KN@PPSTER

Wordle 1775 Hint

2026-04-29T04:49:00.006-04:00

Hint: "Out in the country."

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First Letter: R

Wordle 1774 Hint

2026-04-28T04:50:00.001-04:00

Hint: A charlatan/mountebank.

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First Letter: Q

OK, I Support Trump's Ballroom, But Only With Conditions

2026-04-27T12:10:00.001-04:00

Some people seem to be taking post-assassination-attempt claims from US president Donald Trump and various administration officials -- to the effect that the reason the old East Wing of the White House needs to be turned into a ballroom is because it's unsafe for the president to venture out to e.g. the Washington Hilton -- as evidence that the assassination attempt was a sham/false flag that happened entirely to justify such claims.

In the absence of any real evidence, I'm assuming it was an actual attempt by an actual whackjob, and that the "we need a ballroom" whining is just opportunism.

BUT!

On those specific grounds, I think it's worth making a deal:

The White House gets the big ballroom, where the Secret Service controls security 24/7 and has a facility they're familiar with every nook and cranny of. In return,
Whoever's president hunkers down in the White House (and on its grounds) for four years instead of creating a public nuisance every time he or she wants to go somewhere via motorcade, Air Force One, or Marine One. He or she walks in on January 20 after being elected in November, and walks out on January 20 four years later to get sworn in again or pass the baton. In between, no outside excursions except for medical treatment that can only be provided at a full hospital rather than in-house.

If necessary, let the White House buy up some of the surrounding land for a nine-hole golf course, etc., instead of the mere putting green it has now. I have nothing against presidential comforts (other than preferring to have no presidency at all).

Bonus points h or shee also shuts the fuck up and does the job of the president, which is to sign or veto bills, hold cabinet meetings to ensure his or her underlings are doing their jobs, and occasionally issue a "State of the Union" report to Congress, which can be (and used to be) delivered in writing rather than in person.

It would be wonderful if the President of the United States left home in a public manner even less often than Punxsutawney Phil.

A Nice Tool for the Alternative-OS-Curious

2026-04-27T08:46:00.002-04:00

It's called Ventoy.

Install Ventoy on a USB.
Copy the .iso files for any and all operating system you're interested in to that USB.
Boot your machine from the USB.

At that point, Ventoy presents a menu and boots into whatever OS you choose from those you've put on the USB.

It's an easy way to play around with various operating systems before pulling the "install this to my hard drive" trigger.

At the moment I've got five or six Linux distros on a Ventoy USB. Although I'm pretty settled on MX Linux as my non-systemd distro, I'm still looking at Alpine, Adélie, Devuan, etc. I've also got some systemd distros just to look at because reasons (I've already decided I don't like Pop! OS and haven't yet booted elementary OS).

Anyway, it's a nice little tool for those considering OS changes.

Wordle 1773 Hint

2026-04-27T05:00:00.000-04:00

Hint: That "hair on the back of your neck stands up" feeling.

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First Letter: E

Even I Can Admit That Tariffs Occasionally Produce Good (Unintended) Results

2026-04-26T17:29:00.001-04:00

Yes, really.

I don't support tariffs, and the results of tariffs will always be overall bad for most people.

However:

In 1983, Ronald Reagan announced 45% tariffs on Japanese motorcycles with engine displacements of 700cc or more.

He did that for an openly protectionist/crony capitalist reason. Japanese motorcycles were cleaning Harley-Davidson's clock. Harley was coming in at the rear of the motorcycle sales pack and nearing bankruptcy. Reagan wanted to give the company a chance to get competitive again ... but making its competitors artificially more expensive.

Which, of course, is a bad thing. It meant that American consumers had to pay 45% more for big bikes from Japan, which gave Harley a cushion to keep its own prices high.

So, what was the up side?

Well, the Japanese companies decided to re-orient their production to smaller motorcycles ... and engineer more power and better performance into those smaller motorcycles. Instead of a 45%-tariffed 750cc, you bought a non-tariffed 699cc bike ... and you probably loved it.

Harley did make the most of the situation in terms of improving its own product and regaining market share, and survived when it probably shouldn't have (it continues on and off to have real problems with its business model and profitability).

But in the meantime, a whole generation of riders got a dramatically improved experience in the "mid-size" range. Speaking of which, Harley itself is now promoting a "Street 500" model.

I'm still riding small bikes, but I'll eventually move up into the 350-650cc range, and performance-wise I'll likely be getting a better bike than I would have if Reagan hadn't robbed American riders in the early 1980s. I don't agree he should have done that, but hey, silver linings.

Applicable(?) Aphorisms #16

2026-04-26T06:58:00.002-04:00

"Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without." (Buddhism, Dhammapada 20:28)

True, false, good, bad, useful, not so useful, etc.? Discuss.

My thoughts:

Many religions include an introspective element aside from appeals to deity, and many schools of philosophy focus on the thinker's internal mental state rather than on action or external stimuli (some philosophies even doubt the reality of the latter).

But this particular aphorism really works in all such settings to the extent that "peace" is itself a mental state, presumably equating to "happiness" or "calm" or "contentment." You may or may not be able to affect things external to your mind in ways conducive to that mental state, but most people, most of the time, can probably work directly with that mental state to quiet the roar of negativity.

Wordle 1772 Hint

2026-04-26T06:35:00.006-04:00

Hint: Superficial shine.

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First Letter: G

Wordle 1771 Hint

2026-04-25T07:11:00.000-04:00

Hint: They're more than half the population, but -- contrary to the conventional wisdom among the other fraction concerning driving skill -- are involved in less than half of auto accidents.

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First Letter: W

An Almost Guaranteed Way to Make it Rain ...

2026-04-24T21:54:00.000-04:00

... is to take a motorcycle ride of more than a few miles. So I should have known that when I took the Italica Bulldog 150 out for a 50-mile round trip today, I'd end up running into precipitation.

I'm not complaining, mind you. It wasn't much, certainly not enough to be any great trouble while on the road.

In fact, I may take a long ride on the Lifan KP Mini 150 tomorrow and see if I can get a real thunderstorm going. We need it -- we've had multiple wildfires in the area this week. None have been especially close to the house, but the longer the dry weather continues, the more we have to worry about that possibility.

Wordle 1770 Hint

2026-04-24T05:41:00.002-04:00

Hint: Please don't drive in this condition.

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First Letter: D

Wordle 1769 Hint

2026-04-23T05:11:00.006-04:00

Hint: Even people who finally stopped calling X by its old name usually still call an X post this.

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First Letter: T

Did SegWit Really Fix Anything?

2026-04-22T14:16:00.001-04:00

When Bitcoin Cash came out as a fork of Bitcoin, I thought the former would work better, and for several years used it preferentially.

The debate that led to the fork was over how to speed up transaction times. The Bitcoin Cash solution was to double the block size. The Bitcoin "main" solution was something called "Segregated Witness," which separates signatures from transaction data so that more transactions fit into a block.

It's probably been at least a year or so since I did a Bitcoin Cash transaction, but they're quick. I don't think it's ever taken more than 5-10 minutes for the necessary confirmations.

During REALLY congested times, I've seen Bitcoin "main" take more than a day. Right now, I'm awaiting a transaction confirmation that's been sitting in mempool for more than an hour and has been saying "~30 minutes" away from confirmation for most of that hour. I could increase the miner payment to supposedly speed that up to "~12 minutes." For $62 worth of BTC. On a $300 transaction. No thanks.

I've had friends who do prefer SegWit to increased block size, and therefore BTC to BCH, explain why they consider the latter less reliable and/or more vulnerable, but really I just want speedy transactions unless there's some really severe problem with the BCH way of doing things. To me, the ideal is still being able to buy a soda at a convenience store with crypto.

I may start moving back toward Bitcoin Cash.

Periodic Complaint About Proton Drive, w/ Petition Appeal

2026-04-22T08:05:00.005-04:00

I am a Proton Mail user (yes, that's an affiliate link -- if you try it, like it, and sign up for a paid account, I get some credit toward my own).

I am a paying Proton Mail user. I like the service, including not just the email client, but also the VPN, password manager, and calendar.

I want to like Proton Drive. I want to use Proton Drive.

But 5 1/2 years after Proton Drive's introduction, there's still not a working desktop client for Linux.

They've got one for Windoze. They've got one for MacOS. They've got one for Android. They've got one for iOS.

But they don't have one for Linux.

Apparently they briefly had one a couple of years ago, but then deactivated it.

According to an informal, non-scientific Reddit poll, 28% of Proton's users are Linux users.

I suspect the Linux percentage of paying Proton users is even higher, just because there's considerable overlap between 1) Linux users and 2) privacy-enthusiastic computer users, and Proton is big on privacy.

I still haven't completely cut ties with Google's various offerings, but over the past few years I've tried to minimize my use of them.

For file syncing, I use Dropbox ... because Proton Drive doesn't have a Linux desktop app that lets me sync a folder on my hard drive to a folder in Proton Drive.

If necessary, I'd be willing to pay a little more per month than I already do in order to have that feature. I like one-stop shopping. It's the one missing link in the "everything via Proton" chain.

Therefore, I have created a petition. That'll show'em. Sign if you think it matters. If you don't think it matters, well, sign it anyway.

Wordle 1768 Hint

2026-04-22T05:10:00.005-04:00

Hint: A way of sawing logs that requires no trees and produces no lumber.

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First Letter: S

Wordle 1767 Hint

2026-04-21T04:59:00.000-04:00

Hint: A clod or cluster.

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First Letter: C

Wordle 1766 Hint

2026-04-20T05:11:00.002-04:00

Hint: It's good when you do it with yarn, but bad when you do it on the road.

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First Letter: W

A Rather Dry April So Far

2026-04-19T09:03:00.000-04:00

Alachua County Florida, long-term, averages 2.8 inches of rain each April.

Total so far this April, per the weather station at Gainesville Regional Airport: 0.1 inches.

And there's no rain in the forecast for the rest of the month.

Up sides:

Not as frequent a need for mowing.
Time to de-tarp the Jayco pop-camper and remediate leak problems without worrying about a sudden storm. I've already given the roof one coast of elastomeric sealant and may get the second coat done today. Since I'm not willing to spend three figures on brand new canvas for the pop-outs, I'm looking at various tarp alternative that hopefully won't be quite so ugly.

Down side:

There aren't really any natural water sources for the wildlife for at least a mile in any direction (I'm assuming any small, non-obvious streams are dry at the moment).

We've got a bird bath that I keep filled, and the "tiny pond" as well (I've seen small mammal tracks around it, but can't tell how much water loss is evaporation versus drinking), and I'm also keeping (and cleaning/refilling each day so it doesn't provide mosquito habitat) a five-gallon bucket out in the yard, which does seem to be down significantly each morning after being filled in the evening.

Wordle 1765 Hint

2026-04-19T05:31:00.001-04:00

Hint: The highwayman's alleged first and adamant comand (the second is "deliver").

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First Letter: S

Applicable(?) Aphorisms #15

2026-04-18T07:31:00.001-04:00

"Who is rich? One who is content with his portion." (Judaism, Pirkei Avot 4:1)

True, false, good, bad, useful, not so useful, etc.? Discuss.

My thoughts:

There are at least three ways to read this one. In no particular order:

As a quasi-Buddhist caution against striving/desire, linking enlightenment as "riches" to avoiding ambition and the chase for material wealth.
As a classist "don't try to rise above your station in life" admonition.
Or, far more simply, an invitation to let one's self experience happiness whatever one's situation may be

The first two rub me the wrong way. Maybe it's just a personal preference, but I tend to find my happiness in the setting of goals and process of achieving those goals. More so, often, than in my subsequent enjoyment of whatever benefits the achievements deliver. Not even big goals, necessarily. Like Steve Jobs said, "the journey is the reward."

As for the third, well, yeah. It's better to be happy than not, and if there's something in the "current portion" to be happy about, use that.

Wordle 1764 Hint

2026-04-18T06:33:00.001-04:00

Hint: A sycophant or flunky.

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First Letter: T

I've Pretty Much Made Up My Mind ...

2026-04-17T08:24:00.001-04:00

... to keep the Jayco 806SD pop-up camper as my home office, rather than upgrading to a larger camper.

When I got it, I pledged to give it at least six months before deciding to 1) keep it, 2) buy a larger, non-pop-up, camper, or 3) just move my office back into the house.

It's only been four months, but the little camper has proven to be plenty large for my office needs, and my various climate control experiments have been educational enough that I expect, over the summer, to be able to get it really well insulated, de-drafted, etc. at fairly small expense. Might as well go that way as mess with a complete change of venue.

I've got elastomeric roof sealant arriving today so that I can pull the tarp off the top and get that taken care of. When I first got the camper, there seemed to be one (invisible to the naked eye on inspection) tiny roof leak that allowed a very small amount of water into the main compartment, so the tarp went on for the winter.

Now I've got dry weather (very dry weather, and no rain in the 10-day forecast) to take care of that, and to start figuring out a better way to remediate the crappy canvas in the pop-outs. One solution is to just remove the pop-outs and frame the thing in at both ends, but I don't know if I will do that or something else.

In lieu of the larger camper, I am mulling the idea of looking for a cheap but mechanically sound van with tow capability. I haven't owned a four-wheel vehicle in decades, but I was thinking the other day how cool it would be to have a vehicle that I could roll one of my motorcycles into the back of, strap a kayak to the roof of, hook my camper to the rear of, and drive off for camping, etc.

On the other hand, I may just save my pennies and, later this year or early next, start looking at larger motorcycles. I'm starting to see reasonable prices on my preferred brand (Royal Enfield) in the used market, and I expect those prices to fall further because it's now been a few years since that brand started really penetrating the US market ... so there should be some Interceptor 650s that are reaching the "this takes up garage space but I hardly ride it, might was well sell it" age group.

Wordle 1763 Hint

2026-04-17T05:27:00.004-04:00

Hint: A beautiful woman; or, a B-17 bomber named for Memphis.

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First Letter: B

Another Thing I Didn't Know About MX Linux

2026-04-16T14:06:00.005-04:00

Technically, I began using Linux in 2002, with an ill-fated attempt to install Fedora on a PC -- not my daily driver -- just to see how I'd like it. I didn't. I don't know if I did something wrong in the installation or if that's just how Fedora came back then, but all I got was a command line and I wasn't going to move away from MacOS and Windoze unless I got a nice GUI interface.

As a practical matter, I began using Linux in 2003, when my Windoze computer got a boot sector virus that none of the usual tools could seem to destroy, and I had a couple of CDs a friend had sent me with Mandrake Linux on them. In an 18-hour period, I went from finishing my workday, to nuking my Windoze PC's hard drive, to installing and configuring Mandrake, to teaching myself enough to get by, to starting my next workday, with not a lot of sleep in between.

Since then, I've use a lot of different Linux distributions. A few that I can remember, after Mandrake, in no particular order: Debian, OpenSuse, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Puppy, openSUSE, Slackware, Arch, Manjaro, Knoppix, Raspberry Pi OS, and Mint. I've used some of the previous ones in different versions, GUI setups, etc., and those are not nearly all of them. I've probably at least live-USB-previewed 50 or 60 distros.

And until I went looking for non-systemd distributions, I don't ever recall even hearing of MX.

So I found this headline on my "new tab" page a few minutes ago quite interesting:

3 reasons why MX Linux is more popular than Ubuntu, Fedora, and Zorin OS

I'm not sure the headline is really 100% truthful.

Distrowatch's "Page Hit" rankings have MX third behind CachyOS (which I've never used and barely heard of) and Mint, which indicates a lot of interest, but not necessarily more interest than many distributions that people get other than by visiting the distros' own web sites. It's worth noting, however, that that home page popularity long pre-dates the systemd controversy. Clearly, a bunch of people have been interested in MX Linux for quite some times.

And ranked on the basis of ratings by DistroWatch readers, MX comes in 26th of 34 distributions and behind two of the three in the headline (Ubuntu comes in 31st).

So I wouldn't put it in the "more popular than" league, necessarily. A lot of people get their Linux pre-installed on new machines (especially Ubuntu), or buy one of those "flash drive with 17 Linux distributions" things on Amazon, or get a USB from a friend, or whatever.

Also, the "three reasons" are kinda BS. There are all kinds of Linux distros that work great on all, or under-powered, hardware, that are easy to install/configure/update/maintain/use, and that fit offer "persistent live booting" if you want to run them from USB.

MX is, however, a bigger player than I assumed it was. And it deserves to be. It's a solid Linux distro.

One of These Things is Not Like the Other

2026-04-16T09:54:00.002-04:00

Joseph Solis-Mullen at the Libertarian Institute:

For decades Washington has advertised its air and naval supremacy as the indispensable guarantor of global order. Recent events have shown this to be little but increasingly expensive theater. The 2026 Iran War has paused not with Iranian capitulation but in a cascade of humiliations that have permanently altered the strategic landscape. Washington’s vaunted power-projection capabilities proved unable to shield even its own forward bases, depleted critical munitions stockpiles, and ultimately ceded effective control of the Strait of Hormuz to Tehran. These lessons will not be lost on Beijing or Taipei. If the United States cannot impose its will on Iran, or previously the Houthis, it cannot credibly claim it could defend Taiwan against the far more formidable People’s Liberation Army.

Disclaimer: I am a non-interventionist. In my view, the US has no business meddling in China-Taiwan affairs. This isn't about what I think the US should do; it's about what the US can do.

What Solis-Mullen seems to be missing is that in a Chinese attack on Taiwan, an analogy to the current war would have China as the equivalent of the US and Taiwan as the equivalent of Iran. It would be China attempting to project force to achieve particular objectives as "victory" conditions, and it would be Taiwan that only had to frustrate those objectives to "win."

So far as I can tell, the only material assistance Iran is thought to have received from allies has been some missile attacks from Yemen on shipping, and supposedly some satellite targeting assistance from Russia.

Suppose that (despite a dearth of amphibious troop transports) China decided to attempt to invade, conquer, occupy, and annex Taiwan tomorrow. Taiwan would certainly reasonably expect at least some material support not just from the US, but from Japan and possibly other allies. That material support would likely be more robust than Iran has received. Satellite targeting assistance would be the least of it.

As ugly as both the Iran war and the war in Ukraine are, each has a silver lining in that Xi Jinping is presumably looking at how they've gone for the US and Russia and not wanting that kind of thing for his own regime.