Daniel @daniel@campduffel.social

Some of you non-techies expressed interest in learning a little bit more about computers, so I'm putting a guide together. I really am no one and not particularly knowledgeable, but I might be able to point you in the right direction. Here is tonight's homework. Maybe get some friends together to read and discuss. I'll write a little more every few days.
http://fortwalden.com

I am finally, and very inconsistently, refraining from double spacing before a new sentence.

There are basic things that I wish non-techie folks would look into and learn.
1.) Learn your natural rights and who they come from. These rights extend into computing. For computers that you own, YOU should be in control of what they do. Most smart phones and Windows computers are not this.
2.) The Cloud is just someone else's computer(s). Learn how to store and backup your data.
3.) You can do so much for yourself. You don't need to rely on bad actors for services.

What else would you advise?

Going to sleep with this on loop...
http://fortwalden.com/toot/mech_room.opus

I’ve been thinking about you folks in Northern Europe with the winter coming and high heating costs. I was just considering my chest freezer and how it might be converted to a heater. I think it can hold around 400 liters of water. As long as you could heat the water(the hotter the better) to at least 10-15 degrees Celsius, you could turn it on and it would be a pretty decent heat pump until the water got too cold. A rocket stove, if you have wood, or solar thermal could do it.

Things that @mike didn't tell us about his ADHD treatment journey...

I figured it out. Had to write something small. The printout of the binary data looks clear and should scan in well. Now, just need to do something for data redundancy like Par2. Not sure how I'm going to get the data out of the scan yet though. The PaperBak program is pretty cool, but doesn't live up to its stated data density by a long shot.

This is such a noob question. I’m trying to make a black and white image representation of a binary file. The PGM format grabs the data in bytes, rather than bits, and makes a nice grayscale image instead. Can I just pad each bit to make a byte so I only have 2 colors? Surely there is a simple command line tool for this, instead of me having to write something?

We started at the beginning of the machine and let Heidi watch the process until she realized what it was making. Hot doughnut surprise this morning!

I appreciate folks who have the gift of making things easy to understand and using it. If you’ve ever wondered about heat pumps, this might help.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/06/heat-pumps-work-miracles/

Mesa, master and commander of all livestock.😂

Well, no luck! Best I ever seem to get is around 100 kB per page. I updated the PDF, but it is 8 pages long.

The World English Bible(one of my favorite translations) compressed down to 746 kB.
This allows for the entire Bible to fit on one US letter sized page using paper data storage.
Getting ready to print and test it...wish me luck!
http://fortwalden.com/toot/WEB.zpaq
http://fortwalden.com/toot/WEB.zpaq.pdf

I've worked on a lot of taller buildings, a bunch at 200'-300' and a couple in the 700'-800' range. An off-grid tower cabin is one of the things on my bucket list. Location is important, but most everywhere looks amazing a few hundred feet up. I need to find one of the few pockets remaining without heavy zoning/structure height permissions. Any suggestions?