888 Number Special

Felt sure that this would be blog post number 888, but it was last Sunday's post instead. 

If you are wondering why I'm going all out on all the eights and such, well, its my lucky number. Ever since I was small, 8 has been my lucky number and 4 my unlucky number. I know its more commoner in Japan and China to have these views but as a westerner 7 should be my lucky number not 8.

I was going to go all out on a big blog post on my deepest lore but, the truth is, I can't be arsed. So I'll just give you a quick way of working out my luck day by day.

I have six dice that I roll, I add up the top faces and then when I get the total amount I then add these number together. This is one half.

I then add the numbers up from the side facing me, and do the same. I then add the two together to give an overall luck. 

Say I roll 21. The number for this days half would be 3. 2+1 this is pontoon or special luck, normally 3 is bad. Looking at the side I work out my number and it comes to 18. 8+1 is nine which is very good luck.

I then add the 3 and 9 together to make 12, 1+2=3 which is bad luck.  So over all I should have a mix of great and poor luck for today. 

I have a few other things involving numbers which of course I'll add. I like, whenever I travel by bus which gives you a proper ticket, to add up all the numbers on it and work out my luck along those lines. Though you don't get a printed ticket on London buses now, if I get one abroad, I work out my luck from there. 

Finally a trick with sudoku. I like, when working out the regular 9x9 grids to put completed numbers on the corners  and a x between the top row so the last number multiplies the overall result.

Example. This is how a completed grid looks when I'm done with it. 

12        x 9     78

34                 56

I then add up the numbers 

12

34

56

78

-----

180

-----

x9 this is the number to multiply it with. So 9x180...

Leaving you with 1620 as your result. I'm no mathematician but wouldn't mind knowing what is the actual highest and lowest amounts you can actually get. I figure the lowest would be having 1 as a multiplier and 23 45 67 89 as your corner amounts, I would love to see if this is an actual thing or just more junk. 

Jungle Pyramids

Or as I like to call this, a wild gold chase. The boys have been tasked to find some gold bars, stolen from the Wakefield Mint in an audacious heist. The guards hypnotized and a trail that leads out to Switzerland and then on to Mexico before heading home to Bayport.

The Jungle Pyramid itself is a place called Palango down near Chichen Itza in the Yucatan ( and always humorously corrupted to It's a chicken, by me), which serves as a base for an American archaeology group and prey for a looter called Rumble Murphy and his pilot, who they manage to catch in the act. 

It's not a bad one and introduces some Scythian gold that was stolen too along with the Mints ingots. In fact this is what gets the boys to Switzerland and when that pans out, to Mexico, hunting a mysterious Mr Zemog.

Its an OK book and won't reveal why I call this a wild gold chase. Incidentally, copy of the text in the Weebly archive seems to be the UK edition which of course I already have, so whatever differences in text (if any) are not going to be shown for obvious reasons. 

You can read both here and here and as there's no difference between them, the choice is yours.  

Cats and kittens

Been reading in the Mail about a bunch of sickos making videos about torturing cats, and no you won't get any links to this. It wasn't the first I heard about it, it was a bit on BBC Breakfast, that and for some reason the remote wouldn't shut off*the TV, so for about a minute we had to watch someone go on about watching this stuff and me flicking the button like a mad man.

You may not know it from my header here, but, I've owned cats most of my life. This has been the longest without one around and can't contemplate harming one hair on their head let alone watching someone do this. Of course its China doing this and nuking West Taiwan from orbit would improve the whole world. 

The article in the Mail of course is a rambling piece of trash, as its not the paper it was, drawing in bits from all sorts of animal abuse cases, and even saying it was being distributed on the normie web. I can guarantee its Telegram and darkweb with maybe a few edgelords putting it up. It goes on in weasel words how the think of the children bill will prevent this happening, with no awareness that most stuff like this isn't on the regular web. 

Personally, I would love to see a like for like punishment for those taking part. You kill an animal for fun we kill you for sport, same methods, no compromises. 

* Can only relate the horror of this when we cleared out my aunties place and watching her TV found that the batteries in the remote had died just as Mrs Browns Boys had come on. After five grim, laugh free minutes, we switched it off from the wall.

Wanna watch?

 We have a smartwatch now. Well found a smartwatch, its not the best and leaves something to be desired but can now trigger the camera on my phone remotely like some kind of pervert, which is a bonus of sorts.

It has a companion app which has the worst watch face collection in existence and wondered what would it be like if I was going to do it. Looking into it, it seems you can use a Raspberry pi as a watch for anyone techy enough to fiddle around and solder stuff. 

I always thought there would be a market place or at least an archive up on archive.org for all the watch-faces people made over the years, but I was wrong and its of course a fucking subscription.  

So its got me thinking, what would my perfect smartwatch be. Let's cut to the chase here and say that what it needs to be is generic and repairable. Its got to have a USB c charger interface because I don't trust those magnet chargers, make it a wireless charger. Maybe an e Ink display so it can be permanently on and I won't have to push the button to display the time.  I wouldn't mind some sort of phone integration through android itself rather than an app, but if we're going the app route then open source all the way. Oh and decent battery life.

I'd like it to disable several things in settings menu, such as most of the fitness / period tracking which do not appeal or are usable by me. I'd also like it to load 3rd party watch faces from archive.org if it ever gets them, in a regular open format. I'd also like full integration with OpenCamera or at least your system camera and have volume control for the shutter.

Lastly I'd like to call someone like in the old Dick Tracy cartoons. Though that is one thing I think you can already do.

EDIT.

Poking more with the camera controls its just shutter and the usual switch of front / back facing camera angles. You can't switch from video to camera settings and you can't zoom in via watch or app. I'd love to have something that could be used as a remote camera set up but for various reasons probably illegal that it won't do that. Or disable shutter sound. 

You got a loicense for that grot?

 So you all know what I'm going to talk about, and I'm pretty sure the puritans at Google are going to put this behind a 18+ filter, so here goes.

The week before, the UK finally put up its pr0n block under the pretence of think of the children and predictably it's broken everything internet related.Reddit, Wikipedia, Spotify and Twitter (still not calling it X) has been affected and a few mainstream porn sites have caved and added it. You can find out more why this is a monumentally stupid law here.

Xhamster for one and I'll tell you a hack around for this later. The only place I've been asked to clarify I'm an old git is Bluesky which needed face verification, but apart from that everywhere else has been trouble free. Oh yeah and that includes the pron. 

Laughing pub bore Nigel Farage has come out on the side of repealing it in a rare W for him and a Labour MP Peter Fyle has called him a Jimmy Savile nonce apologist for opposing it on authoritarian grounds.

Lets face it, its not about blocking porn, it's about neutering the web, and turning it into a western version of the great firewall of China. X rated stuff is an easy wedge for governments and  payment providers to crack down on the behalf of Christshaggers and Radfems. Just look at the ongoing Mastercard clusterfuck on steam and the Tea app controversy which held a lot of private data in an unsecure area was doxxed and leaked to 4chan. 

This is why I won't add my face / payment option to any porn site, it can and will be leaked, for those with long memories the whole Ashley Madison farce comes to mind. Which is exactly why I won't do it.

Oh and some advice for those who are looking at paying for VPN's and stuff, get Brave browser instead, not only do they block ads but their incognito mode uses TOR, which means you can still look at smut from the major sites without putting in info. 

Edit. Apparently even NVIDIA Shaders are not immune to this. 

Double Edit. The BEEX forum I visit daily has now gone invite only thanks to this.  Luckily I know my username and password.

Skull mountain

 I really thought I was done buying Hardy boys books from eBay, turns out I was wrong. This is the last of the originals that was incompetently scanned from an old book and as my guessing game is off ordered an original version of The Secret Of Skull Mountain. Apart from the scan being terrible it also missed out a few things such as a graphic box when the boys go to the harbourside. Its not, miss half a chapter bad, as it was in Broken Blade. But its bad enough.

As the books go this is one of those that is halfway between a small edit and a complete rewrite of the original. It's still a story about water shortages and sabotage to a reservoir, but there are a few crucial differences in the original than the remake.

For starters there is just a skeleton crew on the mountain rather than a whole team prospecting. The mineral the crooks are after was Bauxite and is now "Cesium" I guess the old version really liked their tin cans as its used to produce Aluminium. Caesium as it properly should be is an absolute nightmare around water (it explodes in contact) can remember an old Thunderf00t vid where he was exploring alkali metals such as this before he went off the deep end into full on Musk derangement syndrome.

The last final difference in the original is that Chief Collig is not a pal of there's, he's jealous of their success and along with Con Riley are an active thorn in their sides. If you're used to the new versions of them being close, then this is quite the eye opener. Oh and Callie gets a job as a clerk to help the boys out. Which was nice.

 Finally you would never get away with treating human remains like that nowadays, a full archaeological survey would  be carried out on the Indian remains up on the hill and the Hermits pranks would be seen as disrespectful. But its the 1940's so what can you do. 

Anyway you can read the original and the remake here. Seeing as I've given away so little of the plot.

On yer bike son.

 So the good weather has given away to storms and rain for the next few days. We were mercifully spared any thunderstorm action here it did get awfully close over the past few days, enough for me to think about not hanging round at work and think about getting off early. 

The upshot of this was borrowing a Lime Bike I found dumped out (a common occurrence) to speed on to and off site, only to find that this was actually some dudes daily driver, he'd bought! Literally didn't know you could own one and thought they were rental only*.  Most of the time its marshalling them to a main road for pick up or using to get around if I'm pushed for time. 

My storm phobia goes back to being caught in a storm in Greenwich park with my mum as a kid and probably goes into autism stuff as well as I also hate fireworks too. So me driving round on a Ebike so I can avoid a storm is peak me. 

* So it turns out you can't actually buy one and just rent it to get around, in fact this all you can do with this which makes me feel much better. Sorry not sorry.