WiFi Cola

The Right Tool for the Job…

This oscillating multi-tool reminded me this week of how the right tool can change a job from long and hard to fun and trivial.

While helping my dad install a new dishwasher, we needed to enlarge some holes in the back of the cabinetry, for the water lines. This would be an hour of tiring, awkward work with any of the second-best tools we were likely to use, but an oscillating multi-tool made it into 15 minutes of cutting that was so fun, we were almost disappointed when it was done.

Tuk or Die: we did one of those

Riding a motorcycle to Tuktoyaktuk is not as deadly as attempting to summit Mount Everest. It is, however, not without peril. Only so many riders attempt the Tuk run every year, and every year a few die trying, and more get hurt and/or wreck their motorcycles.

We did not die.

COVID: How much to vaccinate the world?

Depending on what you mean, the answer is somewhere between $100 billion and $500 billion in the currency of the realm (USD; which I will use throughout this article).

The question came up, again, because of discussion about whether there should be a waiver on allowing manufacture of the various vaccines without paying anything. Typically, this is for third-world countries. Those questions are complicated and I’m not going to address them in this essay. Instead, I want to talk about the price.

Simply put, the retail price of the various vaccines ranges from $3-37 per dose. Janky AstraZeneca down at the bottom, swanky Moderna at the top. My guess is you can get a discount for volume purchases.

Assuming you want to use the $20 Pfizer shot to shoot the whole world, the retail would be $320 billion for 2 shots for 8 billion people. As I write this, about a quarter of the world has at least one shot.

Let’s Fix Your Zoom Audio

[This is a lightly edited version of a Twitter thread I posted in November 2020]

You may not understand, but this is what peak audio looks like. A boom arm, a good mic, a pop filter (which I rarely use in practice), and a set of headphones.

Even after a year of it, your videoconference audio is still bad. If you don’t realize this, it’s definitely bad. Fortunately, it’s easier to fix than you’d think.

First, and most important: USE HEADPHONES. This makes an enormous difference to how you sound to others. It may seem strange to put headphones above the microphone, but most videoconference software works very hard to avoid feedback from your speakers into your own microphone. The key tricks it uses are cutting off the audio you hear when you speak, and killing your mic when you aren’t speaking. The software works very hard to do this well, but it’s far from perfect, and if you have headphones, it doesn’t have to do this at all.

Fork Failure Fun

A friend had an aluminum fork fail not too long ago, and let me take a look at the bits to analyze, so I thought I’d share it with you. This fork failure was likely very typical, but it had some fun surprises.

The fork in question is a name-brand all-aluminum cyclocross fork. Sized for 700C wheels, cantilever brakes. This fork was well-used for many years, and failed in classic “JRA” fashion, just as the rider was starting off from a stop while on an ordinary road ride. Both legs sheared off just below the fork crown, as you can see above, and the rider was not seriously injured.

Lucky thing, as fork failure is horrible and can wreck your whole life if you’re unlucky. I do not recommend it.

A teardown of a Rancilio MD 80 AT Espresso Grinder

Behold the Rancilio MD 80 AT, fresh from Craigslist. Doser top cover was not included, but parts look readily available, and also it doesn’t actually affect operation.

I have a terrible habit of scouring Craigslist for various things, and I know a secret: relative to Vancouver, the island just to the right of us (Vancouver Island, aka where Victoria and Nanaimo are) has a crappy, thinly traded used-goods market. Some specialty items, which might last mere hours on Vancouver Craigslist at the right price, are just available. And I have a relationship with a courier service that can ship very unreasonable things for less than the cost of a round-trip ferry ticket.

Anyway, local trivia aside, I’ve been using the plague as an excuse to rebuild my work-from-home espresso setup.

Do We Really Need a Governor-General? Yes.

Wait, did I give the answer away? Bad headline! Bad!

It’s 2020, and of course the biggest news in Canada is that maybe the current G-G is bad. Not like evilly plotting to overthrow the government or something, just a pain in the ass, not doing the public appearances typically assumed for this officeholder, and maybe a bad boss? I don’t know. I’m not here to prosecute Julie Payette, who unlike me, has gone into space, and indeed, whatever she might be like as the day-to-day occupant of Rideau Hall, I assume she’s still upholding the actual business of the office just fine.

Yet, the question in the headline is not rhetorical. I’ve seen it posted on the Twitter by probably not-crazy people. I’ve had conversations with a clever friend, who was pretty sure the office of G-G could be replaced with a few more rules added to the Canadian constitution. Many people note the numerous countries in the world that have no similar office, and yet are not ungoverned.

Against Performative Nonsense

I feel like “Against Performative Nonsense” is the working title of half the thoughts in my head these days. Let’s define it.

“Performative nonsense” is a fancy way of describing public acts, of either doing or refusing to do something, that don’t seriously affect the thing they’re claimed to affect. My favorite example is plastic grocery bag bans in, say, Canada: they weigh nothing, we’re really good at getting them to dumps, so they don’t end up in the ocean, and it is very unclear whether their life-cycle efficiency (on any measure: hydrocarbons consumed, CO2 emissions, you name it) is actually worse than reusable bags.

The Hierarchy of Christmas-Related Movies

[This was published on the old site on Christmas Eve, 2010. I am republishing it for the benefit of many -RjC]

So the standard question is “What’s your favorite Christmas movie?” My standard answer was Die Hard until it became In Bruges which I like much more.

These responses are funny because they’re not really Christmas movies in the sense most people mean. And yet both qualify by actually taking place at Christmas.

This confusion is amusing, but I can fix it. As my gift to you this season, I present the Christmas Hierarchical Ring Index System Tracking Movies And Stories (CHRISTMAS; since this is still indevelopment, I call the current version eXperimental Movie Arrangement System, or XMAS).

XMAS is a system for describing, in terms of hierarchical “Ring” domains, how integral Christmas is to a movie. Rather than explain further, I’ll describe the rings. I will also not discriminate against TV specials in this hierarchy, and there appears to be no reason it couldn’t apply to any narrative, including novels and even songs.

An Advent Calendar of Christmas Movies

OK, these are “Christmas” only by a loose definition in some cases, and they’re also sometimes not “movies”. But you can watch them on the audiovisual display system of your choice.

Without further explanation, this eccentrically curated list was created by your author and The Lovely Rebecca, and has been arranged with some deliberation. Not much.