Have You Ever Wanted to Work With 21st Century Material?

 I mentioned that my wife put the kibosh on carbon fiber composite machining. The dust gets everywhere and it is not the healthiest stuff to have blowing around, even if you are wearing a respirator. Before I put these pieces on eBay, I though I would all of you a chance to buy these pieces. You will be amazed at its lightness, stiffness, and tensile strength. I do not really have a price for any of these. If you can pay me for postage, that would be fine. These are all Dragonplate Economy Plate CFC:

Random scrap, mostly 1/2" and 1/4" thick. I have no idea for what these little scraps might be used, but they are amazingly stiff and strong.

2 6x6x1/8" glossy:

2x6 x 1/2 matte:

3 1/2 x 6 x1/8 glossy

6 x 2 1/4 x 1/4 glossy

6 x 2 x 1/8 glossy

I have no idea (my notes do not match the picture sequence)

1 1/2 x 2 3/4 x 1/4 matte

2001 A Space Travesty

Someone decided that the idea of the Naked Gun comedies crossed with Men in Black and a 2001 would be funny.

I watched aboutx30 minutes and decided it was a tragic failure. Leslie Neilsen's deadpan delivery is awesome.  (If you arr sn antique you remember when he was known as a dramatic actor and a good one at that. 

Nielsen can not save this. It is vulgar in ways that make Airplane and Naked Gun seem subtle.  The sight gags are cute, but not enough of them to overcome the vulgarity 

Gravity

I am sorry I did not see this in a theater. It is an exciting adventure story where there are no bad guys, just heroic people trying to do the best they can in a bad situation. 

Never complain about your job ,or the commute, after watching this.

Pro-Life Extremists Used to Claim Abortion Caused Lifelong Trsuma

Do why the need for abortion doulas? 7/24/23 Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest:

An abortion doula provides physical and emotional support to a patient during their abortion process. It's an added level of care outside of the actual medical care where providers are attuning to whatever the patients' needs are, to make them as comfortable as possible during the process. That can look like making sure they're warm enough or making sure that they have food or drinks or just whatever is going to make them feel supported. The doula can step in and advocate for the patient and offer the patient options. This also looks like some level of physical support with breathing exercises or visualization exercises to help take the patient's mind off any pain or discomfort that they may be experiencing because, sadly, with any medical procedure, there can be some level of discomfort. The abortion doula is there to really walk them through that.

How many medical procedures require that level of support. Certainly not after an appendectomy or double bypass to use two examples that I know well. There are women who feel guilt later about the destruction of "a clump of cells" thst might someday have turned into baby.

Thank Goodness Most Spear Phishers Are Stupid

 They do not realize that firebaseapp and on.microsoft.com in an email address means filter it directly into spam folder.

Why Linux is not Replacing Windows Anytime Soon

I s pent most of my career using Unix for software development or being sys admin for a herdof Sun workstationx. Unix/Linux has many virtues.

A friend who is not technical has just switched from Windows 7 (don't laugh, he is moving his email from AOL after 36 years).. He wanted a regular backup of his files to a USB hard drive.

Okay, how hard can this be? Somewhere there is a program either GUI or shell-based that does this, right?  Not that I could find. After a lot steps that brought back memories:

1. Set up mount of USB drive in /etc/mount. What? HNo atomount or autodiscovery? You run lsblk to see what devices are attached, determine which is the USB drive, copy its 8 hexadecimal digit UUID and several other close to magic fields. (I started to remember what UID and GID mean as I fiddled.)

You rediscover that mount is a very picky program. How many spaces between parameters, Running sudo mount -a may not identify errors, just silently fail. How would it be to make a mount editor that prompts you for the parameters ands adds them to /etc/mount?

3. The backup script using rsync was fairly straightforward.

#!/bin/bash

# Mirror backup to USB drive (vfat friendly)




BACKUP_BASE="/mnt/usb-backup/Backups"

LOGFILE="$HOME/backup.log"




echo "$(date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S') - Backup started" >> "$LOGFILE"




# Check if USB is mounted

if ! mount | grep -q " /mnt/usb-backup "; then

echo "$(date) - ERROR: USB not mounted at /mnt/usb-backup" >> "$LOGFILE"

echo "ERROR: Please run: sudo mount /mnt/usb-backup"

exit 1

fi




mkdir -p "$BACKUP_BASE"




# === Directories to mirror - Add more here if needed ===

declare -A DIRS=(

["/home/$(whoami)/Documents"]="$BACKUP_BASE/Documents"

["/home/$(whoami)/Pictures"]="$BACKUP_BASE/Pictures"

)




echo "$(date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S') - Starting rsync mirror..." >> "$LOGFILE"




for src in "${!DIRS[@]}"; do

dest="${DIRS[$src]}"

if [ -d "$src" ]; then

echo "→ Mirroring $src" | tee -a "$LOGFILE"

mkdir -p "$dest"

rsync -aAX --delete --info=progress2,stats2 "$src/" "$dest/" >> "$LOGFILE" 2>&1

else

echo "Warning: $src not found" >> "$LOGFILE"

fi

done




echo "$(date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S') - Backup completed successfully" >> "$LOGFILE"

echo "✅ Backup finished successfully!"

echo "Log saved to: $LOGFILE" 

Adding an entry to crontab was simpler than mount but it still screams for a tool to help you add an entry. Some of why Linux remains user-indifferent is that for a lot of geeks it is the same theory as stick shifts: "It keeps the riff-raff out." 

Urologist Tomorrow

I am hoping this catheter will be removed for good. Inflamed prostrate gland usually shrinks back to normal in 1 to 2 weeks after appendicitis. This is really unpleasant.  The only good side is there are no nighttime needs to urinate. The downside: carrying around a reservoir when you go to bed and get up and a leg bag during the day,  both which require periodic emptying. You will remember the leg bag because it is like wearing a 1 pound weight on your leg after a while.

From watching TV ads, it appears that there are people who have a permanent recurring need for catheters. I cannot imagine what would preclude surgery to fix whatever underlying condition has put them in that state.

UPDATE: Catheter removed.