Don Lancaster's What's New? 2016 Archive

Pick your blog year...
1997	1998	1999	2000	2001
2002	2003	2004	2005	2006
2007	2008	2009	2010	2011
2012	2013	2014	2015	2016
2017	2018	2019	2020	-----

Closed out our whtnu16.shtml blog and started a new
whtnu17.shtml one.

Earlier blogs remain available by clicking on "?new?" on the
home page.

A reminder that we have separately extracted bajada hanging
canal relevant material material to these files...

blog excerpts09.shtml
blog_excerpts10.shtml
blog_excerpts11.shtml
blog_excerpts12.shtml
blog_excerpts13.shtml
blog_excerpts14.shtml
blog_excerpts15.shtml
blog_excerpts16.shtml

The Sand bajada hanging canal is number SEVENTY FIVE
on our list of study candidates. It is extremely interesting
and fairly easy to explore. But, as with previous canals,
it presently is raising far more questions than it resolved.

I could use your help in the following...

Fill in the blanks between N 32.83001 W 109.92742
and N 32.83093 W 109.92610.

Visit the fork at N 32.83453 W 109.92705 to
determine whether its feeder is in fact prehistoric.

Try to determine the intent and purpose of the three
apparently imponderable historic interventions at
N 32.82628 109.92605, at N 32.83096 W 109.93308,
and at N 32.83120 W 109.92570.

Verify that the fence crossing at N 32.82135
W 109.93778 is in fact a significant Sand Canal
routing.

Verify that the Acme Mapper plot at N 32.81909
W 109.94159 is in fact a significant Sand Canal
routing.

Verify that the-acme Mapper plot at N 32.81307
W 109.94579 is in fact a significant Carter Canal routing.

Attempt to prove that the Sand Canal and the Carter
Canal are one in the same.

See if a Carter Canal hanging portion exists at N 32.81258
W 109.94703 and is photogenic.

Determine if Gila Longfin Dace or other fish survive in and
around N 32.81244 W 109.94766

Microsizing and micropositioning can become crucial problems
when printing pages full of small labels or doing other step
and repeat projects.

First and foremost, always be sure to use the same printer for
the same project. And always use the same printer driver and
make sure that driver does not have any weird scalings active.

Add a small target to your code at what is supposed to be the
0,0 lower left corner. Possibly an adjustment such as an
-0.11 inch -0.16 inch translate may be needed to convince the
intended code, the label sheet, the printer, and the printer
driver to all agree on exactly where 0,0 is.

Some label sources will provide you with templates that are
sheets of paper with preprinted label locations on them.

Another ploy that can be very useful: Temporarily remove the
four corner labels from the label sheet. Print to ordinary paper
and register the modified label sheet in front of the paper.
Hold the pair up to a bright light source or the sun. You then check
the intended alignment of your messages.

If you want a bled color background on each label, be sure
to "overscan" enough that all labels in all positions to
not show any annoying white edges.

One way to verify that your h and v counts are correct is to
remove a fifth label from an odd position on the left side
and a sixth label from a strange position from the bottom.

Sourcecode for a new simplified step-and-repeat label
printer can be found  here. With a sample printout here.

The full Gonzo PostScript code gets towed along
internally, so all you have to do is edit your file in
Wordpad or wherever, and send it to Acrobat
Distiller.

Here's the crucial part of the new PostScript code...

/simplifiedstepandrepeat { horstart vertstart translate
     numvert { save
          numhoriz { repeatproc
                             inchoriz 0 translate } repeat
                       restore 0 incvert translate
                     } repeat
                         } store

Gonzo utilities here, tutorial here, and lots of simple
projects here. And intermediate stuff here.

Here's a link to an "adequate supply" of Pittsburgh Streetcar Photos

WARNING: Attempting to view all of these in one session will result
in yunz guys pronouncing "beer" as "airn". Or making a mill outta a
chopaam sammitch and Olde Frothingslosh Pale Stale Ale in Sliberty.

Fortunately, in regards to this matter, a desert rat like me is immune.
Skooze me while I redd up the website.

A midget fortune teller broke out of jail.

Leaving a small medium at large.

Here's a few of our published books and related items...

TTL COOKBOOK -
Well over a million copies in print. Should be
available at Amazon and technical bookstores.
A very few autographed copies are still available
from Guru's Lair and eBay.

MANUAL DE CIRCUITOS TTL-
Status unknown. Likely very hard to find.

PACIFIC RIM TTL COOKBOOK -
Not even sure anymore which Asian language it was
released in. Status unknown. Likely extinct.

CMOS COOKBOOK-
Approaching a million copies in print. Autographed
copies available from Guru's Lair and eBay.
Also should be available from Amazon

ACTIVE FILTER COOKBOOK-
THE defining reference for the field. Still in print.
Autographed copies available from Guru's Lair and eBay.
Also should be available from Amazon.

RTL COOKBOOK -
Good old number one. Currently available as a free
eBook from Guru's Lair. Amazon usually has new
and used copies.

TV TYPEWRITER COOKBOOK -
The opening shot fired in the personal computer
revolution.. Currently available as a free eBook from
Guru's Lair. Amazon usually has new and used copies.
The TV Typewriter story by itself here.

INCREDIBLE SECRET MONEY MACHINE-
Find out how I make money. Send $6.95 to...
Currently available as a free eBook from Guru's Lair.
Amazon usually has new and used copies.

APPLE ASSEMBLY COOKBOOK -
Currently available as Volume I and Volume II of
a pair of free eBooks from Guru's Lair. A sample
Restoration Demo is also available. Amazon  has
new and used copies.

MICRO COOKBOOK VOLUME I -
When combined with Volume II, ends up surprisingly
applicable to the very latest of microcomputer fundamentals.
A very few autographed copies are still available from
Guru's Lair and eBay. Amazon rarely has new and used
copies.

MICRO COOKBOOK VOLUME II -
Currently available as a retitled Volume I and Volume II of
a pair of free eBooks from Guru's Lair. A sample Restoration
Demo is also available. Amazon  sometimes has new and
used copies.

APPLEWRITER COOKBOOK -
Insider secrets of the best Apple II word processor.  Out
of print and hard to find. Your funding requested for this
secondary candidate for eBook restoration. Amazon 
rarely has new and used copies.

ALL ABOUT APPLEWRITER -
Rare Call A.P.P.L.E book was a disassembly script that
possibly could be re-excerpted from the AppleWriter Cookbook.
Status unknown. Not sure I still even have a copy.

HEXADECIMAL CHRONICLES -
Book and circular slide rule calculator exclusively for ultra fringe
Apple II machine language programmers. Produced and typeset
largely on a Diablo 630 Daisywheel! Amazon  rarely has new
and used copies.

ENHANCING YOUR APPLE II VOLUME I -
Collection of construction projects and programming ploys.
Included the "tearing method" of program disassembly.
A prime eBook candidate with your funding welcome.
Amazon  very rarely has new and used copies.

ENHANCING YOUR APPLE II VOLUME II -
Collection of construction projects and programming ploys.
Included the "vaporlock" field sync technique. A prime
eBook candidate with your funding welcome. Amazon 
sometimes has new and used copies.

CHEAP VIDEO COOKBOOK-
Sneaky "Gee whiz" tricks to add ultra low cost video displays
to KIM-1 and similar low end microcomputer trainers. An
intermediate eBook candidate with your funding welcome.
Amazon  sometimes has new and used copies.

SON OF CHEAP VIDEO-
Supplement to the Cheap Video Cookbook covering ultra
low cost video displays. A secondary eBook candidate with
your funding welcome. Amazon  sometimes has new and
used copies, some at outrageous prices.

THE BIG TTL WALL CHART-
Collection of IC data from the TTL Cookbook. Exceptionally
rare and possibly extinct. No eBook plans at present.

THE BIG CMOS WALL CHART-
Collection of IC data from the CMOS Cookbook. Exceptionally
rare and possibly extinct. No eBook plans at present.

BLATANT OPPORTUNIST-
Reprints from Don's Midnight Engineering columns. Once
Book-on-Demand published. Now freely available online as
individual columns.

BOOK-ON-DEMAND PUBLISHING-
The entire concept of low end BOD  publishing largely died
stillborn, owing to the utterly overwhelming advantages of
web distribution. Combined with sanely priced binding
systems and and trimmers never getting available online here.

CAVE CRAWLER'S GAZETTE-
A three year editorial stint for the Central Arizona Grotto.
Very low priority eBook plans at present.

ASK THE GURU I, II, III-
Reprints from Don's Computer Shopper columns. Once
Book-on-Demand published. Now freely available online
as compilations here, here, and here.

HARDWARE HACKER I, II, III, IV -
Reprints from Don's Hardware Hacker columns. Once
Book-on-Demand published. Now freely available online
as compilations here, here, here, and here.

RESOURCE BIN-
A collection of "where to go to get stuff" monthly columns
from Nuts & Volts magazine. Early compilations can be found
found here and here with individual columns available here.

MY THESIS-
One of the first ever developments of low cost analog circuits
to be used for hobby electronics projects. Free copy here.

MY FIRST AND ONLY PATENT -
Can be found here. Good old 3,149,561. And drove home the
utter ludicrosity of the US patent system for virtually all
individuals and small scale startups.

CASE AGAINST PATENTS-
Once Book-on-Demand published compilation of my anti
patent diatribes. Also freely available online as individual
papers.

GILA VALLEY DAY HIKES-
Many hundreds of highly obscure neat places to go and
things  to do in and around the Gila Valley. With the main
free  directory here and images of some of the more obscure
candidates here.

MAGIC SINEWAVES-
Newly discovered obscure math tricks that allow dramatic
low harmonic suppression of digitally generated power
sinewaves for pv panels, power controls, and similar apps.
Find the magic calculator here and lots of support here.

PSEUDOSCIIENCE-
I am very much into disproving such ludicrosities as free
energy, alien abductions, much of cold fusion,antigravity,
UFO's "not even wrong"labwork, perpetual motion, or
outright scams. Find the main resource here and my
special hell reserved for hydrogen here.

POWERPOINT EMULATIONS-
I very strongly feel that Powerpoint is mesmerizingly awful,
so I wrote my own PostScript emulator that completely blows
it away on all counts. A tutorial here and examples here.

POSTSCRIPT SECRETS-
Reprints from Don's Computer Shopper columns. Once
Book-on-Demand published. Now freely available online
as a compilation here.

POSTSCRIPT SHOW AND TELL-
Started out as a flashcard lecture of the underappreciated
wonders of the general purpose PostScript programming
language. Now available as a free web resource.

POSTSCRIPT BEGINNER PROJECTS-
A compendium of projects from our beginning PostScript
community college programming class.

POSTSCRIPT GONZO UTILITIES-
Custom routines that give you exceptional Postscript-as-language
typography, schematics, and great heaping bunches of related stuff.
Find the code here, use guidelines here, and lots of apps here.

VARIOUS OTHER FREE RESOURCES -
Being summarized here, here, and here.

INTRODUCTION TO POSTSCRIPT VIDEO-
Found here.

THE WORST OF MARCIA SWAMPFELDER-
Marcia tended to do my April Fools columns for a number of
years in Popular Electronics and Modern Electronics. The
secrets of how she did the tapioca pudding scene in the cross
genre Godzilla versus the Night  Nurses film classic remains
under strict NDA. A revised and updated free online copy of
Marcia's finest work appears here.

And our very newest...

DON LANCASTER CLASSICS LIBRARY-
A USB crammed full of some 8000+ files spread
over more than 2 Gigs of tight code, along with nearly
a thousand open source and fully unlocked source code
documents. Classics through current. Available from
Guru's Lair and eBay.

GURUGRAMS-
Published versions of our ongoing projects, papers, and
such have largely been replaced by the GuruGrams on our
Guru's Lair website. Announcements on their availability
can usually be found here and on our similar earlier and
later blogs.

BAJADA HANGING CANAL FIELD NOTES -
A work in progress. See the latest info and updates here.

After some extensive archival rework, rearrangement,
and improvement of our Guru's Lair website. we can
now offer USB Thumb Drive copies of our Lancaster Classics
Library.

This includes some 8000+ files spread over more than 2 Gigs
of tight code, along with nearly a thousand open source and
fully unlocked source code documents. All fully searchable in
one place at one time.

Included are reprints of the TV Typewriter, the RTL Cookbook,
the Incredible Secret Money Machine, much of the Hanging
Bajada Canals, and, of course, The Worst of Marcia Swampfelder.

You can contact us directly or view our eBay listing to pick
up a personal copy.

Guru's Lair website access: https://www.tinaja.com

Assorted Neat Stuff:https://www.tinaja.com/ansamp1.shtml
Auction Help:  https://www.tinaja.com/ahsamp1.shtml
Blatant Opportunist: https://www.tinaja.com/bosamp1.shtml
Blogs and What's New: https://www.tinaja.com/blsamp1.shtml
Bezier Cubic Splines: https://www.tinaja.com/bcsamp1.shtml
Book to eBook Conversions: https://www.tinaja.com/bebsamp1.shtml
Classic Reprints: https://www.tinaja.com/crsamp1.shtml
eBay Secrets: https://www.tinaja.com/ebsamp1.shtml
eBook Library:https://www.tinaja.com/ebksamp1.shtml
Energy Tutorials: https://www.tinaja.com/etsamp1.shtml
Gila Valley Day Hikes: https://www.tinaja.com/tinsamp1.shtml
GuruGrams: https://www.tinaja.com/ggsamp1.shtml
Hardware Hacker: https://www.tinaja.com/hhsamp1.shtml
Incredible Secret Money Machine: https://www.tinaja.com/issamp1.shtml
Latest Additions: https://www.tinaja.com/lasamp1.shtml 
Libraries by Subject: https://www.tinaja.com/lbsamp1.shtml
Magic Sinewaves: https://www.tinaja.com/mssamp1.shtml
Marbelous Stacks of Pancakes: https://www.tinaja.com/mbsamp1.shtml
Math Stuff: https://www.tinaja.com/matsamp1.shtml
The Case Against Patents: https://www.tinaja.com/pasamp1.shtml
PostScript Resources: https://www.tinaja.com/pssamp1.shtml
Powerpoint Emulations: https://www.tinaja.com/powpt1.shtml
Prehistoric Bajada Hanging Canals: https://www.tinaja.com/tinsamp1.shtml
Pseudoscience Bashing: https://www.tinaja.com/psusamp1.shtml
Recommended Books: https://www.tinaja.com/bksamp1.shtml
Resource Bin: https://www.tinaja.com/rbsamp1.shtml
Santa Claus Machines: https://www.tinaja.com/scsamp1.shtml
Service Pages: https://www.tinaja.com/spsamp1.shtml
Site Sampler: https://www.tinaja.com/samplx1.shtml
Tech Musings: https://www.tinaja.com/tmsamp1.shtml
Technical Library Directory: https://www.tinaja.com/libry01.shtml
Tinaja Questing: https://www.tinaja.com/tinsamp1.shtml
Video Tutorials:https://www.tinaja.com/ebksamp1.shtml

Main Libraries:

Abeja Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/beewb01.shtml
Acrobat PDF Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/acrob01.shtml
Adept Sliders ( sorry sold out ): https://www.tinaja.com/adeptinv.shtml
Ask the Guru Older Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/glair01.shtml
Auction and Assistance Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/auct01.shtml
Banner Advertisers Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/advt01.shtml 
Bargains and Surplus Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/barg01.shtml
Blatant Opportunist Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/blat01.shtml
Book Access Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/amlink01.shtml
Book on Demand Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/bod01.shtml
Captain Video Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/capvid01.shtml
Consultants Network: https://www.tinaja.com/consul01.shtml
Cubic Spline Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/cubic01.shtml
Custom Auction Help: https://www.tinaja.com/aucres01.shtml
eBay Live Auction Shelf:  https://www.ebay.com/sch/abeja/m.html?
eBook Shelf :https://www.tinaja.com/ebook01.shtml
Electrical Engineering Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/eeweb01.shtml
Flutterwumper Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/flut01.shtml
Fonts and Images Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/aafont01.shtml
Gila Valley Dayhikes Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/gilahike.shtml
Guru Archive (older) Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/glair01.shtml
GuruGram Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/gurgrm01.shtml
Golly Gee Mister Science Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/golly01.shtml
Hardware Hacker Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/hack01.shtml
Image PostProc Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/image01.shtml
Incredible Secret Money Machine Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/ismm01.shtml
Infopack Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/info01.shtml
"Its a Gas" Hydrogen Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/h2gas01.shtml
Magic Sinewaves Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/magsn01.shtml 
Magic Sinewave Older Archive: https://www.tinaja.com/magsna1.shtml 
Math Stuff Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/math01.sht
Navicube Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/navcub01.shtml
Patent Avoidance Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/patnt01.shtml
Pick a Peck of PICS Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/picup01.shtml 
PostScript Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/post01.shtml
Pseudoscience Bashing Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/pseudo01.shtml
Resource Bin Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/resbn01.shtml
Santa Claus Machine Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/santa01.shtml
Synergetics Library: https://www.tinaja.com/synlib01.shtml
Tech Musings Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/muse01.shtm
Third Party Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/third01.shtml
Tinaja Questing Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/tinaja01.shtml
Webmastering Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/weblib01.shtml 
Web Links ( outdated ) Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/webwb01.shtml
Wavelets Shelf: https://www.tinaja.com/wave01.shtml

Here is the first supplement to our PostScript Font
Snooper. Merge it with the internal and external
existing PostScript font name lists and resend the
snooper to Acrobat XI...

/FontlistbyPSname [ %= fonts not yet ps name resolved.

/ARBERKLEY
/ARBLANCA
/ARBONNIE
/ARCARTER
/ARCENA
/ARCHRISTY
/ARDARLING
/ARDECODE
/ARDELANEY
/ARDESTINE
/ARESSENCE
/ARHERMANN
/ARJULIAN

/Ebrima-Bold

% /Fixedsys
% /Fixedsys-Regular

/Gabriola
/HPSimplified-Regular
/Impact
/JavaneseText
/LeelawadeeUI
/LucidaConsole

% /Malgun
% /Malgun-Regular
% /MalgunGothic
% /MalgunGothicRegular
% /MalgunGothicSemilight
% /MalgunGothicBold

/MicrosoftHimalaya
/MicrosoftNewTaiLue
/MicrosoftTaiLe

% /MicrosoftJhengHeiUI
% /MicrosoftJhengHei-UI
% /MicrosoftYaHei
% /MicrosoftYaHeiUI
% /MicrosoftYaHei-UI
%/NSimSun
% /NSimSun-Regular
% /SmallFont-Regular

/SourceCodePro-Regular
/SourceCodePro-Black
/SourceCodePro-Bold
/SourceCodePro-ExtraLight
/SourceCodePro-Light
/SourceCodePro-Semibold
/Sylfaen

% /System-Bold
% /Terminal
% /Terminal-Regular
% /Terminal-Bold
% /YuGothic-Light
% /YuGothicUL

/ZWAdobeF

] store

These files seem embeddable without faux font substitution.

There are obviously bunches of correct PostScript
filenames not yet in the directories. Please email me with
your additions and corrections.

A .html or .shtml web browser file will often tow along bits
and pieces of other files. These can easily get lost or
misplaced on file relocations or distributions and cause
major dropout problems.

An included file in the same directory would have no
slashes in it, such as src="bluestrp.gif". An included file
in the host machine but a different directory might be
referenced as src= "C://stuff/morestuff/blustripe.jpg". And
an included file or link elsewhere on the web would
get referenced as src= "http://:www.tinaja.com".

On file relocation or distribution, it is super important to retain
access to all these included src's. Otherwise, you will get
dropouts and other annoyances. The usual problem is that
Dreamweaver or another browser tool may reassign locations
for the inclusions.

Sometimes Dreamweaver will create a new directory of file
folders for all included items. It is very important to keep
this directory where it can be accessed. Alternately, if
just a few inclusions are involved, you can provide new copies
of everything needed locally accessible.

At any rate, if you find dropout problems, search your file
under "src=" and see what shows up.

A related issue: Dreamweaver tends to drop out backgrounds.
It will usually tell you it has done this with a comment.
Background images may be replaced by their original by
File -> Page Properties --> Appearance --> Background Image
--> Browse

I'll throw in a reminder here that those insidious Dreamweaver
disappearances of the crucial properties panel can often be
restored by a ctrl-F3.

I've gone through our What's New Blogs back to 2009
and extracted much of the Bajada Hanging Canal stuff.

These new files should give more in the way of an
ongoing timeline of discoveries and developments...

https://www.tinaja.com/blog_excerpts09.shtml
https://www.tinaja.com/blog_excerpts10.shtml
https://www.tinaja.com/blog_excerpts11.shtml
https://www.tinaja.com/blog_excerpts12.shtml
https://www.tinaja.com/blog_excerpts13.shtml
https://www.tinaja.com/blog_excerpts14.shtml
https://www.tinaja.com/blog_excerpts15.shtml
https://www.tinaja.com/blog_excerpts16.shtml

This is getting far beyond ridiculous.

Acme Mapper is suggesting a yet unverified SEVENTY SIXTH
Prehistoric Hanging Bajada Canal around N 32.81330 W 109.94637.

It appears to be a companion to the Sand Canal complex and
seems to have a takein pond (!) and a hanging portion. The
tentative name would be the Carter Canal. Total regional
length now appears to be well beyond a world class 130 miles.

Surprisingly, there were Gila Longfin Dace fish in the area.
At least before the drought. More here.

Your help with exploration is more than welcome. Opportunities
for personal world class research abound.

Thought I'd list my end of year predictions here...

The elimination of "unintended consequence" federal
price supports and marijuana farm subsidies dropping
prices to a near cotton parity of 59 cents per pound. With
( as cotton ) standard 500 pound commercial bales ( anything
less being personal use ) and tax estimates ending up a
tad high. But the latter by only by a mere three or four orders
of magnitude. More here.

Surprising but marginal emerging credibility for limited
forms of both Cold Fusion and Reactionless Drives.

Unlikely third world countries soon dropping the pv panel
prices to the utility grade twenty five cents per peak watt
demanded for true renewability and sustainability.

The total demise of coal. With idled locomotives being the
measurable barometer that is spearheading the debacle.

A controversial but credible detection of extra-terrestrial 
mid-level intelligence "real soon now". Perhaps a planet
full of asparagus. And more "WTF" signals yet to come.

Obsolesce of CCFL lamps. Brought about by LED parity
and all sorts of previously unthunk of lighting products.

Pricey solid state challenges to microwave oven magnetrons.
With eventual advantages of simplicity, uniformity, economy.

Strong sales of ultra resolution smart tv's despite zero
available content. Driven mostly by computer users.

A resurgence in traditional electronic hacking, driven by
 Arduino, Raspberry Pi, C.H.I.P. Beagle Bone, the Basic
Stamp and derivatives, magazines such as Circuit Cellar 
or Make, and such suppliers as Sparkfun, Marlin Jones, 
American Science & Surplus, and even ( should they last
a few more weeks ) Radio Shack.

Dramatic increase in the popularity of hackerspaces , 
makerspaces, and fab labs

The terabyte revolution being largely ignored, moving
directly instead into the petabyte revolution.  One thumb
drive to hold all movies, or all books, or all history. With
emerging utterly disruptive IP issues.

Substantial medical breakthroughs, especially in the areas
of cancer and diabetes, female sexuality, dentistry, and
Alzheimers.

Computers that are so cheap there is no longer any point in
charging for them.

WWVB having dropped the football. Far too little way too late.

The stranglehold on technical research publication finally
being broken, with open source dissemination dominant,
low access costs, easy publication, long term access, and peer
review taking place after publication rather than before.

I am in the process of doing some mostly invisible revisions
to our website. With the intent of making more and better
third party backups and offering nearly 2 Gigs of website
in thumb drive form.

Please email me if you want to get in ahead of the hoarders
on one of these greatly improved and updated nav drives.

Some recent links to our Magic Sinewave calculators seem to
point to older versions. The newest and best include quantization
buttons. I'm not sure I have all these fixed.

https://www.tinaja.com/msquant/retry_m/xxxx.shtml is one correct
new version.

https://www.tinaja.com/magsnq1.shtml is an identical copy with a
better filename.

Important note: Should you copy these, an identical named .js
trailer file MUST be included. And files of anytime.gif and
blustrp.gif and ebaylin2.jpg SHOULD be included

The latest PV pricing stats for November are in and once
again show ongoing decreases for an all time best of 42
cents per peak panel watt minimum.

Note that somewhere around twenty five cents per peak
panel watt is demanded for true net energy renewability
and sustainability. The math behind this can be found here.

In a related surprise move, some extremely aggressive
pv project prices were just awarded in some highly
unexpected third world countries.

Much more here.

Here is the obscure code to print out the contents
of a Windows 10 folder or directory...

shift - rightmouse over directory
open command window here
dir > listmyfolder.txt
load new file into wordpad.

The Sand prehistoric Bajada hanging canal ranges from
N 32.81814 W 109.94203 to N 32.83533 W 109.92265 and
seems exceptionally well engineered and largely well
preserved.

Except that there apparently were three very small sections
of historical rebuild attempts that appear to me to be total and
colossal failures. The terra cota pipes and the precast concrete
headgates suggest a rather recent attempt involving appallingly
bad and woefully incomplete engineering. Or possibly kids.

It is unlikely that one recent drop of modern water was ever
delivered. No CCC dominant signatures seemed involved, but
something like a State Lands intern project appear suggested.

There is a companion mystery whose origins remain fuzzy.
A possible branch of the canal ranges from N 32.82839
W 109.93146 to a yet unexplored fork at N 32.83446
W 109.92706. It is obviously fed from a valid prehistoric canal
and has perfect slope and size. Yet it is a tad too deep and
totally lacks the spoil pile berms typical of most other prehistoric
canals in the region.

Other consulted archaeologists remain equally baffled.
Perhaps a ground survey of the fork might shed some light on
the age of this route.

Then again, it might raise more questions than it answers.

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 Machine
Allen Reservoir Failure Docs
RTL Cookbook Classic Reprint
IC67 metal locater classic reprint
Hanging Canal Slide Show

Remastering video for web distribution
Stability Issues in Gauss-Jordan Solutions
Gauss-Jordan Solution of nxn linear equations
Stalking 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 Debugging

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 Simplicity

Enhancing your eBay Skills VI
Cubic Spline Minimum 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 PostScript 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

Here are our co-authored Hanging Canal papers...

Prehistoric Bajada Hanging Canals of Southeastern Arizona
A Tour of Some Stunning Prehistoric Hanging Canal Images

I was recently asked for my views on "global warming".

After many decades of careful observation here in the southwest
over such things as flood and fire frequency and severity, overgrazing, 
species invasion, overbuilding, water management, and drought,
I firmly believe that...

Climatic and weather VARIABILITY are dramatically
on the rise and will continue to become worse
for the foreseeable future .

Much, if not most of the increase in variability
appears to me to clearly be man caused.

Business as usual will no longer hack it.

We better fervently HOPE that the majority of the
problem is in fact man caused; Otherwise, it will 
surely end up MUCH harder to fix.

Yes, the situation is enormously complex. Yes, outright
mistakes will be made. Not to mention unintended consequences
and hidden agendas. But, at least to me, doing nothing would be the
gravest and greatest mistake of all.

My own feelings are that "carbon free" is a monumentally
stupid goal. "Carbon neutral" makes infinitely more sense.

More on energy related topics here and here. 

Well, it took three weeks, but most of the fallout from a
hard disk blowup has pretty much happened, whit the
majority of whatever being nearly or fully recovered.

Since the outcome was seriously in doubt, a four pronged
approach was used during recovery...

First, a commercial restoration service was used
that had the necessary expertise and tools.

Second, an underused laptop was modified to
take care of immediately urgent tasks.

Third, woefully incomplete and dated backups
were carefully reviewed for salvagability.

Fourth , a brand new and updated computer
system was built from the ground up.

Once again expanded and updated our Gila Valley 
Dayhikes page. We are now up to 477 main entries,
most of which now include GPS location links. 

Now including everything from castles to abandoned locomotives
to mystery Gila River tramways. No, not this one. 

Please email me with anything I missed or that needs 
further updating.

It has been a while since I mentioned my most fiendish of
all my papers.

Included are a dozen sure fire "can't miss"winners for
student papers of high school through graduate university
levels.

And one, um, not quite winner. But which?

Can't put one over on her. Nosiree.

Little old lady to a companion at a recent live auction:

"Why, that man has been talking all morning!"

There seems to be a major Windows 10 bug in which the
print queue ends up neither working nor allowing cancellation.

To find out if this is your "won't print" problem, go to the
Control Panel --> View Devices and Printers --> your
usual printer --> See What's Printing. Viewable should
be a blank panel or one that allows cancellation.

The exact bug and its treatment can be found here.

In other times and places, downloading a fresh printer
driver can make a big difference. In the case of HP,
go here for access.

In general, Windows 10 seems to offer bunches of better
ways to do stuff. But finding tasks for the first time can
be monumentally frustrating.

Ferinstance, the greatly simplified and improved file search
is now found by clicking on the task bar file folder. while
an elaborate and mind bogglingly complex new cutsey poo
AI feature is now where the earlier Windows-X used to be.

Now that memory is free, I'm wondering if still using the
C:/ drive is the best place for work files. Putting these
files on thumb drives or other removable media makes
distributing and backing them up a lot easier. As well as
often being somewhat more virus and wear resistant.

And system blowups are now separate from work
problems.

Yes, you still should avoid using a thumb drive for
exceptionally high traffic read and write issues. But
this should not be a problem for most files most of
the time.

I have been having major difficulties getting Thunderbird
to access my Fatcow mail. Apparently Fatcow does not
want a second pc to access supervisory status, while
Thunderbird remembers stuff of yours even if the
account is closed and uninstalled. Fatcow has been most
helpful but we did not get anywhere on several lengthy tries.

Passwords are consistently refused.

The present workaround is to use mail server side ap
from FatCow's RoundCube service and to explore the
Microsoft Mail potential as a newsgroup server from
News.Individual.Net. and others.

Any suggestions of what to try next?

Configuring a computer to replace a blown up one might go
something like this...

Start with a $200 Walmart refurb special
Provide a monitor and speakers.
Upgrade to wireless mouse and keyboard.
Add a 4X power USB expander.
Remove malware and bloatware.
Add shortcuts to Control Panel and C:/
Extract Paint and Wordpad from Windows Accessories
Gain Ethernet access.
Access existing WiFi network
Install Chrome
Install Chrome Extensions no underline and Speed Dial
Install web page, ebay, fatcow etc to Speed Dial.
Make Chrome the default browser.
Add USB Thumb Drive and Hard Drive.
Add CD drive if not present on PC.
Install print driver and verify WiFi printing.
Import important data files to Desktop via USB.
Install antivirus software.
Install scanner and VueScan X64. Test.
Add cable and verify Nikon photo linking.
Test optional camera memory chip.
Install Thunderbird and link to Fatcow ISP.
Explore Fatcow Roundcube
Install a Sigfile signature file..
Verify mail functionality.
Subscribe to News.Individual Net.
Chose newsgroups.
Install Filezilla FTP program.
Link Filezilla to Fatcow ISP
Verify WebSite functionality.
Verify ISP and webpage communication.
Install Winzip GZ file reader for ISP log stats.
Download Imageview32 Arcata.
Install GhostScript
Install Gonzo Utilities, Architects Perspective,
Vingetting Autobackgrounder, Bitmap Typewriter,
other Postscript routines.
Test camera to postproc to ebay functionality.
Consider Microsoft Office.
Download .PDF Acrobat reader.
Subscribe to Acrobat XI
Verify Acrobat XI Distiller run -F disk access.
Verify home page.
Verify YouTube and NetFlix.
Verify Dilbert. KeelyNet, and Slashdot.
Run the font snooper.
Add any missing or favorite fonts.
Download Google Earth
Add velcro where appropriate.
Start backup saves.

We will shortly have a complete set of numeric branding
irons up on eBay.

For some reason, their"9" seems to be missing. The
obvious workaround is to turn the cow upside dowm
and then use the "6" instead.

THE RABBIT FARM -At one time, this San Simon resource
included large artesian lakes and many giant trees, but drought
and falling water tables have taken their toll. Remediation efforts 
are underway, which presumably you can participate in.
N 32.50135 W 109.33844

Much more Gila Hike stuff here.

The latest versions of our PostSript fontname finder and Faux
Fonts identifiers are now available for your review.

Send this .psl file to the Distiller in Acrobat XI to find the correct
spellings and the Faux font shifts for your chosen machine.

Or just view this .pdf file for a sample of somebody else's
results.

Or this .log file for additional info on somebody else's
results.

Or your own new .log file for your specific additional info.

You can click here for a list of the correct spellings of
nearly 5000 valid PostScript font names. Please report
any typos and most especially any missed additions.

Been getting some new PostScript-as-Filename anomalies on Windows
10 involving paths starting with C:\. Not sure what is happening but it
might involve needing some earlier slashes owing to This Computer.

Did find an apparent workaround: If you use a D:// or higher thumb
drive for involved PS filenames, the problem seems to disappear.

Working example: Clicking an image into Imageview32 and then
clicking through on image information should always give you
a valid full font path. Attempting to run windows-X on
a properly installed E:/retest/indptump1.bmp works just fine,
but trying the same windows-X on a properly installed
C:\Users\Bee\Desktop\new_images\indptump1.bmp returns
an error message. Despite very careful keying.

This seems to have nothing to do with the separate need to place
a double reverse slash inside a PostScript string any time you
really want to end up with a windows filename forward slash.

Any ideas?

The "Wow" SETI signal has now been largely discredited, likely
owing to a pair of then undiscovered comets that generated a
large reflective gas cloud.

But we now have a brand new "WTF" signal to deal with. This
involves a Kepler transit so astoundingly complex that citing
intelligent design presently has not yet been ruled out.

More details here and here.

Acrobat Distiller attempts to substitute a Faux Font into your PDF
files for the overwhelming majority of available fonts. This can
utterly destroy the "vibes" of fonts such as Revue or Hobo, and
otherwise introduces an aura of "sameness" to the final docs.

And, unless TrueType fonts are separately converted, most of
these will also be faux substituted. Typically, for every 2000
available fonts, around 1800 of them will be faux substituted
and 200 might sail through unmolested.

Distiller will report to you which fonts have been substituted in
its return log file. And lists can be generated by search filtering
the log file in a multistep process..

But programatically finding out whether a font has been substituted
for raw PostScript uses requires some sneakiness.

It turns out there is a FontDirectory that starts out empty and fills
as it gets used. Each added font should have a OrigFonts subdirectory
and this directory may or may not have a Boolean DistillerFauxFont
entry. Curiously, this entry seems to always be true but only sometimes
be present. So, use of the known operator is needed to avoid errors.

I've just completed an automatic program that both reports all your
font true PostScript fontnames along with a list of those that got
substituted. I hope to post it shortly. Your help in testing and extending
the main 4700 font directory is needed.

So, what software do I actually use?

I overwhelmingly prefer to do all my page layout, math studies, and
related research in raw PostScript, using nothing but plain old
Wordpad and sometimes helped along by plain old Paint.

Raw Postscript code is sent to either the Distiller in Acrobat XI or
GhostScript, being sure to include any code sent to Disiller being run
from the command line with a -F trailer to allow disk access.

I am really big on image postprocessing for our eBay use and have
created several custom programs that you can access at no charge
These include our Architect's Perspective, the Self Vignetting
Auto bakgrounder, the Bitmap Typewriter, and our Web friendly
PostScript Colors.

Nikon to Windows seems be be handled automatically by the PC.

Web maint is handled largely by a Dreamweaver rental.

I use Fatcow as our ISP accessed via Chrome, Thunderbird, or
Filezilla. I prefer an ancient HP scanner that is no longer
Windows 10 supported, so I use VuScan X64 here. My
preferred picture editor is ImageViewer/32.

An interesting collection of pv panel pricing info can be found
here. In general, utility grade panel pricing is at 46 cents per
per peak panel watt and is dropping at ten percent per year
or more.

For true long term renewability and sustainability a quarter
per peak panel watt is needed. Thus, we are presently half
way there and ridiculously closer than we ever were before.

Much more here.

Another approach to backing up things you feel are important
is to post them to independent and archival web resources.

The obvious first choice is Wikipedia, but you have to get
sneaky to work around their "No original research" restriction.
The key can often be major mainstream media coverage.

I've put lots of stuff up on Wesrcch and it has generated a
quarter million hits to date. But this resource seems to have
somewhat missed reaching critical mass just yet.

Another web resource that seems to be going gangbusters
is ResearchGate. I have yet to participate here, but it is
very high on my priorities. They prefer you have an .edu
affiliation, but there are workarounds if you are really a
legitimate independent researcher.

Much of our Bajada Hanging Canal reserach remains unique
to my website, so I've given backup copies to a number of
leading archaeologists for archival storage. Let me know if
you would like a set of these.

I definitely would like to find additional web homes for my
Magic Sinewaves and the Magic Sinewave Calculator.
ResearchGate would be an obvious first choice.

And I have been negotiating with American Radio History
to make many of my early tutorials and construction projects
separately available.

Some very significant developments in understanding and
controlling photosynthesis appear in the latest issue of
Nature.

Managed to blow up a hard drive that set things a little
back here. The key rule, of course, is that no matter how
often you back things up, it is not nearly enough.

Most of it seems recoverable, but several projects have
to be temporarily on hold. And much of the routine stuff
around here is now awkward or tedious.

Our basic approach to backup is to use Fatcow as our
web provider and local resources for our research and
whatever. And to ( in theory ) exchange backups at
least once a month.

Present approach is triple pronged, using a backup recovery
service, a temporary laptop, and a new tower pc.

In these days of ultra cheap thumb drives, backup is
no longer the hassle it once was. As I may have mentioned
a time or two before, we should outright skip the terabyte
revolution and move directly onto the petabyte one.

One of the most infuriating features of Dreamweaver is that, if you so
much as think about looking at it sideways, the page properties panel
will vanish without a trace. This panel is essential for editing as it
controls links, styles, indents, and such.

One top secret recovery method is to use Control-F3.

The latest Dreamweaver versions get rented by the month or
year instead of owned outright. Free seven day samples are
usually provided on request.

There apparently still is a strange bug remaining from way back
when: If you copy the below date bar, one of the three dates
will trash two or three characters. Not sure why this happens or
who it applies to when. The bug survived moving to the cloud.

Field verified the continuance of the Sand Canal and its possible
pair of "maybe" branches. This appears to be the westernmost
known prehistoric hanging bajada canal and possibly is six miles
long, not counting the pair of north trending branches.

The newly verified portion is near N 32.82577 W 109.93365 and
is easy to reach both by desert friendly vehicle and on foot.
The route appears superbly engineered and well preserved.
This portion seems "regular" rather than "hanging". The
route is surprisingly obvious on Acme Mapper.

Much of the projected route is still unverified and you are
welcome to help with the exploration. The projected start is
somewhere around N 32.81743 W 109.94330 with some
unverified bits and pieces near N 32.83024 W 109.92712

Finding out which Distiller Fonts have been substituted can
end up fairly simple.

There is a Distiller dictionary called the Font Directory.
Regardless of the number of available fonts, this starts
out empty and fills as fonts are actually used and optionally
modified as any unpermitted fonts are substituted.

There is a Boolean flag called DistillerFauxFont in
each font placed in the Font Directory. Calling
currentfont /DistillerFauxFont get will return a true
if a font has been substituted.

This can then be used to append a suitable comment
to your font listing.

There does seem to be a curious gotcha: DistillerFauxFont
seems to always (?) be true, but only sometimes is
present. Thus you have to use known to avoid errors.

I'll try to post an example shortly.

The Barbie Index is a new method of measuring math
understanding and competence.

Ferinstance, an individual with a BI of 0.7 would have
seventy percent of the math capabilities of a Barbie doll. 

More math stuff here.

The meanings of "normally open" and "normally closed"
are exact opposites, depending on whether you are talking
electrically or pneumatically.

A normally open switch or relay contact has a gap that DOES 
NOT conduct electricity or signals or whatever. Until such
time as its position is changed or coil power is applied.

A normally open valve DOES allow a liquid or gas flow
from input to output. Until such time as its position is
changed or coil power is applied.

Valves are often further complicated in that if liquid
stays stuck in a pipe, nothing much happens. Thus,
three way, four way, and even five way valving is
more the norm. In which you either provide air or
oil or else let it drain off or return somewhere else.

The "water powered car" continues to run rampant on the
web. Overpriced kits are now available that let you conclusively
prove the bogosity to yourself beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Here's a summary of why the concept is not even wrong...

1. What part of "Gross and Egregious Fraud" don't you
     understand?

2. A fundamental thermodynamic principle called exergy
    absolutely GUARANTEES that hydrogen produced from
    high value grid, pv, or alternator electricity flat out ain't
    gonna happen. For the simple reason that a kilowatt hour
    of electricity is ridiculously more valuable than a kilowatt
    hour of unstored hydrogen gas. 

3. There are EIS or Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy
    instruments readily available. These "run the experiment"
    many millions of times daily with uniformly negative results.

4. The resonant frequency of water is ONE MILLION TIMES
    higher than proponents claim, applies only to water vapor,
    and is not in any manner overunity.

5. Stainless steel is wildly inappropriate for hydrogen production
    devices because of the hydrogen overpotential of iron. and
    because of its low energy and low area passivated surface. 
    Special Platinized Platinum Black normally is required for 
    efficient devices and demands careful repeated renewing.

6. Because of Faraday's Law, only the Fourier Series direct current
    term of any complex pulse waveform can contribute to electrolysis.
    High frequency ac components primarily create bunches of waste 
    heat and inefficiency. 

7. It is trivially easy to mis measure the energy in pulse waveforms.
    So much so that this is Beginning EE Student Blunder 001-A.
    Such measurement is almost always ridiculously low.

8. It is similarly trivially easy to mis measure that actual dry
    STP hydrogen content in any vapor. Such measurement is 
   almost always ridiculously high. 

9. Surprisingly, electrolysis can in fact be up to one sixth endothermic
    and can produce "runs cool" effects. But such operation only can
    happen at very low and unamortizable production rates. 

Curiously, the Ohio trial court fraud proceedings have never been 
transcribed, owing to admin costs and a near total lack of demand.

Additional details of my own appear here and here and here. 
Two useful third party resources are found here and here.

The latest PV pricing stats for October are in and once
again show ongoing decreases for some sources, and
now dropping somewhat to a best of 44 cents per peak panel 
watt minimum.

The projected trend for the year for the best price is about
nine percent down.

Note that somewhere around twenty five cents per peak panel 
watt is demanded for true net energy renewability and sustainability.
The math behind this can be found here.

And much more here.

Added a classic link to our early Paleomagnetism and
Archaeomagnetism paper. Not sure why this vanished
somewhere along the way.

More recently, this and our Thermoluminescence paper
were used as reconstruction examples for restoration
of classic papers using our Gonzo Utilities.

Added a few new natural arch entries to our Gila Valley
Day Hikes. Plus a link to the Natural Arch and Bridge
Society.

Many early Hugo Gernsback publications are newly available
free at https://www.americanradiohistory.com/ Of particular interest
are early issues of Science and Invention

Uh, there's still a detail or two to be worked out in
creating your own display of Distiller substituted
fonts.

A demo of what your results are supposed to look
for can be found here. But I have yet to find several
key distiller parameters.

Instead, start with this file and create a log file. Then
heavily edit the part of the log file that tells you which
files were not found, converting them into a list of
substituted fonts. Then use this result list to create the
second column display that shows which fonts have been
substituted.

It turns out there are very simple flags in Distiller called
/DistillerFauxFont and /FauxFontID and others that should
make it trivial to flag any substituted font display, only I
have not yet discovered exactly to use them.

Your suggestions welcome.

Uploaded a new demo of our PSFontnameFinders that can
give you the correct PS filenames of most of your available
fonts as well as identifying which fonts have been substituted
by Distiller. Useful results will have to involve your own new
data.

Sourcecode can be fond here, which you will have to play around
with by heavily text editing a previous .log file to extract a
/FoundFonts [ /f1xname /f2xname....]  array and a similar
/SubstitutedFonts1 [ /f1xname /f2xname....]  array. At present,
the latter needs converted to a bogus "known searchable"
dictionary by using...

/SubstitutedFonts1Dict << SubstitutedFonts1 { 1 } forall >> store

======================================

This new code points out several non obvious font substitution
features that likely have to be dealt with. The present code
searched a data base of 5765 possible valid PS fontnames,
extracting 2048 of them as locally reachable and demanding
that 1656 of them be multi master substituted.

Thus, over three quarters of the fonts will be MM substituted!
and this would be even worse if you were not embedding
TrueType fonts. Without TT embedding, almost all Distiller
fonts in this example would get MM substituted!

Depending on the chosen font, MM substitution can range
from trivial to really bad to mesmerizingly awful. See Hobo
or Revue as midrange problem examples. And, since "no
vibes" is by and of itself a major vibe, the remaining fonts to
me all seem rather dumpy, alarmingly similar, and uninspiring.

Several workaround come to find. First, be sure to use the
embed TT fonts option. But note that because of quadratic
vs cubic spline issues and others, TT fonts are generally
not as sophisticated as genuine PostScript ones.

Secondly, squeaking by with 800 or so properly embedded "real"
fonts might not end up all that bad.

Thirdly, you can try using one of the online ---> .pfa conversions.
Some of these may or may not work. And may or may not
involve virus and IP rights issues.

Fourthly, you can try substituting free online fonts with sort of
similar names. Or in related offerings.

And finally, you can actually buy a font that is fully Distiller
embeddable. Just be sure that IP rights permit distiller
embedding without substitution..

Two Distiller features include the ability to embed
fonts and to optionally substitute fonts in any generated
PDF document. Per details here and elsewhere. Parts or
all the embedded fonts get "towed along" in a somewhat
longer document so that your end user does not need to
personally own or access your target files.

Adobe forces font substitution on you from multiple master
fonts if your target font has IP rights issues, forbidden
access flags, non standard coding, odd glyphs, or whatever.

The big gotcha with this is that some fonts will substitute
beautifully, while others will significantly lose their "vibes",
while yet others will end up totally illegible. Revue and Hobo
are two examples that get done in rather badly. Most of the
substituted fonts end up looking pretty much the same and
clearly lack their original distinct vibes.

You can find out which fonts have been substituted and how
much damage they have done to the intended original by
viewing the companion .log file generated during the
fontname distilling. Alternately, you can go to Acrobat
and then select File -> Properties -> Fonts.

If you really need the vibes of a particular font, make sure
that it will properly embed without substitution.

Somebody asked me about the "Smokey the Bear" font.

Apparently it originally existed only in printed documents
where it could be hand copied in larger sizes.

But the Brody font is a fairly good match.

Made some further improvements in our PostScript
Exact fontname finder. Find the sourcecode ( which
you send to Distiller ) here, a results sampler here,
and a results log file here.

Plus an ongoing and expanding PostScript filename
directory. Improvements include embedding many
TrueType fonts.

Your help in testing, expanding, and improving these
files is needed.

A companion .log file gets generated any time you use
our PostScript Fontname Finder. Buried in the log file is
all sorts of interesting stuff, some of which may be
misleading.

If you read your output file ( or this sample ) and
then go to Acrobat -> File -> Properties -> Font,
it is easy to reach the astounding conclusion that
over 2/3 of the input fonts get converted to the
Multimaster File format, nearly always forcing
unwanted negligible through mild through
devastating chances in the letterforms and vibes.

But this may be a misleading artifact of our
"find the fontname" algorithms. Firstoff,
this presumably is something remotely near
an average of all fonts. Since it is easy to
conclude that all major size, weight, and
slantiness in any font family would all mostly
need or not need MM conversion, then
the number of conversion font families
would ( WAG ) be only one quarter (?)
of the total number of fonts involved.

Further, there are obviously more popular
and lesser used fonts. Checking these would
likely put the Distiller forced conversions further
down. Especially when there are near identical
appearing Adobe and Microsoft font versions.

You can find out what a font is supposed to look
like by most any of these resources.

One reader suggested using an online ---> .PFA
converter. But be sure to check the skill level
of the converter to make sure the vibes are what
you wanted.

Another route, of course, is to actually buy and
pay for a font. Be sure to get it in writing that
the font is both partially and fully embeddable
in a Distiller generated document without
forced format conversions or IP issues.

Getting Distiller to embed open type fonts should be
possible, given...

<< /CompatibilityLevel 1.6 >> setdistillerparams
<</EmbedOpenType true>> setdistillerparams
<</NeverEmbed [ ] >> setdistillerparams

..but it is not working. I may have missed a key detail.

What am I doing wrong?

Once again expanded and updated our Gila Valley 
Dayhikes page. We are now up to 469 main entries,
most of which now include GPS location links. 

Also added this link to hiking projects that can let
you contribute to world class research. 

Please email me with anything I missed or that needs 
further updauh oopsting.

Greatly expanded and improved our PostScript Fontname
finder, but it still needs your help and input.

Presently, there are some 5747 entries on the Master
PostScript Fontname list. While this is only a drop in
the bucket, it likely includes the majority of fonts actually
used. And should give you a rich field of availability.

You can generate your own list of the tricky-to-find
exact PostScript filenames along with their actual
embedded appearances by sending this sourcecode
to Distiller.

While I mostly use Stone, Revue, Courier, and
Helvetica/Arial, I was absolutely astounded to
find out that I had over 2016 embeddable Postscript
fonts immediately available.

Yeah, a lot of these do include font substitution as
they were transfers from non-Adobe sources. But
the substitutions are often quite good unless the
base font has some unusual vibes. When the match
is not that great, consider going to an Adobe
original instead.

A reminder that your display will show the exact
PostScript filename and the exact appearance
( even if substituted ) your viewers will observe.

Your help is still needed in correcting typos and
layout, along with further expanding the master
list. Surprisingly, the processing time remains
just under a few tens of seconds. Despite finding
which fonts are available by trying all of them.

Sadly, we still are not quite GhostScript compatible.
Please email me with your fixes.

It seems we have a new $4 high performance coin
sized computer called the VoCore 2 Light.

With comments here.

There probably is no longer any point in charging
for computers as they can now be given away as
ad promotions instead.

Uh, Oops.

I seem to have lost a historical canal in rough brush
somewhere around N 32.78087 W 109.77888

This was a short canal with concrete headgates
obviously used to switch between two larger
somewhat modern reservoirs. I forgot to photograph
and GPS it last go around.

But, once you got past the concrete parts, the
rest of the canal appears to be built to prehistoric
standards. And it is newly right in the projected
path of the prehistoric Freeman Canal route.

And significantly east of historic pipeline
fragments.

More on similar stuff here.

Yeah, I remain fascinated by fonts. They sure have come
a long way in a big hurry.

Originally, you had two cases full of lead. The upper case
held the capital letters, and the lower case the small letters.

At one time, fonts were insanely expensive and each was
a single size and weight and slantiness. Many "headliner"
machines were available with phonograph disk-like units
for the individual fonts. And Letraset and others would
sell you transfer letters that promptly went stale or missed
a few critical vowels.

I guess a point could be made that the TV Typewriter included
the first personal computer font. One font, Single weight, single
sized, and, of course, upper case only. A 6x8 dot matrix holding
5x7 characters. That could only represent a piddling 34,359,738,368
different characters.

Other earlier projects here.

My best guess is that there are many thousands of CCC
water spreaders in the area. Which, except for their make-work
aspects, seemed to me to be totally worthless boondoggles that
served no physical purpose whatsoever.

The latest large and dense collection I stumbled upon are
somewhat south of the rarely visited and seldom explored
Lamb Tank.

I generally avoid using flash for our eBay photos because
of the shading and hot spots it creates. Preferring instead
to use outside diffuse light shade.

But here is a difficult instance where flash seemed essential
to "punch through" for the deep internal illumination.

Quite a bid of rework was needed. As was a double exposure
to brighten the strobe and get rid of speckle and hot spots.

Consulting services and training available.

Now that our PostScript Filename Snooper is nearly
complete, you may want to add an internal comment
copy of the exact fonts you presently have available
to our Bitmap Typewriter.

Generally, the exact font shapes in the BMT do not
matter all that much due to their usual small size.

More often than not, I use an ArialRoundedMT-Bold
or a Verdana-Bold with the BMT. Recently I needed
a Microgamma-BoldExtended Font to fake a Casio
trademark, but since only five characters were involved,
I built it up by scratch.

More on the Bitmap Typewriter here. And on the
PostScript Name Snooper here.

An interesting avian collection of the usual suspects at the
Reay Lane Wetlands  ( aka the Thatcher Sewer Ponds ) can
be found here. A recently constructed viewing tower makes
for simplified photography.

Our classiest local bird is the Great Blue Heron. 

While the Huachuchas and Chiricahuas are pretty much theif you are
top birding areas in the state, local sites of interest often
include those on this list..

If you do go birding in the Huachuchas, be sure to watch out for
the extremely rare white throated aerostat.

The long awaited reopening of a local restaurant may have been
marred somewhat by its new signature dish being a fried bologna
sandwich.

If you want it to, the Distiller in Acrobat will attempt to
embed partial or complete fonts in your final PDF document.

While this makes your delivery file somewhat longer, it
guarantees that your viewer will see exactly the shapes
and forms that you intended.

Even if those fonts are not available on your viewer's
host device!

Not all fonts are embeddable, especially those that
originally were in non-Adobe file formats. Or some
fonts that may have an IP rights issue.

Any unavailable font gets substituted by Courier.
Some available fonts may get substituted by a
new font that tries to carefully approximates the
size, weight, and slantosity.

The presence of substitutions can be found by
reading the companion .log file generated
during distillation.

This substitution often works quite good, as this
mix of real and substituted fonts shows us.
Shown are the actual formats your user will view.

Sourcecode to find your own PostScript filenames
can be found here. Simply send this file to Distiller.
Sorry, but the present code is not GhostScript
friendly. Please email me your patches. And
any corrections, or master PS Filename List
additions.

But certain fonts ( such as Hobo or Revue ) will
dramatically change during any substitution.
Especially those that offer weird symbols rather
than stock alphabets. For these, genuine Adobe
PostScript fonts are a must if you feel the vibes
or identities must be preserved.

Fill justification may sometimes be altered by a
font substitution. But its need is largely gone with
many newer web and ap formats.

And, while we are clearing up loose ends, they just may
have found Emelia Earhart. Per details here and here.

The cause of the original SETI "Wow!" signal may have
at long last been found. It turns out there were a pair
of then undiscovered comets directly on the signal
path that may have generated a huge hydrogen reflective
path.

More details here. The culprits are now known as
266P/Christensen and P/2008 Y2 (Gibbs) .

Meanwhile, all is not lost as a bunch of new "Wow"
candidates have been newly discovered. With some
ongoing comments here.

Plans are underfoot for a significant Archaeological Conference
centered on Safford's Bajada Hanging Canals the weekend
of December 10th through 12th.

The "usual suspects" in the way of big time archaeologists
are expected to attend. You are welcome to join them.

Please email me for further details.

Adobe recently added a CID File Format that can end up
tricky to use in your own raw PostScript coding.

The format allows many more than 256 characters and is
most suitable for Pacific Rim glyphs. CID use is not
especially recommended if a 256 character older font
can be used instead.

A CID fontname might look something like...

    /AdobeFanHeitiStd-Bold-Adobe-CNS1-0

  ... with the additional hyphenations selecting which
limited portion of the total available glyphs to use.

I am not yet sure exactly how to properly code
a CID font. Miscoding will let PostScript recognize
the font, but substitute most characters as X boxes.

Just added some more TrueType and other Windows fonts to
our PostScript font name finder.

To use, simply send a copy of
https://www.tinaja.com/psutils/psfontnamesnooper1.psl to
Acrobat's Distiller. And it will attempt to find the exact
PostScript fontnames and appearance of many ( and
possibly most ) of the surprisingly high number of
PS usable fonts you likely currently have available.

A sample of somebody elses' results can be found at
https://www.tinaja.com/psutils/psfontnamesnooper1.pdf

The master fontname search directory can be found at
https://www.tinaja.com/psFontnames.psl At present, there
are nearly 4000 entries in this candidate directory.

Sorry, this s a Distiller ap that still has GhostScript issues.

Your help in expanding the directory is urgently needed.

Thought I'd start a list of eBay insider infuriations...

eBay forces an outrageously unwanted
prechecked "ship foreign" box on you.
ALWAYS stomp on this lousy feature!

Buyer feedback is sharply down, making
getting better star ratings very difficult.

The leap from a green star to the gold
shooting star always was incredibly
high. Now it is largely impossible.

Repeated use of Sell Similar creates
bunches of code bloat, caused mostly
by force feeding of unwanted large type.

Attempting to write over large type
with a smaller font does NOT remove
the large type, which is near certain
to return to haunt you later in annoying
ways .

All a writeover does is insert a new type
change command inside the oversize one.

Instead, create one or more stock templates
that are free of both bloat and oversize text.

The rules on image borders are much too
strict. Design related vignettes should be
clearly permitted.

eBay rules on minimum orders, (such as
"minimum order four packets" ) are much
too restrictive and way too awkward..

There is a Catch 22 in ratings. If you do not
offer one day shipping, you are penalized.
If an occasional one day shipping delay is missed,
you are also personalized. A lose lose situation.

Revised and updated our directory of local springs and
tanks and related resources.

This has become more of an "aquatic resources"
directory than a listing of springs and artesian sources.

It remains woefully incomplete, and I am not too sure
exactly where it is headed.

Just revised, expanded, and improved our PostScript fontname
finder.

To use, simply send a copy of
https://www.tinaja.com/psutils/psfontnamesnooper1.psl to
Acrobat's Distiller. And it will attempt to find the exact
PostScript fontnames and appearances of many ( and
possibly most ) of the fonts you currently have available.

A sample of somebody elses' results can be found at
https://www.tinaja.com/psutils/psfontnamesnooper1.pdf

The master fontname search directory can be found at
https://www.tinaja.com/psFontnames.psl At present, there
are nearly 4000 entries in this candidate directory.

Your help in expanding the directory is urgently needed.

The algorithm works by simply trying to use every
known directory based PostScript font name and
seeing which do  or do not get substituted. Amazingly,
the processing time is just over ten seconds.

Sorry, but this code is presently intended for Acrobat
Distiller only. GhostScript substitutes its fonts in
a different and presently incompatible manner. Your
help in solving GhostScript compatibility is needed.

Managed to field check some possible branches of the
Sand Tank Prehistoric Canal.

Frustratingly, the evidence is fairly weak and the best
that can be said so far is that the negative evidence
to date seems significantly less than compelling.

On the plus side, the candidate seems to start as
a branch from a known valid canal and eventually
splits at a distinct wye. It is quite long, quite linear,
and has exactly the correct slope. Width is remarkably
constant and consistent with known canal portions.

The sandy terrain seems very unfavorable to canal
preservation and there seems to be no evidence
of canal shoulders. Or, for that matter, any
other rock manipulation. Also absent are
any so far observable potsherds or lithics.

I still think this is a canal, but solid proof does
remain ambiguous at best.

Earlier Sand Canal info here. And much more here.

With sharply improved speeds in computers and the
beginnings of the memory "Petabyte Revolution" in
full swing, a mathematical stunt of "Throw another
million calculations at it" now becomes eminently
viable.

Or if a million calculations won't hack it, go for
ten million or a hundred million. Or maybe even
a great heaping bunch. No matter, since memory
is now free and speed is utterly awesome. 

This concept has been the basis of many of
our projects here.

One early implementation was the Fractal Fern,
which used zillions of calculations to manipulate
a mere 24 data points. Sourcecode is buried here.

Over and over again tireless calculations, both
in PostScript and JavaScript were the key
to eventually proving our Magic Sinewaves
and our blinding speed Magic Sinewave Calculator.

Throwing zillions of calculations at any electromagnetic
fields problem dramatically simplified the results,
as shown here and here.

In fact, field solutions became so fast and simple
that they even could be used in PostScript image
vignetting borders. With the key tool here.

With enough calculations, bitmaps can be modified
on an individual pixel by pixel basic. With our
examples here, here, here, and here.

Another recent example is our Marbelous Stacks
of Distorted Pancakes. Which, besides being of
interest to scrapbookers, gives us a whole new
method of making computer stuff look like it
was NOT done on a computer. Replacing
self-similarity with self-UNsimilarity.

Should you still care about code length, these utterly
amazing images can be done with a mere few hundred
bytes.

But the latest stunt involves finding the tricky
and painful location of PostScript font names.
Which you get around by throwing each and
every possible PS fontname to Distiller and see
which, if any, do NOT generate an error message.

Amazingly, this technique only takes ten seconds
or so. With sourcecode here, an earlier demo here,
and the list itself here.

One possible route to finding PostScript font names
is to take a PDF version of the file having proper
font appearance, and then using Acrobat to save
as Other > More options > Encapsulated PostScript
or as > PostScript.

The raw PostScript file can then be plaintext viewed
in Word or whoever to see how the target fonts
were actually embedded.

Ferinstance, an embedded font might show up as
/OIPOSL+BookAntiqua which suggests that
the original PostScript fontname was /BookAntigua.

This seems to work quite well with traditional format
PostScript fonts. But may not work at all on other
font formats. Or on those formats where embedding
is not permitted.

Acrobat's watermarking process gives a tantalizing
list of presently installed font candidates. But so
far, I cannot seem to access the more intriguing ones.

Please enail me with any valid PostScript font name
you can find from any source that is missing from
https://www.tinaja.com/psFontnames.psl

My intent in yesterday's font filename snooper was to
create a Gonzo Utilities based ap for Acrobat Distiller.

The code does not seem to work properly on the version
of GhostScript that I have installed.

First, my version of GhostScript only seems to display
the first of many pages.

Second, GhostScript seems to substitute fonts other
than Courier, meaning that there are more results
but that many of those results are totally useless
in that they destroy the intended shape and "vibes"
of the target font.

As near as I can tell, Distiller DOES substitute
Courier as a FontName in currentfont, while GhostScript
DOES NOT. A search on /Courier is the key to the
present algorithm working properly.

Searching on any change rather than on "Courier"
does not help GhostScript any.

Apparently, GhostScript may substitute various
flavors of Helvetica to more closely match the
weights and slantiness of the missing fonts.

Your attention to gaining GhostScript compatibility
would be greatly appreciated. Please report your results.

Our new PostScript font filename snooper is ready for your
testing.

A demo is at
        https://www.tinaja.com/psutils/psfontnamesnooper1.pdf

The sourcecode is at
       https://www.tinaja.com/psutils/psfontnamesnooper1.psl

Simply send this psl file to Acrobat's Distiller and it will
generate a list of all ( or at least try for nearly all ) of your
Available PostScript font correct filenames, along with
a display of their appearance.

The ongoing master PostScript filename directory can
be found at https://www.tinaja.com/psFontnames.psl

Note that the demo will be of someone else's font
availability. You have to send the .psl sourcecode
to Distiller to find out the resources on your own machine.

Note also that the directory is a work in progress.
Pasting the latest version into the sourcecode should
improve the odds of finding everything. At present,
the directory has nearly 3000 names, with another
1500 or so shortly to be added.

Lists of fontname hits and misses, counts, and other
useful info, can be found in the output log file.

Please report any name omissions or errors to
don@tinaja.com

Ongoing PostScript info and projects here and here.
And some GhostScript notes here and here, and here.

I need your help on a project.

Here is the start of what should eventually become a
master list of all known PostScript fontnames. So
far, there are nearly 3000 entries.

This should make finding otherwise hard to find  
names a lot simpler and straightforward, besides
greatly easing your own PostScript programming.

An upcoming ( working but sort of not quite done )
program needs this to let you scan a PC for all
available currently linked PostScript fonts. And
show their exact appearance.

Would you please...

1. Report any typos or alphabetizing issues

2. Make sure ALL your favorite PS fonts are
    present and working.

3. Report any other PS fonts not yet listed.

4. Tell me why Batang won't correctly list.

As with most of my content, the results will be made
freely available and open source.

Oh yes. See if you can find the Easter egg! This one
could be a most challenging font programming project.

"Prehistoric Bajada Hanging Canals" are the subject of Thursday
November 3rd Free BLM Brown Bag Talk.

BLM welcomes back local researcher and author Don Lancaster
to a lunchtime brown bag lecture on the area's prehistoric
"hanging" bajada canals. Thursday November 3rd at noon in the
BLM conference room at 711 14th Avenue in Safford, Arizona.

Bring your own brown bag lunch and a drink.

Portions of these local spectacularly engineered world class
irrigation structures were literally "hung" on the sheer edges
of steep sided remnant bajada mesas. The apparently brilliant
purpose of hanging seemed to be to make the canal slope independent
of local terrain, and was likely done for exceptional construction energy
efficiency.

To date, some 75 (!) of these canals have been newly identified and their
total length now exceeds 130 miles. In the Southwest, these appear to be
unique to Mount Graham, although a very few others are known worldwide.

Much more on the canals can be previewed at
https://www.tinaja.com/tinsamp1.shtml

An optional guided tour of BLM's Sand Canal might take place later in
the afternoon. This would be an easy hike of less than one mile
in Pima's Cottonwood Wash area and accessible by most any desert friendly
vehicle. Be sure to wear appropriate footwear, a hat, and bring a drink.

More details on Sand Canal appear at
https://www.tinaja.com/canal/field_notes/sandcan1fn.pdf

For further help, contact Don Lancaster at (928) 428 4073
or don@tinaja.com

The latest PV pricing stats for September are in and once
again show some mild decreases for some sources, and
now dropping slightly to a best of 47 cents per peak panel 
watt minimum.

The projected trend for the year for the best price is only
five percent down.

Note that somewhere around twenty five cents per peak panel 
watt is demanded for true net energy renewability and sustainability.
The math behind this can be found here.

And much more here.

Moore's Law may be in shambles.

A new approach to transistors can be done at ONE NANOMETER!
One fifth the size and one twenty firth the area of today's best.

See the report here, or MoS2 transistors with 1-nanometer
gate lengths in Science vol 354 Issue 6306 7 October 2016.

A repeat of a tip to greatly ease entering eBay live links:

Copy a short existing link to your intended location.
Then enter a long string of forward slashes.

Switch to the HTML mode and find the easily
recognized slashes. Paste in the new URL.

Go back to Standard and correct the description.
Then erase the slashes.

Evidence is accumulating for a ninth planet.

If real, it is huge, ridiculously far out in an
instance orbit, but may be tilting and even
wobbling the sun.

The all time classic reference for WWII and later radar
developments was ( and remains ) The MIT Radlab Series.

All 28 volumes of which can now be found free online here.

While much of the content now borders on quaint, Ridenour's
volume one on Radar System Engineering remains
valid and viable to this day.

Many thanks to Jeff Duntemann for his recent link to our
website. Jeff's own site can be found here.

Jeff recently returned to Arizona. His website is big on
bleeding edge software development, science fiction,
odd philosophies, and traditional hobbyist electronics.

A reminder about our classic Energy Fundamentals and
More Energy Fundamentals papers.

With bunches more on similar topics here.

Hints about some new developments in Class D audio
amplifiers can be found here. These are switchmode
devices that can offer extreme efficiency. As well
as dramatically reducing heatsink issues.

The latest developments seem to involve adding
some spread spectrum techniques that dramatically
reduce filtering needs.

I did a very early story on similar techniques long
ago.

It was interesting at the time the number of vehement
"this could not possibly work" hate mail the story
generated.

But you could easily prove it worked simply by taking
any then current switchmode power supply and twisting
the voltage knob in a sinusoidal manner.

More classic reprints here.

Thought I would summarize some of our eBay selling
guidelines...

Always seek out a 30:1 or higher SBR
Sell Buy Ratio.

Such high SBR's are easily achieved
with "contents of shelf" and "contents" of
room" online auctions.

Never pay more than 67 cents for a $20
sale.

Aim for a 28 day cashout and a 15 month
total sellout.

Absolutely NO foreign sales or shipments!

The minimum profitable eBay sale is $24.73.

Consignment sales have a ludicrously low SBR.

Don't sell anything you cannot hold extended
at arm's length.

Try to end up with a final sales price of
one sixth of the new list price.

Spend at least an hour in your image postprep
Suitable tools can be found here, here, here,
here, and here.

Accept Paypal only.

A gross sale of $100 per day could approach a
gross yearly $35,000.00. But only with a SBR
approaching 30:1.

A full time eBay venture demands something
like 800 to 1000 continuous listings.

Seek out pricing info from other eBay sellers
as well as here, here, and here.

Ship via USPS priority mail when and
where possible.

Sell nothing that is not in your hot little
hands, properly cleaned, and well inventoried.

Absolutely NO dropshitting anyplace, anytime.

Set the first few listings somewhat high,
dropping to a reasonable price later.

Very few eBay sales exceed $99.73.

Twice a year, evaluate and throw away
anything abysmally nonselling.

Hire an employee only when the daily
shipments consistently exceed their height.

Know exactly where each and every
item is located at all times.

Store listed and unlisted items in distinct
and separate areas.

Keep an accurate account of how many
items remain offerable at all times.

Hand label each package well before putting
the real label on to avoid mixups.

Revise your description on each relist
as to remaining quantity and condition.

Do not skimp on packing materials, time,
or labor.

If you have a pile of near identical items,
rebuild then into fewer and better ones.

Keep most inventory plastic wrapped.

Attach internal "hurricane names" to any
easily confused items. Alice, Boris, Claudia...

List items as soon as possible after they are
acquired. Do not let unlisted items pile up.

Offer discounts such a "buy 2 get 3" aimed
at raising the per-order bottom line.

Do not use shipping costs as a profit center.

Give a full refund on the least hint of any
unhappiness. Often without return. Then
be sure to block the uncustomer.

Keep fixed future expenses or any
ongoing commitments at a minimum.

Bunches more here. And ongoing hints here.

Just uploaded the missing homepage link to our
"Marbelous Stacks of Distorted Pancakes"
resource page.

Besides being of interest to scrapbookers, this new
technique once and for all solves the problem of
how stuff done on a computer can literally end up
looking like it was NOT done on a computer!

Sort of the exact opposite of Fractal self-similiarity.
We might call the technique "self-UNsimilarity:.

Amazingly, these patterns can be done in as
few as several hundred bytes. Although nobody
seems to care much about code bloat anymore.

The next time you get an annoying phone call from
someone claiming to be a "volunteer for Senator
Clueless Foghorn" or whatever, try this tactic..

"YES! I think I just found your problem! Thank you!"

And then hang up.

Just uploaded what should be the start of a master open source
list of PostScript font names. These can sometimes be tricky to
find, and your help in adding to the many thousands already present
is sorely needed.

A PostScript font name is a space-free and punctuation-free name
object starting with a forward slash. Trying to guess them from their
real world names can often be tricky.

Some hints: Distiller gets its list of font directories from its
Fonts subdirectories. If you have Illustrator present, fontnames
can be found from internal pulldown links. If you have any PDF file
that has an included and embedded font present on your machine,
you can use Properties/Fonts in Acrobat to read its PS fontname.

And base names appear when you add a watermark to any PDF
file. By adding the watermark and using the above properties
method, you can find the needed underlying PS filename.

A complete visual directory of your available fonts is essential
if you are programming in raw PostScript. Here is one for my
machine with comments on it here. You could also scan the complete
list and see what does not come up as a Courier Substitution on your
machine. More on this eventually.

You could also use the master list as part of a ps guessing game
where you pick likely fontname additions and extensions.

And, oh yeah. Almost forgot. See if you can find the Easter eggs.

Much more on PostScript here.

Here's the latest example of what our Bitmap Typewriter
can do in the way of putting PostScript fonts directly onto
a bitmap at the highest normal resolution and clarity.

The original subject, while quite clean, seemed to have
some sort of a varnish overlay that made flash impossible
and even cloudy outdoor diffuse shade erratic enough
that much of the image needed redone from scratch.

The lettering in particular picked up some mysterious
white speckles that badly needed repair.

This and similar offers here.

Several of you have asked about Bruno. Bruno is the attitude
relaterization facilitator for a major eBay newsgroup. Since
he is very big on multitasking, he also combines this with his
role of being a product durability tester for a major New Jersey
baseball bat manufacturer.

Bruno also does trucking for Norfolk & Waay. Norfolk and
Waay, of course, is the only reputable dropshipper for eBay 
sellers. This week only, they are offering free sample pallets 
( limit five ) with free shipping. From their choice of Neiman 
Marcus, Land's End, Eddie Bauer, or Bruno's Trucking.

Norfolk & Waay in a Kilgore Trout sort of focus are NOT me
and NOT my website. I have no idea who their webmaster is.

The Bruno pallets may occasionally include an odd body part or
two. Naturally, this is normal and expected.

More details here.

It sure would be nice to use our work-in-progress Master
PostScript Fontname List to instantly tell you what fonts
you have presently linked and available on your machine.
Along, of course, with a sample printout.

Typically, you should be able to do a currentfont
/FontName get and search on Courier to see if a
substitution took place. I have some code on this
but it is not quite fully debugged.

Remember that you have to run Distiller from the command line
and append a /F if you need to read or write disk files.

All of which I'll temporarily leave as an exercise for
the student unless you crossing palm with silver.

Please email me with any missed fonts on the list.

Added two more long forgotten entries to our all time losers
list, a vehicle miles per gallon meter and a car safety radar.

The MPG meter had trouble with speed sensing, although
the short-every-third-bar stripped motor commutator was
sort of cute. And the flowmeter had serious problems in
those pre fuel injection days. To this day, there does not
seem to be too much demand for real time MPG  reporting.

The radar was based on a reflex klystron, which, surprisingly
we just offered a museum quality one of on eBay. One of the
neat features of X band radar is that the Doppler shifts
should exactly like you would expect them to. Problems
included then outrageous prices of X band stuff and a
monumental lack of consumer interest.

The little known PostScript type operator behaves somewhat
atypically, but can be really useful if a proc ( such as currentoint )
returns two or more flavors of response.

type returns a procedure such as fonttype or dicttype
onto the stack as an executable proc.

The only little surprise is that fonttype or dictype has not
been previously described as a language command. You
have to predefine what you want the proc to do.

The latest PV pricing stats for August are in and once
again show some mild decreases for some sources, and
now dropping slightly to a best of 48 cents per peak panel
watt minimum.

The projected trend for the year for the best price is only
three percent down.

Note that somewhere around twenty five cents per peak panel
watt is demanded for true net energy renewability and sustainability.

More here.

Apparently Discovery Park has discontinued their lecture
series speakers starting back in January 2016.

Mostly because of heavy new commitments in STEM
and elsewhere overtaxing their staff and available time.

As a participant, it sure was fun while it lasted. Most of
my talks remain available on my website. These include...

Energy Fundamentals
PV Panel Intro and Summary
eBay Secrets
Mt. Graham Aerial tramway
Gila Valley Day Hikes
Little known Gila Hikes
Prehistoric Baja Hanging Canals
Prehistoric Baja Hanging Canals Images
Prehistoric Baja Hanging Canals Lecture

And four I would have liked to have done...

Magic Sinewaves
Classic Electronic Project History
Secrets of Technical Innovation
The Wikipedia Story

Updated and improved our PostScript Sampler web page.
Updated and improved our main PostScript web page.

The latter has become somewhat hard to maintain. Some
of its content is sorely dated. Start here instead.

In general, access to Gonzo and visibility of the newest
info has been greatly improved.

An interesting wind tutorial can be found here.
Sadly their maps and charts do not expand properly.

Our Lagrange Bezier curve through four points demo can
be found here. With its sourcecode here.

Additional useful and interesting stuff here and here.

I've long had a Bitmap Typewriter that lets you directly
insert PostScript fonts onto a bitmap. This is especially
useful for eBay image editing and similar restorations.

The resolution is exceptionally high and ends up the
best that can be done short of subpixel techniques. A
recent example can be found here.

I have long needed an internal catalog of my available
PostScript fonts. Which I have newly created here
and have its Gonzo sourcecode for you here.

You can easily access the internal Fontlist and edit
it to create a display of your personally available fonts.

Each array entry consists of the exact PostScript font name
first and its literal string definition second.

Several minor gotchas:

First, you will need a local copy of my Gonzo PostScript
Utilities which you can download here and view in Wordpad.
And find a use tutorial here.

Second, you will have to modify the my_fonts1.psl code
to suite your local redefined Gonzo Utility location.
And will have to modify the internal Fontlist array
data base to match your available resources.

Third, Ghostscript works just fine with Gonzo, but the
Acrobat Distiller has purposely locked you out from
reading or writing disk files.

The workaround is to always run Distiller from the
command line and append a /F to the filename. This
will let you read or write any disk file in any language
from Acrobat's distiller.

Possibly something like this  only all one line...

"C:\Program Files (x86)/Adobe/Acrobat 11.0/
  Acrobat/acrodist.exe" /F run

Fourth, any fonts you do not have installed or do not
have properly linked, or have mistyped the PostScript
font name on will substitute Courier. We saw some
tricks on finding the "real" PostScript font names here.
Be sure to leave any genuine Courier fonts in your data!

Much more on PostScript here. PostScript is a totally
general purpose computing language that, under extreme
and narrow minded tunnel vision restrictions, might even
possibly be able to dirty up otherwise clean sheets of paper.

Consulting services and bitmap remediations available.

Finding out how many fonts you have on your computer and
getting a catalog of what they look like can be trickier
than it sounds. We will see one new solution tomorrow.

In general, there are two different flavors of fonts. In one
stash are the Microsoft and Apple TrueType fonts that
are usually found by way of your Control Panel. These are
fairly easy to access, sample view, and use.

Much better are the Adobe PostScript fonts which
generally offer higher quality, fancier cubic spline design,
and often are easily towed along in PDF documents and
such so that your viewer does not have to otherwise
own or access. This lets all your viewers see exactly
the document appearance you are after.

In general, PostScript fonts are buried hither and  
yon in your computer, and you have to tell Acrobat
Distiller, GhostScript, Illustrator, or your custom
PS code where to look to find them.

For instance, in the Distiller portion of Acrobat,
you will find a Font Locations in Settings that
might list locations such as...

C:\Program Files (x86) Common
Files\Adobe\Fonts\

C:\Program Files\Myfonts_old\

C\windows\Fonts\

C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe
Illustrator CSS\Support Files\Required
Fonts\

If you are writing your own custom PostScript
code ( as I overwhelmingly prefer to do ), one
crucial problem that crops up is finding the exact
PostScript font names. These are very specialized
and non obvious space free name strings that can
end up enormously difficult to second guess.

In general, you can find the name of a font used that
was embedded in an existing PDF document by
getting into Acrobat and going to File/Properties/Fonts
This should give you the exact PostScript font name.
Which must get used precisely as shown.

An online master catalog and sampler of all of the
PostScript font names from all suppliers sure would
sure be useful. Unfortunately, the above stunt does not
seem to allow cut and paste. And screen dumps are painful.

Lots of oddball "free font" tricks can be found here.
And here.

Um, a certain national news anchor may need to revise their
resume somewhat. As they just confused "cannibals" and
"cannabis" in describing an upcoming tasting tour.

More here and here.

There apparently were some scanner recoding errors in
our classic ASCII Encoder reprint. Which now should be
corrected.

Amazingly, some retro folks are newly rebuilding these.

This design was ultra cheap and ultra original but quickly
got obsoleted by MOS LSI ( such as the 2376 ) which
offered far fewer parts, better rollover, and enormously
simplified layout. The latter because it was a recoded
QWERTY arrangement rather than binary.

There was one infuriating bug on the original in which
an occasional extra slash got output. I never got around
to even find the cause, as the design was quickly obsoleted.

But a modern repair with compatible technology and price
would involve generating a narrower delayed keypressed
output. The design of which is saved as an exercise for
the serious student. Hint: Add a 4016 hex Schmitt Trigger.

Many more classic reprints here. And my TV Typewriter
Cookbook here.

Much more than you could possibly ever want to know
about vacuum tube design is available in this free tutorial.

Apparently some enthusiasts are now building their own
vacuum tubes. And, surprise surprise, are finding enormous
problems with glass annealing and achieving high vacuums.

Lots of links here.

And zillions upon zillions of vacuum tube radio schematics
and construction projects can be found in this ever expanding
resource.

But if you really want to pick up all the inevitable classic vacuum
tube hum, noise, distortion, clipping, and nonlinearities, by far the
best way to do so, of course, is with a DSP digital signal processor
emulation.

Shock hazard optional.

Yet another unproven and unchecked Bajada Hanging Canal
potential site can be found here.

This in the area of a mysterious triangle shaped tank. While the
slope and directionality appear favorable, suitable sources
and destination fields are not strongly obvious.

Your help needed on this and other exploration projects.

And other neat stuffs to do can be found here.

The very latest Apple II system software can be newly
and freely downloaded here! And commented on here.

f ProDos 2.4. Conspicuously absent is any USB interface.

Free eBook reprints of some original Apple II docs can
be found here.

Desktop Engineering is a new and free industrial trade
journal that focuses on Santa Claus Machines and
emerging CAD/CAM technologies.

Some apparently significant improvements in solar cell
efficiency can be found here.

Details seem scant, but it seems to involve a concentration
scheme. Meanwhile, the plain old learning curve seems to
be well on track for the quarter per peak panel watt
demanded for true pv renewability and sustainability.

More energy topics here.

The latest scam du jour seems to be trying to arbitrage
by buying on eBay and selling on Amazon while working
out dropshipping so you never have to touch product.

The correct name for this activity is dropshitting, not
dropshipping. And the web seems rife with "haven't got
a clue" get rich quick epsilon minuses.

One more time kiddies:

NEVER sell anything that is not in your hot
little hands.

NEVER sell anything on eBay that you cannot hold
extended at arm's length.

NEVER buy or sell foreign!

NEVER sell anything that you cannot properly clean
and at least minimalist test.

NEVER accept anything but Paypal.

NEVER pay more than a 30:1 SBR sell buy
ratio. Which means absolutely, positively not
more than sixty seven cents product cost for
a $20 ebay sale.

The best sources I have found for 30:1 SBR's and
higher are "contents of shelf" and "contents of
cabinet" web online only auctions from offerings that
either are a sane distance from you. Or lots that are
extremely light, wildly assorted, and in huge quantities.

The second best sources are rural community college
auctions. With links here and here.

Much more here.

The majority of our prehistoric bajada hanging canal projects seem
based on northeast trending Mount Graham perennial streams. Or on
related stream bed springs often at the contact between Precambrian
gneiss to Pleistocene bajada conglomerate..

There also appears to be use of independent springs and related
artesian sources, although these would presently seem to be in a
secondary minority of exploitable resources. Resources that,
while somewhat meager, almost certainly would not have been
ignored in prehistoric times.

Some springs, tanks, and related sources might include.

THE SPRING IN SPRING CANYON - Believed to
be one of the sources of Allen, Robinson, Golf Course,
Freeman, and other prehistoric canals. Postulated but
unproven is a watershed crossing feeder from Frye Creek.
N 32.74532 W 109.84042

FRYE CREEK WATERSHED CROSSOVER - While
still unproven, this link between Frye Creek and
Spring Canyon would seem the most credible way
the other canal routings would make sense. Such
a crossover is proven on the Mud Springs canal.
N 32.74523 W 109.83911

FRYE MESA TANK - Modern forest service diversion
of presumed major prehistoric canal orientation.
N 32.75688 W 109.83480

FRYE RESERVOIR - Modern lake and water supply
project likely prehistorically bypassed by an eastern
and high mesa route because of extreme typography.
N 32.75383 W 109.83400

THATCHER INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TANK -
Apparently modern cattle tank with no obvious
prehistoric evidence yet found.
N 32.81737 W 109.79906

ARTESIA AREA - Numerous artesian wells and hot
springs are in the area. One is believed to be the source for
the Tranquility Canal.
N 32.75906 W 109.73285

DISCOVERY PARK - Seasonal ponds may or may not
include underlying prehistoric field origins. Possible
links to Deadman Canal or TB West Canal.
N 32.79911 W 109.72818

ROPER LAKE - Developed state park fed by modern
Roper Lake Canal believed derived from prehistoric
Marijilda Canal.
N 32.75583 W 109.70487

DANKWORTH POND - Modern recently redeveloped
recreation area site of one time artesian fish farm
possibly derived from prehistoric field destinations.
N 32.72018 W 109.70484

LEBANON RESERVOIR #1 - One of two destination
artificial lakes terminating modern redevelopment of
Marijilda prehistoric canal. Used for modern farm
irrigation and USFS and BLM firefighting.
N 32.73457 W 109.76110

LEBANON RESERVOIR #2 - Second of two destination
artificial lakes terminating modern redevelopment of
Marijilda prehistoric canal. Used for modern farm
irrigation and USFS and BLM firefighting.
N 32.74456 W 109.74641

UPPER DEADMAN TANK - Possible destination for
Deadman East Canal or part of routing for TB West
Canal.
N 32.75864 W 109.77036

DEADMAN MESA TANK - Appear to be historically
derived from the Deadman West Canal. Still in use
to this day.
N 32.75261 W 109.78997

LOWER DEADMAN TANK - Possible destination for
Deadman West Canal or part of routing for unproven
Discovery Park Canal.
N 32.77084 W 109.75139

SHEEP TANK - Possible prehistoric field site along
a larger and often flowing watershed. Evidence of
CCC rework also present.
N 32.77103 W 109.80287

COOK RESERVOIR - Possible destination for the
Tranquility Canal. Likely historic redevelopment.
N 32.77476 W 109.72774

STOWE TANK - Cattle watering impoundment along
the projected route of the Robinson Canal,
N 32.80674 W 109.78552

DALEY HOT ARTESIAN WELL - Recently has been
developed into a private homestead. Highly likely
to have seen prehistoric use.
N 32.79325 W 109.76586

DALEY GOLF COURSE AREA - Numerous ponds here
appear to once had likely artesian or spring courses.
N 32.80202 W 109.77343

RIGGS RESERVOIR - Modern impoundment along the
projected route of the prehistoric Golf Course Canal.
N 32.78419 W 109.77711

NO NAME RESERVOIR - Modern impoundment along
the projected route of the prehistoric Freeman Canal.
N 32.78851 W 109.76835

TRIANGLE TANK - Apparent historic cattle development
has yet to reveal any prehistoric precedents. A suggested
hint of a canal to the south has yet to be explored.
N 32.81812 W 109.77814

BLUE POND - Alternate modern destination for the
prehistoric Freeman Canal. Canal has been historically
modified to switch between Blue and No Name.
N 32.78291 W 109.77368

OXBOW TANK - Historic cattle dirt tank does not appear
to have prehistoric precedents. Topography, sources,
and destinations would also appear unfavorable.
N 32.81740 W 109.79902

PORTER SPRING TANK - Possibly prehistorically fed off the
Deadman North Canal. Near Longview Ruin and numerous
aproned checkdam resources. Also a spring.
N 32.77065 W 109.77795

HAWK HOLLOW TANK - Historic cattle development
is clearly mid route on the Allen prehistoric canal.
Numerous CCC rework projects also present.
N 32.78537 W 109.83275

REAY PONDS - Seasonal ponds behind the Thatcher
Flood Control structure. Evidence of prehistoric
interest seems weak at present.
N 32.82464 W 109.75817

THATCHER SEWER PONDS - Modern construct
is a popular birding area. Very little evidence of
prehistoric interest or use to date.
N 32.86681 W 109.76953

REAY TANKS - Apparently disused collection of
sewage ponds. Restricted area has prehistoric
fields potential.
N 32.81859 W 109.76780

LOWER FRYE CCC PROJECTS - Appear to be
modern cross dam constructs of prehistoric
feeder to Robinson Canal, Golf Course Canal,
and Freeman Canal.
N 32.75783 W 109.82805

MIDDLE FRYE CCC PROJECTS - Appear to be
modern cross dam constructs of prehistoric
feeder to Robinson Canal, Golf Course Canal,
and Freeman Canal.
N 32.75167 W 109.83726

MUD SPRINGS WATERSHED CROSSOVER -
Proven prehistoric major watershed management project
suggests absolute mastery of hydraulic technology. A
second credible crossover is suggested but not yet verified
in Frye Canyon.
N 32.79167 W 109.85398

MYSTERY TANK - Obviously historic mud tank seems to
be using the prehistoric Mud Springs Canal as its one time
exclusive water source.
N 32.82768 W 109.81892

MUD SPRINGS - Developed cattle tank is likely to have
had prehistoric use. The Mud Springs Canal is nearby but
there is no present evidence of a link between the two.
Present corrals to the south suggest underlying fields.
N 32.79829 W 109.84056

GOLF #1 POND - Small and isolated artesian source
seems to be unrelated to nearby Golf Course Canal.
N 32.80259 W 109.78083

GOLF #2 POND - Small and isolated artesian source
seems to be unrelated to nearby Golf Course Canal.
N 32.79578 W 109.78575

BLUE PONDS -- These are directly on the route of
the Freeman Canal and may have once been destination
fields. Historic rework of short canal segments is present.
N 32.78293 W 109.77373

ALLEN RESERVOIR - While possibly fed only by the
prehistoric Allen Canal, presently sparse or dry artesian
sources may have fed this failed but once major lake.
Failure docs can be found here.
N 32.83339 W 109.79372

WEBSTER HILL AREA - Possible artesian sources
might have been more significant during prehistoric
times.
N 32.85038 W 109.78940

THATCHER FLOOD CONTROL - Behind the dam
area appears to have intermittent ponds that may or
may not have origins as prehistoric fields.
N 32.82414 W 109.75947

THATCHER HOT WELL - Artesian source just north
of Gila River was recently dynamited shut in a nudes
versus prudes controversy.
N 32.86678 W 109.74964

WATSON WASH HOT WELL - Artesian source just north
of Gila River was also recently dynamited shut in a nudes
versus prudes controversy.
N 32.90231 W 109.76299

CENTRAL DAM - Only hints remain of once significant
artesian pond and marsh areas. Not clear whether these
are modern flood control artifacts. Area behind the dam
may have been a destination field for the Allen Canal.
N 32.85392 W 109.79716

CENTRAL DUMP - Seasonal ponds may be modern
resulting from remediation or might in fact be
candidate destination fields for the Mud Springs Canal.
N 32.85597 W 109.81528

PIMA DEVELOPMENT - Housing project at site
of one time artesian driven gravel pit.
N 32.90629 W 109.85347

ROGERS RESEVOIR - Large Pima Are impoundment
seems to be in disuse. Prehistoric potential remains
unexplored. Suggestive of an underlying field.
N 32.87890 W 109.84532

BROWN'S TANK - One time fish farming resource
in the Cottonwood Wash area. Prehistoric use
remains little studied.
N 32.85695 W 109.88101

CHATFIELD POND - Apparent historic development
near Pima International Airport has not yet been
explored. Topography would appear somewhat unfavorable
towards prehistoric sources and destination fields.
N 32.84012 W 109.87688

GRANDMA TANK - Large and fairly remote cattle
tank in an area of possible prehistoric fields.
N 32.85313 W 109.81956

CLUFF PONDS AREA - Numerous present and
historic lakes appear to be fed from Ash Creek
and several artesian sources. This is the largest
riparian area north of the Gila.
N 32.81593 W 109.85170

SMITH PONDS - These seem to be fed from spring
or artesian sources and saw historic linkage to the
main Cluff Ponds area. While prehistoric use remains
unproven, there is a major ruin in the immediate area.
N 32.82057 W 109.84248

LAMB TANK - Historic cattle development appears
to be centered on and exploited the prehistoric
Lamb Canal.
N 32.82440 W 109.92339

SAND TANK - Apparently a modern development
with a limited watershed somewhat west of the
prehistoric Sand Canal. Not clear where the
water came from. Little remains today.
N 32.80983 W 109.94106

BEAR SPRINGS - One time hippy commune was
a large artesian source, leading to the Bigler Ponds
and a major mysterious historic canal project.
N 32.85204 W 109.93890

BEAR FLAT - Remote and small artesian source
feeds a half mile long disused historic canal that
has possible but unproven prehistoric origins.
N 32.79578 W 109.78575

INDIAN HOT SPIINGS - By far the largest local
assemblage of springs and artesian sources. This
north of the Gila and northwest of the present
study area. Heavy historic and present reuse makes
study difficult.
N 32.99811 W 109.8978

Many local artesian sources have either dramatically reduced
their presence or have dried up entirely. Likely caused in
part by drought conditions and by purposeful dropping of the
water table.

It would seem reasonable to speculate that many more
springs and artesian sources were present during prehistoric
times. Some of these are likely to have vanished completely.

Here is a "boilerplate" template for eBay sales that
can eliminate any font bloat or force fed unwanted
14 point type.

The general idea is to edit the early paragraphs from
the inside, thus tricking eBay to not mess with the code.

The template also makes it obvious where to put any
particular URL link.

Adding a vsync phaselock loop to the TV Typewriter should
not be that big a deal and seems like it could be done with
components and technology of the era for a dollar or two.

Its advantages would be to completely eliminate any need
for a hard to find crystal frequency and to get rid of any tv set
induced text drift or instability. Caused by the display
slightly "slipping" the power line frequency.

The obvious choice would be the MC4046 CMOS phase
loop. But even a MC4013 could be used as a phase
detector.

More details in my CMOS Cookbook. Autographed
copies here.

The general idea is to compare the vsync output 55 against
a low pass filtered and conditioned copy of the power line.

The resultant phase detection is then used to correct a
voltage controlled astable whose nominal frequency is
4561.920 kHz. Thus keeping the characters locked
to any inadvertent hum modulation and instability.

Some sneakiness could be used for the power line
conditioning. First, filter a large ( say 30 volts ) power
line copy to a 40 Hertz or so time constant to get
rid of any noise distractions. Then route this signal
through a 470K resistor or so into most any
protected CMOS input, purposely using the input
protection diodes. This should give a fairly well
conditioned CMOS compatible 60 Hz square wave.

We have a long term goal of no unhappy eBay customers,
so we will usually issue a full refund with shipping over any
complaint. However minor and whose fault it was.

Often without needing a return.

But a full refund is usually the only adjustment we will
ever make. And, of course, we block the bidder afterwards.

We strongly feel that a SBR sell buy ratio on eBay should
always be at least 30:1. Thus a $19.95 sale should always
cost you less than 59 cents in original merchandise direct
costs. Such margins greatly ease any problems over refunds.

And explain why drop shipping or consignment sales simply
ain't gonna happen.

Much more on eBay policy here

One of our older Gurugrams on Converting Between
PostScript Strings, Integers, Arrays, and Dictionaries
can be found here.

With much more on PostScript here.

Boat anchor ancient electronics that might prove hard to
pack and ship on eBay and possibly too specialized for
Craig's List ( and may have zero remaining demand )
can often be dumped at your nearest hamfest.

Hamfests were swap meets long before they had swap meets.

A directory of Arizona hamfests appears here. And
some national info here.

You can usually spot a boat anchor enthusiast by
their exceptionally long arms.

Best times are usually very early ( for incredible
bargains ) or very late ( for "don't you dare bring
that trash back again." ).

The classic boat anchor support site ( with
scads of manuals and such ) appears here.

Org. Don't know if these are a bug or a feature, but a pair of
eBay infuriations seems to be the cause of HTML code bloat
and excessive unwanted 14 point text lines.

Firstoff, eBay very often will force feed an initial "use 14
point type" on you by bracketing your HTML code with...

<font rwr="1" size="4" style="font-family:Arial">
      ----- your code ------
</font>

Changing this to size=3 forces 12 point instead. But more
often than not, any reuse of the code will ADD a new 14 point
demand on top and around the previous ones!

Thus repeated reuse of "sell similar" may generate great
heaping piles of unused font bloat. And occasional
maddening oversize lines or line fragments.

Use of templates does not help much because their
4000 character limits and 12 menu maximum are both
waaay too low.

Finally, switching to advanced HTML can create more
problems than it solves, because if you attempt to change
a 14 point line to a 12 point one, it leaves the 14 point font
definition intact and writes a new 12 point one inside it.

Further adding to the bloat and leaving 14 point definitions
where they are likely to return to haunt you.

My solution is to write and save plain Jane HTML with
wordpad and repaste it as soon as bloat becomes excessive.

Note a detail that might haunt you elsewhere: HTML allows
<br> but XHTML demands <br />

"Such thinking comes from long hours in the outhouse
alone"

It also seems to me that even more excessive hype is
coming down over making the Gila Valley an  "Inland
Port".

Uh, "they" might have wanted to look at a map or
at least payed attention to grade school geography
classes for the Greater Bonita Eden Sanchez
metropolitan area .

Let's see. There is absolutely zilch, zero, nada,
commercially viable truck, train, or pipeline routes
out of the valley to the Southwest, the West,
the North, the Northeast, and the East. And the
route to the Northwest is fraught with political peril.
Sovereign nation and all.

The only local train ( er, one of two actually )
is a single track spur that goes pretty much nowhere
over dead end right of way unsuitable for higher speeds,
new multiple high profile customers, or heavier traffic .

And by simple topographic considerations, such routings
would seem to be unlikely to develop sometime soon.
Maybe right after the Ayatollahs Bar Mitzvah.

At first glance, Willcox would seem to be a lot better
positioned along an existing high traffic train and
truck corridor that clearly misses the Gila valley to the
south by 45 miles.

But, if a new Southwestern Arizona Inland Port were
to be considered at all, the clear winner would be
Benson. Which is already on a major corridor,
has two train routes, one of which is major and
national, a clean shot at Mexico, and a very viable
overdue potential new thruway route to the northwest.

More geographic fantasies here.

In what to me seems as excessive hype, much noise is
being made over transparent pv solar panels. Whose
goal is to recover the infrared and ultraviolet energy.

Around one half the total incoming solar energy is non
visual. Thus, you have to take a major hit from the get go.

Sea level desert maximum levels are about 527 watts
per square meter for infrared and only 32 for ultraviolet.

Yes, conventional silicon pv has even more restrictive
energy recovery fractions in that energy below a
threshold frequency is ignored and any "loose change"
above the critical frequency is blown as heat.

Good old e=h*nu. Plink. Plunk. Planck.

Amortization is the other biggie. At 500 watts per square
meter and ten cents per kilowatt hour and five useful
equivalent hours per day, each square meter of effective
area generates at most a quarter of a dollar per day.
Which at ten years and ten percent allows a total
installed and maintained cost per meter of only $568.

Um, that would be at 100 percent efficient conversion.
At ten percent, that drops to a meager $56.80

And that is only for "paint it green" breakeven that is
in no manner whatsoever renewable nor sustainable.

Another crucial factor is geometry. For maximum energy
recovery, you must be directly pointed at the sun, rather
than off at some angle in a cloudy location. While covering
windows with pv sensors works in theory, most windows
are pointing in the wrong direction and thus can only
recover a tiny ( and often negligible ) fraction.

There is however, great potential in making otherwise
optimized pv panels transparent so they can use
"bottom entry" reflective light. But this is a totally
different ball game. And only buys you a few percent.

Much more here.

Another oops: The original TV Typewriter was intended for
use with analog NTSC ( Never the same color ) display
devices.

All tv sets sold after June 12, 2009 use a wildly different
digital standard and may not be able to present a viewable
VHF RF derived TVT signal.

The obvious workaround for TVT replicators is to find and
use a very old analog television as a display device. Some
more intelligent computer monitors may still work, as
may some versions of certain new tv's.

Alternately, you can switch to the already present TVT direct video
output instead of a Channel RF one. While unlikely these days,
make sure you do not run afoul of any hot chassis issues!

Meanwhile, good lists of possible TVT crystal sources can
be found here and here. There are far fewer remaining sources of
cheap custom frequency crystals. Most notably, good old JAN
Crystals is no longer in the crystal customizing business.

Also, for ancient history folks, there should be scads of
FT243 crystals still available on dusty shelves. These can
be taken apart and either reduced slightly in size by polishing
to raise their frequencies or literally scribbled on with a
pencil to lower them. More on this insanity here.

Crystals can also usually be "pulled" by as much as one
tenth of a percent in frequency by changing their load
capacitance. Reliable starting may become a problem
if you try to go too far.

A better approach these days might be to use a CD4046B or
similar VCO, and phase locking the TVT vertical sync to the
power line. This should completely eliminate any display
weaving or stability problems. And not need any crystal at all!

Please keep emailing me with your TVT replication
solutions.

Links inside any eBay listing can be tricky. They are allowed only
if they specifically add content or info to the exact item being
offered.

The format of a link is

           Intro gohere text
           <a href="linkedsiteurl">
           <b>linkedsitename</b> </a>

                            ... and it is entered from the HTML side.

All should be on a single line. One trick to find where to place
a link in a bloated or long listing is to copy a short older link
in the intended location, followed by a temporary string of
forward slashes ///////////////////////////////////////////////. Select HTML
mode and the link should leap out at you.

Then edit the link and remove the slashes. Be sure to test
for a working link result. For a confused viewer is a gone one.

Some TV Typewriter replicators seem to be having trouble
getting suitable crystals.

At one time, it was simple and cheap to order any custom
crystal frequency. Driven mostly by ham radio and the
need for industrial oddball custom frequencies.

Note that any deviation whatsoever from a reference
frequency of 4561.920 kilohertz will cause unacceptable
and annoying scrolling hum bars in the display.

Also note that there was a typo in one point in the docs, but
the correct above frequency is listed elsewhere.

Sources to try today include Crystek, Statek, and ICM.

Please email me if you find a reliable source.

If HTML font issues get into your eBay listings, using
"sell similar" may continue them forever.

I was having severe problems with forced and unfixable
14 point font sizes, along with extreme code bloat.

You can check for code bloat simply by viewing the
listing as HTML

It would appear to pay to relist new items completely
from scratch every now and then, rather than encouraging
and perpetuating "sell similar" problems.

Note that bad or bloated code can only be removed from
the HTML side and not the Standard side.

Creating and using one or more templates can greatly
ease unwanted font issues.

I've been long fascinated by the law of the unintended
consequences.

Much more here.

Apparently a Rand Study only sees a piddling 90 percent
price drop. My prediction instead is 99.8%.

We seem to have a brand new discovery in the WOW
Signal SETI category.

Chances are it may follow the original into oblivion.

Discovered here and talked about here.

The latest PV pricing stats for July are in and once
again show some substantial decreases for the more pricey
sources. But remain stuck at 49 cents per peak panel watt
minimum.

The projected trend for the year for one of the more expensive
countries is around seventeen percent down.

But the best price remains flat at double the twenty five cents
per peak panel watt demanded for true net energy renewability
and sustainability.

More here.

Let me be sure I've got this straight on the upcoming drone
delivery services...

What happens bad if you throw the pizza away and then
keep the drone?

Here's the algorithm behind our self-vignetting auto
backgrounder...

Starting at the west border, go east and replace
the background until the first sequence of one
or more continuous red=255 pixels. Include
the continuous red=255's in your replacement.

Starting at the east border, go west and replace
the background until the first sequence of one
or more continuous red=255 pixels. Include
the continuous red=255's in your replacement.

Starting at the north border, go south and replace
the background until the first sequence of one
or more continuous red=255 pixels. Include
the continuous red=255's in your replacement.

Starting at the south border, go north and replace
the background until the first sequence of one
or more continuous red=255 pixels. Include
the continuous red=255's in your replacement.

Scan the entire bitmap and replace any remaining
red=255 pixels with the intended background.
This step deals with undercuts and intentional
punchthroughs.

If background mottling is set, randomly jitter
the rgb colors to the degree selected. If edge
auto vignetting is selected, solve the actual
and hairy full electromagnetic fields problem
and darken the mottled background accordingly.
Secrets of solving fields problems are found here.

For this algorithm to work without punchthru or bulldozer
tracks or other rude surprises, the following details
MUST be strictly attended to...

There must be ZERO red=255 pixels remaining
in the original artwork. This is easiest dealt with
by backing off two red clicks in Imageview 32.

An outline containing ONLY red=255 pixels
must COMPLETELY and EXACTLY surround
the artwork of the object to be kept. Blue or
Green pixel values are ignored, and 255-0-255
purple is often a good choice.

Undercuts not reachable by the above algorithms
must have ALL of their pixels replaced with
a red=255 value. Intentional punchthroughs ( such
as a mounting hole ) must similarly have ALL pixels
replaced by pixels whose red value is 255.

It is extremely important that the source and
object filenames are uniquely different.

Bleeds are not permitted. red=255 borders
must be continuous and are best placed
further "inside" than three or four edge pixels.

Acrobat forbids disk reads and writes unless
a /F is added to being run on the command
line. Alternately, GhostScript can be used.

Anything ( such as scaling or format changes )
that would in any manner change any red=255
values is not permitted between the time the
marking reds are generated and used.

Subject must be cropped to the intended
vignette size before running the algorithm.

Seminars, consulting services, and custom work available.

A reminder on how to view your available fonts in Distiller.

Here's a step-by-step breakdown on how to make a decent
eBay photo. Such as for this item...

1. Shoot the item outdoors in diffuse shade using
    a tripod mounted 16 megapixel Nikon or
    equivalent camera, preferably with a shutter
    release.

2. Transfer the image as a bitmap to a suitable PC.

3. Rotate the image using Imageview32 or equal
    to get a near center vertically dominate line
    to be truly vertical.

4. Do a somewhat oversize crop.

5. Make as many exposures as are needed to
    eliminate any excessively murky or burned
    areas. Do this by adjusting brightness,
    contrast, and gamma, again with Imageview32.

6. Use Paint to paste the various images on
    top of each others. Then deal with any edge
    effects that the various exposures demand
    attention to.

7. Correct to most, and preferably all of the
    Architect's Distortion using this routine to
    make all intended vertical lines truly so.
    Note that Distiller demands a /F before
    being command line run if disk reads and
    writes are to be allowed. Alternately,
    GhostScript can be used.

8. Crop somewhat tighter, but not to final.
    IMPORTANT: Back off on the red color
    by two clicks! This is essential to prevent
    unintended background punchthru in a
    a later step.

9. Get into Paint and define a 255 0 255
    purple you will use to mark edges to
    be knocked out to. The red 255 is most
    essential, but the blue and green can
    be arbitrary. Purple works very well.

10. Start a purple outline that is truly
      vertical when and where possible
      It is of utmost importance to have
      the outline complete without so
      much as one pixel of dropout!

11. Chase the "good" parts of edges or
      lines along and over any problem areas.

12. Make any holes and such where the
      background is to intentionally punch
      thru purple. Also deal similarly with
      any undercuts that cannot be reached
      in cardinal directions from the edges.

13. Note that the quadratic Paint option
      ( second from the left ) is exceptionally
      useful to round edges and create very
      attractive transitions.

14. Deal with any burns or murky areas,
      simplifying imagery where possible.

15. Retouch heavily, but never to the point
      of misleading the condition of any
      collectible. Use a Newsweek Ad as
      a guide to how much retouch is acceptable.

16. If needed, use the Bitmap Typewriter
      to correct any lettering legibility
      problems. In less severe cases,
      trim the background to the exact
      lettering shaped. For slanty lettering,
      distort the lettering so it is rectangular,
      fix it with the Bitmap Typewriter, and
      then distort it back. Some size adjustment
      may be needed with this tedious process.

17. Verify that all vertical line are truly so
      and that there are ZERO non purple
      pixels along any edges, undercuts, or
      intentional punchthroughs.

18. Crop the image to the intended exact
      vignetting size. Pick a suitable Web
       Friendly Postscript Color. Make sure
      your size significantly exceeds eBay's
      500 pixel minimum in at least one direction.

19. Run the Self-Vignetting Auto Backgrounder.
      Note that Distiller demands a /F before
      being command line run if disk reads and
     writes are to be allowed. Alternately,
     GhostScript can be used. As before, make
     sure input and output names are different.

20. Fix any bulldozer tracks or dropouts caused
      by missed purple pixels. Verify that your
      chosen background color is acceptable.

21. Get back into Imageview32 and resize to a
      suitable value, often 1000 pixels horizontally.
      Adjust brightness, contrast, and gamma as
      needed. Experiment with two clicks of
      sharpening, but watch for any sugar.

22. Save as a JPG file to a new filename and
      transfer a backup copy to your website.  

Seminars, consulting services, and custom work available.

One good way to increase the perceived value of most any
eBay item is to add some needed but unexpected accessories.

Ferinstance, Chinese knockoff thermocouples are super
cheap these days ( assuming you factor in the long delivery
time ) and make a dandy value added for a temperature
controller. These also make sure your buyer uses the
right flavor of thermocouple needed by the controller.

Sockets that exactly fit a relay being sold should
also be welcome. Especially the DIN style octal
or 11 pin "octal" ones.

A cheap line cord can greatly easy the testing
of most any relay or similar control device.

A fancy RLC instrument might offer a 4 point
BNC input. By offering four BNC to banana
adapters and some wires and a pair of alligator
clips, end user measurements can be greatly
simplified.

But best of all is to provide a link to an accurate
data sheet for the items being offered.

Some recommendations for assertiveness are...

   1. The best way to get something to happen
       is to ask for it.  "Please" is a power word. 

   2. The best way to stop something from
       happening is to just say no.

   3. The best way to defuse an awkward
       situation is to tell them how you feel.

   4. Exactly repeating yourself a second
       or third time can be devastatingly
       effective.

   5. Should things prove obtuse after three
       attempts, use ridicule: "I'm sorry about
       your hearing problem".

The best way to tell if your assertiveness
is adequate is if you have just been 
arrested for aggravated assault.

Here's some of our latest secret insider eBay selling
info...

FLUSH INTERNATIONAL - eBay will
continually force their international
automarketing on you. ALWAYS uncheck
this utterly worthless box!

AVOID CODE BLOAT - eBay tends to
add unneeded fonts everywhere, so
recode from scratch every now and then
instead of using "sell similar" too many
times in a row.

THE SLASH TRICK - Finding where to
add a url is tricky, especially in a highly
bloated listing. So, temporarily add a
bunch of forward slashes just past where
the url is supposed to go, and the
position will leap out at you.

HURRICANE INVENTORY - If you
have a bunch of almost identical items
that can be easily mixed up, put some
internal "hurricane" names on them to
keep them separate. "Alice", "Bruce",
and so on.

SECRET CODE LINE - Put a very fine
print listing as the last line in which you
code the location of the item, the internal
picture url's, a succinct description, and
anything else that aids the hired help.

WATCH FONT SIZES - Make sure
the present font is always the one you
really want. eBay tends to force feed
bloated and oversize 14 points on you.

PROVIDE DATA LINKS - Always
provide a way for the bidder to reach
the original data from the real
manufacturer.

GET CREATIVE OVER URL's -
eBay will not let you link a url that
does not have specific info on your
offer. See if you can figure out our
present workaraound.

GET CREATIVE OVER OFFCOLOR -
Or anything politically incorrect that is
likely to get flagged . Such as in "Kiss
your onager goodbye" in describing a
nuclear Holocaust slide rule .

RESEARCH ORIGINAL PRICING --
Two highly useful sources are found
here and here. Also here.

Much more here.

As we have seen, "contents of cabinet" and especially
"contents of room" auction lots can be exceptional bargains.

But it is super important that you view the lots and know
exactly what the room or cabinet purpose was. 

Ferinstance, a maintenance stores should have all new or
nearly new stuff, while a "fix it someday" stash might 
only hold abject trash. 

And hour fourteen of a three hour auction can yield
exceptional bargains if the auctioneer gets further behind.
Especially if it is 120 degrees in the shade and no shade
except for the four inch hail. And the rabid bats are not
having much luck driving the scorpions away. Plus, of
course, no restrooms. 

A "bankruptcy" or "forced sale" might have bunches 
of nice stuff in the stash, while an "excess inventory to
ongoing options" routine sale likely only has worthless
and obsolete and broken useless leftovers. 

The nature of the business also tells you a lot. Electronic
components from a failed porno coin-op loop shop are less likely 
to be mil spec quality than from a belly up aerospace custom supplier.

Your risk goes sharply up if you are unable to physically
preview the auction. So much so, that it may not be worth the risk
unless the price is exceptionally low. Even then, you have to
ask why the price is low if others had the ability to preview.

Much more on our auction help library page.

In a stunning genetics breakthrough, they have discovered
that socks are the larval form of the coat hanger.

A dark closet is apparently required for metamorphosis.

More on similar topics here.

It is interesting to review how much technical writing has
changed in the last few decades. The key rule these days
is to think like a cartoonist. Frugal. Compact. Succinct.

Naturally, nobody pays for writing any more. The 
real world return for tech writing has dropped by an
unconscionable factor of TWENTY or more. Despite
ridiculously improved quality and presentation.

Writing is also insanely more competitive than
it once was. Instead of half a dozen other authors
in a magazine, you have half a million or more on the
web. 

A norm for a seventies story might have been 3000
words and five figures. These days, nobody will
sit still for such a morass of detail. A thousand words
is seriously pushing it. 

"Bite Size" short paragraphs dominate. Each separated by 
once excessive leading. Fill justification is long gone.
Hanging punctuation generates a blank stare. 
Bolding and color changes have replaced underlining
and italics. And fonts are no longer a big deal. They
are just "there". 

Some became better. Full color is the norm with zero cost 
penalty. There are fewer size restrictions and any
figures can be placed exactly where you want them
rather than forward or back referencing.

Most significantly, the author now can be in total
control of what goes where on the page. A practice
utterly unthinkable back in the days of hot lead.
Proofs? Sorry, but the deadline was too close.

Vertical scrolling is trivial, but horizontal scrolling or 
multiple columns have become extremely annoying. 

Stories can now be the size that need to be. Instead
of heavily edited to fit columns of editorial space. 
Magnification is trivial. Both for additional figure
detail or for handicapped accessibility. 

There are far fewer deadlines and those that remain
are more flexible. Full text searching is a given.
Links, of course, are a must. Both to more detail
and more fundamental tutorials. 

The two styles are easily compared. With "old way"
methods here and here. And "new way" layout schemes
here and here. 

A reminder that MIT has course materials freely available
either online or as downloads for hundreds of their offerings.
As do many other major institutions. There's no credit nor any
instructor contact, but pretty near everything else is there.

One slight gotcha on your first downloads. All the first pages
are nondescript and suggest a near empty file. Simply go to
page two or scroll down to get to useful content.

A new and nearby Earth Like exoplanet has just been
discovered here.

Only slightly over four light years away.

More exoplanet resources here and here.

Many years ago, a certain New York editor who had
never been off the block at Lawn Guiland visited a
Texas ranch. He was amazed at how greasy the sheep
were and asked why they greased their sheep.

The ranch hands had a big laugh over this and tried
to explain lanolin. Then they moseyed up the draw to 
the cow oiler.

A useful rule at live auctions: Always stay three to
five lots ahead of the auctioneer! 

This lets you be in the auctioneers face on any lot
you want to bid on. You also "beat the crowd" to
the best location to get your bid recognized.

Force them to come to you. 

This also says you should not pay much immediate
attention to a won lot. Celebrating or making a side
sale or worrying about security may trick you into
forgetting completely a better upcoming lot buy.

More on auctions in general here. And your own
regional custom auction finder can be built for you
per the details here.

A slowdown in your comm speeds over time can usually
be traced to Ethernet Tokens that are either corroded or
grime covered.

The usual treatment is to use Brasso. But a better long
term solution is to gold plate the tokens and then flash
overplate them with a few microinches of rhodium.

Once again expanded and updated our Gila Valley 
Dayhikes page. We are now up to 465 main entries,
most of which now include GPS location links. 

Also added this link to hiking projects that can let
you contribute to world class research. 

Please email me with anything I missed or that needs 
further updating.

After decades of neglect, Eastern Arizona College is sort
of backing back into offering electronics technology.

local heThere days by way of some funding for some Fab Lab
courses. Both as an AMT110 classroom and as AMT211
and related labs.

Present focus does seem very heavily on AutoCad. My own
preference, of course, is to use the infinitely superior
raw PostScript instead. I'd hope they would also pick
up on such things as Santa Claus Machines and
Raspberry Pi's as well.

They apparently reserve the right to charge extra if you
excessively profit from the course.

Org. Got yet another email from someone about to
revolutionize electrolysis and would I please recommend
a highly qualified yet low cost electrochemist within six 
blocks of Holt County, Nebraska.

One more time: There is a profound and fundamental
first principle of thermodynamics called "exergy" that
absolutely and positively GUARANTEES that electrolysis
from high value sources such as grid, pv, wind, or alternator
flat out ain't gonna happen.

The process would be exactly the same as 1:1 exchanging US
dollars for Mexican Pesos. There ALWAYS will be more
intelligent things to do with the electricity than immediately
and irrevocably destroying most of its value.

Just for kicks, try finding an electrolysizer manufacturer
sometime. Even if you find one, they certainly will not tell
you how much their products cost, and absolutely will not
sell one to an individual because of safety and liability
issues. The reason being that exergy limits such devices
to highly unique, specialized, and obscure industrial uses.

Virtually all bulk hydrogen gas is produced from hydrocarbons.
The amount produced by electrolysis is utterly negligible and
limited to exceptionally specific needs where system efficiency
and costs are not major design factors. 

Exergy is a measure of the present quality and value of an
energy source. You measure exergy by converting that 
source to another form, converting it back, and seeing how
much you have left. Resistance room heat is a classic 
example of horribly wasted exergy. 

Electricity is about the highest exergy stuff available. Unstored
hydrogen gas has exceptionally low exergy. Electrolysis is the
process of converting many high value kilowatt hours of energy
into fewer very low value kilowatt hours of energy. 

And, thus, is normally and monumentally stupid. 

As such, electrolysis clearly will forever remain totally incompatible
with efficient and sensible alternate energy solutions. 

And that is before abysmal system efficiencies, amortization, or
stupidities ( such as stainless steel electrodes with its hydrogen
overvoltage of iron ). "Real" electrolysizers demand platinized
platinum electrodes that are regularly renewed.

Does exergy mean that solar to hydrogen via Faraday's Law 
is never gonna happen? Not at all. But it does GUARANTEE 
that conventional high value electricity will definitely NOT be 
a mid process energy state.

Once again, our bottom line summary:

    If you do not understand exergy, you SHOULD NOT be 
    pissing around with electrolysis.

    If you do understand exergy, you WILL NOT be
    pissing around with electrolysis.

Either way, the outcome is not the least in doubt. More can be
found here, here, and here.

Shocking.

I just found out that many of the New Mexico subastas are going
to be sold at auction!

Even worse, "slippery slope" issues may also endanger 
a large number of the licitacions and even the almonedas. 

Thankfully, eBay sales and shipping to New Mexico aren't 
quite as bad as they used to be. Yeah, there is still the 
language barrier and the hassles at customs.

One main problem was that of all the New Mexico truck 
tires are all a different size and spacing, so everything 
needed  reloaded at the border crossings.

Fortunately, there are now REVERSIBLE truck tires that
can simply be insided out at the New Mexico ports of
entry.

More details at your nearest New Mexico embassy.

Two "sort of no longer there" Arizona semi ghost towns are
Nothing and Nowhere.

These are about sixty miles apart by way of easy and excellent
lightly traveled fully paved mid-elevation roads.

Which raises the obvious possibility of a Nothing to Nowhere
bicycle tour.

More off the wall stuff to do here.

A curious fact: Any perpetual motion machine that includes
a 555 timer electrocity is bogus and nonfunctional. No
exceptions to this rule have ever been found.

Which saves you bunches of time discrediting a perpetual
motion machine, for if a 555 timer is present, there is
absolutely no point in continuing. Guaranteed.

After reviewing a bunch of recent candidates, the usual 
problem is that narrow pulses are exceptionally difficult
to properly measure. I've dealt with this here, here, and
here.

The key gotcha is that any spike or narrow pulse has an
exceptionally high ratio of rms to average value. And 
even though correctly measuring rms instruments have
finally become readily available, the overwhelming
majority of lay members of the Church of the Latter
Day Crackpots continue to mislead themselves
by still using average reading instruments.

Even if you have a "real" rms meter, there's a 
secondary gotcha called the crest factor that
still will nail you to the wall. Multiply two big
numbers together and they become a huge
number. Waaay beyond anything analog can
deal with. 

Exceed the crest factor and the instrument
will still read deceptively low.

A fascinating supply of totally worthless overunity
devices can be found here on a continuous basis.

More on pseudoscience bashing here.

A new map of the newly expanded Safford and Thatcher
Urban multi use trails can be found here.

Parts of it may be in error or at least awkward to use,
especially along US 70. Present length is around twenty
miles. Pima extensions and 8th street portions have yet
to be built.

More stuff to do here, here, and here.

We picked up a bunch of classic aerospace piezo
accelerometers and are now offering them on
eBay.

We do not have the proper tools to fully check
these, so they are guaranteed but you test.

The Endevco 222D Piezo units have a special
M3 subminiature connector that connects to
a provided matching low loss cable that in turn ends up
with a "10-32" style connection.

Fancy interface techniques are needed to
bias, charge condition, resonance handle, and
low frequency ac filter these units. A very
useful free tutorial of what is involved can be
found here,

It seems a preliminary check on at least some
of the units can be done by connecting them to
an oscilloscope without bias and then mildly
"thumbnail shocking" them. The scope
display should moderately jump around if
the unit is likely to work when properly
connected.

These classic vintage transducers are normally
outrageously expensive. A company called
Bracke seems to have the 10-32 connectors for
around $13 each.

The transducers are often mounted with white
beeswax. We include some from our local health
food nut store.

One of the most confusing things about the .BMP
Image Format is its sometime need for padding bytes.

The rule is that each new pixel row must start on
an EVEN 32-bit boundary. Since three does not divide
by four all that well, the end of each row will need
0, 1, 2, or 3 padding bytes added.

Here is one method using table lookup...

       /padding xpixels 4 mod
       [ 0 3 2 1 ] exch get store 

And another using base 4 arithmetic... 

       /padding xpixels 4 mod
       4 sub abs 4 mod store 

Much more detail here.

Turns out the Lopez Canal appears to be a bulldozer
track instead.

While very few Acme Mapper hanging canal leads fail to
become useful, the very few losers to date include...

Lopez Lead
Jacobson Lead
Ringcone Lead
Lower Mud Lead

And this just barely needing further research....

Discovery Park Canal

Much more here.

Some significant improvements in Lithium Ion battery
technology are presented here.

The claim of a much higher energy density seems much
too good to be true. However; incremental improvements
can certainly and reasonably be expected.

The original CK722 Germanium Transistor project book
is now available for free web download.

The neat thing about the CK722 was that its leakage
was so mesmerizingly awful that you did not have to
bias it. Just capacitor couple an input or some feedback
into the base.

As a result, it usually did not matter in the least how
you connected it or biased it. Generally, no matter
what you tried, it sort of did something.

Sort of.
More or less.
Kinda.

I guess you cannot exactly call it a spectacular engineering
failure, but all is currently not well with the new Blue River
Fish Barrier.

It seems that their companion "anti scour structure" just
exceeded their wildest expectations. But only by something
around five orders of magnitude.

The Allen Dam failure here. And related similar stuff here.
But my favorite two disasters here and here.

Some of the many advantages of magnetic tomcats include:
(a) They will point north if you pick them up by the tail (b)
they store easily overnight on the side of your refrigerator;
(c) herding cats is a lot easier if they are all oriented in the
same direction. And, of course (d) you can levitate them by
using an appropriately powered electric blanket.

More on totally unrelated topics in MARCIA.PDF.

Local EMT lore has it that a South Phoenix free clinic was
having all sorts of problems with prescription pads getting
stolen. Sure enough, a pharmacy called later wanting to
verify that they had prescribed a "gallon of more fine".

Well, maybe just the punch lines...

"The koala tea of Mercy is not strained".
"The thong has ended, but the malady lingers on".
"Pardon me Roy, is that the cat that chewed your new shoes?"
"Its a Hickory Daiquiri, Doc."
"Rudolph the Red knows rain, dear".
"Poncho Villa" is an emergency rain shelter for NM hikers.
"It's a knick knack, Patti Whack. Give the frog a loan".
"Its the only trick I know, Sis."
"People in grass houses shouldn't stow thrones"
"Couldn't hit the barn side of a broad"
Geologists recognize sedentary, metaphoric, and ingeneous rocks.
"Old MacDonald Farm computer interface is now an EIE I/O".
"Tarzan stripes forever"
A furry with a syringe on top.
... handle so long no insect can "Fly above Cayuga's swatter"
"The vet had to charge for the cat scan and the lab tests"
"Crossing a state lion with a gull for immortal porpoises"
"Opporknockity tunes but once."

Plus, of course...

"The squaw on the hippopotamus hide equals the
sum of the squaws on the other two hides."

Just noticed that there was a fundamental design error
in our Decimal Counting Modules.

It is not clear why the units worked at all. But tens of
thousands were shipped without complaint, and ongoing
design revisions apparently eliminated the problem.

The even bus transistor Q2 never receives zero base
current needed for turnoff! Worse yet, there are times
when the substrate ends up forward biased in IC4.

Apparently the balancing resistors ended up doing more
than just reducing the sneak path problem.

The workaround is to add one resistor or two series base
diodes. Or else use a NPN transistor inverter rather than
a RTL one.

Don't want to rush these things. Sorry about that.

Among those of us that were there at the time, it was
absolutely and unquestionably clear that "something"
was happening.

We did not have the faintest clue what that something
was, and we referred to it simply as "IT".

In which it did not matter in the least "what good"
something was or whether it had any use whatsoever
or was ultimately capable of being profitable.

"Stuff" was now possible that never could be done
before. To be followed shortly by infinitely better stuff.

The tasks simply had to be done. And the very best of today
absolutely had to be done in by a better tomorrow.

One of the things I still do not understand to this day is
the vehemence which the concept of putting letters onto
a tv set was attacked. Many, many individuals in many
different fields clearly wanted the concept to fail.

At the time, nobody said anything bad about someone
who wanted to piss around with toy trains, while
everybody and his brother clearly ridiculed the dual
concepts of computing for the sake of computing
and putting text on video displays.

The first clue that "they" were dead wrong were
the walk in orders for the TVT docs. Until that
time, Radio Electronics never had a walk in order and
did not have the faintest clue what one was.

While the spotlight eventually had to be shared
with the Mark 8 and the Altair, and later the Apple I,
the TVT when first published was by far the most popular
hobby electronic construction project of all time.

And is considered by some to be the opening shot fired
in the personal computer revolution.

There seems to be some interest in recreating authentic
original TV Typewriters, with some circuit boards possibly
available from this source.

Amazingly, typos in the docs are still arriving. The correct
crystal frequency is 4561.920 kHz.

The integrated circuit technology at the time was incredibly
primitive and the design ended up far beyond bleeding edge.

The only economical memory chips at the time were bucket
brigade shift registers that approached the demanded
penny per bit surplus in their "huge" 512 bit packages.

Among their other bad features were the horrendously
high supply voltage that was hard to drive and interface;
being unaddressable meaning that you had to wait forever
for your bit to come around in its queue before you could
use it; and only guaranteeing one tenth the needed
minimum dropout time required by vertical retrace.

Memory mapped I/O that drew no distinction between
graphics and alphanumerics was still years away as,
among other teething problems, it needed a minimum
of at least ten times the memory storage.

You want a font? You got one. Fixed size and upper case
only, of course.

This dollar each Fairchild FL77944 chip should utterly
and stunningly revolutionize LED dimming.

But outside of that, it has the potential ( when wildly
abused ) to single handedly create the groundswill of popular
demand required to revive a color organ renaissance.

The chip requires very few external parts and uses an
incredibly complex algorithm that selectively switches
LED's in or out depending on the instantaneous amplitude
of the ac waveform.

Advantages for rev 756.1 Color Organs are minimal RFI,
low parts count, and extreme linearity. You do have to
carefully match the chip to the exact high number of LED's
in use and do have to provide input ground isolation with a
suitable optocoupler from a filtered pwm analog source.

A history of color organs can be found here. With good old
number one here.

Here's yet another eBay photo that did not turn out all that
bad. Its problems included transparency and high contrast.

The perspective correction was done manually instead of
using our usual Architect's Perspective routines. A double
exposure was done to very much brighten the black parts.

The thickness portions of the plastic parts was redone
to eliminate distracting glare and erratic lighting.
And a rare white vignetting background was used to give
credibility of what should be partially seen through the
transparent parts.

Consulting services and seminars available.

The latest PV pricing stats for June are in and show some
substantial decreases for the more pricey sources. But 
remain stuck at 49 cents per peak panel watt minimum.

The trend for the year for the more expensive countries
is around twelve percent down.

This is slightly under twice the price needed for ultimate
renewability and sustainability. More here.

Speaking of bloat, I am sometimes asked about our present
listing of potentially 75 Bajada Hanging Canals of possibly
130 miles total length.

There is not the slightest doubt that there is both an "adequate
supply" and a "great heaping bunch" of these stunning world
class discoveries.

The count does include something like ten percent of losers
that did not work out. Such as cattle or ATV trails that fell
apart after attempts at field verification. With the intent of
not rediscovering the same problem more than once.

There are also canals with missing segments whose ends
might end up with temporarily different names. Ferinstance,
the Frye Mesa Canal is also the HS Canal and more than
likely the Riggs Braids and the Golf Course Canal.

But I strongly feel that the present listing is an accurate
representation of the present canal discoveries. The
field verified total length estimates are always left most
conservative.

Presently, we only have a dozen or so verified field notes.
But our main present goal is to precisely document all
75 listings in one manner or another.

On eBay, if you continually and repeatedly reuse the
"Sell Similar" feature, you may ed up with bunches of
code bloat, mostly involving all sorts of unused font
statements. And also possibly making unexpected
font choices ending up in exactly the wrong places.

It seems to me to be a good idea to "reset to zero"
and purposely hand code a new listing every now and
then. Another trick that may help sometime is to
copy the listing to Wordpad and newly repaste it
into your intended new listing.

Local lore has it that the spring thaw is possibly just around
the corner, with the worst of the ice is out of the Gila River.
All of which has somewhat dampened enthusiasm for afternoon
Bajada Hanging Canal explorations.

New to be checked is the possible Lopez canal #75. So far
it only exists on Acme Mapper. It has a source and destination
and is straight enough and long enough with just the right
amount of highly consistent slope.

On the other hand, it is somewhat north of the other canals,
does not look quite right, and likely will be tricky to prove
its prehistoric origins.

Also in the seldom visited area are mysterious and little
explored ponds that might include duck habitat. I'll try to
add these to our Gila Valley Dayhikes after they can be
verified.

A typical service manual for a newer HDTV intelligent
television can be found online..

The all digital systems are totally unrelated in any manner
to classic analog tv.

Speaking of which, most schematics for most classic
electronics can be newly found here.

If you are really into this sort of stuff, you will know what
the filament tap on a 35Z5 was intended for.

But the secret big picture that is supposed to be learned from sneak
paths is that your first attempt at any product development WILL be
wrong and WILL have to involve major rework.

The rule is that the first 90 percent of any project takes up 90 percent
of the available time. So does the last 10 percent.

Some dated but still potentially useful comments on product development
in general in our Blatant Opportunist library.

One of the things they forgot to tell you about in Electrical
Engineering school were sneak paths. Which became a very
rude surprise in my early development of our decimal
counting units.

Suppose you have a 5 x 2 array of light bulbs and you power
one row and ground one column. How many bulbs will light?

The answer with some hindsight: All of them! One to full
brightness, a companion to annoying brightness, and the
remaining eight rather dim.

The full bright is what you'd expect. Say it is bulb 0. Bulbs
2 and 3 are in series. 4 and 5 are in series. 6 and 7 are in
series. 8 and 9 are in series. And all four of these groups
are in parallel with each other. With ONE HALF the
resistance of a single lamp!

All of which taken together end up in series with bulb #1.
Thus bulb 0 lights full, bulb 1 almost full, and all of the
others end up barely dim. With the perceived results
related to bulb nonlinearities.

There was an obsessive goal of ten dollars per decade,
so the crude and ugly early fix was to add a pair of
33 Ohm balancing resistors. These ended up making
all unwanted lamps more or less uniformly dim at
a cost of heat and increased power dissipation.

The rule is this: Any time you have a row and column
array, you have to provide non linear elements at
each crossing to minimize or eliminate sneak paths.

Eventually we ended up using NPN transistors behaving
as paired diodes for a sneak free and lower power solution.

Related sneak path problems can be found in the
"n key rollover" problem of a keyboard. In which
three pressed keys can create a fourth virtual closure.
Sneak paths can become downright deadly in higher
voltage applications.

We never were able to get under $12 per decade with
incandescent lamps. But we did use a sneaky meter
trick ( stolen from Hewlett Packard ) to actually hit
a $10 per decade solution.

The rest is history.

Our latest addition to our Gila Valley Dayhikes page gives
some fascinating hints on the Bob Brow Saloon Safe. AKA
the Seymour gold.

Which is one of the very few Arizona Lost Treasure stories
that seems to have enough credibility to still be reasonably
recoverable. And perhaps worth some effort.

The safe most likely headed straight down, helped along by
the 1890 Walnut Grove Dam Disaster. Which was somewhat
comparable to the Johnstown PA Flood in the same time era.
But did not receive nearly the press. Nonetheless, this was
the worst Arizona disaster until two planes crashed in the 1950's.
Mexicans and Indians, of course, were not counted in the
fatalities, so the reports ended up way low.

A favorite part of the story was that the town drunk was sent
out to spread the alarm, but decided that a good stiff drink
was first in order.

What if you have a bunch of "not quite" identical units you
want to sell on eBay? Perhaps differing in condition, their
accessories, or subtle features.

How do you prevent shipping mixups?

One simple solution is to attach "Hurricane Names" to
each unit on small stickers. Alice, Barbara, Claudia, etc..

Also list these names into your inventory controls
( You DO have these, of course ), and code them into the
individual listings themselves.

Assume you are an intern working on a SETI
program at a somewhat advanced civilization
on Iota Rectuli IV.

Strong evidence of rocky planets have recently
been discovered nearby in a minor arm of your own
second rate galaxy sometimes called the "Milky Way".
A mere sixty light years or so away.

Amazingly, one of these planets suddenly and
recently became a "radio star" with substantial
output at the VHF frequency range. Your recent
careful analysis has shown detailed comb structure
with strong harmonics related to both 60 Hertz
and 15.750 kilohertz.

Between the latest of advanced signal processing
algorithms and some exceptionally rare viewing
conditions, out pops a perfectly lucid and clear
ten second video clip of ROLLER DERBY!

As the sum total of everything known about
human civilization. We can assume that
"Captain Video" and "Kukla, Fran, and Ollie"
are yet to be discovered.

What report, if any, would you submit to
your supervisor?

A reminder that we have a huge pile of premium grade
VFD motor drives up on eBay at astonishingly low
prices. Many major brands to hundreds of horsepower.
These appear to be unused. But we will only fully
guarantee them to be reasonably serviced.

The larger units have two gotchas: First, we have no
way to test them, so these are strictly you test. Second,
owing to a palace revolt still in process, there is no way
that we will pack these hundred pound plus beasties.

So, our nearest pack and ship service is four miles away
and you will have to work directly with them or a competitor .
Or use one of the uShip alternatives from 85552.

Or do a local pickup only. The units easily fit a small
pickup or medium SUV. A Uhaul site is nearby.

Yeah, but what about way back when?

My bio can be found here, with a historic third party version
here. And an unauthorized autobiography here. There
were mostly books, construction projects, tutorials, and columns.

The biggie project being the TV Typewriter, which others have
called the opening shot fired in the personal computer revolution.
But the decimal counting units were much more of a cash cow.

Online versions of some of the books can be found here, with
autographed copies of others still available on our eBay site.

The worst of Marcia Swampfelder can still be found here.

Reprints of most of the projects can be found here, some of the
books here, and many of the columns here. And videos here.
And the patent here. And reasons to NEVER patent anything
here. And a thesis here.

Yeah, but what have I been up to lately? Here's a summary
of some current projects...

PREHISTORIC HANGING CANALS - Now up
to 75 of these stunning world class constructs with
a total length well over a world class 130 miles.
Now definitely in need of extensive help.

MAGIC SINEWAVES - Obtuse math discoveries
have led to digital sinewave generators with
astonishing low distortion and impressively high
efficiency.

MABELOSITY - Sneaky way of faking book
cover marbleizing techniques can lead to profound
"Does not look like it was done on a computer"
effects. All done with a pile of distorted pancakes.

BEZIER CUBIC SPLINES - Sophisticated solutions
to high quality graphics. Latest studies also involve
Lagrange Polynomials.

GILA HIKE DIRECTORY - Many hundreds of
largely unknown dayhike projects. Including some
very obscure ones.

THE USUAL SUSPECTS - Plus continuing research
and ongoing interests in PostScript, Patent Avoidance,
Pseudoscience Bashing, Marcia Swampfelder, eBooks,
Classic Reprints, firefighting, pv solar breakeven tracking,
GuruGrams, auctioneering, our blog, the ISMM, energy,
the hydrogen debacle, videos, tech innovation, and, of
course, eBay.

Once again, we definitely and desperately need your
help on various canal projects. Especially if you are
the type of hiker that brings along your own catclaw,
just in case there is not enough along the route. The
word "trail", of course, is not in your vocabulary.

Cash in small bills would also be nice, among with
any extra drones you might want to discard in my
driveway.

Speaking of which, funding and completing an
aerial survey of all 130 miles of the 75 bajada
hanging canals would certainly be welcome.

A reminder to always lie like a rug on those "surveys"
that prevent you from accessing newspaper stories or
similar publications.

Be sure to tell them the EXACT OPPOSITE of what
they supposedly want to hear. The goal being to make
their mesmerizingly awful results totally useless.

Always answer "Pepsi" as your favorite brand of 
smoke detector.

And "ketchup" any time you need to fill in the blanks.

The latest eBay infuriosity is that they will repeatedly and
continuously try to force feed you their international shipping
service. You have to unclick it each and every time.

 At least for us, foreign sales make no sense whatsoever.

If you are good at domestic sales, you do not need them.
If you are failing at domestic sales, they will not help you
in the least.

To us, the bottom line is that foreign sales simply are not
worth the problems they demand...

~  Foreign sales invite ripoffs and scams.
~  Shipping costs are higher.
~  Fulfillment takes much longer.
~  Closure takes ridiculously longer.
~  Delivery times are a joke
~  Theft is endemic.
~  There are stiff fees for currency conversions.
~  Our suppliers contractually forbid such sales.
~  Shipping damage is more likely
~  Honoring guarantees becomes cost prohibitive.
~  Keytowing to bureaucracy NEVER pays.
~  Communications barriers create problems
~  Lying on green slips is an international crime.

And most of all...

~  Certain countries ( most especially Canada )
    are CERTAIN to cause you grief.