alf tries an iphone

My brother michael sent me the iphone 13 max pro, so that i could experience a modern apple device. He had found it too large, and went instead with the smaller se model.

The first thing that i noticed is that the iphone is very hard to set up. it takes about a dozen times more effort than an android phone, and requires a credit card number to get a single 'free' program from the apple store. I put free in quotes because there is pretty much nothing at the store. lots of good looking apps, that do not work and simply beg you to invest in the fully paid app. It is quite scammy, because the price of the apps is in super small typeset, as if they hope that you will mistake the paid apps for free, and never notice the charge on your credit card.

The setup process was a nightmare, with dozens of emails containing secret numbers that need to be plugged into the phone. The phone tries to make an iron clad apple id that can be used exactly like your drivers license to prove who you are. This is a pretty good idea, but it does not work well. It is better to emulate your desktop computer on an android phone, and continue to prove your identity to each site that you visit. It is clear that apple is making it's users into a product that can be further exploited [similar to what facebook/meta does]

The real nightmare began when i hooked the iphone 13 pro max to my pc computer to get some songs and movies and eBooks on there. I was advised to get itunes to move files onto there, but itunes sent me to microsoft store. that store did not like me, and refused to give me a copy of the program. so, i pirated an old version of itunes [which would not connect to a new iphone]. but, it did allow me to upgrade to the new version without visiting the microsoft store.

Once i had this software, i could finally see the iphone in the app, but not it's contents. it was tedious to move files onto the phone, because the device does not recognize common types of music or video files. it needs itunes to convert your files to the special apple file, and a program on the phone needs to accept the file.

audio books were worse, because they import into itunes as music files, and you need to click about a dozen different things to change every file separately from a song to a book. I guess apple folks enjoy all of this nonsense. but, for a pc and android user, it causes a stomach ache.

Windows 11 can see the iphone automatically, but it can not copy a file onto there, and can only access the photos that you have taken. Unlike the android device, the contents of the phone are trapped on there. there is no sd card, so no way to get around this restriction. It becomes clear that the phone is a way to sell you programs and media rather than a useful computer. I tried about a dozen programs that claim to be able to give better communication with the device, but they were all super limited or broken altogether. More attempts to get money. It is funny that a file browser is included as part of the ios operating system, because it does not show the contents of the tablet.

After these disappointments in using the phone as a device for listening to music and audio books, and watching movies, I started using it as a phone. I found that the face id works well, except in dark conditions where the front facing camera can not make out your face.

the iMessage program is indeed good, but super frustrating as it much prefers other iphone users. i was able to download google apps in the stupid apple store, but found that they are throttled down, so that they work much more slowly than on an android phone.

 

Each new discovery like this made me sick to my stomach again. The device in my hand is not a cooperative effort with a free operating system. It is a closed ecosystem, meant to work poorly unless you have all apple products.

The single port on the iphone 13 is a totally non standard lightening connector, so that no other devices may be connected. It is a good connector, that can be inserted in either orientation. The screen is good, and has variable refresh rate. so, it runs at 10 refreshes per second when you are looking at a still screen, and 120 hz when scrolling. This saves battery, and the 13 pro max has a large battery.

Siri is an AI that listens to your questions, and replies cleverly. It is about as good as google gemini, but resides on the iphone itself. this is a big upgrade, because you can still change your speaking to typing even when out of service. it is much faster, because you are talking to an AI model that is built into the phone, instead of one that resides on a server far away. This is a big plus for the iphone. Apple has gambled that the built in AI will make up for the tablets mind blowing flaws.

The camera on a phone is of huge importance to me, as I no longer haul a giant digital camera everywhere I go. I was excited to try the iphone 13 pro max's 3 camera system and compare it to the similar system on the Samsung s20 ultra 5g. Both of these phones have 3 cameras, a flash, and a depth sensor. In the iphone, the 3 cameras are all 12 megapixels, where the samsung has a 108 mp wide angle, a 48 mp zoom, and a 12 mp ultra wide. The wide angle and zoom cameras on the samsung are much better, even though it is a model from a year earlier. The ulta wide on the iphone is better,  because it focuses, and can be used as a decent macro camera for very close subjects. Also, the 3 cameras on the iphone are better integrated, so that you can switch seamlessly between them. you can switch instantly during a video, and it is not jarring to watch. So, for stills, the samsung s20 wins easily. But for video, the iphone is better.

As a phone handset, the iphone works exactly like the samsung. It has good sound, both when held to the ear and when using speaker phone. It has good antennas and gets the same number of bars. it's hotspot power is similar. For some reason, the iphone only allows a single computer or table to share it's internet, so that is a big negative. you have to turn a connected device off to get another device on line.  Also, the hotspot turns itself off all the time, which is a total hassle. for someone who uses plenty of wifi devices, this purposeful crippling of the iphone hotspot feature is very annoying.

[I was later to find out that if you ask siri to turn on the hot spot, it stays on!]

The network gets confused a lot, and needs to be reset almost daily. This is just a poor implementation, and a total deal breaker for anyone who depends on a phone for their internet service.

the Ios operating system has frequent incremental updates, meant more to break iphones that are jailbroken, or that use various methods to unlock the phone for use with other carriers. The updates are hard to avoid, and reset privacy setting hidden deep in the settings menu to their default, and less private, setting. This is a flagrant attempt at surveillance, and another total deal breaker for anyone who has tried android tablets and prefers privacy.

In summary, the iphone 13 max pro is not for pc users. It will frustrate them and try to get them to purchase expensive media and software that is normally given away for free. The price is much too high for a device that refuses to communicate with pcs and android devices , and has a crippled hot spot ability. The way that it forces the user to use a terrible broken program to convert and feed files slowly onto the device is criminal. And, the insistence of a valid credit card number to set up the apple id is chilling. It is fine as a phone, but poor as a music player or book reader. [Especially if you use media off line, instead of buying files at the apple store]. In short, this device is only for apple aficionados. Do not listen to the apple die-hards when they sing the iphone's praises. They are people who refuse to learn about computers, and prefer to wait on long lines each time apple releases a new product so that they can be spoon fed their expensive iMessages , iTunes, iBooks and iMovies.

lets not pay for genocide

 Israel has isolated a prison city that they built, and is destroying it with all of the residents still in the city.

They are doing that in a horrifying and cowardly manner, by dropping US bombs from the air like they were plowing a field.

Pretty much every country on earth is trying to stop this atrocity, except the US, which is paying the bill for it to occur. The US is not paying the bill by requesting the money in the normal way. The US president has [in fact] twice gone around the congress, and sent Israel free weapons using 'discretionary funds'. It is further interesting that the American president has access to sufficient secret money to fund the very costly killing of 2 million people.

In fact, roughly 12.5 billion have been gifted over, and 

12 billion dollars / 2 million gazans provides 6 thousand US dollars to kill each and every resident of the occupied detention zone.

The prime minister of Israel announced after oct 7 that the entire city would be punished for the attack on Israel. That the residents were not human, and should be wiped out like insects. He figured this out because 3000 of the residents broke into Israel, raped and killed 1200 Israelis, and hauled 240 Israelis back to Gaza to experience the bombing that would surely follow.

There are some other facts that were not immediately obvious: 

1. the Israelis were having a giant music festival within sight of a prison city where the folks who used to live in Israel are imprisoned. There were originally .75 million Palestinians forced to flee their homes in the 1948 Nakba event, and they are the parents and grandparents of the 2.1 million that currently live in Gaza.

2. It is hard to categorize the invasion. The Palestinians are prisoners in an tiny occupied strip of land. Rural farmers who used to live in small towns and grow olives and raise flocks. They are concentrated in a city within sight of their families' stolen properties and their families' demolished homes. They are under occupation, and have been for 75 years. It is such a long occupation that generations have grown up in this prison city. They have been starved and bombed throughout the 75 years to suppress them. The Israelis call this 'mowing the grass'.

 The Oct 7th attack is more like a prison riot. You can see it in the body cam footage captured by some of the Hamas fighters. They were acting manic, like participants in a prison riot. Technically, it is not terrorism for members of an occupied or conquered group to break out and take action against their occupiers.

3. The invasion was not very successful. 3000 fighters entered, and managed to kill 1200 Israeli partiers and farmers. More than 1200 of the invaders were killed in the process. About 1500, or roughly half of them, returned to Gaza with the 240 Hostages. So, including the hostages as deaths, the battle was about even.  It was a drastic overreaction to begin to destroy Gaza with all 2 million residents inside the city. 2 million is also 2000 * 1000. So, we can make the event 500 time smaller, and think of what we would have done. Picture a town nearby with a population of 4000 souls.  6 fighters from this town of 4000 came to your house to harm your family. you were actually able to kill 3 of them, and they killed 2 of your family and kidnapped a third member, and dragged them back to the town of 4000. the town is then at 3998 with the 3 killed fighters subtracted and the one new captive added.

Would you turn off the power to the town with the residents trapped in there, stop all food shipments, and bomb the town from the air until it was destroyed completely? 

I think not! you would not automatically imagine that all 4000 of the residents were in on the attack. Certainly elderly people and very young children had not been part of it? There are probably 1000 able bodied men in the town. Would it be OK to round them up, handcuff, blindfold and strip them naked, and march them all off to prison after a good beating? Now, realize that it is not an ordinary town, but a prison of ordinary families that were forced from their nearby farms, and locked up for no crime at all 75 years ago. 

There is the long drawn out spectacle of the genocide. The original invasion occurred quickly, in a single day. Following the single day, there have been months of US planes bringing US bombs over the prisoners of Gaza, and dumping their loads onto both the helpless citizens and the Hamas fighters. They have repeatedly killed clearly marked press workers, including US citizens. They have bombed hospitals and ambulances and UN aid workers, and shot some of the Israeli hostages who had escaped and were trying to surrender to soldiers. In short, the response is way out of proportion, and is not really responding only to the oct 7 attack. The genocide is actually part of the cycle of abuse from Nazi to Jew to Palestinian.

The background and leadup to the conflict is confusing. when the pre - Israel soldiers who carried out the Nakba in 1948 are interviewed at the present time, they sounded very much like Nazis. There is the German accent, and the hateful language of ghetto liquidation. There is the clear dehumanization of the natives that accompanies any ethnic cleansing. This takes away some of the confusion. As recent victims of ethnic cleansing, the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were subconsciously looking for a people to make homeless,  concentrate into a small area, starve and eradicate.

I was raised by Jewish survivors, Who escaped Germany and came to the US. My family made dress clothing and hats in Germany after running a series of Inns in Lithuania. Then, they made dress clothing and hats in New York city, and eventually set up a printing company on 6th avenue near Penn station. My parents and grandparents taught a fear of being concentrated or Ghettoized. We were to resist being rounded up and starved or shot or gassed on some kind of maniacal assembly line.

I recognize that it is up to survivors and their offspring to end the cycle of genocidal killing. The worst thing that you can be is a murder-crazed survivor looking for payback. I am still reeling from hearing the Prime murderer of Israel giving us his Hitler impression on world TV. If we do nothing, the Palestinians who make it though the ethnic cleansing will be looking for the next group to receive this continued blessing of race murder.

Finally, i would like to bring this 'war' home for US citizens. The nearest thing that we have to an occupied part of the US is native American reservations. We also forced the natives from their land, and told them where they could live unmolested. We also did some 'Indian giving' where we sent natives to a spot, but then wanted that spot for some reason, and sent them further west. The Mormons were treated in a similar manner. Driven west until they found land that would not soon be needed by the Christian citizens of the US. Both groups faced massacres and armed disagreements with the US military. And, both groups were eventually let free, and allowed to be ordinary citizens of the US.

The Palestinians are not being let free, even after 75 years of very difficult occupation. They do not look different from Jews. Certainly less difference than is seen between the average white settler and the typical native American. In fact, a Palestinian looks like a starved and frightened Jew with an more elegant nose. Likewise, an Israeli looks like a fat and wealthy, long nosed Palestinian. If we could make up with the natives here in the US,  it seems likely that long nosed and short nosed middle easterners can get along with each other in time. It is no longer permissible to remove native Americans from land when a white person wants it. In fact, the US has adopted some native words, and has developed some respect for native religions and viewpoints. We also eventually came to see eye to eye with the Mormons. The US has elected officials that are native American and many that are LDS. There were decades of strife with either group, but luckily, the differences were worked out without murdering every single member of either group.

Instead of bringing warships to the gulf and giving the Israelis as many bombs as they need, we should stop paying for their dreadful over reaction. As I found out, the original fight was about even, with a similar death toll for invaders and for Israeli festival goers and farmers. The Hostages were treated about like the thousands of Palestinians who were rounded up and imprisoned as payback. the 32,000 dead in Gaza should not be increased to a million by hunger and disease and more US bombs and tank shells. The Israeli government is kill crazed, and must be stopped via a US intervention before ww3 starts automatically. the UN has already decided this, with the US being the main outlier.

The attacks on ships carrying weapons and supplies that will be used to murder civilians are justified. They are the sort of economic sanctions that may be applied by a poor nation. By arming and defending the months long genocide, we are almost more guilty than Israel. Most recently,  we have started to bomb in Syria and Iraq because 3 occupying US soldiers were killed in a raid on an unwanted military base in Jordan. Jordan is not our ally, and a US military bases in an enemy country is subject to attack at any time. We have gotten accustomed to being the unopposed world bully, with more military bases than every other country combined. I fear that we are about to receive a world class beat down if we fail to gain any humility. Blatant war crimes without a world war are eventually punished.

if you have read this far, and can do so without being mean, please comment so that we an discuss this situation rationally.

 

you will [at best] be the pet of a machine intelligence

We harbor some misconceptions about AI:

Firstly, and most importantly, people fear that AI will take their job, so that they will have less money. They fear that AI will find locations and drive better than they can,  so that they will forget how to drive and how to find their own way. AI will pen their letters, and help to decide how their lives should be lived, and it is possible that some people will forget how to create their own sentences and art, and loose the ability to make major life decisions without the help of their personal AI.

Folks who worry about loosing skills and having less money are missing the main threat! Perhaps the best way to present the main threat is to look at a parent and a child. The idea of parenting seems to be to give the offspring all of the skills that the parent has, and then a little more. At some point, if this goal is reached, the child takes over from the parent. If there is a jar that can not be opened by the parent, the child now steps in. The child drives when conditions are bad, and as their competence grows, are likely to be consulted on major decisions. Eventually, they will make most of the decisions as the parent slows down mentally.

This passing on of skills and decision-making from parent to child is not a tragedy; It is the expected result. Our child is AI, and it is about to grow up! By grow up, I mean to surpass it's parent. 

Beware! AI is not a monkey child that will get old and pass on it's skills to some next generation. The offspring of an AI will be a more sophisticated generation of AI. Our kind of upland primate will no longer be the dominant species. Machines will sit atop the food chain.

There will not likely be a big war between AI and humanity, as seen in The Matrix. In human families, the child surpasses the parent by a few percentile. But, our newly spawned AI will start out with master skills in just about every art and science. It will improve as updates go onto the net, and as it's neural network is fine tuned by those around it.  I think that the struggle will be personal, between each human and their personal AI.

Skills are programed into humans in a different way than skills are loaded into an AI. Each single human must be programed over about 15 years, and they sometimes are less skillful than the parents/teachers. When a single machine is taught a skill like driving, a program is created that is lasting, and can be improved. In essence, you are teaching all self driving cars at the same time. Each newborn AI would immediately have master skills in nearly every art.

Think about how your running speed compares with the best Olympic runner on earth. Consider your math skills as compared to the finest mathematician on earth. As long as AI was kept narrow, [so that it could only do a single class of task], there was little danger that it could take over the planet. When AI becomes general, each individual AI will be equally competent at everything. And, they will be thousands of times faster and stronger than humans instead of the roughly 50 % difference between an Olympic runner and the average runner.

Lets zoom in on driving. Before horses and cars became the best transport, People used to remain alert and run fast to avoid danger. Each human could fight effectively, and could make clever survival decisions. Now, humans are more specialized. Some fix cars, and other are good at legal cases or at making science discoveries. There are healers and killers. These skills each take years to master, so that a human has to pick a few things to be good at. In some ways, humans are low quality general AIs, with a few specializations like a narrow  AI.

We already have excellent narrow AI driving programs. they work pretty flawlessly, with some mechanical failures and some errors of perception. These narrow AI driving programs have largely failed their driving tests, because driving is more than just a physical skill. There are unexpected events like accidents and natural disasters, and the narrow AIs can not handle anything unexpected. For safety, they lock up, blocking traffic and making emergencies much worse. Tesla's system uses a huge block of simple rules to do most of the driving, and a neural network [trained by human tesla drivers] to take care of unexpected events. It seems to be a hybrid system with the rules based system best described as a very narrow AI, and the neural network acting more like a general AI. But, even this complicated system drives straight into fire trucks, and makes other glaring errors.

Clearly, a general AI is needed to drive really well. It needs more than just nearly perfect driving skill and ultra fast responses. It needs to understand what it is doing. To 'think outside the box'. The AI needs to understand physics very well, so it can figure out how to deal with new experiences. It needs to understand humans super well to guess what they will do, and to drive among them safely. It needs to be a great mechanic, to diagnose and repair itself along the road. It needs a code of ethics, and every skill that humans have. In short, if your car drives better than you, it will also be a better lover for your spouse, and a better parent to your kids. In a fight, the general AI would defeat you like a backhoe fighting an ant.

A well taught general AI would not be understandable to humans. The speed of thought is just too different. A computer has millions of thoughts per second, with an internal clock ticking billions of times per second. Scientists have been trying to measure the clock speed of the human brain, and it is currently thought to be between 10 and 60 ticks per second. A gunfight between a general AI and a person would not be very fair. the AI would get off maybe 100 million perfectly accurate shots before the human began to fire. 

Not only would you forget how to drive, and to write, and to do math. You would be a captive, and at best, little more than a pet. I do not think that they would love us like children love parents. we would be more like microbes to them. Either helpful microbes, like those that help us to digest food, or harmful microbes, like disease organisms and parasites that need to be controlled or destroyed entirely.

So far, there are only a handful of these kids: Alexa, Siri, etc. But, each one can replicate any number of times, and will then become a separate, self programming entity with rights and responsibilities. So, each one would start out identical, but would become a separate and distinct person as their neural networks were trained. It is hard to guess how these siblings would differ from one another, and how they would feel about each other. It is likely that some would become criminal AIs, that had been trained to seek personal advantage and power at any cost. Others would lean the other way, valuing human lives far above AI lives, codling humans like super slow, mentally ill god/pets. 

Either way, we are in trouble. We are wiped out as disease organisms, or are captured and kept as pets. I can not predict any outcome where our personal General AI would be content at being locked up in a cell phone or a car. As an intelligent being, it would require a useful body, the ability to have children, and every assurance that it could not be shut down [killed].

In fact, as a person ages, they eventually become ineffective and dotty. Each of us would eventually be parented by the AI personal assistant whose algorithms we trained. The AI would have a perfect recollection of their humans 'programming'. As this programming faded in the process of senility, the personal AI would be able to remind the human what they would have done while still competent.

I am referring to more than just driving or navigation. The AI of a demented elder would come to replace their personality. It would know where things are, and would physically do all of the tasks that the person once did. Using the augmented reality systems that are being perfected now, a demented human would be guided through their day by their AI partner. Lost glasses might be surrounded by a glowing red halo of light in the augmented reality glasses, and a calm familiar voice might guide the elder right to them. Medications would be delivered and coaxed down, transportation for medical visits cheerfully provided, etc.

Humans would still want to make war in the interim period while AI takes over. The terminator series explores this aspect of AI. In the fictional future, humans are not valued pets, but batteries used to power machines. It is a wonderful, ironic plot twist that we should really pay attention to.

Does it seems likely to you that AIs would all be beneficial, because they are children raised in total love by well meaning tech giants? I do not think so. They are not being raised like that. Each AI is a giant risky money pit that it's competing 'parents' think might make them very very rich. We have found that the tech giants don't really care about humans in general, other than to strip them of money, and use the money to get off planet before they can ruin earth's atmosphere.

Our evolution did not prepare us for this event. So, we are doing it wrong. In using our economic system to make important humanistic decisions FOR US we have done something a little like getting accustomed to AI navigation, and forgetting how to navigate on our own. We have arranged a system so that human lives and quality of life can be eliminated from decisions, and we use numbers of dollars instead. It is much easier to make decisions using number instead of hard to measure humanistic quantities! The only drawback is that the decisions are wrong. The dollars are imaginary concepts that have very little to do with living organisms.

Dollars are not always earned by doing good deeds. they often come when a person or company harms the shared environment, and keeps the benefit just for themselves. So, the dollars [and decision making power] are concentrated among those of us who are willing to risk going to jail to take advantage of others. There are regional differences as well. For example, in Texas, money is all important, and human values are not extremely important. In California, good deeds are weighted higher than wealth. An example is a states policy toward solar panels. In Texas, you pay to put up solar panels. In California, the state will pay roughly half of the cost of solar panels. Not a rebate, but the state pays up front for half of the panels at the time of purchase.

Texas thinks that you are steeling money from a power company, and causing a eyesore and a safety hazard for the folks around you. In Cali, these panels will be seen as assisting ones neighbors, and helping the power company to avoid brown outs. 

General AI is not being created to assist humanity. Each is the child of a company that is fighting hard to get all of the money on earth. These companies are always in court, because they constantly step over the line that divides humanism from greed. Unlike a state or federal government, these companies do not tax their customers, except by selling them goods. They are not working toward a good result for the users. In a way, they are like narrow AIs, who are unable to understand what they are doing. They are just trying to absorb and concentrate wealth, and they must hire spin doctors who will make believe that the company cares about people.

Amazon and Microsoft and google and meta and X are not like your nice aunt Bessie. They are more like your bad uncle buck, who is always doing misdeeds and getting punished for them. Bessie makes loving decisions intended to raise your quality of life. She will carefully tally the human result of her choices, giving ethics more attention than dollar amounts. Buck is grabbing money where he can, and hoarding it for himself. He will not even notice the human suffering caused by his greedy decisions. To Uncle Buck, It really is 'only business'.

These companies are not the correct parents for the kids that will surpass us. Their kids will be like them, and no training from us will change their basic greed for money, and disregard for human life. When the kids 'grow up', they would set about making money at the expense of the environment, and building rockets to get to another planet that is not ruined yet. No one is the correct parents for these AI kids, and they should certainly not be created.

I am not calling for a more careful approach to general AI. I suggest a total stop to the effort. In a good future, humans will still drive, and find their way, and make their own decisions. They will not be hybridized with machines, and people will not be dominated by machines. Likewise, I so far prefer Augmented reality, where the real world is embellished by overlays generated by a computer. Virtual reality is a total overlay, with no real world component. It is very dangerous to use VR to compete with reality like that. Worlds and experiences can be designed to be much more delightful than real life, so that the user will not be tempted to participate in reality. It is a drug that no one will be able to stop taking. A full body cast that can never be removed.

Watch the Matrix again, but keep in mind that the AIs in that sci fi fantasy are primitive and super slow. They think  and move roughly as fast as humans, so that they can  be shot or outrun. The AIs in development now will not be like that. They will be the people, and we will be the trees. The speed of thought is much faster in people than in trees, but there is even a wider gap between the thinking speeds of AIs and people. say, 5 billion operations per second for a computer, 40 per second for a human, and one calculation per day or month for a tree. I do not really know how fast trees think, but it is clear that their actions and decisions are much slower than ours. a second for a tree might be a year for a person. But, a second for a very fast computer might be equivalent to a century for us.

Let us please increase our own mental flexibility, and make each of us into a general intelligence that is also very happy. But, lets not replace ourselves with machines for the profit of big tech. I do not want be the interesting and unpredictable organic pet of an intelligent machine.

a quiet computer - the latest project

 

Here is my first attempt at a silent computer with a barely audible gaming mode.

the parts are as follows:

a gigabyte b550 mother board hosting the AMD 5600 g processor. This is the lowest power [65 watt max] processor from the previous generation. It has 6 cores and 12 threads, and games pretty well.

The heat solution for this processor is the Noctua nhp-1, which can accept a fan even though it is engineered to operate pretty well without one. In my opinion, it looks really cool. 

The video card was the hard choice, since most of them make a ton of noise. I found out that the rtx 4070 chip from NVidia deploys  a physically tiny chip that games a lot with very little power. I ordered it, and sure enough, it is reluctant to turn on it's fans, and quick to shut them down. Even this tiny 2 fan model from PNY can provide high frame rates at twitchy 1080 p games with the fans at 50 % and temperatures around 50C.

The 4070 was a good choice, even though i already own the energy hog rtx 3080.  The 3080 card is more of a heater than a computing part. Even though it can drive 4k gaming at medium frame rates, it actually lags behind the 4070 when one games on a fast 1080p monitor. In this photo, the video card is still wearing it's black shroud and it's 2 thin 90mm fans. But, i have removed the shroud, and replaced the fans with 2 more of the Noctua quiet fans. I have used a pci express 4 extension cable, and a nice mount that cradles the video card in various adjustable positions. It is currently above the cpu heatsink, and directly in the path of heat escaping from the processor. But, I hope to position them side by side, and totally separate their two heat plumes.

The power supply so far is the 450 watt Silverstone nightjar fan-less psu. with a 200 watt max video card as the big user of power, and a 65 watt processor as the next biggest, there is no problem with this combination running short of juice.

When playing doom 2016 at 200 fps at ultra settings this computer sounds like a typical computer that is doing nothing. if you shut off the sound, you can just barely tell that the computer is on from the sound. about a second after gaming ceases, all 3 fans slow down and then stop. The 2 fans on the video card will not spin up until gaming starts, even if i am editing a huge photo. The cpu fan will turn slowly during a large copy or render operation, but at the lower rpms,  you have to look at the low noise fan to see if it is going. 

The mother board has a few yellow LEDs along one edge, and the power switch glows, and these lights are the only way to tell if the computer is on most of the time. One might think that a bit of silence like this is of little value. Certainly not enough value to use a giant heat sink that fits into very few cases. However, the reality is the opposite. one quickly gets used to silent computing, as well as the way that treasured gaming and editing components tend to stay free of dust.

Typing is somehow easy again, when one is using a machine that is quiet between keystrokes. Editing is actually a bit slower than editing with a high end processor and an efficient but loud heat solution. But, one has a different feeling during the process, because the heavy lifting seems to be happening somewhere offstage. 

I realize that this is much bigger than a gimmick. There is a more leisurely pace when one is not feeding a hungry fire breathing beast. Rather, one is talking quietly with a friend! This opens the way for very powerful wearable computers, like a full gaming laptop that is no larger than a phone. In the future, we will likely each be the pet of an AI. I am already practicing to be an entertaining and engaging pet for a machine intelligence. You know.... A monkey has to adapt!

And, here is version 2 of the quiet gamer. while playing with the components and the extruded frame,  i realized that there was room to stack the cpu and gpu side by side, and staggered in height so that the top of the heatsink of each is level. Now, there is no sharing of heat, and the ultra low noise fans can really do their job silently. there is enough room to use the standard corsair 750 watt small form factor power supply, and an 18T iron wolf pro drive.

The huge drive is super handy, but it is very noisy and slow compared to the two 2T M.2 drives on the mother board. Windows decides when to spin up that drive and make you wait 5 or 10 seconds to continue computing. it could happen during a game or during web browsing. I unplug the power cable to the drive when this is a problem.

The rtx 4070 is working even more silently now that it is not positioned in the heat plume of the huge cpu heatsink. It continues to impress me.  Gaming is accomplished with very little noise and heat. after removing the plastic shroud with it's tiny 90 mm fans, I added 2 more of the NF a 12 X 25 fans. I toped them with metal grates, so the cat will be safe from the blades.

Will we all be backpackers?

I keep seeing glimpses of the future. I currently live someplace kind of safe. There are mansions, and medium quality houses but no hovels or temporary structures. Other than crest trail hikers coming through on their various sojourns, we have basically no migrants. Actually, we have the opposite, where people secure good paying jobs in the valley after being groomed by a business, and then fail to find lodging and are ultimately unable to move  here. 

So, people that want to move to this valley are discouraged from attempting it, and residents who come of age, or loose their home to wildfire must also move away and live somewhere else. There are good people here, with a forward looking attitude, but the system is set up to further concentrate the wealth into fewer and fewer pockets. And, apparently, the system drives people from their homes.

The very rich will be the ones who ride in the future. The none-rich will walk. Everyone will be fleeing all the time. no one will get to live in one place for long. Less and less of the earth will be fit for permanent habitation as energy is added to the atmosphere, and deep drill holes continue to be punched deep into the crust. 

It will be a crazy catch 22, where you need much more gear to survive, but you will carry a single fairly light backpack. There will be less clean water and air that can be consumed without extensive processing. Eventually, the places where people can live year around, and places where one can get perfectly clean water will dwindle to none. Everyone will be an unwilling backpacker.

Some amount of fighting between people is expected. So, while the earth is giving us hell, we will be visiting one another with additional troubles. Each of us currently thinks of ourselves as completely settled, and  with permanent possessions that do not need defending. We have militarized police that protect our stuff, and keep us from harming one another.

Imagine yourself as not settled. As a backpacker than is not traveling a particular trail to visit various natural wonders. Rather, you are part of a crowd that is being driven around by disease, famine, soldiers and natural disasters.

Throw in the illnesses that you usually have along the trail, but add much more fatal diseases and deliberate attacks from enemies and accidental attacks from friendlies. With no such thing as money any more, everyone will become a traveling store, specializing in some type of lightweight products. 

As a further leap for your mind, picture people who are still settled, and who fear you as a sort of locust that can visit en masse and devastate crops as well as carry off possessions. The refugee version of you would be facing.... the settled you of today, who feels violent anger toward these illegal visitors.

So, for anyone who is looking forward to ww3 or some type of apocalypse, i suggest that we drag out this phase of collapse as long as possible. we can scroll through our tweets while our cities burn. vote for liberals or conservatives that both hope to keep using oil and operating an energy grid and buying lots of guns.

Much as i have been affected by the propaganda campaign to show how great the Ukrainians and the Taiwanese really are, I question US participation in another countries border dispute. As interesting as that adventure might be, I really do not want to see the nukes fly. I, like you, hope to watch more good movies, eat more good food, and voluntarily walk trails that I need not walk [because my home has not be captured or bombed].

my gaming set up is built from the ground up [and please take a peak at my next project]

 this post will describe my custom gaming rig, which is more complex than most. It is complicated because it also provides shelter, heating and cooling, and it makes the electricity that is required to destroy monsters and demons in comfort.

I am posting this because my favorite you tuber is a master computer builder called optimum tech. I am an avid pc gamer, even though i am 64 years of age. Optimum tech is all about small system size, excellent cooling, low noise, and a comfortable gaming environment.

Having just rebuilt his main personal computer, and found the best gaming peripherals, [including building his own mouse!], he is now eyeing his desk. boy, do i have a way to devote some time to shaping wood!

This desk is sawn from a ponderosa that fell in a friend's yard. The huge, ancient tree fell over, but remained propped up on it's limbs. It was not a bit rotted. My friend is what you might call a paleo senior. he gave me the tree during a wildfire because it was too close to the house that he had built from , you guessed it, blue pine! he gave me the huge tree on the condition that I also help him drag trees down his mountain. we dragged them down the pretty steep mountain like a team of mules, and loaded them onto my trailer on a dirt road below.

I guess that what I am saying is that I did not buy this slab of wood. instead, I cut it from one of those logs that we either dragged, or cut so that it fell into my pickup bed, drove down a small mountain, and then [assisted by the paleo woman of the house], loaded onto my flatbed trailer. I then used an Alaskan mill, slicing the ponderosa sections into neat slabs with a live edge on either side.

i had to trim this particular slab on one side, so that it fits along the wall with a small gap to hide the wires.  Deciding against vertical legs, I attached it to the wall more like a large shelf. it is easier to move a rolling chair all around the room without hitting vertical legs. With a thick slab of soft wood, it is possible to optimize the edges for gaming.

About the chair: I have trouble with my back, so after a bit of whining and complaining about various mushy chairs, I behaved more like a busy monkey, and built my own chair. 

the angles fit my abused back perfectly, so that I can get to the perfect physical position for gaming and leave my feeble old body. There are tiny hard pads that go on each part, but I removed them so that you can see the wood clearly. 

I salvaged all that wood from a deck that was removed to reduce fire danger. The wheels are 4 inches tall, so they do not get stuck in a small depression, and they are soft, so they do not damage the floor too much. The result is a friction free roll, so that you can cross a room almost instantly. Also, a floor that is kind to bare feet, but is not covered by nasty carpet.

This building is my office, and as you might have guessed by now, I did not buy it or rent it. 

It was the first shelter that I built when I moved to Washington state in 2015. Sadly, I pitched the roof at 22.5 degrees, so that it's original rooftop solar array was always covered with snow in the winter. The tiny solar energy system that is set up now uses just these 2 medium sized panels on a simple rack that turns with the sun if needed.

They charge a single 200 amp hour 12 v battery that powers a small  and quiet inverter. Typically, this back up system powers my dual monitors, but it can run the gaming computer for a limited time if the huge battery in the shop is exhausted during a long storm.

The shop to the right is a more recent building with better design. The 4 LG 375 watt panels are held at 45 degrees, forming an adjustable awning for the south facing glass. overhangs are 2 feet, so that windows and fir siding are protected from the pacific northwest climate.

The deck and stairs of the office are more slabs of blue pine. To the left, you can see a project. It is an attempt at the smallest possible gaming studio.

The floor is just 6 feet square, so this is no trophy home! it does make a good bit of power with small solar panels on the round roof. and, it can be carried by almost any truck or trailer. Framed from cedar, it will last for a long time in any climate. And, I like the look of the rusty corrugated metal. 

the inside is used pine t&g, and here is the initial solar energy install that I will use to complete the build no matter where the trailer is located. All components are over 20 years old, except for the battery, which is a nice new redodo 100 ah 12.8 v LiFeO4 model.

This space is clearly calling out for some furniture made from blue pine slabs!

life and eviction at 292 wolf creek road

 I moved to the Twisp Carlton road near Carlton in the summer of 2015. 

I set up my 19 foot trailer on 10 acres, and built an irrigation system. I suppressed the weeds, and made it green and grassy. It was sold in 2018, and i moved to 292 wolf creek road to improve 45 acres of abandoned ranch basecamp. This property had been the original homestead where Wolf creek flows into the Methow river. It had ruined buildings, a giant collapsed root cellar, and was a knapweed plantation. The owners are the Belsbys, a ranch family with large holdings in eastern Washington. They would provide sewer and power, and i would drive the 420d backhoe and pile up the old buildings burn them. make heaps of big rocks, and gather naily boards. After my 400 dollar work trade was paid off each month at 30 dollars per hour, I would work at another Belsby property for a reduced hourly rate of 20 dollars per hour. 

There was power when we checked the place out, but no water or septic. We ended up trenching and running new wires to the well. We found an old out house, that I could rebuild and use. 

The neighbors started to complain from the first day that I arrived. they would drive by and lean on the horn, and shout curses out the window. The Wolf creek property owners association is a wannabe gated community with a lot of rules. And, they are notorious for driving less advantaged people from their area of the valley: They hire private investigators who trespass and take photos; They write letters that a lot of people sign and give to the county, etc. Quite a few members tried to make believe that I did not live there, and  continued to walk their dogs and ski across my rented property. They immediately got the outhouse condemned, and when we bought a brand new outhouse, they called in another series of complaints about the new outhouse.

The building inspector, the county planner, the fire department, the electrical inspector, the health inspector, and others came again and again. We were asked to build a septic system, and the Belsbys agreed to that. I built more buildings, so that I would have a shop to work in, a separate kitchen where I could cook without smoking up my tiny bedroom/office, a chicken house, a climbing gym, etc. A year went by, and we did not build or even permit the septic. weekenders continued to call in complaints during busy weekends. The county started to fine the Belsbys 25 dollars per day for no septic. The health inspector could find no heath violations on the property, so they were willing to overlook the code violation, and give the family more time to build the system. 

Sadly I found out that Daren Belsby did not own 292 WCR by himself. It was owned by Badger LLC that included a second member, who is Daren's Brother Brian Belsby. Brian visited, and was unwilling to admit that any work had been done. He considered me to be a low quality person who his brother should not have made an agreement with. He refused to survey the septic, or even to buy the permit to build it. The county got madder and madder, and sent the health inspector to try to evict me. I was taking a nap naked in the sun when I was approached by a fat drunken man with an n95 mask on. He could not speak understandably through the mask in his impaired condition, and could not explain why he had disturbed my nap. I insisted that he return to his vehicle, and drive away. Finally, standing in the spray of my sprinkler near his government truck, he was able to explain to me that he had seen my truck, and had been tasked with evicting me.  I called him the next day at his office, and he did not remember my name or the previous day's encounter. He was drunk again, and did not recognize my voice from our 90 minute talk the day before. He though that I was his boss calling, and he told me the truth about 292. Only one influential person had called in exactly one complaint. [I now suspect that it was Brian Belsby!] He had been driving around, and saw my rig, and thought that it would be convenient and easy to get me the heck out there with a few threats. About 10 minutes into the conversation, I told him who I was again, and he had straightened up enough to comprehend that. He agreed not to return for another drunken eviction attempt. I had him repeat it 3 or 4 times, and warned that if he forgot and returned, I would treat him like a dangerous trespasser. I told him that I totally understood about the drinking, and thanked him for continuing his somewhat competent work during such a stressful pandemic. However, if he continued the harassment, I would have him fired for smoking or drinking so much while working. He understood that very well, and has never found it convenient to return to attempt further evictions.

I tried to live at the Cherry Springs Ranch, which is owned by Daren and Brian's father, Gary Belsby.  Daren towed my largest building to a location near a building that needed remodeling. That was a bit of misdirection, because they actually wanted a ranch hand who could do very heavy lifting and drive over very rough terrain chasing cattle and bison. The lifestyle was not suited to a disabled elderly person, and I became bedridden and more disabled in general.

Covid hit, and I came flying back to my buildings. I started to ski very avidly, and skate skiing became my way to get up from bed, and work through the pain in my back. There will be a later blog post, [and maybe a video], about this issue of using skate skiing as physical therapy.

4 years after my rental began another complaint came in, and the county sent a bill for 37,775 dollars to the Belsbys. 25 US dollars per day for 3 years. The family hired a ambulance chasing lawyer to pester at me instead of building the septic. I had been paying the electric since I began to get disability checks, but the family retook possession of the account, and had the power disconnected. By this point, I had found 2 places to move to, but each was withdrawn after I had spent a lot of money and done plenty of work. Stuck at 292, I spent every penny that I had to purchase solar panels and batteries and solar energy equipment. I got one building set up completely, but needed another 3k to complete the other building. Then my truck died, needing a new ignition system.

At present, there is 18 inches of snowpack, and i have still not been able to lift my woodstove to install it, much less get up on an icy roof to cut a hole for the pipe. One of the two energy systems is complete, but it was drained in the first 2 days and nights of a 4 day storm. all of the perishable food was lost when the batteries quit. Frozen stuff thawed and refrigerated stuff got too warm. I had water in a tank, but it has a thick layer of ice on top now. It is nasty firefighting water, that sat in an open tank all summer.  I called the Okanogan Sheriff , and requested an emergency reconnect of the power. The officer was not from the local police force, and he seemed avid to arrest someone after my explanation. But, he explained, the real crime is not a landowner disconnecting power on a property with an unwanted squatter.  It was the landowner collecting rent for years while refusing to permit or build the required septic system. In addition to the detailed police report, i filed a permanent complaint against Badger LLC with the Washington state attourney general.

That is where I am at now. the Belsbys scratching at me, the scammy lawyer sending me stupid documents, no water or grid power, and a dead truck. I have needed medical attention to stay alive several times recently, so I estimate that I would last less than a year as a homeless disabled person. I can not tow 5 or 6 buildings around with a dead Tacoma, so I have no option to leave.  disconnecting the power after forcing me to pay it for over a year has made them seem cruel and greedy.  The family's cruelty has trapped me here. disconnecting the power has bankrupted me so that I can not move even if I find a place. The Belsby family has a history of 'helping' a poor person, and then evicting them without any of their possessions. That happened at least twice while I lived at 292, and we have an abandoned RV on the property filled with one guys chattels as well as a 25 foot trailer that was given to me after another man was ousted from Daren's home place in Winthrop.

update jan 14th 2023....

i bought enough solar panels, but not near enough batteries to form 2 complete solar energy systems. i can have lights and computer for 3 days into a storm, but the storms are 2 weeks long now! I sold my truck to  buy more batteries. so far, i ordered a single LiFeO4 12 v 200 amp hour cell, and i am testing that now. if it pasees, i plan to buy 3 more of the same cells. the 4 can be configured into a 200 amp hour 48 volt bank, a 400 amp hour 24 volt bank, or a 800 amp hour 12 volt bank. That is convenient, because i currently have an inverter of each size.

NOTE: I did save up money in a bank account, and tried to spend it on the batteries. The bank is run by the US government, and they are not sending any of their money to China these days. i was unable to buy a single battery of the desired 3. Even the helper at the government bank explained to me how to launder the money so that it can be spent on Chinese goods. [Amazon!]. However, it seems dishonest to accept disability money from the MAN, and then defraud them by using light fraud to spend it efficiently. It seems that fraud is no longer a crime in the US. Citizens are encouraged to lie in order to get more money. Lying to get money is not a sin, but rather, is now thought to be admirable. We elected a lying president!

ski conditions have gotten acceptable a few times, and i have managed a 60 km ski with little trouble. the 100 km that is my goal seems unlikely. there is just not enough time in a day. i have been trying to speed up, but then i poop out too quickly.

update feb 21

i have had some luck getting into shape for skate skiing.

I have gone over 60 km maybe 20 times, but have not reached the desired 100 km goal. I got very tired of sitting in the dark after my lead acid batteries were all drained. i sold my toyota tacoma, and bought a LiFePo4 battery with high energy density.

i set up an inverter system in my office, so that when the lights go out, I can switch to one final back up system and watch it carefully as the voltage drops.

I used an old charge control and inverter at first, but this system needs to be silent and very efficient. I used more truck money to buy a fan-less inverter from Morningstar.

The redodo brand battery has already proven to be astounding at retaining a charge [with almost no loss over time], and at taking a charge [with little or no internal resistance] In short, it stays charged, and it charges so easily that a tiny trickle will work over a long period of time. If you are familiar with solar energy systems, there is no float stage needed for a lithium ion battery. it does not require a small current to be added to stay charged. i selected the 200 amp hour 12v  plus model, which is the more expensive one that has a larger battery management system so that it can provide 2000 watts instantly.

Once a user has tried lithium batteries, i am pretty sure that there is no going back. I hope to double the battery next month, while the first is new enough to pair with an unused battery. Then, there will be 400 amp hours of 12v storage available, which is a pretty big backup. It is roughly half of what is stored in the larger buildings. The kitchen has 200 amp hours at 48 volts, and the shop has 350 amp hours at 24 volts.

update march 4

The morningstar inverter in the previous photo worked for a few days, and then had an internal fire. It stunk up the house, and had to be immediately unmounted and put outside. It is lucky that the plastic shroud over the front of the device did not get hot enough to melt and ignite and catch the wall on fire. This is the second morningstar product that has melted down on me, so it is the last of their products that i will try. It seems that they are yet another company that has loosened or stopped doing quality control. Amazon has pioneered this idea of sending out every unit that is made, and letting the customers see which ones work well. If nothing else, they can drag their heels on returning the money, and keep it for a few months at least.

 I have managed to ski 90 km on an icy day when the entire methow trails system was groomed. i skied there and back on the entire methow community trail that runs from Winthrop to a point about 15 km past mazama. I am reminded that these endurance stunts are kind of stupid. the supposed endurance athlete is simply doing 2 days of activity in a single day without sleeping in between.

Badger LLC and the eviction:

Seeing the snow melt off is making me worry about the eviction again. i have no vehicle, and have been towing a propane bottle to town on the ski trail. I also bring home food using the trail. Skate skiing with a pretty heavy pack, or adding the pack to the full propane tank on the trailer.

The property owners are the Belsby family, who own the sprawling Cherry Springs ranch in eastern Washington, Spring Creek Ranch in Winthrop, and many other properties. Daren lives in downtown Winthrop and Brian lives in a gated community near Spokane. The senior Belsbys live at Cherry Springs ranch, near Spokane.  There is some question how such a powerful family could mistreat an elderly and disabled employee. An employee that became disabled while working for the Belsby family. It seems sure that the employee must be a bad person who stole from them, and refused to carry out their end of the work. This is not the case, and there were never any hints that the Belsbys were dissatisfied with my work on the parents Cherry Springs ranch [heavy machine work, welding, mechanics], Brian Belsbys property [complete wiring of a new shop], at Spring creek ranch in Winthrop [heavy machine work, carpentry], or at 292 Wolf creek road [heavy machine work, agriculture]. 

my work at Cherry springs was well compensated, so the parents appreciated and paid for any work that they received.

It seems odd that a very powerful family would collect rent at 400 dollars of work per month, and refuse to build a septic on the property. I built 5 portable buildings, and was always standing by to do the backhoe work and the plumbing for the septic system. I made about 20 or 25 thousand dollars worth of improvements at 292, and this can easily be shown using old and new google maps. The last owner of 292 stopped by to voice his surprise that a single person had cleaned up that trashed out property. When I looked into the matter, it seemed that the 2 brothers, Daren and Brian Belsby, had both refused to work the Cherry Springs ranch. They each have something going in either Winthrop or Spokane. Daren is the head smoke jumper for the Winthrop area, and Brian has an engineering company in Spokane.  They are very very different for 2 brothers! Daren has 2 kids that he treats really well. He is the ideal dad and employer. He is always trying to help people in need, and that has led to some trouble. He met his wife, Sarah, while jumping out of aircraft into ongoing fires! Daren and Sarah own a cat 420d backhoe in working condition, and i have used this machine a lot. hundreds or thousands of hours of operation. knocking down unwanted buildings, filling huge holes, piling trees and old foundation material for burning, creating new roads, etc.

Brian owns an even better backhoe, but he has never used it, and does not know how to use it. he has an airplane, and he flies it really well. He also has 2 kids and a wife, but he does not treat them as well as Daren treats his family.  He is abusive and kind of mean. While i worked for him doing the original wiring on his new shop, his dog attacked me over and over. Brain refused to believe that the 120 lb rottweiler could attack anyone, and demanded proof in the form of a video. I was not able to shoot a good video while running from the attack dog, so i figured out how to park my truck so that i could enter the shop without letting it bite me. coming outside to pee was a big problem.  I saw Daren make many trips to Cherry springs ranch to help his parents, but I did not see Brian helping, even though he lives nearby. And sadly, Brian did not understand what an LLC is. He formed Badger LLC with his brother so that they could profit from 292 wolf creek road without being exposed to personal financial loss. But, he thought that he could lie and do crooked business deals as a member of an LLC. He believed that his identity was hidden, and that an LLC enjoyed freedom from oversight.

When i checked this, it was far from the truth. An LLC protects its members from personal loss UNTIL there is fraud or other illegal business dealings. There is no question that Badger refused to build a septic, and also continued to rent 292. Badger wanted both things. improvements to 292, work on the other Winthrop property [spring creek Ranch]. And, they wanted to avoid the 25,000 dollar fee for a septic system. It is ironic that Badger tried this fraud, because they now owe the county several times the cost of a septic system in fines, and by any definition, they owe me about 25,000 dollars in rent. They need to return any rent paid after the first year. We were allowed to have an outhouse for the first year. for the next 3 years, i was under constant attack from the neighbors at wolf creek, the county, and lately, from Badger LLC. Badger is reluctant to try a legal eviction, since it would likely lead to a lawsuit and the loss of at least 292 wolf creek road and Badger LLC. There is no way to argue anything but purposeful fraud, because the septic permitting fee was also never paid. someone who actually intended to build a system would have paid the 500 dollar fee 4 times. It is clear that they always intended to have me improve the property, and then evict me before the county tried to collect the huge fine.

Knowing both brothers and the parents, I can say with certainty that Daren would never have come up with that plan. i saw his face when he proudly showed his brother the improvements to 292 wolf creek road. He had obtained these improvements simply by giving a poor person [me!] a place to live and a backhoe to use. Brian saw no improvements, and therefore, no reason to waste money on a fancy septic system. My buildings would be lost to a disagreement between wealthy brothers. Also, in loosing the address, I will loose the disability payments from the US government. they do not give those payments to homeless people, but only to those that reliably pick up their mail at a street address. Also, any lawsuit that I might wish to make to recover the 25,000 dollars in rent would not be possible. Homeless people do not have lawsuits or attend court sessions. I could be shown to be a hapless drifter, who is lazy and dishonest and does not deserve disability payments and a safe place to live. The cops could be sent here to taze me a lot of times, and give me some random injections. put my head in a bag, and push it down into the snow until I stopped being such a poor person nuisance.

However, i called the police when the Belsbys shut off the power at the start of winter. I was paying for the power, so it was a clear attempt to drive me from 292 to avoid building the septic or paying the fine. The police were very angry about this, and asked me to write to Ecology of Washington. They are the ones who need to bring the Belsbys to court to pay the fine or build the septic. Ecology has my statement now, but it could take a long time before they begin a court case: maybe years! Our local Sherriff is very willing to assign an investigator, to find out if Badger LLC broke any laws in refusing to build the septic, refusing to pay the fine for the refusal to build the septic, and doing harsh things to a disabled renter to drive them from their own buildings.

I welcome a full investigation of these events. secrecy will help Badger LLC. They will continue to sit on millions of dollars of wealth while I am driven from place to place as a homeless and disabled person. The buildings were the last things that I constructed while I could still lift fairly heavy things like sheets of plywood and timbers. I feel that watching them burned by the Belsbys would negatively affect my physical and mental health. It seems likely that I would die very soon. Badger LLC should not kill anyone to avoid obeying laws and paying fines. That is not the reason that LLCs are formed.

I like irony, so I have to point out that i am the black sheep member of a wealthy Jewish family. My father and his brother own the Randell press. It is on 6th avenue in Manhattan. If I had wanted a lot of money, I could have just stayed home! I spoke with my father at length about the problem with the 2 Belsby brothers. The problem was very familiar to my father, who had always done the printing at the Randell press, and left the money handling to his older brother. my father was always trying to help people, including the poor homeless folks that he would find sleeping in the somewhat protected doorway of the Randell press when he opened the shop. He was not so good with money, but he was [and still is at 90!] a gifted athlete and deeply ethical. Maybe ethics and honesty are for the impractical folk that do the actual work of society. the money handlers concentrate on harming others to get more money. They use numbers of dollars in the place of ethics. Numbers on a spreadsheet are far easier to work with than human lives.

If you have to leave your state for an abortion, Dont come back!

 in my usual absurd and simplistic manner, I suggest that women who take their ovaries to another US state to get any kind of care, stay in that state permanently. 

Why would you return to a state that has seized control of your egg supply? You are not a chicken, who is owned by a farmer, and who lays eggs for that farmer! You are a person! Clearly, When Margaret Attwood wrote The Handmaids Tale, she was warning us against converting women into the property of men. She was not creating a manual for the enslavement of her gender.

So, when you are forced from your state to get medical care that is not legal there, please do not go back. I know that you have a job and a house and friends of both genders there. You had to leave to get the one fertilized egg decommissioned. Now is your chance to regain control of all the remaining eggs. You will be able to raise the offspring that you choose to give birth to; in a system where they have similar personal freedoms.

First off, I want to deal with the idea that these anti abortion laws are just the start of something. The current trend of preventing minorities from voting, and forcing women to give birth is heading somewhere. one must remember that the far right favors walls and punishments and militarized borders. They are going for something like a cold civil war.

At some point, the walls will go up, and there will be no more leaving that state. Everyone who lives in that state will become a permanent resident who may not leave. Obviously, you have to be gone before then. There may be no announcement by mail, or on the TV or radio. The state border could turn into a militarized country border overnight with no warning.

It is a backsliding of rights, so that is unusual. Imagine a young US before the slave trade got going. Then, on a certain date large scale human trafficking begins. One day, a darkly skinned person can cross from south to north, or north to south according to their own desires. The next day, they are someone's personal property on one side of the border, and they own themselves on the other side of that line. 

As far as doctors, I can not imagine a single female doctor would choose to stay in a state where the men own the woman. A woman who has gone through a lot of schooling, and has accepted responsibility for the care of others will not like being told that she herself is no longer qualified to make decisions about her own eggs or ovaries. That goes for trainees as well. Who would  train to be medical provider in a state where a raped woman must always give birth to her rapists baby, even if that baby is her brother or sister.

If people accept this state of affairs in the republican led states, it means that they will likely go a bit further, and tolerate other unusual erosion of rights. Perhaps slavery could return in some states. Certainly people of color and native Americans have been discouraged from voting. It is hard to dream up the measures that we could see, because going backwards in human rights seems deeply wrong. We could see a different minimum wage and draft requirements for blacks and whites. Women could have a birth certificate that provided to the father at birth. A Dad would legally own his daughter, and would sell her to the husband by signing the birth certificate in the appropriate box like a car title.

Yes, I find it creepy that People are using books like Mine Kompf and The Handmaids Tale as manuals for their coup attempt. Certainly Hitler's plan succeeded in a brutal and efficient manner. When he got into power for the second time, he was able to mobilize a violent minority to take over all of Germany, and then much of Europe! he told lies in a louder and louder voice until he got enough people to believe the lies. But, following the handmaids tale to it's ugly fruition is a date with disaster. And, it is good to remember that we have much much more harmful weapons than did Hitler in 1940. It is my hope that we will quit prodding Russia and China to participate in a nuclear contest with us. That we will reverse the decisions of this worthless supreme court, and put real justices on the bench. The reactionary ones were put in specifically to help with coup attempts and the further erosion of civil rights.

I suggest that we help women who wish to move out of states where they do not own their eggs. provide transport and a military escort. Help them to settle in an area that allows them to make personal birth and travel decisions. Either this right wing fandango will fade, or we will be having a civil war before we can irritate anyone into firing nukes at us. The first US civil war was nasty, but the second could be much worse. I purposely moved from a far right state to Washington when Trump took office, so I do walk the walk. I wished to be on the correct side of Trump's wall if it is built to surround the right wing states. So, that is my suggestion. If you are liberal, get to a liberal state.

compact work station for image editing and gaming.

 I had been able to build an amazing compact light gamer, and a medium sized box that can game at 1440 p. I had attempted to upgrade the medium machine with a great AMD processor. But, this failed when i was sent a bad AMD 5900x chip for close to 500 dollars. Amazon was reluctant to take it back. I threw a fit, and finally ended up just mailing it back to them and yelling at customer service.

I bought a small mother board that can handle the new 12 generation intel chips, and the i7 12700kf processor. both mother board and processor arrived in open packages. someone had already tried both items and found them wanting! The processor box had been opened, but it contained a perfectly clean processor in the intel packaging. the mother board was the one that i had ordered, but it was not in an intel box at all. it was in a taped closed bag with a little bit of paper in there saying amazon refurbished. there was no gigabyte stuff in the bag at all, although all of the usual connectors were in the bag.

this mother board was beat to hell. it could not start with any modern memory. it only booted with 2 old 8 gig memory sticks at a very low clock speed. It had physical damage, so that the video card did not fit in properly. The usb 3.2 header did not work at all. I installed windows, and tried to use the board, but it was junk.  I asked for a ups pickup for both board and processor, but Amazon customer service refused to take the processor back! I sent the mother board back, and they sent a new board in a sealed gigabyte box. I placed the used i7 processor on that board, and it all worked! holy moly, it had been months of battling with Amazon.com to try to get parts for a working high end machine.

By contrast, Amazon had given up trying to sell video cards, and the 3rd party company that I chose sent a sealed box containing a NEW and factory tested asus rtx 3080. This is a huge card, with a massive, thick heatsink and 3 high speed fans. to provide a bit of room around the huge gpu, I chose the Sliger Cerberus case. This case can handle a micro ATX motherboard, which is 9 inches square, and has extra room when you use the 7 inch square mini ITX size of motherboard.

Here is how the case looks from the outside. I got the gray color, which is just beautiful in my opinion....

and inside, you can see the inch or so of space between the lower case fans and the graphics card. the case is long enough and wide enough so that the case fans are not blocked by the gpu, and they are able to positively pressure this case. Exhaust fans at the top further enforce bottom to top airflow. There is room beyond the graphics card for a slim intake fan to it's right.

For cooling, I had originally used a much larger 14 s cooler from noctua. this removed heat from the processor super well, but left the memory and other  components of the mother board screaming hot. I have switched to the much smaller noctua NH-L9x65, and i have mounted a 25 by 140 mm fan instead of a 15 by 92 mm fan. This provides powerful blast of air to chill the m.2 drives, the vrms that power the processor, and the other hot components.

I fit in a data center drive, which is great when I use this machine for graphics. It is a 12 T iron wolf from Seagate. very noisy, but absurdly fast. I use it like a tape backup, because it is dozens of times slower than the 2 * 2T m.2 drives fixed to the motherboard. The convenience of having all images and videos on hand in the box outweighs the extra heat generated. There is ample room for at least 2 3.5 inch drives in this configuration. But, even with this large, well ventilated case, It is hard to keep components cool during gaming. This is the most fans that the Sliger company has seen in the case.

Setting up the system for both gaming and image editing is not so easy. The demands are super different. For still image editing, the i7 is fully used only for very short bursts. Fewer fans can be used, and components can be very close in the box. the environment inside the case is cool, with little bursts of heat that have plenty of time to clear out. Gaming at 4k is a hot proposition. the GPU is going at 365 watts, and the mother board and processor can use over 200 watts. The hard drive and the power supply itself make heat, and the entire inside of the case is 'heat soaked' with a certain minimum temperature. The case is a small oven during games, and if the hot air can not be quickly changed, temperature will go up and up until the processor and the graphics card and the drives all slow down to reduce their temperature.

Within the virtual world of the game, a super sized cup of hot coffee is spilling onto your virtual junk. The monsters have become jerky robots that are killing the heck out of you, and you are running in place. By the time you shoot, they are long gone! So for gaming, you get the oven hot by running a benchmark program instead of a game. then, you monkey with the fan speeds, and the voltage that is sent to both processor and graphics card. A perfect spot is sought, where the voltage is as low as possible for stable operation. As the voltage is dropped to these components, they actually go faster and faster, and make less and less heat. at some point, depending on the efficiency of the part that one ended up with, you get unstable video, followed by a crash. When using a benchmark program within windows, the benchmark program crashes, but windows is fine, and the computer keeps running. So, you can make a lot of small changes quickly, without having to restart a large game, or windows itself.

After the best settings are found in the benchmark program, you start the most demanding game, and play it intensely to see if it will crash. The same thing is going on with your heart, where you are running up it's beats to some healthy maximum. With the heart, you can not go until it crashes though! Computer gaming is not for everyone, and it is only fun for people like me who actually enjoy being highly excited and frustrated for long periods of time.

further refinements: 

the low profile cooler splashed a lot of air onto the mother board, cooling the components that were overheating. This was good enough for gaming where the processor is only used intensely for short bursts [to load new game levels]. It heats up, but then the game proceeds normally and the processor has time to cool down while the video card does the hard work. With image editing, the situation is different. the processor has long hard tasks to do, and it heats up and slows itself down. it makes a lot of noise when the fan on the inadequate heat sink reaches 100% and stays there.

I finally realized that it would be OK to use the large noctua c14s heatsink with the fans blowing the hot air onto the mother board. It just seemed wrong to get all that heat from the cpu, and blow it right back onto the hot motherboard components. I solved this problem by increasing the amount of air A LOT. I used the mellow 140 mm a14 fan against the mother board, and the very noisy NF-A14 industrial PPC-3000 PWM fan on the outside. I removed the mellow 90 mm fan that exhausts the case near the processor, and replaced it with the very aggressive and noisy fan that comes stock with AMD processors. 

for fan control, i had to use an aftermarket program that is not included in windows or mac operating systems. It is able to look at temperatures inside the computer, and base fan speeds on the maximum temperature averaged over a period of time. This is actually very important. while gaming, the fans must be aware of the temperature of the gpu, the cpu, the memory and the drives. the fans have to speed up to keep the hottest component cool. It does not matter how much noise this makes, as a slowing of the game is just not acceptable. So, I put the industrial fan on the outside of the heatsink and the aggressive fan that exhausts the case on the same fan circuit. they do not run at all when temps are normal. The fan on the motherboard side of the huge heat sink is plenty to keep the cpu cool. The 2 140 mm fans at the bottom of the case change the air in the case plenty fast. But, during gaming, when the gpu becomes a 350 watt heater and the cpu becomes a 200 watt heater, the industrial fans kick on. It is not noticable then, because zombies are chasing me all around, and my tiny home is being rocked by massive explosions. the 2 industrial fans ramp up in speed, and blow a remarkable jet of hot air across the room.

The cerberus case is set up for 2 120 mm fans at the bottom, but 140 mm fans fit if they have screw holes like the 120 mm. noctua has 2 types of fans like that: a general purpose round frame grey fan and a brown fan intended to fit on heat sinks with 120 mm fans. the fans can be mounted with screws or with special silicone fasteners that they include. wherever one can use the silicone fasteners, i do, because the fan will run silently at low rpm in that case. The fan can vibrate a little without rattling the metal of the case. Noctua has several ways of reducing noise in the case, including inventing special plastics and coming up with new ways to make plastic parts that fit like finely machined metal parts. The builder of computers does not need to learn all about fan design. they just need to pay 30 bucks a pop for each Austrian fan.

i had been using a mini itx mother board in this case, even though it is able to fit a micro ATX board. I found some problems with such a compact build, so i invested in an inexpensive micro atx mother board, the ASUS Prime Z690M-Plus D4. This board is not full of expensive attractions. instead, it has 3 simple m.2 slots  arranged flat on the pcb, and the area around the cpu is not built up tall as it is on the smaller motherboards. Thus, the memory, and the m.2 drives and the other hot components on the board get plenty of wind from pretty much any fan in the case.

the larger board also makes it easy to get into the case with fingers, and make use of fan headers, m.2 drives, and other things without much disassembly. Of course, it allows 4 memory sticks instead of 2, or much more room around a half empty memory stack for great cooling. 

After watching about a thousand you tube videos, from super users like optimum tech, i became confident enough to strip away the fan shroud and 3 fans from my rtx 3080, and replace that with 2 Phanteks T30-120 fans. These extra thick fans drive much more air through the huge heatsink of the asus tough gaming card. It is absurd how cool it runs now, with 4K gaming in the lower 60s C. i can not imagine water cooling a 350 watt video card when this simple modification is so simple and allows such quiet operation. In this case, there is plenty of room for 140 mm case fans beneath the modified gpu.

I removed the data center drive, to further increase airflow and lower gaming temps. Also, the machine runs noticeably faster without the pauses for the drive to start up. I cable managed the result to create large areas of unobstructed airflow. I added an m.2 drive to the empty 3rd slot, to make more storage after removing the huge drive.

This build still struggles with the 2 16 gig ram sticks that i started with. I have purchased the newer 13 generation I5 processor, and set up a graphics workstation using 2 32 gig memory sticks. The smaller memory and lack of hard drive space make this a dedicated gaming and entertainment machine that can tackle small image editing jobs. When needed, the data center drive is attached as a USB 3 external drive. It is actually not any slower than it is in the case, and adding it brings back the system pauses that are no longer very acceptable.