Wordle 1767 Hint

Hint: A clod or cluster.

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First Letter: C

Wordle 1766 Hint

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

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First Letter: W

A Rather Dry April So Far

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

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

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

Up sides:

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

Down side:

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

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

Wordle 1765 Hint

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

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First Letter: S

Applicable(?) Aphorisms #15

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

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

My thoughts:

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

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

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

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

Wordle 1764 Hint

Hint: A sycophant or flunky.

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First Letter: T

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wordle 1763 Hint

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

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First Letter: B

Another Thing I Didn't Know About MX Linux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of These Things is Not Like the Other

Joseph Solis-Mullen at the Libertarian Institute:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Site-Specific Problem ... MAYBE Related to MX Linux

Over a period of about two weeks, my experience with MX Linux as a replacement for Linux Mint (and systemd) has proven almost uniformly excellent. It's at least as fast to install, and as easy to use, maintain, and update, as any Linux distribution I've tried, and anecdotally it seems to hog less RAM and less CPU time, and run lower CPU temperatures than, Mint.

One, and only one, exception.

I use (and recommend) InoReader as my RSS reader. Since much of my work involves finding/blurbing/linking content online from a (fairly) stable source pool, it saves me a lot of time and trouble.

Lately, it's been intermittently opening links very slowly after clicking, sometimes to the point that I'd even classify the behavior as a "freeze."

Because the problem is intermittent, I have yet to determine whether it's behaving that way only in MX Linux, or only in my usual browser, or only on this particular matchine, or more generally (the latter would point to a problem with my Internet connection or with InoReader itself).

On a little bit of search engine work, I'm not seeing any similar reports from other InoReader users, so I suspect the problem isn't with them. So it could be something with MX Linux. It's not disruptive enough to my workflow to justify another OS switch, but worth taking note of.

Wordle 1762 Hint

Hint: What has six palms but only four fingers?

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First Letter: C

Mass Production Does Not Necessarily Imply Uniformity

Tamara's had her 2006 Honda CR-V for a few years now, and other than some initial work to get things tip-top (because the previous owner didn't keep up with things like replacing a CV axle that had been spraying grease all over the engine compartment for quite a while), it's been a solid car. No reason to suspect that it was a strange, rogue variant.

Until she started having a brake problem that turned out to involve the proportioning valve inside the ABS pump.

It turns out that this particular car was built in the United Kingdom, that it was not built for export to the US, and that this particular year used an ABS pump that is not, and is not compatible with, the ABS pumps CR-Vs made everywhere and everywhen else, and that for some reason is difficult to find. It's turned into a real pain in the ass and even once it gets resolved, I suspect she's going to sell the vehicle and get something else.

As for how a UK-built Honda that wasn't made for sale in the US got to the US, my working theory is this:

At least at one time, members of the US armed forces who got assigned "permanently" -- that is, for more than some minimum amount of time -- got a neat little perq in that if they bought a vehicle overseas, when they were reassigned back to the US, the military would ship that vehicle over for them at no charge.

Back in the late 1970s or early 1980s, after he spent a couple of years at Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in Japan, my brother had his 500cc Honda motorcycle (the replacement for the Norton 850 he sold before leaving the US) shipped back to his new duty station at MCAS El Toro. As soon as it arrived, he took some accrued leave and rode it from California to Missouri ... in January.

So I'm guessing that a US Air Force member spent some time at one of several US installations in the UK, then got transferred to e.g. AFB MacDill and had his shiny new Honda sent over.

The Mark of the Boast

That phrase happened to pop into my little pea brain this morning, and I had ChatGPT turn it into an image. Behold:

Wordle 1761 Hint

Hint: It's not over yet. But it's already started.

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First Letter: B

Wordle 1760 Hint

Hint: Three kinds of today's Wordle -- uni, bi, and motor.

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First Letter: C

Wordle 1759 Hint

Hint: Like Legolas or Galadriel.

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First Letter: E

Wordle 1758 Hint

Hint: Not quite a proper street (but if it's covered it's an arcade).

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First Letter: A

Applicable(?) Aphorisms #14

"Happiness comes to those who bring happiness to others." (Zoroastrianism, Yasna 53:3)

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

My thoughts:

Another version of the Golden Rule, but as observation rather than prescription.

The observation seems valid to me -- "you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar" -- but your mileage may vary.

The more interesting thing to me is that the Yasna seems to pre-date Jewish, Christian, and Muslim versions of the Golden Rule by quite some time. It's hard to say for sure, since the Yasna wasn't published in written form until the 5th century AD (so it's possible that this aphorism arrived late to the script), but its oral transmission began, historians think, in the second millennium BC, more than 1,000 years before Hillel and Christ.

I suspect variations of the Golden Rule go all the way back to the beginning of humankind communicating ideas with each other.

Wordle 1757 Hint

Hint: A proper prissy pearl-clutcher.

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First Letter: P

Hopefully Helpful Definition

 trade deficit, n. a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Wordle 1756 Hint

Hint: When you're on the rebound.

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First Letter: C

Wordle 1755 Hint

Hint: Handle today's Wordle with care -- it's loaded.

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First Letter: L

IMO, It Doesn't Matter Much Who the "Real" Satoshi Nakamoto Is ...

... but if it is Adam Back, as John Carreyrou claims in the New York Times, I have to say:

Job well done, Mr. Back.

Not very many people really, noticeably change the world, even fewer change it for the better, and even fewer knowingly in advance change it for the better.

The writings (on e.g. the Cypherpunks list) of both Back and "Satoshi Nakamoto" display both a clear understanding of what "the better" is, and a clear desire to accomplish it, and Back has a discernible record of working to do so over a long period (supporting PGP and opposing the US regime's attempts to prevent its spread, for example -- I'm old enough to remember that fight, and to have sent a copy to a friend abroad just because the regime said I mustn't).

We've got Satoshi's work product, and we're far better off having it than not having it.

Knowing his or her "real" name or not won't change that, and I'd personally prefer that his or her privacy be respected. I hope Mr. Back isn't given a hard time by the paparazzi and so forth. But I'm sure he will be.

Wordle 1754 Hint

Hint: An arm, but made of water.

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First Letter: I

Another Benefit from the Change of Linux Distributions

I wanted to give it a few days just to make sure it was a permanent feature, not a temporary anomaly. It's the former:

MX Linux (XFCE desktop version) is easier on my computer than Linux Mint was. According to psensor, I'm running noticeably lower CPU and drive temperatures.

I suppose that could be because I've installed less stuff -- stuff that might leave rogue processes running even when the apps themselves are supposedly closed -- but my recollection is that Mint ran higher temperatures than I'm seeing now even upon install.

Not that Mint was red-lining my CPU temp or anything. But presumably lower temperatures on a regular basis should mean longer CPU -- and fan -- life.

Wordle 1753 Hint

Hint: Thick (as in "as a brick").

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First Letter: D

Wordle 1752 Hint

Hint: Bound by oath.

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First Letter: S

Wordle 1751 Hint

Hint: Not quite an ambassador, but more than a mere chargé d'affaires.

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First Letter: E

MX Linux, Day 2 Observations

OK, I've had a full day plus since install to put MX Linux through its paces, meaning I've been able to do pretty much all the things I do on a computer with this operating system. Still liking it. I've only really got two observations, one very positive and one very mildly negative.

Positive Observation: This morning, the little task bar icon that means "it's time for updates/upgrades" turned green. I pressed it. A window opened and showed me a list of OS and app updates/upgrades available. I pressed the OK button, entered my password ... and 20 seconds later (by my count) it informed me that it was done downloading and installing them. Since I did a full update/upgrade on install, there wasn't a lot for it to do. I'll expect downloads to take longer when there's a full new browser version or whatever. But it was easy, and the post-download installation/check was very fast.

Negative Observation: Several times, my task bar has just ... disappeared. It seems to have something to do with power management. It happens when the screen goes dark from inactivity. It's easy to get the thing back (about 10 seconds in settings -- I put the particular function on the desktop after the second or third time it happened), and I expect there's a permanent fix for it that I'll research, find, and implement, but if you try MX out, let me know if it happens to you too.

Other than that, it seems at least as stable, reliable, and easy to install, use, and maintain, as Linux Mint and other good distributions. Which means it's a lot more stable, reliable, and easy to install, use, and maintain than Windoze.

Applicable(?) Aphorisms #13

"The wise man is one who knows what he does not know." (Taoism, Tao Te Ching 71)

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

My thoughts:

To me, understanding the limits of one's own knowledge seems like a basic requirement for survival, or at least for flourisihing, rather than an indicator of wisdom as such. But I could be wrong.

Wordle 1750 Hint

Hint: Like a desert ... or a beach.

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First Letter: S

And The Winning Candidate Distro Is ...

MX Linux.

After messing around with Devuan as a live USB, I did the same with MX Linux, and I just like it better. 

The install to hard drive is as easy as it should be (as easy as Ubuntu or Mint, much easier than Windows), it has a nice intuitive app installer, and so far everything I've mess with has worked easily (for example, setting up Dropbox).

All of this was by way of moving to a non-systemd Linux distribution (MX gives you the choice between systemd and sysvinit), but I was also looking for something "Linux Newbie Friendly," and MX qualifies:

1. Download the iso you want (I chose the one with the XFCE desktop/GUI, but you can also go with KDE or Fluxbox);
2. Burn the iso to a thumb drive;
3. Boot your computer from the thumb drive;
4. Mess around with MX a little and see if you like it;
5. Click the "Install" icon on the desktop and follow the easy instructions;
6. Enjoy!

I considered installing MX next to Mint and Windows, but then I had a better idea: I had it nuke the whole hard drive and just completely take over.

Why? Since I've had this computer, I've used Windows two or three times ... to play Starcraft. If I really want to play Starcraft, I'll do the Wine or virtual machine thing. I'm tired of wasting hard drive space on Windows and after logging into it this morning to grab the product key just in case, I hope it's the last time I ever do that.

Wordle 1749 Hint

Hint: Today's Wordle burns, but just a little.

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First Letter: S

Immediate Ergonomic Improvement!

Preemptive for the economically delusional: According to Amazon's AI, "[t]he product information for the HUANUO Dual Monitor Mount [not an affiliate link] doesn't specify the country of manufacture," but I can reasonably surmise that the item is "cheap Chinese junk."

In this case, I went for the cheapest option not beause I'm unwilling to pay more for exactly what I want, but because I wasn't sure if monitor arms of any kind were exactly what I wanted.

I thought putting my monitors on adjustable arms instead of stationary risers might improve the ergonomics of my desktop setup, but I wasn't sure, so why spend three times as much on the fancy-schmancy gas spring, etc. stuff as a first step?

If the cheap ones worked exactly as I hoped, I'd have spent less money and got what I wanted.

If they worked, but not as well as I liked, I could hand them down to someone else in the household after buying better ones.

If I decided I just preferred risers to arms, I could still hand them down and not buy the better ones.

Evaluation after one day of use:

They work pretty much exactly as I'd hoped. The more expensive ones might be a little easier to adjust, but these do a fine job. Instead of either:

1. Accomodating my body position to the height and distance of the monitors; or
2. Spending a lot of time moving risers back and forth, stacking or unstacking stuff underneath the monitors for height, etc., I
3. Sit comfortably for myself at the moment and just reach out and put each monitor where I want it in a couple of seconds.

I also have a lot of options that I wouldn't have at all with monitors that sit on bases and risers. If, for some reason, I want to tilt a monitor 90 degrees on its side, I can do that. If I want to add a third or even fourth monitor (perhaps to run two computers simultaneously?), I can buy separate single arms and mount the additional monitors to the sides of the desk. And so on, and so fourth.

It was a good use of $25. I probably won't bother "upgrading," at least for now. 

Wordle 1748 Hint

Hint: Sersly ossifer, I ain't drank a drop (hic)!

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First Letter: S

I Happened to Be Thinking About Coffee ...

... because of this story at the National Post:

U.S. researchers found that people who regularly drank two to three cups of coffee or one to two cups of tea per day had a lower chance of developing dementia than those who drank little or abstained altogether. Though caffeinated coffee intake was “significantly associated” with lower risk of dementia, the same wasn’t true of decaf, according to the study.

Challenge accepted. OK, not really. I already drink two to three cups of coffee per day. I'm on my third at this very moment.

So why not blog about coffee because reasons?

Tamara and I do not drink the same coffee. In fact, I don't recognize the stuff she drinks as coffee.

The most important difference between what she drinks and coffee is that she drinks "decaf," so what's the point?

She also drinks, at strongest, a "medium" roast, regular grind, and sometimes even goes off into "breakfast blend" and "blonde roast" territory.

And, finally, she prepares her coffee using a Keurig machine, which is really just a pretty fast drip method. I'll do the k-cup thing when it's all that's available, but I barely consider it coffee under the best of circumstances.

Since I like to both taste my coffee and get an energy boost out of it, I go with a dark/bold roast in an espresso grind (usually Cuban, such as Cafe Bustelo), and if I use the Keurig at all, it's just to heat some water.

Because cheap espresso machines just aren't very well-made and don't last very long in my experience, I use one of three methods:

1. French press. I use that if I want cold brew. Throw in the coffee, add hot water, let it steep a little, throw it in the fridge. The next morning, press and pour it. It's not a pressure-brewed espresso, but the time factor does give it a nice, strong flavor.
   
   
2. Moka pot. It's technically a percolator, but a pretty pressurized one and makes a nice cup of coffee. Not really espresso, but pretty nice.
   
   
3. Aeropress. I got a good deal on an Aeropress Go, their travel model, a few years back (current price is twice what I paid), and bought an after-market "flow control cap" so that it takes pressure to get the water through the grounds instead of just being a compact drip unit. I'm still not sure I'd call the result real espresso, but it's pretty close.

I've mostly been using the Aeropress lately. It's quicker than the moka pot, I don't have to remember to prepare things the day before for cold brew as with the French press, and overall it produces the best quality brew IMO. But as the weather warms up, I'll probably switch to cold brew.

One thing I finally got to decide against is the "Nespresso" line. I'd been wanting to try one, and finally got the opportunity during a recent hotel stay where that was what they had for in-room coffee. The damn thing sounded like a Mack Truck coming down the road and produce, IMO, an inferior cup of ... well, something. I'm not even sure what brew they were going for with the particular pods included, but it just wasn't very good. I ended up going downstairs each morning for a cup of Colombian dark roast from those thermosy things.

One of these days I may buy a "real" espresso machine, but they tend to run several hundred dollars minimum and that seems like a mal-investment to me, at least for now.

Wordle 1747 Hint

Hint: Like a carbonated beverage.

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First Letter: F

Thanks For Asking! -- 04/01/26

Can I get an AMEN ... er, AMA?

Ask (in comments) and it shall be answered (applies to regular people pseudonymous trolls/bots are required to ask interesting questions to get answers).