Links

Canadian David Warren of Essays in Idleness writes about the devil and government misinformation.

Russian Dmitry Suslov writes about the future of BRICS expansion for the Valdai Discussion Club.

BRICS is an intergovernmental organization originally comprised of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

The Valdai Discussion Club takes its name from a lake of the same name that is located approximately halfway between Moscow and St. Petersburg (formerly known as Leningrad).

TV & Internet

Repost: Corrected the garbled data in table of speed test results.

Samsung Frame TV

To put the finishing touch on our big remodeling project, we got a Frame TV. We hung it on the wall upstairs. It can be used to display artworks using very little power, at least that's my impression. It can also be used as a regular TV. My wife uses it to watch sporting events.

Ever since we started using it, games were constantly getting interrupted by the spinning dots which indicate that there has been some interruption in the signal. Very annoying, especially when it happens in the middle of a play.

I've been meaning to look into it, but it took a while to get all my ducks in a row. Today I got all the quackers lined up and ran my test.

Frame TV Driver

The Frame TV is funny. It has a separate control box that is connected to the display by a very thin cable, I think it might have a fiber optic component. It allows you to hide this box somewhere remote from the display, but it means running the cable through the wall. That's okay, major remodel entails tearing holes in walls, so another hole was no big deal. The box has a dozen different connection points. The only one we are interested in is the ethernet jack.

The quickest and easiest way to connect it was to run a 100 foot ethernet cable across the basement floor. That mostly works, but we keep getting the hiccups. So I thought I would try these ethernet-over-powerline adapators.

TP-Link Powerline Ethernet Adapter

They worked, but not any better than the cable. They only work with outlets that are connected to the same circuit breaker. Don't know what's up with that other than maybe their signal just isn't that strong.

Hitron Ethernet over Coax Adaptors

I had coax run all over the house when we built it, so I had coax near the Frame TV control box, but all the coax runs to one cupboard. There were labels on the cables at one time, but the few that are left are near illegible.

Sperry Wire Tracker

I borrowed this one from Osmany and I was quickly able to identify the coax I wanted. 

Now all I need is a computer to run the speed test. An earlier test using long (100 foot) cables was not encouraging, so I wanted to be closer to the control box. A laptop would be great, if it had an ethernet port, but none of our laptops have one, they're all wifi. I could have drug my Chromebox out there, but it had half a dozen cables tying it in place, but now I've replaced the Chromebox, so I can set it up out by the control box and run Google's speed test, so I did. Here's the results:

Cable	Upload	Download	Speedtest Rating
Internet over Powerline	24.6	39.7	Fast
50' Cable	91.7	91.1	Very Fast
Internet over Coax	149.5	244.2	Very Fast

Internet Speed Test - Megabits Per Second

The numbers are averages of three tests. The differences between successive tests were neglible. The coax adaptor is connected directly to the router. The other two were connected to a switch.

Will the coax cure the hiccups? We shall see, I've done enough for now.

WW2 Strikes Again

Debris from the explosion at Miyazaki Airport (The Asahi Shimbun/Getty)

Aljazeera reports: Suspected WWII bomb grounds Japanese airport

Apparently it had gotten tired of being ignored and decided to make its presence known. Creepy / scary.

I just posted about old WW2 bombs still being found in Germany.

Indian Ocean

De Havilland Canada Twin Otter

Cool picture of a cool airplane on the beach in The Maldives. We've been there before. The flight log shows it operating out of Male Int'l, so let's take a look:

Two populated islands in the Malé Atoll
Male / Velana International Airport

Okay, there's the jetport, but where do the seaplanes dock?

Maldives Seaplane Docks

That's a bunch of seaplanes.

Maldives Seaplane Terminal

Might be the biggest seaplane operation in the world. They have docks for 55 seaplanes.

Where are The Maldives? Middle of the Indian Ocean, that's where:

The Maldives & Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean

For Patrick O'Brian fans, Mauritius and Reunion are in the lower left corner.

It's hard to get a handle on the scale of The Maldives. There's a zillion tiny islands spread over a zillion square miles of ocean. This political map gives an overview:

Atolls of The Maldives
Roughly 500 miles top to bottom

Note that an Atoll is not the same as an island. The two islands shown above are part of the Kaafu administrative area / Malé Atoll:

Malé Atoll
The placemark is on the airport

Bonus: I'm poking around looking at The Maldives and Tam turns me onto this BBC report about Diego Garcia. It explains why we don't hear much about the place. The report has several pictures, but nothing recent.

Update 3 days later:  Why is the UK handing the Chagos Islands back to Mauritius? - Aljazeera

                                  Chagos Archipelago - Wikipedia

---

A post I started back in July 2014 but never published:

A Malaysian airliner got shot down in the Ukraine this morning, which reminds us that there is a new conspiracy theory circulating that the Malaysian airliner that disappeared a couple months ago was diverted to Diego Garcia by the CIA. Irba tells us that Diego Garcia is basically a ring of skinny islands around a big lagoon, and the lagoon is fresh water. That seems improbable, so I do a little checking.
    Diego Garcia gets a hundred inches of rain a year, which is a boat load. Oregon, the rainiest place in the USA onlty gets about thirty some inches. Diego Garcia is a coral atoll, and as such is very porous so rain water soaks right in. Since it is going into this porous rock, there isn't a lot of mixing going on, so it basically collects on top of the salt water that has soaked in from the ocean. This fresh water can be extracted via shallow wells and as long as you don't take too much out of any one spot you can get all the water you need. I mean a hundred inches of rain a year is a stink load of rain.

Quote

Found this line at the end of a story about fertility and population by Russell Clark:

Extrapolation without analysis is the bane of modern economics - it is such simplistic thinking. Mentally, it makes economists children, not men.

Second time this week I have encountered someone bashing economists this week, and it's only Tuesday. 

Via ZeroHedge

Hurricane Helene

Power Outage

Been hearing a lot of noise about how bad Helene was, but it was confusing because many of the reports came from places I have never heard of, so I went looking for a map. It looks like Helene had it in for Appalachia, which is kind of weird.

Doonesbury

Doonesbury September 29, 2024

This comic showed up in the Sunday paper. I used to enjoy Doonesbury, but sometime in the last ten years he became afflicted with TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) and he hasn't been any fun since.

I'm posting this one because he's accusing Trump of all the things the Biden haters have been saying about Biden for the last few years, which is kind of weird. One, I have never heard anyone accusing Trump of these things before. Okay, I don't listen to any of the main stream / liberal media, so maybe they have been saying this stuff all along but I just didn't hear any of it. The other is that I have been hearing accusations that the Democrats are out and out lying about all kinds of things.

None of these rumors and inuendo has any bearing on whether he can do the job. Anyway, this comic was like getting hit in the face with a dead fish. Wake up Pergelator! Smell the stink!

While we are talking about propaganda, the default screen on Microsoft's browser is covered with news stories which annoys me to no end. First of all, I don't need any more news, I get plenty from my regular sources, I don't any more distractions. The other is Bill Gates. I don't like and I don't trust him and I certainly don't want to hear anything he has to say, and you know just his looming presence is enough to sway what's showing up on the screen. Google may be guilty of many things, but at least the home screen is just white space. Yes, I know it's my own fault, I said I was going to install Linux, but my head needs to be in the right space to tackle that. Basically, I'm not yet frustrated enough with Windows to take that step, but it's coming.