Category: Tech

Sound upgrade in the garage was accomplished last week with the addition of a JTR Captivator 212.  It’s a Pro Series mid-bass unit, with a heavy steel grill, SpeakOn connectors and thick, truck bed liner finish – perfect for the work environment.  It runs on a Dayton SA-1000 amp pushing a thousand watts of chest-thumping bass.  I expect a patio speaker upgrade to be the last step in completing the stereo systems for the time being.

We bought those SRT-220’s on the garage shelf used in Germany 20 years ago and they still sound great.  The Infinity’s under the eaves out back paired with that little sub are still good as well.  The old Kenwood integrated amp was replaced with the Carver unit because the speaker switching function failed.  It soldiered on with a power-protect glitch after the lightning strike last year, but I knew it was on it’s last legs.

Inside this time – pretty easy to see the flash in the 2nd shot.  I can see much greater detail on zoom, but the brightness delta is the most obvious.  Starting to wonder if this tech involves some sort of flash management, at least in part.

Some parts of the flash pic actually seem to have better detail on initial inspection, in my eye.

Stumbled across an article in Wired magazine where the author made the following statement:  “The Internet is becoming a low-trust society, where an assumption of pervasive fraud is built in to the way things function.” How naive.  Anyone who was paying attention at the beginning never trusted it in the 1st place.  Just goes to show how generational knowledge fails to evolve.

Please allow me to correct the author’s thinking.  “A low-trust society has built widespread public electronic communications infrastructure without security.” I have a newsflash for some of these Internet pundits:  The “Internet” is merely a reflection of the people using it.  The Internet is not the problem, society is not the problem and the Internet is not a society.  I did not even continue reading the article after I saw the summary line.

The Internet is no different in this respect than many other tools used by dishonest and criminal elements to further their pursuits.  Mass shooting?  Guns bad.  Cyber fraud?  Internet bad.  Check your logic.  The typical underlying problem in the Internet’s case was the rush to capitalize and worry about the details later.  In the meantime, lower-tier capitalists were building their scam and fraud empires.  Good luck with that.

Anyone working in a large software development environment knows this intuitively.

What could possibly go wrong?

Interesting observation from somebody considered technically literate:

Perhaps the author overlooks the viability of open-source code and local storage. Of course nobody can download the entire Internet, nor would they want to, as the lion’s share of it is just crap purveyed by political pundits, pornographers, media outlets, and social media morons. But it definitely IS possible to easily and effectively preserve the stuff you need and use, practically speaking.

This is probably about how Facebook would work for me:

Maybe I could make friends with this guy.

This is why I liked Hangouts, and Messages for Web needs voice integration:

Don’t much care for the small devices.

Back in April I posted a little story about trying to remote control publishing issues with Air Force Magazine. Initial results seemed promising after I finally got somebody’s attention, but more than a month went by before I started getting annoyed about it again. I decided to finally take the gloves off, knowing I had at least 1 good email address with a potentially responsible actual human reading it:

Within a few days the high res images were back. Looks like threatening someone’s job is the only way to get things done in Washington DC these days. Apparently that tactic doesn’t work on the POTUS.

I became disappointed with the AF Magazine editors a couple years ago after they stopped posting full-sized, high-res graphics in the newsletter. It makes no sense, even considering the stock explanation given below. I commented on the web response page a few times, to no avail. So a  couple weeks ago I finally became fed up with it and decided to get aggressive. At least I got somebody’s attention. I intended to continue forwarding the original complaint (bottom) with a new insult for every graphic in the newsletter they continued to mis-link. Still not confident anything will get done, but I’ll find Amy’s boss and a couple more higher-ups and add some more addresses to re-start this in the future, if necessary. Scroll to the bottom of the message chain and read-up to see how it took less than 2 weeks to get it done.

Date: Tue, 2 Apr 2019 11:32:06 -0600
Subject: Re: Response to Daily Report comments
From: Paul <acewiza@gmail.com>
To: Amy McCullough <AMcCullough@afa.org>
Thanks for the response, Amy – I imagined my email address was in the spam filter by now. As a big fan of all things aerospace, I believe the biggest disservice in this situation is to the hard-working airmen out in the field taking those pictures. They deserve to have their work displayed prominently and correctly. I’ll stop harassing you about it, now that I believe someone who cares is aware of it.
v/r

On Tue, Apr 2, 2019 at 10:03 AM Amy McCullough <AMcCullough@afa.org> wrote:
Sir,
I do apologize for the low-resolution graphics on the website. We are extremely limited by our current technology, but we are in the middle of a complete revamp of our website/email blast, which will include a completely new CMS system. Once that launches, which won’t be for about six more months, we will be able to post beautiful high-resolution pictures. However, as of now, we are losing capability on a daily basis because our CMS system is no longer supported. I would really appreciate you bearing with us while we go through this upgrade process. We are aware that our existing technology is less than ideal. It is something we take very seriously and we are doing everything we can to get it right, but it takes time.
Sincerely,
Amy McCullough
News Editor
Air Force Magazine
1501 Lee Highway
Arlington, Va., 22209
703-247-5805
From:* Paul <acewiza@gmail.com>
Sent:* Monday, April 1, 2019 9:14 AM
To:* membership <membership@afa.org>
Subject:* Fwd: What is wrong with you Idiots?
Is that a B-1 on the April 1 Daily Report? Hard to tell from that tiny little pic provided.
———- Forwarded message ———
From: *Paul* <acewiza@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 7:14 AM
Subject: Fwd: What is wrong with you Idiots?
To: membership <membership@afa.org>
Is that a nice nightshot of a B1 refueling on the 29 March Daily Report? Hard to tell when you can’t see much on that lowres thumbnail you posted.
———- Forwarded message ———
From: *Paul* <acewiza@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Mar 28, 2019 at 7:54 AM
Subject: Fwd: What is wrong with you Idiots?
To: membership <membership@afa.org>
Hey – nice shot of the AEHF launch on the 17th! Too bad your readers can’t see it very well on the crappy, low-res pic you posted to the Daily Report today.
———- Forwarded message ———
From: *Paul* <acewiza@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 8:21 AM
Subject: Fwd: What is wrong with you Idiots?
To: membership <membership@afa.org>
So today, AF News treated us to a lowres shot of Gen. Raymond. They even linked it to the same lowres graphic in the story. Isn’t that special!? More like specially retarded.
———- Forwarded message ———
From: *Paul* <acewiza@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 7:43 AM
Subject: Fwd: What is wrong with you Idiots?
To: membership <membership@afa.org>
Still no-go on the Daily Report Graphics. Looks like a nice shot of some F-35s on the ramp, but hard to tell for sure. Here’s a few suggestions for webmaster study and course work:
https://www.ed2go.com/courses/computer-programming/programming-classes/ctp/webmaster
https://study.com/what_training_do_you_need_for_a_webmaster.html
https://www.google.com/webmasters/learn/
———- Forwarded message ———
From: *Paul* <acewiza@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Mar 25, 2019 at 7:23 AM
Subject: Fwd: What is wrong with you Idiots?
To: membership <membership@afa.org>
WRT the 25 MAR Daily Report, when I clicked on the lead story graphic it took me to a copy of the same low-res crappy graphic file displayed on the web page. So I just clicked delete and ignored the rest.
———- Forwarded message ———
From: *Paul* <acewiza@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Mar 18, 2019 at 6:56 AM
Subject: What is wrong with you Idiots?
To: membership <membership@afa.org>
What newsletter posts a graphic with a link to the same low-res, crappy file seen in the post? Answer: AF Magazine! In reference to your leading photo in the 18 March newsletter: The fact that (whoever your webmaster is) takes the time to link the picture, only exposes what idiots you people are. You’ve been doing this for years now and I cannot figure out why. It’s either plain stupidity or pure, shitty imaginary greed. Both?
I always believed it true to not blame malice for what can be explained by stupidity. Now I wonder.
v/r
Paul D. Shaffer, MSgt, USAF (ret.)

I thought we were trying to turn the PC into a phone.

So instead of just using a PC, wait, nevermind.

With plenty of time on my hands while recovering from the hip replacement, I decided to update the network infrastructure map for the first time in a few years. There were many changes, and a few of the old stalwarts, including my first-ever PC, the Z-486, are still in the mix. The biggest change would be addition of the Synology NAS. As a long-time sysadmin, I spent plenty of time rolling my own servers. But Synology has been doing a really nice job of integrating that stuff in an easy-to-use package even non-techies can parse, so why spend the time?