Great Airports and that.

Would you like a new old book to read? The Great Airport Mystery 1930 version is done so you can go here to download the PDF.

Its a PDF proof edit I got from a big bunch of files from the net, so will be clearer and make sense in places.

A pissed up pilot, a daring theft and the Hardy's framed for a crime they didn't commit. Will they ever solve The Great Airport Mystery.

A few notes on this, there is some strange terminology here.  At one point Frank says that they are mighty white, meaning a stand up guy or a decent bloke.  It comes from the supposed decency of the white race (or Huite race if you've seen certain youtube videos).  From what I can gather its to do with decency and fair play, though nowadays that distinction is pretty much moot.  We're all degenerates now.

Also a good chunk of the end chapters mention Auto Robes as a means to keep out the elements.  These were a sort of  blanket to protect against the elements and cold in an open top roadster. An excellent source of this as well as some examples are here.

There is some trivia for geeks too, Frank was held back a year due to suffering some undisclosed illness in the winter, which is why he and Joe are in the same year.  We learn Joe's weight 126 lb) (which is 9 stone or around 66kg for europeans) and shoe size (a size 6) which puts his build into the thin, wiry guy category.  They do not mention his height but I'm  guessing he is small too.

Finally I've started work on transcribing The Tower Treasure and  reading its revised version for fun.  Currently a few chapters in on the original and up to Hurd Applegate posting the $1000 reward in the revised versions.  So far there isn't much of a difference, Chet's pranks as usual have got the chop and Oscar Smuff is now a detective and not part of the Bayport Police force.  But apart from the Hardy's doing more detecting (this is book 31 in the UK) and being a year older (15 and 16 in the original) its remarkably close to the original.

MI5

If you're hoping for the Great Airport Mystery to be up, then I'm still going through it.  Proof reading is sort of done, I'm reading through to catch any formatting hazards and typos that may have skipped through the spell check. Next week I swear it'll be done and you'll have a revised PDF to download.

Anyway today's topic, we've been lucky and found a phone and its one obscure motherfucker.  A Xiaomi Mi5 and not MI5, its Chinese, not part of the secret service.

Thought it was one of those demonstration models to begin with and not a real phone but when I switched it on and had a butchers its definitely the real deal.

A decent camera, and the UI on this isn't too awful, its a step down from the Moto G I have as a regular phone and about on a par with an iPhone which I use for work (also found), which it resembles in more ways than one.

I'm not kidding, its as if China decided to make an Android version of the iPhone with a little less of Apples notorious control freakery.  Below is a list of things its cribbed from the fruit company.

Sim slot that opens with a pin: check.

An unexpandable internal storage: check. (64GB so god knows how much Google takes up).

A stupid proprietary software that you have to use to add anything to it. Check and its a lot less cunty than iTunes which should be cast into the Fires of hell.

Edit. A stupid proprietary connector to connect everything with.  Apple Lightning, USB type C.

A User Interface that is closer to Apple than Android. . . erm. . .  pass.

There are some upsides to this though, The phone itself has two sim slots which is crazy, and it feels real nice which is a bonus. The only other thing is that I manage to knack it within a day.

I thought you could just hard reset it and set up with a new user, the trouble with that is that it still requires the old google account, and all its bastard data, to do anything with.  I'm banking on flashing the firmware will fix that otherwise I'm stuck in a boot loop of my own making. And I still don't know if the IMEI number is blocked.

FYI it takes a nano sim or two nano sims if you have different networks.

I don't know if that is part of the android experience or not, I didn't do this to my found Apple as the original guy didn't do much with it and could erase him from existence with ease without going through a hard reset.  Could have left it as it was, but would have had to rely on someone else's google account to download stuff and have no email or phone number of my own.

I guess its just the Gmail account that is the stumbling block here so maybe lineage OS or whatever they are calling Cyanogen Mod  these days, {Edit its Lineage OS}  Otherwise its down to the Indians in the phone shop to check it out.

Edit.  It was the Gmail account, had to look up for FRP bypass and managed to get a guide that worked, phone is unlocked but still has no sim to check if its blocked.

And so it begins again.

We have finally got ourselves a begay (Ebay) account, this will be to buy things mind, I'm not confident enough to trade. 

What really sold it for me was browsing old books and such and seeing a two for one deal on Hardy Boys original stories.  For £20 we got ourselves The Tower Treasure and The Missing Chums, which when I'm done reading them will slowly start to transcribe.  Currently looking to buy 9 books as post book 24 there were only minor edits, which don't interest me.  I know its a lot of work but to hell with it, if a jobs worth doing its worth doing well.

Talking of transcription, we have been going through a bunch of PDF files of the original digest series.  That is books 1 - 57 starting either with the aforementioned Tower Treasure or if you are British The Aztec Warrior.  We used to get a bunch from the library in town and read them in one sitting,  Took about an hour, yeah my autism skill is being able to read like a demon.  Anyway transcription, those that are based on the original unrevised editions are a mess.

Formatting is all over the show, with some transcription errors (though going through the original Tower Treasure this is probably OCR'd with a really crappy printing.) with page titles kept in and some really terrible mistakes.  A few times I've had to change prank back to Frank and others I've had to infer what something meant by looking through the text for context.  We're currently doing The Great Airport Mystery, so expect a blog post on this soon with download.

I'll let you into a secret on how we actually do this: 

If you have a current Edition of Word / MS Office with a rolling subscription you can edit PDFs directly. And ignore the below suggestion.

If you are a cheapskate or are not on Windows, then you can import your PDF into Calibre and convert it to an RTF. file.  Then use whatever office soft you  have to edit the text. My pick is Libre Office which has never let me down. Whatever you use, these files are pretty much open to edit now so good luck and happy editing.

Afterlife

This is my take on eternal life as I see it.  Part of me wants to see what the world will become when I'm not around, advances in science, archaeology and the like. Part of me doesn't. 

Nobody sane wants eternal life, living forever on this earth or in whatever afterlife you envision you will be living in.  I don't believe and kinda want to see what a non secular afterlife would be like, with  ex pets and a family reunion with grandparents and those that have passed on and such.  Maybe an island to live on where we don't have to worship any god, living forever, and getting on.

The other half of me wants oblivion.  Dead means dead. No afterlife, no god, no glory.  No eternal punishment for spurious reasons, and no perma church that is heaven, where we worship Yahweh forever and ever and can never leave.

My take on hell is this, no crime is worth eternal torture, maybe for a few thousand years and such for the worst crimes but certainly for most of what god will send you there for its nothing at all.  I always thought that the X Files episode The List fits my philosophy exactly.  But instead of jail I will expand it to life in general.  Five people who have been cunts to you in life sent down in your stead to hell to pay for your crimes and suffer for some eternity until their crimes are paid.