Blackcap Blog

Published at 09:27 on 23 February 2025

Let me start by saying I have been nothing but satisfied with Digital Ocean, which I use to host this blog, so far. The issue here is not anything Digital Ocean has done, it is what Digital Ocean is highly likely to do in the future.

Digital Ocean is a capitalist enterprise based in a country undergoing a transition from democracy to fascism. The historical role of the capitalist class is to line up in support behind fascist regimes whenever they arise.

I do not know the politics of Digital Ocean’s top management and board of directors. It does not much matter. Even if both are dominated by political progressives, compliance with the rapidly-emerging fascist regime is highly likely.

In a capitalist corporation, management serves at the pleasure of the board, whose prime mission is to act in the interest of the corporation’s stockholders and their desire to maximize profits. Profits are not maximized by staking out adversarial positions to an authoritarian regime.

The above makes compliance the expected outcome, and the historical record of capitalism under fascism bears this theory out.

Yes, even under the Nazis there were businesses like DEF (Oskar Schindler’s firm) and Ernst Leitz GmbH (the makers of Leica cameras) that tried to do the right thing as much as they could. But even they were heavily constrained, and did a lot of complying (both manufactured materiel for the Wehrmacht). Even if Digital Ocean follows in their footsteps (and odds are against it, good guys like Leitz and Schindler are the exceptions that prove a general rule), they will still have to make a public show of being loyal Trump fascists.

Even in the optimistic case, then, this site is likely to end up as collateral damage should it remain on Digital Ocean.

Hence, it is now time for me to move this site elsewhere, which brings me to the requirements for what “elsewhere” should ideally be.

1. As little US connection as possible. Ideally this would be an organization that is neither owned by US capital, managed or overseen by US citizens, based in the USA, nor physically hosted in the USA.
2. Cloud hosting that lets me run my own installation of WordPress on my own installation of Linux. I am not interested in sharing an OS installation or a WordPress installation with others; past experience has taught me that both are insufficient to my needs.
3. The ability to assign a static IP address to a virtual server.
4. A provider that offers an S3-compatible cloud storage service, since I use such to keep this site backed up.

Any suggestions as to the above would be greatly appreciated!

Published at 15:36 on 19 January 2025

Notice that it’s an old-fashioned corded one. “I wish mice didn’t have cords” is a thought that has passed through my mind exactly never. Bluetooth mice struck me as a stupid idea a dozen years ago, and they strike me as a stupid idea today.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that they still made old-fashioned corded mice, given how long Bluetooth ones have been around. I guess it goes to show that I am not the only corded mouse diehard out there. Maybe I should have purchased a second one just in case the market decides to make wireless mice mandatory before this one dies, but I have enough of an issue with accumulating clutter as it is.

As for keyboards and mice, so for phone headsets, but double or treble.

Again, use Bluetooth and they become battery-dependant. They lose a convenient leash that keeps both earbuds paired with each other, and which makes the whole headset significantly larger and easier to find. I just know I’d be losing headsets, running into dead batteries, and ending up with singleton earbuds if I was stupid enough to buy into the Bluetooth hype.

Furthermore, a huge part of my reason for preferring to use a headset on the phone is to get the phone’s antenna away from my skull. No, there is no definite evidence that low-power microwaves are harmful to the brain, but given that it is so easy to drastically reduce my exposure (thank you, inverse square law), why shouldn’t I?

A long time ago, I worked in the nuclear industry, and they have a policy called ALARA which means as low as reasonably achievable. A canonical example, on posters throughout my workplace, showed a worker tasked with moving a low-level radioactive item from one place to another. A cart was available, and using it meant one could put the item on the far end of the cart and wheel it to its destination, instead of carrying it against one’s body. Moral of the story: use the cart. Always do everything you can to minimize your exposure.

Well, Bluetooth uses radio waves to do its thing, which makes Bluetooth headsets a whole lot less useful for reducing RF exposure, since each earbud has a tiny radio transmitter in it.

And then we have bluetooth pairing, needed to prevent unauthorized devices from connecting to one’s computer. Sometimes this ends up being a tremendous pain. For example, I have never had much luck pairing a smart phone with my desktop computer. I tried it, I thought it would be nifty to download images without using a USB cable. Spent most of an hour getting it to work, it worked for a while, then it stopped working. Blew another hour trying to get things working again, then gave up and used a USB cable (which, of course, worked perfectly). Ever since it’s been USB cable all the way.

Aside for some niche cases (such as keyboards for tablets, which have limited battery power and one or no USB ports), Bluetooth just doesn’t make sense, and comes across as the answer to the question: “How do we take perfectly fine wired connections and make them dramatically worse?”

Published at 13:35 on 5 December 2024

Back in 2021, I evaluated different kinds of wire strippers and chose to upgrade my toolchest to contain some better ones. It was in retrospect a good decision that I do not regret.

But I had wondered about automatic strippers, and how well they work. Recently, I had a project that involved stripping a lot of wire, so I bought a set of Irwin No. 2078300 automatic self-adjusting wire strippers. I chose these because they were mid-range: I do not trust cheap Chinese knockoff tools and I do not strip enough wire to justify purchasing expensive German-made ones. Plus, I had heard that the design of the Irwins lent itself well to stripping the jacket off multi-conductor cables, and the latter is a fiddly task that would be nice to automate. (Klein makes a very similar set, but the Irwins were available locally and tend to have a slightly higher user rating.)

My verdict: I have tried them on a number of wires and cables, and their primary best use is to strip the outer jacket off multi-conductor cables.

For wires, it was a crapshoot how well they worked (or if they worked at all). In particularly, they do nothing but fail on Teflon or THHN insulation (but I knew that going in). On other wire types, sometimes they worked quite well, sometimes erratically. There is a tension adjustment one can fiddle with to tailor them for a particular wire type, but why bother? If I use my non-automatic Klein Kurve strippers, they always work precisely as intended, no fiddling with any adjustment necessary. Maybe if I needed to strip a lot of a given kind of wire at once it would be worth the time investment of getting the adjustment just right, but otherwise old-school strippers are a win.

Note: Most Romex these days tends to have THHN-insulated wire inside, so if residential wiring is your thing, these automatic strippers are likely to be a huge disappointment if you are expecting them to strip individual conductors.

For multi-conductor cables, it took the outer jacket off quite nicely, and it did so perfectly the first time, every time I tried it, on every type of cable I tried (Cat 5 cable, audio cable, low-voltage alarm and thermostat cable, round power cord cable, and Romex). No more fiddling with a knife and either not scoring the jacket deeply enough on the first try, scoring it too deeply and damaging the conductors inside, slipping up and cutting myself, etc. That justified their place in my toolbox, but if I had bought them expecting a general-purpose wire-stripping solution, I would have been disappointed.

So if you have wished for a tool to automatically de-jacket multi-conductor cable, buy these, but don’t expect them to be a general-purpose wire stripping solution.

Published at 15:46 on 26 September 2024

This is but one example of why. And it is also a disaster for: accuracy (it can’t even admit when it doesn’t know an answer); intellectual property rights (it is based off unauthorized use of content created by others, which the AI engines then charge for access to; and even from a purely business standpoint (it is merely the latest tech bubble, as most AI ventures are running a loss and burning through VC funding).

Published at 18:02 on 31 July 2024

What Is an Anticipator?

The first time I took apart a thermostat, as a teen, I noticed this mysterious “anticipator” adjustment inside the thing. It was calibrated in these weird decimal fractions from roughly
0.15 to 1.2.

How could an inanimate object anticipate the future? It seemed like magic! Moreover, when I tinkered with the control, the heater’s cycles got longer and shorter. It was almost as if the thermostat did really know what was going to happen as it turned the heat on! And just what was the significance of those strange numbers, anyhow?

It took embarrassingly long (years!) for me to figure it out. See illustration below:

That’s right, the “anticipator” is nothing more than a tiny electric heater in series with the switch contacts on the thermostat.

How Does the Anticipator Work?

When the switch closes, the tiny heater is placed in series with the current flowing through the main heater’s relay coil. This causes current to flow through the tiny heater, and it heats up. This helps counter the thermal mass of the thermostat itself by heating it up, too, hopefully approximately in tandem with the air inside the building. The thermostat therefore reacts faster to what the heater is doing, as if it is anticipating future heating.

What Are the Strange Numbers on an Anticipator Scale?

They mark the recommended starting set point for a given current draw for a standard 24-volt system, as measured across the thermostat when it is open (i.e. not calling for heat).

Because anticipators must run on a traditional two-wire thermostat circuit, they must be placed in series with the thermostat switch point and the load the thermostat switches. Because this is a series circuit, more anticipator resistance means more total series resistance. This means that the overall circuit uses less power, and that the thermostat’s anticipator consumes a greater fraction of that power.

Somewhere between the minimum and maximum settings, anticipator heating is maximized, and somewhere between no anticipation and maximum anticipation is the proper value for a given situation. There are so many site-specific particulars that it is not possible with certainty to say in advance what the optimum setting is; all one can do is arrive at a good first guess. Sometimes that guess will be correct, sometimes it will take further refinements to arrive at the correct value.

For a high current system, only a small amount of resistance suffices. At 1.2 amps, even a small amount of resistance heating is excessive. In fact, there will probably be enough heating from the switch points’ resistance to act as a sufficient anticipator. So the 1.2 setting is for no (extra) anticipation, i.e. no extra series resistance. The anticipator is bypassed at this setting.

For a millivolt system, there is both limited power and limited voltage available. Voltage drop already can be a problem with millivolt systems, even without an anticipator. So dedicated millivolt thermostats do not have an anticipator, and millivolt-capable thermostats have instructions saying to use a setting of 1.2 on a millivolt system.

For a low current system, significant resistance is needed to extract enough power to get significant heating in the anticipator. So the lowest numbers select the maximum extra resistance.

What about the instructions that say to set the anticipator to 0.3 for electric, 0.4 for gas or oil heat, and so on?

Those are the recommended starting set points if you don’t have an ammeter reading or an existing thermostat setting to use.

What is the meaning of “longer?”

It denotes an arrow pointing to the direction to move the setting to make heating cycles longer. Note that the word “longer” is, perversely, often at the end of the scale that offers the shortest cycles (i.e. the most anticipation). It is the arrow pointing to the direction with which to move the setting to get longer cycles that counts.

Which setting is correct?

Whichever one works best! Start with one of the set points recommended by the thermostat manufacturer, but remember that they are only recommended ones. What is best depends on the particulars of your system (different ones draw different currents), your thermostat, your house, and where in your house the thermostat is mounted. There are so many particulars that it is impossible to say in general.

If you have an existing thermostat with an anticipator, copy its setting. If you have an ammeter, use that to determine a setting. If you have neither, use the instructions that came with your thermostat and set it according to your heat type. Failing all that, use whatever the thermostat happens to be set at as you got it.

What happens? Is temperature regulated properly? Congratulations, you’re at the correct setting! Don’t touch that anticipator adjustment! Does the heat run too long and cause temperature overshoot? Move it to a lower number. On a cold day or morning, does the heat tend to turn off too soon, forcing you to turn the thermostat above a set point in order to reach it? Move it to a higher number.

If you find it necessary to experiment with settings, take notes. It often takes several days of experimenting to arrive at the optimal setting.

Published at 15:01 on 11 April 2024

After a recent update, my iPhone started letting me control my headphone volume from threshold of pain loud to insane instant deafness loud. I guess some aging hipster who ruined his hearing going to too many rock concerts without hearing protection got appointed to a QC position at Apple.

Based on what I had read about human sound perception, I guessed I needed about 6 dB of attenuation to tame the thing. A simple matter of adding four resistors to the picture (two for each channel, one in series to cut the voltage in half, and another in parallel to restore the impedance the audio amplifier sees to what used to be pre-attenuator).

The worst part about it was all the fiddly soldering (those connectors have some tiny terminals). But it works, and 6 dB was indeed the correct amount of attenuation needed to restore sanity to the device.

Published at 21:26 on 11 August 2023

The suckiness that is the GPS I mistakenly purchased just keeps on coming.

Last week, I tried to use the device to count down the miles to the unmarked turnoff for where I was going camping east of Chinook Pass. Knowing how generally useless it is for navigating urban traffic, I used a smartphone and Google Maps until I reached Enumclaw, then shifted to the Garmin as I was about to leave cell coverage.

And the piece of junk directs me to go literally hundreds of miles out of my way and get there via Snoqualmie Pass. Yes, from Enumclaw. To get some idea of just how staggeringly bad that routing is, here is a map showing the route Google Maps recommends to the same general area (i.e., the obvious route, the one any sane person would take). It is necessary to zoom out a bit to see the route via I-90 and I-82 that it wanted me to take.

I mean, sure, it’s harmless in this case because I knew better, but what if I didn’t? What if I was using the thing to navigate in unfamiliar territory instead of using it to count down the miles to a turnoff that it had been a few years since I last took?

The Drivestupid 666 only realized the obvious routing once I had travelled most of the way to Chinook Pass, after spending nearly an hour recommending I turn around.

Published at 17:25 on 24 June 2023

Last year, I decided to treat myself to a new automotive GPS system for my truck. You see, I sometimes like to explore forest service roads in backcountry areas that lack cell coverage, making smartphone maps mostly useless. I decided to buy a Garmin unit, since that is a name brand, and I have one of their hiking GPS units and it works just fine. So I assumed that Garmin’s automotive GPS units would also be well-designed. Boy, was I wrong! To reiterate the subject of this post: the thing is pure crap. It cannot honestly be described any other way.

Let me enumerate the ways in which it is crap:

1. Crap software design. If you pair the GPS with your smartphone (which you must, if you want to receive real-time traffic updates for driving in the city), it turns on this cheesy key-click feature, in which the GPS speaker will make a loud click for each keystroke you enter on the smart phone. The rub is, the click will be randomly delayed due to the use of Bluetooth pairing by anywhere from 100 ms to a full second. Just try typing with such a misfeature, I dare you. It is extremely disorienting, and makes accurate typing virtually impossible. And there is no way to disable this crap misfeature. I spent several hours trying to, reading the manual, exploring all the settings, doing web searches. There is no escape. The only way to turn it off seems to be to unpair your phone.
2. Crap real-time traffic information. Speaking of the real-time traffic updates, they are crap. In my experience they report less than half of significant delays. Because the device is unaware of so many instances of traffic congestion, its navigation advice in the city is also crap. Plus the chosen way Garmin indicates traffic congestion on its map is subtle and easy to miss.
3. Crap software quality. The GPS often hangs or crashes at random times. When this happens, it takes about five minutes to recover. Typically this happens when I am running late and most need everything to work properly.
4. Crap backup camera. I decided to spring for the optional backup camera, because my truck is old enough not to have one from the factory. About as much of a mistake as buying the GPS itself. It’s crap, too. The camera takes up to a full minute to turn on when requested. Video is frequently laggy and erratic. My old cheapo analog wired backup camera was vastly better.
5. Crap maps. First, the maps are a good two years or more out of date from the moment you download them. A new road opened two years ago near my property in Bellingham. Its presence changed the optimal way to get there from I-5. Two years on, and the new stretch of road is still not in the latest update from Garmin. Second, the maps are woefully incomplete. The device is essentially useless for its intended purpose of navigating on remote forest service roads; most of them are not in its database.
6. Crap hardware design. The Drivesmart 66 spews radio noise like mad on the lower radio frequencies. Use it while listening to an AM radio station? Forget it! This is extremely annoying, as the same remote areas without cell coverage (i.e. the areas that prompted me to get this unit) also tend to lack FM radio coverage, while stronger AM stations still manage to cover such areas, due to how the longer radio waves used in the AM broadcast band propagate. So even if it was useful in the backwoods (and it is not) I would still have to choose between being able to listen to the radio and having GPS guidance.

My assumption is that these misfeatures are also present in most or all newer Garmin automotive models. Because why wouldn’t they be? It’s only logical to use a common software base in all products, and a manufacturer inclined to cut corners when it comes to RF noise shielding in one device is probably going to cut them in all their devices.

Bottom line is that I cannot recommend any currently-manufactured Garmin automotive GPS units. Avoid them all.

Published at 17:27 on 12 March 2023

To begin, three points:

1. You probably don’t need one. Go here for why. In many cases, a third party app can easily lead to worse photos, if one does not know how to make good use of its extra features, or if those extra features keep getting in the way and messing things up.
2. This is one of those things that Android does better. The standard Android camera app allows for more creative controls and manual overrides than does the standard iPhone one, while being more intuitive and less packed with gratuitous features than most third party apps. If the built in camera is really important to you, consider a high end Android phone. (Note that Android doesn’t do everything better, just some things. More than likely, a tradeoff will be involved. I am just saying that you should seriously consider a leading-model Android phone if using a phone camera is important to you.)
3. Third, sometimes such an app makes sense, if you understand how to use manual overrides. The inability to manually focus was ruining lots of macro (close up) shots for me.

So what I’m doing is giving Halide a try for a year, and using it in those situations where the limitations of the standard Apple camera app are really getting in the way. For situations where the standard app’s limitations don’t get in the way (and this is most photographs), I use the standard app, because it is simpler and easier to use. (Thankfully, it is easy enough to make the two store their photos in the same place, which makes managing them easier and simpler.)

Note that this is only for those situations where for some reason I do not have my interchangeable-lens camera, with my dedicated macro lens that I can focus with a focus ring and a proper viewfinder, along with me. It’s a fallback for macro photography, nothing more. The main reason I have an iPhone because it works better as a phone; performance as a camera is secondary to me.

Finally, it is still annoying, because Android does it significantly better. Much nicer to have just one camera app that once can use in all situations than having to bounce between a limited app and a feature-bloated one.

Published at 17:36 on 15 December 2022

Take a look here. The very first principle listed is:

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

By virtue of being made the first principle, a serious hint is being dropped that this principle is the most important one of all. Any lingering doubt is cleared up by the phrase “highest priority.”

This is, quite frankly, crap. It is predicated on the premise that what customers want most of all is continuous updates and change.

Continuous updates and change are one of the chief reasons why my industry’s products suck so much.

Gone are the days of physical tools like hammers, drills, saws, or even more complex ones like bicycles and motor vehicles, physical devices in a physical world whose limitations binds form to function. Instead, we have user interfaces driven more by fashion trends amongst the UI design crowd than anything else.

Learn to ride a bicycle and you have learned to ride a bicycle for life. Learn to use a mechanical typewriter and you have learned how to type for life. Learn how to use the most recent version of Microsoft Word and what you just learned will be obsolete within a few years.

Lack of stability, plus a near-absolute decoupling of form from function, are two of the very worst things about software.

And the agile manifesto actively mandates one of these two evils. As its highest priority.

It’s not all evil, of course. There is this one in there:

Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential.

Well, gold star. “A” for effort. You got one dead right.

The trouble is, this is the tenth of twelve principles. It appears way down on the list, below a first principle that is unambiguously proclaimed the highest priority.

A first principle based upon a monstrously wrong premise.

And this is the most popular software development methodology within my field today.

No wonder most software tends to be crap.