Toby's Log page 111

mail to person, not address

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Mail ‘addressed’ to a person or business, not a physical address. The intended receiver is not a building, but a person or entity of some sort at that building. Each person and business would probably be assigned an id number and that is what is written on the address field of envelopes. The post office keeps track of the physical address associated with each person or business, and sends letters to that person or business at the currently specified address. When someone moves, they inform the post office, and all mail is automatically sent to the new address, without need to inform the sender. With a computer database, the system would be easy to implement and utilize with database of addresses that probably already exists. Changes to addresses associated with people would be quick and simple, and could perhaps even be done for the short term, such as while on a vacation. Of course, the current address method would need to be supported for a long time to come; it would take years for people to learn the ids of everyone, especially those they infrequently communicate with. One problem would be sending to families, though perhaps a method could be set up to designate a letter sent to a person to be meant for the whole family, such as ‘family of’ written before the number or something.

This same database could perhaps be extended to include phone numbers. Just dial some prefix (so as to allow phone dialing as normal to work) and then the persons id number and it will call their current phone. Phone numbers are already becoming crazy with cell phones, people with home and work numbers, all that stuff. This could of course create problems with which number to route through to get to the person. Perhaps each person could list multiple numbers for different locations they might be. The caller would be presented a list of these with the number to press for each (you are calling Josie Haberdash. Press 1 to call her home phone, press 2 to call her work phone). Of course, this would create privacy problems: giving out your work number would also mean giving out your home number. Perhaps the list could, if the person desired, give out only certain options, and others would require a certain, perhaps 4 digit pin or something, to be dialed in. That sounds a little too complicated though and few people would be able to remember a bunch of peoples numbers plus their pin.

Even email might benefit from this. The .name domain already has something like this, but it is not widely used, only allows for one person with each name in the world, and is a pay for service instead of a government managed system.

car running much better; distributor cap

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My car had been missing and in general running quite poorly. It was bad enough that I always had to give myself lots of room when pulling out into traffic and had trouble getting up to speed on onramps. Up hills, I sometimes had to slow down to 25 mph in second gear to make it up.

A while back, I had looked at my distributor cap to see if it could be the problem. The points in it were rather rusty, they they still looked like they’d work. I bought a new cap anyway, especially since it came with new spark plug cables and boots. My old boots were feeling rather loose on the plugs, and I wasn’t sure how old the wires were. I planned to install that, but didn’t. I decided I oughta install the rotor at the same time, so the old rotor wouldn’t mess up the new cap (though I’m really not sure if this is possible, I wanted to be safe), and hadn’t bought one with the cap.

Finally, just recently, I bought a rotor and installed the cap. It was one of the easiest things I’ve ever done on the car. Three easy bolts plus the boots on the wires held the cap on, and the rotor just pulled right off. The old rotor actually looked better than I remembered, but I replaced it anyway. After replacing, it started right up and I took it for a test drive. It seemed to be running better, but I couldn’t tell for sure.

After several days of driving, though, I was sure the car was running much better. It hasn’t missed once since then, runs smoother, and accelerates much faster. Hills are where the biggest difference is: I can now drive up and even accelerate with no problems. It is great. It feels like a new car (as long as I don’t look at it). If I had known such a simple fix would have such a great effect, I would have done this long ago.

emac died; back to the old server

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On Friday, the eMac being used as my server suddenly died. It was running fine at maybe 1400, and I had remotely accessed the drive around then. But I noticed the fan noise was strangely missing at maybe 1800. The power button did nothing at all. Reading online, it seemed a dead PRAM battery could cause some all-in-one macs of that era to not boot. So I bought a new battery from radio shack on Saturday. It ran a ridiculous $15 for a 1/2 AA Lithium battery, but I figured it was worth a try to get the server up again. Unfortunately, after putting it in and resetting the power management unit several times, the best I got was the fan to get power for less then a second before shutting off. After some more reading, I found the power supply board is probably bad. On those computers, the power supply is built into a special board for only those computers that contains the graphics and audio stuff as well. So it’s probably not worth it to get a new board for the thing to fix it.

I bought myself an external drive enclosure for 3.5″ disks (I already had one for 2.5″) to get the data from the eMac. I had backed up nearly a month before, and had made several important changes since then, so I wanted the data before I got the server up again. The drive was quite a pain to get to. I had to dissassemble much of the emac to get to the drive. Everything in there is very tightly packed together and crazy, very proprietary looking parts for much of it. When I took out the drive, I was a little worried. It had been a while since I had worked with anything but 2.5″ drives. The thing looked so big compared to them that I was worried it might be and old 5.25″. But of course those went by the wayside long before this computer was made. The enclosure I got (an acomdata) works nicely and is very speedy. It’s also quiet, with no fan, but still doesn’t get hot it seems. It cost more than others, but it got very good reviews, much better than the only other one that I could find locally.

So i got the old data and put it back on my iBook, the computer I use most of the time. I had set up a server for testing stuff on it, so I just copied the old site folders and the important mysql files and got it up fairly easily. The new server has MySQL 5, so it is a little more up to date. It still only has Apache 1 though.

Whenever I get my new computer, which will hopefully be in June, when Mac OS 10.5 is released, the iBook will become the server full time. So it worked out alright really. Except that I’m not sure what to do with the dead eMac. It is currently disassembled in my living room. I don’t really know how to sell it, nor to fix it.

finder views saving

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The list view of the finder is good for looking at information about files. I use the column view for browsing, as it shows the hierarchy better and is faster to use, but for information I list. I find myself frequently changing the view settings of a window in list view depending on the information I am interested in. I might want to calculate folder sizes and sort by folder size to see where all my disk space is used. I might want to look at the comments field to see what I’ve said about the files. I don’t always want the processing power usage to calculate folder sizes or the screen real estate of all these columns viewable at once. It’s a pain to set these list views up each time. The dsStore files will save the settings for a single folder, but in general I’d want these settings the same for all folders. All folders contain files and folders, and I have similar information to view about all of them.

I think one should be able to save a view setup that can be applied to any window. Setting a window to the view should be simple, such as with a submenu off the list view menu item, a small menu icon somewhere on the window, and/or a contextual menu. They’d simply have user designated names preferably describing their function. This all would become much more relevant if the list view could have columns with other metadata, such as author, status, or owner.

automatic 3rd party software update

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The OS would have a standard system for developers to implement an auto-update feature for their 3rd party apps, making it easy for them, consistant, and simple to ensure all apps are up to date for the user.

Each installed app would register its name, .app path, current version, url for update information, etc. For all apps released prior to this OS and library feature, much of this info would have to be added manually by the user. New apps could possibly add themselves on first launch, asking the registry on launch if they are registered. This would not allow currently existing software to register, so these apps would have to be registered by some other means. Probably a better solution that would support both new and old apps, as well as not need a specific call to be added in the apps code, would be to have the registry check for the name of the app every time an app is launched. If it is not in the database, it could ask the application for the information. Current apps wouldn’t provide this, so it would have to bring up a dialog alert window in which the user would enter as much of it as known. It could be updated by the user later. Since some people download apps just to try them, then delete them, these apps should be removed from the database. This could be implemented to be done automatically. On each update check, if no .app is at the path specified, then the app was probably deleted and can be removed from the registry. Also, the user could specify an interval after which dormant apps could be removed from the list, something like a month or so. If either of these remove apps that are still desired by the user, they will be re-added to the registry on next launch, and will then be checked on next check anyway.

The developer would use a standard method, perhaps one of several, to post the current version and the files for download on their website. The url would be provided by the app, as stated above. The information at the url would have to be standardized so that the updater could parse it to get the information needed. It might contain just the current version in a tab delimited text file, listing version number, url to file parts or perhaps script to get them, update history (in case the user wants to review the update before doing it), etc. It might also be a list of all versions with this information, each version seperated by a new line appended to the file. Some developers would add the new line to a text file by hand, while others could have a script update it, or a script serve it. The file parts would have to be in a standard format as well, so that the updater app could handle them easily. It could be simply a .pkg, with all modified files stored in their destination paths inside.

The funcionality would probably be added to the software update application already used for the OS vendors software. The third party stuff would be kept somewhat seperate, to ensure things like security updates to the OS were given greater precedence and what not. The user would have seperate preferences to set for handling 3rd party apps, including whether to maintain a database at all, whether to update automatically or ask permission first, seperate update interval (could be ‘same as system updates’ though). The user would be able to view a table of all registered apps with information on them such as current version, if installed version is current, and an editable list of the app name, path, and update url. Clicking on each line item would provide additional information provided from the server, such as a revision history. All information would be stored in a database to save on disk space and be faster than a collection of files for each app.

homesteading wiki

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The contents of this wiki would be a guide to do basically everything you need to do around the home, with all those tips you frequently hear about aggregated in one easy to find location. Will try to find the best way to do things. Acknowledging that different people have different needs for the same home tasks, sections will provide all the best methods for different situations and reasons why that method would be chosen over another.

All people would be able to edit a talk page for each actual page, like a forum on that topic. The community will decide together what should go in the article, and the editor(s) will then commit them to the actual article.

Localized Patent Scope

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Patents are not always taken out by large companies that produce their inventions or use their processes everywhere they would be desirable. Small companies may not have the resources to or interest in provide their wares to anywhere but a small market. Yet if they have a patent, they may choose to prevent other companies who are not even in their intended market from marketing that product. This can cause proliferation of good products to be slowed dramatically. Many companies also like to keep patented processes to themselves, even if they can be easily reproduced elsewhere. Again, this slows proliferation. Licensing fees for use of the patented material is a good method for allowing proliferation while giving the patenting company their “incentive” for creation. It seems, though, that in many cases the licenses aren’t offered or are at such a high fee as to prevent their use.

As the patent process is designed to give companies a temporary monopoly in their market, and marketing of the patented items outside of the companies market by others should not adversly effect the companies profitability, something should be done to ensure others can recieve the benifits of the advance in technology. Patents could only apply to goods produced within the area the company is actively marketing to, allowing companies outside of the area to produce without fear of legal problems. If the patenting company moves into the other companies market area, the company may choose to: stop marketing in that area, pay the companies license fee, or sell the related factories and equipment (if dedicated to that product) to the patenting company. The companies would come to an agreement through negotiation or use third party arbitration if this fails.

socialisms: government pays salary

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the government pays the salary. Everyone recieves a salary from the government based from some determined number, perhaps $20,000 a year. This is everybody: every man, woman, and child. This base pay is modified up or down individually depending on what each person does.
-Children’s pay would be based upon their school attendance and grades. A C average grade with a decent attendance record would get the $20k. B and A average students would get more money. D and F students, and those with bad attendance records, would get less. The system would probably look at other factors as well.
-For employees, they would either need to achieve 40 hours a week to get the base $20k, or their productivity (perhaps based on a calculated independant contribution to GDP or something like that) level would determine their pay level, with some range of normal and acceptable outputs achieving the $20k base level.
-The level should not normally vary by more than perhaps +/- 50%.
-inventiveness and other such traits would reap monetary benefit. Inventors and discoverors would recieve short term spikes in thier salary based on contribition of the invention or discovery to society as a whole and their individual contribution to the project.
-Money given to children would start when they are born being split between money saved for education and their expected costs of living and small toy costs, which would be given to the parents. The money would slowly, as the children age, be given more and more directly to them.
-Other incentives and disincentives would also modify the base salary, in a similar way that they do on income tax returns now. For instance, purchase of energy efficient modifications to homes might increase salary. The children based incentives would not exist since the children make their own guarenteed money.
-There would no longer be an income tax, except on any moneys gained through other means than from the government. All government moneys would be raised from other areas.

-Businesses would pay the government employment taxes, which would provide the moneys for everyones salaries. These would probably be based on the number of employees, company productivity and/or contribution to society, and profitability, and be modified by incentives and discincentives similar to the salaries. The taxes should start out equaling approximately what companies are paying currently in wages and salaries to employees, and eventually take more and more into account the above paramaters.

-many of the non-wage or salary bearing money making methods should probably still be in existance. Entreprenuers could still start businesses and recieve profits for their effort and money invested. Money invested in stocks, bonds, or bank accounts could still earn people interest on their money and finance companies and individuals. People could still take out loans. These oppurtunities would provide the market based incentives available today. The government could possibly emulate these incentives and financial services, but probably wouldn’t be as effective.

copper plumbing

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When I replaced my water heater, I also replaced the piping coming into the house. It had been galvanized steel, which was very rusty at some parts, and I replaced it with copper. Still, the rest of the house had galvinized. This made for constant cloggings of shower heads, faucets, valves, etc. with small bits of rust/mineralization. The water flow to my shower was so low I had trouble maintaining the .75 gallons per minute my water heater needs to stay running. The heat would often turn off when I tried to turn up the cold water to reduce the tempurature, causing it get very cold. When a valve broke and could not be removed with all my might, I had to run a line from the sink piping to the shower to still get my hot water. The water also always seemed dirty, and tasted undesirable, so I never trusted drinking it. I did cook with it though.

I decided a while back I wanted to replace all the pipe at some point. Since I intended to redo the belly of my house before winter (fast approaching) I decided to take care of it at the same time. A few weeks ago (I believe) I started, with the help of my dad. It was very slow going then, since I could only get him out once a week. I’m the only one who could go under the house, so I had to do most of the work for the bathroom fixtures. The other stuff simply was along the side. My dad actually ended up doing most of the work for this. The underneath part was very rough though. It is not tall enough to sit up under there, though luckily much more roomy than under a car. It’s very dirty and there is stuff impeding movement all over the place. Just to get in, I must manuever myself over an electrical conduit and under a sanitary pipe and then a steel beam. The belly board has been ripped out by previous owners and by me during this project, leaving fiberglass insulation all over. Movement in certain areas will knock fiberglass into the air, making for a very itchy and coughy experience. I had to shower after every time working on it. I got a plastic rain suit to keep fiberglass off me, but it got on my neck and wrists with no problem, and the pants eventually were torn to shreds from moving around down there. The project was very slow going, and almost every time I got much less done than expected.

We first rerouted the pipe coming into the house to make most of it within the belly (at least it will be once we replace the belly). We got that working quickly and easily. Then we planned to do the hot lines only, to leave cold water available as long as possible. Some of the line, notably to the kitchen, we would go an entirely different route than the old line. The bathroom lines took a more simplified route, but it still ran into the old line a lot. I had to cut out the old line, as I had no luck getting it out by wrench and had no reason to try very hard with that anyway. I used an angle grinder. Sparks flew like crazy down in that small inclosed space, and I couldn’t help but getting hit by some of them. They also caused a few small short-lived flames in the insulation and bellyboard. With most of the cuts, water would come out when I broke throught the wall, sometimes lots of it. I’d let it drain and then continue. It was a very wet job. I could’t cut all the way through the pipe, as the wheel wasn’t wide enough, but I came pretty close. There was perhaps half the top wall left, and I was able to flex it until it broke. Unfortunately, the old pipes running to the bathroom sink and toilet were too tightly packed amongst themselves, a sanitary line, and a wooden beam to be able to be cut out, so I had to move the lines slightly over. Because of the location of beams and sanitary lines, this led me to need to drill holes through some beams as well as the new holes through the floor. The holes through the beams were difficult, and one required us to get a smaller drill to fit in between nearby obstacles, as well as cut out more old pipe. The hot water was at a lower elevation than the cold so they could cross over going over to the kitchen, so I had to cut a partial hole in the bottom of a beam rather than through it. The first one was done with a chisel, which took forever and a lot of energy. That tired me out, and it was a very tight fit even after that. Later we got a rasp bit for the drill to do the job much much faster and easily. The rasp also helped widen holes to allow for the proper positioning of pipes. This was especially important for one hole that was drilled at an angle because the drill would not fit any other way.

At one point, I wanted to cut part of the hot line to get it out of the way to run a line to the shower. It was right next to the cold line. I realized very quickly, when lots of water started spraying on me, that I had cut the wrong line. Luckily my dad was outside and turned off the water. I was now without any running water and changed plans of which line I would complete first. I intended to complete the line just to the bathroom sink and toilet (they came up through the floor with the same line anyway) so that my house could at least be liveable, but that didn’t happen for a while. I slept at my parents house then, in addition to showering there, which gave me more incentive to complete the cold water line. I had a bucket of water that allowed me to flush the toilet only thrice. I had diarea the one day, making this hard to do.

Soldering is very difficult in tight quarters. There was the plastic vapar barriers above and below the insulation, the subfloor, the wood beams, and the insulation that for whatever reason would burn somewhat even though it was fiberglass. We started off using heat sheilds, but I eventually gave up on them. It was too hard to keep them in place, especially when working by myself, and the heat would often just transfer through anyway. I found that if I carefully shot the flame at a certain angle so that it mostly curved around the pipe, I could minimize or eliminate the burning. In tight spots, though, it was impossible to eliminate the burning, and my house would get somewhat smokey after each of these. Fires of the wood would mostly got out once the flame was removed. They’d still smoke a bit and sometimes would glow, so I sprayed them thoroughly with a spray bottle. The plastic vapor barriers, however, wouldn’t always stop burning. I tried to cut them out of the way, but sometimes they still caught. If they were hot enough, the fire would somewhat quickly spread as it burned a hole in the barrier, dropping droplets of flaming plastic along the way.

Every time I worked I ran into some noticeable problem. I often ran into routing problems. The most noteable (or at least most memorable currently) of these was running the hot water line to the bathroom. I ran the long length to the sink (it seems much longer down there than inside the house) down through the same channel the old pipes were ran in, so it was very easy. Getting over to this run and allowing the shower to be hooked up as well, however, was not easy. The height the line was at was just above a sanitary line, touching it as it ran to the sink. I had chiseled a half hole throught a beam before to allow it to pass that. The sanitary line coming fromt the shower to the main run, unfortunately, was tilted, so I could not go over it. I ended up making two other partial holes through the beam to find a place I could come through with enough room between everything, and I even had some of the pieces for each of the routes.

Later on, I ran into problems with bad solder joints. I’d have to drain the lines and then unsolder, clean really well, then try to get the stuff back together and solder again. This became a crazy, long two night problem for the hot water line. This last Sunday, I had gotten the cold line to the kitchen working during the day with the help of my dad, and had also gotten the hot line cut and nearly ready to solder. I was thus done with the cold line and nearly done with the hot. I figured I could get it done that night in a few hours. I had to cut a few more pieces and then I prepared the whole thing and got it all in place to solder all at once. Most of the joints soldered very well, but I was a little worried about the one under the sink. It was the most surrounded by flamable material, as the one part of the elbow was actually resting on a wooden beam when the pipe was pulled down by gravity. I tried to solder it holding the pipe up with one hand and the torch in the other, then quickly taking the solder and trying to get it up there to sweat. It was very hard to manuever around to see both sides, and ended up being a sloppy job. I was a little worried about it but figured it was worth a try. I turned on the hot water, hoping it would work. Unfortunately, the union just below the heater was leaking like a sieve. I spent perhaps 40 minutes messing around with it, taping it with lots of teflon tape (and wasting a lot of tape in the process) to come to the conclusion that something must be wrong with it. Also, to my chagrin, the elbow beneath the sink started leaking. By that time it was rather late and I had to work the next morning, so I just went to my parents house to take a shower and sleep. Tuesday, I came back to the project, again at night. I was determined to finish. I bought a new union (8 bloody dollars) and installed that to replace the seemingly malfunctioning one. I drained the water from the lower union I had put in for that purpose, but unfortunately the pipes were at such angles as to not allow all the water to drain out. I put lots of heat into the elbow only to find it not getting hot enough to unsolder. I was getting rather angry and hitting the pipes rather hard to try to get the sweats apart. This of course dented the pipes fairly well, but luckily didn’t knock the important parts out of round or rupture the lines. I went into the bathroom, put my lips on the top of the valve there, and blew out the water. I spent quite a while doing this to make sure the water got out, and sure enough, I was able to unsweat the elbow. I made the mistake of only unsweating the one side of the elbow that had been leaking. I cleaned it up as best as I could in place and resweat it. It seemed much better. The pipe in the other sweat had been twisted during my removal attempts, and so had obviously been somewhat unsweat, but there was still solder in it. I figured that it should be fine and applied a bit more solder to be sure (perhaps that was a mistake). I ran the water. My union was mostly fine, though the connection to the water heater was leaking a bit. Unfortunately, the other sweat of that elbow was leaking a lot. I drained the water, blew through the pipes again, and tried to unsweat the elbow again. This time I hadn’t blew out enough water, so I had to go back, twice I believe. I finally got enough out to be able to unsweat, and more water that was rather hot came out of the pipe. This time I took the whole elbow off and cleaned it very well. The sweat looked good, and in testing held up. Through this whole procedure, I had burned the subfloor and other stuff pretty good, making my house visibly smoky. I went back in and retightened the connection to the water heater, then turned the water on. The union and connection at the heater seemed fine, but there was a noticable stream of water flowing through the hole in the floor beneath them. It was actually shooting up from beneath: the elbow there couldn’t take the pressure. I once again drained the water. Luckily, it was much easier with this one, as a union was pretty close by. Still, the floor was soaked with water from the leaks before, and it was dripping down. There was also a drip coming inside the pipe from the water heater. This made the unsweating and sweating process take noticably longer, though it still worked just fine. By this time I had determined that it was a bad idea to try to un and then re sweat only the broken side, so I took the elbow off, cleaned everything real good, and put it back together. It sweat nicely as well. When I turned the water on again, there was no real leak, though perhaps a slight drip from the union. Finally, after countless hours, I had my plumbing all done. It was of course, at this point, 0230 and I had to work that morning. I took a long hot shower and was in bed by 0430. I was rather tired the next day.

set wages

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everyone (that means everyone) makes similar wages, perhaps $10 – 20 an hour base.

-This base pay is determined by the desirability of the job to society: higher pay provides greater incentive to work the jobs. It may also be higher for more dangerous or damaging jobs, to provide for the possible medical bills or funeral expenses. Starting workers and easy no skill workers would get the lower end pay.

-This base may be modified on a person to person basis by up plus or minus 50% based on the worker’s productivity at their job. This would provide a maximum of $30 an hour in my example range for very productive workers doing those jobs most desireable to society. It may need to be watched or held to a curve of some sort to ensure companies aren’t giving the positive or negative bonuses as if they were the base pay.

-Number of hours are chosen by the worker exactly, with no overtime available. Workers so decide how much free time they have and how much money they make.

-Workers should generally be working two or more jobs. They’d work in both a low and a high profit industry (or what would currently be low and high wage jobs) and the companies would split the cost put toward the wages based on their profitability. This would ensure that companies that don’t bring in much money could still afford their labor, while highly profitable companies bringing in lots would not be raking in excessive money. For employees, this would provide a more diversified work-life and the chance to get some excersise from work even if their primary job provides none.

-The job splitting and setting-up could all be handled by a government agency to handle the splitting of hours worked by the employee and wages payed by the employers. It would be made easy to change jobs.