Data Centers and Bicycle Seats

RockBros Bicycle Saddle
Fist Most Bike

Uniberp Reports:

I'd been using a function on my chromebook that lets me select a portion of the screen and google search it, just like Google Lens but easier than drag-dropping an image or selecting a file.

I usually use it to help identify antiques and stuff, but lately it just sits and blinks "Thinking a little longer". Google Lens still works fine with the same image.

Aside from the possible local cache issues, I jump to the possibility that Google is just tired of me wasting its time looking at old lamps and fans.

It could be they have seen some of my critical remarks about data centers or Republicans and I am now pegged as part of the resistance to their goal of data center hegemony, but that would be kinda petty and work against any support I had for the least evil of the mega-providers (namely Google).

SO... what I think is actually happening is that all this processing power they are building "to help the consumer" is simply to mine more cryptocurrency.

Anyhow I got a new bicycle seat from RockBros. It was cheap, and I sold off my old brooks racing seats on ebay for a good price. I needed something that was easier on my new hips, and I ride more heavily on my butt now to reduce hip wear.

I liked it so much I bought another for my cottage bike. They sent the wrong thing, so I sent them a note and they sent me a return label. 

They said they were out of the saddles so they sent me a refund.

So I bought another of the same saddle from Canada.

Then the first company sent me the right saddle. Now I have 3.

If any of you would like to try it, I will gift it to you. It's not leather, but it works for my 1 hour rides.

Now we'll see if Google retracts my refund.

Uniberp's message came in via Gmail. Gmail, being my friend and all suggested this reply:

I'll take the spare saddle if no one else claims it. I've been doing more riding lately too.

As for the search function, that sounds like a typical Google move—making things worse under the guise of 'improving' them. I wouldn't put it past them to prioritize everything but the user's actual needs.

THE LAST CRUISE IRAQ - F14 VIDEO

THE LAST CRUISE IRAQ - F14 VIDEO
fabgenius
The tune is Illumination by the Sagittarian. I've been letting YouTube Music select the tunes for me, and it does pick some nice stuff, but lately they all seem to calm and meditative. Hermanos Gutiérrez show up regularly, they're great, but they ain't rock and roll, so I been playing my old playlists. Every time I post a music video, I add it to my playlist for that year, so now I've got a dozen of these playlists, and every time I open one of them and play it I get a surprise. Today I'm playing Pergelator 2012 and this tune comes up, and video is so good I just gotta post it. These lists sometimes contain some weird stuff, but YouTube has a skip forward button, so can move to the next tune.

YouTube Music automatically copies my playlists from YouTube, but they don't always copy accurately. Stuff gets added and stuff gets deleted and sometimes the tunes on the YouTube Music playlist have no correspondence with the YouTube Video list.

I consider YouTube Music a bargain. It costs me $23 a month and it covers my entire family. Don't know if any of them use it, they are all Apple devotees. Anyway, $23 is about what lunch costs at for-real restaurant, and I do that two or three times a week. 

I do have, I dunno, a hundred CDs, or so, but the only ones we ever play are the Christmas tunes in December.

Death To Google

Up until about six months ago everything was fine in Google land, but then things started getting squirrely. Keyboard and mouse responses got slower, page loads got slower. Not a lot, just enough to be annoying. Today the edit icon disappeared from this blog. The edit icon is a little picture of a pencil that appears at the bottom of each post. It only appears for your own blog.

I was messing around with the layout this morning. It didn't work, so I undid all my edits and that's when I noticed the missing icon. Frightened and confused I asked Blogger Help and found this little turd:

Since browsers can block third-party cookies by default, edit elements may no longer be visible on your blog. This is also related to the new widget management options.

I suspect that the 'new widget management options' are what's behind all my current annoyances. I will be replacing my Chromebox with a Linux box very soon. I suspect I may have to replace my browser as well. Does Netscape still exist?

Fianchetto

Fianchetto - Black Bishop has moved up one row

Fianchetto is this week's most annoying word. I came across it in The Queen's Gambit but I failed to take note of the page number and Google Books won't tell me, so if you care you'll have to dig it out yourself. 

Fianchetto is an Italian word, it is the diminutive of fianco (“flank”). It just means that a bishop has advanced to the second row, which implies it now has a much wider range of attack. In the board position shown above, the fianchettoed black bishop now has the white knight in range. Taking the knight would also put the white king (the piece with the cross on top) in check. However, if black takes the knight it would subject to being taken by the pawn on B2.

Warning! Danger Will Robinson!

 Got a couple of notices from Blogger this morning that a couple of my posts 'violated community guidelines'. The first one contained a link to a site that Google has identified as a malware site, the other one, well, I don't know exactly why I got a warning.

     Hello,

     As you may know, our Community Guidelines 
(https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy) describe the boundaries for what we 
allow-- and don't allow-- on Blogger. Your post titled "Drugs & Money" was 
flagged to us for review. This post was put behind a warning for readers 
because it contains sensitive content; the post is visible at 
http://pergelator.blogspot.com/2014/05/drugs-money.html. Your blog readers 
must acknowledge the warning before being able to read the post/blog.

     We apply warning messages to posts that contain sensitive content. If 
you are interested in having the status reviewed, please update the content 
to adhere to Blogger's Community Guidelines. Once the content is updated, 
you may republish it at 
https://www.blogger.com/go/appeal-post?blogId=4261262990290532740&postId=2454714956865209232. 
This will trigger a review of the post.

     For more information, please review the following resources:

     Terms of Service: https://www.blogger.com/go/terms
     Blogger Community Guidelines: https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy

     Sincerely,

     The Blogger Team

The post in question is from 2014 and is a speculative post about the economics of the illegal drug business. Could it be that I'm not allowed to talk about the American Drug Cartel?

Update a week later: Deleted the link to the compromised website from one post, did nothing to the one about the illegal drug business, resubmitted them to the great and powerful Oz and both were reinstated.

Google, My Benevolent Lord and Master

You're So Cool - Jonathan Bree ( De Commune Live Session )
DECOMMUNE Bangkok

Made a run to PDX (the big Portland airport) this afternoon. Usually when I make these runs it's either late at night or at zero dark thirty and there is no traffic, which kind of makes up for interfering with my sleep schedule. Well, it would if I had a consistent sleep schedule. But today I went in the middle of the afternoon and the traffic was creepy crawly for miles on end. In the middle of the night I can make the round trip in a little over an hour. Today it took two. It's just a hair over 60 miles, so if you figure half a rock per mile for operating expenses it cost $30 for the car. Uber charges $65, so I saved $35. Penny saved, penny earned.

I've got music coming in via YouTube Music on my smartphone and at one point during this drive this very hypnotic tune (above) comes on. It was perfect for our creepy-crawly pace.

Google knows where I am, I mean that's how Maps gives you directions. So now I'm wondering if Google realized I was stuck in traffic and adjusted my playlist to give me music that would hypnotize my inner demon and allow me to creep along with all the other sheep? Can't complain, it worked pretty well.

Danger, Will Robinson!

Danger, Will Robinson!
Tom Crimmins

Got an email this morning from our benevolent overlord Google telling me that one of my posts has been "unpublished". Here's the key bit:

Why was your blog post unpublished?
Your content has violated our Malware and Viruses policy. 

The offending post contains a bunch of links, all of which were copacetic except for this one:

Chrome Warning Sign

Ignoring all their warnings and pushing past the red warning screen I got to the site, but then quickly got redirected to Sarah Westall's site, which seems to be legit.

Blocked by Chrome

The second time I tried to push past the warning I got this message.

Blogger Review Request Button

I changed the link for "made men" to Wikipedia's page, and pressed the Request Review button. We shall see what happens.

P.S. Just including the URL of the offending site, just as text, not as a clickable link, was enough to get this post bounced. If you want to visit the forbidden zone, you'll just have to type in the address yourself.

Update a couple of hours later: added a link to the offending post which has been reinstated.

YouTube Music Videos

I'm not quite sure what prompted it, but I've been compiling playlists of all the music videos I have posted. I have got the most recent five years completed, though the latest is obviously not complete.

• Pergelator 2022 - Incomplete
• Pergelator 2021
• Pergelator 2020
• Pergelator 2019
• Pergelator 2018
• Pergelator 2017 - Incomplete
• Pergelator 2008

So I've got the earliest and the latest but there are a bunch in the middle that I still haven't done. What might have prompted this is I will have a vague memory of a tune that I am sure I have posted but I can't recall just what it is. These lists should make it a little easier to track it down. I have a bunch of other YouTube playlists that I have constructed but that I never use. I probably should delete them.

Most of the tunes are modern popular music but there are a few oddballs in there. If you decide to try one of these playlists and a song comes that you don't like, there is the next button in the bottom of the video frame, right next to the pause button.

I think there is a way to transfer YouTube playlists to YouTube Music or maybe it just happens automagically.

Curious thing about YouTube is that videos that are marked as being for kids cannot be added to a playlist. There were a few of those, I listed them in the playlist's description.

Some people who post videos to YouTube disable embedding. Scallywags is what they are.

I've put up 9247 posts in 14 years. I only tagged 503 as being music videos, which is not quite one a week. I have also tagged 1184 as videos, which means I have posted a non-music video roughly twice a week.

I probably could have written a program to compile these playlists, but I'm not sure I could write the program any faster than compiling the list manually, well if you can call point-and-click manual. Besides this way I get to run all the material through my hands so I have a better idea of what I have.

Books

Books on my Desk

I just finished reading The Ipcress File and now I've picked up The Terror again. I'm spent so much time with this book (a few pages at a time, whenever I have to wait for something, for months) that I feel compelled to finish it. 

We also have The C Programming Language here because I can never remember whether the source or the count is the second parameter to the library function movmem*. So these three books are on my desk, and I thought their physical condition is worth commenting on.

The Terror spent months being hauled around in my bag. It didn't seem to be of robust construction to start with, so it's no surprise that it's falling apart. This copy has a lived a full and useful life. When I have finished it, I will commit it to the great recycler in Toledo.

The Ipcress File is roughly the same thickness as The Terror even though it only holds one third the number of pages. I don't remember how I came by this copy, but it's a nice copy (Franklin Mystery Library) that's been sitting in the bookcase for eons. They (Franklin) inflate their pages to make their books look more impressive. At least they didn't inflate them with clay. I picked up a small atlas one time, 'one page for every country' or some such. It was a normal size book, not oversize like at atlas typically is, and I swear it weighed three pounds. Clay gives the paper a smoother finish which is what you want for detailed images. That's the story I remember anyway.

The C Programming Language is about half the thickness of The Ipcress File but has roughly the same number of pages - 280~. In spite of being a zillion years old and being well used (mostly the dozen or so pages in the back that describe the library functions) it is still mostly holding together. There are a few pages at the very back that will fall out occasionally and will have to be put back. So far, so good, i.e. I don't think I've lost any.

Cropped Screenshot of Google Lens Results

When I pulled up the image (top) on Google Photos, it asked if I wanted to extract the text, and I thought, sure, why not? Let's see what Google Lens can do. The words it found are the gray highlighted** text at the right side of this image. I don't know where it got 'trusted', but it got the SNOWWIS NE by reading the author's name backwards (the blue trapezoid enclosing most of the author's name).

* I asked Google about memove and the first page it returned is from a guy in Russia. That's pretty cool. He got the source and destination reversed, but what do you expect from a place where half their letters are backwards?

Who are the bad guys here?

YouTube copyright notice

 IAman went horse back riding yesterday. He took some photos and then made a video. He added some music and then he uploaded it to YouTube. Shortly thereafter he got this copyright notice. It is very weird.

Stupid Linux

Cleaning out cupboards in preparation for moving, which might happen in a month or two or maybe not at all, the future is cloudy, I cannot see. Anyway, cleaning out cupboards I came across a small hard drive in a case with a USB connector, so I thought to try it out, see if it's any good. Seems to be working so I load a new version of Linux on it and go charging on.

Funny how little stuff I need off of the old hard drive. Copied my dominos program from the old drive to the new one. I can read from the original hard drive installed in this PC, but I can't write to it. Try to compile the program and it trips over assert.h. Okay, the default installation is weak, so I go mucking about and end up with broken packages that cannot be fixed. Fortunately, there is the Linux Mint Forum and someone will surely rescue me shortly.

I'm posting this because I didn't want to copy the text from the error message, so I thought I would just include a screen shot with my inquiry, but the image needs to be on the net somewhere, and for some reason Google Photos couldn't provide a link, but Blogger could, so here we are.

Prizes!

Google Search Console Report

This showed up in my email this morning. Looks like I won a contest of some sort, they awarded me a trophy after all. Okay, it's just an icon representing a trophy, but still, something nice, or least not bad.

I don't know what any of it means, and I'm pretty sure I don't care. I just checked my blogger stats and a ten year old post about Zimbabwe that has been in the top spot for years has been knocked out, so maybe Google finally got around to looking at how they were collecting these stats. I don't know where they are getting their referring pages though, none of them even mention me. The top referring page is three years old. I think there Google's stat collection is still a bit wonky.

Anomaly of the Day

Google 'distance earth to sun'

I don't think that's quite right.

Via Detroit Steve.

Zig Zag

Aircraft leaving zig zag contrails over the Arecibo radio telescope

I came across this while I was mapping Big Antennas, and I wondered what could have caused the contrails to zig zag like that? Are there narrow bands of contrary winds blowing north and south? Is the plane following the conture of the ground while flying over hills? Neither of these explanations seemed likely.

Aircraft leaving straight contrails over the Arecibo radio telescope

Then it struck me that is was likely an artifact of Google's imaging program, and sure enough, change to the 3-D view, spin the orientation 180 degrees and tilt the view a little bit and those contrail lines straighten right out.

Caught in the Act

Google Steet View Recorder

I'm looking at bridges in Belgium using Google's 3D Viewer. Zooming in, it automatically switches to Street View. Panning around I see this red car in the mirror. Pan all the way around and there are no other cars in sight. How can this be? Oh, that must be camera car, looking at itself.  The mirror is there because we have a blind corner. Click on the link to see for yourself.

Googlicious

I'm checking out what I've said about pyramids and I get distracted looking at a satellite view of the Meroe Pyramids in Sudan. I zoom out and there isn't much to see except the Nile river and a couple of roads, or at least Google says there are a couple of roads there. Let's turn off the labels and see if what the place really looks like. Wait, what? No way to turn off the labels anymore?
    Google has had a new version of their map program floating around for a while and I just got a notice that all my maps had gotten moved to the new map ap. Well, that's the way of the world, change or die, and I suppose I can try to adapt. So how do you turn off the labels? Help takes me to some posts from numerous  people asking the same thing. No answer, but in reading along I turned up this little gem:

Sarah Sukhoi

Mar 10

There are two groups of people at google.

Engineers and Designers.

The Engineers used to run the company, smart people who made stuff that worked.

The designers are the ones who huff glue and then shout buzzwords like "WEB 2.0!" "MOBILE FUNCTIONALITY" "SOCIAL MEDIA ENABLED" like they are suffering from a nerdy form of tourettes.

Until about 3 years ago, google was run by the Engineers.  Somehow the Designers have made their way into the decision making positions and we get horrible products like Wave, Buzz, youtube comments tied to google, the new gmail, the new docs, and the new google maps.

Send feedback to google and tell them to put the engineers back in charge.  So we can get products that just work.

I couldn't fail to disagree less.

Update July 2019 replace pyramid link.

Google Drive

I'm trying to do a little bookkeeping and The Google is telling me to wait. I don't like waiting. Ten seconds to deep fat fry those buffalo wings? That's too long! I want them now!" says Homer J. Simpson. I don't like keeping records on my own machine. If you do that you are supposed to make back up copies occasionally, and I've never been very good at that. Besides, I don't think I've ever lost anything important due to a hard disk drive failing. Well, maybe, once, a long time ago, and it must not have been that important, after all I'm still here.
     If you keep your records in the cloud like me, you are dependent on a whole host of other people and their machines. The advantage is that there are a zillion other people doing the same thing, and some of them are paying customers, and presumably The Google does not want to aggravate their paying customers, so maybe my little account is protected by the enormous shadow of the giant paying customer. Or not. It seems to work well enough most of the time.

G-mail New Speak

I am trying to do a better job at bookkeeping. To that end I tried to move all of my messages from Amazon to a separate folder. Gmail has a search function which works fine. It finds and lists all my messages from Amazon. Now I want to move them to a folder, but there does not seem to be any way to do it. I can move the messages to the Inbox, but that is kind of pointless as they are all already in the inbox. If I pull up a single message, I can move it to a different folder, but there are more messages than will fit on one page. (You might think this means I am doing all my shopping at Amazon, but each item ordered seems to generate three of four emails, so ordering half a dozen books could put you over the 25 item page limit.)
    Anyway, I fuss with it for a bit, and then I decide to go to help and file a complaint with the great and powerful Oz, like he'll even listen to the scarecrow, but you have to draw the line somewhere. So I look in help and find this:

Move is nothing more than label + archive (archive just means remove the Inbox label).  So when doing a search, if move-to is not available, use label and then archive.

Also note:  Gmail doesn't have folders.  All your messages are saved in All Mail.  Everything else (Inbox, Starred, Drafts, user-labels, etc) are just "views" into a sub-set of the messages in All Mail.  And since there's only one copy of any message, if you delete it from any label, you're deleting the only copy, so it's gone from all of them.  If you delete a label you remove that "view", but the messages are still in All Mail.

When you Archive a message, the only thing that does is remove the Inbox label from the message.  The original message is still in All Mail along with all your other messages, and you can apply labels to them to make them easier to find later.  Remember that Archive is an action, not a location.

Yes, language is dynamic and ever changing, but God Damn it, we had a perfectly good working definition of "move", "archive" and "label", and now Google just arbitrarily changes the meaning of words? Assholes.

1157 Light Bulb

I was surprised a few days ago to discover that the brake lights in the late model Mom-mobile were ancient technology, which got me to wondering just how ancient they were. Poking around on the web I didn't find much, so I wrote to Sylvania, and surprise, surprise! They replied with a copy of the 1157 Patent document from 1965, which included this very nice drawing.

Just to complete the circle: the patent document was digitized by Google, which means it is probably stored on a Google server somewhere. That is somewhere else besides where my copy is stored. I just don't know where.

Update March 2016 replaced missing picture.

The Curse of Virtual Stuff

Even Google has limits. I recently ran out of online storage space for photos on Picasa. After I aborted the last upload I noticed this:

You are currently using 1005 MB (98.18%) of your 1024 MB.

My Gmail account is in much better shape:

You are currently using 1270 MB (16%) of your 7519 MB.

Google Documents is much more forgiving, as long as you play by Google's rules:

You are currently using 6 MB (0%) of your 1024 MB.
Only stored files (.PDF, .DOC, .JPG, etc.) count towards your storage limit. Google Docs formats don't use up your storage space.

Funny they give you so much more free storage space for email then they do for the other things. I suppose it's because more people use email and many of them are careless of what they save. Documents and photos require some purposeful action, and people who have taken the time to upload these things may appreciate their value more and are willing to pay for it. Upgrading is certainly cheap enough: $5 per year for 20 Gigabytes. Yes, you can buy enormous disks really cheap, but then you have the curse of real stuff to deal with. Me, I am just going to delete some photo albums of my brother's pictures. He can store them on his dime.

P.S. Putting this post together was an onerous exercise in html. I wanted to copy the storage messages from Google exactly, not just the text, but the color and font as well. You would think that would be simple, but no, no, no and no. Simple cut and paste didn't work and Blogger's rinky-dink editor doesn't support multiple fonts. None of my usual tricks worked. I ended up editing the html in Notepad++ and just trying different things to see what worked.

The text of the messages is a little larger than the originals, but I prefer that as it's easier to read. I suppose changing the background on the messages to match the originals would improve the contrast and the readability, but I've had enough of this, it's past my lunchtime and I'm hungry.