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mental airplane glue
Thursday, February 11 2016
This morning I listened to a live audio feed from within the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge as the last holdouts among the right wing militants who seized it finally surrendered, having been there since January 2nd (when I was in the Galapagos). The feed was apparently coming from the fully-charged smart phone of one David Fry, the last man to surrender. Unlike his phone, Mr. Fry did not manifest much in the way of smarts or even sanity. Though, in fairness, he was under a lot of stress during the final hours of the siege and had probably convinced himself that the jack-booted thugs sent by presidential pretender Obama wanted nothing more than to shoot him down like a rabid dog. There was a lot of incoherent delusion and ignorance in the things he was saying, evidence that the paranoid foolishness Fox News disseminates to its low-information viewership has real consequences. Though he was part of the occupation of a piece of federal land tasked with providing habitat for bird life, Fry's main beef with the federal government seemed to be that they collected taxes from him and then used those taxes to pay for abortions. This is the sort of thing one can come to believe if one watches Fox News or listens to Republican political candidates. But it doesn't take much research to uncover the fact that, as a matter of policy, the US Government is forbidden from paying for abortions. Perhaps if David Fry had known this, he might have given up earlier and wouldn't have come so close to shooting himself in the head. Other concerns were more realistic, such as his fears of being ass raped while in prison. But such risks are mostly the result of his political forebears trying to make the world resemble his version of utopia, with prisons as unpleasant as possible for the rounded-up minorities. In addition misplaced and valid fears, David Fry also exhibited paranoid fears that could only come from the darkest corners of the internet, places where low-information viewers with poor critical thinking skills go to snack on mental airplane glue. InfoWars is perhaps the best-known of such sites, but there are many others. (I recently had fun plumbing the depths of YouTube videos purporting to prove that the Earth is actually flat and that all evidence to the contrary is an elaborately-constructed conspiracy involving thousands or perhaps millions of conspirators.) For poor David Fry, these theories evidently fill his brain as a jumbled mess, and in between threats to shoot himself and bizarre religious proclamations, he mentioned UFOs, chemical castration (perhaps from chemtrails), and ærosolized thorazine. Through all of this, a pair of voices on the other end of the line tried their best to talk him down while agreeing (overall) with his worldview. These people kept trying to bring him back to religion, sometimes asking for him to pray. That's always cloying to my sensibility, and in Fry's case it didn't seem to be a particularly good way to reach him. Ultimately, though, when he decided not to shoot himself and to turn himself in instead, his only request was that the FBI people all shout "Hallelujah!" (which they did, possibly in defiance of their own personal religious views).
While all that was happening, I was adding a connector allowing me to attach any SMA antenna to the controller of my Syma X5C-1 quadcopter, thereby extending its range. In doing this, I soon discovered that the little nub of an antenna sticking out of the back of the controller is purely cosmetic; it's a small hollow plastic phallus. The actual antenna is a short piece of wire coming off a tiny daughterboard and does not reach into the phallus. I desoldered that and soldered in its place a tiny wire leading to an SMA panel-mount connector. Since the location of the old antenna wasn't suitable for installing the connector, I drilled a hole through the center of the Syma logo. I have a large number of 2.4 GHz antennas with SMA connectors, including a big parabolic, several Yagis, three flat-panels, and probably a dozen different whip. Given all those options, I now have the ability to control my drone from a great distance.
Today, on a whim, I tried doubling the horizontal and vertical size of every image in a Winamp skin to see how they would render in Audacious on my nascent Raspberry Pi audio player. A smart skin engine would note the size of the base image and then scale everything up, and it would look beautiful and be big enough to see on a tiny screen. Unfortunately, this didn't happen. The window produced by Audacious was the same size as always, with only a portion of the inflated image displayed. That appears to answer the question as to whether or not Audacious can produce a larger player window. I'm going to have to look elsewhere (unless I want to wade into the swamp of Audacious source code). Open source is like science: the very fact that it is open is enough to give those of us who understand the paradigm faith that it is provisionally "good enough." This does not mean that we actually want to wade into it ourselves and confirm that it is anything at all, or extend it into new realms.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160211 feedback
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