Nature’s Uncanny Beauty

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Alertado pelo meu amigo Martin, tirei estas fotos de um “pilar” solar ontem à noite. Embora aparentemente bem documentado, esta é a primeira vez que vejo este belo fenómeno.
Duas características distintas são a coluna vertebral em si e a cor vermelha. A coluna vertebral é provocada pelo reflexo de cristais de gelo em queda, e a tonalidade vermelha pela “dispersão de Rayleigh”, que se refere à luz que atravessa partículas muito mais pequenas que o comprimento de onda da luz, filtrando assim o azul e o violeta, deixando o vermelho.

Portanto, não é Deus a deixar a Terra enojado com o que Ele próprio criou, embora fosse útil se levasse Putin e Trump consigo ao partir. Boa viagem, para o mau lixo.

[English]
Alerted by my friend Martin, I took these photos of a sun ‘pillar’ yesterday evening.Although apparently well-documented, this is the very first time I have ever seen this beautiful phenomena.
Two distinct features are the column itself, and the red colour. The column is caused by the reflection of falling ice crystals, and the red hue by ‘Rayleigh scattering’, referring to the light passing through particles much smaller than the wavelength of light, thus filtering out the blue and violet leaving red.

So it’s not God leaving the Earth in disgust at what He himself has created, though it would be useful if he took Putin and Trump with him as he left. Good riddance, to bad rubbish.

AI, a latter day ‘Kings New Coat’ or God, Lord, Saviour et al.

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The current furore over chatGPT’s ‘sycophantic’ answers, is in itself, ridiculous. A game of ‘follow my leader’ by many companies, and apparently a large percentage of the population, that expects sensible and suitable results from them doing ‘naff all’, is not unlike praying to a God, for what they want, instead of simply doing it themselves.

True machine learning is a very useful tool. Using shit scraped from existing websites and hosted in an LLM, ends up as an aggregation, in other words, a bag of shit. My view is simple, users of these ‘bots’ get exactly what they deserve, nothing useful whatsoever.

So-called social-media, facebook, ‘X’ plus a long list of other garbage sites that deliberately post news of this, so folks can ‘have their say’, is a simple scam, to promote discord and argument to sell advertising space, so that the weak-minded that follow, are lead like lemmings, into parting with their hard-earned dosh.
Latterly, Google puts a so-called ‘summary’ from AI, at the top of a search page, adding to the crap I have to ignore in front of me.

I advertise nothing. I believe in no ‘god’, and no hype. Frankly, I care not if folks dislike what I post, the truth apparently, can ‘hurt’. The bywords on my ‘compliments slip’ for many years, has been ‘Belief In Divine Intervention Proved Worthless, So I Did This Stuff Myself.”

Turn Our World Into A Garbage Heap – Transformar o nosso mundo num monte de lixo

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The following link indicates the trajectory that is sadly followed by big business and useless politicians.
El siguiente enlace indica la trayectoria que tristemente siguen las grandes empresas y los políticos inútiles.
Right To Repair Europe
Direito de Reparar a Europa

The endless flow of ‘Designed To Fail’ shit from China is my concern. An example being the multi-outlet mains block. Complete with input mains lead, and fitted with a switch.
Generally the casings are made of cheap plastic, and in two parts top and bottom RIVETED TOGETHER.
Attempts to remove the rivets usually destroys the case. There is simply no excuse for this, self-tapping screws could be used. Of course, that would mean folks repairing faults would be possible, thus negating discard of the product and purchase of a new one.
The Certificate of conformity should confirm that the item is repairable using readily available tools.
Claptrap about protective measures ensuring customer safety are nonsense. Anyone messing about with mains power should understand the hazards involved.

Singling out each individual product for legislative action is simply ‘jobs for the boys’. Right to repair should include every item in use by the public.
Chancers that think they know everything, can carry on tinkering at their own risk. Idiots that employ such individuals deserve everything they get.
Sample offer of help. “I can do that, have you got a screwdriver, and a pair of side-cutters?”

O fluxo interminável de merda do tipo “Desenhado para Fracassar” da China é a minha preocupação. Um exemplo é o bloco de alimentação com múltiplas tomadas. Completo com cabo de alimentação de entrada e equipado com um interruptor.
Geralmente, as carcaças são feitas de plástico barato e divididas em duas partes, superior e inferior, REBITADAS JUNTAS.
As tentativas de remover os rebites geralmente destroem a caixa. Simplesmente não há desculpa para isso, podem ser utilizados parafusos auto-atarraxantes. Claro que isto significaria que seria possível reparar as falhas, evitando assim o descarte do produto e a compra de um novo.
O Certificado de conformidade deve confirmar que o artigo pode ser reparado utilizando ferramentas facilmente disponíveis.
As conversas sobre medidas de proteção para garantir a segurança do cliente são um disparate. Qualquer pessoa que mexa com energia elétrica deve compreender os riscos envolvidos.

Selecionar cada produto individual para ação legislativa é simplesmente “trabalho para os rapazes”. O direito de reparação deve incluir todos os artigos em uso pelo público.
Os aventureiros que pensam que sabem tudo podem continuar a tentar por sua conta e risco. Os idiotas que empregam tais indivíduos merecem tudo o que recebem.
Exemplo de oferta de ajuda. “Eu consigo fazer isso. Tem uma chave de fendas e um alicate de corte lateral?”

Exchanging views with a snail – Trocando opiniões com um caracol.

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Bom dia, Sr./Sra. Caracol. Como se sente hoje?

Bom dia, Zé. Bem, eu sinto-me um homem esta manhã, por isso estou à procura de uma parceira atraente, e tu?

Bem, nada muda muito comigo, ainda estou à procura de um parceiro atraente. Começo a sentir-me um pouco solitário.

Sinto muito por isso, Zé. Eu faria isso se pudesse, mas não posso. Desculpe por isso. Infelizmente, o tamanho faz diferença. Quando chegar ao topo desta janela, ficarei de olho em si e informá-lo-ei.

Obrigado por isso. Cuidado com os pássaros, está bem?

Não te preocupes, Zé, eu trato disso e tchau por enquanto.

[English]

Good Morning Mr/Mrs Snail. How do you feel today?

Good Morning Joe. Well I feel like a man this morning, so I’m looking around for an attractive partner, and you?

Well nothing changes much with me, I’m still looking for an attractive partner also. I’m beginning to feel a little lonely.

I’m sorry to hear that Joe. I would, if I could, but I can’t. Sorry about that. Size does make a difference sadly.. Once I get to the top of this window, I’ll keep an eye out for you and let you know.

Thanks for that, watch out for those birds, won’t you.

Don’t worry Joe, I’ll take care, and bye for now.

The Eyes Have It..

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They certainly do. Unfortunately these are not rendered well on this cut-down apology of a blog. Everyone now bow low and salute the mobile phone, which a lot of folks think is a computer, which it certainly is not. Rant over. These pics were the randomly-selected heading photos on a previous blog which no longer exists, except on the wayback machine. Some of the photos are of ‘friends’, and some are not. IMHO all were very beautiful, and if the ‘eyes’ are indeed windows of the ‘soul’, ’nuff said. Although all pics were originally uploaded in 2012, some date back to pics I took much earlier.

Four Days.

Afghan Girl. Not a pic of mine, but staggeringly, hauntingly beautiful.

Angel Eyes. And a little naughty.

Redhead. Ever the appraising look.

February girl. A professional model.

Helen. Was a little older than me, I was 16 when I took this.

I rather think not, naughty boy.

January girl. A beautiful Japanese girl.

Very kindly said ‘No’.

Cure My Loneliness.

Shockingly beautiful, soft and silky red hair.

Russians are lovely folks, unfortunately their country is dominated by a bag of shit dictator, and his ‘hanglers-on.’

Sad Eyes, plus photographer.

This smiling face blow-up of a hi-def pic shows the photographer also.

Keep young and beautiful..

Valda. The eyes tell all.

Vita. Always my favorite.

Arduino IDE v2 Install on Windows 10 ‘Unconfirmed Download’ Problem Solved

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Hi, I wanted to upgrade my old v1.18.9 IDE on Windows 10, and downloaded the V2 IDE from Arduino site.
Got a file name unconfirmed_download_blah.
No help whatsoever from Microsoft community. Une suggestion was ‘select ‘properties’ on file and uncheck the unblock box’
No such animal. I plugged an NTFS drive in my pi400, and downloaded the file, after an initial name of ‘unconfirmed-download_blah’ it morphed into an ‘exe’ file.
Transferred drive onto the Win10 machine and installed IDE no problem.

A digression (somewhat)
I have to admit, the win10 machine (AMD board) still works well (apart from the sloooow speed).
But I can now proceed to try out boards that can’t be developed using raspberry pi, who have abandoned dev of the latest family of Arduino boards altogether.

One pi400 has recently ‘bit the dust’ and the Raspbian OS is now a disaster, also including the 64-bit ‘Wayland’ rubbish.
Two Apples I bought in 2012 still work well, if a little slowly, so my next machine will be a new Apple.

From The Sublime To The Ridiculous – The Raspberry Pi OS

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Update 15th March 2025
It would seem that the ‘last straw’ for me was the dreadful ‘Bookworm 64-bit raspi OS’.
For existing projects, I’ve had to revert back to a so-called ‘legacy’ 32-bit version. At least there are ‘working’ versions of software I can actually use. I am NOT a ‘tinkerer’, I still develop software, and also write. I need something that ‘works’, not ‘might work when we fix it’.
Here’s a link that may interest, or even amuse, on the subject of Wayland. Wayland

Hi, Yes I’ve been here before, with comments regarding the ‘Pi-400’, the truly miserable quality of which was matched by Clive Sinclair’s BOS offerings some considerable time ago.
I have an early raspi board running ‘jessie’ which has given sterling service over many years hosting a local web server (wordpress) and a website interface to it.
Sad to say, every so-called ‘upgrade’ since, on other projects have reflected badly on the quality of the development. Upgrades fixed one problem and ‘broke’ code previously written.
Latterly. Raspberry Pi has become a ‘business’, with the typical mental mindset of ‘shove it out the door as fast as possible’, and ‘the users will find the bugs and fix them.’
The latest BAG OF SHIT ‘Bookworm 64-bit’ is nothing but that. Note I have not used my normal ‘polite’ abbreviation of ‘BOS’.
As the author of the very first language compiler for the BBC Micro, FORTH, and the same compiler on Acorn’s ARM 1, I’ve followed the ‘history’ very closely, and it has been a somewhat dreary ‘progress’ since.
Very recently, I did ‘burn’ a copy of ‘RISC OS’, a bad joke back then, and sat laughing at it. Almost nothing worked, as it had done on the old ‘Archie’.
Maybe Raspi Pi folks included it as a joke in their list of ‘alternatives’.
To be blunt the concept of ‘free’ software is blown out of the water, the cost in time (a very valuable commodity to me), frustration, et al, makes me give up.
I have two oldish Apple Macs, still giving fault-free performance, and will upgrade shortly. For now, Raspberry PI, it’s RIP.