grouchyfarmer

The Future of Tumblr

You may not be aware of it, but I’ve had a blog over at Tumblr for years now, and I’m far more active over there than I am here for a variety of reasons. But that is probably going to be changing in the near future.

Tumblr was bought up by Yahoo a while back, and they have not exactly been kind to their new toy. They’ve made a number of questionable decisions that have seriously annoyed many of it’s long time users. Advertising has become far more intrusive, paid, commercial blogs are being injected into our feeds over there. They’ve tampered with the user interface, adding features that no one seems to want, while removing features that people liked.

A few months ago they removed the “Reply” function, replacing it with some kind of messaging function so you can send a message to the author of the blog, but not make a public comment. They really hyped up the message function. And hype was exactly what it was. We always could send messages to the author of a blog if we wished to. It was already part of the system. All their “new” version did was add an icon to the bottom of each post to make it easier to do.

Meanwhile, the Reply function, which was widely used and widely liked, was eliminated, causing such a storm of protest that they’ve been promising to bring it back RSN (Real Soon Now).

The biggest problem with Tumblr, though, is it’s parent company, Yahoo. Yahoo hasn’t had a very good track record. It’s been losing money for years. It’s only really profitable venture is Alibaba, and there is ever increasing pressure on the company to reorganize itself, shed it’s unprofitable ventures and try to become something it hasn’t been in a long, long time, a profitable business. It’s CEO is under fire constantly, with increasing pressure to either resign, or attempts to force the board of directors to fire her. There is even pressure now from some of the bigger stockholders to fire the entire board. And to be perfectly honest, there seems to be considerable justification for both of those actions.

Shortly after buying Tumblr, Yahoo announced some sweeping changes. There would be new terms of service which would regulate what content could be posted to try to eliminate ‘offensive’ material in an effort to make the service more attractive to advertisers. Censorship/filtering software to weed out ‘unsuitable’ content would be installed. Advertising would be injected into people’s dashboards. Paid blogs would be injected into people’s dashboards. Etc. etc. etc…

There was such an enormous outrage over these new policies that they were forced to back off. While the injection of advertising into the service did take place, they backed off on the threats of censorship and other types of content restrictions. I won’t go into all of the other attempts they’ve made to “improve” the service that have irritated and alienated it’s users. While they’ve backed off on some of the more potentially destructive changes they wanted to make, they’ve continued to do things that have irritated it’s users.

But to return to Yahoo and it’s problems…

Right now Yahoo has announced it’s drastically cutting staff, firing people left and right. It’s trying to either sell off or spin off different units of the company in order to shed it’s unprofitable ventures. One of the ideas the CEO put forward was that they’d spin off everything except Alibaba. Basically Yahoo would become Alibaba, and everything else would be dumped into a company that would immediately go bankrupt because all of Yahoo’s less than successful ventures would be rolled up into that new business.

That plan got shot down. Now they’re trying to sell off various parts of the business. If they can find buyers for the stuff. In any case, the handwriting is on the wall. Yahoo, as it is known today, is not going to exist for much longer.

What’s going to happen to Tumblr? I have no idea. Tumblr isn’t all that profitable, to be honest. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to monetize it to the extent they would like because doing so would drive away the people who create the content that draws viewers to the site in the first place, as Yahoo quickly discovered when it took over the service.

I think it’s highly likely that Tumblr will not remain the property of Yahoo for much longer. Whether they sell the service or spin it off into an independent company is something I don’t know. (Frankly, from what I’ve been reading in the financial press, I don’t think anyone at Yahoo knows what the hell they’re doing.)

My dissatisfaction with what’s going on at Tumblr and the uncertainty about the future of the service means I’m going to try to move more content over to grouchyfarmer.com in the future. Over here I don’t have to worry about injected advertising, dealing with the ridiculous way they keep changing the user interface, etc.

2017 Bolt EV: All-Electric Vehicle | Chevrolet

Introducing the 2017 Bolt EV: an affordable all-electric vehicle with over 200 miles per charge. Learn more about Bolt EV at Chevrolet.com.

Source: 2017 Bolt EV: All-Electric Vehicle | Chevrolet

It looks like Tesla is finally going to get some serious competition in the electric vehicle market. GM’s Bolt is going to get about the same driving range and be in the same price category as the Tesla III which is supposed to be coming real soon now.

But I look at all of this hype as being just that — hype. The numbers both companies are putting out are based on ideal conditions, not on real world driving.

Right now it’s about 6 degrees outside with a -15 degree wind chill. I’d be curious to see how the Bolt, or the Tesla, for that matter, would react. All of these range tests are done under ideal conditions, in warm weather. In the cold that much of the US experiences during winter, what will these things do? Just heating the cabin of the vehicle up to a bearable temperature is going to be a significant drain on the electrical system. Add to that the fact that in extreme cold battery efficiency drops, electronics begin to have problems, etc, struggling through 5 inches of wet slushy snow… I’d be willing to bet that the 200 mile range rather rapidly drops to 100 or less.

Forget about taking it on a long trip, not with it requiring nine hours to recharge, even with the optional 240 volt charging station.

And you can forget about that $31,000 price tag right away. The actual cost is about $37,000 for the base unit. The extra $7K comes from ‘tax credits’ which you may or may not qualify for. Eliminate the tax credit, add in all of the options, the “optional” 240 volt charging station and all the rest, and the real price of this car is approaching $50K.

Old vs. New: The Descent of Publications Into Mediocrity

I’ve had the good fortune of obtaining, over the years, a few choice issues of old magazines and other publications, and it is irresistible to compare the modern version of those publications with their descendants. Some of these more technically oriented publications like QST and CQ have been around for a long time indeed, with QST going back around 100 years, and CQ having been around for fifty or more.

One thing that becomes glaringly obvious as soon as you open one of these old magazines is just how incredibly bad their descendants have become, at least from a technicians point of view.

Open a QST or CQ magazine from the 1960s, and you’ll find yourself quickly overwhelmed with circuit diagrams, schematics, mathematics, construction articles… If you had a basic knowledge of electronics, could read a schematic and follow instructions, you could build yourself one hell of a nice set of communications equipment just from the articles in the magazines. Not just transmitters and receivers, but linear amplifiers, antenna tuners, a wide variety of essential testing equipment… Just from reading the magazines you could build all of it if you had the ambition to do so.

There were articles about improving commercially made equipment, fixing quirks in existing equipment, modifying it to get better performance. Articles about converting military surplus equipment for ham use.

When’s the last time you saw an article in CQ or QST showing you how to build a complete receiver, a complete transmitter? A full blown linear amplifier?

The list goes on, and on, and on… Articles explaining everything from basic radio theory for novices to material that would challenge the experts. It was all there…

Now…

QST is, frankly, hardly worth the effort to open. It seems to be devoted almost entirely to “radio sports” (now there’s one of the most ridiculous uses of the term ‘sport’ I’ve ever heard), DX expeditions begging for money to fund a half million dollar trip to an island so small it only exists at low tide, and the ARRL’s attempt to turn amateur radio into a division of FEMA. About the only thing I read is The Doctor Is In column and the advertising.

CQ is a bit better, but not by much. At least it isn’t under the delusion that ARES is the only thing keeping the country from descending into chaos.

It’s sad to say, but I’ve learned more about electronics and radio from publications dating back to pre-World War II than I ever have from their descendants.

It works… Sort of

Finally got around to testing the FlashForge 3D printer after replacing the thermocouples.

Yes, it’s a TARDIS… Yes, I’m a geek…

Results weren’t horrible, but not as good as they should have been.

I’m not sure why but It’s been having issues with prints not sticking to the bed for some reason. It didn’t do that before. I replaced the kaptan tape, double checked the temperatures… nothing seems to help. If you look close at the model above you’ll see that on the far left corner it’s lifted up a bit where it began to release from the bed during the print run.

I also seem to be having extruder problems. I haven’t changed any of the settings. Temperature, feed rates and everything are the same as before. Going to need to do a bit of investigating. I tried two other test prints. One curled so bad I had to abort the print. The other was a rather complex object, a rendering of two people embracing, and the print quality was so bad I aborted that to

I’m not really sure what’s going on with the print temperature settings. I use ReplicatorG to generate the files and the temperatures I set in the program aren’t changing the temps on the printer. Even worse, it doesn’t allow me to change the print bed temperature at all. I’ve even tried changing it on the printer before printing, but no matter what I do it always reverts to the old settings of 220C for the extruder temp and 100C for the bed.

Fix It Day Part II

In part two of Fix It Day, I finally got the FlashForge working again with assistance from eldest son. The thermocouple monitors the heat of the right extruder went bad, and the one n the left side seemed to be intermittent. I’ve had two new ones sitting on the shelf for two or three weeks now and we finally got it back together.

And, of course, we managed to reverse the polarity of the thermocouple wiring so it indicated temperatures were going down instead of up, so we had to re-wire that. Then we reversed them so left was right, etc. Had to re-wire that…

Handy hint! Label stuff! Would have saved us a good half hour of time if we’d bothered to label everything as we took it off when we disassembled it.

I really need to replace the kaptan tape on the plate, too, but I’ve been putting that off because it’s a royal pain in the neck. Everyone tells me it’s no big deal but I’ve tried everything, looked at videos, etc. Nothing works. Always end up getting air bubbles all over the thing.

Anyway, seems to be working, so I’m happy.

It’s Fix It Day!

Putting the MC-60 back together. Finally got around to tinkering with it. It started having intermittent issues a couple of months ago so I was using the Heil headset, which I prefer anyway so I was in no big rush to get this fixed. How the heck does something that’s been working fine for two and a half years suddenly develop a bad solder connection? You’d think it would have started acting up long before this.

Never know, though. Had to take apart the relay box on the remote control system we use to turn the outside Christmas lights on and off. We had that for two years and had no problems, now a capacitor on the circuit board had somehow worked itself loose enough to just fall off the board entirely… I suppose the solder joints were bad to begin with but just good enough to hang on and thermal stress finally forced them to let go.

Agrimoney.com | Corn futures – will their, relative, resilience last in 2016?

Corn futures have fallen this year – but by less than soy or wheat. Can this outperformance last? Or will it fuel raised output, and price pressure?

Source: Agrimoney.com | Corn futures – will their, relative, resilience last in 2016?

Trying to figure out how the commodities markets are going to move is sort of like trying to herd cats. There are so many different factors involved that sooner or later chaos theory gets involved and no matter how good you are at it everything falls apart.

I really thought corn was going to go down the toilet when the numbers from the 2015 harvest began to come in. We’d had an increase in acreage planted, weather had been decent, yields were quite good, the market seemed poised to drop significantly… I wouldn’t have been surprised if the price fell to under $3, in the 2.8 to 3.0 range.

And, of course, I was wrong. Prices remained remarkably stable even as the harvest concluded with near record numbers.

Now everyone is trying to figure out what’s going to happen in 2016. And while there are the usual doom and gloom purveyors out there, along with the usual eternal optimists, if you ignore the extremes everyone else is indicating that corn pretty much isn’t going to move anywhere in the near future. Barring some kind of extreme weather event or something else that causes wide spread issues, the people who should know this stuff like Rabobank believe prices are going to remain fairly stable. Rabobank thinks it could hit 4.20 in the second quarter, but by the third quarter it will be dropping down to around what it is now.

Looking at the predicted acreage figures, long range weather predictions (which are pretty much a joke if you’re honest) and everything else, I’d agree with Rabobank.

There seems to be no drastic increase in demand in the works. Considering how low oil prices have dropped, there certainly isn’t an increased demand for ethanol. The only reason that industry is even around any more is because of government mandates. A lot of people, engine makers especially, would like to see ethanol just go away. (we just bought a chain saw and it’s accompanied with dire warning about running any kind of ethanol blended fuel in it. My new car… it doesn’t come right out and say ethanol blended fuel will kill it, but it comes damned close)

I don’t have a lot of money tied up in commodities so I don’t really have a horse in this race. I watch the markets mostly for the entertainment value (some of these people are, well, loopy to put it politely). So don’t take this as advice or a recommendation. Frankly I think you’re nuts if you invest more than a bit of mad money in the commodities markets.

It’s fun to watch though and try to figure out what’s going on.

Was That Steak Raised In The USA? Soon, It’ll Be Hard To Know : The Salt : NPR

Source: Was That Steak Raised In The USA? Soon, It’ll Be Hard To Know : The Salt : NPR

If you don’t know what the COOL (Country Of Origin Labeling) was, I don’t blame you. Most of the consumers I’ve talked to didn’t even know the laws existed.

COOL required meat packers to label their products by country of origin. The consumer had to be able to tell if that meat came from the US, Canada, Argentina, Mexico, China or wherever.

This doesn’t sound difficult to do, until you realize that the product in that package could be from two, three or even more places. It’s common practice these days for meat packers to make ground beef from lean meat from one country, mix in fat from another. Or meat from two or more different countries can be included in that stewing beef or chicken pieces package.

It doesn’t sound very controversial, either. Who would possibly object to knowing where their food comes from? I certainly didn’t object to it. I liked the idea. And so do most consumers. We’ve all heard the horror stories about dead pigs floating down rivers in China or the horrific melamine milk contamination that took place a few years ago.

The people who didn’t like it were countries outside the US like Canada and Mexico. They claimed that if they had to label their meat as coming from their country, people in the US might prefer to buy US products instead. And the World Trade Organization that polices such things agreed. So Canada and Mexico were poised to launch a massive increase on tariffs on a variety of US products that would have cost billions of dollars.

So Congress, with some justification, caved in and passed a repeal of COOL on Dec. 18

I have rather strong feelings about this. I rather liked the COOL regulations.

First, consumers seem, to me at least, to have the basic right to know where the products they purchase were made. They also have the right to know what’s in them.

Second, wanting to hide where your product comes from makes me a wee bit suspicious. What exactly is wrong with your product that you feel that if people knew it’s origin they wouldn’t buy it? What are you trying to cover up?

The thing I find most disturbing, though, is that increasingly these treaties are giving outside interests extraordinary power over our internal affairs. In this case, the WTO, Mexico and Canada were able to force a significant change to US law. The Trans Pacific Partnership, which politicians on both sides of the political spectrum have been pushing for hard, makes things even more concerning, giving individual corporations the power to do what Mexico and Canada did here. A corporation could, in theory, sue a country under the TPP, forcing that country to change it’s law.

This seems to be giving an enormous amount of power to not a government which (theoretically at least) is supposed to guard and protect the interests of it’s citizens as a whole, to an entity that cares for nothing but profit, even at the expense of the welfare of the people.

Bulletproof backpacks for kids? Here are 10 sick products you can buy in America — thanks to the NRA

Source: Bulletproof backpacks for kids? Here are 10 sick products you can buy in America — thanks to the NRA

For the paranoid on your Christmas giving list, Just in time for Christmas…

Just in case you’re thinking of rushing out and getting one of these, I should point out that they are all utterly worthless, so save your money. The ballistic armor police and military people wear is, despite the hype you see in these ads, not related to these products in any way. Just look at that photo of the kids cowering under those blankets… Come on, do you think those are going to provide those kids with any protection at all? Even if they did offer some protection, they don’t even cover the kid. They’re totally worthless. As are the ‘bullet proof’ backpacks, ‘bullet proof’ baseball caps and the ever popular bullet proof bible, because of course in a shooting situation that bad guy is only going to aim for that five square inch bible…

So, Grouchy – you had the day off you must have read something exciting, right?

Screen Shot 2015 12 03 at 6 04 39 PM

Oh, you bet! Found this fascinating article on the development of the bailer twine knotter. It started back before the civil war, it seems with this guy named Appleby and after the war he moved to Beloit where he developed a knotter that would work with sisal twine instead of wire..

What? Oh damn, I really need to get a life, don’t I?