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DC Clean Up

X has been melting down over the federal government using the Constitution to take control of local law enforcement in D.C.

Wolf Blitzer stepped in it by posting a picture of a HUMVEE at Union Station. He implied it was an affront.

He got ratioed badly. There were many personal comments about how people were feeling safe to be outside at night. One woman talked about how this was the first time in years she’d been able to walk through Union Station without being verbally and sometimes physically harassed.

Another reporter visited a homeless encampment, expecting the standard anti-Trump screeching. Instead, they were told how much better it was now that the criminal element, drug users, and those in need of mental help are gone. One homeless person’s statement was to the effect, “It is the first good sleep I’ve had in months.”

Pushing Back

I do remember Ronald Reagan as our President. He was one of the most skillful orators I’ve had the pleasure to listen to. He was quick-witted and used that skill to zing the media. He did it so well that most of the media laughed at themselves for being zinged.

Trump is not as articulate. He speaks at a 6th grade level, if I recall correctly. I don’t like listening to him speak. What he does is connect with The People.

What is a greater strength is his ability to troll the media and Democrats. He trolls, whereas Reagan cast zingers.

What is most noticeable is just how hard he pushes back on the media and narrative.

What is the massive win, in my opinion, is that his administration uses the same method of pushing back. They don’t get upset with the lies and narratives; they just call it out. And many times make fun of those who have idiotic stances.

According to Reddit, I Live in a Racist State

I don’t engage on Reddit. I have more than enough on my plate as it is. Today’s joy was an “ICE” warning. The top comments all misrepresented facts. “Immigrants,” “neighbors,” “friends” were used to describe the criminal aliens that ICE was looking for.

The kicker for me: “My daily reminder of just how racist this state is.” I live in New Hampshire. There are blacks in this state. There are people of color in the state. The blacks seem to gather in the cities, as per normal. But I can’t find racists anywhere except within the black community.

But they have defined “racist” to mean anybody who doesn’t accept every third world alien that comes into our country.

For them, it is racist that people are upset about the Indian who killed a family of three by making an illegal U-turn. The Florida cops administered a simple test: English proficiency and road signs. He got 2 out of 12 right on the English portion and 1 or none of the road signs.

This monster with a CDL from California killed a family of three, and I’m racist for being upset that he entered my country illegally and was given, given, not earned, a CDL.

OpenStack

I like doing things the old-fashioned way. I like knowing what the hell is going on inside my network. Having software magically do things bothers me.

Unfortunately, none of the documentation for Open Virtual Network (OVN) talks about manually configuring OVN. It all uses OpenStack. In addition, I’ve become unhappy with my Docker Swarm solution. Since I’m not hosting anything locally anymore, it is time to “upgrade” to OpenStack.

What the heck will I break? I’ll know next week.

AI Code Generation

I’ve started using Grok for code generation. There are issues, but I’m working through it.

First, Grok is not a programmer. It is a piece of software that does a particular task. You have to spend the time to define the task.

In this particular case, I’m interested in creating network maps in a cleaner way. Grok gave me that starting point.

No matter how smart it appears, it is stupid. My latest example is that there is an input field for interfaces. There is a example prompt, provided by Grok.

That example prompt leaves out an entire part of the syntax using a different set of symbols.

This reminds me of the discussion about secretaries back when word processors became a thing.

The director of the lab and the directors of the lab divisions all had secretaries. The secretaries did most of the writing. They typed out letters to be sent by snail mail, and they often wrote the email sent over their boss’s signature.

When word processors came out, the directors were expected to write their correspondence. The result was substandard grammar and English. Not because these guys were dumb, but because their skillset didn’t include touch typing at 80 WPM and all the rest that a secretary brings to the mix.

Can the average person use AI to write programs? Maybe. In a year, yes.

Will it be good? No.

Just like we went from having electrical engineering to computer science to information technology, I expect to see classes in creating AI prompts showing up in colleges in the next couple of years.

Until AI makes the next leap, it will take real programmers, coders, and systems people to create fully functional software.

On the plus side, Grok has shown me several patterns that I’m copying.

What Happens When You Use 78% of Your 100 TB of storage?

Alarms start going off. I had a Ceph node die on me. I have the parts to replace it. I haven’t had the time nor incentives to do so.

The nice part was that I was able to physically move most of the drives to different nodes. This led to the great rebalancing.

Ceph uses a layout called a “CRUSH tree” or “CRUSH map.” The idea is to define a set of rules for how data blocks should be distributed to different drives (OSDs).

Ceph provides resilience with two methods: one is via redundancy, and the other is by error codes.

Using redundancy, you specify how many copies of each block of data you want. Three is the smallest safe number. This means that every byte written is duplicated twice. When you retrieve the block, it is pulled from the “closest” node.

A redundancy of 3 means three copies. With error codes, the cost is better. Something closer to 1.6 instead of 3 at the expense of more work calculating the error codes.

If you had all 3 copies of the block on the same drive, if that drive (OSD) fails, you’ve lost that block of data. The CRUSH map tells Ceph how to protect duplicate blocks from single points of failure.

In the simplist configuration, you do OSD isolation. No two copies of the same block are ever stored on the same OSD.

You can expand this to the node/host. You can make the same rule that no one host can hold two copies of the same block.

My CRUSH configuration is attempting data closet isolation. No two copies of the same block can exist in the same data closet.

If I had moved the physical drives to a host in the same data closet, then some rebalancing would happen. I moved the drives to hosts in different closets.

Ceph then proceeded to rebalance 70 TB. Which is why networks had to be reworked. I managed to eliminate most of the bottlenecks.

Unfortunately, it also meant that I had OSDs and Placement Groups go “near full,” slowing down the rebalancing. More drives to the rescue.

Question of the week?

For years, if a Democrat or leftist started yapping about this or that, regurgitating CNN talking points, I kept my mouth shut and just moved on.

Except if it was gun-related, then I spoke up.

Today, I’m much more likely to speak up. To attempt to bring facts and logic to the discussion. I no longer sit silently for their lies.

Do you feel it is safer to speak up about your political stance today?

Can I call Network Support, Please?

I’m in network hell again. The internal network keeps getting better, but I’m a cheap SOB, so I don’t buy Cisco $50 SFP modules. I buy 4 for $50.

This has downsides, one of which is when it breaks, I’m responsible.

So here’s the story in short. Node 3 <=> SW1, Node 4 <-> SW1, S1 <=> R1, R1 <=> N129, R1 <=> N5, R1 <-> GW, GW <-> THE WORLD.

I have measured bandwidth between N3 and N5 at nearly 10G, as expected, both directions. I have measured bandwidth of nearly 2G between N129 and N3 and N5, as expected in both directions. I have measured bandwidth between N4 and N3, N5 and N129 at 1G, bi-directional.

The measured speed from the WORLD to the ONT is 1 Gbit, bi-directional. The measured speed between GW and WORLD is 480 Mbit bi-directional. This is because the GW is CPU starved at that point. It is a router, not a compute engine.

The measured throughput from the GW to N129 and N5 is 1 Gbit, as expected.

The measured throughput from N129 and N5 to the GW is < 30 Mbit. This is messed up. I'm working backwards. ONT to GW replaced ethernet cable. GW to R1 I've replaced the fiber modules on both ends, next step is to replace the fiber itself. That's where I'm stuck. I've even power cycled R1.

Techs vs Tech Support

The Fidium/Consolidated Communications tech was on site yesterday. He quickly found the ONT. Measured its performance, declared it needed to be replaced. Took a look at the equipment he could see and the fiber runs, went and moved the house to a different splitter. We are now on the primary splitter instead of one a few steps down. There are only 4 drops on this splitter instead of 10+.

When he was finished, I ran my speed tests again. 1G down, 0.040G Up. A major improvement, still not good.

Here are some observations. English was his primary and likely his only language. He understood that he was speaking with somebody who knew networks.

After we decided that something else was wrong, we decided to test with his laptop. Before he did any testing, he tested his dongle. He made sure his laptop was capable of 1G testing. That dongle was not. He went back to his truck to get one that did support 1G.

We tested, and he was getting the same numbers I was.

I’ve ordered a USB-C to Ethernet dongle for the laptop so I can connect directly to the GW to do testing. That’s a different question.

He called tech support. Those people, tech support for the techs, could not handle him just plugging in his laptop to test.

I introduced the tech to 8.8.8.8 and showed him how to verify he was online.

Because Tech Support couldn’t figure it out, he had to install a company router for them to be able to test. Tech Support then tried to force me to use their router. Their router has no SFP ports. No, thank you.

New Client

The new client project is winding down. After their people said it couldn’t be done for over a month, I do have the new server running. Management and their customers are happy. Most of the people using the new server are happy.

Their IT people are not happy with me. He managed to make enough visible mistakes that management noticed. Not that they hadn’t noticed before, they just didn’t know what they didn’t know.

Now comes the difficult task for me: turning a one-time project into long-term client support.

TDS

I look at the world of today versus the world of 12 months ago, and my life is better. I might not be pulling as much money as I want, but the economy is moving in the correct direction.

If I see a headline with “Trump!” in it, I know another TDS sufferer is about to tell me why their life is horrible because of Trump.

People being told to buy soda and snacks with their money and not mine? That’s evil.

The federal government not paying for people’s solar systems with my money? That’s evil too.

Removing criminal aliens from our country? Think of the children!

There was a thread on Reddit complaining that solar is going to die in Vermont because the solar subsidy is being stopped.

I’m sorry, solar in the Northeast is not as viable as solar in Florida or other sunny places. If you think it is such a great deal, buy it with your money, not mine.

Go read Dive Medic’s blog over at https://areaocho.com for his personal experience with solar power. It is a win for him. It is a nice concept for me. But it requires doing the math. And using your money.

The National Guard Can Be Used for Law Enforcement IF

It is for a good cause, like protecting President Biden from those horrible, evil, red-hatted people. They should have been called in to stop the most horrific, violent, attack on the government of the United States ever. January 6th, when 10s of thousands of the most heavily armed people in the world, left all their guns at home.

Activating the National Guard to help law enforcement officials in the District of Columbia? That’s forbidden. That’s misuse of the military.

Remember, the Second Amendment only protects the rights of the Militia, which is the National Guard, until Trump uses them, in which case they are the Military and it is a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. (End sarcasm).

There is nothing that the Trump administration can do that the left won’t cry about.

It’s Not Sharp

I think I’ve mastered the art of woodworking with hand tools. All cutting implements are dull, by definition. Sharpen them before you start.

Seriously, almost every time I’ve had issues, it is because I have not done enough sharpening or flattening.

That includes such things as flattening your planes. I have a Stanley #4 that needs more work to make its sole flat. It is almost there, but I got tired of trying to make it flat. I’m in a position to work on it again.

I picked up a wooden fore plane. This is really a jack plane, but it works.

The first step was to examine it. The sole looked ok, until I realized that there were little drips from whatever was used to finish it.

It took a good 30 minutes on 320 grit sandpaper to make the sole flat. It took longer than that to grind a good edge on the iron. It was so bad that the iron got to hot to hold, even with my slow speed grinder.

I need to spend a bit more time, but I believe this will be a real workhorse.

Now all I need is a day that isn’t so hot and muggy.

The same with the 26″ handsaw I found. Once it is properly sharpened, its 8 TPI will just rip through wood. The long length of the panel will make it another workhorse.

All I need to do is finish my Jointer’s Box. OH, I realized I had been staring at a Jointer’s box at the Fort without seeing it. I have to spend the time to examine it more closely.

Question of the week

My standard in interacting with the police is “I don’t answer questions.” Which I fail at, so I work harder at succeeding.

If police were to roll up in my yard, I would be telling them to leave.

With the advent of federal law enforcement hitting the streets of DC, there are reports coming out that LEOs are walking up on people sitting on their stoops to demand ID and justification.

Where do you stand on the idea of the cops demanding ID of people sitting on the steps of their own homes?

Ceph For The Win?

One of my Ceph nodes had started acting up. It would stop responding, and I could get no network traffic to it.

It is a truly headless server. My only input was the power button. Which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.

After the third time the node went offline, I put a monitor on the node and got to see it die.

It limped along for a few more days before I remembered I had hot-swappable cabinets and moved the large drives to a different node.

Ceph is now rebalancing the cluster by moving 24+ terabytes around. It should finish in a couple more days. The cool factor is that nothing that depends on the Ceph cluster noticed. It all just works.

I would be replacing the dead node, but other work is interfering.

New Work

I’m in the process of bringing on a new client. It has been an interesting 48 hours. My first task has me busy for the next 4 days, if their networking team can get their network configured correctly.

They depend on Linux for several servers but have had nobody with Linux skills in their IT department for many years. Troglodite to the rescue.

I love this stuff. Doing emergency fixes faster than most other people can even evaluate the problem is where I shine.

Democrats AWOL

In a move that reminds me of pickup baseball games of my youth, the Dems of Texas were losing, so they kicked sand on the plate, grabbed the ball and bat, and took off for the hills.

Being Dems, this wasn’t “I’m taking my ball and bat and going home.” No, it was “I’m stealing your ball and bat and taking off with them.”

The governors of New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, and other Democratic strongholds are threatening to redistrict to remove Republican districts.

This would be a real threat, except that these states already did it. There are no Republican representatives from Massachusetts.

Ebay is an illness

So there are three or four planes you need for hand processing wood.

You require a smoothing plane, a Stanley #4. You require a jack plane, a Stanley #5. You require a jointer, a Stanley #7. And you should have a fore plane, a Stanley #5 with a wide mouth and specially shaped iron.

• Veritas #4: $290.00
• Veritas #5: $389.00
• Veritas #7: $459.00
• Veritas #6 Fore plan: $346

I’m not about to add those up. I’m lucky in that I already owned the #5 and #7.

eBay has Stanley #4s for around $50 plus shipping. Stanley #5s are going for $25 to $50. #7s are a bit more, in the $70 to $125 range.

Wooden planes are even cheaper.

I need to stop spending any time on eBay.

Diets

The weight is slowly coming off. It working for me. I just need to keep up the exercise part of the diet.

Question of the Week

What incident sticks out in your mind where you were told that there was a difficult problem and you gave the simple solution?

To give an example. I once interviewed with one of the big three automakers. My friend had gotten me the interview.

The interview went well. They explained the project I would be working on. They explained how hard the problem was that I would be working on.

I received permission to use the whiteboard and sketched out my proposed solution.

A few days later I received an apologetic phone call from the project manager. Seems that my 15-minute whiteboard session had provided them with the solution they needed. They had completed the project and the project was being shut down. The position they were going to hire me to fill was gone.

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.

Why is it so slow?

I wish I knew. There is a fast server running nothing but Ceph and MariaDB. It is connected via 10 Gigabit to the backbone. It is running on NVMe.

That’s not a bottleneck.

The container is running on a nice fast computer with plenty of memory, 10 Gigabit networking, and multiple CPUs running at 98% idle.

That’s not a bottleneck.

I’m done. I know you are done too. We’re moving to a different server in a different data center. You won’t notice the downtime because the server is so slow today.

I’m spoiled

I can go to Amazon and order something; it will be here the next day with free shipping. I order from some place apart from Amazon, and they want me to pay shipping.

If something goes wrong with an Amazon shipment, they have it fixed in a few minutes.

Powdered Paint

With the way my woodworking is going, I expect to need to put a finish on some items shortly.

Earlier this week, I used a 1-pound cut of shellac with a Tried and True beeswax and boiled linseed oil finish. That came out very nice.

On Wednesday I tested out a dark 2-pound cut of shellac on pine. Oh my, that is beautiful. I’m going to make some beeswax, carnauba, and olive oil paste polish over the top. I just have to make it.

But the fun thing that arrived Thursday was milk paint.

This has very period colors. I’ve used it in the past. That was a product by General (I think) which I applied with an HVLP sprayer. It did a fantastic job of covering with a dull finish.

Those shelves have stood up to abuse above the washer and dryer. The remarkable feature is that the paint never gets tacky, unlike latex paint.

The new paint comes in powder format. You mix it at a one-to-one ratio. Unfortunately, the person who wrote the instructions didn’t specify if it was 1-to-1 by volume or by weight.

I’m going with volume because the instructions have far too much “until it looks good” and “semi-melted milkshake consistency.”

The colors look very period. Next week will be a test week for painting.

Shellac or paint first?

Research and still more research.

Unfortunately, the seller is happy with “just use my product.” I’m not a fan of putting paint straight on softwoods directly.

So what comes first, a few coats of shellac to create a smoother surface or paint only, or paint then shellac to seal it, followed by wax?

The good news is that almost any finish will work over de-waxed shellac.

SCOTUS: One Little Phrase

In Rush v. U.S. Jamond Rush was found to be in possession of an unregistered short-barreled rifle. He is making a facial Second Amendment challenge to 18 U.S.C. §§ 5841, 5845(a)(3), 5861(d).

A petition for writ of certiorari was filed June 6, 2025. On June 13th, the government said they would not be responding.

This is “OK” for the new DoJ. They aren’t fighting the petition, nor are they attempting to get the case heard.

SCOTUS has distributed the case for conference on 9/29/2025.

Yesterday, The Court added this short phrase to the docket: Response Requested. (Due September 2, 2025)

This is a big deal. It means that the Supreme Court is asking the Trump Administration if the Trump Administration wants them to hear the case.

Given what we have been seeing out of the Trump DoJ, this is likely a very good thing.

With the OBBB having passed and the reason for SBS, SBR, AOW, and Supressors being on the NFA gone, this could be the end of the NFA for these types of items, or for the NFA as a whole.

We will keep watching.

Question of the week

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. — William Shakespeare, Macbeth.

The one thing that keeps disappointing me with this administration is the lack of arrests and criminal cases being filed.

I have held DoD clearances. I had to take yearly classes on how to handle classified material. I know that Hillary Clinton broke the law in her handling of classified material. She should have been charged, arrested, prosecuted, found guilty, and then spent time in prison.

The fact that she is still walking around without any consequences upsets me.

I was hoping that we would see several high-level people being perp-walked over the Epstein files. It hasn’t happened (yet?)

Now there is another dump of data exposing criminal actions on the part of multiple players.

Q: Do you think anybody will be going to trial over any of these criminal actions? Do you think anybody will see any prison time for their criminal acts?

DoJ is Pro 2A?

In a strange twist of events, the federal DoJ has filed multiple briefs with the Supreme Court supporting the Second Amendment-protected rights of The People. Amazing!

They have also done things at the circuit court level to close out future attacks on the Second Amendment.

It is a great time to be alive.

Sharp Yesterday Means Dull Today

My progress as a woodworker has been frustrated many times. The most common frustration? The tool is no longer sharp.

Yesterday, I was fitting the bottom to my tool tote. I’m sweating like a pig. It is dripping onto my glasses, making me even more misirable.

When I came in for a break, I told Ally that this is the first time I wished I was using my power tools. With very little effort, I could have set up the table saw and fitted the bottom in just a few minutes. Planing the ends flat and with the correct angle was painful.

Then, for grins, I pulled the blade out of the plane, did a hand touch-up, and then put the iron back in the plane. What had been a fine sawdust became end-grain shavings. Not more than 10 minutes later I had a great fit.

What Do You Mean Rip Cut Saws Rip Boards Better?

There is a scary moment when you first modify a tool to “fix” it or make it work for you. I think my first time was when I cut the shank of 3/4″ to JT-3 from 3″ to 1.5″. It worked perfectly, but cutting a piece off my new adapter? That was scary.

Modern handsaws are basically shit. Most people don’t know how to use them. Most people won’t even bother to learn how to use them. Most people would consider it too much work.

Older saws can be had for a reasonable price, but they are not ready to use.

The reason that new saws are so bad is that they are designed to do everything and to leave the best edge possible.

You can find old saws with 4 Teeth Per Inch (TPI). It was seldom that you found an old saw with more than 10 TPI, with a few being 15 TPI.

There is a good reason for that: the coarser the pitch, the faster the saw cuts.

Saw teeth have several parameters to them. The TPI, the angle of the tooth, the set, and the shape of the tooth.

When you crosscut , you want to sever the fibers. This requires a knife-like action. This is accomplished by putting a cutting edge on the saw tooth, alternating teeth. This cuts the wood fiber before removing the waste.

When you are rip cutting, you do not need that knife-like action. What you want is a chisel-like action. This is accomplished by having a 90° angle of attack that shears the fibers under the blade.

Modern saws are marketed to do both. They have a crosscut grind to the teeth, and they have a high TPI count. They do not do either type of cutting “well.” They do both adequately.

Thursday I took a new saw blade and “sharpened” it. That is to say I reshaped the shape of the each tooth to be that chisel profile. Then I tested it.

In soft pine, a full stroke was cutting somewhere between an inch and a half and two inches. Three or four times as well as it was cutting before the reshaping.

Obama Fights Back

The Obama sycophants, on command from the holy one, have stood up and screamed that the referral that Tulsi Gabbard made to the DoJ is just a distraction.

The argument is something like Trump is in the Epstein files. He doesn’t want you to know what we all know, that he is a kiddy diddler and a rapist. This referral is just to distract the MAGAots.

How do we know? Because Trump said he wasn’t in the files. He is lying.

How do we know he is lying? Because he was lying in his first term.

How do we know he was lying in his first term? The media told us so.

How did the media know he was lying? Because Trump always lies.

You can’t make this shit up.

Epstein

The world turns; now the Democrats are demanding the files be released.

There is a huge issue with the files, and every Democrat who is listed in the files will scream it to the skies.

The chain of custody has been broken because untrusted agents could have modified the content.

The files have been in the Biden DoJ for 3 or 4 years. Who had access, who could have modified the content, and who could have added or removed content? None of that can be trusted today.

For the Democrat caught with his pants down the same will be said. They will claim that the Trump Administration modified the content.

Obama Has Immunity!

Did he order these things done as part of his duties as the President of the United States?

No? Then he doesn’t have immunity.

Question of the week

Are you going to keep your Sig P320? Sell it? Buy them as they flood the market?

Site Display Issues

Somehow how, some way, my theme was lost. I’ve reset to a working theme.

It is loud, it is in your face, and it looks like 100 other sites. I do not have the time or energy to put it all back right now. I’ll be working it over in the coming weeks.

Woodworking

It is difficult to know or anticipate what you don’t know. I like to anticipate; I sometimes fail.

Right now my hands are scratched and bruised. My thumbnail is a beautiful shade of blue and black.

I’m currently working on flattening the benchtop. This consists of using the smoothing plane to take down local high spots. Then use a straight edge to make sure that you have a flat surface from side to side. Then you use winding sticks to make sure your top is not twisted.

My top is not yet smooth, much less flat, much less without twist.

On the other hand, there is no noticeable difference in moving from board to board.

Up coming woodworking projects

I intend to make a wood journeyman’s tool tote as my first action. I intend to pick up my wood at a local sawmill. 4/4 rough-cut pine.

If I can find some 6/4 or 8/4 cherry, I’ll pick up enough to make a rabbet plane and a router plane.

Vehicle Issues

I drove home from the autoshop today with a lighter wallet and a much cooler cabin. The bearings on the A/C condenser went out.

If I were the only person to drive my truck, I would have ignored it for a while. But I am not. So, I got it replaced. The issue is that it is too easy to turn the A/C on. All it takes is pushing the A/C button OR turning the knob counterclockwise.

We Must All Watch the Same Videos, Read the Same Articles

There are days when I finish writing an article and then watch a video that covers the same issue. Sometimes I learn more, and sometimes it feels like they are responding to the article I have not published yet.

In the Sotomayor situation, I was pleased to watch two videos where the presenters quoted nearly the same things I did. All of us pointing out that Sotomayor is an agenda-driven rogue justice.

Question of the Week

When I was a kid, people would buy a car for cash every couple of years. A car loan for 48 months was almost unheard of.

Today, I’m seeing people taking out 6- and 7-year loans on a vehicle.

How long do you expect your cars to last? My truck is 15 years old; it needs bits and pieces to be fixed or replaced. I expect to get another 5 years from it.

My first car, a 1967 VW Microbus, was traded in on a 1987 TransAm in 1987. I expect my cars to last 10 to 20 years.

SCOTUS

Trump keeps winning at the Supreme Court. There was an 8-1 opinion in his favor this week. With only the DEI Hire dissenting.

Violence In the Streets

There were two events where armed terrorists decided to shoot at federal agents.

Compared to the Dallas, TX, shooter a few years ago, this is barely making a ripple in the news.

Stay strapped. Keep your head on a swivel. Stay out of stupid places at stupid times with stupid people.

Evil

The flash floods in Texas and New Mexico have claimed multiple lives. Parents will never see their children alive again.

There are far too many people in the socials going, “Good, they deserved it.”

These people are evil. They sicken me.

TDS, Lies

People have been blaming Trump for the tragedy in Texas. I’ve heard that it was Trump’s fault because the fully manned weather service was not properly staffed. That he defunded the early warning system. That he hasn’t gone to Texas, like Biden went to NC.

Except that Trump was in NC before Biden. Trump has been in contact with the Texas state government. He has offered all help possible, and the federal government had responded, was rescuing people within hours of Trump learning of the tragedy.

These people are nearly evil. If they had the brains of an amoeba, they would be evil.

Safe Travels

My wife has returned from her vacation. Happy dances throughout the house.

Sharpen That Tool

Wednesday, I was cutting a mortise. Because of the style, I cut two partial cross cuts, then knocked out the waste. This created a mortise that was intentionally to small.

The mortise is then trimmed to size with a chisel. While this started fine, it really wasn’t working as I expected.

Thursday, I needed to finish trimming those mortises. Before I did that, I ran the same chisel through the sharpening pattern.

When I went to cut that end grain, the chisel shaved a piece so thin I could see through it.

I need to spend more time keeping my tools sharp.

Shortly, I will need to plane the top of the frame flat. This will require me to use the jack plane or joiner plane. Before I do so, I’m going to spend still more time making sure those plane irons are razor sharp.

Woodworking Tools

The tools you need to make tools. My workbench frame is nearly completed. I am currently adding bracing. But I can clamp boards to the top of this frame to do work.

Planing a short piece of lumber flat two days ago took about an hour and was a chore the entire tim.

I clamped a board to the top of the frame with a plane stop in it. With this in place, it took just a few minutes to smooth and flatten a brace. This workbench is a good height for me, and it is a joy to work on.

Question of the Week

When you look in your holster drawer, what brand of holster do you see that you should not have purchased?

What holster brand have you found to be good for you, and why?

We have decided to give away some cards!

The first 20 people who send a mailing address to us at info@troglodite.com will receive 15 cards via USPS first class mail.

Depending on demand, we might ask for a donation to cover the costs.

Thank you!
Chris, Ally, and the rest of the team

Trump Wins, Again

My hope is that in 10 years, my grandchildren can read about the 12-day war. Read how the man who did not want to be president became president and brought peace to the middle-east.

President Trump played better than anyone could have expected. And it started on the 20th of January.

When Trump took office in 2016, he was a businessman. He knew that even if it was a hostile takeover, you kept the top people. Everybody wanted things to work. They might hate your guts, but they wanted things to work so they could continue to take home a paycheck.

The government is not like that. Trump was sabotaged before he even took office. People he trusted shouldn’t have been trusted. People he wanted in his team were forced out. The swamp creatures latched on, the media tried to destroy him.

In some ways, losing to Biden is one of the best things that has ever happened to this country. Trump 2.0 is so much better.

Trump started this term as if he were a Democrat. He fired everybody who wasn’t on his team. He is still working on that. And it worked.

He got people in as directors and at cabinet level that believe in him and believe in his vision.

There were no leaks about the bombing attack. None.

D.C. has been a cauldron of leaked secrets since I was a child. Most of those leaks served Democrat interest.

After the attack, there was a leak. A highly placed source, or a person with access to high-level intel, leaked part of a BDA. They seemed to have omitted the part where it was a preliminary BDA with low confidence.

A day later, Trump declared a ceasefire between Israel and Iran. When both parties tried to “empty their tubes” he slapped them both down.

As I write this, there does not seem to be any more exchanges between the two major parties.

In The Supreme Court

Trump keeps winning cases that get to the Court. Sotomayor, Brown, and Kegan keep writing dissents.

It is important to note that the agenda-driven justices have not yet written a single thing about the merits of the cases that are being brought to The Court. It is all about waiting.

As far as I can tell, everyone who is not a sheeple knows that the Trump Administration is going to win these cases.

The leftists don’t care. For them, it is the cost to the Trump Administration and delay, delay, delay.

If these cases were to proceed through the courts as the leftist want, Trump will be out of office before they are resolved.

Consider Duncan, which was filed in 2016. The case went through the District Court, through the merits panel of the Ninth Circuit, through the en banc Ninth Circuit, through a motion for writ of certiorari, was granted certiorari, the Ninth Circuit’s opinion was vacated, the case was remanded to the Ninth, which remanded it to the district court, where another full finding of facts, post-Bruen, won, was appealed to the Ninth, was taken by the original en banc panel, against Ninth Circuit policies, the district opinion was vacated and remanded for final disposition, and is now seeking certiorari for the second time before the Supreme Court.

Nine years! I could easily see rogue inferior courts dragging out cases for years and years.

Regardless of the agenda-driven justices, the Supreme Court has handed out win after win to the Trump Administration.

Truck Sounds

Wednesday, I drove the truck 50 miles or so. It had this really weird sound.

That sound was silence.

It turns out that there really was a second bearing going bad, or which had gone bad.

Because my dude is cool, I was able to observe the work done on my truck. Watching the mechanic use the same methods that I was questioning was nice. On the other hand, watching him do some things just blew my mind.

Even when the metal does not rust, two metal parts in close contact will stick. The axle on the passenger side of the truck was seriously stuck to the hub. It took some heavy work with a 5 lb sledge and a punch to break the axle free.

Jess picked up the air chisel, put a punch in it, walked over to the axle and triggered the air chisel. That axel backed out almost instantly.

Doh, I have that tool. Never even occurred to me to use it.

The cost of the hub for the driver’s side was $10 more than I would have paid at the local shop. With his profit built in, having him (shop owner) source the hub didn’t really cost extra.

It turns out that the job I wasn’t willing to do, replacing the bad flex brake line in the left rear, was a simple job of unscrewing the hose from the two hard lines and replacing it.

I saw that and was irritated that I didn’t do that work myself. Easy, right?

That was, until I saw, as part of the miscellaneous shop items, two new lengths of hard line. Jess had to replace the hard line after they failed while replacing the flex line.

The truck is good for a few thousand more miles.

Stock Market

On the first two days the stock market was open after the start of the 12-day war, my accounts dipped, hard. It was extremely scary.

So I dropped another chunk of money into the market to make some purchases.

As of last night, the market has recovered everything from that dip and a bit more. I expect to see it go up again today.

Woodworking

I’ve started making my workbench. Instead of pulling out the chop saw, I set up a pair of saw horses and used hand tools. I don’t think I’ve ever made cleaner cuts by hand. After 58 years of using handsaws, I might actually have learned how to do it.

One end of the bench has been glued and screwed, and I’m working on the half lap braces. This is my first half lap.

It is finished, the fit is good, as long as I don’t want the other end to touch the opposite leg. I’ll have to refine the joint tomorrow.

Tools

I haven’t been able to find one of my marking gauges. The one I did find didn’t work for me.

The nice option was the 3/4 wide chisel I pulled off the wall. It was properly protected by a cap. It was properly sharpened and worked perfectly.

The other side of this was finding out that I seem to have let somebody borrow the 1″ chisel. How do I know? Because there are chips in the cutting edge. It looks more like a saw blade than a chisel.

It is going to take a bit of work on the grinder to get that edge back. Thank goodness for slow speed 320 grit diamond wheels. Without a grinder, it would take hours to recover that edge.

Oh, those bench chisels are the cheap box store chisels, they are Marple’s.

I now have a “working” No.4 Stanley. I have one of unknown condition of the same general size, and one that seems to be junk. It is nice to have the tools I need.

Question of The Week

How concerned were you that we were about to get stuck in another war?