We’ll be back to regular postings tomorrow. Tuesday Tunes, then “Envy” and “Show Me Your Papers.”

In the best of all worlds, every server would have two interfaces (NIC) with two ports cross-connected to two switches.

Each switch would be cross-connected to their upstream switch and so forth until you reach your redundant gateways.

The problem with this setup is that you can end up with loops that will take that part of the network down.

This means that switches need to be smart enough to keep that from happening. And you have to configure your network to allow for all those cross connections.

This means that a room will have three subnets. Primary 1, Primary 2, and Management. The switch needs to have routing capability. Then you use a routing protocol like OSPF to make magic happen.

OSPF sends out routing information often. Timers are measured in seconds, not minutes. This allows every router/switch to pick the best path at that instant.

Last week I determined that there was a problem with uplink speeds to the network. I was getting maybe a hundredth of what I should have been observing. This became obvious when I was attempting some bandwidth tests of client configurations.

So we start the process of elimination. The first thing to eliminate is the provider network. They could not provide a remote speed test because I was using my router; therefore, it required a technician to be dispatched.

The goal was to eliminate any questions regarding their side of the “demarc,” or demarcation.

The demarc is the separation of responsibility between the provider and the customer. Everything on their side of the demarc is their responsibility; everything on my side is my responsibility.

In my installation the demarc is the Optical Network Terminator (ONT). The ONT is a fiber modem; it’s not really, but it works for our purposes.

The provider prefers to provide the ONT, the router/access point/switch/VoIP gizmo. If they provide that gizmo, they move the demarc to that gizmo.

My issue is that the gizmo in question is always home quality, never better. My router is just a router. It has two 2.5 Gbit Ethernet ports and two 10 Gbit SFP ports. It has a 60 Gbit internal bus and provides DHCP, DNS, Proxy, port forwarding, and many other professional features. My access points are on a controller that monitors the power usage and adjusts the power of each access point to produce the best coverage. This allows me to have multiple Wireless Access Points (WAP) within the house and grounds that don’t interfere with each other.

Better yet, as you move from place to place, your device will seamlessly transfer to different WAPs as needed, without getting new IP addresses.

Regardless, my equipment is much better than what they provide.

We tested from the ONT and got good upload and download speeds. A step in the correct direction.

The next test was from the router. This gave me acceptable speeds, much better than 0.260 Gbit.

This left SFP modules, SFP sockets, and fiber. Being lazy, I start with SFP modules. Switching modules doesn’t help. Next I swapped the cables. Finally, I swapped the router ports.

Nothing fixed it. I currently believe that the SFP port/slot on the router has an issue.

Since I had a second switch, I could have used that; instead, I decided on a network upgrade.

The new switch was configured. It was attached to the second SFP port on the router. All the management networks and the DMZ network were attached to it. Removed from primary (router1). Then router2 was cross connected with router1 via a Direct Attach Connector (DAC). A DAC is a wire with module connectors on both ends. They are cheaper than fiber plus two modules and will run at very high speeds. They are the connector of choice for SFP to SFP within a meter or so with no sharp bends.

It took way too much time to get everything configured correctly. Mostly because I just didn’t have all the pieces correctly configured.

My network map was wrong. I had 192.168.99.x/24 allocated to P2P connections. It isn’t allocated to P2P. It is allocated to a remote subnet that is part of the local network via a VPN. Oops!

One that was taken care of, I had working connections between the gateway and both routers. But the routers would not talk to each other.

Turns out that I had the DAC plugged into the wrong slot. Once I had it in the correct slot with the correct media type, everything just started working.

I now have a cleaner network, with more options, and better bandwidth than ever before. It is working as I anticipated. It just took way too long to accomplish.

I moved the site to a new server. It appears to be more responsive.

On the downside, I don’t know if the citeserver is still working, and I have a server that has decided to kick the bucket.

Supreme Court Lessons

There are people who spend a lifetime learning how to predict what the Supreme Court is going to do. The short answer?

They get it wrong almost as often as us amateurs.

There are many moving parts involved with court cases. What is allowed and what is not allowed.

In general, the Court prefers to take cases that are important to the country or which the federal government wants them to take.

There are things that reduce the chances of a case being granted certiorari, the biggest being a case that is still in an interlocutory state. Interlocutory means that the fact finding part of the case has not completed. A final judgment has not been reached and all other means of redress have not been exhausted.

Four justices must vote to grant certiorari. Just because one side or the other has a majority, that might not be enough to get a case seen by the Court.

The question then becomes, what makes a case important to the country, in the eyes of the Court?

One of the big ones is a circuit split. The country is broken into circuits. Each court of appeals handles one circuit.

The famous circuit courts are the Ninth, Seventh, Fifth, and Second. If you want a good court for business law, the Second Circuit is the place to go. They deal with it constantly, being based out of New York City.

The Fifth circuit covers Texas and can be trusted to do the right thing most of the time. The Seventh Circuit is out of Chicago, and there isn’t an infringement they haven’t found constitutional. The Ninth en banc is currently around 250 to 0 for the state and against The People in Second Amendment cases.

To have a circuit split, different circuits must come to different conclusions given the same fact pattern. In this, the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 7th, and 9th Circuits have all been presented the same fact pattern regarding magazine bans and assault weapon bans. They have all agreed that such laws are constitutional.

The Fifth has not issued an opinion on that fact pattern because they don’t have any magazine ban or assault weapon ban challenges.

This means no circuit split.

The next thing the Court seems to be looking at is correcting past errors. We can look at the history of Roe v. Wade and Chevron and a host of other cases where the Supreme Court started walking back their original opinion shortly after it came out.

This happens when the inferior courts decide to apply the new case law in ways the Court did not intend. The Court will then take cases that touch on the original issue to “refine” their opinion. In general, the inferior courts seem to ignore this.

In the end, the Court will issue a new opinion declaring their old opinion revoked, and they will explain why. The Dobbs opinion, overturning Roe v. Way is an example of this. The Court had been limiting the extent of Roe v. Wade for a few decades before Dobbs.

Chief Justice Roberts prefers this incremental approach over more substantive changes.

This takes us to the “important for the country” cases.

Heller was a good example of this. After 8 decades, the Court heard a Second Amendment case. The purpose of the case was to reset the inferior courts.

The holding in Heller was that the Second Amendment was an individual right. In the process, the Court set up the rules on how Second Amendment cases should be adjudicated in the future. They defined almost every word of the Second Amendment, established the “plain text and historical tradition of firearm regulations”, and established the dangerous and unusual test for banning arms.

This last is sometimes stated as “in common use.”

If an arm is in common use for lawful purposes, then it is not unusual. Since an arm can only be banned if it is both “extra” dangerous AND and unusual, this means that an arm in common use cannot be banned.

When we look at Snope it was a slam dunk. Why? Because it was a repeat of Heller. There is nothing new in it.

The Supreme Court knows that repeating a past opinion will not change the inferior courts in a positive way.

To put it differently, if a case is granted certiorari, and then the lower court’s opinion is vacated, and the cases is remanded back to the inferior court to redo in light of some other published opinion and the inferior court reaches the same opinion, doing a full opinion isn’t going to make a difference.

When we were breaking up with a partner family, the other family came to the negotiation table with an offer of $16,000. They explained how they got that number.

I used their numbers to show that $16k wasn’t the correct answer.

The next meeting, they again offered $16k. The justification reason and numbers were different, the result was the same.

Again, I used their numbers to show that $16k wasn’t the correct answer.

The next meeting the offered the same $16k with still another justification and set of numbers.

“Your sister only gave you $16k to buy us out, right?”

“Uhhhhh, yes”

The rogue inferior courts keep coming up with the same answer with the same fact pattern with different justifications, every time. See the Fourth Circuit court’s handling of Bianchi v Brown, now known as Snope.

There are several Second Amendment cases that are currently seeking cert or that will file a petition for a writ of certiorari soon. One of those is Duncan v. Bonta.

This is a magazine ban case. Unlike Ocean State Tactical, this case is not in an interlocutory state. It should be ripe for taking.

I do not believe the Supreme Court will take it. It is not the slam dunk of an arms ban. It has too much extra baggage with it, regarding “is it an arm or is it an accessory.” The Court is more likely to take an arms ban because that is a slam dunk, and they can explain that accessories, such as magazines, are arms under the Second Amendment.

This leaves us some cases regarding the NFA, sensitive places, licensing requirements, and Second Amendment rights following you across state lines.

All of these cases will advance Second Amendment jurisprudence.

It Will Cost

My truck is 15 years old. It has a new frame and the motor appears to be strong.

Unfortunately, after 15 years, it is showing some of its age.

Yesterday I got the bad news: New pads and rotors in the front. New calibers on both sides for the front, new wheel bearings for both sides of the front. Replace brake hose crimp in rear right. Two broken brackets that need to be replaced, and a half dozen other things.

R and R for the wheel bearings is over $700 each.

The local parts store has everything in stock for me to do the break and bearing work. At over $1000 in parts.

Rockauto had all the parts available for $450 with $69 in shipping.

On the 21st I’ll be working on the truck to do all the work I can in the front. The only issue I really see is I might have to replace a short section of hard line.

Who wants to bet it will be raining that day?

Website Design and Coding

Tuesday I arrived at the next step in my museum website project. After three days of frustration, attempting to decide what I wanted to do, I took a step back, went and implemented the shopping cart.

Things just got simple in the backend. Simple in the front end. Just a small bit of coding before I find my next roadblock.

Question of the Week

What preparations are you taking for the “No Kings”, nationwide, mostly peaceful protests? It is taking place tomorrow, June 14th.

The court has issued 40 opinions as of June 7th. We are expecting more before the end of the term later this month.

Two of those cases were Second Amendment cases, around 5%. We had 2 major opinions, for The People, in the 2023 term.

The first major win for The People came in Loper Bright. This started life as a case regarding offshore fishing regulations and inspections. The Commerce Department issued new rules regarding inspections of offshore fishing. The rules required the fishing vessel to provide food and bunk space, as well as to pay the cost of the inspector onboard the vessel.

In short, the boat had to pay to have an inspector living onboard looking over their shoulders, even if they weren’t catching any fish that required the inspector.

They sued for relief.

The lower courts applied the Chevron doctrine, which had been interpreted to mean, “What the Federal Agency says is what we have to agree with.” Chevron has stopped many civil suits through the decades. Loper Bright puts an end to that.

Takeaway ONE

The court’s job is to decide what the law is, not some regulatory agency. Courts must do their job and not just accept what the government says.

This takeaway is used in later opinions of the Court.

NRA v Vullo is our second interesting case, this is one of the lawfare, red tape war waged against gun owners’ rights. The short of it was that the state of NY was pressuring regulated business to stop doing business with the NRA.

Takeaway TWO

The government cannot compel a third party to do what the government is forbidden to do.

Garland v. Cargill was one of the cases that led to the striking of Chevron. In Cargill, the Court found that the ATF exceeded their statutory authorizations.

Takeaway THREE

The executive branch does not get to create legislation, even when Congress appears to have granted that transfer of power.

United States v. Rahimi was a case with bad facts which did get us a reasonable result.

Rahimi had a TRO against him. He was aware of the TRO. He was in the courtroom when the judge issued the TRO and he had agreed to the conditions of the TRO. Those included “no firearms”.

Rahimi was and is a violent person. He was charged with multiple crimes and was captured with TRO paperwork and a firearm.

Takeaway FOUR

There is no regulation in this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation that permanently removed the right to keep and bear arms.

Takeaway FIVE

A violent person can be temporarily denied his Second Amendment protected right.

Bondi v. VanDerStok

HELD: The ATF’s rule is not facially inconsistent with the GCA.

This case is a legal match to Rahimi The question we wanted to be answered in Rahimi, and which was answered, is 18 U.S.C. §921(g)(8) facially unconstitutional.

To be facially unconstitutional, there can be no situation where the law is constitutional. This means that the law is unconstitutional when applied to 1 million people, but because it is constitutional when applied to the 1,000,001st person, then it survives the challenge.

In Rahimi, was there any time a person could have their Second Amendment protected rights removed? The answer turns out to be “Yes.” They can be taken away temporarily if the person has been adjudicated violent.

In VanDerStok it was again a facial challenge. The Court found that there was at least one kit being sold which met the definition of a firearm.

Takeaway SIX

There are infringements which will survive judicial review in light of Bruen and Heller

Takeaway SEVEN

The Court attempts to be consistent with their previous opinions. This leads to outcomes we dislike.

Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc., et al. v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos

Takeaway EIGHT

The Remington settlement caused negative ripples. It emboldened the infringers to ramp up their lawfare actions.

Takeaway NINE

The agenda-driven Justices agreed that Mexico did not meet the requirements to pierce the PLCAA protections.

Takeaway TEN

AR-15s are in common use for lawful purposes.

Takeaway ELEVEN

While it does not require a probable event to pierce PLCAA protections, it does require a true allegation of a crime and plausible connection of the defendant to that probable event.

Takeaway TWELVE

PLCAA is a powerful protection against frivolous lawsuits.

Takeaway Thirteen

This was a major course correction after the failures in the Remington case.

SCOTUS Watch: Trump v. CASA, Inc, 24A886

This is a case regarding birthright citizenship. That is not the important part before the Court. What is significant is rogue inferior courts issuing nationwide, or universal injunctions.

The numbers of universal injunctions is difficult to know, at this instant because there could have been another yesterday, or today.

Bush had 6 universal injunctions issued against him, 3 by judges appointed by democrats.

Obama had 12 injunctions issued against him, 7 by judges appointed by republicans.

Trump 1.0 had 64 injunctions issued against him, 59 by judges appointed by democrats.

Biden had 14 injunctions issued against him, all 14 by judges appointed by republicans.

As of May 15, there have been 40 nationwide injunctions issued against Trump. 35 come from the same 5 districts.

This case is about those nationwide injunctions. I’ll need to spend some time reading the transcript, but my takeaway from the first few pages is that Justice Sotomayor is firmly for universal injunctions.

My guess, is that she knows that rogue inferior judges live primarily on the left. She doesn’t need to worry about rulings that go against her agenda in the lower court getting nationwide injunctions. Those come mostly from leftist rogue judges.

Thomas asked the first question. Sotomayor talked over the answer and monopolized the mic to the point that Roberts asked “May I hear the rest of his answer?”

Hard reading.

Airplanes are Bribes?

Something that I have not confirmed, it seems as if the Biden puppet masters were talking to Qatar about getting this plane in 2022.

The amount of noise in the signal is pretty bad on this one. My best filters suggest that the plane is being given to the US military. Both narratives seem to agree on this.

One side says that the plane will be taken down to its bones and rebuilt to spec. The other side says we can’t trust Qatar and that they are giving a bribe to Trump in the form of this plane, which they will then blow up while Trump is aboard. The same group says that it is too expensive to accept because it will be stripped to the bones and rebuilt, so we should pay more, wait for the delivery from Boeing.

At which point the military will strip it down to the bones and …

One side says that the plane will stay in service. When Trump steps down, the plane will stay as part of the fleet transporting our next president. The other side says that the plane will go to the Trump library, making this a bribe to Trump.

You can guess which side I’m leaning towards.

Maryland Man Upgraded to Salvadorian Man

This case is over in the court of public opinion. We’ve got the left claiming Trump is so dumb that he thought the characters M, S,1, and 3 were tattooed on his hand.

This has led our smartest, elitist, left representatives to claim “The image was doctored! It doesn’t say MS-13”

Then argue that the actual tattoos don’t indicate MS-13 because they found an expert who says it doesn’t.

TdA is About to Go Flying

It looks like the case of J.G.G. is about done with. The left is still trying to bury Trump with “contempt of court.” The plaintiffs (bad guys) wanted the terrorists to get 30 days to seek representation and to have a chance in court. The case has been enjoined for that period of time. This means the case is moot and the government should be able to ship them out.

I have read part of a court finding that says that Trump is allowed to continue deporting terrorists.

Typescript is Winning

As I learn more of the syntax and tricks, this is getting easier and easier. I finished most of the text editing module yesterday. This makes it possible to edit live blocks on the page.

I still miss Makefiles.

Snope

Has been listed again. It is in conference today. I do not expect to hear anything about it.

Ocean State Tactical

It seems I was mistaken, this case is still in an interlocutory state. The fact that it hasn’t been denied cert is very surprising to me.

Question of the week

What current behavior was not tolerated in your youth?

Has your tolerance of that behavior grown stronger or less over the last few years?

Are you suffering from behavior fatigue?

Once You See It …

Why Is It Slow?

We use multiple different server infrastructures. The paying clients run on cloud infrastructure, development and my pet projects run on internal infrastructure.

The internal infrastructure consists of a 2GB link to the outside. This connects to a dedicated PfSense box.

PfSense provides firewall, VPN, and load balancing. The box itself might need a bit more memory, but nothing horrible is happening with it.

PfSense uses HAProxy for load balancing. It does SSL offload to allow easy certificate maintenance as seen from the outside.

For web connections, it looks for one of two nginx process running on one of the servers.

Those nginx services run inside a container and connect to a dedicated shared network. They forward traffic to the correct container.

That container is running WordPress. It is configured on the correct network and connects to a MariaDB server on the external network.

That database is running on NVMe and has zero performance issues when tested.

The base code is stored in the docker container, the plugins, and media are stored in a mounted volume.

So, you request a page from The Vine of Liberty. That hits the firewall, which forwards it to a web server (nginx). The web server forwards the request to an Apache web server running in a container with WordPress installed. PHP within WordPress is configured to connect to the database for long term storage.

Media that is needed is loaded by Apache from the mounted volume of a Ceph distributed file system.

PHP that is on the mounted volume is loaded and cached.

This is running much too slow. I’ve tested so many parts of this, and I can not discover what the bottleneck is.

JavaScript Sucks

Over the years, I’ve gotten better and better at JavaScript. This week and last, I transitioned to TypeScript.

This is driving me bonkers. I know how to write a module. I know how to load a module and have it do something. I can see how other packages have exposed global items. What the heck do I need to do to make this work!!!!

Just another learning curve. Sometimes I get tired.

jQuery is so yesterday

For the new site I’m working on, I’ve decided that I will only support modern browsers on the internal side. This means I’m writing everything in pure JavaScript/TypeScript. It is working, but I still use jQuery syntax when I should be using JavaScript syntax.

And I miss my Makefiles.

Snope and Ocean State Tactical

Were both relisted yesterday. This makes 13 times they have been distributed for conference.

Mark Smith says this is good. Points out that the Dobbs case was relisted 12 times before cert was granted. This lead to the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

I’m tired of waiting for the Court to do the right thing.

They’re Suing John Roberts!

Yeah, the same way we sued Bruen, and they are suing Donald J. Trump.

They are suing these people in their official capacity.

In other words, they are suing the head of an entity. Roberts is being sued for some entity he heads, other than SCOTUS.

What can you do with a .357 magnum?

Turns out that with that old lever gun, I can vaporize a skull. My bone person is upset with me. I’ve learned to take headshots at most smaller animals to protect the pelt and meat. It was a short range shot, less than 30 yards.

It was a Hornady bullet with the plastic tip. I’m too lazy to go dig up my reloading log.

Question of the Week

When did you first suspect that the News might be lying to you?

When did you first find proof that the News was lying to you, in mass?

Tariffs

I work with people that are dealing with tariffs. I needed to update a custom web application which handles purchase orders, inventory control, warehousing, sales orders and a bunch of other things.

The owner explained to me how tariffs were going to affect them. I gave some of that in the Thursday’s post.

What does it come down to?

American goods are becoming competitive in other countries. As more than one person has pointed out, there are no American-made cars on the road in Japan. The cost of the tariffs into Japan are high enough to alter consumer choices.

As other countries lower their tariffs, they are lowering the prices of American-made goods, this in turn increases demand for American-made goods.

The price you pay for goods is based on what the market will bear, not on the cost of production. Every leftist will tell you that when they talk about pharmaceuticals. “It only cost them $15 to make this, and they are charging over $1000!!!!”

When they are talking about tariffs, they are talking about tariffs on the $15, not on the $1000.

Pricing Goods and Services

The boss calls in his best salesman and yells at him costing the company money. He is selling widgets for less than it costs to make them. How the heck does he expect the company to make any money!

The salesman beams, leans in and says softly, “I’ll make it up in volume.”

In a different situation, I once listened to the CEO of Cray Research give a speech. He was telling a humorous story about how he was out selling a super computer to Apple that was designed on Apple computers.

He and Cook got a chuckle out of it. They were then discussing their income streams. Cook mentioned a number and our CEO was happy to respond with “That’s just about what we made last year.”

Cook looks him in the eye, “I’m talking about per quarter.”

Cray sold million dollar computers, Apple sold thousand dollar computers. They sold so many more that they were making more than Cray.

Every businessman attempts to set their prices to get as much as the market and their conscience can bear.

That elementary equation is Price*volume. My profit on a sale is price-cost. If my profit is $1000 per unit and I sell 10 units, I make $10,000. If my profit per unit is $100 per unit and I sell 1000, I make $100,000.

The price you see is always profit + cost. In most resale stops, the profit is multiples of cost.

It costs $0.50 to make a glass of lemonade. You don’t sell it for $0.75, you sell it for $5.00. If your costs double, to $1.00 per glass, you can still keep your price at $5.00 and advertise your sacrifice selling more.

So here is the dirty secret, spelled out, again. If I am assembling a computer with parts bought in China, my price will be multiples of what I paid for those parts, and the tariffs only apply to my cost of getting the parts.

Typescript vs. JavaScript

The power of a scripted language is that you can see the results of your changes instantly. In 1976, I was writing code on an PolySci 8080 computer. I think I got that name right.

The language was BASIC. As I typed each line, the computer told me if the syntax was correct. Instant feedback.

I moved to assembly language. That was done in an instant assembler on the Apple II. Again, instant feedback on syntax errors.

As I moved forward, I learned different languages, PASCAL, FORTRAN IV, FORTRAN V, COBOL, Compass, C and some other assembly languages.

These separated the process of creating a working executable into: Edit, Compile, and Link. You could then execute (run) the resulting “binary”.

Compile times for even small programs took a noticeable time. I wasn’t aware of how long it took until I wrote my first test program on the Cray X/MP.

Same edit process. Then I ran the compile and link process.

The time it took was so short that I spent 5 minutes trying to figure out what I had done wrong.

The power of most of the languages above, outside the Assembly languages, was strong typing and good structures.

It was worth it to have slower test cycle times to have those features.

Then came some more modern languages, JavaScript, Python, Perl, PHP, and others. These do not have strict typing. JavaScript being one of the worst.

Consider the following, what is 10 + 100? The answer is logically 110. What is 10 + “100”? Logical, 110 is the answer. Except that in JavaScript the answer is “10100”.

What we want or expect is for the language to convert the string “100” to the value integer value 100. Then we are adding the integer 10 to the integer 100, resulting in 110. But JavaScript says that adding the integer 10 to the string 100 requires converting integer 10 to the string “10” then concatenating “10” with “100” resulting in “10100”.

TypeScript is simply adding strong typing to JavaScript. Then a TypeScript transpiler/compiler writes the code out as pure JavaScript. The original C++ did a similar thing. The C++ “compiler” translated C++ to pure C. Then it used the C compiler to create assembly code which was linked to create an executable.

The process is going relatively smoothly. Unfortunately, JavaScript is not my favorite language, see “no typing and weird implicit type conversions” above.

This means that I’m having to learn a new workflow. I’m getting there.

Question of The Week

What is the most outrageous lie you’ve heard from a leftist political leader, this week?

A.A.R.P. with SCOTUS

This is just sitting there, waiting for the Justices to give an opinion. This is a motion for terrorists being removed under the Alien Enemies Act to be paused.

The legal argument is that the terrorists haven’t been given enough warning to petition for a hearing. The argument also includes statements that the warnings are only printed in English, so the terrorists don’t know what is being put in front of them.

This is mostly a nothingburger. I suspect the Supreme Court will let the Fifth Circuit do something then will say, yes, what they said.

Trolling Garcia

The amount of world-class trolling going on makes my heart sing. The RNC is offering to pay Democrats to fly down to El Salvador to attempt to see Garcia.

There is a question of the Login Act, but all in all, this seems to be a gift that just keeps on giving.

His wife has taken to posting all images of herself with her wife-beating husband, with cute hearts over his tattoos. It doesn’t matter, the images are already out there.

Ally is reporting that even some of her leftist friends are starting to get a clue about this.

It Is Always A Surprise

I ordered a small fiber switch (L2) from somebody in China. It arrived. What I was expecting was a box around 1U high, 6 inches wide, and 4 inches deep along with a 12v wall wart.

What I got is 1U high, 9 inches wide (have rack), and 4 inches deep. It has an internal power supply and uses a standard three prong power cord for 110v AC feed.

I’ve not tested it yet. If it handles jumbo packets, this is a going to be a winner for me.

Oh, it showed up with this cute power cord. Standard female at one end, to plug into the box, and the other end had two round prongs with the third prong removed/missing. I think that what I am seeing is a British style power cord.

Fun with CSS

Every time I start working with CSS, I end up frustrated. Why? Because I’m generally starting with somebody else’s base and I need to modify things.

In this case, I needed to make the logo a little larger. Look it up in the debugger. Add a new class, modify the height, no change. Turns out that somebody was taking advantage of SCCS and so had created a more specific selector of .header .logo img which was firing instead of my .trog-logo

Used the correct selector, things got much better.

Also JavaScript

JavaScript, jQuery, Bootstrap, jQuery-ui, custom.css, main.css, bootstrap.css, oh my.

Everything is magic when significantly complex. Don’t breathe hard, it will break.

Question of the Week

What is the most ludicrous thing you’ve heard somebody on the left say this week?

And on the right?

Trump Before The Supreme Court

Thursday afternoon, the Supreme Court consolidated three cases on appeal from by the administration and scheduled oral arguments for May 15, 2025, at 10 a.m.

24A884, 24A885, and 24A886 are consolidations of 10 different cases, though some of those are duplicates as they came through the circuit courts.

In short, this is the vehicle for the Supreme Court to knock down the raft of inferior courts granting nationwide TROs and preliminary injunctions.

I don’t know if this will extend to final judgment, regardless, this is the case to watch.

Fort at #4 — Projects

I will be up at The Fort tomorrow to take some pictures. I just finished two woodworking mallets. Boy, I’m a poor wood turner. They look ok. I’ve polished one of them and put a sealing coat on it. On the other hand, I can see ever mis-cut and catch as I learn how to do this.

I’m hoping to get at least one of the spinning wheels down and into the cabins. This will give me something to do when I don’t want to be in the wood working shop.

Which means I need to finish the clamps for the clamp to hold my wool combs. I like the way wool spins once it has been combed.

I might even try spinning some carded wool. I’ve not tried that yet.

I have a reed in our big floor loom. We got the loom for cheap, but the reeds were rusted nasty things. I’ve not recovered them yet. I need to make a raddle to allow me to warp the loom. And I have to spin some yarn for the weft.

Computer Frustrations

There are two standard ways that power is supplied to computer type devices. One, they take a 110v AC into a power supply, which then generates 12V and 5V from that for the system. Two, they have a “wall wort” which generates 12V DC, which is then converted as required internally.

More and more of the small devices I’m picking up use the 12V wall wort. The issue? Space for the wall worts.

Wed, I went to plug in a new device. Accidentally unplugged the wrong wall wort, dropped my room switch until I got it plugged back in.

Once I had the correct wall wort removed, I found that I had 2 open outlets but the orientation of the outlets and the orientation of the wall wart don’t fit.

Now I’m dealing with another issue, A new switch that won’t come online.

Snope

The SCOTUS Friday Conference was moved to Thursday. Snope was conferenced again.

I really, really, want to see some forward motion on these Second Amendment Cases.

The reason I don’t update you on Ocean State Tactical is that it has been following Snope and I’m too lazy to have another tab open on https://www.supremecourt.gov

Tea!

I used to drink Coke-a-Cola. I stopped years ago, mostly because of the sugar content. I was converted to coffee.

I do drink tea occasionally. It is not my go-to drink.

In 1773, a bunch of rebels dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. Approximately 92,000 pounds.

For much of my younger years, I thought they were talking about Lipton tea bags. I.e., loose tea in individual small filter bags. There was no way that you could get that much tea into just 342 chests. Then I found out about real loose tea. This was better.

Then I found that what was actually transported were bricks of black tea from the orient. These bricks were solid.

For use at The Fort, we ordered a brick of black tea. It is formed the same way it would have been formed in 1773. Our brick is 2.5 pounds.

The cool thing? It has a shelf life of 50 years. This is prepper paradise!

Question of the Week

What do you think will happen when Karmelo Anthony is convicted for murder?