* Blog & notes for the current week.
DAYLOG MON 04 NOV 24: Tomorrow is Guy Fawkes Day, and more significantly for the USA, election day. I'm trying to ignore it. I'm not worried about the outcome, and the hysteria in the media annoys me. I check news on my smartphone every morning before I get out of bed. I should get interesting news on Wednesday morning.
* One of the latest weapons to arrive in Ukraine is the "MQ-35 V-Bat" from Shield AI. It has a "tailsitter" AKA "pogo" configuration, taking off & landing vertically, flying horizontally. It has a torpedo-like fuselage with a duct ring at the bottom, enclosing the prop for a 2-cylinder engine, and a long straight wing above the duct. It has a day-night imaging turret in the nose. Height is 3 meters (10'), wingspan 2.7 feet (9'), and weight 55 kilos (125 pounds).
It's not very fast, cruise speed of about 90 KPH (55 MPH), but it has endurance of up to 10 hours, allowing it to spend hours in the target area. Ukraine tests show that it is very resistant to electronic warfare and highly effective.
DAYLOG TUE 05 NOV 24: IEEE SPECTRUM spoke with Rachel Plotnik of Indiana University titled: "Touchscreens Are Out, and Tactile Controls Are Back" (interview by Gwendolyn Rak, 3 nov 24) to investigate the return of the pushbutton.
It has seemed like touchscreens are forever, but Plotnik -- who wrote a book on the history of the pushbutton titled POWER BUTTON -- says there's been a reaction against them. Touchscreens are great, but pushing a button on one gives no tactile feedback.
Besides, touchscreen buttons change with the device mode, while we always know where a physical button is. When driving a car, buttons tend to be more predictable, though they are much more inflexible. Touchscreen inputs are also troublesome for the blind.
Touchscreens aren't going away, but there has been a reaction, with designers adding physical buttons and knobs. Myself, I would find it much easier to play some smartphone games -- pinball for example -- with a couple of buttons. A rocker switch would be nice, too.
Plotnik said she got interested in the history of the button during the gesture recognition craze. I once had an XBox-Kinect and the gesture recognition was fun, but a game controller works much better. Touchscreen gestures have endured, however.
* This goes along with the backlash against touchscreen checkouts in supermarkets. They were seen as eliminating checkout clerks at the outset, but they didn't come close. They don't work efficiently for more than small purchases, and a clerk needs to keep an eye on them. Customers can get confused, and there's been a problem with theft as well. Some stores have abandoned them, but most think they're fine in their place. I like to use them when I want to buy a few items.
* OK, election returns are coming in this evening, and they are making me jumpy. I'm posting this and going to bed. I'll check in the morning.
DAYLOG WED 06 NOV 24: I couldn't see how Trump could do better in 2024 than he did in 2020 -- and last night he didn't, getting about the same number of votes. Unfortunately, Kamala got well fewer votes than Joe Biden did, and we got an electoral disaster all down the line.
It is not clear how bad things will be down the road -- the best case being another four-year fiasco, the worst case being Rightist rule for a generation. It is also not clear how long Trump will serve, since he's obviously falling apart. JD Vance is likely to be president sooner or later. How will that work? It will be a mess.
All this because so many Joe Biden voters couldn't be bothered to vote for a black woman. It's a hard call, but maybe it wasn't really a good idea for Joe Biden to have dropped out of the presidential race. Unkind to say it, but he simply had more clout.
I'm elderly, I may not see this to the end. Right now, I'm just proceeding on track -- not that upset, just at completely loose ends, not really knowing what to do next. Opportunities will arise.
DAYLOG THU 07 NOV 24: All kinds of recriminations going on right now about Kamala's failed presidential bid -- most notably Bernie Sanders, carrying on about how the Biden Administration didn't pay enough attention to the working class.
Since anyone who read the news knows Joe Biden focused on the working class, that was way out of line, and the general response was: Shut up, Bernie. Other foolish reasons have been floated -- but the ugly reality is that too many Dems refused to vote for a black woman, even when the alternative was a crooked, decrepit, fascistic trashbag.
* This morning I got up, started on my morning routine; when I went into the kitchen, a mouse scuttled under the refrigerator. A mouse? I've been in this house for over 30 years, I never saw a mouse in it before.
A mouse was bad news -- not merely filthy vermin in itself, but capable of doing petty damage to the house that wouldn't be so petty to fix. I got a box with a lid and pulled out the refrigerator, hoping to corner the mouse, but I wasn't hopeful it would work. It didn't.
I went on my morning walk, the far endpoint being the local supermarket mall, and bought a pair of mousetraps for $2 USD. I hate mousetraps, they're cruel, and would have bought a live trap for much more, but they didn't have any. When I got back home, I immediately baited -- with cheese, of course -- and set the traps. I didn't think I'd get results during the day since the mouse was likely keeping a low profile until it was dark, but I wouldn't rest on the matter until I had done all I could.
Later, I went into the bathroom -- and looked into the trash bin there, with the mouse staring back at me. I picked up the bin &, shaking it to keep the mouse from escaping, took it outside and emptied out on the lawn. I said: "Now BEAT it!" -- and the mouse scurried off. Things moved too quickly for me to inspect the mouse in detail, but I think it was a field mouse, not a house mouse.
The mouse boxed itself in. Happy ending -- I didn't want to kill it, certainly didn't want to mangle it in a mousetrap. Even if I hadn't caught it, I doubt it would have survived inside the house, since I keep it clean; I don't think it could have easily found food and water. I don't believe it had been in the house for long -- probably crept in while I had the door to the garage open.
Later I looked up live traps on Amazon, and found out I can get two for $10. No rush to get them, it might be decades before another mouse gets into this house. I'll just trash the two kill traps. I don't want them to be used.
DAYLOG FRI 08 NOV 24: I mentioned getting into the Korean-American WEBTOON site. I've been sampling comic series that seem interesting to follow, and finding more than I expected.
Latest I've found is THE GREATEST ESTATE DEVELOPER by Lee Hyun Min and Kim Hyunsoo, apparently adapted from a "light novel" series by Moon BK. It's an "isekai (Japanese term)" or "isegye (Korean term)" series, meaning "different world". It involves a person from our world transplanted to some other world.
One common variant of an isekai is people being transplanted into works of fiction, gothic novels being popular targets. ESTATE DEVELOPER involves a civil engineering student named Kim Suho, who went to bed after reading the novel KNIGHT OF BLOOD & IRON.
The novel was about a failing aristocratic family -- Lord & Lady Frontera, along with their dissolute and worthless son Lloyd; the hero being the knight Javier, a family retainer. In the novel, the family comes to a bad end. Suho wakes up to find out he is Lloyd, lying in the road after a drunk. Suho / Lloyd is brought home by Javier -- to find out everyone despises him, and for good reasons.
Suho / Lloyd decides to use his civil engineering skills to rescue his reputation and head off the family's doom. He starts out building a tiny house with an "ondol", a traditional Korean underfloor heating system. It soon attracts attention and more customers. Javier is bewildered, since Lloyd is acting like a sensible person, and doesn't know what to make of him.
Typically, isekai involve the hero charging forward with a sword. With Suho / Lloyd, it's a shovel instead. I'm trying to get four comic series to read, checking out an installment every night except the three when I watch a video. ESTATE DEVELOPER has over 150 installments.
AND SO ON: Latest reports from Ukraine indicate that Ukrainian forces are using drones that lay out a fiber-optic thread, making them highly resistant to jamming. The thread is about 5 kilometers (3 miles) long. Other reports indicate that AFU attacks on Russian artillery with drones were often ineffective, because it's hard to damage artillery. Now they're attacking with swarms of drones -- some with fragmentation warheads to hit the gun crews, one with a shaped-charge warhead to punch a hole in the gun barrel. Once holed, firing the gun would burst it. Gun barrels are not easy to replace.
Trump 2 Administration officials are already making noises about selling out Ukraine. We'll see how that goes down. I am refusing to be optimistic or pessimistic: it's like playing a game, the issue is not whether I'll win or lose, because at the outset there's no way to know. The issue is what my options are and what moves I make next.
Indeed, after a few days of dither, my morale's back to level. Incidentally, Spout's Chris Bouzy says Spoutible has been booming in the aftermath, though spammers and some trolls are coming in along with new users.
