notes on fluff

 

Wait, I just read a really nice website 

https://www.downandfeathercompany.com/pages/how-to-choose-fill-power?srsltid=AfmBOoocnHrcnJtIQsxesvy2N_8Tb1iQtNqo3LoreYa0xYjp4ps1nM9e

My geese aren't Hungarian, they're "Canadian." (From China)

The entry I erased had tags from their little blurb.
So as soon as it arrived, I took a photo of the actual tags 

(there are three, but only two fit into the photo).

"Cotton with Teflon"
(20% goose feather)
I'm ok with the Teflon (I think)
No cooking

But (I wrote, then erased) 

pillows generally are delivered very slowly from very far away. 

If I wrote a fluff-piece on the thing when it finally gets here, would you read it?
I prolly won't, then.

I'll let reddit bombasts do it for me.

I personally don't mind chinese products, I own almost exclusively from them.

 But this guy has a real bug up his butt about chinese.

The next one will hit you in the face (it did me)

Whadda deal, only $1700 for a pillow.

Lice, barf, snot, face-cream, and the delicate shell/covering that you buy a pillowcase for,

make me think $1700 is too outré.

---

While I waited for the slow-boat-delivery, I did some more research on why my videocard runs slower with newer drivers after August 2024.
It turns out to be more nuanced.
The Card is faster, slightly, but the CPU-test is slower, lowering the test score.

Left, December-adrenalin; Right, August Adrenalin Driver results.

note on the right, August's test "21,450" is slower than DECember driver on the left, 22,005 (it's within a margin of error)

but the CPU-test on the right (august-driver) is much faster than the December (the latest) driver. 15831 vs 13430, and the tests were run within minutes of each other,

with nothing else changed.

..........

 

Are one of my BIOS settings wrong now, 

or did they shift some load over to the CPU, 

is there anything I can do, 

or is this the new reality?

My first thing I'd like to try is, enable SMT again, just in case I am wrong thinking SMT makes benchmarks slower at 3dmark.

But I'd have to keep switching back to December's driver.
IDK.

August driver w/ SMT

Dec Driver w/ SMT

3dmark hates SMT

3DMark likes my August Driver.
Don't know why.

Everything back to where it was before I wrote this

I see a pattern, sort of: The card gets all happy but the CPU gets pissed.

If this were some forum I'd be getting advice to overclock this or that, or the other thing. 
This PC was built on an impossibly high amount of money and if anything breaks, it's curtains for the entire PC.
So forget overclocking.

I want to write a blog about bra-commercials.
The ones on the commercials look bullet-proof.
The ones I've seen IRL look like the top of a bikini, all cottony and soft.
OK it's not like they stand there to answer questions about bras, but I was wondering: Why the biggie difference?
No-nonsense bras to keep breasts in line, vs thin printed ones that look like part of a shirt or a pillowcase. It was a fluffy train of thought, which I'd pursue on Google except for all the gossip about how "He likes bras!! Look!!"

I'd rather not know.

muddled (brodny, Grozny)

Train: 

 There's this god awful event about a plane going from one town to another, diverted because of fog, and shot down (that's the current rumor, until after the holidays when they can clean up the rumor)

Not Related but similar?

I'm avoiding getting shot down by the judgmental person close by who would sell me to the devil if it helped her juicy gossip-daily, and sticking to events occurring in movies you might see on TV.

(Link)
But names of places change, depending upon the year and who is in charge.

well...anyway...

I might have to delete this muddled quote
because Google refewses to find it again

Dumb as dishwater wikipedia:

"river-City"
But no one speaks it (apparently)
(But a lady in New-england will say it)
Solzha-Gala (sounds a lot like the name of a mall, I swear)

TLDR: "Brodny" equals "Grozny"??

Where is Grozny, where is (see above) Chechnya?

That dinky unlabeled spot on the map is chechnya (according to Google-Maps)

(   )

oooh, so trendy (hmm)

 Windows Hello™ got me on a biggie train of thought a few years ago.

https://orphanrocks.blogspot.com/2021/08/fingerprint-mumbling.html

Skip forward to today when the thing is literally on its way to the trash because it's so flimsy. 

I created a sort of a bandage to keep it happy, but I am seriously shopping now.

I don't think desktop fingerprint readers ever caught on, or they peaked and are fading away.

"We hardly knew ye"

But that's just an opinion.
"Don't use your thumb," 

people warn, but that's the only digit that seems to fit without twisting my arm.

"exfiltrate"

They'd rather you bought an entire system for a thousand than let you do add-ons.

But (mean-teacher mode) let's review

No Batteries

No headphones 

no external readers

It's all for your protection, I am sure.

(Exfiltrate THIS)

Capacitive, optical, Ultrasonic?

Tap or swipe?
HOTP/Fido2 capable?
NFC??

I just read (and totally forgot) what HOTP is.

"What is HOTP, what is TOTP & what is the big difference?

There are two options when it comes to OTP. Hash-based Message Authentication Code (HMAC) based One-Time Password or HOTP for short and Time-based One-Time Password or TOTP for short. HOTP uses an event-based OTP algorithm which executes and invalidates during an event counter once a user uses the code. TOTP uses a time-based OTP algorithm which executes and invalidates from a specific time counter, once the countdown of time-to-use hits zero. Duo now has both options available for users, with our recommendation to move strictly to TOTP once your organization can (we will discuss how to achieve this below)."

So depressing. 
I hate over-the-shoulder spies, (way different manifesto)...
So My bright-bulb idea long ago was to buy a password-less device,

A dongle/doohickey/thing that would recognize only me.
But it only works 65% of the time, and the rest of the time it wants a PIN.

Plus it (the thing) is made of the cheapest plastic available, and the plastic broke.

ToTP , for those times you have a phone that isn't damaged or temporarily lost,

or is that NFC?

An article on Passkeys is readable, if you ignore the unreadable terms (Ble?)

I'm guessing (totally) fingerprints never caught on, less profit margin.

"Thanks to EU"? 
I missed something.
(Bah, republicans)

Pick a choice, someone hates it.
(Two reviews, and positive ones get more weight?)
Do you ignore them, damn your torpedoes,
Buy it anyway?
IDK

The above (SidePass) looks like it might break too easily, would clog the space needed for USB devices.

I found a model I kind of like,

but it has zero reviews.
I must have a soft-spot in my heart for unloved Amazon products with zero reviews.
They are always quirky (there's always been a reason they're unloved.)

Well anyway:

USB-C devices cannot be pressed on with much force, because the tiny connector will snap off like a small bird's neck. 

So right away I know one of the flaws. The connector is female, 

so any cable-connectors would break before the device, but that's a guess.

The second biggie thing is, it will not work on anything else besides windows.
No nfc here.

Third, it's relatively expensive compared to higher functioning products.
But it's cute, like a puppy in a pet shop.

Windows 11 picks it up as a "Chipsailing" device.
I would install the actual Flywise driver, but the thing works so well without it.
So I gotta say, "Why?" and let windows think it comes from Chipsailing.

Chipsailing has a somewhat confusing site...I was unable to quickly verify it is one of their products, or to find any drivers from them.

On the other hand, Flywise doesn't seem to have a specific driver windows would like anyway, and windows prefers the Chipsailing one.
All these readers come from China anyway and (I suppose) will be extinct soon...

It matters, sort of, because the device can gladly hold all your passwords, if you'd trust it to.

Here, read the blurb on the box:

Eight Hundred Passwords

I think that's great, I just, um, don't trust it. Well for a few reasons, on cop shows the NSA/FBI/whoever breaks the encryption in seconds. So why do they need passwords?
To make it easier, I guess. 

(The rest of the specs are mostly unreadable to me, 

and I discount them as showing off, 

especially with a third-party driver.)

I'm noting that everyone else everywhere uses "508dpi" 

but then you have to define "Modern." More modern than my iffy reader before this one? It was like gambling in Vegas to get it to work, before it finally quit.

If THIS one quits, presumably it'll still be good for the eight-hundred passwords.

The fingerprint reader I already own (the decrepit one, remember?)

died last week, in such a weird way. It appears to work but is functionally blind.

FlyWise replaced it. FlyWise appears to work very well, but only time will tell.

for reference only, alt-numpad-Plus, 2122=™ or (if it's easier) HTML mode, "Ampersand trade semicolon"

penance

 A train of thought on Christmas.
Is it a guilt-holiday,
a shopping-spree holiday,
an economy booster,
a time for bickering families to force themselves into a mold?

OK "all the above" sounds so cynical.
We barely hear anything about Ramadan (or is that just me)
Kwanzaa (just me?)
Passover /Hanukkah

(OK there's this biggie list)

And certain religions (wait, I gotta go google something)

Certain *christian* religions don't believe in christmas, per their dogma
Or (conservative-right-wing factions) don't believe in the trappings (trees)
And on the drop of a hat will lecture on about "Saturnalia."

So who believes whole-heartedly in Christmas?
"Catholics", I wanna say, and stick in Google's address for nasty letters
(No one comments.)

And people hawking ham

---

I nearly forgot the reason for my title.
Well OK it's tough to explain.
Street-corner santas in the bitter cold hoping for a quarter,
Or year-round people knocking on doors in the bitter cold or standing on the street holding magazines for hours.
So if you subscribed to their religion, you could look forward to a long life of sweltering / freezing street corners next to bus stops full of mean people, or 
Getting ripped off at a store-front.

(credit for illustration)

My entry seriously rambled on, so I excommunicated the rest of this.

But on a way different (much more interesting) subject, a space-probe called "parker" travelled close to the sun.
Now suppose you were planning to construct something based upon the heat-shield specs (Stay with me, this is important)

So you read (I read) about the room temp.

The heat shield consists of a layer of carbon foam sandwiched between two layers of a carbon composite, explains Congdon, whose official title is lead engineer for thermal protection systems. The 73-kilogram shield is 2.44 meters in diameter and a scant 11.43 centimeters (4.5 inches) thick. While the probe orbits the sun, the front of the heat shield is expected to reach 1400 degrees Centigrade; its back side will be a comparatively frosty 300 °C (600 °F). Inside the spacecraft’s bus, where the instruments will be shielded, the temperature is expected to be 30 °C (85 °F).

waitasec, 600 or 85?
Future sweaty bodies would reeeeally like to know!!

https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/traveling-to-the-sun-why-wont-parker-solar-probe-melt/#:~:text=The%20Shield%20That%20Protects%20It,keeping%20almost%20all%20instrumentation%20safe.&text=If%20playback%20doesn%27t%20begin%20shortly%2C%20try%20restarting%20your%20device.,-Your%20browser%20can

An unsung hero of a shield you never hear about from anyone anywhere, 

dissipates 600F into a tolerable 85F.

I googled the crap outa this for the invisible shield they don't speak about, like it was planned way up in the attic outside the view of guests.
It either doesn't exist (except as magic, math and physics)
Or it's not something they talk about in polite society.
Without knowing exact details, science and the aforementioned religious beliefs become foggy, unclear, and people argue and hole themselves up in different churches and labs.

No one would want to travel to the sun, that would be crazy,
no one would want to argue against Xmas, that would be crazy
(No one sane would run for president, ditto crazy)
But people do!
sticking equipment you couldn't afford in a year into a box, using technology we'll never use on earth (more's the pity,)science will (at the end of this) go "hmm" and everyone else will argue on the details... But that last sentence was mostly to myself.

music box

 Celeste plays a celeste:

Glockenspiel is an affordable version of a celeste (sort of), a celeste is strictly upper crusty.
And both of these can be found in Christmassy music and in "Harry Potter."
The train of thought ends here. 

Insert a clumsily-written anecdote here about a dying relative with Alzheimer's,

who listened to my tiny piano-music-box until it broke.
This was a train of thought, and I'm no writer, so the tear-jerk story is missing, but it's true.

I'm better at conjuring trains-of-thought,

like the writer who took an old song that kids learn in school and turned it into a twilight-zone episode.

---

Shadowheart's hand hurts through the entire game.

(Insert grumpy remark here about BS quests that go nowhere and do nothing)

If you move too fast through quests, you could prolly be forgiven for emphasizing the piddly crap-quests and botching some major ones.
The PTSD-guy in the inn was inconsolable because I forgot to include Halsin in my camp three hours and several chapters ago.

Halsin yells at some lady (check), someone will reward me (check) but I forgot the party at my camp (or I skipped going there.)

So NOW my dialogue says Halsin is stuck in a goblin camp, which is a total lie.

I backtracked ten zillion saves and I have to redo this biggie chunk (the hand, the kid's parents, the evil surgeon...)

---

Most of the HTML you see on this page was invented by someone a lot smarter than me. Carriage-returns get replaced by "DIV" and paragraphs and line feeds need to be specified, or everything looks double-spaced.
Now comes a new (actually, very old) technology similar to emojis, that I'd like to maybe use, if it wasn't so complicated.
If there is an icon you like, you can refer to a webpage with it, 

or (otherwise) make it look like a clumsy picture.

Icon vs picture, the icon looks more professional.

But how?

I don't know, yet.

https://icons8.com/icons/set/link

A website in New York has their own trademark icon 

(I think it's an emoji-sized shape of the state of New York.)

I was fascinated, and even more fascinated that I could not select it to copy.

It is different from an emoji, in that respect, it's more like a tiny javascript-routine.

Eggs at Kroger are incredibly high.

Alcohol prices are low enough for a guy to buy a small liquor store
(While I waited for my 0.45-cent coupon to get approved,)
but eggs, while well-stocked, 

are $7 a dozen.
This far outstrips any news media quotes, although they are correct that prices are rising.

Why?

"Bird flu", they claim.

But then they say it's a nice investment, prices will go higher.

The aisles are crowded, clogged, with alcohol.

(Bah, humbug)

The egg-estimates from official sources are laughably low ($3 or so)

and the reasons (crowded cages) are wrong.

Someone somewhere has a war, or a strike, or it's Tuesday, plus Kroger is really pissed off right now (really pissed)

And investors are happy the commodity is launching to the moon.

A nice website but their quoted prices are way low.

Amazon to the rescue!! (I'm not pushing their eggs, but geez, three dollars cheaper 

is something to crow about)

Unsafer

 I might log into my router to change a setting I heard makes it run better.

This invalidates the certificate, the dummy one my PC doesn't like anyway,

and now, an endless sequence of login attempts begins:

Login

"Unsafe!"

Login Anyway

"Unsafe!!"
Login for real.

"Unsafe!!"
I don't know if the latest firmware update (37038) made this worse (I think so.)

Reset, repair, wash hands, these are all precepts I'm ignoring for now.

I'm standing on the corner of some tiny street and the highway. 
A vehicle rolls to a stop on a very dark night, and the passenger quietly leaves, disappearing into the darkness.
The driver is slumped over the steering wheel.
Should I call "911"?
(Where the hell am I?) 
I look at the corner's street-signs, I drag out my phone, only it is the thin small remote for my stereo.
After that shocking fact is discovered, I look back at the car, which is now gone.

My wake-up dreams are becoming more creative, and the streetcorner actually exists, according to Google maps.
I hope this isn't some portent of a really crappy day.

In a previous blog entry, I noted that the authorized computers and phones 

were hard to set up, due to the fact that my PC used two mac-addresses and entering one wasn't good enough.

Skip to today when I cannot seem to even find that option, although that could just be me and not seeing what's smack dab in front of me ...

Asus (the instructional page) says:

"Wireless mac Filter," 
Right there on top.

Mine says something different
(Look between WDS and "Radius")

"enable access restrictions" uh, It's very early. I don't wanna fight this router.

prohibit me and a friend from accessing the router?

My mac address is available to any hacker within earshot.

But then it gets too technical for me: The router mac is not my PC's mac nor my phone's. Those are not broadcast (I don't think.)

Well, long bombast cut short, I used to like my wireless mac filter, but some guru won and managed to have it deleted MOVED as an option.

(I'll go look)

O. (nevermind)

I needed to click on my single broadcast-network to see this.

Does it mean they discriminate between networks now?
2.4, 5, etc? 

So I could create a network only upper-crust insiders would be able to access?

Interesting (but not verified)

5Ghz

---

Ai Propaganda tool?

 

Teach your AI well, and push Olive oil.

Live people disagree, but they are irrelevant and will be subsumed.

---

---

---

I'm wondering a day later who the hell likes Lox, and I know not to ask AI or lox salespeople.
Skipping H.O.W. stuff.
It's like this:
I don't like bagels, capers, most fish, and totally hate cream-cheese (unless it's inside of a cooked cake).
Links needed (if you actually care about the subject.)
*I* am three minutes beyond this five-minute train-of-thought, but I'll look.

You forgot EVOO and how it cures cancer

Kills / cures, it depends on your faith