The Wandering Minstrel

Last evening, I ordered a RACK’EM full door rack that holds up to 16 handguns on the door of the safe. I ordered it from Cheaper Than Dirt.

Fully adjustable Pistol Hooks(TM) attach to a wire grid, customizing the interior of any safe door and allowing easy access to your pistol. Pistol Hooks hold revolvers and semi-autos, from the smallest pocket pistols to the largest framed revolvers. The Maximizer allows air to circulate around your pistols to keep them dry, and a hydrophobic plastic coating protects their finishes. Fits all standard size safes and fastens securely to the top ledge of the safe door with screws. Constructed of solid steel and includes all hardware. Select from full-door or half-door racks. Full Door, Holds 16 Pistols, 48×16.75×2.25″.

I will post pix and a write-up when it gets installed here.

By the way, how do you like my new barcode watermark?

The software that I use for animations on this site is a Flash® animation tool called SwishMax4. I subscribe to their technical blog and just this week they added a jigsaw puzzle component. Of course, being the penultimate nerd, I had to try it out regardless of being of no actual use other than entertainment. The button controls are self-explanatory.

Almost exactly one year after we first met at the same site, The Better Half and I drove up to Fort MacArthur where DrJim of Every Blade of Grass was setting up for the ARRL Field Day event. We had an enjoyable, albeit brief, visit where we discussed work, retirement, the dogs and several other topics. DrJim and I share the same political leanings as well as many of the same interests.

Clickable image: Cap’n Bob/Minstrel (left) and DrJim (courtesy The Better Half)

We finished most of our California business and will be heading home tomorrow. We have a couple of milestones to make on the new house this coming week; our spa will soon be delivered (we hope) and after it’s on the patio, the rest of the screened enclosure can be completed. That will be just about it until we get our last planned improvement; a custom entertainment center installed in the great room.

Our furniture store delivered my new desk and file cabinet today. I set about getting the computer set up and working as soon as the desk was in place. The (clickable) image at the right shows the completed setup.

My computer is a HP laptop that I got about a year ago when my old Dell laptop started showing signs of decrepitude. I use a Kensington aftermarket so-called ‘docking station,’ which allows me to connect the LAN, speaker/phones, mic and several USB devices like the printer, keyboard/mouse and external 500GB hard drive. Unfortunately, the Kensington does not have a video cable receptacle so I have to directly connect the external monitor (a Dell 20-inch display) to the HP directly. I guess that’s the drawback of not having a true ‘dockable’ laptop (expensive) like I used at work before I retired.

The bottom line is the furniture. I really like the desk and file cabinet (a.k.a. printer stand). At last I can spread the equipment out instead of cramming it all onto a two by four foot folding table. The Better Half has a matching desk, although hers is a smaller style where she reads the blogs on her HP notebook.

The Better Half subscribes to Archaeology Magazine. When her copy arrived yesterday, she showed me an article devoted to the history of old computers. They featured the MOS 6502 microprocessor that powered early Atari, Nintendo, Apple and Commodore computers. The article highlighted a group of computer experts that are digging into the history of old computers and attempting to reverse engineer some of the lost, but primitive, technology.

The group has a website that contains a slide show about devices using the 6502 as well as an actual simulator of the microprocessor. If you remember these old computers, you will enjoy their website.

Clickable image - screen shot of the 6502 simulator

Excerpt from their interesting Visual6502.org website:

Welcome to Visual6502.org! Here we’ll slowly but surely present our small team’s effort to preserve, study, and document historic computers. We aim to present our work in a visual, intuitive manner for education and inspiration, and to serve as a solid verifiable reference for classic computer systems. See our slides for an introduction and some fun images.

Have you ever wondered how the chips inside your computer work? How they process information and run programs? Are you maybe a bit let down by the low resolution of chip photographs on the web or by complex diagrams that reveal very little about how circuits work? Then you’ve come to the right place!

I updated the GPS with the latest map files today. About two years ago, I bought a Garmin Nüvi 205W GPS unit. Other than a few glitches now and then, the unit has proved to be a worthwhile investment.

Clickable image - Garmin screenshot showing map and software update status as up-to-date

When I acquired the GPS, I signed up for lifetime map updates. That, also, turned out to be a good investment. When we first bought our property in Wickenburg, ADOT (Arizona department of transportation) was just finishing the route 93 bypass and it had yet to be updated on the GPS maps. Then, the new bypass and roundabouts showed up on the very next update.

In the near future, The Better Half and I will be taking some deserved vacation time, even though the new house experience has been like a permanent vacation for us. I have been charting excursions to some of the Native American artifact sites in the four corners states since that is one mutual interest that The Better Half and I have in common. She is one-eighth Creek/Cherokee and I am one-sixteenth Cherokee although our Irish and English heritage covers most of that up. Still, we have a great interest in ancient American peoples.

We will also have the opportunity to visit some of America’s natural wonders (Grand Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, Arches, Canyonlands, etc.). We can hardly wait.

I hiked up the hill across the road from the new house and snapped a series of photos that I combined by using the stitch feature in the Canon Zoom Browser application. I took three images from left to right which covers the front property line of the half-acre lot. During the stitching process you can accept the automatic merge function or you can specify two or more corresponding areas. I find that the latter technique makes for smoother “seams” in the final image.

I think the house has “curb appeal” even though there aren’t any curbs on our unpaved road. Clickable image.

One of the ‘features’ of our property in Arizona is that we have a couple of small storm water runoff washes on the west side of the lot. Our house sits up on a pad at the southeast corner of the lot and isn’t in an area subject to much flooding, but when the monsoons come this summer, there will be runoff from the hills behind us through both washes.

We selected our landscape contractor based on references and our one-on-one discussions about the project. He provided us with what I considered to be the best plan for dealing with storm water. My qualifications included electronic, computer and software engineering during my career. I haven’t had much experience with civil engineering, but intuitively, I can visualize good problem solving.

The landscape proposal included accounting for runoff water across our RV pull through road with a trench aligned with the wash filled with river rock. The proposal also included lining the second wash with more river rock to mitigate erosion.

You can see several views of both washes in the slideshow. Both washes terminate at the road in front of the lot. The bonus is that it is beautiful and functional at the same time.

You can pause the slideshow by rolling the mouse cursor over the image and resume playing by rolling out.