Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   replacement for the Frankenphones
Monday, March 24 2014
Unseasonable cold is back this week, and temperatures were in the mid-20s when I walked the dogs this morning. But because it was sunny, the sun was so high in the sky, and there was still a largely-intact snow pack, the sun tended to concentrate on dark objects such as myself and it didn't feel so bad. I hiked from the Mountain Goat Path southward (upvalley) at the bottom of the Valley of the Beasts, eventually using the battery-powered chainsaw to buck a piece of very dry oak into pieces I could haul on the backpack frame at 41.92004N, 74.10337W. This was over a mile from home, and the wood load I'd prepared was about 60 pounds. I carried it up the slope to the west until I got to the Stick Trail, and I headed home from there, though I rested at the site of where I'd gathered firewood yesterday long enough to set a waypoint on the Droid cellphone I'd brought with me. That one break made the job of shlepping the load the rest of the way home much easier than it otherwise would have been.

Several weeks ago, my Frankenstein MP3/radio headphones finally died for good. These were the ones that I'd fixed with a hacksaw blade, epoxy, and, most recently, the remains of a set of cheap hearing protection earmuffs. Those headphones had been fragile and unreliable, but they'd filled an important niche. They'd lacked and sort of cord and hadn't relied on the friction of the inside of my ear canal. I'd come to detest the presence of a cord running the length of my torso when I'm listening to audio entertainment, particularly when walking in the woods, where branches tend to catch it and tear the headset right off my head. And earbuds always seem to work their way out of my ears whenever I'm doing anything the least bit physical. I need a cord-free headset, and it needs to clamp to the outside of my ears. In the absence of my Frankenphones, I've been relying more on my WorkTunes headphones. But their only electronics are the built-in FM receiver. That's great for around the house and into the nearby woods, but beyond a half-mile from the house, I can no longer pick up my FM station and listen to podcasts. I'd come to appreciate the Frankenphones' MP3 player.
I'd tried a number of other possible solutions to this problem, but most cheap MP3 players (particularly the kind integrated into headphones) are terrible, with unreliable batteries and bewilderingly non-intuitive user interfaces. It was only after Gretchen gave an endorsement to the SanDisk clip MP3 player I'd gotten her for her birthday that I knew of a good cheap MP3 player small enough to attach directly to the WorkTunes headset. I'd managed to buy a used 4GB SansaClip+ for only $10, and it arrived in the mail today. Because I want it to be a permanent and reliable part of the WorkTunes headset, I nearly clipped it on to a stiff span of cable and then attached it to the WorkTunes' audio-in through a short eighth-inch stereo patch cord that I zip-tied in all the places possible. The result looked and sounded good. Interestingly, the WorkTunes behave as passive speakers when the audio-in jack is used; the signal is not put through its amplifier at all and its batteries aren't even necessary.
To test the new system out in the field, I loaded up the SanDisk with music and podcasts and then ventured somewhat far into the forest west of the Farm Road with the backpack frame and the battery-powered chainsaw and proceeded to prepare a firewood load of perhaps 75 pounds. The new system seems like it will be perfect for my needs.

While paging through a click-bait HuffingtonPost list of embarrassing moments in cinema, today I learned about the famous laxative scene in the movie Dumb & Dumber. So I used I used Bittorrent to download the movie and proceeded to watch the whole thing over the course of the day. The most essential observation I can make after seeing it is that it really seems dated after 20 years. Back in 1994, before Ali G and Stephen Colbert, humor was actually rather different than it is today. It was more ernest and obvious even when it was going for gross-out gags and extreme forms of slapstick. Also, there was a time back in the early 2000s when I thought Jim Carrey was hilarious, but these days his over-the-topitude is just irritating. I think part of my disaffection with him comes from the taint of having ever had anything to do with Jenny McCarthy, famous for her shit-for-brains opposition to childhood vaccination. That said, the laxative scene was hilarious, though I'm confident Sacha Baron Cohen would have made it five times funnier.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?140324

feedback
previous | next