Author: davehamby

A modern Merlin, hell bent for glory, he shot the works and nothing worked.

Virginia Absentee Voting

Post author By davehamby
Post date August 7, 2020

The 2020 legislature changed Virginia voting laws to permit general voting by mail and to remove the ballot witnessing requirement. These changes allow anyone to vote by mail in any Virginia election without a note from their mother.

Exercising your franchise is important to the vitality of US, Virginia, and Norfolk City polity. I have attempted to summarize Virginia policy and procedures for voter registration and absentee balloting. Please read the linked pages and use the links for all voting-related activities. The display text and link text are identical. Please confirm this by looking at the link target display in your browser, typically appearing in the window footer.

Reference [5], the citizen portal, is where you register and verify that your ballot was received and accepted. The other links give background information.

Reference [7] shows a typical locality Elections Office website. There, your general registrar will give information unique to the locale, especially local ballot questions and office citizen procedures and hours.

As of this writing (8 August 2020) I am unable to verify if the witness signature is still required on the outer envelope. It is the last bit of Jim Crow remaining in Virginia election procedures. I believe the legislature was to remove it in the emergency budget session scheduled for 18 August 2020.

More after the break

Personal Computing

MacOS Catalina Stability?

Post author By davehamby
Post date July 26, 2020

MacOS kernel panic announcement asking if you want to forward the kernel panic dump to Apple.

Image is a screen capture of a screen capture from a blog article linked as Reference 2. Jim thought to catch this standard Apple alert box.

As Apple updates MacOS Catalina, stability appears to be on the decline. Here at Camp Dismal, we are experiencing a number of issues that the Dismal Wizard believed were related to USB disks. This 27 inch Retina iMac has 2, a USB Blue Ray drive from MacSales and a LaCie external disk that had been used for disk backup on our FreeNAS file server.

I’ve been sending crash reports to Apple. I can visualize some summer intern at home up to his armpits in panic reports and hang reports. What is going on? I have no effing idea. After the break, what I have tinkered with to no avail to remove the issue.

Audio

Introducing Modius

Post author By davehamby
Post date July 17, 2020

Modius image courtesy of Schitt Audio.

A new camper arrived at Camp Dismal (our summer name) a few weeks ago. As you may suspect, Dismal Wizard has some more audio stuff. This time it is a Schiit Audio Modius DAC. Modius is a new “low end” DAC conceived after Jason and Mike had made yet another visit to The Highway 51 Crossroads to find a new DAC and some new output parts. After the break, some impressions of Modius.

Greyhounds

New Meal Plan

Post author By davehamby
Post date July 7, 2020

Rocky gets powerful hungry over night. When Rocky wants fed, Rocky gets shouty. Painfully shouty if he’s within a foot or two of your ear. So what can we do to get Mr. Fancy Pants to sleep through the night?

Greyhounds for Dummies has plenty about proper feeding but not what to do about a colicky baby wanting fed in the middle of the night at age 4. At least he doesn’t want nursed!

So, brilliant idea, divid his ration in 3 and give 1/3 right before bed. The bedtime feeding prompts a bedtime loo visit. This works pretty well as I have to wait for sinuses to settle after brushing teeth. So I brush up, then feed Rocky. Missy was offered food but it ended up in Rocky so Rocky gets three squares and Missy gets two.

So far, so good. Mixed wakeup times. He’ll ambush me returning from the loo some mornings. Today, he slept in until first light and then some. So we’re calling this change in husbandry a partial success.

Greyhounds Personal Computing Photography Twittering

Mister Fancy Pants

Post author By davehamby
Post date June 15, 2020

Rocky with big muscles flushed (pink) — Mister Fancy Pants

Image taken by the author and manipulated in Apple iOS Clips.app. Photos of the Bovver Boys courtesy of their social media minions.

Rocky has made great strides in his house manners. We continue to work on treat taking, table manors are largely down when I’m at the island counter, and he is getting the hang of moving about the house. He’s caught on that Missy won’t be bullied to change beds.

He’ still a shouty git. He still wants brekkie at 0400 but waits to mug me after a loo visit. He still wants his tea around 1530 but can be distracted into waiting until 1630 or so. He’s still working on meeting trades and has yet to catch on to the notion that trades are not Blighters of Zombies. Maybe Zombie Squad HQ has a training for that.

So why is he Mister Fancy Pants?

His ticking makes him look like he is wearing yoga pants! This is an iOS 13 Apple Clips manipulated image that exaggerates his markings and coat texture. In boring reality his bum looks like this.

*Rocky showing off his yoga pants while watching Squizzer TV*

So that it?

No, he did something stupid so Missy give him the nickname for a Twitter post. Her social media assistant has forgotten the specific incident.

Apple iOS Clips App is a lot of fun

Clips App can process new camera images or video clips to apply various transformations to them. I’ve done a couple of things where I’ve grabbed a promising photo off of Twitter, filtered it, and posted it back as a comment on the original post. I modded an image of @NormTheCairn. Later that day both #BovverBoys were posting photos for me to render for them. I like the “Comic” filter.

Before

The Bovver Boys posted this image on the occasion of friends day. I suspect it is a paste up but it is one of their better efforts at getting both of them into the same image. So I saved it to my iPad and had a go at it.

After

This image is the result of cropping and applying the color version of the Comic transformation. There are monochrome, pen and ink, and various color transformation filters. I keep coming back to the color Comic filter.

This may be a good technique to try for #ZZST storyboard collages. The ZZST artists make these up using Zombie cartoons as a base layer and clipped images of the brave Zombie Squad war fighters participating in that Saturday’s event.

Audio

What to do with My CARES Act stimulus payment?

Post author By davehamby
Post date June 11, 2020

Shows a pair of LRS in a lounge setting — Magneplanar LRS loudspeaker

Magnaplanar LRS Stock image courtesy of Magnepan.

The CARES Act, in an effort to keep US residents whole during the early days of the SARS-COV2 pandemic, gives each tax payer and social security recipient $650 to spend as they will. Not needing it to make ends meet, I decided to direct my stimulus grant to a US company that makes things here in the US and was able to continue operating during the state’s shelter in place order.

Gardening

Dismal Gardens Makeover

Post author By davehamby
Post date June 7, 2020

Dismal Manor viewed from the street with new beds in place

Photos taken for this post.

The front beds were getting out of hand. The beloved former owner of Dismal Manor worked for Naval Facilities Command. Every construction project ended with surplus landscaping material, some of which found its way into the Dismal Manor beds without regard to what it would be when fully grown. The result was a row of Leland Cypress that would eventually close the side street, a row of ligustrums behind them, and acuba planted under the carport canopy. Over the years we have been removing this wrong plant wrong place material. It was now time to do some right plant, right place planting.

Greyhounds

Updated Hookworm Protocol

Post author By davehamby
Post date June 3, 2020

Hookworm image courtesy of the NIH Public Health Image Library #5205 and in the public domain. Used by permission.

Recently, I wrote about treatment of medication resistant hookworms in former racing greyhounds. Since that article was published, new research has been published and American Animal Hospital Association recommends a new treatment protocol. I’ll describe the new protocol after the break.

Healthcare

Thoughts on the COVID-19 Pandemic

Post author By davehamby
Post date May 23, 2020

This article describes the understanding of COVID-19 here at Camp Dismal. It is an attempt to help my readers understand the dynamics of infection spread and protective practices.

References

For authoritative answers to common questions, please consult the following websites having researched verified information about the disease.

https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/question-and-answers-hub WHO public information portal.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/ US CDC public information portal. May be tainted by US politics.
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html Johns Hopkins University tracking site.
https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/ Virginia health department tracking site.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_modelling_of_infectious_disease A run through the math of disease spread
https://youtu.be/gxAaO2rsdIs A wonderful video showing the form of the model, simulation runs of the model, and how public actions affect model parameters and the spread of the disease.

Audio

Vidar Invades Camp Dismal

Post author By davehamby
Post date May 19, 2020

Vidar photo is a stock image kindly provided by Schiit Audio.

FedEx beat its delivery promise to bring Vidar to Camp Dismal 2 days early. So we had an unboxing and installation, both fairly trivial and got to have a first listen playing the Thile-Mehldau eponymous duet record and Judy Collins In My Life record. The Judy Collins record features her beautiful voice singing Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and other songs with an electric backing. Vidar pairs nicely with my Dhalquist DQ-10s and has been a perfect gentleman since arrival.