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Potentiometers and Variable Capacitors
        In the first installment, written over a decade ago, I bemoaned the loss of volume and tuning knobs on car radios, which had been stupidly replaced by buttons. By the second installment the knobs were back, although the knobs were digital, rather than analog.
        A potentiomenter is a variable resistor with three leads. Usually the control lead is the center and can raise the voltage to a second lead while lowering it to the third. In analog systems they were used as volume, tone, and balance controls. In stereo systems there were two stacked together, one for each channel.
        A variable capacitor was a capacitor where turning the knob one direction raised the capacitance, the other was lowered it. These were used for tuning radios, and UHF channels on early televisions.
        Never once did I ever see one of these two devices fail. Old potentiometers suffered from getting dirty, which caused a crackling noise when turned, and often made the sound silent. However, this was easily remedied with switch oil, sold at Radio Shack as color TV tuner cleaner. It only took removing a few screws to access them for cleaning.
        I drive a fifteen year old car, and the volume knob drives me nuts. Try to turn it up and the volume often goes down, or the reverse, or nothing at all. The digital tuner often jumps off the station. The old analog equipment never did that no matter how old it was.
        There’s no reason whatever to use digital switches for volume knobs, because all sound is analog and all amplifiers are analog. Potentiometers would still work well, and you can still buy them, but I don’t think I’ve seen one on any new stereo in this century.
        Why did they change? The mantra of youth, “new is always better!” Well, sometimes it is. Just as “reform” doesn’t mean “improve” but to change the form of something for better or worse, change can be better or worse.
        Digital volume and tuning controls have no advantages at all over the older tech, and many disadvantages. Changing this was just stupid.

Packaging that doesn’t need tools to open
        Back in the last century things generally came in thin cardboard boxes, simple things that were always easy to open and seldom needed tools, and the only needed tools for some were a knife or scissors. Now? They package things in hard plastic that sometimes breaks scissors!
        And it’s terrible for the environment. Over half of all plastic on Earth was manufactured in this century! There’s absolutely no rational or logical reason to imprison a product in a stupid, very hard to open plastic package. It seems that with some items, they gave more thought to the looks (but not usability) of the packaging than the actual merchandise!
        Stop making all that damned plastic and stop making it so damned hard to access everything I’ve bought!
        Now, easily opened packaging isn’t completely dead; they still use paper wrappers and cardboard boxes for fast food. But anything else? “Honey, have you seen the jackhammer?

Car windows you can open or close without the ignition in the operating position
        Now, I love power windows. It’s great to be able to roll up all your windows from the driver’s seat without having to pull over and open each door to roll the windows up. It’s also nice to be able to keep passengers from rolling them up or down.
        But why does the key have to be in the running position? I should be able to simply open the driver door and roll them up or down. When they’re rolled up and it’s hot outside, you certainly don’t want to put you upper body in that hundred fifty degree furnace!
        There’s absolutely no reason why I should need a key to roll a window down.
        This isn’t exactly on-topic, but when it starts raining, the windows should roll themselves up.

Glass soda bottles
        Plastic bottles make sense for a lot of things; viscous substances like shampoo and condiments are far better served by squeezable bottles, especially ketchup, which was hard to get out of a full glass bottle. Milk and other assorted liquids are fine in plastic, as long as the container has a flat bottom.
        But there is no good reason to put liquids, like soda or cooking oil, in plastic. Plastic is bad for the environment, particularly the oceans’ environments. The only reason it’s used is because it only takes a hundredth of a penny to make a glass bottle but a penny for a glass bottle.
        That saving of .99% of a penny does in no way make up for the environmental damage of plastic, nor for the instability of soda bottles. Beer still comes in glass bottles, and you can set one on the hood of your car easily. Not soda, a soda bottle’s design (which makes it look like it holds more soda) is unstable unless on a perfectly flat, level surface.
        But worse, plastic is pliable (or a plastic ketchup bottle would be useless), which means the soda will go flat much faster. That’s why they still use glass bottles for beer!
        As for cooking oil, if it’s on your stove when the oven is on, it will melt.
        Plastic soda and cooking oil bottles are not user-friendly, or environment friendly. Bring back glass!

Paper cups and straws
        As mentioned above, plastic is bad for the environment. There used to be no plastic cups or straws; they were made of thin waxed cardboard, and I see no reason why plastic cups and straws should cost any less than paper.
        They should bring back paper milk cartons, too.

Bezels
        They’re not dead yet, but it’s coming. Now, getting rid of bezels on TVs and monitors is a great innovation. The one on my new fifty five inch TV is only half an inch. But why do designers these days never look at how a device is going to be used? The bezel on my four inch phone is already too small, and I’ve read they’re so small on the new phones that they’re being called “bezel-less”.
        It’s stupid! The bezel on a phone or tablet is necessary to keep from accidental clicks, which my phone gets all the time. My tablets, with generous bezels, never do.
        Idiot designers, forget about cool, I don’t need to impress anyone with “innovation” that some stupid young hot shot came up with.
        Getting rid of phone bezels is almost as dumb as touch screen controls in cars, the most idiotically dangerous “innovation” in decades. You shouldn’t have to take your eyes off the road to adjust the heater or turn up the radio!

Foot operated car dimmer switches
        I don’t know ahat idiot in Japan... or was it Germany? Whatever, cars used to have foot switches to dim their headlights.
        And then some moron decided to move the dimmer switch to the turn signal. I guess whoever made that decision never used his turn signals and figured he’s add a use to the “useless” turn signal.
        But using your turn signal to turn or change lanes is the law in all fifty states (I don’t know about foreign countries). The problem occurs when you go to use the turn signal and blind some poor soul in an oncoming vehicle.
        Someone please fire these morons before they kill more of us!

I am back in the ER starting to feel a little more rational

I made sure the firemen and the EMTs wrote down my URL so they could read living with schizoaffective disorder

Will post after I chill for a while

A Suicidal Nanny, an Underground Industry and 3 Babies Stabbed

The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail

China’s Media Crackdown Spreads to Hong Kong

Hong Kong’s expulsion of a British journalist after he led a foreign correspondents’ meeting with a pro-independence activist is, first and foremost, an attempt by Beijing to tamp down any dissent in the former British colony.

Hong Kong officials have not given a reason for rejecting a journalist visa for Victor Mallet, the Asia news editor for The Financial Times. China’s only comment has been that Hong Kong authorities are within their right to do so. But that’s the typical legalistic evasiveness of authoritarian regimes when they do something they know is hard and embarrassing to defend.

The authorities have never criticized Mr. Mallet’s reporting. But he was the main spokesman for the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club in August when it hosted a talk by Andy Chan, head of a political party that called for Hong Kong’s independence from China. Hong Kong and Beijing officials blasted the event in advance and subsequently banned the party.

Beijing took back control of Hong Kong from the British in 1997 after nearly a century of colonial rule, and agitation toward independence has never pleased China’s leadership. Hong Kong as an “inalienable” part of China is written into the territory’s Basic Law.

UK says Hong Kong rejection of FT journalist visa politically motivated

Monday evening I decided I'd take the bus to the Emergency Room after supper as I could feel Bipolar Mania coming on, but at the time it wasn't so bad that I felt the need to hurry, so I rang up my Mom to let her know where I'd be, and told her not to worry I know all about this stuff by now as I was diagnosed with Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder in 1985.

A half hour later I realized I was not competent to eat a bowl of homemade chicken soup so I decided to expedite that bus trip. Despite being way crowded the ER got me into the back right away, where I requested Haldol, a powerful antipsychotic which is generally used only for the most severely disturbed patients, as well as so far as I know, only used in hospitals, never outpatient.

"I think we can set you up with that," said my doctor with a smile.

Three hours later I was still unable to sleep so I asked for some more. "Once you've been given Haldol they don't want to give you any more. They don't want it to put you to sleep."

"When you're manic, your only hope is to sleep." And friends, my doctor agreed and in fact gave me four times as strong a dose than the first one, and for good measure some Ativan. Most commonly used for anxiety it's also used as a sleep aid, but I never ask for it other than in the hospital as Ativan is quite addictive.

Mid-afternoon yesterday - Tuesday - the ER staff work me up then gave me the boot. I went home, slept for five more hours then felt just fine so I came into downtown Portland to work through the night.

Well now it's four AM and I'm starting to feel wired again. I decided it would be best were I to go home when the transit starts running again at five, then to do my best to sleep. I'm going to take a few days off from work.

That's going to be hard for me as I am heavily into my work, but better stir crazy than Crazy crazy.

Tennessee death row inmate wants electric chair as 'lesser of two evils'

A condemned Tennessee inmate wants to die in the electric chair, rather than by lethal injection, calling electrocution the “lesser of two evils,” his lawyer said.

Edmund George Zagorski, 63, is set to pay the ultimate price on Thursday for the 1983 slayings of John Dotson and Jimmy Porter — 35-year-old victims who were planning to buy 100 pounds of marijuana from Zagorski.

Lethal injection is the primary form of execution in Tennessee, but inmates whose offenses happened before January 1999 may opt for the electric chair.

The Volunteer State is one of nine that still includes the electric chair as a form of execution.

Kelley Henry, Zagorki's defense lawyer, said lethal injection is a long, brutal process that can take up to 18 minutes.

“Faced with the choice of two unconstitutional methods of execution, Mr. Zagorski has indicated that if his execution is to move forward, he believes that the electric chair is the lesser of two evils,” Henry said. “Ten to 18 minutes of drowning, suffocation and chemical burning is unspeakable.”

Use of the electric chair is rare, with just 14 of the 871 executions happening via electrocution since 2000, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The last electrocution was in Virginia in January 2013.

After serving me well these past five years, my good old Nexus 7 is finally going to retire. I've gotten a new tablet, a Xiaomi Mi Pad 4, which is more or less the same form factor, just slightly bigger, and the hardware specs are really sweet. But I should have been a tad more careful reading of both the place I bought it from and the stuff on XDA about it. First off I'd bought a version that has a Chinese ROM. This shouldn't be such a big deal, except that the damn thing doesn't have Google Play or any sane app market. There's the Mi App Store, and while it has some of my essential tablet apps, some omissions are rather notable, not even including including something as basic as a workable FTP client. Since one of the main uses of my tablet is to play video files I download from a network storage server at home, this is essential. Maybe there is something there that could do that... if only I could read Chinese. F-Droid seems to help somewhat, except that there still isn't a simple FTP client that will let me download several files in a batch. The closest thing there seems to be Ghost Commander, but it downloads all the files in parallel and can't display progress for all of them. This is ridiculous. Even the web browsers like Firefox are in Chinese! The keyboard is also the Google Chinese keyboard, and there's something of a dearth of alternative keyboard apps, at least no keyboard that will let me type numbers on a password screen lock without pressing a modifier key. I fucking hate that. There is a lot of space on a 1920×1200 screen that is 8" across, I could use a row of number keys at the top thank you very much! There certainly seems to be nothing like the Hacker's Keyboard on Google Play, which you can actually use vi on a remote shell with because it gives you that all-important Esc key. :P

The other thing is that locked bootloader. I could have flashed a custom ROM to remove the useless Chinese cruft. While Xiaomi will allow me to unlock it if I want to (after giving them something like $250 for it I expect no less), they have an irksome requirement. They are making me wait 720 hours (yes a whole fucking month) before they will permit me to unlock. The fact that they impose this delay on you for your "protection" is extremely irritating and paternalistic. Sure, if the device is stolen it becomes essentially unusable if the bootloader is locked but there are better ways to make that happen I think. Given the lack of GPS or LTE circuitry in this version of the Mi Pad 4 I have, if that happens I don't think it's going to help. So do I own my device or not? Seems they want to hang onto it for a month longer before they'll actually give it to me.

In the meantime I've managed to sideload a few of the essentials after using Titanium Backup on my Nexus 7 to convert them into APKs. They largely seem to work.

I'll be just fine using only my Mac mini until it arrives.

Tomorrow I've set my alarm for 4:00 AM, then will register homeless people to vote at Vancouver's Share House. It is a men's shelter and a soup kitchen, restroom and shower facility for both men and women.

I've got 200 Washington State voter registration forms, the Secretary Of State has PDFs on their website.

I'm getting up so early so I'll have time to sit in a stupour for a while before setting out for West Vancouver. I always have an incredibly difficult time for the first hour after I get out of bad. That totally sucks but it eventually dissipates, then I feel just fine.

At 11:00 AM I'm going to register at a church in Central Vancouver; they serve lunch at 11:30-12:30.

During the afternoon I'm going to register at an apartment building that houses 55 veterans who were previously homeless or at risk for becoming so, then an apartment building for garden-variety homeless not far from my own apartment, then late afternoon I'll drop off the completed forms at the Clark County Elections Commissions in the big county building next to the courthouse and jail, also in West Vancouver.

Tuesday morning I'll go to the Multnomah County Elections Commission in South-East Portland to request a pack of 500 registration forms - Oregon doesn't provide PDFs. Then at 4:00 I'll register at the Blanchet House Of Hospitality in Oldtown, then at 5:30 at the Portland Rescue Mission. It's in Oldtown too.

Tomorrow is the last day for registering Washington residents but for Oregon I have until a week from Tuesday.

I'm very tired, I'll have an easy time getting to sleep. I'll go to bed in a half hour.

I had some leftover Kraft Dinner with diced tofu because I was quite hungry when I got home but after I post this I'll heat up some homemade chicken soup. The previous resident of my apartment left me lots of really great cookware including a three gallon stainless steel pot. I used five large chicken thighs, two large onions, a whole bunch of celery, lots of carrots and five medium russet potatoes.

Life Is Good

Rumor: New PlayStation 5 Feature Revealed

Earlier this week, a new patent filed by Sony suggested that it is planning on adding backwards compatibility to the PlayStation 5. Now, another patent has surfaced revealing possibly another feature the system will have.

Filed back in May by Sony Interactive Entertainment, and approved just a few days ago, the patent appears to suggest that hardware V-Sync will ship with the next Sony console.

Titled "Video Frame Rate Compensation Through Adjustment of Vertical Blanking," the patent is pretty extensive, but in short, it should help games run better on the system.

Great, patents for backward compatibility and V-Sync. WTF?

Read this. Fuckin' read it. You want someone with violent tendencies? You want "disasturbation?" You want stone-cold nihilism? Runaway has you covered. Here he is, cheering for megadeaths, wishing horrible demise upon 50 million people he dislikes ("progressives") because he thinks people with brown skin are somehow the privileged class in this country. He also seems to think I'm some kind of unreconstructed Marxist, which is...not only not right, it's not even wrong. I've bolded the especially...telling...parts of this little rant.

Alright then -

A civil war will be uglier than most liberals have ever dreamed. Maybe uglier than the war-happy conservative capitalists have dreamed, as well.

But, it might be better than allowing the progressives to have control. The so-called left is hardly any more left than the R's are, but they are strongly into authoritarianism. That left makes me look silly as hell with my claims of being an authoritarian. The REAL difference between me, and them, is the legitimacy of authority. If I recognize an authority as being legitimate, then I respect it. If I don't recognize an authority as legitimate, I fight it.

Your left wants to create it's own authority by force. There is no legitimacy to either the force, or the authority which they desire. None.

But, if the right stands by, and watches the "left" proceed, it's possible that the progressives could win. Chances are slim, but the possibility exists.

Yes, I'd rather see twenty million dead liberals lying in the streets, than to see their progressive heros taking over this country. And, I'll willingly sacrifice five million dead conservatives and independents to put a stop to the progressives.

The tree of life must be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots, from time to time.

And, welcome to reality, where most important decisions by nations are settled by force. As it has been for tens of thousands of years, so it will be for tens of thousands of years into the future.

Have you ever considered the dystopias portrayed in much of science fiction? Have you never imagined one of those dystopias, in which death is preferable to living? The dystopia being offered to us by the progressives is one in which a child can be punished, and branded for life, if he so much as notices that his own skin is not the same color as that of his teacher, or one of his class mates. In this computer age, any "deviant" behaviour will be documented, put into a database, and NEVER forgotten.

Progressives promise a number of things, which I fear, and despise, with their racial inequality ranking high. "People of color" vs "white and Asian". It's already real, it has made it into headlines. Follow that to it's logical conclusion - if you're brown, or black, you get a leg up in education, employment, in everything. If you're white, or Asian, you get shit on, and you're lucky if you can ever get a job cleaning septic tanks, or collecting garbage.

The party, as well as the progressives, have forgotten Martin Luther King, who had a dream. They've abandoned his dream. Today, they don't want equality, they want vengeance.

And, I, for one, am not willing that my grandchildren should be cast into some third-rate citizen role, to make those brown or black people happy. I side with King - my great grandchildren should compete with black, white, brown, and Asian for their place in life. And, the best man/woman for the job should win the job.

Political correctness? I've fought that bullshit since I first heard of it. It was a Soviet construction - if you were in good graces with the party, then you were politically correct. Fuck PC. Seriously, just fuck PC. Progressives promise to enslave my descendants, at the expense of brown and black people. Just fuck them.

Twenty million dead progressives? Make it fifty million - it's all the same to me. A future with slavery in it looks pretty damned bleak, no matter whether it's my descendants, or yours, or whoever's. We had a war, ~150 years ago, over a number of issues, including slavery. Today, "liberals" want to go back and explore slavery. Kill 'em all, and let God sort them out.

The bunch of dumb bastards in charge of the Democrat party need to pull their heads out of their asses, BEFORE they spark that civil war. Once the first few shots are fired, there will be no mercy.

Gawwwwwwwwwd...DAMN. This is what a meltdown looks like. This is what "identity politics" actually is. The man has gone bat-boinking nuts. Okay Runaway, suit up in your Rambo gear, here's an MP3 player with the soundtracks to the entire Contra series on it, here's some MREs, now go and defend your country from those horrible brown people.

Jesus. Jetskiing. CHRIST.