Random Stuff: Rockets, Pi5, Fake Milk, AirPods and More Wierd Weather

Artemis Delayed Again:

R.I.P. SLS?

Once again NASA has delayed the next launch of Artemis, the space agency’s program that is supposed to take astronauts back to the moon using what is one of the most complicated and, frankly, bizarre schemes that even NASA has ever come up with. Artemis, and the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket are billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.

The Orion space craft that is supposed to carry astronauts is riddled with problems that include gas leaks and heat shield failures. (Nice job there, Boeing) It’s attempt to use it to send astronauts to the ISS ended in failure and when seirious leaks and other problems were discovered after it docked at the ISS and the astronauts were stranded had to wait for a flight from SpaceX to get back home. And the rest of the moon program is even worse. NASA still doesn’t have a lunar spacesuit, doesn’t have a lunar lander, doesn’t have the “mini” space station that will orbit the moon that it says it needs, doesn’t have… Well, it doesn’t have anything it needs to make this work, really. According to NASA’s original time table, the agency should already have astronauts on the moon or be nearly ready to land them there. In reality, we’re looking at mid-2026 before the Artemis is even ready to fly again thanks to numerous problems that have including gas leaks and issues with the heat shield, and it’s going to be years beyond that before anyone actually gets to the moon

And as for the SLS itself, it is so much over budget and will cost so much to launch, that no one knows how the program can even continue. I’ve seen estimates of as much as $2.5 billion per launch. Rumor has it that there’s about a 50/50 chance the whole program will be scrapped. Considering the progress SpaceX has made with its Starship program, it’s going to have similar heavy launch capabilities for a fraction of the cost, so why is NASA even dumping all that money into that black hole in the first place?

Apple AirPods Pro

I love music of all kinds and probably have spent way too much on speakers, turntables, albums, etc. in my life. I’ve had Apple’s basic AirPod headphones, one of the first versions, for a long time but didn’t use them all that often because I found them awkward to use, they fell out of my ears frequently, and while the sound quality was surprisingly good, it wasn’t anywhere near as good as what came out of my stereo system speakers. But along came Black Friday and there was a huge discount on the AirPod Pro. So I got a set for a Christmas present for one of my sons and at that price I couldn’t resist getting some for myself as well.

I’m no expert on headphones. As I said my only experience with these things were the original AirPods. So when I plugged these things into my ears it was quite a shock.

First I thought I’d gone deaf because suddenly I couldn’t hear anything. Not the kitchen exhaust fan, not the furnace fan, not the air filter, not the cat’s water fountain, nothing. There was almost utter, total silence. I hadn’t bothered to read the blurbs for the things because if I had I’d have realized that the Pro model comes with noise canceling technology. And it works so well it’s almost scary. Noise canceling can be turned off, or it can be set to let in some ambient sound and things like that. But at first I couldn’t believe how quiet it suddenly got.

Then I fired up Amazon Prime Music and started going through my playlists. Holy sh*t… I’d never heard anything quite like it before. How the hell do they get something that small to sound that good?

Then there the other goodies, like being able to take phone calls with the things (paired with my phone), interact with Apple’s Siri, and other goodies I haven’t had a chance to explore yet. There are built in microphones for phone calls. There are accelerometers that can sense when I nod yes or shake my head no to respond to Siri, pressure sensitive switch in one of the stems to switch modes or to pause music or switch to the next track.

Like I said, I’m no expert on headphones. Far from it. But damn, these things are good. I might write about them later after I’ve had a chance to use them more.

Pi5 SSD

If you’ve been reading grouchyfarmer for a while you probably know I love the Raspberry Pi computers. Basically the Pi 4 and 5 models are full blown computers costing less than $100, running a version of Linux. Just plug in a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and you have yourself a pretty darn nice little Linux computer that can do just about anything you need to do with a computer, except for things like hard core gaming, video editing, etc. that requires a huge amount of processing power and/or memory. Plus it’s easy to connect to the outside world to work as a controller for robotics and other goodies.

One of the biggest pains in the butt when it comes to the Pi computers has been its reliance on micro SD cards for booting/data storage. Micro SD cards are a serious bottleneck. They have a limited lifespan and for modern computing needs they’re woefully slow. But the new Pi5 can handle modern SSD drives with the addition of a simple plug in board, making it much, much more reliable and much faster. You can roll your own, or you can get one complete with a 250 gig SSD and the add on card, with Rasberian (the Pi’s version of Linux) already installed and ready to go from Canakit for about $200. And I got my hot little hands on one.

I only just started playing with it, so this is something I’ll probably bring up in the future once I have a chance to put it through its paces. But my early impression is that wow, this thing is neat. I wouldn’t have though it would be that much fast than the Pi5s I have that run off the SD card, but yeah, it is. Much, much faster. Using a real SSD instead of that micro SD card makes a huge difference.

Fake Milk

I’m not a big fan of things like almond “milk” and all that stuff. Most of it is, frankly, crap. Horrible taste, non-milk like textures, and the only reason they can claim it’s “healthy” is because the manufacturers shovel in vitamins and minerals from external sources because the tiny, tiny amount of actual real nuts in that “milk” have very little nutritional value.

But over the years I’ve become increasingly sensitive to dairy for some reason. I can’t eat ice cream any more, for example, without experiencing a great deal of gastrointestinal distress. Nor can I eat cold cereal with milk. A bit of cream in my coffee doesn’t bother me. Much. Cheese isn’t a problem. But drinking milk? No way in hell. My eldest son is even worse than I am.

I don’t normally make product recommendations like this, but I have to bring this one up.

So I’ve kind of been keeping an eye out for some kind of fake milk that is reasonably close to the same texture as real dairy milk, and I think I’ve found one. That’s it over there on the left. I picked it up as an impulse buy when I was at Walmart the other day.

The texture, mouthfeel and all of that is pretty similar to a rather rich whole milk. And while it doesn’t taste anything at all like dairy milk, the flavor is pleasant. And even more impressive, it’s a reasonably good substitute for the half and half I normally put in my coffee. And it’s good enough that I might even be able to start eating cold cereal once more. I told my son about it and he picked some up and he loves the stuff.

If you absolutely need to have some kind of milk-like substance for your cereal or coffee or cerealor whatever and can’t handle dairy milk, you might want to give this a try.

Weird Weather

grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters

It’s no secret that the weather has been weird for some time now. After the warmest winter we ever had last year, one of the warmest summers we’ve had, and one of the warmest autumns we ever had, temperatures abruptly dropped to well below zero for a few days with some light snow, then abruptly jumped up to 40° with rain… Then we had dense fog for a couple of days.

The brief period of cold resulted in a lot of lakes in the area developing a very thin layer of ice, and people being people, the DNR and the sheriff’s department has had to issue warnings to people to stay the hell off the ice. I’ve heard news stories almost every day of idiots venturing out onto ice that’s still way, way too thin, falling through and having to be rescued.

Random Thoughts: Jaguar. (The car, not the cat)

Some motor vehicles become iconic. Almost everyone, at least in the US, will instantly come up with an image of the Ford Mustang in one of its many forms. A classic shape that Ford has more or less stuck to since it was first introduced in the 1960s.

Another automotive icon is the Jaguar E-type.

That up there is the image most people think of when someone brings up the car brand.

Jag has always produced cars that are stylish, sporty, elegant and, of course, bloody expensive. And often not very well made, I’m afraid. My experience with Jag is that it is a company that has always valued style over substance. That beautiful E-type up there? I never owned one but I have driven two different examples of that car back in the 1970s when they were still relatively new, and I can tell you from first hand experience, that while looking at one is fantastic, driving one is something else again. Both of the ones I drove were utterly awful in every single way. Over the last 20 years or so that’s changed, the cars certainly handle and perform better. But, alas, they have earned a reputation for unreliability that has hurt sales badly.

Jaguar’s biggest problem though has always been that it can’t seem to be able to actually sell cars. At least not enough to remain profitable. The company has changed hands more than once over the last few decades, and since 2007 has been owned by an Indian conglomerate called Tata. And it is doing worse than ever, I’m afraid.

Jag’s solution to the problem is to stop building cars entirely. Seriously. It is completely shutting down all production of all current models and in the future it is going to completely retool and produce only newly designed EVs. So what is it going to do to tide itself over while waiting to bring out the new models?

This is what Jaguar dropped on an unsuspecting world a few days ago:

I’ve watched that ad about six times now and I still don’t know what the hell it’s supposed to be. No one else seems to know WTF it is either.

The ad sparked a firestorm of controversy on social media, as I’m sure you can imagine. The comments on FB, X, Youtube, etc. have been scathing, and often they have descended into downright abusive language and even hate speech directed at “woke” ideology and LGBTQ persons. It’s all really rather sad.

Basically all Jag has going for it right now is its brand, Jaguar, a maker of over priced, over powered, stylish and not very good cars that seemed to be aimed squarely at the kind of fellow in upper management who takes his Jag to a secluded resort in the Catskills to cheat on his wife with his trophy girlfriend, and the golf clubs in the back so he can go golfing with his boss on Sunday while trying to explain why he doesn’t have all the receipts for his expense account claims.

What this ad tells me is that Jag is desperately trying to change that image. And I mean seriously desperate. It also tells me that they don’t have a fucking clue as to what the hell they’re actually doing. They have no sense if direction, no market that they’re aiming at, no technology they are trying to push, and worst of all, no cars. They got nothing. So all they can do is put out whatever the hell this is to try to keep the brand name alive until they have something, anything, they can try to sell.

But this? This is supposed to give consumers confidence in the brand? This is supposed to somehow make people curious enough that they’ll wait until Jag can retool and start producing cars again? No. Sorry.

Stop it. Just stop it. It’s time for Jaguar to just hang it up and retire gracefully instead of trying to hang on far, far too long like an aging quarterback who refuses to admit he no longer has the ability to compete.

Radom Thoughts: Movies

So I’ve been watching movies of late. Netflix has dropped a whole bunch of (shudder) Hallmark style holiday romcoms and I (god I don’t believe I’m admitting this. I’m never going to live this down, am I?) have watched pretty much all of them. I could probably come up with a lengthy essay about that all on its own, but that’s not where I’m going with this.

I want to talk about the multiverse. You know, that theory that claims that there are many, many universes out there. All of them just like this universe, only a bit different here and there. Somewhere out there is another universe where you’re filthy rich and Musk is your personal toenail trimmer. Or where you are a small, intelligent duck named Roger who lives in his mother’s basement. Or where you’re a ferret herder in Canada. You get the idea.

Specifically I want to talk about the movie industry and the multiverse.

So let’s get back on track, shall we? One of the reasons why I was watching those romcoms was because I needed to do something to recover from watching the Deadpool/Wolverine movie that I’d watched earlier. After watching two hours of bad jokes, dozens of disembowelings, beheadings, and an eventual body count that that surpassed that of a small war, I needed to do something to get all that gore out of my head.

For those of you who have been living in a cave for the last year or so, the biggest event in the movie industry (arguably) was Marvel/Disney dropping the new Deadpool movie on an unsuspecting public. And if you aren’t a fan of the franchise, you probably don’t know why this was such a big deal.

After the wildly successful Avengers movies, Marvel put out a few flicks that were, to be blunt, stinkers. The Eternals did badly. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was disappointing. Instead of following up the mildly successful Captain Marvel movie with a decent sequel, we got something called “The Marvels”. I’m still not quite sure what Marvel was trying to do with that movie. And as for poor Thor… The last time we saw Thor he’d been partnered up with a 9 year old girl. Seriously. They’re apparently trying to turn Thor into a kids show? The last Dr. Strange movie was – was just odd.

So basically Marvel needed to do something. They needed to do something big. And even more importantly, they needed to do something to make gobs and gobs of money because they got bought by Disney and Disney needs the money. Keeping Walt on ice in the secret vault under the Magic Kingdom ain’t cheap, after all. The only two superheroes whose careers Marvel hadn’t ruined yet and which were pretty much guaranteed box office gold were Deadpool and Wolverine. So, someone said, let’s team the two of them up! Our two most popular characters, the only ones who’s reputations and careers we haven’t driven into the muck yet, together in one massive blockbuster movie? Heck, they could have put DeadPool and Wolverine in tutus dancing in Swan Lake for two hours and a lot of fanboys would pay money to see it.

There was only one problem. Wolverine/Logan was very, very dead. A fact that was abundantly made clear when in the opening minutes of the movie we see Deadpool using Logan’s rotting corpse to dispatch several dozen bad guys in a variety of very entertaining ways.

No problem, though. This is Marvel, after all. Need to replace a hero who was killed off in the previous movie to make people all weepy and sad? Just trot off to an alternative universe and find a new one.

Yes, more “multiverse” crap. Sigh… Kill off your hero? No problem, just pop into a different universe and find the alternative version of said hero. There are apparently an infinite number of them. Just whip out your Walmart alternative universe twiddler and pop off and bobs your uncle. Take your pick…

Sigh… Look, okay, it was kind of neat the first time they pulled this stunt but it got old fast. Both Marvel and DC have been pulling this crap for years now and we’re getting tired of it. It’s hard to get movie goers to invest emotionally in the tragic death of a character when we know damn well that chances are good that in the next film they’re going to whip out another one brought in from an alternative universe.

So stop it. Just stop it. Okay?

Is Abnormal The New Normal?

So, it’s October 29. Deep into fall. Frost on the pumpkin and all that.

About that frost thing…

It’s sunny, blustery, and about 78° and on its way to 82° the weather guy said and I’m tempted to turn the air conditioning back on. Wisconsin is known for it’s odd weather but this?

I have cilantro and tiny onions sprouting from seed out in the raised beds.

I have dill sprouting

And my parsley looks like this:

Oh, and the rose bush out front was starting to go dormant but has now decided it’s going to start flowering again.

This is just ain’t right.

Random Thoughts: Stuff We Know That’s A Lie

The List of Health Fallacies Continues to Grow

Being mumble mumble years old, I’ve lived through dozens, perhaps even hundreds of claims about what is or is not good for your health, only to see many of those claims turn out to be blatantly, even ridiculously wrong. The latest is the standing desk. That’s what got this train of thought started.

A few years ago someone had one of those “Aha!” moments. People who have a sedentary lifestyle generally have shorter life spans and poorer health than those who are physically active, they thought. So that must mean that sitting at a desk in an office all the time must be bad for your health, they thought. So we need to throw all of our traditional desks and chairs out and get desks that make us stand up all the time. You’ll burn more calories, get more exercise and generally it will improve your health. And almost immediately many people jumped on the bandwagon, especially the desk manufacturers who saw the opportunity to scam sell standing desks to company managers who dearly love to torment and torture their employees and otherwise make their lives a living hell.

(Sidenote: Even worse is the abomination known as the walking desk. This is a desk where you not only have to stand up, but it also has a treadmill built into it so you have to walk while you’re trying to work. There is a special circle in Hell just for people who come up with this kind of crap. At least I hope there is. Right alongside of the same bunch who came up with the “poverty simulator” the school district I worked at forced all employees to attend where underpaid school employees who were, in fact, already poor, were forced to pretend they were even more poor for an entire afternoon.)

But those of us who have ever worked in the grocery store or retail store environment would have immediately laughed you out of the room if anyone had bothered to ask us. One of the leading causes of workman’s compensation claims by employees at grocery stores and other retail businesses is physical injury caused by… Guess what? Yeah, standing for prolonged periods of time. Lower back injuries, knee injuries, ankle and foot injuries, deep vein thrombosis, other circulation problems… The list goes on and on. New studies indicate that working at a standing desk does nothing to improve cardiovascular health and can even cause significant health problems.

So standing/walking desks join a long list of other nonsense that have made their way into the “it’s good for you” world of nonsense. Here are a few others.

Coffee has long been claimed to cause all sorts of health problems ranging form sleeplessness to cancer. While it will indeed keep you from sleeping, the rest is complete nonsense. We now know that moderate coffee consumption has many significant health benefits. It seems to help to prevent some types of cancers. It seems to prevent or at least delay or make less serious some kinds of dementia.

Stretching before exercising? Doesn’t seem to do any good at all. It might feel good, might seem to make sense in a way, but in actual clinical studies it did not reduce the number of injuries when done before strenuous exercise. In fact, in some cases stretching before doing proper warmups sometimes actually caused injuries.

Milk? All that stuff about how good it is for you? Yeah, well… Sorry, no. Milk does provide a lot of nutrition, but all of that nutrition can be obtained from other sources easily. You don’t need milk. You certainly don’t need it for bone health. In fact, studies have shown that people who consume large amounts of milk actually have more fractures and bone health issues than those who drink little or no milk.

How about cholesterol? Eating foods high in cholesterol has little or no effect on your blood cholesterol levels so avoiding those foods does little or nothing to reduce your blood cholesterol levels. The reason why is that your body needs cholesterol. Needs it so much that it makes its own. There are some exceptions for some people with a particular genetic heritage, but generally speaking dietary cholesterol has little or no effect on blood cholesterol. A diet high in saturated fats can increase your blood cholesterol, but except for a minority of people who have that specific genetic situation, eating foods high in cholesterol has little or no effect on blood cholesterol.

We all know that a glass of wine occasionally is a good thing, right? Wrong. So many people bought into that nonsense that even my doctor was advising me to have one or two drinks a week even though I can’t stand the stuff. He, and they, were wrong. A more careful examination of the data used to indicate that there was some kind of health advantage to drinking certain types of alcohol like red wine has proven that those benefits were illusory. All that guff about the antioxidants in wine being good for you? Yeah, the problem with that is that for you to get enough of those antioxidants to do any good you’d have to drink gallons of the stuff every day. What it boils down to is that there is no health benefit from even moderate consumption of any type of alcoholic beverage, and alcohol consumption at any level causes an increased risk of cancer.

But enough. I’m getting bored and I’m sure you are too.

Coming Up!

Yes, I’m still alive. Yes, I’m still fiddling around with stuff, but I’ve been so busy with gardening and other summer stuff I haven’t had time to do much writing. Plus my laziness index seems to have gone up significantly lately, so there’s that.

I’ve got several projects in the works. I’m building an 8 legged robot because why not.

I’ve also decided I hate my bedroom clock so I’ve decided to build my own clock radio using a clock module I got from Ukraine that uses some kind of Cold War era electro luminescent numeric display salvaged from some kind of old Russian hardware and an AM/FM radio kit that comes as a bare circuit board that I have to put together myself because, well, also why not?

I still need to get my off center fed dipole up before the snow flies. I like the mag loop antenna a lot but I need the OCFD not just for amateur radio but also for short wave broadcast band listening. And to get that up I have to dig a hole to put in a 16 foot post, pour cement and… I did mention I’m lazy, right?

Wait A Minute… It’s Fall Already? How The Hell Did That Happen?

I know, I know… It’s been a long, long time since I wrote anything here. Here it is mid September already? Where the heck did the summer go?

It was an incredibly busy summer here. Busy in a good way, though. The gardens were spectacular this year, but everything except the tomatoes and squash are finished up for the season and we’ve been working on cleaning out the beds.

We processed the last of the beets and carrots this past week. We have enough carrots, beets, peppers and beans in the freezer to last us for at least a whole year, I think.

The tomatoes just don’t want to stop, though. The darned things are still producing like crazy and we’ve already put up something like 30 or 40 pints of spaghetti sauce, pizza sauce, marinara sauce, bloody mary mix, etc. More than enough to last us an entire year. But the darned things are still going.

We just picked these yesterday and by the end of the week we’ll probably have two times this many ready to pick.

We can’t use them any more so whatever we’re getting from now on is going to the local food pantry and St. Vincent de Paul. They said they’ll take whatever extra we have.

That’s the celery in there. That bed is 4 ft wide and 8 ft long and it’s almost solid celery plants except for the onions around the outside

We put in a whole bed full of celery more or less as an experiment and even that was wildly successful. And the flavor was amazing. We used a lot of it ourselves in sauces, froze some, and gave the rest away.

One thing I am really going to miss is smelling the sauces simmering away all day. There were days when walking into the house was like walking into an Italian restaurant with the whole place filled with the aroma of basil, thyme, garlic, onions and tomatoes simmering away.

Now that the canning season is finally over things aren’t quite as hectic here.

MrsGF and I both got in to get our flu shots and the new Covid vaccine. Covid is rearing its ugly head once again. Hospitalizations are skyrocketing. Local hospitals and clinics are requiring people to wear masks when coming in their buildings again, etc. It’s getting nasty out there.

It’s Time!!!

It’s time to turn this:

Into this.

Finally the tomatoes are coming ripe! We started early this morning, picking tomatoes and basil and prepping garlic, celery, peppers and onions, all from our own gardens, to simmer all day to make pasta sauce. Dear lord it smells good! It’s not even close to being done yet but I keep sneaking tastes.

This year everything in that pot up there came from our gardens. The only thing we’ll have to add is oregano, salt and pepper. Everything else we grew ourselves. All the work we put in is finally paying off, and it’s worth every hour we spent out there tending the gardens. Not only does it taste enormously better than what you can buy, there is the enormous satisfaction of knowing we grew everything that’s going to be in those jars once we’re done canning the sauce.

We generally make enough pasta sauce, chili sauce and canned tomatoes to last us the entire year but we ran short in early summer and had to resort to buying pasta sauce and it was horrible. It was both too sweet and too sour, at the same time, too salty, and utterly lacking in in flavor. I’m afraid most of it ended up going down the drain. We’re spoiled, I guess.

It looks like we are going to have more than enough tomatoes this year to let us stock up.

A few years ago we started using a 6 quart Nesco roaster to cook everything up. It makes a nice sized batch, is easy to work with, easy to control the heat, easy to clean up afterwards and keeps the stove top free so we can still cook and then later prep for canning.

Hmm, I think it’s time for another taste just to make sure the spices are right…

Flowers

The other day I was taking photos out in the gardens and the light was just about perfect so here are three of my favorite photos. You should be able to see the images in full size if you click on the photo.

I love zinnias almost as much as I love irises. There are at least a dozen different varieties in the mix MrsGF put in back around the old stump.

Something, we aren’t sure what, has been eating the buds off our lilies but this one somehow managed to survive.

And then there’s this one, which is my personal favorite.

Just look at the color on that little poppy. It’s so brilliant that it almost glows.

That’s it for now.