Gonna talk about Harry Reid for about half a second, maybe as part of an essay that's bubbling in my head about bad faith and the Republican Party, but also in the Democratic Party, because holy hell was Harry Reid good at bad faith.

What got me thinking about it was electoral-college shenanigans and thinking about the 2000 election - or rather, ( Read more... )

I've been playing with ideas about how to recapture dryer exhaust heat in the wintertime, and how to do so with controllable humidity.

I realised during this event in particular that sometimes we want that humidity, or at least some of it. And that leads to a very, very simple - and trivial to engineer - solution.

Conveniently, today is laundry day, ( Read more... )

Let's talk about what I have been thinking of as the Goldilocks scenario, but which I've revised recently to the Get Lucky scenario...

...for COVID-19.

A Goldilocks scenario for COVID would be a variant that is both incredibly contagious but functionally harmless. Something that you don't even notice you have, basically all the time. Someone that ( Read more... )

watching it on television, the seahawks at home in green bay playing the chicago bears

seriously it looks like a game at green bay it's hilarious
Also posted to ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん;
( Read more... )

So we have serious snowfall here today, and temperatures well below freezing. It's currently -4.5C, with temperatures expected to fall through the day. We have over 13cm of snow and it's still falling.

I was really curious what all this falling snow would do to our antenna performance, right? Because we've known this has been coming for days. And ( Read more... )

Another small Twitter essay, of course.
Reuters Fact Check -
( Read more... )

So we had bad weather last night - the always-weak channel 46 was breaking up badly, and we had some glitching even on better UHF stations - and I went up to make some more antenna adjustments to try and cope with it.

I tried enlarging the reflector on the VHF antenna, but got absolutely nowhere with that. Surprised me quite a bit, since I know ( Read more... )

After posting that previous bit of antenna wankery, I had a thought that maybe I could gain a little more signal by bulking up the reflector on the back of the UHF antenna from a thin wire grid to a continuous foil reflector using ordinary aluminium foil backed with plastic for stability.

Being an outdoor antenna, the reflector needs to be thin wire ( Read more... )

Kyle Griffin - @kylegriffin1 · 10:30 AM · Dec 21, 2021
Important note for the unvaccinated who believe in 'natural immunity':

The first Omicron-linked death in the U.S. was recorded in Texas' Harris County on Monday evening. The man was unvaccinated but had previously been infected.
Solarbird - @solarbirdy · 1:59 PM · Dec 21, 2021
The vaccine is MORE ( Read more... )

So we don't have cable television, we stream or watch local TV over the air. We get 64(!) air channels, counting those we block for evil content. (Fundamentalists and 24-hour shopping get the boot.)

But there are some channels we REALLY want, like NHK World via KBTC-2 in Tacoma.

We're in a terrible location for over-the-air for a lot of reasons, some ( Read more... )