Knuckledragger

RIP Bob Uecker who passed at the tender age of 90. He delivered one of my favorite voice lines in all of cinema:

"We have iMac at home." A temporary system I cobbled together for my (sainted, octogenarian) mother from spare parts: a 2012 Mac Mini, 1920x1200 Lenovo monitor of about the same age), a Macally compact keyboard and a Microsoft Trackball Explorer that's now 25 years old and a bit of a collector's item. It all works just fine. This photo is actually a little out of date. I've since replaced the trackball with a conventional mouse (mum did not like the trackball at all), added USB speakers, a webcam and a printer. The Lenovo is actually a really good panel. 16x10 monitors were never really consumer products. It's only 60Hz, but it's LED backlit and its color accuracy out of the box blows away every non-Apple display I've ever owned. There's a reason I've hung on to it for over a decade now. The Mini is an interesting story in that I bought it refurb'd from OWC and it was supposed to be a 2014 model. They sent me a 2012 and by the time I figured it out, the return window had long closed. This is only one of many examples of the precipitous drop in quality OWC has exhibited over the last decade. Things are so bad that I'm scuttling my plans to buy one of their 8 bay enclosures because I just don't trust them. I'm now looking at an equivalent (and cheaper) model made by by QNAP. Also, observation: The base model M4 Mini is such a good deal, it utterly kneecaps the refurb'd market and does a lot of damage to the used one. I spent several hours a few nights ago looking at the Minis for sale on various sites (including Apple's own) and nothing comes close to the price/performance of the base M4.

RIP David Lynch, just shy of his 79th birthday(!) I was never a huge fan of his work, but it was clear from the get-go that he was a true auteur with a very uncompromised vision. EDIT: Ninja'd by dsavitsk

I swear I don't just log in here to report medical mishaps. Yesterday was a banner day by anyone's standards. MV is an expensive place to live. There's few doctors on the island because full time general practitioners cannot afford to live here. Mum doesn't have a doctor and neither do I. She had a followup phone call yesterday from a nurse practitioner. When mum went to the ER on Christmas day because of covid, they detected what they thought was a heart murmur. Mum didn't see fit to mention that to me until yesterday, but that's another matter. The fallout of all of this was that I had to drive her to the hospital yesterday afternoon. After many hours there, they determined that she has Lyme disease from a tick bite this past summer. That is a recurring theme here on MV. I am cursed to spend my whole life in places that are hotbeds for tick borne diseases. Still, much better news than actual cardio problems. With that in mind, I've mentioned the Dreyer family here on MV before. They're a nice couple in their 80s. Peter is a photographer, who shot 4x5" for decades. Adele is a piano teacher with a Steinway. They're both in as good health as any member of the silent generation. They have a daughter named Gwen. She's my age and in far better shape than I am. Yesterday she was giving blood and fainted. The staff could not revive her and she ended up in the ER. A blood test revealed high levels of troponin. TIL (or more to the point, YIL) troponin is a protein found in heart muscles and a high percentage of it is in the blood stream, that most likely means a heart attack. I repeat, Gwen is a healthy woman in her early 50s. The MV hospital doesn't have the necessary equipment to perform the required heart tests, so they doctors ordered Gwen be sent to MGH in Boston. There were no beds there, so she had to be sent to Mass General Brigham. She was to travel there by helicopter, which arrived sometime after 1AM. At 3AM, the helicopter had to make an emergency landing because of instrument failure(!) It wasn't until 6AM that there was another one available (as of yet I have no idea where the copter touched down) so Gwen spent a number of hours in the early morning (and COLD) waiting. I still have not heard what the tests performed at MGB revealed. I did learn that one of her cats has been keeping vigil on Gwen's bed during her absence. It's been quite a 24 hours.

Covid is no joke. My mother is in her 80s and frail. I'm 50 and ...sturdy. She went to the ER and got prescribed Paxlovid. It appears to help, but some of the side effects are a bit rough. I'm fully vaxed and in fact recently boosted. I'm no longer feverish, but far from well. I suspect this is a new strain that has yet to be named (remember the ominous sounding Omicron Variant?) Also the heating system is still not fixed, but after my mother went to the ER I opened the mechanical closet and yelled at it. Then I turned it off and on again and it's been making heat since. In the 40K universe I'd be a tech priest.

JC was our best ex-president. I worked for him 1994, building houses in Mississippi.

My mother just went off in an ambulance and and our heating system stopped working. This is the best of all possible worlds.

Tested positive for the 'rona. After 5 years, it finally got me. I still wear a mask just about everywhere in public and have been verbally accosted by a couple irate boomers for doing so. The main problem is that I have to pull it down to wear glasses (which fog like mad with a mask on) and I can't see shit up close without them. I've been isolating in my room like a hikikomori because I don't want to get my (sainted, octogenarian) mother sick. So far the symptoms haven't been terrible, like a strong sinus infection. I had have some genuine fever dreams earlier. I think the mower shed is haunted.

RIP Gordon Mah Ung, PCWorld editor and hardware journalist. He made occasional appearances on the GamersNexus YouTube channel. His spicy takes and ability to lambast industry incompetence and malfeasance was the stuff of legend. Pancreatic cancer is one of the absolute worst.

TL; DW: Obvious scam is obvious.

Speaking of expensive vinyl... There's a certain Gallic beatsmith named Pascal Arbez. Since the year 2000 he's recorded under the name Vitalic. Prior to that he did some original material and remixes as Dima. For an all too short period of time, he was the best producer on the planet. His Poney EP is the stuff of legend, but it's actually not my favorite work of his. He did two remixes, The Hacker - Fadin' Away and Bolz Bolz - Take A Walk that were the most fresh, amazing sounding things when they came out at the dawn the new millennium while still being hugely "retro" and electro. 25 years later, they sound at least as good. There are not many tracks I'd call "anthems" but both of these absolutely are. I own both on vinyl and you'll have to pry them from my cold dead hands. Unfortunately, Vitalic did not keep up the quality of his early works. His 2005 album "Ok Cowboy" was a decidedly mixed effort, but it does have his single greatest original work: Even people who don't remotely GAF about electronic music seem to like it. In late 2004, a well meaning soul put together a collection of Vitalic rarities and remixes ...in 192k mp3. I had it on my clickwheel iPod for years. On it are a cancelled remix of Basement Jaxx feat. Siouxsie Sioux(!), a Bjork remix, a Slam feat. Dot Allison (of One Dove fame) remix, a remix of Miss Kitten that's utterly monotonous until the euphoric melodic breakdown (a Vitalic trademark), a remix of Royksopp featuring Karin from The Knife (don't get me started) as well as some genuinely rare originals (PC 100 remains a white whale, 20 years later.) As the years wore on, I tracked down nearly every song on the bootleg collection confirmed lossless. Well, in 2020, ol' Pascal must have finally noticed this bootleg mp3s and saw fit to issue most of them as well as a bunch of others on five mighty slabs of vinyl. I missed it at the time. 2020 was a chaotic year, I vaguely recall. I just checked used sales and saw "4 copies from $781.25" yeouch.

Oh shit. Oh shit oh shit oh shit. 135L Oh shit. I mean the 2470LII is a far more useful everyday lens but the 135L is a special kind of magic.

M4 Mini finally arrived today. It only took AMZN a month to ship it. I've had a longstanding tradition of naming my Mac Minis (now 4 in number) after film directors. Previous machines were Kubrick, Fellini and Ulmer. The M4 is Kurosawa. I'd say I forgot how much of a PITA it is to set up a new machine, but that'd be a lie. I remember, and it always is one. Google is reasonably painless. Still haven't gotten my password manage up and running yet. Steam initially locked up and refused to play nice, but after a force quit and restart it acted fine. I have no real interest on gaming on this machine but I figured I'd give it a bash. Tomb Raider 2013 works just fine and looks quite good. It's not really my kind of game (I got it free with the GPU I bought in late '13 and played it for 38 minutes) but trying out again it seems ...fine. The M4 plays it at 1080p constantly above 120FPS. The real headaches will be slsk, Transmission (torrent client), inheriting my Backblaze backup state and ...actually setting up Kurosawa s a server to replace Fellini. I have to get my two Windows boxes to play nice with it as well. This process should take well into next year.

In the summer of 2007 I heard that there was a car show in the parking lot of a Walmart (ya rly) two towns over. Being as ADD as I am, I arrived entirely too late and got there just in time to see a bunch of cars leaving. I did hastily snap a bunch of photos with my 30D (not a particularly good camera) and its "better" kit lens, the 17-85mm (which sucked at the wide end.) I had the camera set for jpg+RAW and at the time I processed them as pseudo-HDR in Photomatix. I also invariably cropped the shots entirely too close (a bad habit that would take years to break.) I've revisited these shots a number of times in the last 17 years, most recently a few months ago. I now use Luminar 4, which makes use of its own pseduo-HDR math. Unlike Photomatix and every goddamn smart phone camera app ever, Luminar's faux HDR processing can be adjusted to remove most of the cartoonish qualities. Luminar also makes use of lookup tables, which are a lot of fun when used correctly. None of these shots are spectacular. I didn't know a thing about framing in 2007 (I still don't but I didn't then, either.) In almost every case I wish I'd back up a couple feet and gotten more of the background and people milling about. At this point the photos are a fascinating time capsule. 17 years is a long time. 2007 was after 9/11, but before the 2008 financial crash (two watershed moments that have steered us directly to where we are.) The 1990s were still a relatively recent memory. Most of the attendees are aging boomers and exactly none of them know what "social media" means. A global pandemic was the stuff of bad thriller films. The cars are timeless of course and made all the mores so by how, ahem, absolutely fucking hideous current vehicles look. The 30D's sensor (a permanent "unsharp mask" and the processing in Luminar gives everything a slightly dreamy quality. I quite like this photo set as both a moment in time captured but also a tone piece.

Everyone's favorite high-pitched, hyperactive, hypoglycemic, hyperborean tech dropper seems to quite like base M4 Mini: