Don Lancaster's What's New?       2018 Archive Blog

Pick your blog year...
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2007	2008	2009	2010	2011
2012	2013	2014	2015	2016
2017	2018	2019	2020	-----

We just relisted our stunning Southern Oregon Gold Hill  
spectacular view property for sale with Chris Marshall of
American Forest Management at (541) 664-9200.

20 acres. Find it here on Craig's List.

Price has been reduced to $7475 per acre. This is the last
remaining large developable property immediately adjacent
to the northern Gold Hill city limits.

We have secured a full access easement for these 20 acres.
Power and cable on the property.

Legal description is T36 R3W S16 Tax Lot 400.

Attractive financing is now available. Mid-size city
amenities are twelve minutes away at Medford. The
property borders directly on the town of Gold Hill. The
Rogue River is very close; beaches and mountains
are only an hour away.

Here's a newer group of photos...

You can click expand these. Then click again.

This steep to sloping parcel is immediately adjacent to
the Gold Hill city limits and offers absolutely outstanding
views. It is in one of the most in-demand rural areas in
the country, and has really great access both to recreation
and to midsize city resources. Plus superb climate, low crime,
and good schools.

Here is a map. Property is the green rectangle "pointed to"
by Thirteenth Street. You can click here for an aerial photo
and flyby.

You can contact the owner directly by phoning (928) 428-4073
or don@tinaja.com .

Additional older photos here. More info here and here. Free
guided tours are immediately available.

Closed out the 2018 What's New file and started a 2019
one.

We are in the process of further reducing 404's and other
link issues. Surprisingly, our malware detector and reporter
tells us there are now far fewer script kiddies attempting to
download invalid URL's in a quest to find vunerabilities.

At present, our internal 404 rate is just over two percent,
with the lion's share of these being malware attempts.
This would seem close to an irreducable minimum.

We do have a few 404's intentionally left in our Hanging
Canal paper images. These simplify the generating and
processing of emerging new files. We are working on
these on a daily basis.

Please report any other 404 issues.

Reprints of our Psyctone story can be found here and
here. With a youTube demo here and a JavaScript
Synthesis approximation here.

This started out as an aerospace bet with a cellmate
doing a million dollar study of then new pseudorandom
sequences. I bet that I could get a ludicrously short
sequence to squawk. And did so.

A partial tutorial here and here, with lots more on
pseudorandom here, here, and elsewhere.

I never did find a n=19 near optimum solution. Was
one ever found? How  about n > 31? Beyond this
sneaky stunt? Please Tell me.

One sort of competitor ( I never thought so and was
unaware of it before my publication ) can be found
here with its JavaScript approximation here.

And the latest of TV TypeWriter modern rebuilds
here.

There's some details involved with using this W3C
URL verification software:

First, the process takes a long time since there is
an intentional one second delay between queries.

Second, some sites have robot exclusion rules that
it cannot check, so you will have to manual recheck
each and every one of these.

Third, the process may return an obscure error
message such as (500) after actually reaching the
intended site. Chances are your user could not care
less, but, once again, a manual check is needed.

Fourth, link redirects are reported. The most common of
which is http: changing to https: You can decide whether
fixing these is worth their considerable effort. Benefits
are faster loads and a more secure web.

Fifth, pay particular attention to anchor problems in
that they directly affect your user navigation.

Sixth, emails are locked out and not checked.

Seventh, if you have a wrong URL such as "here.", it will
be reported as something like https://www.tinaja.com/here.
The correct search term with Dreamweaver or whatever
when searching would be "here.

Eighth, your report can easily be overwritten by newer
browser activity. Wayward caches can also be a problem.

This is a really great service, but the key rules are to
be patient, manually retest everything questionable,
retest often, fix only what you feel is time and cost
effective, and prioritize repairs on visitor probability.

One other detail in converting a .SHTML web file
into acrobat .PDF: Navigation anchors require
some extra effort per these details..

What ever happened to Carl and Jerry? You can still
find their original hijinks here and here.

These days, Carl is now a universally despised and
quadruplely divorced gazillionare. And Jerry is now
relearning to tie his shoes, purpotedly owing to an
inadvertent incident involving some specialty herbs
and spices.

The back story on the series author remains amazing.

I guess I was in some ways very similar to the original
Karl, albeit for real. Details here.

Did I ever tell you my story with my involvement with
the CIA? It took place somewhat before ( and was a
proximate cause of ) the Bay of Pigs incident. 

As we tended to do, Bee and I were wandering around 
southcentral Arizona and came upon a then presumably 
long abandoned Marana airstrip. We continued with the
vague ( but unlikely ) hope of finding some unusual
planes stashed or even an open restaurant.

We were stopped by a military uniformed type of
person having no identifying marks whatsoever and
holding an ancient SCR 536 WWII handi-talkie.

He asked us what we were doing and we told him.

Things then proceeded to get bizarre in that he in
no manner could stop us or tell us what to do 
because --------> he was not there!

We continued our tour and noted shadowy figures
furtively hiding just at the edge of buildings carefully
tracking our activities, also with ancient handi talkikes.

But again, they could not interfere in any manner 
with us bacause ------> they were not there!

At the time, I held a DOD secret clearance, so I 
eventually decided that what was happening was not
quite right. As suspected, there was no restaurant,
and the only planes were a bunch of derelict connies.

The outcome of the Bay of Pigs clearly indicaded the
skill levels of the epsilon minuses involved. It seemed
to me that a simple "ROAD CLOSED" sign might
have helped their cause significantly.

Eventually many years later, the CIA involvement
was admitted.

Time for our usual end-of-year predictions...

Total elimination of "unintended consequence" federal
price supports and marijuana farm subsidies dropping
street prices under a cotton comparable 59 cents per
pound. With standardization on 500 pound bales. Some
more analysis here.

Recent declines in pv prices continuing unabated and
dropping under eight cents per peak cell watt. This
figure well below traditional power sources and fully
within acheivable long term goals for renewability and
sustainability at utility scale.

Hangnails readily becoming a qualifying condition for
medical marijuana.

Spectacular advances in oversize tethered "bounce" type
drones rendering any border fences a ludicrous absurdity.

A new class of metal air transistors resetting Moore's
Law back to zero.

AI Artificial Intelligence soon unexpectedly crossing a 
self-awareness threshold. Boy, are they gonna be pissed.
Ya mean they are made outta meat?

Another AI interface dramatically increasing human
to dog communications. Cats need not apply.

Significant advances in graphene deslanation that
involve a new name brand of perforene.

New but still misunderstood developments in phase
change memory.

The latest in nootropics going well beyond placebos
and possibly even impacting Alzehimers.

Increasing climatic and weather variability, combined
with size and frequency of outrageous fires. All clearly
caused by human activity.

Major new improvements in axial flux motors.

Optically stimulated luminescence dramatically
replacing thermoluminescence in archaeological
and geological dating.

Vacuum Metal Deposition significantly altering
fingerprint forensics.

Stunning breakthroughs in new ultra thin and vaguely
Fresnel like meta lenses.

"Just in time" education where "look it up on Google"
repaces outrageously overpriced and clearly no longer
cost competitive college educations.

Emerging proposals for the conversion of coal fired
power plants into singles bars.

Here's some useful tools to repair and maintain your
web site...

1. Always: Use at least one antivirus program.

2. A good spelling checker, such as the shift-F7 that
    you will find in Dreamweaver  CC.

3. Understanding .htaccess for such things as blocking
    bad guys, allowing extensions, enabling JavaScript
    and includes, proviing for strange trailers, blocking
    byte range, etc... Warning: extremely dangerous!

4. Verifying .htaccess with this routine.

5. Viewing daily ISP reports, such as Visitor Statistics
   from FatCow.

6. Getting daily log files, such as using FTP to access
    your stats folder from FatCow. Extremely Important!

7. Decompressing log file reports, such as with WinZip.

8. Doing sophisticated log file analysis, such as with my
   logfile report interpreter or this service.

9. Verify your HTML code with this routine.

10. Verify your CSS code with this routine.

11. Verify your URL links with this routine. But always
      rechekck manually!

12. Prioritizing repairs based on user access popularity.

A collection of tens of thousands of of free university
online courses can be found here.

A reminder that the DOAJ or Directory of open Access
Journals has been readily linkable on our home page.

I just discovered arXiv and socarXiv. These are Cornell
University related open access publications. The former for
"hard" science such as physics, and the latter for "soft"
stuff like archaeology. I hope to provide them with a few
examples of our hanging canal resources.

I have lots of papers already in Research Gate and WeSrch.
An "also ran" is Academia, but I don't care for their vibes.

Here's a list of some othe random open source stuff...

Crossref
DeepDyve
Doug's Archaeology
eLife
Hubmed
Innocentive
Lifewire
Mendeley
Peerlibrary
Publishing Archaeology
Pubmed.gov
PubSci
Selected Works
Slashdot
Sourcefabric
Wikipedia

Please let me know any that I missed.

A super useful and little known Windows stunt: Right
clicking on a URL gives you options to open in a new
tab, window, or even incognito.

This works both with PDF and HTML files. It very
much simplifies getting back where you were in
Acrobat.

Author forcing a new URL opening directly in .PDF is
still tricky, but it can be done with JavaScript. The
problem is that behavior of target="_blank" differs
between web and Acrobat.

Just revised and updated some long overdue changes
and relevancy checks to our home page offsite web
resources links.

These are my selection of "best of web". And are
based on most everything I personally need or use.

I'd like to add at least nine more links. What do you
suggest?

It is real easy for Dreamweaver to create partial URLs
and other errors in tables or other large blocks of links.

First and foremost, always use the Insert Hyperlink
tool rather than the Link tool. The link tool often can
leave previous fragments or allow disallowed characters
such as spaces. With CSS, all spaces must be $20 replaced.

Second, always "empty" any previous link before you
change them to a new one.

Third, if you have problems, temporarily "pretty print"
all your links into identical formats, such as...

<a href="https://www.first.com">Name One</a><br>
<a href="https://www.second.com">Name Two</a><br>
<a href="https://wwwthird.com">Name Three</a><br>
<a href="https://www.ourtht.com">Name Four</a><br>

Strive to get everything "perfectly" aligned. From there,
missing names or wrongly coded sequences should leap
out at you and be easily fixed..

Work only in the coding screen while you do this.

Yeah, Dreamweaver may instantly trash your pretty
printing whenever you go back to their live layout
screen. But even if temporary, the pretty printing
easily solves problems that can be very infuriating
otherwise. And is often worth the effort.

Finally, always check your links with this tool.

Started an image cross reference and directory for our
Bajada Hanging canals found here and here.

Go to https://www.tinaja.com/hang01.shtml#imgs
Then go down four lines and click on "click here
to open".

Completion will take a while as the images themselves
and the field notes obviously should have a higher
priority. And there are great heaping bunches of  them
remaining to be created or updated.

Your help and support welcome. Tours and lectures
are available. A major pub is imminent but remains
super secret.

I was asked to comment on these recent claims on
dramatic incandescent lamp efficiency improvements.

Firstoff, MIT is usually not into scams and often
does pay attention to thermodynamic fundamentals.

The scheme is to dramatically raise the internal
lamp temperature by coating the filament with a
reflective filter that bounces the heat back in.
Thus raising both the filament temperature and
its efficiency.

Well, LED's now are 10X to 12X more efficient
that incandescents and have the possibility ( and
probability ) of further raising their efficiency.

So, a 3X incandescent improvement won't hack it.

The magic numbers for "perfect" lamps are 334
Lumens per watt white and 668 Lumens per watt
green. Per this old story of mine.

But, my, oh my, they missed Beginning EE Student
blunder #001-B found here. Which reveals that
the life of an incandescent bulb will depend on
something like inversely by the SEVENTH power (!)
of its temperature.

Thus, they invented the flash bulb!

Chances are overwhelming that improving life
versus temperature has been milked dry decades
ago. Nonetheless, this could make a useful student
paper for you. With a few others here. But watch
out for the secret hidden "gotcha".

Separately, check here for Beginning EE Student
blunder #001-A.

There were at least two foreign translations to my
million plus selling TTL Cookbook.

The manual de circuitos integrados TTL was the Spanish
version and remains fairly findable.

The Chinese version seems a lot harder to find.

If you can send me scanned versions, I'd be happy to convert
them to free eBooks. I am also curious what their press
runs and net sales were.

Also needed are scans of Active, CMOS, and Micro I.

Just realized that our free Computer Faire ebook lacked
several crucial mentions. Find it here.

My Hexadecimmal Chronicles was the strangest and least
selling of my books. Seems it had a great cast of characters
but a weak plot and totally lacked any surprise ending.

In those days, hexadecimal calculators were outrageously
expensive, and, even then, did not include Apple's odd
"inverted decimal" code needed for their Basic and some
machine work. Nor a 6502 relative branch calculator.

So, I created a "just look it up" equivalent to a log table
book with all sorts of tabular data that was personally of
enormous use to my ongoing Apple development.

Which brought about the question: Could an Apple II
by itself author, lay out, and typeset an entire book,
ridiculously reducing the then outrageous prep costs
of traditional book publishing? And do so without any
human error?

It could and it did. Helped along by a souped up Diablo
630 Daisywheel.

The Hexadecimal Chronicles remain available from
the usual suspects, albeit at outrageous prices.

If you want me to do a free ebook on this, please send
me a scanned electronic copy.

There are times and places where you might want a
HTML or CSS link to open in a new window. Perhaps
for an optional reference sidebar or whatever.

The secret incantation is to add target="_blank".

As in...

<a href="https://www.w3schools.com" target="_blank">
Visit W3Schools.com!</a>

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.

A website to convert legal land descriptions to lat-lon,
GPS, UTM, and more can be found here.

Our spectacularly engineered prehistoric Bajada
Hanging Canals now are rapidly approaching 100
study areas with a total length exceeding 150 miles!

They now newly surround Mount Graham as well!

Even so, they only represent a tiny portion of the
woefully understudied prehistoric Safford basin.

Here's some of the also rans...    

1. Spectacularly engineered bajada canals.
2. Plain old riverine canals.
3. Thousands of "booze factory" grids.
4. Ubiquitous mulch rings.
5. Aproned check dams.
6. Severely endangered petroglyphs.
7. The usual habitations and field houses.
8. Exceptional evidence of trade patterns.
9. Unusually widespread tradeware sherds.
10. Numerous other rock alignments.

You are welcome to participate or contribute to this
world class research. Talks and tours also available.

I'm not supposed to mention that a really major
scientific publication on the canals is imminent. So,
email me if you want to get in ahead of the hoarders.

Many hundreds of highly unusual Postscript-as-language
projects can be found here and here. With a not yet nearly
completed list here.

Your best starting points are our PostScript Beginner Stuff,
our PostScript Video, and the PostScript Reference Manual.

There's also our Gonzo Utilities that dramatically expand
and simplify PostScript. Details in this tutorial.

By far he best way to run a PostScript program these days is
to use Acrobat Distiller with the top secret command line run
incantation of  //acrodist /F. But there's also GhostScript.

Our goal is to have one new blog entry daily, but it
sure gets easy to get way behind. And it often is more
efficient to do several postings at once.

So, please always check back a week or two to see
if you missed anything.

And tell me what you would like to see as future posts.

Many of the presently 179 subsites that are found via
https://stackexchange.com/sites are certainly worth
visiting. Some have millions of users.

For anybody can ask a question on anything and anybody
can answer. As the answers pile up, so ( usually ) will their
voted upon credibility. Until ( often) the question is "solved".

I'll try to add this one to our offsite resources menu.

There's a new development that might be outright hype
or may dramatically advance all of solid state electronics.
In which a reincarnation of the vacuum tube possibly may
blow everything else away.

Only it turns out you can use plain old air instead because
the distances are small enough that the air molecules do
not interfere!

Search the web under Metal Air Transistor. Such as this
IEEE Paper. Or view this slashdot flapdoodle.

At the least, should be a sure fire student paper. With
( mostly) more useful topics found here.

For most of you individuals and other small scale startups
most of the time, any involvement whatsoever with the
patent system is nearly certain to result in a net loss
of time, energy, money, and sanity.

Find out why in our classic Case Against Patents. With
When to Patent here. And Patent Horror Stories here.

And my very own horrible patent here. With bunches
more on patent avoidance here and here.

And a bizarre collection of historic patent scams here.

Secrets of Degubbing are described here. Including
the original origin of the Baud Rate.

Yup. One Baud! In the LAN of the nineties! Uh, that's
the EIGHTEEN Nineties!

An older paper on how to become a crooked auctioneer
can be found here.

To quote Josh Billings ( usually wrongly credited to
Mark Twain ): "I've never known an auctioneer to
lie. Unless it was absolutely convenient."

I was actually there when this happened: A little
old lady to her friend at a live auction: "Why, that
man has been talking all morning!"

Can't put one over on her. Nosiree.

Or at an eBay auction: "All fright arrangements are
to be made by the buyer." Presumably, they were
selling swash stickers.

There seems to be a glitch on our home page that is
proving hard to pin down. I could use your suggestions
on its cause and cure.

A partial "empty" bar only sometimes shows up on the
green sampler table. It seems to only involve Chrome and
only happens sometimes and may go away on refresh.

The code looks clean and straightforward to me and green
passes the usual CSS validity tests.

A wild guess is that it involves Chrome and a rather unusual
YouTube URL. It does not seem to involve Chrome history.

Have you seen this and can you fix it?

A newsgroup was looking for a stairstep circuit, and
figure 6-3 of page 219 of our free TTL Cookbook
eBook was suggested. While this works, there are
two subtleties involved.

First, the higher value steps will be somewhat less in
amplitude than the lower ones. The fix is to sum your
output into the virtual ground of an opamp's inverting
input. This almost totally prevents step interactions.

Secondly, the TTL output high state is NOT the supply
voltage! It is instead a time and temperature dependent
value somewhere around 3 volts. The obvious workaround
is to use CMOS instead.

Should you only want ten output levels, it is better to
use a counter that is weighted 1-1'-2-5 or 1-2-2'-4 .The
details are found elsewhere in the free TTL Cookbook.
As well as in lots of places in our free Classic Reprints.

It turns out there is a newer and better circuit called a
R-2R network that you can find detailed here.

A reminder that the latest version of our Magic Sinewave
Calculator can be found here, with more details on the
Magic Sinewaves themselves here and here.

These should work beautifully with the Raspberry Pi and
similar micros. Among the other new benefits are a software-
only solution that combines amplitude and frequency.

We still have a few autographed copies left of our
Active Filter Cookbooks. The latest Synergetics
Press blue-and-white 17th printing! Find it here.

This is by far the best-selling active filter book of
all time. It gives you everything you need to know
to build active opamp based lowpass, bandpass,
and highpass filters.

Note that the "usual suspects" are selling UNautographed
versions of older printings for a mere $50 surcharge.

We newly have two versions of the latest ongoing revisions
of our prehistoric bajada hanging canals. Find the .SHTML
version here and the .PDF version here.

Please keep checking back as the major upgrades to our
image documentation is taking a lot longer than expected.

We also think we are about to see a major new scientific
paper released, but we are not allowed to talk about it yet.

We are in the process of adding a whole new layer
of detail to our prehistoric bajada hanging canal
images. With lots more info on titles, origins, names
lat-lons, accesses, and significances.

This will take a while as there are many hundreds
of images so far, with lots more expected. So,
please keep checking here for ongoing progress.

Meanwhile, here is a sampler....

hc000
hc001
hc002
hc003
hc004
hc005
hc006
hc007
hc008

Quadrature Art consists of routing phase shifted or
frequency shifted waveforms to an oscilloscope or
other X-Y display.

We saw some examples long ago on page 221 of our
Active Filter Cookbook. Autographed copies here.

The two key concepts are that a circle results if both
inputs are  the same amplitude, identical in frequency
and 90 degrees in phase. And that Lissajous Figures
result when the inputs differ in frequency.

As this new third party video shows us, there are some
astonishing results when you mix and match quadrature
art input audio  signals. With lots more here.

Yeah, we are working on ebooking Active. Meanwhile,
many of our other free eBooks can be found here. And
some autographed hard copies of a few of our other
titles can be found here.

All you need to know about sailing: The binnacle goes
on top and18the barnacle goes on the bottom.

Interchanging the two is a serious breech of maritime
etiquette.

Recently received a few emails and calls over 
homopolar motors, generators, and Faraday Disks.
We covered them here and here. 

These are the only known rotary dc generators.
While they make excellent student papers,  they
are otherwise useless because of their extreme
low voltage, high current operation. Which usually
makes their commutation losses very high and
their efficiency very low.

These devices are extremely hard to understand,
Faraday and Lorenz laws must be treated together!
Your frame of reference is not at all obvious. 

And it is easy to wrongly convince yourself there
are some overunity possibilities. Which, of course,
there are not.

It turns out that special relativity demands that
you cannot tell if a uniform magnetic field is
stationary or rotating! You can prove this by
trying to rotate a magnet on a string with one
beneath it. 

As in Figure 3 here.

There are no such thing as "magnetic lines"
and any attempt at "cutting" them to explain
this class of machines is utterly futile. Besides
being not even wrong. 

The best discussion of this is in the Feynman
Lectures. Physics Volume II, section 13.10
in particular.

My Blatant Opportunist columns started out in 
Midnight Engineering magazine and then were
web published as ezine topics in my www.tinaja.com
website and their continuations ultimately were
merged  into our GuruGrams.

The focus was on product development for the
individual and small scale startup. They remain
linked here and here. Most include sourcecode.

Many of the earlier Blat columns remain relevant 
and useful  to this day.

Blat #01 -- Book-on-demand publishing
Blat #02 -- Stupendous stuff sources 
Blat #03 -- Desktop finishing ideas 
Blat #04 -- Emerging technologies I 
Blat #05 -- Son of desktop finishing 
Blat #06 -- The case against patents 
Blat #07 -- Mastering the advertorial 
Blat #08 -- Stalking the wild paradigm 
Blat #09 -- Direct toner printed circuits
Blat #10 -- New ISMM II introduction part 1

Blat #11 -- New ISMM II introduction part 2
Blat #12 -- Why I like PostScript
Blat #13 -- Insider research secrets 
Blat #14 -- Revisiting Book-on-demand publishing 
Blat #15 -- Terrific toner techniques 
Blat #16 -- Post justification editing 
Blat #17 -- Emerging technical opportunities II 
Blat #18 -- Inventor's organizations 
Blat #19 -- Bound & Determined

Blat #20 -- Book-on-demand publishing resources I
Blat #21 -- Book-on-demand publishing resources II
Blat #22 -- Patent horror stories 
Blat #23 -- One thousand and one reviews 
Blat #24 -- Becoming a purveyor of risk reduction 
Blat #25 -- Elegant simplicity 
Blat #26 -- Picojustification techniques 
Blat #27 -- Emerging technical opportunities III 
Blat #28 -- Some catalog musings
Blat #29 -- When to patent

Blat #30 -- Flutterwumpers
Blat #31 -- Some helpline hints 
Blat #32 -- Avoiding engineering ratholes 
Blat #33 -- The Mount Graham aerial tramway 
Blat #34 -- Catalogs using Adobe Acrobat PDF 
Blat #35 -- Magic Sinewaves 
Blat #36 -- Con Tests 
Blat #37 -- Emerging technical opportunities IV 
Blat #38 -- Winning the micro game 
Blat #39 -- Options for self-publishing

Blat #40 -- Making B/W print more colorful
Blat #41 -- Weaving a tangled web
Blat #42 -- My primary research tools 
Blat #43 -- Don't get sick 
Blat #44 -- Emerging technical opportunities V 
Blat #45 -- Essential tools to bust a $650 patent 
Blat #46 -- Insider banner advertising secrets 
Blat #47 -- Guidelines for tri-mode publishing 
Blat #48 -- Cash & Carry consulting 
Blat #49 -- How to bash pseudoscience

Blat #50 -- Secrets of 24/7 publishing
Blat #51 -- Adding website bells & whistles 
Blat #52 -- PDF & PDF link checking 
Blat #53 -- Emerging technical opportunities VI 
Blat #54 -- The surplus and auction scene 
Blat #55 -- Eminently effective email etiquette 
Blat #56 -- Funding your personal web site 
Blat #57 -- Imaginative imaging
Blat #58 -- Some thoughts on ezines 
Blat #59 -- Web imaging secrets

Blat #60 -- The eBay phenomena
Blat #61 -- Steplocked magic sinewaves 
Blat #62 -- Bouncy bricks and other web tricks 
Blat #63 -- Don's unauthorized autobiography
Blat #64 -- Debugging insider info
Blat #66 -- Thoughts on refurb
Blat #65 -- My eBay secrets 
Blat #67 -- Step by step image prep 
Blat #68 -- Emerging technical opportunities VII 
Blat #69 -- The worst of Marcia Swampfelder

Blat#70 -- How to become a crooked auctioneer
Blat #71 -- Some energy fundamentals
Blat #72 -- Fun with stuff

But my very favorite is the hazmat rule of thumb:

Hold your arm extended with your thumb up. Then
close one eye.

If you can still see the scene, you are too close.

One of the handier "rules of thumb" that
sometimes apply some of the time and can be
enormously useful is this:

Very often, one percent of what happens 
nationally happens in Arizona. And one percent
of what happens in Arizona happens in the Gila
Valley.

Thus, roughly, there are 300 million people in
the US, 3 million in AZ, and 30,000 locally.

While not super accurate, this rule can quickly
give you a rough estimate of an amazing variety
of events or tasks. Where you otherwise may
not have the faintest clue as to scale. 

Naturally, the "rule" does not apply to anything
with a regional bias. I suspect Thatcher has
more cotton module fires than Bangor, Maine
does. And that walrus attacks may be rare in
Nebraska.

Newly updated and expanded our Gila Valley Day
Hikes. We are now up to 559 primary entries!

Added are a CNF road directory, a new backcountry
wonderment, and a bajada hanging canal update.

The latter is updating almost daily, so be sure to check back.
For the .shtml version here and the .pdf version here.

Linking and posting to appropriate Gnu Public License sites
welcome.

A sampler of some of the more unusual day hikes can be
found here. Talks available.

Welcome to hell. Here is your accordion.

Managed to find what may be a missing 1000 foot
middle piece of the Mud Springs Canal. Which, as
usual, raises more questions than it resolves.

Find the new map here and a few photos here, here,
here, here, and here. Connections at either end
remain unproven, and there's a two meter deep cut
into a possibly natural channel. While maintaining
an apparently optimal canal grade.

Mud Springs may have been an early prototype as
it is one of the very few where almost its entire
route can be easily viewed from several points.

The big picture here. Visitors welcome. USB's of
nearly everything done to date are newly available.

Texas Instruments has a new line of 76 GHz radar
chips, apparently mostly aimed at car safety apps.

One early project of mine that never really got off the
ground was an X band car safety radar. This failed
largely because of a monumental lack of interest
combined with outrageous costs of crucial parts aimed
only at military markets.

One of its neat features was that X band Doppler returns
sounded exactly like you would expect them to. As in
"swooshing" a baking sheet or sounding like you were
stomping in the snow.

More on stuff that either did or ( or should not have! )
seen the light of day here and here.

A favorite pv pricing site just changed their access
format. Grab it here for their Wednesday updates.

Or newly click down several screens.

pv pricing remains in free fall, with eight cents
per peak cell watt now clearly in shouting distance.

Which should be "close enough" for long term
renewability and sustainability.

Our free eBook downloads are summarized here.
Many are freely second sourced here. With my
autographed hard copies listed here and buyable
here. Straight from the horse's whatever.

Note that "the usual suspects" are offering their
autograph-free versions for a mere $50 surcharge.

Other free classic reprints can be clicked to here.
With numero uno here. The very latest here. But
not to be confused with this.

Next on my free ebook to-do list are Active, CMOS,
and Micro I. Please let me know if you know of any
already scanned sources.

A possible bizarre semi-solution to an annoyance: I
started getting these huge square ads lower right for
tv reception scams and whatever.

And found if you mouse grab the ad left margin,
drag it off screen right, return a quarter inch
and then try to draw a "J", the ads go away.

Other suggestions on this Chrome related problem
can be found here. Please email me your solutions.

Were there any prehistoric hanging canals along
Aravaipa Creek? This paper and this one do not
mention any, and this search hit is likely bogus.

Any canal examples would more likely be riverine
instead of hanging. And easily destroyed by the
area's spectacular 100 year floods.

But with hanging canals now proven to completely
surround Mt. Graham, ignoring such a major water
resource would seem highly unlikely.

There's this historic canal at N 32.64517 W 110.15639
that still needs visited. As does landowner contact.

Your help welcome.

Pico De Gallo : A very small parrot.

Details on autorunning a USB drive can be found here.
All that is involved is a four line textfile called, of all
things autorun.inf.

Our latest .PDF hanging canal update here.

Here are our present steps to "improving" our .SHTML
to .PDF conversions...

0. Default no docs, white, or headers.
1. Rename top filename, fix date.
2. Set right margin from Print Prod.
3. Page numbers 3x3 from Edit-->header
    Ariel bold 10 all pages.
4. Delete last page?
5. File size from Optimize.

A bizarre glitch is driving me and others up the wall.
In which only a few video-on-demand sites ( including
CBS and Fox ) produce only blurry and grossly zoom
magnified images. And then only on their selected and
delivered content. And only on some machines.

The cause may be related to a windows update of
the display hardware accelerator.

A temporary Chrome cure is three dots upper right -->
settings --> advanced --> system and then turn off
--> Use hardware acceleration when available.

One side effect might involve adding glitches to sound
and larger display sizes and resolutions. Most especially
full screen. Back off the size if this happens.

Chances are future updates may fix the problem.

If it seems your longer thumb drive loading times are all
excruciatingly slow, it is probably because your thumb
drive loading times are excruciatingly slow.

Chances are your computer has disabled USB 2.0 support.
A video solution can be found here.

There's some non-obvious subtleties involved if you
are converting .SHTML web pages into Acrobat .PDF
ones...

Making sure a correct filename is displayed.
This is easiest done with a .PDF text edit, and
might nicely fit on the same line as your original
top web anchor.

Including a publication or release date might
be a good idea.

Right cropping for balanced margins. Most
web pages are variable width, while Acrobat
pages are fixed widths intended for printers.
Go to Tools -> Print Production ->Set Page
Boxes and adjust Right: as appropriate.

Removing Right Margins ( also from Set
Page Boxes ) might be wanted, or might having
your printer disable backgrounds

Adding page numbers via Edit --> Header &
Footer.

Disabling doc info, margins and white borders.
Reducing page breaks to dotted only.

Possibly dropping backgrounds when printing.

Making sure color choices are acceptable both
on screen and on page. Certain printers may
markedly alter brightness and contrast.

A newsgroup denizen apparently had the audacity to
challenge my Guru status.

To clarify,  I do remain a card carrying member of the
International Brotherhood of Gurus and Swamis Unions
Hulapai County local #357. And have just newly been
recertified to MIL-TFD-41.

I did have to upgrade from local #427 because of the
Tapioca Pudding Institute's restraining order over that
Godzilla versus the Night Nurses definitive scene.

More here.

A directory of free online university tech courses can
be found here..

Once again updated and revised the .PDF version of
our new bajada hanging canal resources.

As we have seen, there can be some rude surprises
when you try to convert a .SHTML file into .PDF.

A web page is normally continuous without breaks,
while an Acrobat file is based on printer sized sheets,
initially with possibly unwanted headers and footers.

Yes, you can crop out unwanted headers or footers,
and sometimes downgrade black bar page breaks
into dashed ones. But the breaks can end up in wildly
wrong places, such as the middle of a table or a too
small boundary.

The rule is this: If you know you are going to want
a .PDF output, make sure it gets involved as early
as possible.

You can use ledding and rearrangement to try and
have pleasant .SHTML and .PDF results. But
note that early doc changes can easily pile up
you sequentially. And return to haunt you later.

OK. Here's a simple and mainstream CSS solution
to having bold indented text blocks with half vertical
space ledding:

In your <style> header...

div.e { font-weight: bold;
           margin-left: 75px;
           margin-bottom: 0.50em; }

... and typically in your <body>...

<div class="e">
          Your paragraph goes here.
</div>

Separately, to just add an approximate half
<br>, try this sneaky stunt...

Some interesting recent plots of utility LCOE or
Levalized Cost of Energy can be found here.

With utility scale solar and wind utterly and totally
blowing everything else away.

But this is 2017 data, so it does not include the
latest continuing spectacular drops in solar costs
that you can find here and here.

We can shortly expect new proposals for the conversion
of coal power plants into singles bars. As this clearly
will be their emerging highest and best use.

More on energy topics here.

.PNG is a lossless image compression scheme that
comes in several flavors. By restricting it to 8-bit
"web friendly" colors, its final file sizes can often
get dramatically reduced.

Several tutorial sites here..

These are called PNG8 files. One source of color
restriction utilities can be found here. These also
apparently work with .JPG.

The usual web friendly colors only number 216
rather than 256 and can be found here, coded
0-215 for PostScript or 000 to FFF for CSS.

216 as in six reds, six greens, and six blues.

For many images, the increase in "color granularity"
can end up negligible or at least tolerable.

The "anvil test" for camp coffee...

If the anvil sinks, it it too weak.
If the anvil floats, it is just right.
If the anvil dissolves, it is too strong.

Newly updated and expanded our Gila Valley Day
Hikes. We are now up to 555 primary entries!

New are links to the Sunny Flat Canal, a major
SCS dam blowout, and our new prehistoric canal
directory. Details on a second dam blowout can
be found here.

A sampler of some of the more unusual day hikes 
can be found here.

No, I am not making this up.

The Lawrence Welk version of One Toke Over the Line
can be linked here.

I am wondering if this could not have exclusively been the
defining moment for the birth of "WTF?"

Much more ( 100 million entries per day! ) here, a detailed
analysis  here, and the curious origin of the analysis here.

Half-height vertical paragraph ledding is generally more
attractive than full. It also gives you options when you
are dealing with page breaks on any .SHTML to .PDF
Acrobat conversions.

The usual <p></p> bracketing forces a minimum of 1
em. And all padding can do is make the spacing end up
higher. Some have suggested using <sub> and/or <sup>
spaces, but this can get tricky.

I have yet to find a simple or elegant half space ledding
solution example. But what comes close to working for
me now is to add a single period one pixel table!

In your <style> header...

.adjled {font-size: 1px;}

And in your <body>...

<table><tr><td class="adjled">.</td></tr></table>

Please let me know if you can come up with something
that is less sledgehammerish and inelegant.

Managed to find a few details on the Sunny Flat historic
canal here and here.

This dated from 1922 and failed after three years. It is
one of very few local modern canals that were not based
upon prehistoric originals.

Very little remains today. The canal was unusual in that
it included a long and high flume, a tunnel, a siphon, some
wooden supports, and a mystery structure reminiscent of
an underground silo. Seven mile length was north of Bear
Springs Flat.

Much more on our prehistoric canals here. Or here for
the Acrobat .PDF version.

Here's how to "white correction fluid" fix a .PDF doc..

Get into Paint and create a small while rectangle. Or
Otherwise match a suitable background color. Then use
Acrobat's Add Image editing feature. Slide it around and
change its size as needed.

Evidence is strong and compelling that most, if not all,
historic  canal rework were adaption of prehistoric originals. 

First, because it is is infinitely easier to "dig out an old ditch"
or "steal the plans" or "borrow the blueprints" than to engineer 
a new canal from scratch. And second , because nearly all of
the decent canal locations were already and nearly exclusively
prehistorically taken. And third, because historic rework often
only applied to a smaller portion of the entire canal reach.

Key historically related bajada canal issues include...

(A) Finding out who did the Bear Springs Canal and when,
whether it was an investment scam, and whether it had
a prehistoric origin. Almost certainly, such a prehistoric
resource could not have been in any manner ignored.
But the construct was grossly and obscenely oversized.

(B) Proving that the Roper Lake Canal was in fact very
recent and uniquely historic. It is presently cardinal and
orthogonal (!) to Henry's Canal.

(C) Resolving who did what to whom from an artesian lake
near the Aravapia Road turnoff. Bandelier first mentioned
it, with obvious historic rework.

Your assistance welcome.

As we have seen, it is a simple matter to convert
a .SHTML web page into Acrobat .PDF. With its
abilities to post to many different places. And not
needing a browser ( or web anything ) to display.

With other possible search, speed, handicapped,
size, distribution, and magnification advantages.

One route is to get into Acrobat and then select
File --> Create --> PDF From Web Page.

But there is a hidden gotcha or two that may
demand your attention: The .PDF conversion will
include headers and footers you may not want.
These can be cropped with the usual Acrobat
editing, but may get old on any high page count.
And will need redone on any original web edit.

Worse, conversion will force page breaks that easily
can end up in awkward or ungainly places. Some
breaks can be replaced by dashed lines, while others
( especially under Chrome) will force wide black lines.

Your workaround is to edit your .SHTML original by
selectively adjusting ledding or making other space
adjustments or even rearranging. Note that any
"pileups" can be accumulative, so you are best
to get early pages correct before moving on.

Removing glitches from .PDF may add some to
your original .SHTML. If a compromise is needed,
the best bet is to make the .PDF look as good as
Possible. Web viewers are generally less critical.

If you know for sure you will need a .PDF result,
it is best to involve it as early as possible in your
original .SHTML editing.

An Acrobat demo with very minor glitches remaining
can be found here. With its web original here.

The latest new .PDF conversion of our Prehistoric
Bajada "Hanging" Canals can be found here.

We have also added this to ResearchGate and Wesrch.

The original .SHTML web version is still found here.

Amazingly, rectocranial inversion can easily be both 
chronic and acute at the same time. 

I've long been mystified by this #45 Mystery Tank
from our Bajada Hanging Canals at N 32.82766
W 109.81896.

A newly discovered and remarkably similar tank
has just been located at N 32.83148 W 109.81419.

The new discovery is clearly historic only, has nothing to
do with the canals, was built to "Gradeall" specs, used
only marginal seasonal water, was built by damming, and
even includes a USGS survey marker.

A newly credible explanation could be the mystery tank
was a "steal  the plans" failed historic attempt at using
SCS dam water, but never did so because the dam blew
out. A branching Jernigan canal was likely never blocked.

Meanwhile, a nearby "Troll House" or "Adena Embassy"
"tank" remains clearly prehistoric, apparently"hand" built,
and excavated from the bottom up into rising terrain. Find
this as #43 Troll House or N 32.82538 W 109.82281

WARNING: Do not attempt to internally explore the dam!

It is apparently possible to convert at least some parts
of web .shtml files into Acrobat .pdf files! This gives you
a way to put your web files on such open source doc
sites as Wesrch, ResearchGate, or Academia. And thus
entice their viewers to directly link back to your website.

The process is simple enough. Just get into Acrobat 10
( now cheaply rentable ) and select File --> Create PDF
From Web Pages.

Much of the process works surprisingly well. Other
portions not so good or not at all. But a lot seems quite
possible with some creative sneakiness.

Be sure to do a Tools --> Optimize. This can dramatically
reduce your final file sizes.

Do make sure any relative href's actually have useful
file links in them. And any new headers in poor places
can get cropped out.

Sadly, narrow page breaking bars may still end up in
unpleasant locations. These can be turned off as a
user option, but a fairly unobtrusive dashed line will
still remain. And some browsers may force the bars.

Editing or ledding your .shtml original is one workaround
for moving anything really bad. Note that such mods can
end up page cumulative.

Yes, plain old header ads work just fine. But ad rotators or
Adsense do not. One trick probably not worth the effort
is to rotate the ads weekly with a new upload. I've also
not yet found a search fix, short of making it conspicuous
via a linked banner ad.

Web JavaScript is very much different from Acrobat
JavaScript, but chances are that useful adaptions can
be found. A sledgehammer approach is to print out as
PostScript, add sneaky new JS code, and then redistill.
But this can create huge file sizes.

A reminder that Distilling should always be done from
your command line by using //acrodist /F. Bunches more
on PostScript here.

Chemistry 101: If you are not part of the solution,
then you are part of the precipitate.

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.

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

Only one. Who hands the bulb to six Californians. Thus 
reducing the problem to a previously solved riddle.

The next planned projects in our Bajada Hanging
Canal work are to expand the photos on our main
directory and add a new resources center.

This will likely take a few weeks. You can follow
the progress here. And above.

There seems to be a glitch or two in the latest Acme Mapper
marker options revisions. In which markers keep piling up even
when they have been option disabled.

To presently and properly view our new Hanging Canal Index,
please always clear all previous markers. Note that your markers
always should start with "A" and always should be relevant.

Just completed a second pass on our Bajada Hanging
Canal index page.

It should now be complete and accurate and 404 free.
Please report any and all issues.

Acme Mapper has added a new option feature that lets
you turn your markers on and off selectively.

We recommend turning the markers off when viewing
our Bajada Canal index and directory.   This way, you'll
only see the relevant current view markers that we
want you to, rather than accumulating any marks from
previous viewings or your other previous projects.

An excerpt of the Safford Basin of the Arizona Water
Atlas can be found here. It also includes a map of
the major area land ownerships.

Here's an opportunity for you to help us by doing some
new world class research on our bajada hanging canals:

The Tripp Canyon Canal has only had a short portion
discovered at N 32.80207 W 110.05129 to N 32.81256
W 110.04597 to date. It is significant in that it closes
the loop of canal development nearly all the way around
Mount Graham, besides being long, having a possible
hanging portion, and a likely watershed crossing.

Needed are verification of its source and destination,
more photos, and GPS notes. Dronework would also
be really nice. Location is an hour's drive by using a
backcountry vehicle. Trivial foot access to the already
explored part, but longer hikes for the rest.

More details here.

The latest bajada hanging canal index and directory can
now be found at https://www.tinaja.com/hang01.shtml#iad

As part of https://www.tinaja.com/hang01.shtml.

Please report any or all omissions and corrections.

Just discovered the hard way that the Nikon Coolpix
L22 has an incredibly bad flaw. In that the battery
compartment lid latch will self-destruct if you so much
as think about looking at it sideways.

There's apparently no reasonable fix, and this
would seem utterly incomprehensible for Nikon.

Partial repairs can sometimes be done by taping
the lid shut, by a repair made by a paper clip but
requiring machine shop skills, or by keeping your
tripod permanently attached.

Needless to say, beware of used eBay sales. And
this might be one time to buy a protection policy.

And major new text adventure developments here.

A new Commodore 64 emulator can be found here.

A bizarre twist on whatever is a new PostScript emulator
called ToastScript that is written in JavaScript.

Long available has been the free and open source
version of GhostScript.

But your best route to PostScript is to use the Distiller
in Acrobat Cloud. And now cheaply rentable.

But note that Distiller arrives with its ability to read or
write most disk files disabled. If you want to run our
Gonzo Utilities or anything else that needs disk file
access ( handling  ANY file format in ANY language! ),
you have to use the top secret incantation run from
your command line of //acrodist /F.

 

There's a major combination flapdoodle and telephone
annoyance scam going on in Arizona over solar net
metering.

Per this source and this one, solar pv component pricing
is now well under what is needed for long term renewability
and sustainability. With costs now threating eight cents
per peak cell watt and literally falling weekly.

Clearly, subsidies are no longer needed. If, in fact, they
ever were. Utilities should be allowed to buy power at
their avoided cost rates. In exchange for providing
the infrastructure and virtual storage needed for any
and all suppliers.

All power should be buyable at wholesale and sellable
at retail. On an equal footing basis.

Much more here.

Certainly some of the most spectacular features of our
prehistoric bajada hanging canals are the apparent
presence of watershed crossings. In which canal water
is routed "up" out of a wet drainage, across a very
carefully chosen saddle, and then "down" into a much
drier one.

Whose side effect is to demonstrate an absolute and
utterly total mastery of hydraulic engineering.

The best studied and most convincing of these takes
water out of Ash Creek, crosses a saddle, and then
discharges into Mud Springs Canyon. Eventually
becoming the Deadman and the Mud Springs canals.

The saddle is six feet wide and has a three foot wide
canal centered on it. All the while maintaining a
perfectly correct slope.

Find its location here and a crossover photo here.

There is also a candidate watershed crossing here
that would go "up" out of Frye Creek and "down"
into Spring Canyon. While not quite yet proven,
its presence would greatly simplify explanations for
sourcing of Robinson, Golf Course, Allen, and
Freeman Canals. Ockham's Razor at its best.

The absence of a watershed crossing here would
demand "their" completely ignoring a major water
resource. As in "no way!".

A third watershed crossing seems to be involved
with the Tripp Canyon Canal found at N 32.80207
W 110.05129 to N 32.81256 W 110.04597 This is
still under study as only a tiny fraction of the canal
has yet been explored and its  destination still
remains unverified.

While crossover candidates are rare, there is yet
another possibility here in Nuttall Canyon. But
the alternate routing they chose makes more sense.

A new index of the known hanging canals can be
found here.

Your help is needed on all levels.

There's some interesting new variants on an old Nikolia
Tesla motor design, called an axial flux motor.

These seem especially suited to electric vehicles
and wind generators. They potentially can offer
significantly higher efficiency, especially in lower
but still gearless speeds. More of a typical winding
can also be spent doing genuinely useful stuff.
Designs can be a short "pancake" style and can
easily be stacked or cascaded. .

More here. And some of the problems here.

An astonishing new advance in photography speed can
newly be found here. Involving sub picosecond and even
femtosecond exposure times!

One of my ancient early Electronics World papers was
on what was then state-of-the-art nanosecond pulses. The
closest I managed to get at the time was an impressive
400 picoseconds. Done by avalanching a transistor.

More reprints here. And free eBooks here.
And everybody elses'  free reprints here.

It is interesting to compare an eBay Selling Sell-Buy ratio against
the equivalent Consignment Fee for the same amount of placement
effort. The formulas are...

      SBR = 100/(100 - COM)    and   COM = 100 - (100/SBR)

Thus a 50 percent commission equals an unacceptably low 2:1 sell-buy
ratio. A 20 percent commission equals a laughingly absurd 1.25:1 SBR.

Our recommended SBR is 30:1. Easily achievable through
creative use of both live and online industrial auctions. Most
especially by paying close attention to "contents of cabinet"
and "contents of room" opportunities.

Much more eBay stuff here. And our own eBay sales here.

An eBay auction with sniping is more properly called a Vickrey
Second Price auction. And is optimal for several reasons. A very
good review of Vickrey auction theory appears here.

The best of all possible auctions for buyers whose time and whose
convenience is important would appear to be a Sealed Bid Second
Price auction. These would also appear seller optimal as a bidder
is MUCH more likely to bid if the odds are high that they will get
the item for far less than their max proxy bid price.

While sniping eBay approaches this ideal, Sealed Bid Second Price
Auctions seem to be nonexistent elsewhere. Yet they should be
the best for everybody. And are Vickrey optimal.

More here and here.

Managed to verify that Acme Mapper did in fact switch
from Google to Leaflet and that this has dramatically
trashed our ability to view many prehistoric bajada
canals and CCC water spreaders.

You can use 32.84831 W 109.93414 as a "resolution
tester" that shows or omits five water spreaders.

Apparently the very best of satellites offer 0.3 meter
resolution, while more typical ones 0.5 meters.

The solution would appear to be to switch to drones.
Which, of course, would required support and funding.

How to speak Tucsoneese ( aka "Nogales Junction" ):

R.O.B.'s ---> Regular Old Brownies

The pv breakthrough of the week involves perovskites
and can be found here.

Any pv breakthrough of the week always has, of course,
a 6.99 day half life.

Meanwhile, as found here and here, pv cell pricing
continues its massive decline and is newly threatening
eight cents per peak cell watt. Far under what is now
needed for long term renewability and sustainability.

Energy fundamentals here, its "son of" sequel here,
a slide show here, and lots of similar stuff here.

How well did you score on the slide show quiz?

I am mystified by what appears to be a historic cattle
tank at N 32.82776 W 109.81894. It is clearly fed by and
associated with the Mud Springs prehistoric canal.

Yet, I have yet to find any evidence that any part of
this canal was ever used historically.

Best current thinking is that the tank was built at the time
the SCS dam was, intending only a shorter segment of this
canal to actually see historic reuse. But the poor quality
of the SCS dam construction promptly blew itself out.

Your theories on this are more than welcome.

Work is slowly progressing on our new master
prehistoric bajada hanging canal index and
directory. We are now almost half way there.

You can follow the daily progress here. Please
report any omissions and corrections.

One of the key secrets to eBay success is having a high
enough SBR or sell buy ratio. 30:1 works well for me.

30:1 SBR's are fairly easy to achieve at industrial 
auctions on "contents of cabinet" and "contents
of room" deals. As they are on multiple pallets.

Especially when the lot gets "poisoned" by the
auctioneer using "put it with the next lot" to
maintain momentum.

I just got an email asking be to do some eBay
consignment sales for a 10 percent commission.
The minimum practical commission for me would
be 96.7 percent, equal to a 30:1 SBR.

I can see no point whatsoever in trying to 
do eBay consignment sales for others. It makes
absolutely no economic sense. 

Particularly since it is YOU that gets hung out
to dry when things inevitably go south. 

More on similar eBay insider sales secrets
here.

Newly updated and expanded our Gila Valley Day
Hikes. We are now up to 551 primary entries!

New are links to remaining lookout towers, some
improvements to the Columbine visitor center,
new satellite imaging problems, and reaching
the halfway point on our new hanging canal
indexes.

A sampler of some of the more unusual day hikes 
can be found here.

And more details on your spectacular research 
opportunities of our Prehistoric Bajada Hanging 
canals here. And much more on the canals here 
and here.

eBay's "sell similar" sucks.

If you reuse it several times, you will end up with extreme
bloatware, with dozens to hundreds of unwanted and
unneeded fonts jamming things up, besides doing lots
of random and unwanted size changes.

Instead, write something like this "dummy" program
replacing your html  code for each new listing...

<font rwr="1" size="3" style="font-family:Arial">
.<br>
<b>Only one available!</b><br><br>
para line first<br>
para line mid<br>
....
para line last<br><br>
....
Received by us ... more <br><br>
Guaranteed usable.... more.<br><br>
Your <b>unit</b> bid.... more <br><br>
In stock for immediate delivery.<br><br>
.... ( etc... )
<font rwr="1" size="2" style="font-family:Arial">
nelanai heat3x6.j pipes3 <br><br>
</font>
</font>

A comment on the third line above: This is some find print
code to assist your hired help. In this case, the location of
the item in inventory, the image .jpg, and a description of
what they are looking for.

More eBay help here.

Go to 32.84831 W 109.93414, first on Acme Mapper
and then on Google Earth.

Google clearly shows five CCC water diversion channels,
while Acme Mapper gives only the faintest hint of one
of them.

I suspect Acme has switched to a lower resolution or
a more highly filtered satellite source. Possibly to work
around new Google fees.

This, of course, is very bad news for our hanging canals.
Many of which have similarly vanished. Or at least have
become much harder to identify.

The obvious solution is to drone everything. Your
funding and assistance is sorely needed.

The old WOW signal is once again back in play.

Meanwhile, a brand new one can be found here.

Two of our recent eBay images can be found here and
here. I thought I would once again review just exactly
how these are done. Lots more photos here.

Photography starts off with a 10 Megapixel Nikon
Coolpix camera and is done outside in moderately
heavy shade with no flash and a uniform background.
Use of a tripod is mandatory!

All image postproc is done in bitmap format, until the
very final .jpg conversion stage. At least 95% of your
time and effort MUST be spent in postproc, compared
to your actual photography!

The pix is then imported into imageviewer 32 and gets
coarsely cropped. It is then slightly rotated to get all
horizontal lines as near horizontal as possible. Followed
by some modest brightening and gamma reduction.

Regardless of whether it is a "hex 3D" or "flat square"
view, our Architect's Perspective  routines get run to
force any and all vertical lines truly so. This  requires
full Acrobat and their secret magic //acrodist /F command
line incantation.

The next step is subtle but super important. Get back into
imageviewer 32 and back off one red click on your color
balance. At this point, it is of major importance that there
are  ZERO pixels present with whose red value is 255!

Next, get into Paint and select a color having a red value of 255.
Carefully outline your entire subject continuously and at least
one pixel wide. Your entire outline must be complete. Strive
for truly horizontal or vertical lines where appropriate.

Should there be any undercuts or "holes" in your subject, also
fill these with red=255 pixels. An "undercut" is anything you
cannot reach by a horizontal or a vertical line from any border.

Any murky or burned areas can now be repaired, possibly with
double or triple exposures or with individual local retouch. But
be careful not to add any unwanted red=255's. Lettering issues
can next be restored with our Bitmap Typewriter.

When the image looks like you want it to, get back into  
imageviewer 32 and crop it to a balanced size. If you use
a vignette, be sure to leave enough room. Get into our
Web Friendly PostScript Colors and select a suitable
background. And then use our Auto Backgrounder.

Finally, resize to 1000 pixels horizontally or so, touch
up the brightness and gamma, and possibly add ONE
click of sharpness. Then save in .jpg format.

Consulting services available.

Here's a summary of our eBay resources...

Master eBay Directory and Index

Our own eBay Sales 
eBay Selling Summary
eBay Buying Summary
My eBay Photo Secrets
Successful eBay Seller Strategies
Successful eBay Buyer Strategies
Enhancing your eBay Skills I
Enhancing your eBay Skills II
Enhancing your eBay Skills III
Enhancing your eBay Skills IV
Enhancing your eBay Skills V
Enhancing your eBay Skills VI
Enhancing your eBay Skills VII
Enhancing your eBay Skills VIII
Image Post-Processing Tools
The Arizona Auction Scene
Your own Custom Auction Finder
Auction Help Library