Blackcap Blog

Published at 11:20 on 10 June 2018

From the standpoint of many Never Trump conservatives it’s politically incorrect to point this out, but there really is not an quantum gap between Trump and the Republican Party from the era of Nixon onwards.

It’s been a party built on lies and bigotry, from Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to Reagan’s lies about welfare queens driving Cadillacs (no evidence of such a person existed), to Bush the Younger’s lies about Iraq and his acolytes’ expressions of love for myth and contempt for truth, and their dislike for the rule of law.

Trump is merely more crude and blatant (and thus, in a sense, more fundamentally honest) about his fascistic principles; that’s all. For more details, see this Twitter thread.

Published at 09:45 on 9 June 2018

It didn’t go as badly as the norm for such things, and they are desperate to hire new talent, so there’s a chance that I will get an offer. But only a chance, and not much of one at that. The effort to get out of tech work must continue unabated.

The effort must continue unabated even if I do land an offer, because past experience indicates such a result will be at best only a temporary solution to the permanent mismatch between me and where the tech world is today.

At least I got a lunch at an upscale restaurant and a free notebook (with paper that doesn’t bleed with fountain pen ink at that) out of the day’s efforts, so they weren’t a total waste no matter the outcome.

Published at 20:49 on 8 June 2018

The above picture was taken by me last week in Lillooet, BC. There were several large patches of yellow flowers by the road, easily enough to get my attention as a passenger. Their size and color indicated they were probably cactus flowers. I alerted the driver so we could go back, stop, and admire them.

Many are surprised to learn there is wild cactus growing in Canada; my fellow companions on that trip were amongst the surprised. Many are equally or more surprised to learn that the same species also grows wild in western Washington, in the most rain-shadowed areas of the Olympic Mountains. Here is a patch I saw near Sequim earlier this spring:

It shouldn’t really be a surprise that cacti are found in either Lillooet or Sequim, as both locations are rain-shadowed. Lillooet in particular is known for being a dry spot, and being well inland often has just the sort of hot, dry summer conditions that cacti love. Plants don’t care about our preconceived biases or political boundaries; they grow wherever the environment is suitable for them.

The winters aren’t hot or dry, but this species is one of the hardiest and most northerly of cacti. It grows as far north as the Peace River Valley in northeastern BC, a region that can see temperatures colder than -40˚ in the winter.

Its common and scientific names point to how its pads easily become detached from the mother plant, their thorns embedding themselves in the fur, clothing, or skin of unwitting creatures that brush against them. When removed and discarded, they root and create new plants. In this trait, this prickly pear acts more like a cholla. That’s not a huge surprise, as the chollas (genus Cylindropuntia) and prickly pears are very closely related; for many years both were even lumped into the same genus.

Some of my own Opuntia fragilis are getting ready to bloom. I may be interested in plants, but unlike most who are, I’m not very good at gardening. This cactus was the answer to my question: “What could I plant in those window boxes (preferably a native plant) that I wouldn’t kill by forgetting to water or being away and not able to water?”

Those window boxes in question face south and are beneath eaves that serve to keep most rainfall out of them, the perfect micro-habitat for a sun-loving rain shadow plant like this. It felt a little odd dumping the nice potting soil out of them and replacing it with the gravely glacial till (of which I have plenty in my yard) that our local populations of this cactus prefer.

Published at 08:52 on 8 June 2018

I’m heading into the city for another job interview. We’ll see how well it works out. I would like to say I am cautiously optimistic but honestly I am not. This is not pessimism; it is realism. Everything I have learned in the last few years points to:

• Overall trends in the computing industry running precisely counter to my own personal needs for a work environment, and
• Persistent ageism, coupled with how I am not getting younger as the years pass, leading me to being rejected based on appearance alone.

At this stage, job interviews are something I am doing on a non-interference basis to the pursuit of other strategies for financially supporting myself. If I do manage to get lucky and land a job, experience has shown it will prove to be temporary anyhow, and extremely unlikely to last longer than a few years. It will be a means of kicking the can down the road and buying some time for me to complete the difficult process of securing a good alternate strategy to conventional tech work, nothing more.

Published at 22:33 on 6 June 2018

My iPad decided to randomly demand all sorts of security information (which I don’t have committed to memory and never will, because I have better things to memorize than random bits of data like that). Worse yet, it then decided to demand I boot one of my Macs (which of course I didn’t have with me at the time) to complete the process of allowing me to use it again.

I think this is Apple’s way of punishing me for attempting to use the Internet while in Canada, which they seem to regard as a sign of fraud and theft because (gasp!) it’s a foreign country. Well, yes it is, but Apple should take a look at the fucking map some time: it’s as big a deal for someone to travel from Seattle to Kamloops, BC as it is for someone to travel from Chicago to the Upper Peninsula.

An iPad is a smaller and lighter than a full-featured computer, which makes it significantly more portable than a full-featured computer, which in turn means it is likely to be the device someone takes with them on a trip, while leaving larger and bulkier computing devices behind at home. Therefore it is unrealistic to demand someone follow the process of booting and using another of his computers to re-enable an arbitrarily disabled iPad. This is so obvious that it feels somewhat painful to have to type it.

All of which serves to reinforce the idea that it will be a cold day in Hades before I ever get a smartphone stupidphone. Why would I want a phone that randomly decides to brick itself while I am on a trip?

Published at 08:39 on 30 May 2018

With his purchase of the Trans Mountain Pipeline, Justin Trudeau has just revealed himself to be nothing more than a less-honest version of Donald Trump.

Trump campaigned on being a climate change denier. Trudeau campaigned as something else but acts as much as a climate change denier as Trump does, and as the old saying goes, actions matter more than words.

Published at 18:39 on 29 May 2018

The instructions are unclear on how to connect the rotary encoder. If you look at the encoder from the rear (shaft facing away from you), with two terminals on the left and three on the right, the correct way to wire it is with the black wire on the top terminal and the brown wire on the bottom. The diagram and the written instructions show those two wires reversed, but the photograph in the instructions shows them connected correctly.

I guessed (incorrectly) that the way in which two pieces of information indicated was the correct way was the way to wire them. I also guessed (correctly) that since the two wires on the other side were for a normally open pushbutton switch, and the middle contact on the encoder side was grounded, the controller was simply detecting which of the brown and black wires were getting grounded in which order to determine the direction of the shaft rotation, so there wouldn’t be any drastic consequences to wiring those two wrong, just reversed tuning.

Naturally I opened it up again, warmed up my soldering iron again, and switched the two wires around. Every normal radio in the known universe has a tuning knob where turning it clockwise makes the frequency go up, and it was very annoying to have a radio that acted in the opposite way.

Published at 08:43 on 29 May 2018

The official instructions for the uBITX transceiver kit recommend wiring the hot side of the audio out to both the tip and ring connectors. I consider this to be a faulty design and thus an error.

If you plug a stereo device into the jack wired per those instructions, it will work. If you plug a monaural device into the jack, it will cause a short circuit between ring and sleeve, because the sleeve on a mono plug is longer than the sleeve on a stereo one (the tips being the same size, and there being no ring). This short circuit can cause the receiver’s audio section (specifically its output transistor) to self-destruct!

Contrast that with wiring it with the hot side of the audio to tip only, as I recommend. That way you have something that works completely with a monaural device and works somewhat (left channel only) on a stereo device. Works (to at least some degree) with both versus works on one and self-destructs on another. It’s pretty darn obvious which is the better engineering choice.

This is mentioned on uBITX.net, but it isn’t mentioned as prominently as some other errata are (or even labeled as an error), so I figured I’d mention it here. In my opinion, it definitely is incorrect, because it qualifies as faulty design.

It’s particularly nasty because the uBITX receiver is of course a monaural device, making it only logical to assume it has a standard monaural output. Murphy’s Law means that uBITX wired per the standard instructions will sooner or later have an unwitting user (a guest, someone at Field Day, etc.) fall into this pitfall that was laid for them.

What they were trying to do is use a stereo jack in a manner that causes both stereo and monaural devices to fully and properly work. There is a way to do that: use a stereo jack whose sleeve is isolated from ground, and wire ground to ring and hot to tip. This will cause a mono plug to get signal presented at tip and sleeve, and a stereo one to get signal presented at tip and ring. The latter will result in both speakers being connected in series, if the sleeve is isolated from ground.

If the latter is not the case (and it cannot be with a metal case and the stock jacks furnished with the uBITX), ring and sleeve will end up being shorted and you’re back to seeing a signal in the left channel only. Not drastic, but not the full universal performance desired, either.

Instead of using a nonstandard technique that paves the path to a future mishap, it’s far better to just wire it as a mono device and use an easily-obtainable external mono-to-stereo adaptor if you want to feed audio to a stereo device.

Published at 19:23 on 27 May 2018

I was hoping to see a Dudleya on my recent quick trip to Southern California (which mostly dealt with family matters, leaving little time for nature). I was lucky and managed to locate one in bloom despite there being a multiyear drought there. (Sorry, no picture of the leaf rosette; it was buried in a dense, low shrub and impossible to get a useful photograph of with the limited equipment I had with me.)

And yes, I know the focus is on the crappy side. Chalk it up to using an autofocus-only compact digicam on a bright day when the preview screen was hard to see in the harsh sunlight.

Published at 09:04 on 27 May 2018

At Sea-Tac, I arrived to find all luggage windows closed save for two, despite a crush of incoming passengers. A huge line snaked through the terminal to those two.

I got into it, and within minutes was told that there was a problem with one of the conveyor belts, so the pair of agents was being shifted to another set of windows. Everyone was told to move to the new set about 100 feet away.

No measures were taken to ensure anyone’s spot in line was preserved. A number of people who had just arrived managed to get in front of those of us who had been already waiting for a while.

The whole process took fifteen minutes. At Sea-Tac, this hardly rates a mention. Once I almost missed a flight because I had only arrived at the terminal a mere hour before the scheduled departure time, and the wait to check a bag was nearly fifty minutes.

Then I have to get through security. Without much explanation or clear signage, two of the security checkpoints have been converted to pre-check only. Those two were in a row. There were no signs pointing to a non-pre-check security checkpoint. Naturally this caused me to get into the wrong line and have to wait twice to go through security.

At Orange County’s John Wayne Airport, there were three agents staffing the baggage check windows despite it being a far smaller airport with far less passenger influx. There was no wait whatsoever. The security checkpoints were clearly labeled and again there was no wait.

I was about to get annoyed because there were no seats anywhere with outlets near them, then I notice a row of carrels with desks, each with a pair of outlets, for those with laptop computers to use. Instead of having to hunch over my computer while it’s on my lap, I am sitting at a desk much as I do at home.

Maybe I wouldn’t hate flying quite so much as I do if my home airport didn’t so abjectly suck.