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I think I understand now why some people are very keen on open water swimming (wild swimming). I've just been on holiday and spent a lot of time swimming in the sea (yes, in the UK, with a wetsuit) and doing a spot of body boarding. It's very relaxing. You can spend hours in the water. It's quite fun when the waves are breaking over you, but it's also good when they're smooth and you bob over the top.

There's a bit of a knack to body boarding, catching the wave at the right point, and adjusting the attitude of the board so it stays on the leading edge of the wave for longer. I don't think I'll ever get around to trying proper surfing. I think that would take some lessons and quite a bit of time. It's fun to watch though.

I have a NodeMCU v3, an ESP8266-based Arduino work-alike board with Wi-Fi, and after getting a few cheap sensors and a display, I managed to wire up together a network sensor system that can give readings of temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure that I'm feeding into an RRD to make pretty graphs. This is what it looks like as of now. I know it's on a breadboard, but I kinda suck at soldering and after burning two perfboards trying to get the circuit built I decided screw it and made the breadboard a permanent fixture. I'll have to buy another one soon. Yeah, it's hot here where I come from. 29°C and 84% relative humidity is punishing.

That 0.96" I²C SSD1306-based OLED display is very nice and clear, but it was also the very devil to interface. It took a lot of fuzzing around to get the thing to work reliably. The specs say that it ought to be compatible with both 3.3v and 5v, but I've found that it is very unreliable at 3.3v, and that the 4.7kΩ pull-up resistors that are generally required to use I²C have to then be pulled up to 5v. The rest of the components, the DHT11 temperature sensor (blue box) and the BMP 180 pressure sensor are all wired to to 3.3v for Vcc.

If you'd want to build one like it yourself, more details and code here. If you try to build upon my work I'd like to hear about it!

The historically racist origins of gun control are hardly a topic for debate. As noted by Cato Institute’s David Kopel, the matter of arming blacks in America was the subject of the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision; with one Supreme Court justice warning about the rights of free blacks “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.” Kopel also notes that as a part of the Black Codes passed in the South during the early post-Civil War Reconstruction, free blacks were required to secure permission from police in order to carry firearms.

From Harriet Tubman, who carried a pistol with her during the heroic rescues of slaves, to abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who quipped “a man’s rights rest in three boxes: the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box” -- there is perhaps no other group in American history whose members understand intimately the “right to self-preservation” embodied in the Second Amendment than black Americans.

It is therefore more than a little curious as to why Democrats continue to push gun control measures that are inherently, historically, and intentionally designed to disenfranchise minority groups from their Second Amendment rights.

In spite of a downward trend of gun violence in America, even as gun ownership soars, Democrats contend there is both an “epidemic” of gun violence sweeping the country, and that access to firearms is the culprit. This mindset guides virtually every part of the Democrats’ gun control agenda; with no apparent regard to who actually is or will be impacted the most by their plans.

Carried to its natural end, the philosophy of gun control virtually ensures the only people left with firearms in a Democrat-controlled America are cops, affluent whites, and criminals.

Perhaps street crime and police response times are not concerns for rich liberals hiding behind privacy fences in gated communities with private, armed security guards (can you say, “Silicon Valley?”); but for millions of Americans in urban areas ravaged by gangs and crime, firearm ownership is literally a matter of life and death.

One underpinning gun control strategy favored most by Democrats centers around price control; wherein regulatory measures squeeze both supply and the cost of production of firearms, making them cost-prohibitive to acquire and possess.

Schemes such as removing the legal shield that protects firearm manufactures and retailers from lawsuits resulting from criminal acts by end users, and resurrecting the Obama-era tactic of employing the FDIC to bully banks into not doing business with firearms retailers and manufacturers, are measures intended to dry up the lawful gun industry.

However, the actual and ultimate victims of such measures are not big businesses, but individual, law-abiding men and women whose ability to protect themselves, their families, their homes, and their small businesses will be made increasingly difficult.

We see this strategy already playing out in municipalities controlled by liberal officials. Even where technically lawful to carry a firearm, such officials delight in making firearm licensing exorbitantly expensive and time-consuming. Overly complicated testing mandates are coupled with multiple in-person filing requirements available only during regular business hours. Such measures require significant time and effort to pursue -- luxuries largely unavailable to the working poor and middle-class workers.

One of the latest proposals gaining popularity among the Democratic presidential field is to mandate that gun owners carry firearms liability insurance; another side-door tax on a constitutionally-guaranteed right.

This “death by a thousand cuts” has now become gun confiscation by a thousand regulations; with its earliest and most numerous victims being the poor and “marginalized” citizenry these very Democrat bleeding hearts claim to champion.

Democrats long have vigorously opposed every effort by Republicans to require voter identification as a prerequisite to exercising one’s right to vote. Liberals assert such mandates intentionally “suppress” the minority vote. Yet, those very same civil rights champions have no hesitancy in pressing for measures that would seriously suppress the ability of minority and poorer citizens to exercise another precious right; one that is expressly guaranteed against such suppression in the Bill of Rights. Their hypocrisy is disgraceful.

https://townhall.com/columnists/bobbarr/2019/08/21/the-notsosubtle-racism-of-gun-control-n2551961

This morning, I took a quick look at the website of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, https://www.venganza.org. I got a very short web page: "You Are Banned." text centered on the top line. Hmm. Was their website down? What's going on? I tried a proxy website, and that worked. Checking with Chrome (I use Firefox), I had no trouble viewing the web site. I ran Firefox under another user account, and had no problem viewing the website that way either. On the user account with the problem, I could view other pages on the FSM website, eg. https://www.venganza.org/join/ but when I hit the Home button on the FSM site, I got the "You Are Banned." message again.

And then, as I continued to investigate, things mysteriously just started working. Pulling up another window in the browser, I was able to see the FSM site. I hit refresh on the page with the message and the site came up like it should, no more strange message. On the one hand, no more problem is nice, but I really wanted to learn how my browser had been compromised. Cookies? Add-ons? Some other website I visited? Maybe it's not my browser, it is the FSM site after all, doing some sort of browser fingerprinting? Or, could it be my ISP? A quick search for "You Are Banned." in the page source turned up nothing.

OK, so my favorite talk radio show. John Walton has passed away, and some millennial is trying to fill John's shoes. Kenny is from Chicago, raised up in a liberal city, by liberal parents, taught by liberal teachers, and probably had liberal preachers if he went to church. And, Kenny has grown into a right-leaning Libertarian. He made a comment that "Being conservative among millennials is counter culture, like being a hippy in the sixties was counter culture then."

That was worth a chuckle, obviously. But, maybe it's worth more than just a chuckle? Hmmm. In my own home, out of three millennials, two are political agnostics. That third one? I'm proud to say he's pretty much the same sort of asshole I am. He has plenty of contempt for Trump, and much of the rest of the right - but he hates the left with a passion. All the time he spent in college, he mocked all the SJW's and activists. When campus concealed carry was made legal in Texas, he concealed carried on campus.

So, I'm listening to the talk show host, thinking about my own son, and finally did a search for millennial counter culture.

Zane Turbyfill has some ideas on the subject here - https://www.quora.com/Why-are-Gen-Z-people-so-much-more-conservative-and-right-wing-than-millennials

9/10 of us are absolutely supportive of the LGB_ community. See the blank? We look at things logically, not Ethos (republicans) and not Pathos (democrats). LOGOS. We don’t hate transgender people, we just think you can’t logically change your gender by cutting your d_ck off and saying you changed. You make about as much since to us as those instagram girls that swear up and down that they’re black but are very obviously not. We think people with Gender Dysphoria should seek better treatment (becoming transgender showed a less than 1% decrease in deppression among people with gender dysphoria last I checked) and people who become transgender without Gender Dysphoria (or any other condition that would make you want to become transgender)… Pretty much the entire right wing Gen Zs response: F_ck you, you’re being an illogical idiot who likely goes to Antifa riots and preaches about the evil fascist ways of Trump (Not that Gen Z was proTrump as much as it was anti-Hillary, but his progress in the presidency has caused us to look at him in a much more positive way). Gun control is stupid to us, because it logically does not work. Communism (and socialism) is stupid to us because it logically does not work.

Hmmmmm - logic before feelz? What a concept!!

But, wait - there's a Z in his name. There's a Z in my son's name. Maybe it's the Z that does it to them? Let me search some more . . .

Alternet, of all places, has some thoughts on millennials and boomers - https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/lessons-millennials-can-learn-from-boomers/

Yet there is a certain irony in the popular depiction of Boomers as out of touch, conservative, and entrenched in their economic interests. Boomers were, after all, originally the opposite: the counterculture generation — who lived through the Cold War, rejected the American imperialist experiment in Vietnam, stoked the civil rights movement, and spread liberal social ideals through music, art and culture — was largely comprised of Boomers. Arguably, the generation born between 1946 and 1964 were more radical than millennials or Generation Z: the Black Panthers, Young Lords, American Indian Movement, Students for a Democratic Society, and the Weathermen all were semi-militant Marxist groups who saw themselves as connected to a larger international socialist movement — and were, need I remind you, largely Boomer creations. The New York Times noted that there were 4,330 bombings in the United States between January 1969 and April 1970, more than one every day. Leftist millennials may have coined the term “woke,” but our politics are downright tame compared to our bomb-slinging parents’ generation.

Forbes - https://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleystahl/2017/08/11/why-democrats-should-be-losing-sleep-over-generation-z/#66af4ade7878

According to research, Gen Z is more individualistic, more conservative both socially and fiscally, and they’re already making waves of impact on our political system. Gen Z, those born in 1995 or later, is possibly the most conservative generation since World War II, and it is worrying that their impact has been completely overlooked during this election. While our fears might be preemptive, we should not make the mistake of disregarding the intriguing yet also possibly worrying world views of Generation Z.

Oftentimes Millennials have been criticized for being notoriously liberal, but it looks like the generation right behind us has completely rebelled. A U.K. Study at The Gild did a survey of almost 2,000 adults and found that on issues like gay marriage, marijuana legalization, transgender rights, and even tattoos, 59% of Gen Z respondents described their views as ‘conservative’ and ‘moderate’.
 

Oh, crap, that's another Z there? Maybe it is the Z that's doing it!! Maybe conservatives need to name all their babies with names with Z in them? Nahhhh, O'Crazio Cortez blows that theory out of the water, dammit!

OK, I'll stop A̶r̶i̶s̶t̶a̶r̶c̶h̶u̶s̶i̶n̶g̶ editorializing, and give a few more links on the subject:

https://canadafreepress.com/article/hip-conservative-counter-culture-vs.-repressive-liberal-establishment
https://time.com/4909722/trump-millennials-igen-republicans-voters/
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/generation-zs-rightward-drift/

For those who prefer not to read - a video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avb8cwOgVQ8 "You can't be the dominant culture, and the counter culture"

Maybe culture today is so far left, the only direction left to go is right?

Red pilling - awesome!!!

Speculation: No operating system can have a version number higher than 10.

It started with Apple Mac OS X.

Next Microsoft Windows 10. Version 10 seems perpetual. It seems there will be no Windows 11. So why not just rename it: Microsoft Windows OS X ?

Next . . . Google deserts desserts: Android 10 is the official name for Android Q

Google has officially named the next version of Android, which is due to be released this fall: Android 10. Breaking the 10-year history of naming releases after desserts, the company is bailing on providing a codename beginning with a subsequent letter of the alphabet (in this case, Q), which is the way we’ve been referring to Android up to now. This year is Android 10, next year will be Android 11, and so on.

So maybe there will be an Android 11 ?

But then, there is Linux. To complicate things, Android is built on top of Linux.

The kernel isn't past version 10. Yet. Some distributions are well past version ten.

What about other OSes? MS-DOS didn't make it past six? What about the mainframe or minicomputer era?

Maybe older systems don't count. Maybe the trend toward X is a recent 21st century thing since Apple's Mac OS X and the need to identify with it.

(now back to the study of incandescent transistors!)