• Wow. Dig with a backhoe, and then spray a target with a machine gun. Only $384. Writers should get out and do all kinds of things that aren't part of everyday life for writers. I'm not a big fan of Las Vegas, but I could see myself doing this.
• Ok, this is clever. Forgive me if I don't believe it will work.
• Here's a service that the world needs, but I don't give it even a year, especially now that Wired has launched it into high visibility. Big Print doesn't want us too comfortable with the notion of scanning books we own to ebooks.
• Here may be one reason why: A consortium of tech book publishers is going after two anonymous Usenet posters who have posted literally hundreds of thousands of books (including several of mine) on alt.binaries.e-book.technical, not once but many times over the past several years. I've monitored that group since 2008 or so. It's astonishing.
• Yes, I'm a crank. I hope to be a crank who lasts awhile. Shorting sleep will kill you. There are some excuses (small children at home being the biggie) but I also wonder if college life makes us night people. Most of the morning people I know (Carol and myself included) lived at home during college. (Thanks to Alan Zeichick for the link.)
• And though I'm not a necromancer, I know that you're bound to answer when I propose: Everything's SCO's!
• Baby armadillos are cute, but I'm not sure I'd hold one, because they can carry leprosy. (Ok, ok...just wash your hands afterwards!)
• After all, armadillos are all that's left of my favorite Pleistocene megacritter, the glyptodont. (Pssst: Mister pinch-hitter, that's not a good stance to take!)
• Paywalled, but read it if you're a subscriber: Ford is putting buttons back on their dashboard. I'm having some reliability problems with my new knob-less car stereo, and if I return it I may insist on something with a volume control knob at very least. They exist.
• And they exist in half-height too. Now I'm wondering if I can get a 2M/440 mobile rig that will fit in the other half of the bay...
• I had one of these once. I was called a "young punk" on occasion, by those who had reason to think it was true. So I was a steampunk long before it was cool.
• I was a little early for the Lego phenom, and was quite happy to be a Meccano kid. Here's a great overview site for all the metal constructions sets I've ever heard of. (Except for Buildo, which was obscure even in 1960.)
• That said, don't tell Certain Small Girls, but one of these may be under A Certain Christmas Tree this year.
• Colorado and Washington State will make this at least possible. But...but...what if your dog is under 21?

[Hugh Daniel died suddenly at home on June 3, from an apparent heart problem. Please come help remember him and how he touched you. Please forward to people who knew Hugh, or lists where he was active. There will also be a memorial for him at the Ohm2013.org conference the Netherlands in July. --John Gilmore]

From Odds & Ends

In frequently volunteering for Operations, Hugh took the weight of many a conference onto his mighty shoulders. Courtesy Daniel family memorial site, photographer unknown to me.

Most of the problems that turn up while configuring Raspberry Pi systems cook down to inadequate power. The infamous stuttering keyboard problem vanished immediately here when I put the RPi on a stiffer 5V supply. When I bought a second RPi for a programming system, I incorporated a powered hub capable of sourcing 500 ma from each port, and in doing so strangled the power problem in its crib.

Problem solved, but I still wondered: How much juice do these things actually need? How stiff is the 5V supply? I'm a bench tech, and not being able to do actual measurements made me nuts. So I sniffed around a bought a test instrument for measuring voltage and current at a USB port under load. It's the Smartronix USB Power Monitor, model ST034TT05-01-001. I bought it from CyberGuys; $49.95.

It works like any current meter: You connect it between a USB port and a USB device. It simultaneously measures the voltage on the port and the current through the device. There's a full-size Type A jack on the right side of the box for connecting the load, and a full-size AB cable plugging into a B jack on the left side of the box, which plugs into a Type A port.

Works like a charm. I did the measurements below in about ten minutes:

In the readings above, the two numbers are the range across which I saw current run. In most cases, the first number is when the device is idle, the second is when it's busy. All measurements were taken from the same USB port, one of the four ports on the Rosewill powered hub. All devices tested are USB 2.0, because the meter itself is not listed as capable of testing USB 3 devices.

I have several of most of the thumb drives, and identical models were almost alike in their power behavior. This made me wonder how the Cruzer Minis managed to use so little power while doing the same task that all the other drives did. In this case, the task was copying a 109 MB file (the Lazarus 1.0.6 installer) from the PC to the thumb drive. One would think that smaller drives would draw less current, but not so.

Probably the biggest eyebrow-raiser was how rubbery the 5V USB rail is on my quadcore. An 8GB Cruzer Micro Skin thumb drive pulled the port down from 4.99 v to 4.91 v while drawing 90 ma. The same drive pulled the Rosewill hub supply down by only .02 v , from 5.17 v to 5.15 v while drawing 70 ma. (Current draw in thumb drives is not the same on the RPi as it is on Windows.)

My only gripe about the meter is that "peak" mode displays the highest values for voltage and current, when voltage and current generally move in opposite directions as load increases. So a downward movement in voltage isn't registered in peak mode.

Other than that, it works as described and answered a whole lot of questions about what sorts of things I can reasonably expect to connect to a Raspberry Pi's built-in USB ports. Actually, I now recommend using the powered hub for everything, given the RPi's touchiness about power. It makes the RPi system bulkier and snakier, but a whale of a lot more reliable.

And as for the Smartronix USB power meter, let's say solidly (if not quite highly) recommended.

Noonish today, Carol asked me to go out on the porch and sniff. There was a haze in the air that we don't generally see, and the faint whiff of fire. I knew that there were a couple of fires over a hundred miles SW of us, and didn't give it a lot of thought. I had a writers group meeting at 1 PM up at the Pikes Perk coffee shop at Academy and Vickers. We wrapped up a little before 3, and when we got out into the parking lot, Cynthia Felice began gesturing wildly to the northeast. I was already in the car, but I jumped out and looked where she was pointing.

Immense plume of black and gray smoke. I watched for the motion of the billows to get a sense for its distance. My guess was 6-7 miles. Once I got home it was all over the local news, and we learned that it started in the Black Forest area northeast of Colorado Springs. Measured distance from Pikes Perk to the fire is about eight miles, so I was close. From our house on the other side of the city (we're less than a mile from the NORAD entrance, if you know where that is) it's about 18 miles to the fire. I should have snapped a picture on my phone, but I wanted to get my butt home ASAP.

And there's another one. A new fire broke out down near the Royal Gorge to the west of Canon City at about the same time. That one is even farther away; I measure about 30-35 miles from here. Still, we're seeing the smoke from here, and the air smells a lot more like fire.

The Black Forest fire is blowing toward the northeast, directly away from us and away from more populated areas in Colorado Springs. However, several houses have already burned, and it doesn't sound like there's been any progress yet in controlling the fire.

I'm putting the dog kennels in the 4Runner. I'm watching things on TV. We're in no immediate danger, but cripes! Up in Black Forest homes were burning half an hour after the fire was reported. When there's a 30 MPH wind, these things happen fast.

I'll report here and on Facebook from time to time. Check Facebook first.

• Well. Amazon (finally) pulled my name off Garth Williams' book Baby Farm Animals. Years of polite complaints didn't do it. Making fun of them in the comments did. Thanks to my friends Eric, Steve, and Dave for working the magic. Poor Garth can rest in peace now without having to learn x86 assembly language.
• Erik Klemetti has a good overview of the 1783-84 Laki eruption in Iceland, which caused a sulfuric haze that Benjamin Franklin said reduced the intensity of the sunlight so much that a magnifying glass could not concentrate it sufficiently to ignite paper.
• Here's a good if technical discussion about what's wrong with X and why Wayland almost can't help but be better.
• Yet another force pushing print magazines into the torn-off-cover return racks of history: People are checking Facebook on their smartphones while waiting their turn in supermarket checkout lines. Good-bye to starting a story in People and then tossing the mag in the cart to finish at home.
• I don't always agree with Stallman. But this time I sure as hell do. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
• Bruce Eckel pokes holes in a couple of recent SF films. I hate to think of what he might have said about Independence Day. (Thanks to Jason Bucata for the link.)
• I'm not sure that Beowulfing boxfuls of Raspberry Pi boards makes sense, but it can be done.
• As can using a Raspberry Pi to take video through a telescope.
• There will be another perigee moon on June 23. It's not especially close as such things go; for a really close perigee moon, consider January 14, 1930, when our lesser light was only 356,397 km away. It won't be that close again until 2257. Nice page on the topic here.
• And the sunspot count of our greater light was down to 27 this morning. This sure doesn't look like a sunspot maximum to me.
• Tor has been publishing DRM-free ebooks for a year now, and reports that piracy has not increased as a result. They're mostly mum on how they measure piracy rates, but it's encouraging that a major print player would even do the experiment.
• Nice reminder that nobody died at Fukushima, and according to the UN it's unlikely that many will even get sick. Nuclear is not the demon that Certain Parties insist it is.