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


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   a month of dog shit
Sunday, March 12 2023
This morning Facebook yelled at me that the content I'd attempted to share was "a private intimate image" and violated their Community Standards. Apparently the image "threatens or promotes sexual violence or exploitation" and that they "remove intimate photographs or videos shared without permission from the people in the images." Initially I couldn't see what the picture was of, and wondered if I'd done something foolish the other night while on ambien. But eventually I saw that it was a not-very-funny photo of a naked Donald Trump in profile being sprayed with some sort of tanning emulsification. I'd posted it back in 2016, and only now were they doing something about it. I checked off the button saying I disagreed with their decision, expecting to be in Facebook jail for who knows how long. But instead their robots immediately got back to me saying that they'd decided I was correct and the photo wasn't offensive.
I don't know what is going on at Facebook these days, but their attempt to downsize after blowing tens of billions of dollars trying to build a virtual reality seems to be affecting the quality of their product. For example, I can no longer view or respond to direct Facebook messages on any of my Chromebooks. And when I try to caption a photo on Chrome in Windows 10, the text I am typing is rendered so tiny that I cannot see it, not even when I zoom in on it.

I spent the day doing chores on various computers: backing up data (that is, putting a bunch of stuff on an SSD sold by a scammer that had significantly less than its claimed 1.8 TB capacity — I intend to use it for off-site storage), cloning a good Windows 10 boot drive for use on another system, and fixing my old Acer monitor, which of late had developed a problem. It would work for a period of time and then act like it had lost its signal (it's the only monitor in my monitor array still using VGA), though a power cycle would usually bring it back up. That monitor was the very first one I bought with LED backlighting and it was my second monitor with a resolution of 1920 X 1080 pixels. The fact that it's been working trouble-free for more than eleven years suggests it's better made than most LCD monitors. Once I'd cracked it apart (this required some unpleasant work with a spudger) I could see that two of its electrolytic capacitors were visibly swollen. They were both 220 microfarad/25 volt capacitors by a company called Jamicon, one of which now had a tested value of 40 microfarads. It turned out that I had brand new 220 microfarad 35 volt capacitors on hand. They were a little bigger, but they fit inside the limited space available. After installing the capacitors, I hooked the monitor up to test computer and let it run for hours, and the problem seemed to have been solved. So I returned the Acer monitor to Woodchuck's monitor array. Unfortunately, though, it started doing the same thing it had been doing before the capacitor replacement, suggesting there was some other problem.
Gretchen would be returning home later tonight, so I was sure to do all the things that made it look like I'd been more conscientious than a middle-aged bachelor. I emptied the litter boxes of all their piss and poop, washed all the dishes, filled all the water bowls with fresh water, and even cleaned up all the dog shit I could find in the yard (there was plenty of that, much of which had accumulated while we were in Costa Rica).
Before I went to bed, Gretchen was sending me messages from her plane as it sat on the runway in Newark. It would take an hour to get to the gate, and all the while someone was passing very unpleasant-smelling intestinal gas.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?230312

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