It’s October and as sure as frost, Apple has announced new iPhones that start selling in a week or two. Dismal Wizard gives his thoughts on iPhone 12 and 5G. But more important to DW, Tucows sold his Mobile Virtual Network Operator, Ting, to Dish Network. Change is coming whether DW wants it or not.
In his search for a better calendaring app, the Dismal Wizard remembered that he had been using CardHop for some time to wrangle contacts quickly. So he poked around some at the App Store to discover that the Card Hop people are also the Fantastical Calendar people. So he bravely plunked down $5 colonial dollars for a one month trial of Premium Fantastical Calendar. It is what the Wizard had been seeking for 18 years. He’ll explain after the break
Dismal Wizard used Aunt Nancy Pelosi’s CARES Act stimulus payment to purchase the Magnepan Magneplanar Little Ribbon Speakers shown flanking Rocky and Missy (in red). The Maggies (audiophile speak for any Magneplanar speaker) are merciless. Things that sound ordinary on box speakers sound gorgeous and things that sound impressive on box speakers can fall flat on the Maggies. It’s all about the coherency and dipole radiation pattern of Maggies. They respond differently to finished records that do box speakers.
In short, the Maggies seem not to like records that are heavily processed in production. Compression and reverb are evil. The end result is a flat, lifeless mess. More simply mixed records like singer songwriter fare and jazz present well, sometimes brilliantly.
Do you like the 2020 iOS 14 Unified Apple Calendar? Dismal Wizard does not. He decided to do something about it and found One Calendar by a couple of intrepid young Netherlands programmers. Read about DW’s gripes and OneCalendar after the break.
Dismal Wizard is a bit concerned because Norfolk has not logged in his returned mail ballot. The carrier picked it up on 22 September and local delivery is 2nd day or better. It only takes a minute to run the lot through the OCR to scan the outer smart mail code that ties the ballot to a poll book entry.
The wheels of government turn slow but they do turn, Norfolk, Virginia Elections Office assures me. The Registrar (head honcho) has not revealed to staff the office’s internal timeline for doing the work it needs to do. Speaking with a staffer, they are still responding to absentee ballot requests and have been holding returned ballots for envelope scanning until they are caught up with the requests. They expect they should be caught up in early October. They are deliberately holding the mail ballots until they have time to properly perform the quality processes that assure that they are all recorded. Everything happens under two person control using reader-worker procedures like those used in nuclear power.
Virginia law sets the following constraints for county elections offices
Norfolk machine counts everything using mail sorters and optical scanners. In practice, Norfolk must scan the envelopes before election day. This will happen before in person voting begins. This scanning process updates the poll book to record participation in the election. Later, the signature is verified against the application and the signature on file (usually your drivers license signature). Missing and poor quality signatures are reported to the voters at this point so they can correct the issue before early voting and absentee requests close.
Experience in the vote by mail states indicates that 1/3 of ballots are returned in the first week, 1/3 are returned on election day, and 1/3 come in between the two milestones. Norfolk staff are currently full time on responding to ballot requests with 2000 0r so in hand on 28 September. Once these are sent out, they expect to scan the returns that they have in hand. Later, they will open the envelopes (2 man control) and scan the ballots. They know better than to wait until 3 PM on election day. October 31 is the close of early voting so they’ll probably record the inventory ballot votes on that day. Totals remain in the machines until the polls close. Machines used for early in person voting and mail voting are set aside under seal and not used on election day.
Virginia election statutes specify election milestones in detail. The 2020 election table appears in [2]. It is a multi-page spreadsheet having 253 entries (why the Elections Office staffer wouldn’t answer). Some of the milestones of interest to voters are below.
City officials have 4 days in which to count absentee ballots and seven days in which to check, total, and certify the official results. The statutes don’t specify how the jurisdiction must schedule its internal work flow, just how local mechanics must match up to larger election mechanics. Other statutes establish verification and validation procedures. Part of these is the testing of machines with standard ballots prior to their use in an election.
Note that many expatriates, military personnel, and diplomatic personnel vote by mail from overseas. Mail ballots must be postmarked election day or before. The mail ballot close is set to allow these important groups to vote. National elections have about one million OCONUS participants.
The election night results are unofficial and incomplete because they don’t include the mail ballots requested late in the election process. The city also has to verify the results to ensure that all machines have been read out and included in the total. The totals themselves have to be checked. Some elections are close and may swing back and forth as the last results are located and reported. In one case, the election was an actual tie broken by game of chance.
Election night results usually tell the tale because most elections are not so close that the outstanding mail ballots will change the result. It is reasonable to expect last minute mail ballots to have a vote distribution similar to the vote already cast as these last minute requests are driven by last minute schedule changes. This is not true with the early ballots which have historically had a Republican Party bias in many states.
With the liberalization of Virginia election law, it is likely that those who have to work on election day will dominate the absentee and early voting. Lower wage occupations and child care logistics will drive this change. Many lower income voters were staying on the sidelines because they could not afford to give up a half-day of wages to vote. Similarly, many lower wage households had multiple jobs constraining the day job worker to take evening childcare while parter worked. The new Virginia mail and early voting changes will change Virginia election demographics. These new voters may well skew Democratic.
Our beloved President has been disparaging use of the absentee ballot process thinking that Democratic Party voters used it more heavily than Republican Party voters. In prior years, it was the other way around. Republican voters have been more likely to vote using absentee procedures. This is typically because older mobility limited voters were voting absentee and this demographic skewed Republican. This will be the case in Florida. Is he suppressing his own vote in a key small margin state?
At one time, our beloved President was advising Republicans to vote absentee and attempt to vote again on election day. This can be interpreted as a felonious act in several ways. In many jurisdictions soliciting multiple votes from an individual is a felony. In many jurisdictions, queuing of absentee voters in the election day queue can be taken as a voter suppression tactic because each person has to be looked up in the poll book and told to vote or leave. In many states (yes, you, Georgia), districts that are majority party out of power are deliberately under provisioned with election equipment and poll workers. This is a voter suppression tactic. The President’s double voting scheme would aggravate the problem. Simply make less voting resources available to those people.
The various schemes to challenge absentee balloting can also be taken as voter suppression schemes. The Republicans are doing this in plain sight. Let’s gum up the works by challenging all of the signatures! Clever. But we’ll only do it in minority Republican districts. Same thing with challenging all of the machine rejects were boxes were not completely filled.
The Dismal Wizard, being retired with adequate savings, was not concerned that the wolf would be at the door in a few months so he spent his CARES Act income support where it would benefit fellow Americans. He bought a pair of Magneplanar Little Ribbon Speakers made in a small town in Minnesota. The LRS is a planar magnetic speaker about a foot wide and 4 feet tall. After the break, read about this magical panel speaker.
Dismal Manor runs a small hobby TrueNAS server to hold and serve photos and music. This server shares files with a MacOS system and runs instances of Roon and Plex to distribute music about the manor. On Friday, Dismal Wizard said 3 hail Marys and upgraded from FreeNAS 11.3 to TrueNAS Core 12.0 RC1. Here are the Wizard’s first impressions.
There’s no end of Schiit showing up during the pandemic. Gas money is ending up in music and inexpensive yet magical audio equipment. This weeks change was to move all the study bits to the “study rack” and get it working. After the break, we’ll look at what is in the rack.
I did a bit tinkering with the blog to update it for the theme change and to revise the sadly dated About page. The big change visually was to make the footer more compact and to add my Creative Commons license grant at the bottom. The CC grant is a carry over from the old theme.
The second thing I did was to revise the About page. It was sadly out of date so I revised it to reflect what I was doing with the blog now. It really changed its mission after I retired. Now I write mostly about hobby-related topics but try to write about them in ways that are different from the more common content on commercial sites and YouTube channels. I try to fill in the gaps between product announcements and detailed procedural guides.
The third thing I did was to fix the menus. They were just plain boneheaded. All of the site content is now in posts assigned to categories. This is deliberate so I don’t have to maintain a page tree of static content. You can find things using the site search and categories. The “Menu” is really just a list of the high count categories that WordPress generated for me. It is static though so if I start writing about budgies (parakeets) a lot, I’ll have to add a menu link for the topic. What the menu does is to filter the posts appearing on the home page to those in the category.
Yet more Schiit Audio has come to Dismal Manor. Jason Stoddard has designed a little integrated circuit phono preamp that is an incredibly musical and flexible device. Oh, and Schiit Audio sells Mani for the princely sum of $129. And it works. And its dead quiet. Not a hint of hum. That’s insane! It was in impulse purchase.
Dismal Manor Dispatches 
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