give your local variations, their slope, and
their history. Just change your local airport call letters
These will be the luggage tag with a K in front.

September 01, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

( Continuing yesterday's entry on how good a barometric
altimeter can become... )

If we take the canals at a nominal 3500 feet, we see from
this reference that a tenth of an inch of mercury barometric
variation translates to a hundred feet of elevation
.

The nearest barometric history reference I could easily
find was from Safford. Where we find that rapid variations
seem rather less common here than this Phoenix barometric
history
.

Phoenix fairly routinely will show a tenth of an inch per
hour variation, although the norm is much less. Safford
only rarely has a slope steeper than a tenth of an inch
in two hours.


Thus, our normal expected local barometric altitude drift
would be at worst something like fifty feet per hour.


However, some correction techniques are possible.
The simplest is to close the loop and return to the
initial point, averaging the results. Next simplest is
to repeat the measurement closed loop a dozen times
and average the results.

Making the measurements on a dead run to minimize
any time delays would also surely help.

Curoiusly, the Safford barometric pressure seems to
be flattest betweeen 8 and 10 am.
This appears to be
reasonably consistent from day to day.

Going true differential would likely be needed for more
accuracy. In which one eTrex-30 would sit on the initial
point and a second would be carried between the
measurement points. And continual correction being
made by the measured drift.

All of which predicts that special effort will likely be needed
to get anything remotely near a one foot resolution
.

The obvious next step is to receive one or more
barometric altimeters and record their drift rate and
their differential drift rate. And their internal noise.

The radio control model folks surely must be working
on this as well.

August 31, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

We definitely need some accurate differential altimetry to
resolve several hanging canal problems. GPS vertical resolution
is pretty much worthless as it can be off by 400 feet or more. A
one foot differntial resolution sure would be nice.

Some painful older solutions would be to use a Brunton Compass,
an automatic optical level, a laser level, or full survey gear.
But these can prove expensive, bulky, inconvenient, or painful.

I just ordered a Garmin eTrex-30 which has a barometric based
altimeter. The obvious question is how accurate can barometric
altimetry be?


New mems and piezo low cost sensors are now available, and it
is reasonable that Garmin would use something similar.
Some useful tutorials and conversion sites appear here,
here
, and here. The actual sensors can be found here.
These devices can in theory offer a nine inch resolution.

Factors which affect resolution are the micro and macro weather,
the noise of the sensor, the number of measurements, and
whether the loop is closed on itself to allow averaging.

Barometric pressure sometimes can vary half an inch of
mercury in a day, which translates to an absolute 500 feet
at an elevation of 3500.
Which might be 50 feet per hour.
And might be significantly reduced by closing the loop and
averaging. Or with repeated faster measurements.

But average barometric variations should be much, much lower
than this. Especially on the upper Sonoran Desert on a cloud
free and wind free day.

More on this when and if the eTrex-30 shows up.

August 30, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Once again expanded our Gila Valley Day Hikes library.

August 29, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Revised and improved our Bitmap Typewriter with
the tenative new code here, the older tutorial here
and general details on using PostScript routines here .

The bitmap typewriter lets you add or improve small
typography lettering on a bitmap with the highest possible
resolution and quality allowable without going subpixel.

It is especially well suited for eBay photography.

In general, the new routines allow a larger transfer map with
greatly simplified entry, provides for new minor color
adjustments, and adds a 216 color capability. The latter
is somewhat coarse to be always useful, though.

The new space is 1000x1000 split into four regions.
Here is the new simplified command set....

ba - set backgroumd A (bottom quarter)
bb - set background B (next highest)
bc - set background C (next highest)
bd - set background D (highest quarter)

gk - set global kern

so - set color old RGB way (as in 127 26 47 so )

sc - set color new 216 way (as in 32 sc)
sf - set PostScript font family
ss - set bm size
st - setgraystring
sy - set y increment

tr - set color trim change

b+ - more blue
b- - less blue
g+ - more green
g- - less green
r+ - more red
r- - less red
w+ - more white
w- - less white

Please report any bugs or suggestions for further improvement.

August 28, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Some epsilon minuses that were pissing around with Brown's
Gas just managed to blow Southern California off the map.

Hydrogen is exceptionally dangerous to play around with.
It gets ridiculously more so when you store it premixed with
stochiometric volumes of oxygen.

An analysis of the stupiditiies of both deadly and totally
worthless Brown's Gas
appears here. And the utter ludicrosity
of the "hydrogen economy" here

Thanks to Keeylynet for this info.

August 27, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

When selling integrated circuits on eBay, it is super important
to have photos with identifiable part numbers. Subtle postfix
differences can make a radical difference in package, speed,
or temperature range.
 

Such as this, this, this, or this image. The dilemma is to get
useful and decent pictures with a minimum of time and effort,
as ic's have to have a low unit price and you may not have
bunches of them to divide front end tasks.

Scanning at ultra high resolution is a must. I've found 575 DPI
to be a useful compromise. Since the bitmap will be on the
huge side of enormous, you'll want to crop and move into
Imageviewer 32 as quickly as you can. The usual first task
here after cropping is a slight rotation to get the chip
perfectly horizontal.

It is always important to scan at the same high resolution
so that any future cuts and pastes will end up the correct
size without rework.


At this point, you have a choice of reusing an existing
background and package and pasting the new lettering
over it. Or of starting over from scratch. To start from
scratch, pick a mottled background such as one of these.
The reason for a slight mottling is to eliminate JPEG
edge artifacts.

Pick the nicest looking edge pin and stretch it into a
credible shape. Then bump the new background up to
it. Then step and repeat the pins to cover one whole
edge. Always try to keep your horizontal and
vertical lines oriented to one pixel accuracy.

Then work out a credible corner and next do the
vertical edge on the right end that does not have the
notch in it. Then cut, flip, and paste to take care of
the other horizontal pin edge. Next, do the left
vertical edge, taking care of the notch.

Note that you can temporarily put a vertical guideline
well out in the background to get your edges perfectly
aligned.

The remaining inside areas are redone with credible
patterns, again preferably with a slight mottling.

Ideally, you should not mess with the lettering beyond
raising its contrast and sharpness
. Any rework that
introduces typos is clearly a no-no. Sometimes simple
patching of minor lettering dropouts will work, as will
carefully outlining each letter with the suitable background.


If you must do stem rework, start with an H and an O and cut,
clip, paste, and rotate as needed to generate the rest of the
letters. Generally, you'll want to work at least double size
and preferably larger. Your final reduction should cover a
multitude of sins.

If all else fails, you can use our revised Bitmap Typewriter. But this
takes time and could easily lead to typos.

August 26, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

We are in the process of adding and expanding many
of the items in our eBay auctions and store.

First and foremost, are more than a dozen variations on
genuine ITT Cannon round CA mil-style threaded connectors in
many of the most popular sizes and pinouts. Still sealed in
original factory baggies.

These are at a tiny fraction of distributor cost and are
available for immediate shipment. A request: Please
be sure you understand the part numbering!
There can
be subtle differences in shell size, number of pins,
plug versus socket, rotation, mounting style, and such.


Second are great heaping bunches of classic integrated
circuits
, many of them mil spec or otherwise premium. And
many of them impossibly difficult to get with prompt shipping.


And fourth are four flavors of classic all-metal XLR style Cannon
and Amphenol 4-pin connectors
. Male and female, Square,
rectangular, and round.

August 25, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Here's a summary of our ongoing Safford Basin prehistoric canal
research to date. A total of 12 canals are reasonably known with
an estimated total distance of 51 miles! Projections suggest at
least 16 hanging canals with a total distance of 60 miles.


From east to west...

0. - P Ranch - remains speculative with only a short
V section of canal, favorable terrain, and persistent
rumors.
Not included in totals.

1 - Ledford - total length of 3 miles. Difficult access.
Initial hanging portion from Smith Dam.
Needs
further exploration.
Studied and reported on by Neely.

2 Henry's - Recently visited portions end in modern
stock tank. Connection to Marijilda unproven. The
known length is 2 miles, likely length is 4 miles.


3. Marijilda - Well researched with spectacular hanging
portion. Historic rework flows to this day. 5 miles long.

Includes "aquaduct" portion a meter high by a hundred long.
Studied and reported on by Neely.

4. Twin Boobs - Many mysteries remain and possible
Marijilda branch origin remains speculative and unproven.
Quite obvious on Aerial photos. Significant hanging portions.
Projected possible length is 5 miles. Includes apparent field area.

5 Deadman - Initial hanging portion speculatively covered
by modern pipeline. Possible 3-way switch mid channel.
At least 5 miles with possible extensions into Longview area.
Original canal flows to this day.

5A Longview - Hints of canal structures in the Freeman Flat
area below Longview Ruin. Which could have been Deadman
fed via switching. Not included in totals.

6 Robinson - Reworked to feed cattle tanks by anglo
pioneers. Excellent topo traces, well hung. Destination
not currently known, but likely Robinson Flat.. At least
3 miles long.

7 Allen
- Sources from Spring canyon, runs under Allen
resevoir to an unknown destination. Several key but
small segments unproven and unexplored. Exceptionally
large "Culebra" cut two meters deep and a hundred long.
At least 6 miles long.

8 Mud Springs - Sources in upper Ash Creek and impressively
climbs "up" the Mud Springs bajada. Some hanging
portions and a companion structure. Several pieces missing.
Believed to source the Jernigan Canal. Final destination
unknown. At least 7 miles long. Ten inch diameter mesquite
tree midstream and overrun by SCS dam strongly supports
prehistoric origins.

9 Jernigan - Apparent branch of Mud Springs seems to terminate
in the Central Dump area. Has a triple "U" turn to maintain
slope. Small but crucial portions missing and unexplored.
Possibly 3 miles long. Possible branch with short aquaduct.

10 Shingle Mill -
Newest "rediscovery" appears to source
in Shingle Mill canyon and deliver to the Cluff Ponds area.
While only a few hundred feet have been visited to date,
projected length is 3 miles.
Still under active exploration.

11. Lefthand - Studied and reported on by Neely. Includes
plant nurseries and other intensive ag. Projected length is
2 miles.

12. Carter/Nuttall - Possible continiuum with other
hanging canals remains unproven and unexplored.
Includes Taylor Terraces which likely are CCC
but may have prehistoric origins.

August 24, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Some free planetarium software for PC, Mac, or Linux
can be gotten from the folks at Stellarium.

August 23, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

We still get asked all the time why we have no foreign sales.
The short answer is that they are not remotely worth the
grief and hassles that inevitably result.

I guess I am still pissed over the Canadian post office refusing
to accept 45,00 pieces of my first class mail several decades
back. Separately, several of our suppliers contractally demand
that we permit no foreign sales.


The bottom line is this: If you are a success with your domestic
sales, you have no need for foreign ones. And if you are not a
success domestically, foreign sales only compound your problems.

More on eBay and other small scale high tech marketing here.

August 22, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Updated and expanded our Gila Valley Day Hikes library.

Also added a link to mine and mineral data.

August 21, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

One of the foremost insider "secret" rules for eBay success
is simply no pissing around.


Paypal only. Absolutely no checks or money orders. No self
hosted Visa or MC unless you have tremendous volume and
ridiculously low rates. Absolutely no foreign sales.

Absolute minimum average order of $19.73. Minimum line
item of $9.73, hoping for multiple sales per customer. No
free samples, no exceptions on minimum quantity per order.

Discounts only on larger volumes, perhaps 5 percent at
$79, 10 percent at $199.

Nothing offered for sale that you cannot hold extended at
arm's length.
Nothing for sale in obvious known problem
categories.


Minimum of 30:1 SBR. Absolutely no consignment sales, anytime,
ever. Always seek a 21 day payback and a 15 month hang time.

Above all, should a customer be unhappy for any reason,
refund them. Usually without a return.Then, of course, block them.

Your 30:1 SBR protects you from any occasional misfires.

Photography, scanning, and listing as efficient and hassle free as
possible. Shipping at cost. Combined where and when possible.

Much more here. Consulting services and lectures available.

August 20, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

One sure way to tell a microcomputer pioneer is by all
of the arrows in their back.

August 19, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

At first glance, these Taylor Terraces seem like a UFO
fish filet recipe. But a more credible explanation is that they
were likely a CCC project.

Onsite inspection shows many lichen covered rocks where the
lichen edge is non-horizontal and not in ground contact. Which
strongly suggests recent construction or disturbance.

There are also similarities to other CCC worthless boondoggle
projects, but none I know of that are quite this monumental.

Similarities to recent stimulus spending are stunning.

August 18, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Google Maps just upgraded the newness and the resolution of
much of Southeastern Arizona. Acme Mapper also uses and offers
this service, among many others.

Here's a split between the old and new resolutions. Note that you have
one more click of resolution, but the old stuff goes green on you.

You can easily recognize telephone poles and wires. But it is still
hard to tell if the hawk on the crossarm is missing any tail feathers.

New coverage seems to range from Artesia to Portal and from
the new mexico line to the San Pedro River.

August 17, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Garmin just announced an eTrex 30 handheld GPS unit
that includes a barometric altitude sensor. Presumably
something similar to to the Bossch BMP085 or its Sparkfun
SEN09694 breakout.


I have yet to find its specified resolution or when it will be
available.
But it clearly should be ridiculously better than
GPS elevation readings. Whether it will be useful for finding
missing portions of our prehistoric canals remains to
be seen.

The theory goes something like this: In absence of
sheet flooding or other terrain mods, a canal can
reasonably be expected to continue at its previous
slope. The area in question can be no higher than the
entry point nor any lower than the exit point. And the
midpoint elevation should be somewhere near half the
difference between the entry and exit heights.

When these constraints are placed on the current
topography, candidate areas should often be
dramatically limited.


Much more here.

August 16, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

What improvements could be made in eBay? I'd start
with these...

First and foremost, eliminate any and ALL restrictions on URL listings
in offers or direct off-eBay contacts between buyers and sellers.
Ebay's paranoid obsession with losing an imagined offsite sale
is completely overwhelmed by the damage and inconvenience this
policy is causing both buyers and sellers alike.

Second, allow sellers to recover ancient listing history, Even if a modest
fee is necessary. It is common for a seller to realize they forgot to relist
something many weeks or months after the fact.

Third, institute a twenty five cent autosnipe service. In which bids would
be invisibly placed just after the normal closing. This would convert eBay
into a true Vickrey Auction with tremendous benefits to sellers and buyers
alike. Sellers should have the option of enabling or disabling this service.


Much more on eBay strategy and tactics here.

August 15, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

It is fast becoming apparent that a prehistoric mountain stream fed
canal system existed in the Safford valley that seemed to attempt
to exploit every drop of Mount Graham water. At least twelve
canals are known with a total length in excess of forty miles!


A distinguishing features of these world class engineered canals is
that they are often "hung" on the edges of steep sided mesas.
Giving precise control of slope independent of terrain!

A reasonable question might be why these canals and their significance
to Southwestern Archaeology have not been previsiously discovered.

First and foremost, despite a few superb papers such as this one and
this one, the Safford basin has largely been a backwater of Southwestern
Archaeology
. Owing to the powers that be lying elsewhere. While the
local community college has an entry level archaeology program, they
are not in any manner a major recognized research institution.


Secondly, there seems to have been a local cultural bias against the
abilities of the stone age inhabitents
. Suggestions that anglo pioneers
"stole the plans"or "dug out an old ditch" are often met with anathema.

Thirdly, most of the canal routes lie on state lands of difficult access
and sharply limited current interest or development. Physical
evidence of many canal reaches are subtle or missing entirely. Yet
others flow to this day.

Fourth, the very concept of the magnitude and scope of this canal
system demands a population and a political system vastly in excess of
what was previously believed to exist.

Fifth was the difficulty in recognizing continuums. A hanging canal on
a 200 foot high mesa is obvious, while one on a 20 foot mesa might not be
Nor is a hanging canal that was long buried by an anglo pipeline.

Sixth was the dearth of recognizable artifacts beyond the often filled in
canal
reaches themselves.

Emerging technology also became considerably important.. Centralmost of
which was Acme Mapper. This image of the Twin Boobs Canal played
a central role in greatly expanded current discoveries and exploration.
The Garmin eTrex handheld GPS receiver also continues to serve as
a key resource.

Much more here.

August 14, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

This site  is an interesting resource for units and conversion factors.

At first glance, our prehistoric mountain canals seem to be rather small,
but if you run them long enough, they move a surprising amount
of water.

Ferinstance one gallon per second equals an interior attack firehose
of 60 GPM or just under 100 acre feet per year or over 31 million
gallons per year. Enough for 40 acres of modern drip irrigated cotton.
And great heaping bunches more for teacup-at-a-time prehistoric watering
of desert acclimated crops .

And one cubic foot per second equals a fire cannon of  nearly 500 GPM,
over 700 Acre Feet per year, and nearly a quarter billion gallons
per year.

Otherwise proven by a leaky faucet racking up an incredible water bill.

August 13, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Aparently certain military suppliers still stock the older HP
oval line cords. But you have to have a security clearance to
buy one!

As near as I can tell, these old line cords have become unobtainium.

August 12, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

If you integrate a pulse width modulation PWM waveform,
you can extract its analog equivalent. This has an enormous number
of uses, not the least of which is LED dimming.

I just ran into a pair of PWM variants that you may find of interest.

We might call the first "phase alternating PWM". In which you
output a PWM waveform and then its mirror. This cuts the number
of transitions in half and raises efficiency by reducing your switching
losses. But probably is not all that much different from reducing your
PWM frequency by two.

The second is called "binary code modulation". Picture a PWM waveform
with a 256 microsecond period. And a microcomputer or whatever that
has an 8-bit parallel input. Bit 0 makes 1 microsecond of the period
high. Bit 2 makes 2 microseconds high. Bit 3 makes 4 microseconds high.
Up to Bit 7, which makes 128 microseconds high.

This is an all digital approach that avoids any analog involvement. It is
less efficient that conventional PWM, though, in that up to eight transitions
are needed per cycle, compared to two in conventional PWM and one
in phase alternating PWM.

A tutorial on binary code modulation appears here.

Variations on PWM for digital sinewave generation that allow you to force
any number of low harmonics to zero can be found here. And a newly
revised calculatior here.

August 11, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Further expanded our Gila Day Hikes library page.

Yup, White Streaks Canyon is still at the bottom of the
list. Definitely an acquired taste. Recommended for hikers
that bring their own Catclaw just in case there is not enough
along the trail.

A rock scramble best viewed from a distance. Right here is
more than close enough.

365 main entries might make a reasonable goal or
waypoint. But it is getting harder and harder to find
( and verify ) quality new stuff. Yet I feel some obvious
stuff is glaringly absent.

Please email me with your suggestions.

August 10, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A reminder that consignment sales simply do not work
on eBay and that they are a certain formula for disaster.

Optimum results on eBay demand something like a 30:1
SBR or sell buy ratio. This would pretty much be the
equivalent of receiving a 97 percent comission.

A 50% commission would equal a pitiful 2:1 SBR, while
a 20% commission would be a laughingly absurd 1.25:1
SBR.

In addition, people's expectations of the value of something
sold on eBay are often wildly excessive. And they fail
to realize the an eBay sale is an enforcable contract under
the uniform commercial code.

Offering a commercial consignment service is even worse,
because you add employees, rentals, and other fixed brick
and mortar costs to the mix. Besides raising questions of
product legality and theft.

Much more on viable eBay routes here.

August 09, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

The next step in the Shingle Mill Canal research   
would be proving or disproving its prehistoric origins.
The canal is certainly in an expected place, an expected
size, seems to fill an expected need, and has the expected
engineering.

And "fairly large" mesquite trees mid channel certainly
suggest little recent use. But the adjacent "service road"
raises serious questions. As does its overwhelming
obviousness
on Acme Mapper compared to the others.

The canal and road combination already occurs nearby
in Marijilda Canyon. Where we clearly have an anglo
rebuild and reuse of a known prehistoric ag feature.

But following a prehistoric canal would be a rather
obvious "steal the plans" route for a much more
modern road.
Perhaps one that was Weech Toll Road,
McEniry Scam, Cluff Ponds, or CCC related. Or
even had something to do with the shingle mill itself.

Cluff Pond access from the west was cut off in the 1980's
by locked gates. The amount of "overgrownedness" on
this "lost" road is consistent with this time frame. But
the two could certainly be unrelated.

Logical next steps are to visit the portions of the canal
that do not have an adjacent road to see what differences
if any exist. And to check any road crossings ( at least one
is suggested by Acme Mapper ) to see if they run roughshod
over the canal without accomodation. As is the case in
many nearby examples. 

A closer look at the actual road construction might prove
useful. At first glance, it does not seem graded, nor does
it have any evidence of heavy equipment cuts and fills.

But there are nicely arranged edge rocking in places.

Obvious direct CCC involvement seems absent, although
there clearly are other minor CCC works in the area.


Totally separate would be a historical approch with
appropriate interviews and family journals common
to the area.


Your participation is welcome,

August 08, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Managed to actually visit and verify the Shingle Mill
Canal
. It appears to be an anglo rework of a prehistoric
water project similar to the dozen others that seemed to
use world class engineering to exploit nearly every drop
of available Mount Graham water with as much as FIFTY
MILES of water channels!

Using a mix of stone age technology and mind-boggling
engineering. .


As usual, the find raises many more questions than it resolves.
The site appears to clearly be pre Cluff Ranch and not at
all in the CCC style. Five and six inch diameter mesquite
trees are common in the middle of the water channel.

While clearly sited exactly where a needed prehistoric
canal would be expected, there seems to be an adjacent
roadway that raises issues. Just to complicate matters
further, this "lost" or "forgotten" roadway could in some
manner be associated with the Weech Toll Road or the
McEniry scam.

Aerial photos also show some rather ambiguous areas
further south that could be grids or  sites. These remain unvisited.


Only about a mile has been verified. The source is believed
to be Shingle Mill Creek, and delivery is believed to be
in the area of one of the smaller and now drained Cluff Ponds.

Your assistance in both field work and funding would be
most certainly welcome.

August 07, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A credible source for global warming appears to have
been located  Per this analysis.

August 06, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Updated and expanded our Gila Valley Day Hikes
library pages.

August 05, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A new variation on GPS appears to be tested and ready
for commercial rollout. It seems to offer dramatically improved
sub-inch resolution, especially vertically.

What you do is build a few fake GPS satellites at WiFi
frequencies and spread them at the edges of your farm
field or survey area or wherever. Much higher resolutions
can cheaply result. The fake satellites can track each other's
stability for much cheaper time accuracy.

August 04, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Most newer scanners can easily be used as a superb
magnifying glass or microscope.

This can be very useful for identifying hard to read
integrated circuits and SMT devices. The trick is
to first raise the resolution for an initial 8X magnification
perhaps by using something near 575 DPI. You can pick up
a further 8X in paint with its pixel magnification for a
non-half-bad 64X total,

Further dinking with the gamma, brightness, and contrast
can yield additional enhancements.
And the accuracy
can be much better than writing down what you saw.

August 03, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

It can be real easy to confuse the watermarked copy
protecton on the Google Maps used by Acme Mapper with true
ground features. In general, these appear as subtle lettering
that runs diagonally up the image. Perhaps repeating eight times
per screen.


The resolution of local features ( typically 100 feet per inch ) sure is
frustrating when tryng to interpret archaeological detail. Apparently
doing anything significantly better has to be flown rather than
satellite. And thus outrageously expensive for remote areas.

August 02, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

... And a reminder that our mid-level navigation has
been improved as an ongoing project. With full
details here.


Several additional links remain to be added.

August 01, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Those old Hewlett Packard 3 pin "oval" line cords seem to
have just gotten a lot more difficult to find. Seems that the
Belden/Volex 17280 has been discontinued. And that recent
surplus offers have been gobbled up.

The few that are available show up on eBay for $20 or more
each . Rumor has it that some older sewing machine
repair stores have some pricey ones that also may be called
"recorder cords".

The Molex .093 crimp terminals are somewhat small, but possibly could
be spread. A replacement could be made from a standard line cord and
three of these. Followed up by sealing them in polyethelene from a hot
glue gun.  But the terminals are rather fragile.


Someone else suggested crimping yellow butt splices to a cord.
These apparently also can be made to fit with a slight crimping and
also would be hot glueable. But neither of these methods seem very
reliable or promising.

There are two flavors of the cords with opposite sequences of the
outside pins.
Using the wrong one could raise some safety
issues during servicing ( the switch would be on the low side ),
but otherwise would not cause unreasonable problems to
most people most of the time.

Probably the best solution is to replace the connector with
a standard IEC jack. Such as the sixty two cent Mouser
562-701W-X2/02. But these may have nibbling and rear
clearance issues. Not to mention panel space availability
for their much larger size .


Yet another possible route would be to use a fixed line
cord and a Heyco strain releif.

Please email me with any suggested solutions.

July 31, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

What was an excellent website for the TEP Springerville
solar pv array seems to have gone dark with no obvious
upgrade or update.

This despite a recent modest expansion. A curious fact: The
generated power was never used at all for consumer
distribution.
Instead, its entire output went to partially
powering the pumps on their adjacent coal fired plant.

July 30, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Two additional sources of local VHF scanner frequencies
can be found here and here.

July 29, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Per this price tracking directory, the prices of pv solar
panels have been dropping significantly. Partially due
to overcapacity caused by the word getting out that
these are still gasoline destroying net energy sinks,
and partially due to some obscene European subsidies
mercifully being discontinued.

Present pricing averages $3 per peak watt with some
prices around half that. The value needed for genuine
no-bullshit net energy production is a quarter per peak watt,
so present prices still miss by a factor or six to twelve.

Even after the quarter per peak watt is reached, it will take
at least another decade to pay for all of the previous
subsidies and industry wide energy consumption.
Plus the
amortization of obvious heavy new investment
Or possibly
a lot longer per this analysis.

An interestng free solar industry trade journal can be
found here. With more on energy fundamentals
here. And more on pv in particular here.

July 28, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Found yet another bug in the Black and Decker power
monitor
. Their outside temperature sensor is encased
in black plastic. During times of direct sunlight, the
reported temperature is ridiculously high.

July 27, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Expanded and updated our Arizona Auction Resources
link farm.


Your own custom regional auction finder can be created
for you per these details.

Additional auction support can be found here.

July 26, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A map of when Netflix comm is up or down can be found
here. And a list of their "watch now" movies here.

Or here. And TV shows here.

At present, a reaonable guess of their watch now DVD's is
about 4000, compared to many more than 40,000
mailable DVD's.

You can create your own watch now of stuff they
don't have by using these links. Especially Fox, CBS,
and ABC.


Your network ready "smart tv" will have to allow
unrestricted internet interface to access these. Otherwise,
input via VGA ( from your own computer ) is sometimes
possible. Note that HDTV resolution is normally much
less than the best computer monitor resolution. But the
results will be the same for any HDTV sourced material.

I am eagerly awaiting CSI Gila Bend. Plus the cross-genre
classic Godzilla versus the Night Nurses. But the restraining
order from the Tapioca Pudding Institute caused the latter to
only be released directly to 8-track
.

July 25, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A reminder that our Magic Sinewave Calculator has
been updated and improved.

Quantization effects are now much more accurate and
are more conveniently exported.


Much more on Magic Sinewaves here.

July 24, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

There seems to be a fatal flaw in the Black and Decker
Power Monitor. If the conventional meter wheel does
not make it around once during the calculation interval,
the reading rounds down to zero.

This gives a tremendous credibility gap when a zero
is displayed during obvious power consumption time.
It also lowers the monthly totals dramatically. It also
gives you the least information at the time it would
be the most crucially useful.

Accurate measurement info should be provided at
least down to fifty watts, and prefereably less.

The solution has been known for years: To measure
a low frequency event, calculate its time period
instead.
Run the calculation separately and
continuously so that the rest of the algorithm always
has something useful to work with.

Such a solution would also allow "Your sensor is not
properly set"
error messages as well.

July 23, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Here's some of the local Gila Valley VHF comm frequencies.
Many of these are now plain talk and newly narrow band...

122.8000      SAD Safford Airport
146.8600      Heliograph Ham Repeater
146.8800      Ham Radio Skywarn Net
146.9000      Heliograph Ham Repeater
151.3175      RAC East ( Transmit )
151.4975      RAC West ( Transmit )
151.4000      AZ State Forestry Helio ( Receive )
153.0200      Pima Schools
153.6800      Graham County Electric
153.7400      Safford Utilities
153.7850      Graham County H2 ( Transmit )
153.9500      Fort Thomas Fire Department
153.9950      Graham County SO1 ( Transmit )
154.0400      Safford Municipal
154.0850      Thatcher Fire Department
154.1150      GC Search & Rescue ( Transmit )
154.2125      RAC East  ( Receive )
154.2800      Fire Mutual Aide
154.3250      Safford Fire Department ( Receive )
154.4250      U/A Observatories
154.7250      EAC Secuirty
154.8750      Safford Police Department
154.9100      Thatcher Public Works
155.0400      Bylas Police Department
155.0550      Graham County H2 ( Receive )
155.1450      Pima Municipal
155.1750      Southwest Ambulance
155.1900      AIRS5 ( Transmit )
154.4525      VTAC12
155.4750      AIRS5 ( Receive )
155.7150      Graham County SO1 ( Receive )
155.7600      Pima Fire Department ( Receive )
155.8350      Gram County SO3
156.8175      RAC West ( Receive )
158.8050      GC Search & Rescue ( Receive )
159.0825      Pima Fire Department ( Transmit )
159.1050      Graham County H4 ( Receive )
159.4050      AZ State Forestry Hekio ( Transmit )
162.1625      BLM Law Enforcement
168.1500      USFS Fire Helio  ( Receive )
168.5375      BLM ( Receive )

169.6000      Coronodo NF Fire Net
172.2750      USFS Fire Helio ( Transmit )
172.4250      San Carlos & Phx Fire Dispatch

173.8250      BLM ( Transmit )

Traffic on most of these channels is quite infrequent. Reception
is usually limited to line-of-sight from the Gila Valley. Some
additional frequencies may appear here.

Arizona law allows you to listen but in no manner interfere.

July 22, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

One of the unintended consequences of continual video
on demand becoming and being the entertainment norm:


What possible point could there still be in having "seasons"
to television series offerings?


There would be no competing for time slots because
there would not be any time slots for most viewers.

July 21, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Managed to pick up a Black and Decker Power Monitor
and am rather disappointed with it. I'm not the least
surprised their EM100B is selling at deep discounts.


The alignment of the meter sensor ( It looks for the
black bar coming around on a stock older power
meter ) seems to be extremely critical. And the
display seems to consistently read low, especially
during low power usage times.

I suspect there is a fundamental algorithm problem
involving very low rotation rates.

And I feel the programming and interface is not all
that well thought out.

I've yet to take it apart to see if Flash Memory
storage can be added.
Or if a full web interface is
even remotely possible.

Nonetheless, at $25 it seems eminently hackable.

July 20, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Just added four precision slides to our eBay pages,
three of them possibly super premium SKF/ Gillman
brand.

One has a lockable slider, one has a dial style manual
advance. One is rotary with a half degree calibration,
and the final one has an unusual pitch and yaw
capability.

July 19, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Added a new fast navigation feature to our Santa
Claus Machine
llibrary page.

I keep lowball bidding on these, and hope to
eventually end up with one. As with real print,
it looks like inkjets will literally run away with
all the marbles.

July 18, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Looks like its ecopornography time again.  A  
major electric car company has put a gasoline
destroying net energy sink pv solar panel on their
factory roof so they can claim their cars are
solar powered.


There are several fundamental reasons why solar
powered cars are both ludicrously absurd and
clearly ain't gonna happen.

The first, of course, is that not one net watthour of
pv solar electricity has ever been produced
. And will
not be produced till a decade after the fully burdened
panel costs drop under a quarter per peak watt.

Actually, it may be a lot more than a decade. At least
per this analysis

We, of course, are still missing by a factor of twelve
or more, not counting the hideous subsidies that skyrocket
the additional true cost. Per details here and here.

The second is that on-board solar energy recovery
makes no sense whatsoever. At best you could come
up with two meters of effective area. Which even in
the Arizona sun would only be good for a kilowatt hour
of electricity per day. For a 30 kW ev, this translates
to a stunning TWO minutes of run time.

That is assuming your air conditioning energy costs do
not skyrocket, that the cv aerodynamics do not change,
and that the added panel cost is zero.

Thirdly, even if stationary and off vehicle solar energy is
a very poor time match.
Instead of one set of batteries in
the car, you need one in the car, one being charged, and a
third set floating around charging stations. Tripling the
battery cost of an electric car is unlikely to aide in its
adoption.

But what about those student solar racers? Yes they
can be outstanding engineering project challenges.
But
they have no relationship whatsoever to real world
transportation solutions.

Meanwhile, find that turkey that put the panel on the
roof and stake them to an anthill.

July 17, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Not surprisingly, Borders has gone belly up. I still
maintain that most people will be astounded with the
upcoming sudddenness, speed, and totality of the
utter demise of books and traditional publications.


eBooks are already far outselling traditional print
titles. Despite eBook readers still having grevious
and obvious flaws.

A decent eBook reader would present a display
comparable to a full page printed color ad in Newsweek,
would cost less than $49 unless it was a free promotional
giveaway, would have only the mildest forms of DRM
as the rare exception rather than the rule over totally open
content, would allow totally portable and exportable
content over all platforms and all countries, and,
most definitely, would allow many different and totally
open formats that must include .PDF or its improved
offspring .

I can see several unavoidable consequences of where
the eBook revolution is heading. First, Book-on-Demand
publishing is pretty much stillborn
, owing to eBook formats
having overwhelming cost and convenience advantages.

The earlier fatal flaw in BOD appears to have been the
total lack of cost effective trimming and binding solutions.

Secondly, libraries are clearly doomed and headed to
extinction
. Because the very concept that a control
freak, rare material, and an end user need be in the
same place at the same limited time is now ludicrous.
At present, the best library in town is usually
Burger King's free WiFi link. Not to mention their
having far fewer food and drink restrictions.

Thirdly, scholarly publication is about to implode.
It is absolutely inexcusable that older scientific and
technical publications are not instantly and freely
available. Meanwhile, open sources such as
Wesrch should shortly utterly dominate.

Fourth, unexpected collateral consequences are likely
to hasten the eBook conversions
. Such as a student
revolt against backpacks or wholesale bootleg publications
of outrageously overpriced info.

My own free eBooks and videos can be found here.

July 16, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

While I try to have a new and eclectic blog entry
every day, it is usually easier and more creative
to do several entries at once and "backfill" the list.

Please always look back a week or so to pick up
anything you may have missed.

July 15, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

In a monumentally stupid move, eBay is attempting to
ban most email links ( live or otherwise ) from their
seller listings.

The theory is that there will be fewer off-eBay sales.
The reality is that there will be MORE off-eBay sales
and that the amount of seller pissing off will vastly
exceed any possible imaginary benefit or savings.

eBay is entitled to any actual sales made through their
site. They are not in any manner entitled to payments for
any additional later sales conducted offsite between
buyer and seller newly communicating through email.

It does seem that the Business and Industry category
is exempt from the email link ban.
One of the unintended
consequences, of course, will be that the listings in this
category will now go through the roof.

July 14, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Posts to many Usenet newsgroups seem to be sharply
down,
as does their quality. I suspect some of this is due to
the eyeball siphoning of newer social media such as Facebook
Twitter, and the rest of the gang.

The degradion of the sci.energy.hydrogen newsgroup was
pretty much expected, since word has finally gotten out that
the "hydrogen economy" is a ludicrous scam. Per these
details
.

Less obvious is the drop in popularity and quality of the
alt.marketing.online.ebay newsgroup. Caused in part by
eBay itself no longer being a leading edge phenonomen.

Bruno does continue to be the AMOE attitude relateralization
facillitator.
Since he is so big on multitasking, he frequently
combines his duties with those of being a product durability
tester for a major New Jersey Baseball Bat manufacturer.

And AMOE pioneered resolving the hassles at New Mexico
customs and language barriers
through the use of truck
tires that can now be insided out to meet the different
spacing and size requirements without needing reloading
at the border crossings.

AMOE, of course, was instrumental in making sure that
the illegal aliens used in the Alabama grits harvest
were being used for flavor only. And that, contrary to
popular belief, Oliver Hazard Perry was not responsible
for sinking Lake Erie. It instead was Ednumd Fitzgerald.

I still find the sci.electronics.design newsgroup highly
useful, although even it sometimes degrades into
unhousebroken playground squabbles.

July 13, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A reminder that we have a program going to make many
of my classic electronics books newly available as free
ebooks, along with constuction projects and videos.

A current list and links to what is already available can
be found here.

Present in-process projects include Micro Cookbook volume I,
Applewriter Cookbook, Cheap Video Cookbook, and
Enhancing your Apple II volume I. Along with bunches
of "golden era" Popular Electronics tutorials and
construction projects.

I'd dearly love to do full "Directors Cut" restorations
on all of these. Such as this example. Or this one
in process
. But the required time and effort would
require your further support as a Synergetics
sponsor or Banner advertiser.

July 12, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

We've usually have several different flavors of solid
state relays on our eBay website. It is important to
understand what each of these does, because they
most definately are NOT interchangeable.

The most common version is called a logic level
driven, triac output ac only zero crossing switched
solid state relay.
The input signal will typically
be 3 to 24 volts of isolated dc of a low enough
level to be microcomputer or logic level compatible.

The high current bipolar output will turn on and
STAY on, starting with the next ac zero crossing and
staying on for the remainder of the ac half cycle.


Other ac solid state relays will respond only to
ac inputs in the 90 to 240 volt range. And while
suitable for traditional industrial relay circuits,
are definitely not microcontroller or logic friendly.

A variation on the logic controlled input versions
can be turned on at any time in the ac cycle and
staying on for the remainder of the ac half cycle.
Zero crossing switching gives minimum RFI and
optimum line cleanliness. Random turnon instead
lets you do such things as lamp dimming or solder
iron heat controlling.


These do not normally work well on brush type
universal motors and not at all on induction
motors when speed control is intended. Instead,
special feedback circuits may be needed for
universal motors, and induction motor speed control
demands much fancier controls in which, besides
feedback, control of both amplitude and frequency is
needed.

Further, ac solid state relays do not normally work
well with highly inductive or highly capacitive loads,

although some circuit tricks can help.

The triacs or SCR's in ac solid state relays also have a
MINIMUM current requirement.
Thus they are not
suitable for very low current or highly variable loads.
Proper testing also demands that reasonably heavy
loads be used. Fifteen watts is often a good choice.

An ohmmeter is totally useless for testing ac
solid state triac or SCR style relays.

DC solid state relays instead use power MOSfets
for their output stages. The stages turn on when the
controlling signal is applied and back off when it is
removed. These are typically a lot more expensive
and are usually intended for a single output polarity.

One newly popular variation is called reverse phase
control.
In which a lamp load is turned on at the
zero crossing and off in proportion to the brightness.
By slew rate limiting the turnoff, the usual dimmer
RFI can be dramatically reduced. Special devices
and techniques are required for reverse phase control.

July 11, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Some of the local emergency services are switching
to a narrow band VHF system that only has one half
the FM deviation of the previous systems.

On one hand, this doubles the number of available
channels. On the other, it adds millions of dollars of
unneeded costs to new comm systems.

If you have a newer pager, usually narrowband can
be reprogrammed. The frequency and squeltch codes
may also need changed.

On older pagers and some older scanners, these
may still work and may still have the same sensitivity.

But will have only one-half the output audio volume.

July 10, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

The future ain't what it used to be.

July 09, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I've pretty much convinced myself that legitmate
energy efficiency breakthroughs continue to be
of neglible interest and have zero market.

Yes, there are all sorts of "steal the money" scam
subsidies for business-as-usual that still do the wrong
things in the wrong way.
And all sorts of grant
writing scams that bypass the real breakthroughs.
And money being thrown at "ain't gonna happen "
pseudoscience.


Proof of negligible interest are smart power meters
that are closed for utility use only rather than open
for owner energy conservation , power sensors that
are being abandoned as unsellable in warehouses
,
deep distress discounts on Black and Decker energy
monitors
, Google cancelling their entire energy powermeter
awareness program and, of course, my own energy
efficiency breakthroughs
largely being ignored for decades .

July 08, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Just discovered an amazing piece of technology called
a Rogowski Coil. These have been around since 1887
but only recently have become a major new way to measure
ac current ( and thus energy and power ) for energy
conservation and awareness.

The concept is simple enough and is based on good
old e = L di/dt. The problem in the past had been
building a decent integrator. Doing so digitally
appears to solve the problem. For another definition
of an integrator is a digital network that has a
slope of 6 decibels per ocatave and a phase shift of
90 degrees.

Compared to a classic current transformer, you have
an air core loop that is linear and and can not saturade.

The usual form is a is a coil that that is a toroid that
completes nearly one turn and then closes directly back
through itself.

One popular version is the Fluke i2500-18
Useful general tutorial can be found here

and here.

July 07, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

One of the key secrets to dealing with pseudoscience is
being able to separate the useful adjuncts to porcine whole
body cleanliness from the total hogwash.

More details here.

July 06, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I've pretty much convinced myself that the recent
stimulus boondoggle did not have so much as one net
cent of economic benefit.


In this analysis, the cost of providing rural broadband
ended up around seven million dollars per home. But
I suspect few of those homes actually needed or ended
up using the web all that much in the first place.

Our local fiasco Du Jour involved trucking plain old
dirt nineteen miles
to slightly alter the turnoff to an
obsolete road that nobody uses anyhow.

July 05, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

We picked up half a zillion Allegro Microsystems UDN2597A
octal interface chips at an aerospace auction and will
continue to offer them on eBay. at less than fifty-six
cents each.

Although no longer current production, these remain
absolutely ideal for mid level microprocessor output
interface, and are almost indestructable, even in
student labs.


The octal outputs are all saturating NPN for cool
operation and high efficiency
. And are rated a full
50 volts and one ampere.

The eight outputs can handle a pair of medium power
steppers or up to eight power relays at once.

July 04, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Analog Devices now has a wide variety of power line
monioring chips. Some of which sell for btween $4 and
$8 dolars each.


Some examples appear here. With tutorials here and
here.
With bunches more onsite.

July 03, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Most of the television sets being sold today are totally
worthless scams.


There is not the slightest doubt that the overwhelming
majority of media delivery will shortly be web based
,
interruption free, and able to be be started, stopped, fast
forwarded, and rewound instantly at your command.

CRT televisions are, of course, obsolete. As are
plasma displays and all 720P resolution displays.

A "smart" TV that is going to have a useful lifetime
must be wireless internet capable, and must have instant
and no hassle access to the entire web. And not just to
a limited number of paid subscription services.

The TV also must have some sane method of conveniently
and remotely entering alphanumeric data.


Our own links to web based tv appears here.

July 02, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

We just picked up some rather impressive aerospace
grade electronic components at a recent auction. I'll
start listing them shortly on our eBay auction site.

Typical pricing will be one-sixth of the usual
electronic distributor net.
Some of the items
have recently become unobtanium and might
be extremely difficult to find elsewhere.

Most items appear to be new, unused, clean,
and still in original packaging.

July 01, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I'm wondering if there might not be yet another hanging
canal
linking the Shingle Mill drainage with the area around
Cluff Resevoir #3.

The topography is favorable and canal systems are known
to the east and west. Others have mentioned this possibility.
Acme Mapper does give some tantalizing hints.

June 30, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Some auctioneers are now offering only a fraction of their
live auction lots online.
Items that do well online usually
have a well defined object, include definitive photos,
have value easily searched, and are of broad interest.

Lots that tend to do poorly online will be somewhat vague,
such as "contents of room" or "contents of cabinet" Besides
getting lower online bids, these are more likely to be
noshows at pickup time.

All of which shades points in your favor to attend live auctions
rather than bidding online.

More on auctions here and on eBay opportunities here.

June 29, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I'll be giving a talk on the Mount Graham Tramway tomorrow
Thursday June 30th as a BLM Brown Bag presentation at
12:00.

BLM is located at 14th Avenue and 8th Street in Safford AZ.
You are welcome to bring your own brown bag lunch.

June 28, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

The CIA World Factbook site has bunches of useful and
intriguing info on it.

These comparison pages are particularly scary.

June 27, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Very few stainless steel alloys are magnetic and the
even fewer that are will be only weakly so.

A magnet is thus a very useful tool at an auction to tell
whether you are looking at plated steel or stainless.

Note that aluminum will usuall scratch very easily with
an ordinary knife, and stainless will not.

June 26, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A very useful websites for tracking down electronic
and semiconductor logos appears here.

June 25, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Outside of that Missus Lincoln, how was the play?

June 24, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Texas Instruments has come up with a new MEMS
thermopile system
that lets you do non-contact
termperature measurements cheaply and efficiently.


The TMP006 specs can be found here and a USB
evaluation unit here.

June 23, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

The definitive location of the Mount Graham Tramway is a
knob once called Alabam Point. This name apparently has
fallen into disuse, but can be found on current topo maps as
an elevation point 7565.

Looking North from Alabam Point, the entire tramway
route down shingle mill canyon can be viewed at once.
Looking South across a deep canyon, the Graham
Escarpment
looms above you. Crossing the canyon
was done in a single spectacular tram jump that was
2600 feet horizontally and 800 feet vertically.

There are hints of a tension station on this point
as well.


The access terrain to Alabam Point would make a
marine drill seargent blanch. You can't get there from
here
. Which is one reason that numerous artificats
still remain in the area. Most buried in high brush.
Amazingly, recent fires have pretty much spared
the Shingle Mill canyon area.

June 22, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Further modified and improved our ultra speed
Magic Sinewave Calculator.

You can now directly export quantized delay values.

Please email me with any suggestions, improvements,
or problems.

June 21, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Going back to our "Throw another few kilobytes of
memory at it", with larger 16 or 32 bit embedded micros...

You can easily do a precision delay by using some
seemingly ridiculous brute force table lookup programming.

Just set aside, say, 4K worth of NOP's followed by a RTS
subroutine return. The rest of your precision delay code
then becomes amazingly compact, clean, and largely
free of "pinch points".


More on the Magic Sinewave use of precision delays here.

June 20, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Two more AZ wildfires added to the mix: The Willow Fire
west of the Wallow Fire and the Laguna Fire near Sasabe.


You can keep track of some of these at the InciWeb website.
An interactive Wallow Fire map appears here.
Tucson
TV Stations have also proven useful.

At present, over ONE PERCENT of Arizona is on fire.

Nearly all of the Chirachua Mountains have burned, along
with a substantial portion of the White Mountains.

June 19, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

There still seems to be some confusion over how some
of our eBay switches operate.

A sustained switch stays in the position you left it and
leaves the contacts in your chosen orientation.

A momentary switch is usually spring returned. It places
the contacts in your chosen orientation when pressed and
keeps them that way only so long as being pressed continues.

A center off switch will have a mechanical position in which
no output contacts are active. These are somewhat unusual
but quite useful in motor reversing apps.

Switches with momentary positions are usually shown in
( parenthesis ).
For instance, an on-off-(on) switch would
be center off with one side momentary and the other
sustained.

There are rather rare switches that are alternate action. An
alternate action switch works like a traditional ball point pen.
Each pressing changes the contact arrangement. The usual
use for these in in push-on, push-off applications. Very few
of our offered eBay switches are alternate action; when
they are, this feature is specially and specifically called out.


The number of poles in a switch determines the number of
circuits that can be independently controlled. A single
pole momentary switch might be NO for normally open
or NC for normally closed. Some single pole sustained
switches can be converted from NO to NC simply by
turning them upside down or relabeling them.


Switches will have a voltage and current rating usually
stemped on them. Exceeeding the voltage rating is a
big no-no. Exceeding the current rating may cause arcing
or contact burning.
In general, switches that control
inductive loads such as motors must be derated compared
to ones that handle resistive loads.

Surprisingly, high current switches are NOT suited for
dry switching or other very low current uses
. Special
gold plated contacts and other techniques may be needed
to prevent contact oxidation. Such switches are usually
carefully described for their suitability.

June 18, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Once again expanded and updated our Gila Valley
Day Hikes
library page.

Plese let me know anything I have missed.

June 17, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Our website traffic does not seem to be expanding at
its traditional rate. Despite major improvements and
expansions such as new videos, free eBooks, improved nav,
attention to detail, careful validation, and greatly
expanded contact.

Which leads me to wonder if external factors may be
limiting website growth at present. Or for the future.

We might call the obvious suspects "eyeball siphoning".
.
Brought about by dramatically expanding social network
sites, greatly increased video-as-the-web-norm services,
and even smart tv sets which should approach actually
being watchable in a very few years. Once ( and if )
their rectocranial inversion problems are resolved.

Yes, our website remains primitive and classic. But I
strongly feel this makes a unique statement in itself.
And still probably is the best way to deal with hundreds
or thousands of internal and external links.

June 16, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

An optimal or "absolutely best" live auction for me would be...

Midweek - to discourage addicts and casual big spenders.
Very short notice - so the word does not get out.
Early start - for maximum inconvenience
Lousy weather - 120 in the shade except for three inch hail.
Outside of auctioneers speciality - doesn't know your items
Mistakes - moves tech items to small town, runs wrong ads
Terrible terms - no VISAs or checks, plus huge deposit.
Horrific website - none or badly done and way out of date.
Poorly promoted - wrong ads in wrong papers.
No pissing contests - troublemaking competitors absent.
No online bidding - or else incompetently processed

5 gottahaves, 15 wants - enough to make trip worthwhile
Unspecialized - items of your interest a tiny fraction of total
Pallet lots - bunches of identical items going for much less
Passes my "Globe" test - is it worth a 72 mile round trip?
New merchandise - hopefully with original packaging
In place - NOT recognized, higraded, moved to auction barn
Deep distress - nobody cares about value, other goals dominate
Low registrations - preferably zero in your area of interest
No bad vibes - no owners ( or next of kin ) present or involved
Contents of room - or shelf or cabinet opportunities abound
Many lots - auctioneer gets behind; others run out of money
No blackmail games or other last minute cancellations
Dark and murky - or high on hard-to-view dusty/dirty shelves

Wildly mixed lots - high value items buried in abject trash
No bulk bids - or other "monopoly money" participation
Personally lose less than $25 to bidding errors.
One auctioneer - so you do not have to retrain over again
Second tier auctioneer - out of area but not national.
Huge bizarre beasts - $2.50 items strippable for goodies
Poisioned lots - "Put it with the next one" for "next" steal
Poorly organized - only a few bidders can get near items
Very long - auctioneer gets very tedious then sloppy
Parking difficult or nonexistant.
Not nationally promoted - local or regional only
Shilling and lowballing possible - accepts subtle $2.50 bids
Hard to find info - poorly promoted in wrong places

and, of course, ...

No restrooms - or at least none with doors or water.

Much more here.

June 15, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Added some new math stuff directory links to our home page.

June 14, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

As any chemist will tell you, if you are not part of the
solution, you are part of the precipitate
.

June 13, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

What is really spooky and scary about all this is that the
Arizona Fire Season is unlikely to start for a week or two
more.
When dry lightning gets added to the mix. After all,
the 800,000 acres burned so far in the last few weeks were
just a couple of stray campfires
.

Our only personal involvement so far is that the lookout
cabin that Bee once worked long ago totally burned in the
Horseshoe 2 fire. And TFD was uninvolved because of a
squabble with the feds over red cards.


A reminder that local TV stations and local Newspapers can
sometimes give you news ahead of Google or MSNBC.
Links here or on our home page or our auction help page.

June 12, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Upgraded our main ultra speed Magic Sinewave calculator
to the new temporary version having improved quantization..

More on Magic Sinewaves here. Please report any calculator
problems here.

June 11, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

To date, we have four 3x3 Suduko solution files available:
A form program that greatly simplifies manual solution
here and a sample printout here. And an automatic
instant Sudoku solver program here and its typical
run here.

Our solution approach seems to differ from the usual
algorithms
. We establish a maymap of the remaining
allowable numerals in any slot and then continually
minimize that map with update constraints based
on its rows, columns, and groups,

The solution is presently somewhat redundant, so
it takes a glacial full quarter second to complete. The
program can easily be sped up down into the ten
millisecond solution area, but its progress self-illustration
becomes limited when this is done.

I'm still not sure this solves every possible Sudoku
puzzle. Should a nondeterministic point be found,
you can still guess and continue using this code.


Some much older math stuff can be found here.

And more on PostScript here.

June 10, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

One of the more inspirational messages to come out
of the Wallow firecamps:

"Courage is being willing to try again tomorrow."

June 09, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

The latest version of our Sudoku 3x3 puzzle solver
written in Gonzo PostScript can be found here. With
a sample run here.

To use, load into an editor or word processor and
change the input problem. Then send to Acrobat
Distiller.

I'm not yet sure if this will solve all 3x3 Sudoku puzzles,
but it seems to work just fine on most that are clearly
deterministic. Solution time is one quarter of a
second at present,
but this can be dramatically
sped up if needed.

The algorithm is based on exclusion. In which a
list of possible candidates for each slot is pared
down depending on their remaining allowability.
Around nine passes through the code may typically  
be needed. Progress is automaticlly reported to
an output log file.

The concept is based on Using Acrobat Distiller
as a PostScript Computer
. With much more
found here.

June 08, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

The big lie about pv photovoltaic solar panels is that they are
in some manner renewable or sustainable. They are not
and never have been .

Not one net watthour of pv electricity has EVER been
generated!
And we are currently missing by a factor of
TWELVE! For renewablility or sustainability, the per-panel
delivered cost must approach twenty five cents per peak watt.
The present average is three dollars per peak watt.

Such essential accessories as a synchronous inverter currently
can consume the value of 150% of the electricity fed through
them. Analysis that claims pv breakeven usually makes the
fatal flaw of counting a government subsidy as a 1X asset,
rather than a 3X to 5X liability based on true societal costs
.

Some ongoing panel costs can be tracked here. Plus a useful
amortization calculator here.

And a detailed analysis of what has to happen for pv to become
a valid and true net energy source here. With more energy
fundamentals here.

June 07, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A Windows version of the original text Adventure can be
found here. And some interesting history here.

June 06, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A preliminary release of version V of our Magic
Sinewave
calculator can be found here. Please
email me with any problems or corrections.

The main improvement is a new and more accurate
quantization feature. Jitter explorations are also
now a lot easier. Speed remains blindingly fast.

June 05, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A reminder that a useful website checking utility can be
found here. And an URL Checker here.

June 04, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

The next thengs that need done on the Magic Sinewave
front are to upgrade the calculator for exact quantization
and add more "regular" and "non zero bridged" solutions.

And to investigat newer 16- and 32- bit embedded micros
for cleaner and more efficient delay code. And for integrated
internal frequency or speed setting. Preferably using all
stock chip demo hardware, rather than needing anything
new or custom or special.

And to create reference designs that would include a solar
pv synchronous inverter, a half horsepower induction motor
drive and a three phase, five horsepower industrial drive.

Funding and partners are urgently needed.

June 03, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Someone was asking why their eBay sales seemed to be
dropping off.

It is just that little dip between the spring slack period and
the summer slump.


Additional eBay assistance here.

June 02, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Once again expanded and improved our Gila Day Hikes
library page.


Please email me with your suggestions of anything
I missed or that could be further covered.

June 01, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

There's a curious glitch in the Magic Sinewave math that
I am having trouble understanding.

Explicit n equations in n unknowns can be written for all of
the other types of magic sinewaves, but the "regular" ones
only seem to have n-1 obvious equations in n unknowns.

Regular solutions can be done the "old way" by edge jiter
optimization. And "new way" solutions can be handled by
holding any pulse edge constant. Or another equation can
be written to zero some further high harmonic who is going
to be "very low" anyway.

Obviously, there are "many" regular solutions. ( One of
which would be the Best Efficiency one. ) But WHY do
these solutions ( apparently ) uniquely exist and what
can be done to optimize them?

May 31, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

As a review reminder, the HTML code to add your own
"click to expand" image is simply...

<p><a href="https://www.tinaja.com/images/bargs/vmach1.jpg">
<img src="https://www.tinaja.com/images/bargs/vmach1.jpg"
alt=" " width="100" height="112" border="0" \></a></p>


The width and height determine both the size of the thumbnail
image and how many bytes you will need in your listing.

The width and height should also more or less preserve the
aspect ratio of the expanded picture.

Similar "click to expand" in Acrobat is somewhat trickier.
We saw many details on this here.

May 30, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Here's an image of our current Vee Machine...

You can click expand it for a larger view.
Yeah, it is pretty much similar to the rest of
the gang
. Features included using a sturdy
frame made from a reclaimed ink jet refilling
machine, a V-trough costing $7 from a HVAC
firm, a Nikon CoolPix 10 Megapixel camera
bought used off of eBay, Cool white fluorescents,
a $4 camera adaptor swivel clamp, and various
other bits and pieces from Home Depot.


I'm not totally happy with the results just yet, but we
have scanned some 30 Electronics World stories and
are working on early Popular Electronics reprints.
The results semm "good enough" for our Level II
Restorations
.
 

BTW, the above image shows some of our usual
image postproc we use on our eBay pictures.
Including knocking out to a slightly mottled
background to greatly minimize JPG artifacts,
eliminating distortion by going to Architect's
Perspective, reducing or eliminating shadows,
and the usual cropping, gama, color balance,
and sharpness adjustments.

More on which here and here.

May 29, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I've long been fascinated by "Rules of Thumb".
Approximations that can greatly simplify getting
useful numeric results.


Some ferinstances: The daily watthour energy output
of a solar panel on a good day will be numerically equal
to four to five times its noontime peak power in watts.


On a 60 Hertz full wave rectifier, it you use a 8300
Microfarad filter capacitor, the volts of ripple will
equal the amps of currrent.


Back from my radar days, by far the hardest system
improvement to acheive is three decibels.

A crystal oscillator can typically be pulled in frequency
by one tenth of one percent.


For a surprisingly high number of situations, one percent
of what happens nationally happens in Arizona, and one
percent of what happens in Arizona happens in the
Gila Valley.

But the ultimate rule of thumb is the literal hazmat one:

Hold your thumb extended at arm's length and close one eye.
If you can still see the scene, you are too close.

May 28, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

An auction house by the name of Salvex seems to have
some industrial opportunities that so far only seem to
attract a few bidders.

They mostly have "two tier" auctions where the first
pass is a sealed bid and the second pass is arbitrariry
length with amounts readable by the bidders. The
seller can accept or reject any and all bids and can
add, remove, or change reserves at any time.

Most reserves appear to me to me outrageously
unrealistic,
typically 25 times what the items will bring.

I've added them to our Arizona Auction Resrources links.
Your own custom regional auction finder can be
created for you per these details.

May 27, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A crucial rule for any newsgroup participation is to never
have a battle of wits with an unarmed person
. Especially
if their IQ is less than their shoe size.

Or are otherwise an unhousebroken epsilon minus.

Their postings will always have the last word and any
possible response you make can only strengthen
their position.


Let them win! The best way to avoid a tug of war
is to drop your end of the rope. Preferably suddenly.

Instead, always post for the lurkers. If a point needs to
be made or further expanded, find another way to
introduce or strengthen it. As a separate topic or as a
response or expand to some more civil third party post.

May 26, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Added a new Book to eBook Conversions fast nav
page and a new Pseuddoscience fast nav page.
Expanded the Magic Sinewave fast nav pabe.

Our GuruGram library page is sorely in need
of an update, which I hope to get to soon.
Meanwhile, a more recent file list appears here.

The actual Book to eBook new library page is not
yet quite ready, but many of its files are. A new
hanging canals library page is also planned. Some
of its files appear here with ongoing developments
here.

May 25, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A corrollary to our "Throw another million calculations
at it" new design principle might be "Throw another
megabyte of RAM or ROM at it."


Simply because you can no longer afford not to.

Ferinstance, our PIC based earlier Magic Sinewaves
assumed that you drove the clock pin with a reference
frequency that in turn set your output sinewave
frequency. Details on this had been more or less left
up in the air.

But some newer microprocessors may not tolerate
dinking with the clock frequency. Especially if they
are also involved in critical USB or baud rate timing.

At the same time, the newer 16- and 32-bit systems
can potentially give us much simpler timing
when
precise delays of 12 or more bit resolution are
essential. Sneaky factoring tricks were required
on 8-bit systems ( usually involving combining a
calculation step with a table lookup step ) to reach this
precision level.

Conveniently, these larger but now reasonably priced
chips can include as much as half a megabyte of
flash memory. Which might make direct synthesis of
a hundred frequencies not that big a deal.

As an example, a seven-bit-per-quadrant Delta
Friendly Magic Sinewave
might need eight words of
storage per amplitude. Or 800 bytes for 100 amplitudes.
Storing 100 different frequencies ( by changing the
total number of bits per quadrant ) would take about
80K of flash memory. Or double that for a Best
Efficiency Magic Sinewave
design.

Numbers like these would certainly seem in bounds
for the latest of embedded microprocessor chips.


Other innovation development here.

May 24, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I continue to be utterly astounded at the monumental
engineering that went into our mountain stream fed
prehistoric canal systems. Especially Mud Springs.

The canal started in Ash Creek and climbed "up"
a steep canyon wall only to change watersheds into
the Mud Springs Bajada. The crossover opportunity
was only about twenty feet wide and was made at
the lowest possible altitude and the shortest possible
routes.


The crossover, of course, was precisely centered in
the crossover opportunity.

Projecting present trends, I expect around sixteen
canals total with fifty miles of extended length
. All done
with stone age technology.

May 23, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Geologists usually recognize three kinds of rocks:
Sedentary, Metaphoric, and Ingenious.

May 22, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

At present, our Magic Sinewave calculator is split
into two parts - The browser side and a Javascript script. This
makes both portions easier to understand and shorter.
Its tutorial appears here.

The browser side can be viewed through the usual
view source command.


In particular, the BitsperQuadrant variable should be
found near the end and can be used to explore
non-PIC quantiztion errors. The 10416 default value
lets a 10 MHz clocked PIC output 60 Hertz.

I'll eventually work this into an updated calculator.
Meanwhile, more on magic sinewaves here.

May 21, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Revised and updated our Arizona Auction Resources
links.


A tutorial can be found here, your own custom auction
finder here, and general auction assistance here.

May 20, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A sidewalk street performer was offering "See the
Heavens"
with a telescope. Saturn was $3 and Sirius
was $5.

When asked about the price difference. they replied
"Sirius is further away."

May 19, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Cold Fusion seems to be crawling out of the swamp
again. This time with Italian origins.

I seem some irony in the origins being Bologna.

Because of the "once bitten, twice shy" factor, any
cold fusion evidence today absolutely has to be held
to evidence levels ridiculously far and above any
other potentially credible development.


The present announcements have the usual "looks
like a duck, quacks like a duck" pseudoscience
odor about them. And thus, to me, do not seem
to even approach normal credibility. Let alone
the exceptional evidience demanded today.

Still, there have been enough people over time
observing something that possibly is out of the
ordinary and beyond rotten labwork. Time will
tell if credible evidence of any sort will emerge.

May 18, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Today's HDTV sets seem to be a mix of brilliant
engineering and monumental stupidity. Most of them
appear to me to be totally worthless. And certainly
not worth buying.
Especially any 720P or plasma dregs.

There is not the slightest doubt that the overwhelming
majority of home video sources will shortly be web
based.
To the point of which traditional cable or off-the-air
access or owned physical media is nearly certain to vanish.

I'm evaluating a Vizio E3D320VX at present. It is
reasonably priced and offers a wide variety of input
options, including wireless internet. Picture and sound
quality is superb. Full 1080 HDTV resolution, which
is still rare in a 32 inch class display. It also doubles
as a large VGA connected computer monitor.
Albeit
one with a rather wimpy 1024 x 768 resolution.


Note that this is much less than a typical 20 inch
monitor intended specifically for computer use..

But - besides ergometrically ludicrous data entry that
shortly should be banned in all civilized nations of the
world as cruel and unusual punishment, they purposely
crippled their internet access to only those sites they
feel are good for you.


Seems their VIZIO Internet Apps are based on contractual
arrangements that mostly have surcharges or extreme
crippling. Such as offering clips but no full episodes.

At present there is no "open" browser, not any intended
method for unfettered full internet access. But -- hoo haw --
you can easily add your own browser through the VGA
input
. Thus negating any forced access limits.

All you need is a one possibly older computer and
a VGA male to male cable, preferably with an attached
sound cable. Some USB, a wireless keyboard and
trackball or input pad would also be handy.
As would
wireless web access. Total extra cost via auction could
be as little as $50.


Windows XP seems to have issues with plug and play on
the monitor. This eventually straightened out. Should
part of the screen be missing, try updating the control
panel display refresh rate on the computer to 70 or 75
Hertz. Sound levels may also have to be cranked wide
open. I'm also still having trouble configuring a secure
wireless link
..

Note that some special Vizio remote buttons will no longer
work on VGA inputs and have to be provided by the computer.
Such as pause, resume, rewind and fast forward.


Vizio can cure their obvious rectocranial inversion problem
by (a) providing a fully open browser ap, and (b) providing
a larger remote that includes a full true QWERTY keyboard
that is touch typeable and has a friendly mouse substitute.


Putting a qwerty but non-typeable keyboard on the back of the
remote was a good first step. But a remote that bi-folds or
tri-folds and snaps into a compact but typeable system with
some sort of a trackball substitute would be far more useful.


You can explore some fully open home video web options here.

May 17, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

This site seems to be a fascinating and complex directory
of abandoned or little known airports and airstrips.

Curiously, Thatcher International is not included. Probably
because of continuing nightly DC3 service to Columbia.

Sharp eyed pilots may note minor debris on the runway,
such as refrigerators or evaporative coolers.


Similar info here.

May 16, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Found another short chunk of the prehistoric Mud Springs
Hanging canal. This part is near the Ash Creek takein and
centers on the shortest and most efficient watershed crossing
route.
On a narrow and rather non-obvious saddle transect.

< http://mapper.acme.com/?ll=32.79288,-109.85294&z=16&t=T&marker0=32.79083%2C-109.85472%2C10.0%20km%20N%20of%20Mount%20Graham%20AZ&marker1=32.79166%2C-109.85348%2C10.1%20km%20N%20of%20Mount%20Graham%20AZ&marker2=32.79288%2C-109.85294%2C10.3%20km%20N%20of%20Mount%20Graham%20AZ >

The find was well north and west of where it was expected. Its
location predicts a significant hanging portion between its
saddle and the takein. The takein also appears to be located
at the present above-ground Ash Creek water limit. As seems
typical of several other canals in the complex.


The sheer brilliance of the engineering on these stone age canal
systems continues to utterly amaze and confound me.

More here.

May 15, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Our Vee Machine is more or less complete and working
and we have now scanned some 30 of our early Electronics
World stories. Two of the fully restored reprints now
appear here and here.


I'm not sure there is much point in publishing our version of
the Vee Machine because (a) we used a special frame that
happened to be available , and (b) Other designs are probably
more cost effective.

One thing we noticed is that there is a significant difference
between using warm white and cool white fluorescent
lighting.
If the magazine pages being scanned at all tend
to the faded yellow, the red phosphor additive in the warm
white lamp moves them unacceptably further into the orange.

I suspect that this can be further improved by inverting all
the colors and using blue only for text extraction. Or otherwise
playing with selective enhancement and thresholding.

May 14, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Not surprisingly, Borders has gone belly up. I
predict that most individuals will be astounded with
the suddenness and rapidity with which books will
cease to exist.
Vanishing entirely.


Yes, eBook readers are not quite useful yet. And
won't be till they standardize on color PDF and
quit pissing around with worthless DRM. And
the differences between laptops and readers will
continue to narrow to the point that it will not
be clear why a special reader is even needed.

At any rate, it is interesting to list the fatal flaws
of the traditional "dead trees" book format...

Best selling authors typically receive 6
percent of the final book price. The
remaining 94 percent is stolen.


For every best selling author, there are at
least 20 who can not get published and
200 or more non-authors who have stuff
they would like to say.


Books are not instantly available, not full
text searchible, not web linkable, and not
handicapped readable.


Publisher's committes have honed the art of
sitting on a submission for fifteen months and
then rejecting the title because it is "not timely".


Because of the Thor Decision, the IRS pays
publishers to burn books.


It typically takes 35 weeks to have a book published,
compared to 35 milliseconds for online publishing.

Older and less popular content is ridiculously
difficult to find and often rather costly. Most
especially to previous owners.

Updates, revisions and corrections are enormously
difficult.

Large bookstore chains will stock ten copies of
5000 titles rather than one copy of 50,000.
Severely and arbitrarily limiting selectivity,
visibility, popularity, and shelf space.

There is tremendous waste in that many books
never reach their intended readers. Caused in
part by remainders and by sales uncertainty.


A student revolt against backpacks is inevitable.

Some related thoughts on technical innovations appear here.

May 13, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Expanded and updated our Arizona Auction Resources
in our Auction Help library.


Our own eBay auctions can be found here with additional
eBay resources here and your own custom regional auction
finder here.

May 12, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

As we saw here, there are five flavors of Magic Sinewaves
currently under study. One of these is a special Delta
Friendly
variant compatible with three phase power. The
remaining four "normal" Magic Sinewaves differ in their
pulse positioning with respect to the fundamental zero
crossings and peaks.

A stunning and amazingly curious discovery was made
a ways back: The first group of uncontrolled harmonics
in the Best Efficiency and Nonzeroed Bridged variants
can be identical in amplitude and opposite in sign
. Similarly,
the Bridged Best Efficiency and Regular variants can be
also identical in amplitude and opposite in sign.

Exploiting these facts through some sort of cancellation
scheme could cause a dramatic reduction and simplification
of required Magic Sinewave filtering. Sadly, every attempt
at doing so to date has failed, and it appears that this
potential improvement is unlikely and possibly impossible.

The crux of the matter is that Fourier series demands
continuous functions independent of discontinuities
. Any
discontinuities or modulation will introduce new harmonics
or cosine terms of existing harmonics that will negate
most if not all of the possible cancellation benefits.

Ferinstance, consider a sinewave of frequency "19"
routed to a light bulb through a synchronously
reversed polarity switch at a frequency of "1".

The Fourier series here would have a zero
fundamental amplitude and a zero 19th harmonic!

Yet 19H energy is clearly delivered to the bulb.
The explanation is that the switching modulation
introduces new harmonic and/or cosine terms
as exactly needed to deliver lamp power.


Thus, the harmonic energy gets sensed and used
before it can be cancelled
. A workable solution
would demand the opposite.

More here.

May 11, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Oops. The latest version of our Magic Sinewave Calculator
seems to be nonresponsive to the quantization buttons.

Actually, at present thre is a hidden temporary feature that is
much more accurate than the original quantization code. If you
click on "deBug", you get an exact quantization to 10416 bits
per quadrant.


This is the present quantization level used in the demo hardware
( making a 10 MHz PIC clock equal 60 Hertz )  and should
accurately represent the real world rejection of the "zeroed"
harmonics that you can reasonably expect.

Note that typical "zero" harmonic values are often 65 or more
decibels down from the fundamental.
Note also that the first
three zeros right of the decimal point put you -60 decibels down.
An 0.0005... would thus be -66 db, etc...


At present, this quantization level can only be adjusted in the
.ASP form of the file and not on what you get from the ISP.

Workarounds can be arranged on special request.

Since the original quantizations were approximations that
were not all that useful, I may or may not restore them.
I 'll drop them or correct them when I get a chance, but
meanwhile here is an older calculator that has working
rough quantiztion buttons for many but not all of the new
calculator's selections. I may also make the new quantization
level programmable in the final delivered code.

I continue to be amazed by the calculation speed under the
latest versions of Firefox or Chrome. Calculations are
now virtually instantaneous for some unbelievably complex
mathematics.

More on magic sinewaves here.

May 10, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

This stupendous example conclusively proves that you can
get "not half bad" image resolution by using a mere 5
gigabytes worth of pixels.

May 09, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

As we saw long ago here, a perfect lime colored
light would have an efficiency of 668 Lumens per
watt. Because of human color responsiveness, the
best white light you can reasonably expect would
be somewhere around 333 Lumens per Watt.

An ondinary incandescent light bulb produces
a stunning 12 Lumens per Watt or so. And thus
wastes "almost all" of its input energy as heat.

Cree has just announced a new LED with an
efficiency of 221 Lumens per watt. With no
obvious reasons it cannot be further improved.

This is clearly approaching the "fair to middlin "
range of efficient lighting. And clearly blows
away the best of available white light.


BTW, the correct term is really efficiacy rather
than efficiency when you are changing the
nature of energy.

More energy fundamentals here.

May 08, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

There are still many "holes" in our prehistoric canal
exploration. Precision altimetry could possibly aid
in their resolution.

If a "black hole" exists with one canal going in and
one canal coming out, Ockham's Razor tells us it
is likely they are one in the same
.

It is further reasonable to assume that the first
canal enters the black hole with a resonably
continuous direction and slope
. And that the
second canal similarly leaves.

It is unlikely ( excepting rare aquaducts ) that
the canal will be located anywhere in the black
hole that is above its entry height or below its
exit height.

Further, an assumption can often be made that
the halfway distance of the canal will often be at
an elevation halfway between the entry and exit
altitudes.

When these assumptions are measured with
some sort of precision altimeter or laser level
and plotted against the actual terrain, very
definite limits of canal possible location will
often result.


Causes of the black hole can be (a) looking in the
wrong place, (b) sheet flooding, (c) stream piracy,
(d) modern obliteration, or, of course (e) not being
there in the first place.


I am currently evaluating this altimiter that has
a nine inch theoretical resolution.

May 07, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

It seems like there are far fewer local industrial distress
auctions and that auctioneers are more and more going
to online auctions and mixed online/live auctions.

We've already seen that mil surplus has pretty much
vanished as an auction resource
. Caused by many
items now being shredded rather than offered to the
general public, by transporting items 900 miles as
an economy move, or by commercial services with
utterly obscene minimum bids.

Aerospace firms have also picked up on the shredding
gig, with some biggies replacing their sealed bid sales.

The problem today is that the fewer remaining auctions
are much more buyer competitive. Online auctions are
less likely to offer stunning "contents of room" and
"contents of cabinet" bargains. And are unlikely to
give much in the way of "put it with the next one"
poisioned lot opportunities.

While bidding at home is certainly convenient, this
often eliminates crucial inspections and previews.

Additional thoughts here.

May 06, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Here's some more obscure and harder to pin down
free Adobe PostScript resources...

PostScript Reference Manual

Supplement 2011
Supplement 2012
Supplement 2013
Supplement 2014
Supplement 2015
Supplement 2016

Supplements 3010 and 3011

Adobe PostScript SDK
Font Technical Notes
Adobe Font Development Kit
Datalogics Implementation and Guide
Adobe CID Fonts
Font Embedding Guidelines
JavaScript Support
JavaScript Scripting Reference
JavaScript Debugger
PostScript SDK Archive
PostScript Language Specifications
PostScript Language Books & Sample Code

Acrobat 9.1 SDK Release Notes
Acrobat 9 PDF Browser Rendering
Acrobat X SDK Release Notes

0091 Macintosh FOND Resources

5001 Language Document Structuring
5002 Encapsulated PSFile Format
5003 Printer Description File Format
5004 Font Metrics File Format
5005 Glyph Bitmap BDF Format
5006 Binary Screen Font Files Spec
5009 Printer Description File Format 4.3
5012 Type 42 Font Format Specification
5013 Cyrillic Font Specification
5014 CMap and CIDF Font Files Spec
5015 Type I Font Format Supplement
5040 Supporting Downloadable Fonts

5042 Printer Driver Optimization
5044 Color Separation Conventions
5045 Sonata Font Specification
5048 Font Switching Optimizations
5049 StemSnap Hint Operator Type I

5072 Macintosh Type Manager API
5073 Windows Type Manager API

5074 Macintosh Multiple Master API
5075 Supporting PostScript Fonts
5078 Adobe Japan 1-6 Character Collection
5079 GB1-5 CID Character Collection
5080 CNS1-5 CID Character Collection
5082 Host Switching Binary Communications
5083 JPEG Technical Specification

5085 Ref Manual III Errata
5087 Macintosh Multiple Master Fonts
5088 CID Font Naming Issues
5090 Font Names Reference Table
5091 Designing Multiple Master Typefaces
5092 CID Font Overview
5093 Korea1-0 CID Character Collection
5094 CJKV CMaps for CID Keyed Fonts
5095 JPEG Source Vendor List
5096 Bar Code Font Vendor List
5097 Japan2-0 CID-Keyed Characters
5099 Building CMap files for CID Fonts

5110 Supporting Level 2 Functionality
5111 Emulation of setstrokeadjust

5112 Emulation of makepattern and setpattern
5113 Emulation of execform operator
5114 Advanced Level 2 Path Construction
5115 Supporting Data Compression in Level 2
5116 Supporting DCT Filter in Level 2
5117 Supporting Device Features
5118 Generic Text Interface Overview
5119 Setscreen & Currentscreed Level 2
5120 Timing Techniques
5121 Improving Color Lookup Tables
5122 Matching RGB Monitor & Printer Color
5123 Emulating rectclip, rectfill, & rectstroke
5124 Level 2 Device Independent Color
5125 Roman Font Re-Endocing Issues
5126 Recaangles Code Optimization
5129 Save outside the server loop
5132 Japanese Font File Organization
5133 Writing a Print Spooler
5134 New Macintosh Printer Driver
5136 Fast Text Rendering
5137 Macintosh Font Handling
5139 PrGeneral Communications Resources
5144 Using EPS Files in PS Forms
5145 Overprint Mode
5148 SING Glyphlet Production Tips
5149 CID/CFF CJK Fonts Name Table
5150 Pdfmark Reference Manual
5151 Acrobat Distiller Parameters
5172 Acrobat Highlight File Format
5174 CID Keyed Font Installation
5175 CID Keyed Fonts for ATM
5176 Compact Font Format Specification
5177 Type 2 Charstring Format
5178 Building PFM Files from CJK Fonts
5180 CID sfnt Macintosh Font File Format
5186 Acrobat JavaScript Object Specification
5194 FDF Toolkit Reference
5411 ToUnicode Mapping File Tutorial
5412 Widths-Only CID Font Tutorial

5430 Acrobat JavaScript Scripting Guide
5431 Acrobat JavaScript Scripting Reference

5600 Smooth Shading
5601 Masked Images
5602 Halftones and Screens
5603 Filters and Reusable Streams
5604 DeviceN Color Space and Model
5606 Printer Systems-Based Separations
5607 Clipsave and Cliprestore
5608 The Copypage Operator
5609 PostScript 3 Core Font Overview
5622 PostScript Level 3 Trapping Extensions

5640 CJK Fonts Appllications Support
5641 CID-Keyed Font PDF Embedding
5642 ATM API for Windows 95 and NT4
5644 Page Document Comment Extensions
5645 PPD Specification 4.3 Update
5660 Open Prepress Interface OPI Spec

More on our own PostScript resources here.

May 05, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Expanded and improved our Gila Day Hikes library
page.

While we clearly have many hundreds of unusual
places to go, I'd like to get the number of separate
and useful entries up to 365. Of which we are
presently are some 70 shy.

BTW, I have personally checked nearly all of these,
although a dozen or more remain on the todo list.

Please email me with your suggestions of anything
I missed or that could be further expanded upon.

May 04, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Our local libraries seem to be in a death spiral and
they do not seem to have the faintest clue why. 

Attermpted outrageous new charges are creating
extreme controversy. And,of course, will end up
having the exact opposite of their intended effect.

Many of the concepts of a local library are now
ludicrous.
Such as having one or fewer available
copies of information. Or not being open 24/7.
Or requiring that an individual, the document, and
a control freak be physically in the same place
at the same time. Or some items not being immediately
available. Or dropping the Interlibrary Loan service. 

Or the documents not containing links to more detail 
and related info. Or totally arbitrary distinctions on what
info is and is not "allowed". Or "read it aloud", language
translation, and similar handicapped aides. Or not
being full text searchible.

Or even the concept that once scarce info now has a major 
big time glut problem. 

If libraries are to survive at all, they will have to immediately
and dramatically reporpose themselves to the concepts of
unlimited info access and otherwise meeting specific
community needs.
Sadly, I do not see this happening. 

Meanwhiile, the reality is that our best local library is
----> Burger King! With free WiFi access, long hours,
and far fewer food and drink restrictions. 

May 03, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Post office costs are skyrocketing while their mail
volume is dropping precipitiously. It seems to me
that it is way past time to ask the questions "What is
it exactly that the post office does?"
and "Why not
flush the entire postal system?"


Even the social security buracracy has abandoned the
post office, going to direct deposit when and where
possible.

Lets see: You take some information to the Post Office
and then pay them to DELAY the delivery for days or
even weeks.
Meanwhile, direct mail marketers are happy
as a clam getting a fast dropping fractional percentage
response while overloading the system with heavy unwanted
trash that pisses everybody off .


If someone could be found that still wanted a leaner and
meaner post office, key steps would include (a) repealing
the obscene private express statutes and (b) using box-only
delivery.


The latter, of course, works just fine in the mountain west
and has done so for many years.
But privatizing makes
far more sense.


Additional thoughts here.

May 02, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I was recently asked for an update on our prehistoric
Canal research status. The latest links can be found
here.

Mud Springs Canal:  Much of it located and verified.
Found a twelve inch mesquite tree mid channel. Also
run over by a dam. Spectacular hanging portion
"climbs" out of canyon. Pristine Troll house in
association. Black hole of Central now under 3000
feet and enigmatic mystery section linked. Some
CCC confusion. Ultimate destination still unknown.
Ash Creek takin still unvisitied. Evidence to date of
first two miles is weak.

I am left with the feeling that Mud Springs is the
earliest, longest ( SEVEN miles! ) , and most
important of the known western canals. Much of its
route remains pristine.

Jernigan Canal:  Major portions located and tentative
route traced. Two gaps. Probable link with Mud
Springs found. 2000 foot gap. Possible short aquaduct in
association as a side venture. Seven inch mesquite tree
mid channel. Triple "U" turn shows spectacular
control of slope.

Allen Canal: Half of reach between Hawk Hollow Tank
and original discovey point now covered. Portions missing,
but now includes several hundred feet of one meter deep
cut. Very nice midsize point in Basketmaker II class
found, not in direct association. Major mystery remains
as to how and where canal leaves mesa and heads to dam.
The "Culebra Cut" below Allen Dam is the most spectacular
known, being two meters deep and several hundred long.
Modest extension north of dam makes a northward turn
down canyon. No evidence of canal going anywhere useful
beyond that. Remote unassociated shards from corregated
tradeware. Small hillock rises discredit any reasonable
linking to mud springs.

Robinson Canal: Pretty much explored. Stream greatly
restricts destination.

On the eastern end, the Henry Canal is apparently a
thirteenth branch of the Marijilda complex. Other
hanging evidence seems to be on rare private land
and on the wrong sides of fences and postings.

Definitely need to make "them" aware of the spectacularly
underappreciated potential here.

Summary papers are now up and linkable at
< https://www.tinaja.com/tinsamp1.shtml > Canal papers are
"professionally" but not peer reviewed published at
< http://www.wesrch.com/  >

Did make a random presentation to a commercial
salvage archaeology crew. Hal Herbert has their names.
Did pass papers on to ADOT highway developers.
Unable to create much EAC interest, but did do a student
canal lecture and a noncanal field trip.

Totally ignored to date by Amerind, Center for Southwestern
Archaeology, Arizona Highways, and History Channel.

Now have received two precision altimeter sensors, but
they are sensors only to date. NINE INCH resolution!

Definitely could use many field mice, high energy researchers,
a working precision altimeter, and a Draganfly.

Present prediction: At least fifteen hanging canals
approaching fifty miles total length. Absolutely and
unquestionably world class stone age engineering.

Beyond beyond.

May 01, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Bank America is apparently sincerely committed to
minimizing identity theft on their credit cards. We
recently received two calls from a real live person
checking recent purchases.


One case involved a foreign newsgroup access for $12.
The second a medium size purchase from a local store
we rarely charged before.

The algorithms used must be fairly sophisticated if they
can reasonably balance the hits and misses.

April 30, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A computer without Fortran or Cobol is like a
chocolate cake without ketchup or mustard.

April 29, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A rather spectacular cave video can be found here.
And possibly here.

But calling this the "World's Largest Cave" is not
even wrong
. It appears to have the largest known
cave room.

Flint Ridge, of course, blows it away with its 600+
kilometers of passage.

April 28, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Most auctioneers are very reluctant to pre-publish their
rates. A reasonable average is 25 percent for low value
items, 15 percent for a larger decent auction, and dropping
to 4 percent or so for multiple vehicles or larger machinery.

On top of this, a buyer's premium may be charged. This
often can vary from ten to twenty percent, and a 3 percent
VISA surcharge might be added on top. Plus, of course,
local or regional sales tax.

Pickup and storage for an auction house sale can
approach 35 percent. On top of which, the sale price
is likely to be a lot less than you anticipated.

A guide to Arizona Auction houses appears here, and your
own regional auction finder can be custom created for you
per these details. Our main auction and eBay site appears
here, with quick links here.

April 27, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A side venture of many of the Alt.Marketing.Online.eBay
newsgroup posters is to post wildly "disoriented" info
somehow grossly misrelated to various scholarly, historic, or 
artistic facts.

Such as these eBay product recommendations.

Ferinstance, one of the regular posters lived for a long time
on the Perry Highway. When a different Perry was mentioned
completely out of context, this led to "Wasn't he the one who
sank Lake Erie?
." And the obvious rejoinder "No, that was
Edmund Fitzgerald
."

The illegal aliens used in the Alabama Grits Harvest were,
of course, being used for flavor only. And the Gila Bend
church decided not to get a chandilier because nobody in
the congregation knew how to play one. They were also
a bitch to tune.

Bruno, of course, is the AMOE attitude relaterization facillitator.
Since Bruno is big on multitasking, he combines his activities
with being a product durability tester for a major New Jersey
baseball bat company.

And by far the best dropshipper of them all is Norfolk & Waay.

Some more stuff here.

April 26, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Added a new fast access directory to our Prehistoric
Canal, Gila Hike
, and Tinaja Questing web pages.

Find this on our home page.
About one screen down.   

April 25, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

If you take our 215 web friendly PostScript colors and
treat it as a 6x6 cube, several interesting "tuning options"
will result...

Black to gray to white -   0 43 86 120 208 215

Black to red -                   0 1 2 3 4 5
Black to green -               0 6 12 18 24 30
Black to blue -                 0 36 72 108 144 180
Black to yellow -             0 7 14 21 28 35
Black to aqua -                0 42 84 126 204 210
Black to magenta -          0 37 74 111 148 185

White to blue -                 215 208 201 194 187 180
White to green -               215 178 141 104 67 30
White to red -                   215 173 131 89 47 5
White to aqua -                 215 214 213 212 211 210
White to magenta -            215 209 203 197 191 185
White to yellow -               215 179 143 107 71 35

Blue to aqua                      180 186 192 198 204 210
Green to aqua -                 30 66 102 138 174 210 

Blue to magenta -              180 181 182 183 184 185
Red to magenta -               5 41 77 113 149 185
Green to yellow -                30 31 32 33 34 35
Red to yellow -                    5 11 17 23 29 35

Red to gray                         5 46 51
Yellow to gray -                   35 64 57
Green to gray -                    30 61 92
Aqua to gray -                     210 169 128
Blue to gray -                      180 151 122
Magenta to gray -               185 154 123

Tans -                                   9 16 94 95
Oranges -                             53 59 23 95
Violets -                               153 183 189 195

April 24, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I have a long history of being fascinated by puzzles.
Especially if I can find quick and dirty workarounds to
their solutions.

A class of numeric Sudoku puzzles seems to be currently
popular. In which a partially filled 9x9 array of
numbers is provided. Your task is to make each
3x3 subarray, each row, and each column contain
one each of the numerals 1 through 9.


It turns out that a fully deterministic solution often
exists that requires nothing but error-free careful
housekeeping.
At least on the samples I have seen,
there is no trial and error or redundancy that needs
to be involved.

This form ridiculously automates the process. Generated
by this PostScript routine sent to Acrobat Distiller.

What you do is fill in the known numbers and then continually
cross off disallowed small candidate numbers.
Eventually, the
uncrossed off candidates will allow only one possible numeral
in a chosen 3x3 subarray, column, or row position. Fill this in
and repeat the process with any new exclusions.

It looks like the entire process can be fully automated into
a PostScript proc that takes less than a second to do the
entire job.
I'm halfway through a solution and may post
the code shortly. It is not yet clear whether this will work
for all Sudokus or just the simpler ones.


More on PostScript here.

April 23, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Sometimes it pays to strip a perfectly good item for
parts.
Especially if it is not selling for one reason or
another on eBay.

Some ferinstances: I got a bunch of high end but older
Dell servers. They were hard to package and I had
to issue a refund for what I felt was a buyer who
did not have the faintest clue what a server was or
what was needed to get it up and running. But the
servers had bunches of mid-sized hard drives in
them which could simply and reasonably be shipped.
Net potential profit was about the same, with far
less in the way of shipping or satisfaction hassles.

We got a whole truckload of obsolete and broken
traffic light controllers. But it turned out a minor
capacitor was usually the fault culprit. Inside were
primo solid state relays, easily removable and
sellable.

We have these outstanding theater light dimmer
assemblies. But nobody apparently wanted to
build the simple interface needed to pick up DMX
compatibility. Stripped into control modules, RFI
coils, heatsinks, and breakers, they just barely
matched the assembled price. But the bits and
pieces are selling much faster with far fewer problems.

We have several huge public utility panel racks that
seem to be doing well by stripping and repurposing. In
particular, horribly obsolete knife switches seem to
be doing well as steampunk components. And the
steel and copper scrap value seems to be covering
the acquisition costs.

In general, an auction "poisioned lot" can sometimes
have some really valuable goodies buried in it.

More on eBay tactics and strategy here.

April 22, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A very obnoxious and obscene parrot gets put in a freezer
for punishement. On release, parrot profusely apologizes
for their errant past behavior and asks....

"May I please inquire what the chicken did?"

April 21, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Had a client who is still using an upscale system
that has PostScript in its printer. They wanted to be able
to preload such things as logo images or fonts on power
up
so they would not have to be resent for each and
every job.

First some fundamentals: If you are doing anything at
all with PostScript, you should have a free PostScript
Language Reference Manual,
and some of the free tools
and tutorials you will find here.

The classic "old fashioned" and largely obsolete
way of preload stuffing a printer is called a persistent
download,
and is found in the Bonus Supplement #3
of my PostScript Secrets.

A better but still dated method is to find out if the
PostScript printer has an internal hard drive.
You
can then preload the drive with all your favorite
fonts and images and utilities ahead of time. There
are specific details on the hard drive operating
system that vary from printer to printer. To learn
these, you should go to the PostScript Language
Supplement
for the particular code version in use.

But these days, we have a far better and far better
option to preloading. It turns out you can use the
Disiller in Acrobat as a general purpose host based
PostScript Computer
. Alternately, there is a free
and open source GhostScript program that lets you
do the same thing.

With Distiller, you can fill your host computer hard
drive or thumb drive any old way with any old word
processor or editor. So long as your stored code is
valid, the PostScript run operator will then stuff
what you saved into your present PostScript program.

Acrobat normally generates a .PDF file which then
can be sent to most any printer, not just a PostScript
speaking one. Even if you still want to continue to use
a high end PostScript speaking printer, it will usually be
far faster and simpler to get your problem solved
and demonstrated in Acrobat first.


Three major gotchas: First, Distiller is only included in
commercial and educational versions of Acrobat and is
NOT a part of a normal free acrobat reader.

Second, the reverse slash is reserved as an "escape"
character in PostScript strings, so every time you need
a single reverse slash in a Windows filename, you have
to put a DOUBLE reverse slash into its calling
PostScript string.


And lastly, since PostScript used to let you read or
write or erase any disk file in any format, its abuse
potential was off the wall. Starting with Acrobat 8
Adobe defaulted Distiller to prevent most disk access.

The Windows XP workaround is to run Distiller from
the command line, using "Acrodist-F".
This will let you
have full access to most any file on your host. You
can contact Adobe directly for solutions on other
hosts.

My Gonzo Utilities can also be quite helpful here.
Consulting services available.

April 20, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I've pretty much decided that the mystery canal segment
near N 32.83893 W 109.81104 is really just a normal and
expected piece of the Mud Springs Canal.

What seemed to be a chunk heading off in the wrong
direction now seems to be some ATV damage heading
down a natural and rather steep drainage. At the top of
the drainage, a very subtle ( but barely convincing )
canal route has just the needed routing and slope to
properly match up.

Thus, the Mud Springs Canal goes more along the
fence rather than across it and source routes somewhat
east of expected.

3000 feet remain in the Black Hole of Central.
Alternate explanations seem weaker than before,
with Allen Canal staying well north and east, ( and
possibly somewhat lower ) and zero on-ground
evidence to date for a lower Hawk Hollow canal.

April 19, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Two of the more useful Goodle Chrome Plug Ins
include this Ad Blocker and this URL De-underliner.

April 18, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Curious and curiouser. Power Utilities will often penalize
large industrial users if they draw too much reactive power.

Reactive power cannot be charged but it contributes
significantly to distribution current losses and equipment
sizing .

Almost always, any reactive power is lagging and caused by
the inductance in large motors.

It turns out our telescopes were drawing a LEADING
0.3 (!) power factor and getting hit with enormous fines.
The cause was their 13 mile long buried supply cable
loading the utility with a ridiculous amount of capacitance.

Since leading correction is virtually unheard of in the
US, they had to go to Canada for solutions where many
long distance cables are apparently buried. Three custom
reacting inductors seem to have solved the problem.

April 17, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Several AMOE newsgroup posts have asked what
the best items to sell on eBay are. This is highly seasonal
dependent...

        January - eBooks of dropshipping resources 
        Feburary - UK cable descramblers
        March - Plasma HDTV displays from Rumania 
        April - Nigerian lotteries
        May - Add three inches to your mortgage 
        June - Pallet liquidations 
        July - Norfolk & Waay overstocks 
        August - Korean laptops 
        September - Home theater pyramind buying rights 
        October - Escrow companies 
        November - Password phishing software
        December - Microsoft and Disney replicas

More on our Auction Help page.

April 16, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Bosch has replaced their super precision older altimiter with
a nine inch (!) resolution BMP085. The improved performance
appears to be a tech step backwards as the old unit was
MEMS and the new one is "only" piezoresistive.


Sparkfun has breakout boards and the sensor for around $20
as their part SEN09694.


Note that these sensors must not be directly soldered, that they
are light sensitive and their port must be totally dark and
that some access to ambient pressure ( such as GoreTex )
must be provided.


Note also that considerable interface is needed to get from a
pressure sensing to a useful and field reliable digital differential
altitude display.

I'm not sure what the real world resolution will be, but this seems
far and away the best route for prehistoric canal research.
Repeated measurements ( especially differential )
should
improve the resolution, and "out and back" round trip
measurements should minimize drift caused by most
barometric
weather shifts.

GPS resolution, of course is pretty much useless. Being
hard to get under a hundred feet vertically.

April 15, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I've been having a terrible time trying to do a FireFox 4
upgrade. I'm not sure it is just me or my system, but I
urge extreme caution and thinking twice before upgrading.

The good news is that their JavaScript is now blindingly
fast.
Especially on my Magic Sinewave Calculators that
literally now executes instantly.

But I am now apparently unable to even load a web .PDF file
let alone print it.
And many videos no longer let me pause
or fast forward.
And the link checker is gone. Plus a dozen
other infuriating hassles suddenly appeared..

The problem seems to be a fleeting upgrade screen that
says "We had to disconnect some plugins". Apparently
only some of the plugins get fully disconnected; others
remain to cause partial problems. Many plugins do
not yet ( or may never ) have replacement upgrades.

There is no obvious way I have found to revert to an
earlier FireFox version.

Naturally, it is utterly unthinkable to use Internet
Explorer anyplace, anytime, for anything.
So, I have
temporarily gone to Google Chrome while I try a
remove and reenter. The only problem I found so far
with Chrome is it forces url underlines on you and their
zap bookmarker does not yet seem to work for me.

April 14, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A reminder that Wesrch is a superb place to instantly
post most any technical paper. Amazingly, the quality of
virtually all of their uploads consistently exceeds that
of peer reviewed publications.

And happy horseshit such as a traditional pub holding
a paper for review for twelve years and then giving
twenty minutes for revision ( as just happened to
an associate of mine ) is long gone.

Wesrch paper publishing latency is approximately
four milliseconds, but they are working on reducing it.

I've got nearly ninety papers published there, and
these represent the "best of the best" of my website.
Page views are approaching 100,000.

April 13, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Can't put one over on her. Nosiree.

Little old lady at a recent live auction speaking to her
friend: "Why that man has been talking all morning!"

April 12, 2012 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I am slowly but surely making progress in speeding up
doing a  "Level II" Processing to dramatically improve
restored eBook presentations.

An evolving "Director's Cut" example appears here.
As before, all text ( including figures! ) is now fully
searchable, and some .PDF page lengths are approaching
6K total,

One trick is to reformat the Acrobat X text output.
Perhaps replacing text with full paragraphs, making
pages easier to isolate, and half space paragraph
ledding. Other formatting is easily added. Note that
Windows XP Wordpad and such needs a carriage
return followed by a linefeed for proper appearance.

A reminder that Distiller demands an Acrodist-F
run from the command line to permit full disk
reads and writes.
More details here.

It can also be convenient to go to two large monitors.
As many as a dozen windows might be conveniently
open when doing Level II rework.

Attention to detail is super important, as is
batch page processing. Any mistakes or omissions
can need another eBook pass for wasted time.
In addition, it is best to avoid guessing of positional
info.
Make everything as accurate as you can on
the first page pass.

Even with greatly reduced processing time, Level II
restorations
do require potential income or anticipated
reasonable cash flows. Especially with schematics or
other fancier artwork.

Consulting services available.

April 11, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Do solar "power towers" make any sense whatsoever?

Yes, they are currently cost effective and competitive
with traditional nonrenewable energy sources. At
least in theory.

But there is not the slightest doubt that pv solutions

will utterly, totally, and completely blow them out of
the water within a very few months.
What seems to
be happening is a mad race to scam BLM and other
government agencies into a manic and poorly thought
out land grab giveaway.

Building something with a 30 year lifetime and a
30 month obsolecence seems ludicrous to me.

A "steam engine" solution makes no long term
sense whatsoever. At least to me. As guaranteed by
thermodynamic fundamentals.

Among its hassles is a very large need for water and the
inability to incrementally expand or its "sole use"
commitment to large contiguous areas. Not to mention
concentrating energy generation to megacorporations.


I also suspect the towers will contribute strongly to
local and regional climatic unstability, being totally
unneeded eyesores, and creating avaitaion safety
issues.

More on energy fundamentals here and on some pv
specifics here.

April 10, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Every few months, a new miracle engine climbs up
out of the woodwork, makes a bunch of outrageous claims
and then vanishes without a trace. The engine du Jour can
be found here.


The lead claim of 3X efficiency improvement is clearly totally
bogus bullshit,
since modern gasoline engines approach
40 percent thermodynamic efficiency. The big question is
how much of the blatantly ridiculous puffery in the story has
at least a smattering of possible credibility?


It turns out serious research has been going on for many decades
on wave rotor technology. This is a "topping cycle" ( as opposed
to a "bottoming cycle" ) applicable to turbines. Thermodynamic
efficiency is potentially significantly improved ( possibly by as
much as a theoretical 30 percent ) due to higher combustion
temperatures without a significant need for external cooling.

All done with an easily spinning rotor between compressor and turbine.

A very credible 2004 paper appears here.

As near as I can tell, the studies are not remotely near anything
that constitutes a useful product,
and the technique is primarily
fixed speed and requires an electronic transmission.

Nonetheless, wave rotor technology definitely bears watching
and would appear to have considerable potential. So long as
the techno turkeys can be kept away from their blatant overhype.

April 09, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Traditional books out of necessity had differences
between even and odd pages. Some of these were
subtle such as the repositioning needed for gutter versus
trim spaces. Others were intentional to put the page
numbers on the outside and double the info content of
headers or footers. .

But, unless you are after an exact replica of a precyber
book, there is no particular point or need on an eBook
to have even or odd anything
.


My own position so far is to downgrade even-oddedness
on reworked "Level II" ebooks but leave a few hints remaining.
Per this Director's Cut example.

April 08, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A Pico De Gallo would be a very small parrot.

April 07, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

This image needs distributed to the widest possible
audience.
 

April 06, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Tarzan Stripes Forever.

April 05, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A sampler of the fully restored "Directors Cut" of
the Apple Assembly Cookbook can now be found here.

File sizes are ridiculously smaller, appearance is much better,
and full searchibility of nearly all text and figures is preservecd
both now and ( crucially ) for any future revisions.

There are also numerous linking, color, magnified image
quality, and layout improvements. Even hyphenation has
been eliminated.

This full restoration was done by starting with a vee scan
of a precyber textbook and combining Acrobat X with some
"Level II" rework of my Gonzo Utilities.

The dilemma is that it is hard to get such results under
five or six minutes per average page.
Which makes costs
unacceptable on any limited funding project. Especially
since there is a backlog of hundreds of papers and dozens
of books.

We can do similar work for you on a consulting, project, or
seminar basis. email me for details.

Other ebooks here.

April 04, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A valid premise on our prehistoric canals is that "they"
fully exploited every drop of water coming off of Mount
Graham and transported it three to five miles north.
Which begs the question of how many unknown canals
remain and where are they?

Why stop at twelve and a mere 40 miles of length? We
are already ridiculously beyond world class and clearly
have the finest high tech anyime ever in the Gila Valley.
This makes the LBT look like a tinkertoy set, given the
available stone age tools and techniques.

So far, I have not found the slightest hint of evidence that
a Hawk Hollow canal exists.
But (1) it has about the
same drainage and watershed height as Spring Canyon.
(2) At one point, water could reasonably be shunted between
the two drainages. (3) The terrain simply has not been
carefully looked at ( you can't get there from here ), (4) Hawk
Hollow tank is mysterously misnamed, since its water sources
from Spring Canyon, and (5) There is a mystery canal stub
well downsteam around N 32 50.333' W 109 48.673'  that
presently defies explanation.

Field mice needed. email me if you have any interest.

April 03, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

There's some interesting third party variants on the
original PIC based Basic Stamps, some using fancier Atmel
Chips. The Teensy USB development boards seem
of particular interest.

These are USB interfaced and USB powered and
require nothing in the way of special programming.

They seem to attract all sorts of artsy craftsy people
who otherwise would not sit still to learn programming.

Prices are in the $16 to $24 range, and as many as
46 I/O pins, 8 analog inputs and 9 PWM ports are
included.


A Make video on one fairly innane ap appears here.
Dozens of additional projects appear here. Some of
these are amazingly sophisticated, including a custom
plastic extrusion machine
. These are related to the
Arduino open source community.
Who have this blog
and this forum. and this playground.

I can see these immediate uses for the Teensy...

8-bit Code on my Magic Sinewaves
involves "pinch points" and tricky
programming to provide 12-bit and
higher delay values. Code should
be cleaner and dramatically simplified
by using 16-bit or 32-bit processors.

An excellent ultra high resolution
altimiter board
is available and
should prove most useful for my
Prehistoric Canal research. But
it needs adapted into a handheld
differential stand alone altitude
display.

A USB capability could greatly
simplify moving Apple II or IIe
disk file images to more modern
systems.

We have some excellent professional
theater dimmers up on eBay at
unbelievably low prices , but
they require an external DMX
receiver or some interface smarts.
One Teensy could easily handle
many of these dimmer channels,
either on a custom or fully DMX
compatible basis.
.

April 02, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

One of the ugly little secrets of becoming a researcher
is that you have to keep looking stuff up. No matter how
innane, useless, or nonprofit.


Continually, obsessively, forever and ever. Nonstop.

Our local school is doing an Oklahoma play. The furry with
the syringe on top
song speaks of isinglass curtains. Turns
out these are really oiled canvas for moderate light transmission,
combined with very small mica or muscovite windows.

Mica is a polysilicate mineral that has unusual combined
properties of transparency, cleavability into very thin
sheets, excellent temperature performance, reasonable
strength, superb electrical insulation and very high thermal
conductivity.

Other uses for mica included windows on stoves so their
fire could be monitored. Mica also made good heatsinks
for semiconductors until recently. You can buy mica from
antique stove supply houses, typically for a few dollars
for a small piece and much more for larger sizes.

I strongly suspect that isinglass carriage windows had uses
other than dealing with inclement weather.  

All of which inevitably led to my researching the ghastly
inner city getto school I was forced to attend in the ninth
grade. Which, amazingly, is now a superb magnet acadamy.   

From there, it was an easy and unavoidable leap to discovering
the fact that organists wear special shoes.


Sigh.

April 01, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

The problem of unwanted email spam has been eliminated
completely with today's long awaited passage of House
Bill 27-234. Which places a tax on anyone admitting to
reciving any unwanted email. Initially 35 cents per email
on a sliding scale up to $4.37 in June of 2013.

Because it would place an unfair burden on the spammers
themselves and because of ISP considerations, the tax
was placed on the sendee rather than the sender. The
number of admitted unwanted emails is expected to
shortly and dramatically drop.

Thus eliminating unwanted spam once and for all.
Additional details are found here.

March 31, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Started a "Director's Cut" of the Apple Assembly
Cookbook. You can follow its progress here and
compare it against the original restoration here.

The Director's Cut results when you apply my
Gonzo Utilities on top of Acrobat X. The files are
ridiculously shorter and all text and figures are
fully searchible
, even through future revisions.

Figures can be greatly expanded without degradion
even with extreme compaction. There are many
other minor improvements, such as better use of
color, elimination of most images, live linking,
improved layout, and even outright elimination of
hyphenation.

This is intended as an ongoing demo of what
can be done by a Level II rework of a precyber
book or artical restoration. Seminars, projects,
and consulting services are fully available.

Additional details are found here.

March 30, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I was never fully happy with our earlier solutions to
a menu justify. In which each line is the same width,
but there are apparently equally spaced uniform dots
between an "entree" on the left and a "price" on the
right. Or a similar "table of contents" layout.

The trick is to get all the dots equally spaced. And,
more importantly to get the menu price decimal points
properly aligned.


One solution that is not nearly as gruesome as it
sounds is to use a fill justify, then adjust the number
of dots so that any spacing adjustments end up minimal.

In our gonzo utilities, simply place three spaces, an "a" and
a |k after the price or page number. This forces each single
line to be fill justified, even if it is the last line in a normal
paragraph.

If the "a" appears to the right of the price, simply add enough
dots to get the "a" on the next line.
Once everything is
properly alignhed, erase all your "a' characters.

March 29, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Jeff Duntemann has some interesting views on DRM
Digital Rights Managements in his ongoing blog.

The Apple IIe people, of course, long ago proved
beyond a shadow of a doubt that DRM ( then called
"copy protection" ) does not work, cannot work,
and never will work.


The only possible use for DRM is to hasten the
inevitable demise of a rotten business model.

Music studio time currently rents for about $850
per hour. You can build your own much better
music studio for $849 total
. Thus, traditional music
and record companies no longer serve any
useful purpose whatsoever.

March 28, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Another thing that "ain't gonna happen" is making
hydrogen through electrolysis from high value electrical
sources such as grid, wind, pv solar, or alternator.


There is a fundamental thermodynamic principle called
"exergy" that absolutely and positively guarantees this.

Electrolysis is the process of converting four or more
kilowatt hours of high value electricity into one or fewer
kilowatt hours of very low value unstrored hydrogen gas
energy. And that is before amortization, operating costs,
and safety issues. The process is exceptionally and
permanently destructive
of value.

There ALWAYS will be more intelligent things to do with
your electricity than instantly and irrevocably destroying
most of its value. Electrolysis is quite similar to 1:1
exchanging US dollars for Mexican Pesos.

There is no way in hell that your alternate electricity can ever
be cheap enough to justify electrolysis. If it is, somebody,
somewhere is being ripped off.

One way to measure exergy is to convert the energy to some
other form, convert it back, and see how much ( if any )
you have left. In the case of electricity-->electrolysis-->
hydrogen gas-->electricity
, the return is laughingly
negligible. And hence totally pointless.
And, again,
that is before any amortization, operating, maint, or
safety considerations.

More on energy fundamentals here, and on the ludicrousities of
alternator driven electrolysis here.

March 27, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Part II of our Apple Assembly Cookbook ebook is
now up and downloadable.

Note that our eBooks may not load properly on very
early versions of the Acrobat Reader
. Owing to
file sizes becoming outrageous if very early versions
are to be fully supported.

Besides, the latest free Acrobat X reader offers
major nav and convenience improvements.

I'm also working on a "Director's Cut" of the AACB
that will offer much shorter files, cleaner preflight,
full searchibility, click image expandability, better
color, and bunches of other features. This will initially
be a demo of what can be done with a Level II rework
of a precyber text that combines Acrobat X with
my Gonzo Utilities.

Consulting services available. Sponsors will be needed
for further level II full article and book conversions.

March 26, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Found some possible extensions to the Allen Canal
near...

< http://mapper.acme.com/?ll=32.83443,-109.80465&z=18&t=S&marker0=32.83321%2C-109.80572%2C4.8%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ
&marker1=32.83518%2C109.80428%2C4.5%20km%20WxSW
%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker2=32.83443%2C-109.80465%2C4.6%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ >

The canal appears to make a right angle turn, hugging the west side
of Central Wash. Evidence here is scant and intermittent.
One guess is that it is headed to the siphon on the
modern lowland Union Canal. Low rises and hillocks
would seem to largely prevent any merger with the Mud
Springs canal 2000 feet further to the west.

Another canal between Allen and Mud Springs cannot yet be
completely ruled out. Sourcing on Hawk Hollow and
converging near the Central Dam.


Field mice are definitely needed. email me if you are
interested.

March 25, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A reminder on our Magic Sinewaves. Whose high
speed calculators are found here, tutorials here,
three phase extensions here, and an executive
summary here.

These have the remarkable property that any
chosen number of low harmonics can be forced to
zero
. Exactly so in theory, and to astonishingly low
levels (-65 decibels) in practice.

Compared to standard PWM, there are far fewer switching
transistions, ( none fewer are known to be possible ) and thus
offer significantly greater efficiency.

This proven green technology represents a billion
dollar opportunity.

Magic Sinewaves are primary of use at power line
frequencies
for motor controls, solar inverters,
electric vehicles, and various power quality apps.

Because of the extreme sampling involved, they
are not at all suitable for general audio or higher
frequency applications.

Evaluation systems and consulting services available

March 24, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

The "air powered car" apparently refused to die.
Despite there being fundamental physical laws why it
clearly ain't gonna happen.


Compressed air has one big thing going for it on the
industrial shop floor, and that is portable convenenience.
Its woefully low efficency is otherwise useless.

Firstoff, the energy density of compressed air is much worse than
lead acid's unacceptably low values.

Second, if you try to compress air in a simple system, the air gets
warm and you have to input energy that you cannot recover. No
efficient means of compressing compressed air is known. Efficiency
can only be approached by multistage compressors with elaborate
intercoolers and large heat exchangers.

Third, compressed air motors are woefully inefficient. An efficient
air motor would have to exhaust air at zero velocity with zero noise.
Since the output velocity would be zero, no upstream deliverable
energy can exist. The windmill efficiency curves are somethat
useful here. They tell us you cannot build a 60% efficient windmill.

More on energy fundamentals here.

March 23, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Sometimes the strangest gotchas can foul up the
simplest measurements. I had a bunch of large RFI
chokes I wanted to measure before selling them on
eBay.

The first trial was to resonate them with a 1 microfarad
mylar capacitor off a Tektronix swept function generator
.

But I could not get any sane results at all. I next tried using
this calculator to find what the inductance would have been
in absence of extra core permability. Which promptly
revealed a reactance of only a few Ohms at most audio
or ultrasonic frequencies. For series resonance to work,
a source impedance under one Ohm would likely be
needed.

Meanwhile, I decided to see what we had scrounging away
in the form of old impedance bridges. An old ESI "magic eye"
unit seemed just plain unfixable. And I started getting some
really bizarre readings on a GR 1658 digibridge. Turned out
the problem was an intermittent external jumper that sometimes
measured 27 Ohms and sometimes added erratic signals
prossibly from a local radio station.

March 22, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Our approach to reducing Acrobat file sizes has been
to replace as many bitmaps as practical with vector
graphics and to replace any special OCR fonts with
standard searchible Acobe fonts.

We will typically run 3K to 6K per page on a multi
page document. This is often less than 1/1000th
that of others.

There are several other possibilities. Acrobat X does have
a minimum file size feature in its distiller.
This can actually
cut your file size in half. But does so at the penalty of being
only Acrobat X compatible and not running on previous
versions of Acrobat.

Another stunt we used way back here was to reduce the
resolution of everything. There's no real need for more
than half a point accuracy, rather than the more detail
normally provided. These days, this is likely overkill,
but it could still be a useful tool.

March 21, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Volume I of the Apple Assembly Cookbook ebook is
now up and downloadable. Volume II should follow
shortly
.

These are excellent candidates for full Level II restoration
and rework. But a sponsor or grant will be required
due to the time and effort involved .

Sourcecode can be provided if the Level II full restoration
project proceeds.
Present Level I sourcecode consists of
zillions of megabytes of scanned bitmaps.

March 20, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Our posting of the Mud Springs Canal info missed some
of the detail that we later provided with the Jernigan
Canal info
and the Allen Canal info.

Here is sort of an addemum to the previous info...


The Mud Springs Canal is possibly the earliest of the
dozen or more known prehistoric canals. It likely
sources high on Ash Creek, works its way "up"
the Mud Springs Bajada, and apparently sources
The Jernigan Canal as well as feeding lowland
irrigation systems. Total known length exceeds
six miles, well preserved portions of which are
"hung" on the edges of steep sized mesas. Age
is supported by large Mesquite trees midchannel
and 1930's flood control dams covering without
accomodation.

Reach #1 From Ash Creek takein to the actual
Mud Springs. Status 0 of 5.

Largely ( and inexcusably ) unexplored
because of brush and 4WD hassles. No other
logical or reasonable place for the canal to
begin. Route rancher vetted with PVC pipe.
Some promising unchecked Acme Mapper
aerial photos.

Reach #2 from Mud Springs to the Mud Springs
expressway crossing. Status 4 of 5.

Much of the route is easily traced but
fairly unexceptional. Expressway crossing
was the original discovery point. A
diverting branch seems to shortly go
into a wash. Possibly used for mud
control or flood prevention.

Reach #3 goes from Mud Springs expressway to
the super climb. Status 3 of 5.

Route starts out fairly tracable, disappears
near a pair of CCC dams, possibly reappears,
vanishes in a canyon bottom thru stream
priacy, and then becomes exceptional at the start
of the super climb
.

Reach #4 goes from the superclimb to the huge mesquite.
Status 4 of 5
.

The superclimb shows exceptional engineering
where the canal leaves a canyon bottom with
a spectacular hanging section going "up" the
canyon wall. Becomes ill defined near an old
east-west fence, then erratically resumes.
Eventually does a large "S" loop, temporarily
going back south. Reach ends with a twelve
inch mesquite tree mid channel. Age of tree
strongly supports prehistoric origins.

Reach #5 shows obvious CCC interference above the
failed flood control dams. Status 4 of 5
.

Several canal routes are tracable between the
huge mesquite and the dams. Portions have
been expanded into very large CCC feeders.
A mid-sized hanging portion is halfway. The
failed dams themselves completely run over
the canal, again suggesting a prehistoric origin.

Reach #6 goes from the Dam to the Troll House. Status 5 of 5.

One of the most spectacular sections climbs "up" from
under the dam, and cliffhangs, eventually becoming
quite wide and well defined. Ends at a mysterous
and well defined pithouse structure in obvious association.

Reach #7 is the projected Jernigan Diversion area. Status 2 of 5.

Canal here becomes rather nondescript, identifiable largely
throug dead flowers and linear features that have no
ceosote bushes. A western branch appears to become
the Jernigan Canal source. A short southern branch
appears to be anglo rework that ends in a very
small and disused cattle tank. The main Mud Springs
canal can be followed on Acme Mapper, but is rather
vague on the ground, disappearing into the Black Hole
of Central.

Reach #8 is the black hole of Central. Status 0 of 5.

A 3000 foot square has three canals going in and two
or more coming out, with zero intermediate evidence
to date. At one poing three canals appear to parallel
each other within 300 feet of each other and very
small elevation differences. A major mystery.

Could be a field area, stream piracy, prehistoric
fields, or sheet flooding.

Reach #9 goes from the Ocotillo Crossing to the Central Cemetary.
Status 4 of 5.

Canal is well defined and easily traced over most of
this area with a significant but rather low hanging
portion. Easy access.

Reach #10 may or may not exist and may or may not feed
the prehistoric equivalent of the Union Canal. Status 0 of 5.

Area shows considerable modern activity including
cemetaries, power lines, ATV routes, disturbance,
and other rework. Purpose of Allen Canal is thus
presently unknown
.

What needs done next: (1) map and videotape entire canal.
(2) Resolve Ash Creek source and takein. (3) Find credible
routes through the Black Hole of Central. (4) Verify intent
and purpose of canal system, (5) Resolve interrelation with
the Allen Canal. (6) Resolve why three canals go to
exceptional constructs only to parallel each other.
March 19, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A reminder that we have two extremely rare classic
Eastman commercial silent 1908 movie projectors
available. Provenance is from the Clifton AZ
theater.

They are currently disassembled and easily UPS
shipped. We guarantee them eminently restorable.
They are also available for local inspection and
pickup.

Please email me or call (928) 428-4073 for further
details

March 18, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

It is clear to me that many people do not have the
faintest clue over the significance of "half life".

Suppose, as recently happened, an isotope with an
eight day half life is measured at 100,000 times normal
level. In eight days, the isotope drops to 50,000 times
normal level, and in sixteen days, it plummets to
25,000 times normal level.

How long before it reaches normal? Depends on what
"normal" is, but certainly a very, very long time.

March 17, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Some predictions: The next three Cherynobles will happen
in India, France, and Canada. About the time the Canadian
Big One happens, someone will make the amazing observation
that nuclear power is NOT a net energy source. Owing to the
extreme energy losses involved in disaster mitigation,
disruptions, and decomissions.


Meanwhile, CIGS pv solar can be reasonably expected to reach
the magic quarter per peak installed panel watt needed within a
very few years. To completely eliminate any interest in nuclear
power whatsoever.

Also, now is probably a good time to take your "before" photos
of Wintersburg, Arizona.

Kiddies, it is long past time to put the Genie back in the bottle.

March 16, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A preliminary pre-release of our second classic article
reprint restoration can be found here and its sourcecode
here.

There is considerable time and effort required to do such
a full restoration, so your sponsoring support is needed.

Consulting, seminars, and custom precyber restorations
are also available.

March 15, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Let me be sure I've got this straight: The two leading
MSNBC news stories this morning are one of the worst
emerging nuclear power disasters of all time and the
Alflec Duck getting fired for inappropriate tweeting?

March 14, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I'm trying to resolve the purpose and end point of the
Allen Prehistoric Canal. Running a transect that was
intended to intercept at least something ended up with
a short piece of canal at N 32 50.322' W 109 48.595'
but no other likely candidates.

The canal section appears only tracable for a meager
distance. But suggests both the Allen Canal and the
Mud Springs canal may merge
just north of the
fence. As usual, the discovery raises more questions
than it answers.

Field mice are very much needed to explore these
and similar questions. email me if you have an interest .

March 13, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

As we have seen, precyber book and article restorations
can dramatically benefit from replacing any bitmaps with
vector PostScript art.
Such as this totally restored example.

While my Gonzo utilities are great for this sort of thing
for short and simpler technical bitmap conversions, they
can get tedious and expensive for fancier work. Especially
for projects with a limited budget or restricted cash flow.

It turns out that you can use both Illustrator and Gonzo
together to trace bitmap artwork. Reducing the results
to Gonzo ridiculously shortens and simplifies the resultant
code.
Sometimes by more than 1000:1!

I have an automatic reformatter with some crude details
here
.

The key problem is to change Illustrator coordinates so that
they lock to Gonzo grid coordinates. This basically involves
solving a plain old y=mx+b linear equation. Another detail
is that illustrator builds its y coordinates down from the top,
while Gonzo works up from the bottom
. Resolved by an
exchange and a subtraction.

Custom consulting, seminar, and reformatting services available.

March 12, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

BLM has some new local Arizona web pages up
here, here, here, and here.

Much more on Gila Day Hikes here.

March 11, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Here is a summary of the current exploratory status of the
Jerningan Canal:

This is one of a dozen prehistoric canals totaling nearly
40 miles (!) that delivered Mt. Graham stream water to
more northerly fields. These are often characterized by
being "hung" on the edges of steep sided mesas, include
aquaducts, diversions, French drains, and route switching.
All the while representing utterly astonishing world class
engineering. Apparently crucially based upon a hanging
canal having its slope largely independent of terrain.


The Jernigan Canal appears to be approximately three miles
long. It appears to be a higher and western branch of the Mud
Springs Canal, sourcing water from well up Ash Creek and
delivering water to a group of fairly well documented
prehistoric fields in the Central Landfill area. With possible
extensions to lowland riverine canal systems.

< http://mapper.acme.com/?ll=32.83620,-109.81305&z=16&t=S&marker0=32.82879%2C-109.81920%2C6.1%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker1=32.83694%2C-109.81517%2C5.5%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker2=32.83917%2C-109.81562%2C5.4%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker3=32.84219%2C-109.81477%2C5.3%20km%20W%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker4=32.82774%2C-109.81980%2C6.2%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker5=32.83986%2C-109.81340%2C5.2%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker6=32.84162%2C-109.81624%2C5.5%20km%20W%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker7=32.84285%2C-109.81295%2C5.1%20km%20W%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker8=32.83039%2C-
109.81842%2C6.0%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ >

The canal may be broken down into eight reaches, based
upon its present degree of exploration and state of
condition...

Reach #1  N 32 49.664' W 109 49.188' to
N 32 49.727' W 109 49.152' Status: 2 of 5.

Canal apparently starts as a subcanal
of Mud Springs. Very shallow in this
area and rather nondescript. Most
evidence consists of dead flowers and
a linear absence of creosote bushes.
No obvious diversion feature. Vanishes
into short sheet flood area near north reach end.

Reach #2 N 32 49.727' W 109 49.152' to
N 32 49.823' W 109 49.105' Status: 3 of 5.

Fairly well defined and easily followed
in this area. Typical depth of less than
half a meter. Close and west of 4WD track.
More distinct Vee shape than most areas.
Disappears entirely at north and south ends.

Reach #3 N 32 49.823' W 109 49.105' to
N 32 50.216' W 109 48.910'  Status: 0 of 5.

Vanishes without a trace in this entire area,
despite extensive exploration. Topography
is credible and Ockham's Razor somewhat
precludes alternate explanations. Possible
sheet flooding or stream piracy.

Reach #4  N 32 50.216' W 109 48.910'  to
N 32 50.392' W 109 48.804' Status: 1 of 5.

The modern waterbar on West Layton
Road suggests a credible crossing of
appropriate size and topography.
Evidence of a possible shallow canal
route is just barely there. Extensive
erosion and possible stream piracy.
No other known routes in this area
appear remotely as credible.

Reach #5 N 32 50.392' W 109 48.804'  to
N 32 50.350' W 109 48.937' Status: 2 of 5.

Weak evidence of a possible western
diversion, presently ending in what
might be a badly damaged aquaduct once
crossing a fairly major wash. Might
service candidate fields somewhat
further to the west.

Reach #6 N 32 50.392' W 109 48.804'  to
N 32 50.571' W 109 48.777' Status: 4 of 5.

Excellent example of fairly typical,
well preserved, and easily followed
prehistoric canal route. Fairly
shallow. Easily seen west of road.

The Mud Springs canal parallels
some 300 feet easstward and slightly
lower; Another canal ( possibly Allen )
parallels some 600 feet eastward and
slightly more lower. As is typical of
most of the higher portions of most of
the hanging canals, any along-route ag
uses or cultural remains are conspicuously
absent.
With an apparent singular
goal of delivering water ever northward.

Reach #7 N 32 50.571' W 109 48.777'   to
N 32 50.531' W 109 48.886' Status: 0 of 5.

A large postulated semicircular loop to
the north is devoid of all evidence, despite
careful exploration. Possible sheet
flooding. Route is totally topographically
credible. Possibly resolvable with precision
altimetry.

Reach #8 N 32 50.531' W 109 48.886'  to
N 32 50.497' W 109 48.974' Status: 5+ of 5.

All of the stunning good stuff in an amazingly
compact area. Starts with a TRIPLE loop
to preserve slope. Has a 7 inch Mesquite
tree growing mid-channel, largely precluding
CCC and somewhat strongly discrediting pioneer
origins. Several hanging portions and fairly
deep cuts, some half a meter or more. Very
obvious and easily traced, once you know where
to look. Ends in a French Drain above candidate
prehistoric fields.
May extend to lowlands.

What needs done next: (1) Map and videotape entire route
to acceptable accuracy. (2) Resolve mysteries of Reaches
#3 and #7. (3) Reinforce validity of Reach #4. (4) Study
possible aquaduct in Reach #5. (5) Resolve why three
canals parallel each other so closely despite major
construction effort to do so. (6) Prove or disprove lowland
extensions.

email me if you want to help.

March 10, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

There is a new drink consisting of beer mixed with
nitrous oxide. It is called a Brew Ha Ha.

March 09, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A reminder that there are several tricks you can pull
to minimize JPEG edge artifacts.

If you are knocking out to a background color, always
use a slightly mottled background with random alignments.

This will remove almost all of the JPEG edge artifacts at
only a negligibly larger file size.

Some sample backgrounds appear here. Load into Paint,
then copy and paste one background repeatedly. Be sure to
randomly reposition and resize your edge knockouts.

But please do not use this 2 Meg knockout bitmap as site wall
paper!
Like several someones have stupidly tried. If you must
steal this as a design element, change it to JPG and resource it.

Another ploy is to use a click to expand feature. Clicking on
your website presentation links to a full bitmap should larger
magnification be needed.

We saw some details here and a tutorial here.
Consulting services available.

March 08, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Expanded our Arizona Auction links subpage of
our Auction Help library.

A guide to the Arizona auction scene can be found
here and your own custom local auction finder can
be created for you per these details.

March 07, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Three useful "find a font" websites can be found here,
here, and here.

But none was of specific help to a project here. I
am ebooking my Apple Assembly Cookbook and
should shortly have it ready for viewing.

Sams apparently used a Linotype age font somewhat
similar to FranklinGothic-Heavy. And FranklinGothic-
Heavy actually looks a little better.

But I still would like to know what the original font
was they used. The differences are that their upper
case "C" has nearly vertical right ends. Their lower
case "t" has a straight bottom. Their lower case
"k" has a "vee" meet, rather than a "leaning tee"
meet. And the inner circles on the "o" or a "p"
are rounder rather than slightly oval.


This should be an older and popular mainstream
font from the Linotype era. Please email me
with any suggestions.

March 06, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Expanded and updated our Gila Dayhikes web page.

March 05, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Our very first complete restoration of a precyber article
appears here with its sourcecode here.

This was done by using a Vee machine to scan a
bound magazine collection. Followed by Acrobat X
combined with my Gonzo Utilities.
Note the small size,
minimal fonts, absence of scan artifacts, and full
searchibility
, even including isometric artwork text!

Text searchibility can be fully presserved through any
future revisions or updates. Per these details.

Consulting, seminars, and custom projects available.

March 04, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Note that Adobe Acrobat X apparently does not attempt
to combine included fonts on any new page insertions!

On a recent 5 page restoration project, eighteen nearly
identical fonts were included because the project was
built one page at a time. By distilliing all five pages at
once, this was reduced to 5 fonts and a 30K reduction in
file size.

A final distillation that combines the maximum feasible number
of pages in each pass thus can significantly reduce your
final file sizes.


You can easily check your included fonts by going to
tools-->preflight-->options-->create inventory.


We've already seen that it is a good idea to replace any
and all ClearScan fonts with standard font equivalents.
This (1) can reduce your embedded fronts from hundreds
or even thousands on a book project to a dozen or
so at most, and (2) permits full text searchibility on
later edits and upgrades.

My Gonzo Utilities do a superb job of converting fill
justified ClearScan glyphs into standard text.

Consulting services available.

March 03, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Sincerity is everything.

Once you've got that faked, all else follows.

March 02, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Added our improved Web Friendly colors utility to
our existing Bitmap Typewriter...

/webtintmat256 [0 1 5 { /a exch store
0 1 5 { /b exch store 0 1 5 { 5 div 256 mul cvi

b 5 div 256 mul cvi a 5 div 256 mul cvi
}for} for} for] def

/set216color { abs cvi 216 cvi mod
webtintmat256 exch 3 mul 3 getinterval
/curcolor exch store} def

The latest code can be found here. The optional
new scheme limits you to 216 colors,
but they
are much easier and more intuitive to enter.

It can be handy to copy and paste this chart
onto the wall. .

March 01, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I'm always on the lookout for sneaky math tricks.
We saw some isometric drawing transforms here
with a use example here.

The next needed step was a way to draw isometric
half cylinders.
If done directly, these get tricky
because all three axes are involved.

But isometric has to be redundant, since we are
compressing 3d xyz info into a 2d x'y' plane.

Can we simply find the "shadow" of an
isometric 3D image projected onto a 2D
plane and use it instead?

Consider the top isometric plane. You can
easily draw ellipses here, with 45 degrees
at the extreme right, -45 at the bottom,
-135 at extreme left, and 135 degrees
at the top.

But there is no way to introduce true z
axis shift and still stay in this plane.


But note that a z axis motion can be faked
by combining the difference between an
x move and a y move into one repositioning.

Like so...

/topisohalfcyl { /clydia exch store /cyllen
exch store
itt
0 0 cyldia 2 div -135 45 arc
cyllen dup neg exch  % sneaky trick here
cyldia 2 div 45 -135 arc
closepath
gsave 5 setwebtint fill grestore
line1 stroke

0 0 cyldia 2 div 0 360 arc % end cylinder
gsave 167 setwebtint fill grestore
line1 stroke

grestore } store

Curiously, the half cylinder construct is independent
of the axis
, so all you have to do for the other planes
is rotate it by plus or minus 120 degrees...

/leftisohalfcyl { gsave translate -120 rotate
topisohalfcyl grestore}

/rightsohalfcyl { gsave translate 120 rotate
topisohalfcyl grestore}

I'll try to work our revised isometric drawing routines
into a future GuruGram.

February 28, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Here is a summary of the present status of the prehistoric Allen
Canal research...

This is one of a dozen prehistoric canals totaling nearly
40 miles (!) that delivered Mt. Graham stream water to
more northerly fields. These are often characterized by
being "hung" on the edges of steep sided mesas, include
aquaducts, diversions, French drains, and route switching.
All the while representing utterly astonishing world class
engineering. Apparently crucially based upon a hanging
canal having its slope largely independent of terrain.


The Allen Canal appears to be approximately seven miles
long (!). It sources water from a preannual stretch of Spring
Creek and either delivers it to yet unknown fields or
lowland riverine canals in the Central area. Or else merges
with the Mud Springs canal further to the west. Portions
are extremely well defined, while others remain enigmatic
mysteries.

http://mapper.acme.com/?ll=32.83142,-109.78586&z=13&t=S&marker0=32.78237%2C-109.83541%2C9.6%20km%20NxNE%20of%20Mount%20Graham%20AZ&marker1=32.78536%2C-109.83305%2C10.0%20km%20NxNE%20of%20Mount%20Graham%20AZ&marker2=32.79050%2C-109.82856%2C9.2%20km%20SW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker3=32.79619%2C-109.82361%2C8.5%20km%20SW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker4=32.80270%2C-109.81824%2C7.6%20km%20SW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker5=32.82596%2C-109.80329%2C4.9%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker6=32.83274%2C-109.79500%2C3.9%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker7=32.83575%2C-109.79822%2C4.0%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker8=32.83330%2C-109.80625%2C4.8%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker9=32.83883%2C-109.81081%2C5.0%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker10=32.85782%2C-
109.79599%2C3.6%20km%20WxNW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ

The canal may be broken down into ten reaches, based
upon its present degree of exploration and state of
condition...

Reach #1 N 32 46.942' W 109 50.125'to
N 32 47.122' W 109 49.983' Status: 4 of 5.

The takein point is very well defined at the
last current preannual stretch of Spring
Creek. It is quite obvious and easily
followed, but may have had some later
rework in the CCC or SCS overlaying
the canal with the Hawk Hollow Tank.
There is no evidence of modern headgates,
iron, or concrete work.

Reach #2 N 32 47.122' W 109 49.983' to
N 32 47.430' W 109 49.714' Status: 0 of 5.

This route from the obvious CCC masonry
work on the Hawk Hollow Tank oveflow
northward has not yet been visited. Portions
of the route are expected to have vanished.
Likely due to stream piracy or sheet flooding.
No related ag features are expected.

Reach #3 N 32 47.430' W 109 49.714 to
N 32 47.771' W 109 49.417' Status: 4 of 5.

This portion is a curious mix of the well
defined and the vanished completely. A
rather large and long cut that is a meter
deep and a hundred long is centered here.
The route is missing near an obvious
older east-west fence. There are numerous
CCC check dam projects in the area
that appear unrelated .

Reach #4 N 32 47.771' W 109 49.417' to
N 32 48.162' W 109 49.094' Status: 4 of 5.

This portion is relatively small but
easily and consistently followed. It
ends at the initial discovery point.

Reach #5 N 32 48.162' W 109 49.094' to
N 32 49.558' W 109 48.197' Status: 4 of 5.

This was the original discovery portion
of the Allen Canal, and is readily traced
except for a few shorter dropouts.
Several older barrel cacti can be found
growing midstream, discrediting any
more modern possible origins. A
side dumping route appears near the
northern limit, apparently used for
flood control or mud maintenence. It
is readily observed on the aerial photos
by a white caliche. No water use below
the caliche has been observed.

Reach #6 N 32 49.558' W 109 48.197' to
N 32 49.964' W 109 47.700' Status: 0 of 5.

This is a crucially enignatically missing
portion of the Allen Canal. It is not yet
clear exactly how the canal gets from
its mesa top to the bottom of the Allen
Reservoir. Yet the route is steep but
credible, and alternate explanations
suffer from Ockham's Razor. The Allen
Reservoir
itself runs roughshod completely
over the canal without accomodation.
Providing strong evidence of the canal's
prehistory. There is a possible prehistoric
pond or lake in this area, either canal or
cienega driven. The Allen watershed drainage is
otherwise rather small and has no significant
access to snowmelt or other significant
water.

Reach #7 N 32 49.964' W 109 47.700' ' to
N 32 50.145' W 109 47.893' Status:5+ of 5.

This reach includes a significant hanging
portion and a spectacular, world class
cut two meters wide, two meters deep,
and several hundred long. It is fairly
easily 4WD accessed.

Reach #8 N 32 50.145' W 109 47.893' to
N 32 49.998' W 109 48.375' Status:4 of 5.

The canal is fairly large and rather
easily traced in this area. A large
loop is made at the conspicuous
north-south fence, with the canal
considerably to the south of the
dirt track.

Reach #9 N 32 49.998' W 109 48.375' to
N 32 50.330' W 109 48.649' Status:1 of 5.

The canal vanishes without a trace
over much of this partially unexplored
route. A short stretch at the north
is fairly well defined but ATV damaged.
Its location raises more questions than
it resolves. At this point there are
apparently THREE parallel canals
within 300 feet of each others. There
relative elevations and linkability
remain unknown.

Reach #10 N 32 50.330' W 109 48.649' to
N 32 51.469' W 109 47.759' Status:0 of 5.

Postulated continuance of Allen Canal
to merge with prehistoric version of
modern lowland Union Canal. A
credible alternate would be a merging
with the Mud Springs Canal to the west.
Modern rework including cemetaries and
dams makes interpretation problematic.

What needs done next: (1) Map and videotape entire route
to acceptable accuracy. (2) Resolve mysteries of Reaches
#2 and especially #6 and #9.
(3) Resolve whether the Allen
reservoir had prehistoric beginnings, (4) Resolve why
three parallel canals existed and their interaction. (5) Seek
preservation of world class reach # 7.

February 27, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A "poisioned lot" occurs at an auction when some item is
so gross, so ugly, so dirty, so heavy, or so cumbersome that
nobody but nobody wants it.
And the problem is easily
compounded if the auctioneer decides to "put it with the
next lot".

Needless to say, poisioned lots can be an incredible opportunity
if there is good stuff buried within or beneath. Or if it is
strippable for useful smaller components.

At a recent county auction, there were these huge, ugly and
badly splintered wooden crates that long sat outside. Inside
of which were badly water damaged boxes. And inside these
terrible cosmetics were around $40,000 worth of mint
outdoor lights that made perfect grow lamps.

Opportunities lie where you see them and others do not.

February 26, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

The latest release of the Chrome Browser has yet another
ridiculous speedup of JavaScript.
My Magic Sinewave
calculators
  now calculate virtually instantly.


These calculators are a good check on JavaScript speed because
of the enormous number of complex calculations they have to make.

February 25, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I initially came at some of this with a KIM-1, trying to
stuff useful features into a hundred bytes or less of code.
Things drmatically eased when they came up with a foot
square combination hotplate and 4K memory expansion card.

Today's one gig of Ram and half a Terabyte of online storage
utterly boggle the mind.
While, of course, adding obscene
bloat to nearly all software
.


But why do we need to go into the Terabyte memory era at all?
Let's instead skip it entirely and go directly to the Petabyte Era.


Where you would have ONE thumb drive for ALL the movies.
ONE thumb drive for ALL the books. ONE thumb drive for
ALL technical papers. And, of course, ONE thumb drive for
any and ALL music.

An interesting and inevitable consequence of this, of course,
would be the utter and total trashing of the very concept of
intellectual property.
Clearly slashing its value to zero.

I can hardly wait.

February 24, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Filled in more of the gaps in the Mud Springs Canal...

< http://mapper.acme.com/?ll=32.82198,-109.80783&z=14&t=S&marker0=32.82689%2C-109.82137%2C6.4%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker1=32.80402%2C-109.83894%2C9.0%20km%20SW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker2=32.82813%2C-109.81983%2C6.2%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker3=32.81633%2C-109.83144%2CN%2032%2048.980%27%20W%20109%2049.886%27&marker4=32.82786%2C-109.81918%2C6.1%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker5=32.80953%2C-109.83648%2C8.5%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker6=32.85351%2C-109.80459%2C4.3%20km%20W%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker7=32.78560%2C-109.85442%2C9.5%20km%20N%20of%20Mount%20Graham%20AZ&marker8=32.80686%2C-109.83815%2C8.8%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker9=32.83154%2C-109.81491%2C5.6%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker10=32.78864%2C-109.85242%2C9.8%20km%20N%20of%20Mount%20Graham%20AZ&marker11=32.81931%2C-109.82912%2C7.4%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker12=32.81140%2C-109.83395%2C8.2%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker13=32.84367%2C-109.81153%2C5.0%20km%20W%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker14=32.82056%2C-109.82791%2CN%2032%2049.234%27%20W%20109%2049.674%27&marker15=32.82383%2C-109.82445%2C6.8%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker16=32.83896%2C-109.81120%2C5.0%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ >

There's some interesting features just north of what was the
"middle gap", starting at
N 32 48.980' W 109 49.886'.

A gap to the South is apparently caused by stream piracy
where the canal was at the bottom of a drainage. Just to the
North, the canal is a real cliff hanger,
"climbing" well out of
the wash. Both the presrvation and engineering here is
exceptional.


The canal briefly vanishes near an obvious east-west fence.
The likely crossing is at a pair of Mesquite trees just west
of an obvious and only "five boulder" lower fence retainer..


The canal then resumes in a hard to find but reasonably
obvious path. It then drops into a second wash via a
sweeping "S" curve in which the canal actually briefly
heads back South again
.

Just past the wash, there is a Mesquite tree that appears to
be growing mid channel. The tree is a foot in diameter and
largely stunted
, suggesting a hundred year age. This
would largely discredit any CCC or anglo pioneer
construciton dates.

A fairly deep and fairly long cut follows, perhaps a meter
deep by twenty long.
Beyond that, there appears to
be some obvious CCC rework of the canal,
leading into
flood control dam feeder channels.

There are numerous other checkdam projects in the area.
These are believed CCC but prehistoric origins cannot be ruled out.  


A very large and spectacularly failed dam follows, likely
SCS rather than CCC. This dam runs roughshod over the
canal without any accomodation whatsoever. Giving
independent strong evidence the canal is in fact prehistoric.

Below the dam, the canal once again "climbs" out of
the wash and is quite distinct. Near a 4WD track crossing
is an apparently associated and somewhat pithouse looking
structure presently named the "Troll House".


Evidence further north gets a tad thin. In places the
presence of dead flowers and no creosote bush
linear features only suggest the canal route.
Aided
by topographic credibility.

In midst of the weaker evidence, the canal is
believed to go through a three way switch, one
the continuance of Mud Springs, one the beginning
of Jernigan, and a third ( presumed Anglo ) short
route into a disused and very small cattle tank.

Three of the existing canal breaks are fairly minor,
but many thousands of feet remain to be explored
at the far South. Including the crucial Ash Creek
take-in point,

February 23, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Had yet another individual attempt their first solo flight
in the Watson Wash area.

The outcome would likely have been significantly better
had they been in an airplane at the time,
rather than
a pickup truck.

The flight was in fact quite successful, up to the somewhat
suboptimal landing.

February 22, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Our Vee Machine finally seems to be working, and
we now have some twenty Electronics World stories ready
for restoration. I'll try to work up some machine details
shortly.

The restoration process presently goes something like this:
The bound magazines are page-by-page photographed on
the Vee Machine using a Nikon P5000 10 Megapixel camera.

Captured images are then sent to Acrobat X for ClearScan
character recognition. Amazingly, most pages are OCR'ed
to better than 98 percent accuracy. The pages are then
saved as .PDF for restoration prototypes. They also are
brought up in Acrobat Reader, and their ( better and
simplified ) text saving option is used to save the captured
text.

Reediting the text and converting it to Gonzo fill justification
is reasonably fast and efficient. The dilemma comes about
over the remaining bitmaps. Ideally, nearly all of these should
be redone as vector PostScript, for the overwhelming advantages
it offers. But certain images may take an hour or more, and this
quickly adds up on any project lacking obvious income potential.

I'll start off with at least two full restorations and see where we
have to go from there. Meanwhile, your sponsorships are
certainly welcome.

February 21, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

And the winners in the isometric sweepstakes are...

A general isometric transform...

/ixf { %isometric transfer xyz to x'y'
/zz exch store /yy exch store /xx exch store
xx .866 mul yy .866 mul sub
xx .500 mul yy .5 mul add zz add
} store

A "right side plane".  All text and all circles and
all splines are automagically converted...

/irt { % isometric right plane concat
gsave % WARNING: open gsave!
ixf translate
[.866 .5 0 1 0 0 ] concat} store

A "left side plane".  Again, All text and all circles and
all splines are automagically converted...

//ilt { % isometric left plane concat
gsave % WARNING: open gsave
ixf translate
[.866 -.5 0 1 0 0 ] concat} store

A "top plane".  Again, All text and all circles and
all splines are automagically converted. Use for
all "normal" art and LEFT lettering ..

/itt { % isometric top plane concat
gsave % WARNING: open gsave
ixf translate
[ .866 -.5 .866 .5 0 0] concat} store

An alternate "top plane".  Use only for RIGHT
lettering...

/ittalt { % isometric top plane concat
gsave % WARNING: open gsave
ixf translate
[ .866  .5 .-866 .5 0 0] concat} store

Additional linear and nonlinear transforms
can be found here.

February 20, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

When restoring a precyber book, or technical article,
there are many compelling advantages to going
beyond most of the bitmaps provided by ClearScan
and Acrobat X.

These include much shorter file sizes, ridiculously
better appearance, greatly improved text search,
elimination of speckle and rattiness, ease of
further editing, and many other major benefits.

We just saw how to add a rudimentary tracing
ability
to my Gonzo Utilities. This offers superb
results for simple technical drawings. But such
manual coding and keying may
prove too time and
cost intensive for fancier bitmaps or limited
funding projects.

There have been numerous attempts to automate
conversion of a bitmap to vector PostScript.

One early version was called Adobe Streamline.

A current product that I found exceptionally disappointing
( and, to me, utterly useless ) was Vector Magic
.

Adobe has just announced a new Live Trace feature
to Illustrator CS5. That may end up being nearly
good enough for my needs. I'm in the process of
starting to evaluate it.

Note that Illustrator is now an exceptional memory
hog
, demanding 1 gig of RAM and more than 1
gig of disk space. It also requires a minimum of
Service Pack 3 on Windows XP. It also is
exceptionally snotty at telling you your system
is not good enough for Illustrator but will not
tell you why.

Educational versions of Illustrator start at $199.

There are free 30 day trials, but these easily
and frustratingly run afoul of any script or popup
blocking you may have on your browser.

February 19, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

This is more than just a little bit scary.

A price index of exotic metals can be found here.

Virtually ALL of the prices have way more than
DOUBLED in the past few weeks!

February 18, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A rudimentary image tracing ability is easily added
to my Gonzo Utilities
. The manually traced code can
give you exceptionally compact, exceptionally custom,
and exceptionally good looking results. But certainly
can get tedius and time intensive for fancier projects.

Here are the Gonzo code additions...

/setimgasbackground { exec /comesfromurl
exch store /goestourl exch store /imscale exch
store /imyres exch store /imxres exch store
/imyshift exch store /imxshift exch store

save /jpgsnap exch store imxshift ypos imyshift
add  imxres imyres imscale goestourl comesfromurl
jpegimageprocwithlink jpgsnap restore} store

This requires these support utilities...

/jpegimageprocwithlink { % hoffset voffset hres vres
save /snap2 exch def /infilename exch store /inurllink
exch store /photoscale exch store  /vpixels exch
store /hpixels exch store translate
inurllink setareaurl /DeviceRGB setcolorspace
0 0 translate hpixels vpixels scale photoscale dup scale
/infile infilename (r) file def   /Data {infile /DCTDecode
filter} def
<< % start image dicationary
/ImageType 1 % always one
/Width hpixels % JPEG width in pixels
/Height vpixels % JPEG height in pixels
/ImageMatrix [hpixels
0 0 vpixels neg 0 vpixels ]
/DataSource Data % proc to get filtered JPEG
/BitsPerComponent 8 % color resolution
/Decode [0 1 0 1 0 1] % per red book 4.10
>>
image % call the image operator
ypos snap2 restore /ypos exch def
} def

/setareaurl { /cururlname exch store
mark % start pdfmark /Rect [ 0 0
hpixels photoscale mul vpixels photoscale mul ]
/Border [ 0 0 0] % [0 0 0 ] = none; [0 0 2] = debug
/Color [ .7 0 0 ] /Action <</Subtype /URI /URI
cururlname>> /Subtype /Link /ANN % annotation type
pdfmark % call pdf operators
} def

This is a little fancier than need be in that it also includes a
"click to expand" image link to a remote website.

And here is how you use it. The important detail is to scale the image
pixel width by the number of layout grid lines displayed....

true {50 50 10 setgrid { 0 0 326 278 40 326 div % fit
(https://www.tinaja.com/images/newgor02.pdf)
(C:\\Documents and Settings\\don 2\\Desktop\\
EW reprints\\ampm\\fig1.jpg)} saveimgasbackground
40 40 showgrid } if

Change true to false to vanish the grid and the background image
when you are finished with it.

February 17, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean is a very
interesting collection of anecdotes related in one way
or another to the periodical table of chemical elements.

The spoon itself was made from gallium. Which is a
solid at room temperature but dissolves in a hot
cup of coffee or tea.

Other reviewed or recommended books appear here.
Ordering your reading material from these links supports
The Guru's Lair at no additional cost to you.

February 16, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Here is an interesting but somewhat pricey precision
altimiter. It has an accuracy of a tenth of an inch
anywhere in a 100 foot circle, reading,to plus or
minus forty feet in elevation.

It completely blows most of the other altimeter
schemes away for its resolution. 

This is my guess how it works: It is nothing but a
fancy water level.
A 100 foot hose is filled with
water(?), and its differential pressure from end to
end is sensed.

Each foot of height makes an end-to-end pressure
differential of 0.434 psi. 80 feet measured to
1 part in 8192 (or 13 bit) accuracy gets you just
under a tenth of an inch resolution.

To deal with positive elevations, the entire water
column is probably pressurized to, say 20 psi at
the main machine end. Which is the equivalent of
adding a 46 foot vertical column of water at the main
machine end. Making all measurements positive.

Cute.

February 15, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Latest GuruGram #119 is an update and revision on
our Web Friendly PostScript Colors. Sourcecode is
separately found here.


This routine accepts a number from 0 to 215 and
generates a "web friendly" color from it. Those
colors are optionally displayed.

This is basically a "paint by numbers" scheme which
reduces any color to a single decimal number from
0 to 215. Thus greatly simplifying its recognition and coding.

You can think of each color as a cublet arranged into a
6x6x6 master cube.The principal diagonal of the master cube
varies from black through gray to white. Red is stronger
to the east. Green is stronger to the north. Blue is stronger up.
The three remaining corners are strongest yellow, aqua, and magenta.

The code also shows how a self-building table lookup can avoid
messy or cumbersome math algorithms.

Curiously, certain named HTML colors are not web friendly! And
are not available as standard web friendly colors. These will have
an $80 in their hex codes. They can be picked up by substituting
a 5x5 cube for the 6x6 above.

February 14, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Found a key missing chunk of the Mud Springs Canal.

< http://mapper.acme.com/?ll=32.81600,-109.83097&z=19&t=S&marker0=32.81633%2C-109.83144%2Cn%2032%2048.980%20w%20109%2049.886&marker1=32.81601%2C-109.83125%2C7.7%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker2=32.81572%2C-109.83090%2C7.7%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ >

This includes a very well hung portion purposely (!) on
the very edge of a 15 foot high cliff.  Also a stunted Mesquite
tree mid channel with an enormous ( but oddball ) trunk.

This section is not yet linked to either known continuance.
Gaps of 600 feet north and 1500 feet south remain.

There's some CCC projects in the area, but they seem to
be separate and unrelated ( and, as usual, spectacularly
failed ) check dams.

The shortest vehicle route eats tires for lunch.

The scope and degree of preservation of this canal system
utterly and totally boggles the mind. There is probably
nothing comparable anywhere in the world. Except for
its dozen nearby companions that are approaching
forty miles (!) in length.
 

February 13, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Our annual Thatcher Fire Department dinner is coming up
shortly. This year saw some utterly amazing developments.

First and foremost, over half of our volunteer members are
now Firefighter I or Firefighter II certified.
Which means that
they receive exactly the same training that paid firefighters
in large city departments do.

Second, we just took delivery of the first and only 85 foot aerial
platform truck in the entire Gila Valley. Something that
was sorely needed in light of new motels and EAC
buildings. And something that will take many years to grow
into.

Third, we now include female members. Plus several
others with unique and diverse backgrounds.


Fourth, our now larger department has greatly
minimized previous daytime response problems.


Fifth and finally, our training resources have dramatically
improved. Partially through web resources and in-house
DVD libraries.

February 12, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A reasonable question on our prehistoric canals is
"What survey instruments did they use?"

None seem to have survived. Yet controlling the
exact slope of a canal is crucial
. Especially a six
mile long prehistoric one built with stone age
technology. A constant slope of about one percent
or five feet per mile is often in the optimum range.


"Trial and error" won't hack it over such a major project.
Especially since everything else involved shows an
extreme efficiency of effort and structure.
And since
the entire route shold be preknown to prevent boxing
themselves in a topographic corner.


My own belief is that "they" could easily have come
up with any of a number of schemes that are fully
consistent with the available tools
and thought patterns.

And from which survivable artifacts might not be expected.

Ferinstance, say you have a hundred feet of existing canal
of known and correct slope that is to be extended. One
native kneels at a reference end. A second kneels at the
old end. A third kneels another hundred feet further downslope.
Native number one simply centers native number three's
head behind native number two's head.

Or, the 1300's had well developed ceramics. Take a large
bowl and fill it nearly to the top with water. Create a flat
bottomed ceramic" boat" around ten inches long. Scrape
reference marks on either boat edge. A one tenth inch
difference in ten inches would be a one percent slope.

Now, neither of the solutions is likely to have been
actually used. But the key point is that there are
sighting tricks that could easily have been used that
either result in no survivable artifacts
. Or unrecognized
ones.

February 11, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A "Boy a whole flock of em flew over that time"
slew of perpetual motion machines seems to be
evolving, both locally and internationally.


The local was just a rework of my very first
perpetual motion machine.
( see Fig 33.1 )

In which the repulsion energy of the magnets is
considered without allowing for the much higher
energy required to get the magnets there in
the first place.
( If you shift the rotor by 36
degrees, a very different picture emerges that
explains why the machine instantly freezes.
)


And noises are being made in the Far East of a new
overunity scheme involving high voltages.
Which
appears to be yet another variant on the Grey Motor
scam/fiasco. In which pulse measurements are
improperly made, confusing average and rms results.

Some key points: Just in case you slept through
Physics 101, there are fundamental physical laws
involving conservation of energy. All of which will
summarize to "There ain't no free lunch".


What mystifies me is why anybody would piss around
with perpetual motion. Finding a source of unlimited
free energy would be the most henious imaginable
crime against humanity
, making Hitler look like
Mother Teresa. Because of the unavoidable
isentropic heat death involved in rapidly converting
the planet into a cinder.


Even worse: Suppose you built a perpetual motion
machine and the load even slightly eased off. Your
machine would instantly destroy itself
because the
free energy had to go somewhere!


More on all this here.

February 10, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Usenet Newsgroup quality and participation and traffic
seems to be plummeting.
Possibly brought about by
competition for eyeballs by social networking sites.


The hydrogen newsgroup long ago degraded into a
misinformed playground brawl, before dropping to
essentially zero traffic.

The arguments aginst the hydrogen economy appear
here. There are no known arguments for the hydrogen
economy.


The eBay newsgroup is still more or less retaining a
measure of civility. But traffic has largely dropped to
the regulars joking with each other on wildly eclectic
topics. Such as comments on Duluth, on Doris does
Des Moines
, or following the saga of the Tapioca
Pudding Institute
restraining order on the release of
the Godzilla versus the Night Nurses cross genre
DVD classic. Or comments on the Alabama grits
harvest
where the illegal aliens are being strictly
used for flavor only.


Plus, of course, the border crossing hassles involved
in shipping to New Mexico getting eliminated by new
truck tires that can simply be insided out.


Even the electronic design newsgroup has degraded
into some playground tactics. But still remains more
or less a useful place to get answers of last resort.

February 09, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

We recently bought a Frididare freezer and were highly
disappointed how noisy it was. We did have a service
person come out and take the old noise out and replace
it with an absolutely identical new noise.

Such performance is intolerable in what at one time was
a quality and top rated brand.
Especially since a sealed
scroll compressor should be nearly totally silent.

The problem was not the compressor, but cutting corners
on the fan. They should have gone to an electronic
three phase motor rather than a single phase one
with inherently higher noise, hum, and vibration
. The
speed (and noise) could be varied to just enough to
do the job. The fan could be ducted. The blades
could have "feather" edge trim to eliminate
edge turbulence. And, of course, the blades could
have been better balanced.

The bottom line: No traditional quality brand can
be remotely trusted any more.

February 08, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A Josh Billings quote, often wrongly attributed to Mark
Twain...

"I've never known an auctioneer to lie. Unless it was
absolutely convenient."

February 07, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I may have found one of the key missing pieces of the
Jernigan Canal...

< http://mapper.acme.com/?ll=32.83564,-109.81288&z=16&t=S&marker0=32.84248%2C-109.81513%2C5.3%20km%20W%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker1=32.82762%2C-109.81971%2C6.2%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker2=32.84215%2C-109.81494%2C5.3%20km%20W%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker3=32.84203%2C-109.81425%2C5.3%20km%20W%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker4=32.84083%2C-109.81279%2C5.2%20km%20W%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker5=32.82985%2C-109.81874%2C6.0%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker6=32.84241%2C-109.81582%2C5.4%20km%20W%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker7=32.84264%2C-109.81544%2C5.4%20km%20W%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker8=32.82895%2C-109.81901%2C6.1%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker9=32.83894%2C-109.81412%2C5.3%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker10=32.82848%2C-109.81936%2Cunnamed&marker11=32.84201%2C-109.81465%2C5.3%20km%20W%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker12=32.84182%2C-109.81596%2C5.4%20km%20W%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker13=32.84223%2C-109.81392%2Cn%2032%2050.534%20%20w%20109%2048.835&marker14=32.83027%2C-109.81835%2C6.0%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker15=32.84151%2C-109.81263%2C5.1%20km%20W%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker16=32.83706%2C-109.81515%2C5.5%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker17=32.84265%2C-109.81414%2Cn%2032%2050.559%20%20w%20109%2048.848 >

The problem was that there apparently are THREE "U"
turns
(!) in the canal in an apparent attempt at maintaining
extreme slope control. And that a portion of the delivery
end of the canal ended up surprisingly far east and NORTH
of where it was reasonably expected.

While there are two huge gaps unverified, the probability
seems quite high that the Mud Springs Canal is in fact the
water source for the Jernigan Canal.
And that high up
Ash Creek is in fact the water source for the Mud Springs
Canal, routed "up" and "over" the Mud Springs bajada.

The Jernigan Canal seems to parallel the main Mud
Springs Canal for a surprising distance, done only
for a very small elevation difference. The two canals
are consistently only a few hundred feet apart.

There is one 7 inch diameter Mesquite tree centered
in the Jernigan water channel. There is one 12 inch
diameter Mesquite tree centered in the Mud Springs
water channel. These strongly argue for prehistoric
canal origins.

The Jernigan engineering boggles the mind. The triple
U turm is reminiscent of the Twin Boobs Canal further
to the east.

There might be an aquaduct associated with a smaller
side branch of the Jernigan Canal. And possibly a
diversion channel back to the lower Mud Springs Canal..

The ultimate destination of the Allen Canal remains
a big mystery, as does two intermediate huge gaps.

More here and here.

February 06, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

It sure would be nice if someone would provide a
complete set of reprints to Popular Electronics,
Radio Electronics, Electronics World, and even
Modern Electronics.

Scant bits and pieces can be found here and there.

I am in the process of restoring and uploading at
least some of my reprints here. And some of the
secrets of stunning precyber scan improving here.

Jeff Duntemann has reprinted the Carl and Jerry
series here. And Michael Holly has some of the
SWTP related stuff here.


Note that there are two different Electronics Worlds.
The one of interest here is a US magazine that started
off as Radio and TV News and became Popular
Electronics. There is also a British Electronics World
magazine that used to be Wireless World.

February 05, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

The CSI Tulsa and CSI Omaha tv programs seem pretty
much the same and blah to me.

But CSI Gila Bend completely blows them away.

February 04, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Had our older Nikon CoolPix 5000 apparently strip a zoom
gear, either through a fall or a lens cap remaining on.

Amazingly, genuine Nikon repair manuals are available
on the web from several sources
ranging from free to
fee. Here is one example.


The problem is that a camera this old will either involve
bunches of tedious hassle or at least $100 in repairs.

Instead, the ( also now obsolete ) but significantly
upgraded P5000 can be found on the web used
for $100 or so.
Which we did.


One advantage of the P5000 over, say the L22, is
that it optionally outputs 10 Megapixels in RAW or BMP
format. Which gives an advantage for a text
copying Vee Machine.

February 03, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Hey Mister Taliban, tally me banana.

February 02, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I'll be speaking tonight ( Wednesday February 2nd ) at 7:00 PM
in EAC Academic Programs Room 108 in yet another talk on
our stunning prehistoric hanging canals.

Visitors are welcome. No charge. The AP building is just
North of Admin near Stadium Avenue and the RR tracks.

February 01, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Expanded our demo on Acrobat "Level II" improvements.

The demo is a long term project, so pages may remain missing
for a while. Your sponsorship could greatly speed the process up.

This is a real dilemma with many precyber book scans. There
has to be reasonable anticipated cash flow to justify the additional
time and effort needed for the dramatic Level II upgrades.

January 31, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

The ARA ended up its usual eclectic mix of technical papers.

One high point was going next door to the NASA facility and
watching great heaping streaming terabytes of live real time
lunar mapping data arrive.

There's apparently a major new world class cave discovery
in a highly unexpected and surprising geological formation.
Located South of the Mackenzie River.

A favorite restaurant often returned to by cavers is the
Siamese Cat in Tempe at the Northwest corner of
Price and Baseline. I can't say enough great things about
this small family restaurant. Superb food at reasonable prices.
And you can specify your hotness anywhere from super
mild to totally offscale.

January 30, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

The latest improvements in our Level II upgrade of the
Machine Language Cookbook I are approaching 6K
per page, or around 1/12th the original size.

Compaction occurs both on the Acrobat text and image
side. On the text side, going to a standard font eliminates
many hundreds of glyph font definitions, plus the
needed touniCode lookup tables. Besides dramatically
improving text quality and legibility. In addition, the glyphs
are imaged one character at a time, while the standard
font is often imaged one full line at a time.

On the imaging side, any time an image can be replaced
by a PostScript proc, you usually gain a tremendous
size and quality improvement
. One problem with the
Acrobat Reduced Size option is that the figures can
no longer be magnified without degrading
. By going
to a click-to-expand option, larger full resolution
images can be web delivered with only a negligible
increase in downloaded file size.


Consulting services available.

January 29, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

For years and years, Radio Shack  has had a now
somewhat pricey product called TV Tuner Cleaner.

TV tuners, of course, no longer get worn or dirty.
But this spray glop remains a highly useful mix of
electronic cleaner and mineral oil.
It is especially
useeful on contacts and wipers of test equipment
being refurbed. .

January 28, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Moses' negotiator comes down from the Mountain:

"Well, I got him down to ten. But adultry is still in.

January 27, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

One gotcha with Acrobat: If you are using fill justification,
be sure to embed your fonts.


Otherwise, the MultiMaster substitution will force you
ragged right. Owing to differences in individual character
relative widths between custom and multimaster fonts.

Fill justification is no longer the great panacea it once was.
On new content, the web pretty much demands wider and
single columns. And other improvements, such as live url
linking, half line paragraph ledding and replacing italics
with bolded tints, outweigh any visual benefits.

Nonetheless, we still have and still use some incredibly
powerful progressive three stage microjustification in our
Gonzo Utilities. Per this older tutorial.

January 26, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

The high speed calculators used on our magic sinewaves
use classic Fourier Series and "real trig". They are thus
totally immune from such issues as FFT Fast Fourier
sample rates, windowing issues, and the breadth of any
FFT algorithms.

With some outside help, these calculators have also
become blindingly fast, with most calculations now done
in a fraction of a second. Caused mostly by newer
computers being much faster, and stunning speed
improvements in JavaScript itself. Especially on
the Chrome Browser.

But note a big gotcha: Modern sound cards and
newer spectrum analyzers may give you a mix of
the true Magic Sinewave response and their own
grevious sampling and window shortcomings.

A typical magic sinewave may demand 43,000 or
so samples per cycle. This is vastly more than
your usual sound card can deal with. And earlier
FFT spectrum analyzers used as minimal as a
1024 point FFT.

Chances are you will get the most accurate results
by using an ancient traditional swept analog spectrum
analyzer, or even a --gulp-- a tuned voltmeter and a notebook.
I still occasionally use a HP 3581C.

Unless you are into some really cutting edge and big bucks
gear. The Sigview32 also remains a highly useful tool.

January 25, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A reminder that I'll be presenting a talk on our Hanging Canals
at the ARA Paper Regional in the Mouer Building on the Tempe
ASU  Campus on Saturday January 29th in Tempe. Mouer is just
Northeast of Gammage Aditorium.

Not sure of the exact time, but will be between 9AM and 4 PM .
No admission charge and parking garages are free on Saturday.

January 24, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I've dramatically improved and siplified my PostScript
utilities that can be used to make stunning improvements
to a scanned precyber eBook.

The sourcecode is found here, the "Level II" output
here, and the original for comparison here. Along
with a full tutorial here.

By applying these techniques to an Acrobat X scanned
precyber book, the file sizes can be dramatically reduced,
the text and graphics appearance made much better,
full preservation of searchibility through revisions (!),
and the fully compressed images can be expanded
to any size while preserving sharpness and legibility.

Text can easily be made 100 percent accurate and
searchible with all OCR suspects removed. As can
removal of any objectionable backgrounds or speckle.


In addition, bunches of bells and whistles are now
possible, such as full color, adding URL's and
"click to expand" images, improving layout and
justification, bolding italics, removing hyphens,
and much, much more.

The new utilities can upgrade an average page
to Level II in only a few minutes.

Consulting services and total custom rebuilds
available.

January 23, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

The ancient oriental art of Ti Wun On consists of
getting totally snockered, but always doing so in
a professional and workmanlike manner.

January 22, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Apparently many military operation and service manuals
can be gotten for free download online.

January 21, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

As we saw a few days ago, eBay makes copies of your
first hosted image. This prevents using your log files from
telling you how many visitors an offer has
or discovering
image theft.

One partial workaround is buried in your My eBay page.
If you go to Active Selling and change the format to
Auction Only, you can read the number of viewers and
watchers for any current auction.

January 20, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

We picked up a very unusual ( and potentially quite
valuable ) surplus item and now have it on eBay.

This is a Datasonics ATR397 underwater sonar
release that originally sold for $15,000.


To do underwater data recording or experiments,
You put one or more of these between your
instrumentation package and an anchor. Then
throw the package overboard.

After your data collection is complete, you send
a sonar signal and the release drops the anchor.
Letting your data float to the surface for analysis.

Frequencies are normally audio rather than
ultrasonic, with 17 kHz being typical.

We have a surface transponder, an apparently functional
receiver that needs some fairly trivial battery
rework, and a second receiver that has some
corrosion damage to a small portion of its
circuit board plus needing battery rework.
All offered as a package.


The system ialso seems easily converted to a wired
or wireless terrestrial release system for rigging
or video special effects.
Its rating is around a
thousand pounds.

email me if you have any questions on this
system.

January 19, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

The You Tube "Candle Power" video is, of course, an
elaborate hoax. One that carries "not even wrong" to
new levels of mesmerizing awfulness.

While it did succeed spectacularly in its goal of going
viral and generating significant ad clickthrough income,

its fallout and consequences seem utterly apalling.

Ferinstance, last night a college physics teacher made
a fool of themselves by apparently genuinely believing the
vid to be real  during a public "popular science" presentation.

The bogosity of the vid is so wrong on so many levels
that I don't even know where to begin
. ALL major
electrical laws appear to be in violation. From Faraday
to Maxwell to Kirchoff and back again.

If you rub a nail with a magnet, the upstrokes will
cancel out the downstrokes.
Even if they did not,
the total energy and the total magnetic strength
resulting would normally end up largely negligible.

Magnetic anything can generate electricity ONLY
if there are moving conductors!
And if it is going
to do so with any level of efficiency, the air gaps
have to be exceedingly small. Especially at dc.

There is no circuit! Candle Wax is an insulator.

Thermal to electrical conversion DEMANDS a
temperarature differential!
One lit candle may
possibly do something under wildly different
circumstances, but the second one would simply
cancel out the first.

Energy levels are ridiculously higher than
the physics would allow.
Even if induction
worked and if the differential thermoelectricity
was not bogus, the amount of power would
be utterly negligible compared to a fully
lit bulb or a max speed motor.

Any of a number of standard magician's tricks
could have been used. Misdirection in spades.

Ferinstance, the vid might not have been
continuously shot. The hands under the table
are suspect to say the least. And that is
without any Photoshop techniques. Finally,
you heard the motor but did not particularly
see it spinning. Standard audio track editing.

Much more on such goings on in our Pseudoscinece
library.
Particularly this tutorial.

January 18, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond


I'll be presenting talks on our Hanging Canals this
thursday at Noon as a BLM Brown Bag lecture at
14th street and 8th avenue in Safford.

And at the ARA Paper Regional in the Mouer Building
on the ASU Campus on Saturday Januayry 29th in
Tempe. Mouer is just Northeast of Gammage.

Here's the BLM announcement...

=============================

PREHISTORIC "HANGING CANALS" SUBJECT OF NEXT
THURSDAY'S BLM "BROWN BAG" FREE LECTURE

Some recent archaeological discoveries have revealed an astonishing
series of prehistoric canals just South of the Safford area. These
mountain stream fed canals have the remarkable property that
portions are literally "hung" along the steep edges of remnant
Quatranary bajada mesas. Some as much as ninety feet above
their valley floor.

At least twelve hanging canal systems are known. Their total
explored length now exceeds thirty miles. Other amazing
features of these canals are that some include above-grade
aquaduct portions. Others provide for elaborate switching to
route water between different drainages. And most include
a "breakaway" feature that makes flood repair fast and simple.

The stone age technology involved seems well beyond world-class.
Reaches of at least some of these canals still flow to this day.

Some engineering details on these hanging canals will be
presented as a talk in the continuing BLM "Brown Bag" lunch lecture
series by local author Don Lancaster. This free presentation will
begin at 12:00 PM on Thursday, January 20th in the BLM main meeting
Room.

The lecture may be previewed at < https://www.tinaja.com/glib/hangcan1.pdf >
and at < https://www.tinaja.com/glib/hangshow.pdf >

Everyone is invited to these general public-oriented talks. BLM is
located at the corner of 14th Avenue and 8th Street in Safford, AZ.
Bring your own "brown bag" lunch.

For more details, contact BLM's Diane Drobka at (928) 348-4400
Or visit < http://www.blm.gov/az/st/en/fo/safford_field_office.html >

January 17, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Found another 1600 feet of the Mud Springs canal.

This section seems quite spectacular in that it changes
its architecture every 200 feet or so. It also has some
very wide sections and some very deep cuts.

Very conveniently, there is a 100 year old Mesquite
Tree growing smack in the middle of the water channel.

Which is strong evidence that the canal is in fact
prehistoric.

The end of this reach also gets run over by a 1930's
flood control dam that spectacularly failed. The canal
was simply ignored, without any attempt whatsoever
of preserving its flow or providing piping or headgates
or whatever.
Or any other accomodation.

Overall, this part looks "too good to be true". But there
is no sane reason for CCC or other rework. And it is
located exactly where it is expected. Independent
verification is obviously needed.

Please email me if you have any interest in this project.

January 16, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Expanded and improved our Gila Valley Dayhikes library
page.

January 15, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

We are about halfway through building our own Vee
Machine
. Aimed at book scanning my PE and EW archive
stories.

Stuff we learned so far: The best camera will have both
12 Megapixels or higher resolution AND will output with
an uncompressed format such as RAW or BMP or TIFF.

Even the best JPG ( lowest 4:1 compression ) will add some
white dots to your character bitmap. But the Nikon L22
seems to be useful and only costs $80.

It is utterly amazing what Coolpix in Acrobat X can do
for OCR text recognition. But the better your Vee
Machine, the better the final results and the less the
need for Level II techniques.
Level II can dramatically
improve your quality and ridiculously reduce your file
sizes. But at a per-page processing time that may or
may not be cost effective.


An absolutely rigid frame is a must. We were going to go
with PVC pipe, but instead are adapting a really superb
aluminum "erector set" frame from an inkjet refiller.


Lighting MUST be diffuse and uniform. But most digital
cameras these days have awesome sensitivity, so any
hot fixtures are unlikely to be needed. And LED's or
fluorescents are much more efficient than photofloods.
We found some $9 undercounter fluorescents at Home
Depot that look like they are going to be good enough.


Lexan is probably better than glass for shooting through.
But rather expensive. See if the glass company has a
scrap pile. Glass is more likely to injure the operator or
break.

The camera MUST be precisely center aligned. The "film"
plane and the book plane MUST be exactly parallel. Images
MUST be TOTALLY free of keystoning or skewing.

We still need some sort of a camera swivel or minor
adjustment hardware
of one sort or another.

January 14, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

The /cj, /lj, /fj, and /rj callout justifies in our original Gonzo
Utilities
were specially set up so they could set text in a
figure without affecting the text on the rest of the page.

It did this by keeping any changes in x or y position inside
of a save/restore context.

Our new Level II eBook Rework project instead requires
that the changes in y position be passed on to the next
object in the layout. Here are the modified routines...

/cly {save /snapcl exch def /linestring linestring2
def /justx (justL) def 3 1 roll /ypos exch def /xpos
exch def stringgonzo ypos snapcl restore /ypos
exch store pop pop} def

/cfy {save /snapcf exch def /linestring linestring2
def /justx (justF) def 3 1 roll /ypos exch store /xpos
exch store stringgonzo ypos snapcf restore /ypos
exch store
pop pop} def

/ccy {save /snapcc exch def /linestring linestring2
def /txtwide 5000 def /justx (justC) def /pmrun 0 def
3 1 roll /ypos exch def 2500 sub /xpos exch def
stringgonzo ypos snapcc restore /ypos exch store
pop pop} def

/cry {save /snapcm exch def /linestring linestring2
def /txtwide 5000 def /justx (justR) def /pmrun 0 def
3 1 roll /ypos exch def 5000 sub /xpos exch def
stringgonzo ypos snapcm restore /ypos exch store
pop pop} def

January 13, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Org. eBay has made a change in their image hosting.
Even when you "self-host" your first image, they usually
will copy it and display it from their server.


The reasons for this are supposedly better uniformity
and quality. And also to prevent image changes after
bids are made.

But this reimaging seems to totally trash any ability
for your log files to measure your eBay item popularity
and image theft.


The only workaround may be to add HTML images to the
middle of your eBay description. But these will get
logged ONLY if the bidder does a click thru.

January 12, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

A caller asked if there was an optimum closing time for
their eBay sales.

The chances are that it doesn't really matter all that much
if you have lots of Buy it Now and Second Chance sales.
And few sales end up all that competitive.

And there clearly is no "one size fits all" answer. If you
are selling industrial stuff, your obvious best closing

times are noon to five pm Eastern Standard time. This
covers you for the three hour shift to West Coast time.

If you are selling personal stuff, a saturday or sunday
closing might be better.
But certain items may still offend
certain people if sold on Sundays. A "blue law mentality"
is still very much alive and well for certain individuals.

But the top secret cosmic time when things actually happen
is usually "Tuesday after Lunch".


Other eBay insider secrets here.

January 11, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond


An apalling number of my email inquiries for industrial
price or data information seem to be going unanswered these
days. Or worse, end up with the wrong answer or an
English-as-a-fourth-language "not even wrong" answer.

I'd estimate that getting a straight email answer from an
American industrial firm these days is under FIFTEEN
PERCENT!


So, I was pleasantly surprised yesterday when Nikon
had a real person answer a special technical question
in only an hour or two. Unfortunately, the answer was
not what I wanted to here.

We are in the process of building a Vee Machine so I
Can get reprints of my older stories extracted out of
bound yearly volume copies of EW, PE, ME, and RE.

Nikon now has an amazing array of cheap digital
cameras that have an acceptable 12 Megapixel
resolution. Such as the L22. But they all seem to
output in JPEG only, without any provision
whatsoever for a .RAW or .BMP or .TIFF output.

They do have a higher res 4:1 compressed JPEG
output, which they obviously feel is acceptable for
the intended market for low end cameras. The
problem is that JPEG tends to add white dots
to scanned text.

The OCR in Acrobat X seems to still be able to
deal with this, but I sure would like to find a
camera that is both high resolution (minimum
12MP and JPEG white dot free.

Here is a good starting point

Please email me if you have any suggestions.

January 10, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond


Here's a summary of the prehistoric Allen Canal status...


The url is...

< http://mapper.acme.com/?ll=32.82724,-109.81298&z=13&t=S&marker0=32.78246%2C-109.83586%2C9.6%20km%20NxNE%20of%20Mount%20Graham%20AZ&marker1=32.78556%2C-109.83264%2C9.9%20km%20SW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker2=32.79720%2C-109.82287%2C8.3%20km%20SW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker3=32.80391%2C-109.81760%2C7.5%20km%20SW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker4=32.82631%2C-109.80311%2C4.9%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker5=32.83335%2C-109.79478%2C3.8%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker6=32.83543%2C-109.79737%2C3.9%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker7=32.83362%2C-109.80240%2C4.4%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker8=32.83277%2C-109.80529%2C4.7%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker9=32.85143%2C-109.79975%2C3.9%20km%20W%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ >

Patience in loading may be required. A "slow script" box may need verified more than once.
If all else fails, strip out a few flags and keep trying.

===============================================

Assuming the flags are still lettered A to the south and J to the north....

A - is the verified Spring Canyon headgate at the normal active stream flow limit.
B - is the "steal the plans" Hawk Hollow Tank and the northern end of verified Reach I.
C - is the southern limit of verified Reach II.
D - was the original discovery point and mid Reach II.
E - was the end of verified Reach II. A cutout may head west.

E to F remains an enigmatic mystery. Considerable elevation
drop is involved between mesa top and Allen Dam.

F - is the southern limit of verified Reach III where it exits Allen Dam.
G - is a spectacularly deep and long cut following a hanging portion.
H - is where Reach III works its way around an old fence.
I - is the northern limit of verified Reach III.
J - is along the unverified but assumed credible northern route.


Going from I to Mud Springs Canal seems unlikely because of
intermediate washes and I apparently being 30 feet or so BELOW the
other canal.

Visual "canal" images near Central Dam have proven to be
quad tracks to date.

Crucial further exploration is B to C, and particularly E to F and I to J.

The sudden turn at FGHI is more than justified by the typography.

The total length approaches FIVE miles!

January 09, 2001 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Latest GuruGram #118 is on Some "Fat Tail Arrow" Utilities

Its sourcecode can be found here and its actual code here.
More GuruGrams here and more on PostScript here .

January 08, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Our latest eBook is Part II of the Machine Language
Cookbook
.

This is a reprint of chapters eight and nine of the original
Micro Cookbook, volume II. Much of its content remains
relevant today.


Part I of the Machine Language Cookbook can be found
here. And additional eBooks here.

January 07, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

How could anyone possibly be stupid enough to buy
the current versions of HDTV sets?


To watch decent video, you buy a 1080 computer
monitor in the thirty inch class and add a wireless
keyboard to your pc. If absolutely necessary, you add
a pair of cheap cable and off-the-air adaptors, which you
will rarely ever use today, and probably NEVER will in the
future .

720 resolution makes absolutely no sense in ANY size,
let alone in the mid thirties. Not receiving web delivered
video as your primary source makes even less sense.

January 06, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Added another thousand feet to the middle of the Mud
Springs canal. There seems to be CCC "interference"
with a possible aquaduct or buildup across a wash.

Here's a summary of the Mud Springs status...

=========================

The url is

< http://mapper.acme.com/?ll=32.82782,-109.81359&z=13&t=S&marker0=32.78560%2C-109.85442%2C9.5%20km%20N%20of%20Mount%20Graham%20AZ&marker1=32.78864%2C-109.85242%2C9.8%20km%20N%20of%20Mount%20Graham%20AZ&marker2=32.80402%2C-109.83894%2C9.0%20km%20SW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker3=32.80686%2C-109.83815%2C8.8%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker4=32.80953%2C-109.83648%2C8.5%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker5=32.81140%2C-109.83395%2C8.2%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker6=32.82383%2C-109.82445%2C6.8%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker7=32.82689%2C-109.82137%2C6.4%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker8=32.82813%2C-109.81983%2C6.2%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker9=32.82786%2C-109.81918%2C6.1%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker10=32.83154%2C-109.81491%2C5.6%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker11=32.83896%2C-109.81120%2C5.0%20km%20WxSW%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker12=32.84367%2C-109.81153%2C5.0%20km%20W%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ&marker13=32.85351%2C-109.80459%2C4.3%20km%20W%20of%20Thatcher%20AZ >

Patience in loading may be required. A "slow script" box may need verified more than once.
If all else fails, strip out a few flags and keep trying..

Total length exceeds at least SIX MILES!

Assuming the flags are still lettered A to the south and N to the north....

A - is the presumed Ash Creek headgate, presently unvisited and unverified.
B - is unverified but has a rancher PVC pipe route validation.
C - is the southern limit of verified Reach III.
D.- is a short spur side canal ( mud or flood control? )
E - is a wash crossing with a possible aquaduct or CCC interference.
F - is the northern limit of verified Reach III.
G - is the southern limit of verified Reach II, buried under modern flood control dam.
H - is the "troll house" circular structure in intimate association.
I - is the believed diversion point for the Jernigan Canal, separately mapped.
J- is a short spur to a believed modern "steal the plans" tank.
K - is the northern limit of verified Reach II.
L - is the southern limit of verified Reach I.
M - is the West Layton Road crossing of Reach I
N - is an ill defined northern limit of Reach I.


The canal is presumed to extend another thousand feet north to lowlands in the
modern Union Canal region. This area is extremely disturbed with modern
activities.

The relationship with the Allen Canal to the east remains speculative.
Best present guess is the Allen Canal is in fact separate and runs under
the Central Dam. "Obvious" canal image tracks in this area are really
quad runs.

The "black hole of central" is about 3000 feet square and has three
canals going in and two coming out. With no internal evidence to date.
In particular, the Jernigan sourrcing evidence remains scant and vague.

As does the purpose and destination of both Mud Springs and Allen.

Feel free to jump into "BC" "FG" or "KL" and see what you can find.

The world class engineering on this is beyond beyond.
Much more here and here.

January 05, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

What is the display resolution of, say, GPS or Acme Mapper?

One display option is degrees and minutes to three place
accuracy
. Considering North first, the earth is roughly
25,000 miles in circumference and there are 90 north
degrees in 6250 miles..

For 69.44 miles per degree. Or 1.157 miles per minute.
Or 0.00157 miles per thousandth of a minute.

Or 6.94 feet North/South per thousandths of a minute.

Considering east/west at the equator, there are 180 degrees
in roughly 12,500 miles. Or 69.4 miles per degree.
Or 1.157 miles per minute. Or 0.00157 miles per
thousandths of a minute.

Or 6.11 feet East/West per thousandths of a minute
at the equator. And getting better as you head north
or south.


Curiously, when you use the Link to This Page feature of
Acme Mapper, it reports to a display resolution of five
decimal places. This is "surveyor accurate" to under an inch.

Naturally, your reporting accuracy has very little to do with
your measuring accuracy.

January 04, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

( Property has been sold. Thanks for your interest. )

We also have a unique five acres for sale in
an extremely remote ( think survivalist ) area
immediately adjacent to the East Fork of the
Gila River
and nearly surrounded by New Mexico's
Gila Wilderness.

3 074 074 248 118 District-02N Section 11
Township 13 S Range 13W PT NH 4.7Acres


Taxes are currently $2.79 per year.

Access is by foot or horse only over National
Forest land.
You can email me for more details
on this stunningly unusual opportunity. Asking
$6900 per acre with financing available.

January 3, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond
We just relisted our stunning Southern Oregon Gold Hill
spectacular view property for sale with Chris Marshall of
American Forest Management at (541) 664-9200.

Price has been reduced to $8475 per acre. This is the last
remaining large developable property immediately adjacent
to the northern Gold Hill city limits.

We have secured a new full access easement for these 20
acres.
Power and cable on the property. A land use planner
is available and we professional land use planner and we
fully expect Jackson County homesite approval.

Legal description is T36 R3W S16 Tax Lot 400.

Attractive financing is now available. Mid-size city
amenities are twelve minutes away at Medford. The
property borders directly on the town of Gold Hill. The
Rogue River is very close; beaches and mountains
are only an hour away.

Here's a newer group of photos...

You can click expand these. Then click again.

This steep to sloping parcel is immediately adjacent to the Gold
Hill
city limits and offers absolutely outstanding views. It is in one
of the most in-demand rural areas in the country, and has really great
access both to recreation and to midsize city resources. Plus superb
climate, low crime, and good schools.

Here is a map. Property is the green rectangle "pointed to" by
Thirteenth Street. You can click here for an aerial photo and flyby.

You can contact the owner directly by phoning (928) 428-4073
or don@tinaja.com .

Additional older photos here. More info here and here. Free
guided tours immediately available.

January 02, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Latest GuruGram #117 is on "Level II" Enhancement of
Pre-Cyber eBook Conversions

Its sourcecode can be found here and a use example here.
More GuruGrams here and free eBooks here.

January 01, 2011 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Closed out the 2010 Archive and started the 2011 one.

December 31, 2010 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Here's a useful technique to ease and speedup conversion
of bitmaps into their PostScript vector equivalents:

Temporarily scale the bitmap to exactly ten times the
number of pixels of vector width.
Then flip it vertically
so that the numbers increase from the top.

Locations of all the PostScript vector elements can be
read by using the pointer for locations, and the box
select for widths. Mentally divide by ten to get your
new PostScript coordinates.


I'll try to work up a demo on this whenever.

December 30, 2010 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Revised and updated our Auction Help library.
Mostly by removing some broken links out of the Arizona
section.


A review of Arizona Auction Resources can be found here.
You own custom auction finder can be created for you
per these details.

December 29, 2010 deeplink   top   bot   respond

There are both powerful advantages and disadvantages to
doing a "Level II" ebook remastering by combining Acrobat
10 with my Gonzo Utilities.

As this new demo clearly shows, Level II is markedly superior
to results you would normally get by using Acrobat 10 alone.
A comparable Acrobat 10 only result appears here.

Files are much shorter and text quality is much higher. Far
fewer fonts are normally required. Full text searching is
provided and maintained through later rework. Image
appearance is much better, and, despite high compression,
can be arbitrarily magnified to any desired resolution without
degradation. Value-added features such as full color, web
links, hyphen elimination, emphasis substitution and such
are easily included. Fill justification is easily preserved
with only the most minimum of text rekeying. Halftone
images are greatly improved and can be made text searchible.

Turning to the disadvantages, if there is some historic, legal,
or IP reason an exact replica of a precyber source is needed,
then the method is largely inappropriate.

Secondly, it is tricky to do more than four or five "easy" Level II
rework pages per hour. Some pages ( especially electronic
schematics ) may take much longer. Thus the project has to be
reasonably profitable
to justify the time and effort. Similar,
problems arise iif many new ebooks are needed in a short time.

Finally, the uniquely high quality of the Gonzo Utilities is based
on them being proudly non-WYSIWIG. If you are not into
"bare metal" machine language programming, then they might
not be at all suitable for you.

We do offer custom Level II rework for both current and
pre-cyber ebook projects, as well as training seminars. You
can email me for details or call (928) 428-4073.

December 28, 2010 deeplink   top   bot   respond

There's some interesting and sneaky tricks you can pull if
you add some unprinting spaces to the justification routines
in our Gonzo Utilities.

The rule is that all leading line spaces will be deleted. If
in the rare instance you want to add leading spaces, preface
them with a |j or |k
. Or both if your layout is extremely
critical.

If you want to force a fill justify on the last line of a page,
add as many spaces as you need, and follow them, again, by
a |j or |k
. Naturally, this takes a last line that is "nearly full"
to start with.

If a command ends up at the end of one line and the action
is supposted to begin on the next one, the command may be
ignored. This can be a problem with web links or bolded
emphasis. The cure is to add one or more spaces to the
end of the previous line
. This will force both the command
and the command action to be together as they belong at
the beginning of a line.

Beyond this tutorial, the best way to study Gonzo is to
view most any of the .PSL files in our GuruGram Library.

December 27, 2010 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Once again expanded and updated our Gila Valley Day Hikes
library page.

December 26, 2010 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Here's a list of links to our Wesrch papers. They sort of
form a "the best of" for our website...

Machine Language Programming Cookbook Classic Sampler
Restoring faded or scuffed text for web use
TV Typewriter eBook   
An "Un-Halftoning" scheme to improve eBook Images
Remastering a Technical Book for Web Distribution
The Incredible Secret Money Machi
ne 
Allen Reservoir Failure Docs
 
RTL Cookbook Classic Reprint 
IC67 metal locator classic reprint
Hanging Canal Slide Show
 

Remastering video for web distribution
  
Stability Issues in Gauss-Jordan Solutions
  
G
auss-Jordan Solution of nxn linear equations
Staliiking the Wild Paradigm   
Prehistoric Hanging Canals of the Safford Basin 
Recent Developments in Magic Sinewaves
 
Enhancing your eBay skills VIII
Website Link Checking Tools  
Secrets of Recent Technical Innovation
 
Lessons Learned During a uv Lamp Debu
gging  

Some Possible Book Scanning "Gutter Math" 
Utilities for HTML & XHTML Revalidation

eBay buying secrets
eBay selling secrets
 
Pseudoscience Bashing Secrets
 
Isopod Energy Monitor
  
Enhancing your eBay Skills V  
Build this TV Typewriter

The next big things
  
Elegant Simp
licity    

Enhancing your eBay Skills VI  
Cubic Spline Mininum Point Distance
 
pv
photovoltaic panel intro & summary   
Energy Fundamentals Intro & Summary

Real Time Acrobat PDF Animation  
A Solid State 3 Channel Color Organ   
When to Patent
  
Exploring the .BMP file format  
150 Gila Valley Day Hikes
 
A Gonzo P
ostScript Powerpoint Emulator

 Enhancing your eBay tactical skills VII  
 Synthesis of Digital Power Sinewaves 
Graham Tram Plan and Profile

Some fifth generation Magic Sinewaves
 
Drawing a Bezier cubic spline through 4 data points
.BMP Bitmap Circular Lettering 
An expanded ultra fast magic sinewave calculator
 
How to trash a vehicle hydrogen electrolysis
  
A Partial History of the Gila Lumber and Milling Company

Some bitmap perspective lettering algorithms & utilities


How to bash pseudoscience
An Improved Bitmap Typewriter
 
Using Distiller as a PostScript Computer
 
Some Architect's Perspective Algorithms and Utilities
 
Successful eBay Buying Strategies

Why Electrolysis Ain't Gonna Happen

The math behind Bezier cubic splines

Some Image Post Processing Utilities
 
The Case Against Patents

Some eBay Selling Strategies

A Digital Airbrushing Algorithm
Don't Get Sick!  
Some More Energy Fundamentals I
 
How to scam a student paper
  
Some Inverse Graphic Transforms
 
Nonlinear Graphics Transforms
  
Three Phase Magic Sinewaves
  
Bitmap to Acrobat PDF Image Conversions
 
The way things were -- an unauthorized autobiography

A review of some pixel image interpolation algorithms

Some possible false color and rainbow improvements
An Executive Guide to Magic Sinewaves
The worst of Marcia Swampfelder
Acrobat PDF Post Document Editing Tools
A new method of solving electromagnetic fields
A Newbie's Intro to the Web
Gonzo PostScript Tutorial and Directory
An Ultra-fast Magic Sinewave Calculator
Some Energy Fundamentals
Secrets of Technical Innovation

December 25, 2010 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Here is a brief example of the benefits of combining  
Acrobat X with my Gonzo Utilities for "Level II"
eBook rework. Full 16K sourcecode is found here.

The improvements in file size, text quality, image quality,
new value added features, and preservation of searchibility
can be stunning.
Especially when starting with a pre-cyber
textbook.

The original Acrobat-only remastering can be compared here,
starting with page 9.

The process begins by scanning the original book pages to
Paint, and transferring these to Axcrobat X for a Level I
eBook remastering. . The text only output is then fed to
the Gonzo Utilities where a "standard font" conversion
can be done much faster, simpler, less infuriating, and more
conviently than redoing a fill justification from within Acrobat X.

Note that no text rekeying is required! When needed at all,
text mods are usually quite minimal.

The benefits of this route is that all text is now unicoded,
and very few fonts will need embedded. Full searchibility
is preserved, even after repeated PDF-->PostScript-->PDF
improvement steps. Text appearance over ClearScan is
generally significantly improved. And Gonzo's three stage
progressive microjustify does a better job than the
original phototypesetting could manage in the print book.

Since exising fonts can be shared, additional text-only
pages can add as little as 2K to your final file sizes.


Value added features are easily included. One example is
to replace italic fonts with tinted and bolded text.

Background speckle vanishes without a trace.

Bitmaps can be improved or outright replaced by

short and compact "raw PostScript" routines. The
original gray halftone boxes did not look all that great and
got considerably worse if you attempted Acrobat's
reduced file option. These got replaced with some
raw PostScript routines that offer color tints, smaller
file sizes, and much better appearance. They also
add full text sarchibility
, which was not available in
the Acrobat original conversions.

The original B/W "pen and ink" drawings were converted
to full color. Mostly in a fast process involving the bucket in
Paint. With care, full color can often end up smaller than
the untined original.

A dilemma exists with Acrobat X's reduced font size
option. In that it largely prevents decent magnification
of any image.
An interesting value added workaround is shown
in our example. In which any size reduced original can be
click expanded into a web delivered master image of
arbitrary quality and appearance. All done with only
a few dozen bytes of additional .PDF code.

Consulting and conversion services available.

December 24, 2010 deeplink   top   bot   respond

I was asked if there was not a recent drop in eBay
sales.

It is just that usual little dip between the fall slump
and the winter slack period.


More eBay resources here.

December 23, 2010 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Bingo! And Eureka! and Hoo Boy! I may have found
solutions to many of the limits of Acrobat X. For files
that are much smaller, fonts that are better looking,
and new value added. While fully preserving searchibility.

Just use ClearScan to output text to my Gonzo Utilities.
The fill justification font replacement in Gonzo is ridiculously
easier to use than the klutzy and infuriating text replacement
routines in Acrobat X. But you will still have to decide
exactly how much time and effort is justified for what
degree of improvement you want to achieve.

Switching to a standard font eliminates all the hassles
of non unicode and losing the ability to search after a
PDF-->PostScript-->PDF rework.
Better yet, if you
are using ClearScan fonts on a page-by-page basis, there
may be thousands of these in a 300 page precyber
eBook with manditory embedding. Replacable by three or
four fonts total that may not even need embedding. For
a ridiculous reduction in final eBook file size.

Text quality generally goes up somewhat. The Gonzo
Utilities
normally are a very good match that go beyond
the original fill justification. And, while seldom needed,
can force a rare mismatch with either an extra space
or negative kerning.

You can decide how many of which type of images
to improve. Ferinstance. an image might be colorized
and offered in the small size Acrobat "do not exapand"
extreme compression. While clicking on it can give
you an arbitrarily larger and better direct web access
for only a few dozen bytes increase in .PDF file size.

Fax style gray boxes can be replaced with raw PostScript.
For benefits of dramatically smaller file sizes, much better
looking uniform color tints, and new full searchibility.

Other images can be left alone, retouched, or replaced
with raw PostScript for similar benefits. Dramatically
improving most Pre-cyber book remastering.

I'll try to work up a demo on all this in a few days.
The Gonzo Utilities are, of course, proudly non-WYSIWIG,
so they clearly are not for everybody.

December 22, 2010 deeplink   top   bot   respond

Found a few hundred more feet of the Mud Springs
Canal
, acutally inside the "black hole of Central". The
full story is eventually likely to unfold as follows:

The Mud Springs canal is 7 miles long and a feeder to
a 3 mile long Jernigan Canal.
It likely sources from far
up Ash Creek
. Its early portions remaiin unverified, But
a rancher's PVC pipe verifies the route credibility and
there is no sane alternative to "Where else could it
have come from?
"

A case can be made that this was possibly the first of
at least a dozen prehistoric canals. Owing to its entire
route being viewable at once from certain points. And
to the absence of certain fancier features, unusual
terrain, and nonobvious routes of the others.

There is a short stub canal that apparently dumps into
a wash midway at the Mud Springs Expressway crossing.
A possible explanation is that this is for mud control or
dealing with flood overflows.

Further downstream is a large and failed flood control dam.

Smaller and different from Allen Reservoir. The dam completely
runs roughshod over the canal without any accomodation of
any type. Which suggests extremely strong evidence that the
canal is in fact prehistoric
.


A very well definied "hanging" portion follows, going "up"
a wash wall to continue. Just past where the canal once
again reaches the bajada is a strange circular structure.
Very pithouse looking, but probably centuries newer. And
only half a meter from the canal. Until proven otherwise,
this is the "troll house".

Somewhat further southeast, the canal appears to branch to
source the Jernigan Canal. Evidence in this area is somewhat
weak and consists primarily of long linear arrays of dead flowers
combined with the same linear array studiously avoided by the Creosote
Bushes. But all three ends connect to more credible evidence.

A small spur in this area leads to a small and obviously Anglo
tank. This is presumed to be a "steal the plans" and "dig
out an old ditch" similar to Hawk Hollow Tank.

The two canals parallel each other for a surprisingly long time
over very minor spacing. Presumably this was needed as a
"setup" to maintain slope on the two routes. The canals
never seem to get more than 800 feet apart. Sometimes
much closer.

The west spur vanishes into the Black Hole of Central to
emerge as the well defined Jernigan Hanging Canal. The
east spur also vanishes into the Black Hole of Central to
emerge as a well defined continuance that appears to
be headed for river bottomland near the Union Canal.
The final thousand feet is indistinct and largely trashed.

Slopes and terrain inside the Black Hole are eminently
credible. Possible explanations for the absence of hard
evidence are incomplete exploration, sheet flooding, or
stream piracy.

Meanwhile, the Allen Canal enters the Black Hole of Central
from the east. Where it goes and whether it merges with the
Mud Spring canal has yet to be determined. The only other
route would be unlikely as it is heading towards a cineaga.

Kiddies, we are dealing with utterly spectacular world class
stone age engineering here
. Orders of magnitude beyond beyond.

Yet, with one or two grateful exceptions, I cannot seem to interest
the powers that be in the Southwestern Archaeology hierarchy.

Just because I skipped one too many compulsory faculty teas
half a century ago.

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