I just want to remember this...

"We’ll have an economy based on wind. I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much. I’ve studied it better than anybody. I know it’s very expensive. They’re made in China and Germany mostly — very few made here, almost none. But they’re manufactured tremendous — if you’re into this — tremendous fumes. Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything. You talk about the carbon footprint — fumes are spewing into the air. Right? Spewing. Whether it’s in China, Germany, it’s going into the air. It’s our air, their air, everything — right? So they make these things and then they put them up." - Donald Trump , December 2019

Carzy Trump Rant

There is a bunch of wacky stuff this guy says but this must be at the top of the crazy pile

I assume a trump supporter would would ignore the incoherence and try and distract with Solyndra or imply I hate birds, but keep the eye on the prize, this one is crazy

And to answer his question, yes, I know we have a world.


Why are evangelicals so in the tank for Trump?

I just wanted to get this insight down on virtual paper and for the record I will be painting with broad strokes.

Why are evangelicals so in the tank for Trump? I’ve seen some discussion online about how he fulfills their goals or how he is a “Cyrus”, or just an imperfect politician used by a God for godly purposes. And while some of that is what evangelicals will say, I am really intrigued that the craziness and cruelty of Trump seems to focus the evangelical enthusiasm from a practical allegiance to him for their political purposes to a white hot devotion.

The insight springs from an article linked to below, but my re-working of it is that central to the evangelical worldview is a STRONG authoritarian God, and with Trump their psyche is in love with him subconsciously because Trump's erratic behavior is on the same wavelength as their conception of God.

The more I thought of it the clearer it became. If you actually read the Old Testament, God is a really messed up deity. He is viciously cruel, unfair, and mercurial in judgments. And that is SO Trump! The whole thing falls into place with amazing clarity.

Of course there is the "Jesus" thing that is supposedly the Christian reason for the season, but when you can only hold one idea in your head at a time, cruelty generally wins out. And that is another amazing thing about evangelicals, they seem to somehow never notice any of the liberal and compassionate stuff in the Gospel and by some religious alchemy they filter away anything that an authoritarian sees as weakness.

So while I might see the Beatitudes as a temptation to join a Christian cult where there are irrational ideas like,
  • Blessed are the poor in spirit
  • Blessed are the meek
  • Blessed are they who hunger
  • Blessed are the merciful
  • Blessed are the peacemakers
These thoughts are ignored by any notable evangelical and in the age of Trump such revolutionary thoughts are actually anathema to the Trump/Republican way of life. Trump is always about being “strong”, being “really wealthy”, being bellicose, belligerent, and always threatening. Basically modern evangelicals have adopted Trump and anti-Beatitude framework.

The short version is evangelicals worship a cruel, confusing, mercurial God and Tump is a cruel, confusing, mercurial president. The connections make themselves.

the article is not perfect but still worth reading



There is no "I" there is only NOW!

From Nathan Gill's "Clarity"


First a confession. I became irritated and upset the other day at work when someone purposely or purposely on accident, would not respond to my questions. I think I was justifiably upset because of the inconvenience, But something about that just "pushed my buttons".

Well we got over it, but it took a while to figure out why I was REALLY so upset. I think it was my ego. By not paying attention to me they were diminishing "my" worth and and ego HATES that kind of stuff. Most work conflicts I immediately recognize as of little real importance and can keep my perspective. But this one seemed worse.

As I stewed about the disrespect to me and my surprising internal sensitivity, I finally realized I was dragging this act with me all the time. I couldn't let go of the past.

Then I remember Nathan Gill's story about how with "dropping of the ‘I’, all need for understanding fell away as knowing was revealed."

Last year my thought was that there is only NOW, and we are all living in the NOW and the constant worry about the past and the future was just stuff we keep projecting in our brains during the NOW. And that is what I was doing. My ego was constantly replying this disrespect and it take on a life of its own.

Just remembering that story a bit of the ego, the "I" dropped away and my muscles relaxed. Not dramatically like Gill, but still it was something I could feel.

And I think most of society is like that. We are all a bunch of wounded egos running around upset because somebody disrespected us or our team, be that a political team, sports team, or religious team. So to drop the "I" you drop ego, and without ego there is nothing to offend.

So to calm down, my mantra is : There is no "I" there is only NOW!




MEANING: noun: Extreme optimism, even under most hopeless circumstances.

ETYMOLOGY:After Mark Tapley, a character in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44). Earliest documented use: 1857.


Cat Tracking

Cat Tracking

Where the Hackaday Cat goes when she steps over the threshold into the wider world is a mystery, she reveals her whereabouts strictly on her terms and would we suspect be very cagey were we able to ask her about it. [Andy C] however has a need to know where his cat is spending her time, so he’s made a GPS collar for a bit of feline spying.

There are commercial GPS collars for pets, but they all share the flaw of extremely limited battery life. His challenge then was to create a collar that delivered the required pinpoint fix alongside a battery life measured in months. The solution was a combination of a low-power miniature GPS receiver and a low-power PC microcontroller hooked up to an FSK radio whose frequency he doesn’t give but which we suspect is probably the usual 433 MHz. The collar remains in low power mode until it receives a call on the FSK, at which point it wakes up, gets a GPS fix, transmits it, and returns to sleep.

The summary links to a series of posts which provide an extremely detailed look at all aspects of the project, and go well beyond mere GPS trackers for a cat. If you have an interest in low power devices or antenna matching for example, you’ll find a lot of interesting stuff in these pages. Of course, if all you need is a GPS tracker though, you may prefer a simpler option.



How to Write a Story - thank you Doc Savage

Michael Moorcock's Summary of Lester Dent's Method








Reading Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

From "Cat's Cradle"

“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle


Experts, Smexperts!!

I just wanted to bookmark this interesting article






Note to Self: How to get subtitles from a BluRay or DVD (that you legally own!)

Next Day UPDATE:
It turns out I was using the wrong tool I wanted
MKVCleaver x64

I setup a RaspberryPi as a Plex video server and converted all my DVDs and BluRays to MP4s. I don’t have a huge library but still enough to be a bit of a task.

The problem is Foreign films, and how to get the English subtitles to show up.

In case you don’t know, to save BluRay discs to a file you need MakeMKV and HandkBrake. And to get subtitles you need MKVextract, which gives you two files one with a .sub suffix and an .idx siffix. If you have this type of subtitle result yo just need to put them in the same folder as the MP4 of the moving and then add the subtitle track in the PLEX setup of that movine.

HOWEVER, for some reason some BluRays export as .sup files and these just don’t work with the PLEX server.

After a couple of attempts I found my answer was to use Subtitle Edit which needs the movie in mkv format but can read through the movie and use OCR (optical character recognition) to confert the image based sup file to the text based srt file. The PLEX server is cool with srt files, so the only wrinkle is the quality of the pictures of the subtitles will cause it to throw that part up and ask you to type it in.

I think if the disk is a quality manufacturer you may have to respond to a dozen or so problems in the OCR process. Not to bad really. But on a cheap production you might have to retype the whole movie.

And if you have a DVD you just need to use MakeMKV rather than Hanbrake (with the VLC mod) since MKVextract only works on MKV files. After you have the subtitle files you just run the mkv file through Handbrake and you are done

MKVextract & gMKVextractGUI & MKVToolNIX





Registration Key for makemkv beta


VLC libdvdcss.dll for Handbrake
https://www.videolan.org/developers/libdvdcss.html then look for “releases” link…


The latest one for windows is ver 1.2.12

My MKVextract wasn't working (not sure if it was just the one Blue ray so I had the mkv file but used  Inviska MKV Extract on it. Then used Subtitle edit

Next Day UPDATE:
It turns out I was using the wrong tool I wanted
MKVCleaver x64 
Although it delivered a sup file which subtitle edit had problems with, so that finally I found a website that had an srt file that worked


My BluRay fix

i can't believe I haven't saved this here, but the driver for my USB ASUS BluRay Burner sometimes gets corrupted.

Here is the fix with the difference that my drive was not in the Intio.. heading but under Serial Device Devices and had an indicator that it was not recognized


OK, so follow these instructions TO THE LETTER.

  1. Plug your external drive back in, and “Intio Combo Device Class” should reappear in the Device Manager.
  2. Click on the little “>” next to it, and you should see something called “Initio Default Controller” appear underneath.
  3. Right-click on “Initio Default Controller” and click ‘Disable’ to turn it off.
  4. Now right-click on it again and click ‘Properties’.
  5. In the window that pops up click on the ‘Driver’ tab.
  6. Click on ‘Uninstall Device’, and then follow the instructions carefully to ensure that you do uninstall the drivers (IMPORTANT: you may need to click on a checkbox to confirm that you want to delete the driver software – don’t miss this step if so).
  7. Unplug the external drive from the USB ports.
  8. Shut down your computer (be sure to shut it down fully, don’t just restart it).
  9. With the computer powered off, plug in the external drive to the USB ports.
  10. Restart the computer and let it boot up.

The drive should now work! It should appear in “This PC” and it should appear in “Device Manager” in the list of “DVD/CD-ROM drives”


Raspberry Pi Reminder

So a year of so ago I setup my Raspberry Pi as a wiki. THEN since I have short attention span I just left it.

And now I want to try out the Raspberry Pi as a Plex server to host just that limited number of movies or TV series I feel define me.

SOooo, because I am no expert I know rebuilding from scratch my current simple wiki would be a chore I decided to back up an image of th Pi, apply it to a new 32GB card and save the original in case it all goes sideways.

So I want to record the instructions on doing that.



Cloning the SD card is simple. Just follow these steps:

Get everything set up just the way you want it on your Raspberry Pi, whatever you're using it for. Then shut down the Pi and remove the SD card. Insert the SD card into your computer.
Start up Win32DiskImager, a program that you probably have from when you first set up your Pi. (If you're on OS X or Linux, you'll have to use the dd command as described here instead of these steps).

In the "Image File" box, enter the path of your soon-to-be image file. For example, I put mine in C:\Users\Whitson\images\myraspbmc.img

Under the "Device" box, select your SD card.

Click the "Read" button to create the image file from your card.

When it's done creating the image file, you can eject your SD card and put it back in your Raspberry Pi. Keep that IMG file in a safe place.

Now, if anything ever goes wrong with your Pi, you can restore your fully-set-up image using the reverse instructions:

Insert the SD card back into your computer.

Head to the start menu or screen and type "disk management." Open the disk management program and find your SD card in the list.

Right-click and delete all the partitions on your SD card. When it's empty, right-click on it and format it (it doesn't matter what filesystem you format it to, your computer just needs to recognize it).

Open Win32DiskImager again and browse for your image file. Select your device from the Device dropdown just as you did before.

This time, click "Write" to write the image to the SD card.

When it finishes, eject the SD card and re-insert it into your Raspberry Pi. When you boot it up, it should be in the exact same state it was in when you first cloned the SD card.


Now to the plex steps.. this is th site I am using