testing the best screen that i have found for raspberry pi

 

I am creating what is called a cyberdeck using the raspberry pi compute module 5 paired with the wisecoco 10.1 inch amoled display.

 

I am using this particular screen because it's resolution is 2560 by 1600, making it ideal for working with more than one window at a time.

Among the different implementations of this particular amoled display,  The Wisecoco screen has by far the best case for mounting to an arm, because it is machined from a single slab of aluminum, and it is tapped for the 3 mm screws on a standard 75 mm pattern. It is also tapped with the 2.5 mm holes to mount any of the pi family directly on the back of the screen. Perhaps best yet, for setting the screen into the lid of a plastic case, the ports are set back a few cm from the edge of the screen, leaving ample room for the power and data cables to be hidden behind the screen inside of the lid.

  

I got to look into this screen very deeply, because when i mounted it into the lid of a pelican case, it fell apart the first time the case was closed. The glass did not break, but it seems that something was damaged, because the screen quit lighting up. I dumped the glass out again, and tried resetting the delicate backlight cable that had taken the weight of the falling glass. I tried a lot of times, actually, and finally got the screen working for a few days more.

 

But, eventually it quit entirely again, and I notified Wisecoco about the incident. I told them my screen was lacking either two sided tape or  glue on the machined surfaces where the back of the screen rests. Also, i had found a loose screw inside, besides the 3 that were holding on the display board.

 

Luckily, Wisecoco is one of those companies that care a lot about quality, and they very quickly shipped me another screen with all the useful cables.

The photo is of my home-made triangular desk after receiving the replacement screen, and mounting it to the arm next to my 27 inch oled screen. 

 

As far as machines that i have tested this screen with, I first tried the Lattepanda Mu module mounted to the official light carrier board. It worked perfectly, and provided beautiful gaming when i added a low profile rtx 4060 to the pci-e port of the light carrier board. The amoled screen is only a 60 hz screen, but that works well with the reduced performance of the 4060 when it's 8 lanes of pci 4 are bottle-necked through the 4 pins of pci 3 found on the Mu. 

The Mu [without the low profile gpu] fits well in the low volume case that is exactly the size of the 10.1 inch screen.  There is ample room for a large dc/dc voltage converter, a powered usb-3 hub, and some m.2 drives in enclosures.

 

I don't need that much power in my portable cyberdeck, so I next tested the raspberry pi 5 with wifi and 4 gigs of ram. This works flawless out of the box. The pi 5 has enough power to run both 2k screens at the same time, as well as a smaller dci screen that is driven directly from the pi5.

The pi5 lacks a headphone jack, but the sound comes through the hdmi cable along with the video, and the two speakers on the screen are loud enough if you boost the sound to 120 %. I created an icon on the desktop that boosts the audio to 120% with a single click.

 

I tried the wisecoco screen with the smaller pi zero 2w, but it did not work out of the box. The zero can not output larger than a 1080 pixel tall signal, and the wisecoco screen does not automatically downscale to 1080. I think that it would be fairly easy to get the zero configured manually to output 1280 by 800 pixels, but this screen is too nice to downscale it like that.

 

Currently, I am testing the Raspberry pi computer module 5 with 8 gigs of memory and wifi. It also works flawlessly with the high resolution screen, and the module allows for some nice improvements over the pi5 computer. The module has an external wifi antenae, so it gets a stronger signal. Also, using the waveshare nano b carrier board, I get a headphone jack as well as the ability to boot from a m.2 card.

 

I got very excited poking around in the aluminum housing of the screen, because it is ideal for making a version where the pi 5 compute module mounts directly to the display board. The maker is clearly able to machine to very small tolerances inside the case, so it would be possible to cool the cm5 with the aluminum of the whole case. A little thickness needs to be added, and, the ports would no longer be for signal input and power. They would be the io ports of the cm5, and 6 - 24 volts for charging a thin li polymer battery. And, there would be a place to attach several external antenae, in case the cm5 has wifi, or a cell module or software defined radio is added.

 

the current display board is only about half size, so increasing it to full size should provide ample room for mounting the cm5, and for the charging system,  and mounting for one or two m.2 drives.

 

I have checked very carefully, and there is no general purpose tablet kit for the cm5 that is silent, high resolution, and built from a single slab of metal. 

The cm5 is the correct module to base a long term tablet product on, because it has remained port compliant with the cm4, and will likely be compliant again with the cm6 in some years. Raspberry pi has amazing long term product availability as well as software support for every pi made since the first model. 

 

I have posted this early account of the testing for my cyberdeck, because Wisecoco reached out to me, saying that another customer can not get their screen to work with a pi5.  I have had the opposite experience. Aside from the surprise with the  missing 2 sided tape, this screen has worked out of box as a second screen for my gaming system. It is perfect for monitoring temperatures and downloads while gaming on the faster and larger screen. I could rotate the screen, and make it my main screen so that the i could use my mouse or touch to navigate.

 

It worked perfectly with each model of single board computer, except the pi zero 2w which lacks the compute to run the screen. The sound is adequate, about like a cheap laptop. It is the most readable screen that I have ever seen, and is just perfect for reading text or watching movies in bed. If i take my glasses off, i can focus to about 6 inches, and this screen becomes something like virtual reality. The screen has 5 levels of brightness, accessed by long presses on the single button. short presses turn the screen on and off.

 

 Notes on using the 10 inch amoled screen as a second screen:

 

O yea, this thing is perfect for a second screen. I have noticed that 2 27 inch screens makes such a wide view that the neck becomes tired looking back and forth. In the above image, the 27 inch screen is the 360 hz gaming oled from Dell. The 10 inch screen actually presents a few hundred more pixels in hight than the 27 inch screen, even though it is a little greater than 1/3 the diagonal measure. So, this screen makes an image or a video pop more than i have even seen before. There is no way at all to see a pixel, or to notice that you are viewing a screen instead of a 2 dimensional view of a subject.

 

In fact, I now watch the news on the 10 inch screen in the morning, even though the 27 inch is right beside it. the Pi cm5 is already running, And it looks better if anything. A warning about oled screens: dont try one until you are ready to change over. After you use an oled, a movie or a photo on even the best of the old backlit screens will no longer look real. it will look like the old rounded tube tvs looked after we already got used to flat screens. So, after you get a large oled that rivals your samsung or iphone in quality, all of your screens will need to be changed. It could cost thousands of dollars!

 

The screen uses about 10 watts of 5 volt dc current, and i have found that the standard 12 v to 24 v input and 5 volt output buck converter [about 8 dollars on amazon] works best. I have rigged a switch for the converter, so that i can shut the screen off very easily. 

 

In this shot, the 10 inch screen is mounted via a quick release to a super simple aluminum arm that was 25 dollars on amazon. I have found that the post of the arm is great for attaching switches, m.2 enclosures, a usb 3 dock, and a raspberry pi cm5 in the smallest possible configuration.

 

 The cm5 is attached to the Waveshare nano - b carrier board, which is the same size as the module.

A huge heat sink is attached to the processor, so that no fan is needed. It may be possible to stick the processor right to a the anodized aluminum of the arm. I have done that with a m.2 2230 enclosure. It used to get really hot, but now, it heats the whole arm.

 

When i travel, i will rig the 10 inch screen to the lid of a box that is exactly the same size, forming a sort of laptop screen for any sbc that i place in the bottom part of the box. The sbc can run on a power brick, as that is cheaper than setting up a battery and a charger. I am debating between trying to mount the little keyboard that also fits in the bottom of the box, or should i install a second screen? having 2 working touch screens would be nice, where you could work on different documents, or use the lower screen for a keyboard, and the upper for the website or document. Raspberry pi 5 handles screens super fluidly, so you could turn either of the 2 screens off,

or use them in conjunction with additional external screens. It is easy to add 2 hdmi screens which each need a data cable, as well as a power/touch cable, and 2 dci screens that each receive power and signal and touch from a dedicated dci cable.

 

 

In summary, this Wiscoco 10.1 inch amoled display is the single best made medium sized screen for both desktop use and for projects. I dream of a tablet kit based on the Pi CM5. Then, there would just be a single slab of metal attached to the stand, with a single power wire leading to it. 

 

I would be very willing to help in the design and testing of such a tablet. I am a retired engineer, and need fun projects to do!

 

 

 

 

 

 

new favorite small computer!

 this is one of the two new 'nano' carrier boards from the company Waveshare.

Snapped to it is the raspberry pi cm5, that itself is wearing a heat sink and fan.

The cm5 is a full raspberry pi 5 computer, without any ports. 

  

 

 

In this case, it is snapped to the nano carrier board.

the carrier is the same size as the cm5, and has a power port, an ethernet port, a usb port, and an hdmi port.

 

  

You see a complete computer system, including a heat sink that is much larger than the other components, and a small fan. The result is only slightly larger than a match box.

 

you may notice the headphone jack, which is what got me all excited to try the nano b carrier board.

This thing is so packed! there is a port for a tiny pwm fan, a place to plug in a real time clock battery, 3 tiny switches, and 2 ports for a camera or a touch display.

On the back of the carrier is a holder for the micro sd card, and you can see it protruding from the upper left. there is also a place to attach the standard pci express cable, as well as headers for a second hdmi port, and an additional usb port. 

 

the card that is inserted is a 500 gig samsung, with the latest raspberry pi OS. I have installed the samba server, so that files in my shared directory are available to any other computer on the same wireless system.

 

The CM5 uses the least power of any in the raspberry pi5 generation, so it is ideal for leaving on for very long periods.  

This example is the model with 8 gigs of memory and wifi, so it was over 100 dollars. the nano b carrier board is 25 dollars. The heat sink is 7 dollars, and the fan is 3 dollars.  I wanted the 8 gig model for running a server, but also watching youtube videos, playing old games, and downloading for days at a time. And, doubling the memory increases the processor speed and snappiness of the cm5.

 

As far as i know, no case exists for this baby, outside of several 3d prints that are available on line.

A great case might be a worthy project! 

 

 

Which countries are US allies now?

We have elected a president that promised to become a dictator, and to somehow stop America's fast decline. A supposed business genius that we now find is simply a con man and liar. 

Have we indeed become great? let us look at some things that have changed. 

 

 

1. low income US citizens are loosing rural mail service, free medical care, and much of the safety net that the US was once respected for. It is a kind of corporate downsizing, where the lower wealth US citizens will be made homeless, driven from place to place by militarized police, and finally expelled from the US or killed. Our willingness to pay for the Israelis to drive surviving native Israelis into Egypt foreshadows the plans for the continental US. Perhaps here, homeless Americans could be driven south into Mexico? The small share of national wealth that was held by the lower half of the US economy will be passed to the super rich as tax savings and lucrative government contracts. Elon will be able to continue heating up and harming the earth, and will likely get to play rocket man with the money that was once used to control monopolies, and feed, house and medicate the poor. He will fly to mars on food stamps! 

 

2. We have paid the Israelis to continue bombing Gaza, so that their prime minister can continue to ignore the will of his own constituents. They have turned Palestinians, who are basically the native Israelis, into non humans who should be killed or driven off. Much like the Native Americans and the undocumented in the US, these unwanted natives have been hunted and pushed from place to place for 75 years or more. Where they used to run rural farms, they are now jammed into walled cities, and may not leave. This is very obviously the most cruel thing that the US has paid for and participated in since we chased the native Americans around, killed them and destroyed their food supply. Amusingly, we colonizers killed off our own food supply as well, so that cows would dominate the landscape instead of deer and buffalo. We had essentially privatized the free meat! 

 

3. We have purposely hurt our allies, and driven them to deal with our enemies and competitors. Now, Canada will be buying from China and Europe instead of from us.They have sent us back our Tennessee sipping whiskey and our hated Tesla cars.They are currently talking about charging us to go to Alaska by road, or even blocking our land access entirely. The reason for our attacks against Canada are totally absurd, as most fentanyl goes from the US to Canada, and not the other way around. Who will benefit from these trade wars? certainly not ordinary middle class citizens. Their wages will drop, many will loose jobs, and prices will go up. Homeless populations will soar in the US and in the lands of our trade war enemies. As I have predicted for years, poor people will soon be hordes of zombies, driven from place to place, but denied entrance into cities or towns. Instead of help, they will get bullets and tear gas. 

 

4. We have betrayed NATO, which is our strongest group of allies. NATO uses our super expensive and slightly better f35 jet as it's main air workhorse. Common use of this jet made the US rich, and allowed NATO forces to coordinate well, and to easily maintain this one kind of machine. Like the Tesla car, the f35 is now a symbol of the the cruel and abusive trump regime. Unless we change our behavior, NATO will let it's f35s age out without much maintenance. They will replace them with much cheaper, and only slightly more visible and less lethal planes. 

 

5. It is clear to the rest of the world [although, strangely, not to us?] that a coup has occurred, where the biggest companies in the US have literally taken over the federal government. Nothing about the coup was secretive.The plan was published long before the election. The company heads paid for trumps election, and stood behind him from the start. Social security would be de-funded. The early warning health care system that we set up for the entire world would be abandoned. We would shutter pretty much every government department meant to control monopolies and discourage fraud and corporate cheating. We would abruptly stop assisting the poor all over the world, leaving a huge gap for china to stroll into. China will now get the good will and raw materials of the third world nations that we abandoned. 

 

6. US Judges are the last line of defense. If Trump can safely ignore their decisions, or fire the ones that will not cooperate, the US will quickly change its form of government. We will be done with the rule of the people, and will be lead by the wealthiest Americans. It seems likely that there will be attempts to rebel. Ironically, Trump will have to disarm the people of the US, even though a love of private gun ownership was a hook used to fool the working class into electing the despot. To sum this up, i will answer my title question. Israel is our last remaining ally. After both the US and Israel further infuriate the world with epic misbehaviors, This strong partnership will have to fight the entire world. I don't see how we can win a war like that. It is so strongly reminiscent of WW2, where Germany and Japan took on the entire planet. You can only fight the whole world when your country is ruled by hate and division. Hate starts wars, but does not win them. Hate always turns on itself in time, as it did for Germany. Hitler started strong, but later turned against his strongest ally. Does this sound similar to our present situation? I believe so. i want to leave you with an image:

 

Imagine the leaders of many countries meeting to decide how to oppose, and even destroy, the US of A. Instead of a period of glorious prosperity, we are headed for world war. It will be fought right here, in US cities and rural areas. Because our weapons are more powerful, it will not be as quick as ww2. i believe that it will drag on for decades, until folks forget why they are fighting. Remember that during world wars, we also have pandemics, internal race wars, and increasing natural disasters. 

 

So, for your safety, i will provide the following:

 

 You can translate "can I have some food?" to Chinese as 

 

"我可以吃点东西吗？" (Wǒ kěyǐ chī diǎn dōngxi ma?). 

 

Here's a breakdown: 

我可以 (wǒ kěyǐ): "I can" or "I may". 

吃 (chī): "to eat". 

点 (diǎn): "a little" or "some". 

东西 (dōngxi): "things" or "food". 

吗？ (ma?): question marker. 

 

 also please memorize: 

 

我其實是一個美國原住民。我在第三次世界大戰期間強烈反對唐納德·特朗普 

 

Wǒ qíshí shì yīgè měiguó yuán zhùmín. Wǒ zài dì sān cì shìjiè dàzhàn qíjiān qiángliè fǎnduì tángnàdé·tè lǎng pǔ

 

 which means: 

 

i am actually a native American. i strongly opposed Donald Trump during ww3.

 

 In the present day, over 30% of Germans think that their family was anti Hitler, and helped to hide Jews during WW2. It is time to come up with the story that you will tell your grand kids when they ask you why you supported trump. Why you took no action while the education system was purposely crippled, immigrants were rounded up and sent to torture prisons in El Salvador, and when we turned against our own allies in a trade war, and why we then took on the combined armed forces of the planet Earth.

revised best gaming rig

 

this is my new amd 7600x and rtx 4070 moved to a larger box so that i could plug the graphics card right into the asrock a620 mini itx board.

I originally tried it with case fans on the bottom, and another set of thin fans strapped to the pny graphics card. But, it is cooler and more quiet with just a single set of  25 mm thick fans strapped to the 4070. The noctua quiet fans act as both gpu fans and intake fans for the case.

 

there is room for a larger cooler, but that starts to block the air flow in the case. Also, the AMD 7600x surges up to about 100 watts, but typically games at 60 watts, and shows a 4k movie using about 40 watts. So, a huge cooler is not needed. this 90 mm low profile noctua does the job, especially with the 120 by 15 mm noctua fan just above it vacuuming the hot air quickly out of the case.

The 4070 peaks at only 200 watts, and games at more like 150. So it is relatively easy to keep cool.

 

The hdplex 500 watt atx power supply provides ample power, and also leaves room for more airflow lanes through the case and a 3.5 inch data center drive.

this is peak case airflow, with all fans facing up.

it is true that these cases where the gpu plugs right into the mother board typically have hot spots, compared with sandwhich style cases that use a riser cable to house the graphics card in its own private compartment. 

The hard drive is rarely heard, as i use the data center drive as a long term backup for the pair of 2 tb m.2 drives on the motherboard. you can see the samsung drive on the top.

 

the cooling is so good in this sliger case that extra overclocking headroom is enjoyed. I am able to use +237 mhz on the gpu chip, and +900 mhz on the gpu memory. in this mode, the low power chip speeds along, with little delays when it hits its feeble power limit of 200 watts at 1.1 volts. 

the gaming is amazingly quiet, with the 90 mm fan on the cooler being the only fan smaller than 120 mm. And, non gaming operation is silent. you actually have to look for the light on the power button to find out if the system is on.

 

The new AMD graphics cards are out, and it looks like they have hit it out of the park in terms of value. i am eying a small form factor card like the powercolor reaper 9070xt, which could drop right into this system. We will see when the wildly inflated GPU prices fall toward MSRP.

new medium sized gaming system in a form T1 case

 The Graphic card side is shown here. I used a 2 fan pny rtx4070 after removing the shroud, and cable tying 2 noctua 120 * 15 mm fans to the heat sink.

The fans are a few millimeters from the mesh when the case is closed, but there is no rattling sound. They left enough room at the top of the case for a thin all in one water cooler, but, for this low wattage system, I used 2 phanteks t30 fans. These are the best 120 mm fans that i have found. they move a lot of air, make almost no sound, and are adjustable to low medium or high on each fan.

The motherboard side, with the asrock a620i mb mounted with the amd 7600x processor. cooling the processor is the noctua L12 cooler. I had to try mounting it several ways to get the cooler to fit in the very restrictive case. 

 

This processor is impressing the heck out of me, and games well better than the intel 13600 KF, using much less power, and producing much much less heat. I actually tried the intel processor in this case, but it could not be air cooled.

 This low end motherboard is very impressive for 120 bucks, with a fixed io shield, 2 m.2 slots, and a somewhat beefy power solution for the cpu. It has 3 full sized fan ports, so you dont need those stupid little dongles that plug into the miniature ports on high end mbs. And, there are no daughter boards poking up from the board to cause issues and block airflow. There is one m.2 slot on the front, with a nice heat sink, and the second is on the back, with no heat sink. This is much better than the stack of 2 m.2 drives with their complicated attachment that you see on most boards now.

 

The board is free of rgb, as is the case. I do not understand the rgb craze, perhaps because i am 66. i do not want a light show in my case. I want a nearly silent gaming computer that stays super cool. 

For drawbacks, this motherboard lacks usb 4, or even fast usb 3 ports. there is a single usb-c port, and it is slow as well. Otherwise, i have no complaints.

 

The power supply is the corsair 750 sff. It is spaced out from the center, so that the hot air that blows through the back of the 4070 has a nice way to depart. also, if the fan operates, it gets cool air right through the mesh, and not a mix of cool outside air and hot air from inside the case. Of course, this psu is not working hard with a 200 watt gpu, and a 75 - 100 watt cpu. So, it mostly operates in it's fan-less mode. 

 

I do not want to give the impression that i am only doing crossword puzzles and looking at you tube videos on this machine. I am playing doom 2016, cyberpunk 2077 etc on a 360 hz 2k monitor. I am downloading large files and making large file transfers, even while gaming. The processor and the video card have no trouble with these tasks, and so far, I believe that there is no reason to upgrade the amd 7600x until i get a more powerful video card. I do intend to eventually upgrade to the 9800x3d and something like the upcoming rtx 5080.

 

 but, for now, i am gaming at between 120 to 200 fps, and it is not a good deal to spend 4 times as much to get up to 250 fps.

trying to build a nearly impossible computer system. very small, very quiet, very low power consumption and nontheless not too bad for gaming and photo editing.

 Here is my first attempt. The equipment is:  

hdplex 500 watt atx power supply, 

noctua L12s cooler,

gigabyte b550 itx motherboard,

amd 5600G processor,

gigabyte low profile rtx 4060 gpu.

 

In this iteration of the design, I have tried to replace the stock fans of the low profile graphics card with larger noctua fans. this did not lower the temperature or the noise level, so i later went back to the stock shroud and cooler. 

The case for the early prototype is actually part of the shroud for a trace sw4024 inverter.

With either cooling solution, the low profile graphics card was fantastic in this build. both small and quiet, as well as gaming nearly as well as the much larger rtx 4070 for older games. For video playback, the 4060 does the rtx super-resolution quite well. It should be noted that super-resolution would cut out when i undervolted the card to 0.90 or 0.95 volts instead of the default 1.1 volts that it goes to under load. One has to run this tiny card full bore to enjoy all of the rtx enhancements. It uses as little as 100 watts while gaming, and around 80 watts to upscale a movie in real time.

The older amd 5600G processor can not keep up with the more modern graphics card, so there are very long load times when the scene changes in a game. To fix this, I ordered an inexpensive am5 motherboard, a amd 7600x processor, and the newer ddr5 memory. I hope that these parts will better compliment the tiny graphics powerhouse.

I should mention that although the 4060 was received poorly because it has little memory and a low power limit, this low profile model is quite at home in a small form factor gaming build. I highly recommend this gpu for it's low noise, low heat, and it's more than adequate gaming. One games at ultra settings at 1080 p and medium setting at 1440 P.

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 perform many 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 numbers 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!