Alaska Question

 On the Software for a New CNC Router An organization I run, Juneau Makerspace, has recently gotten a new CNC router, a big machine that will carve shapes out of wood from a digital file. We had our first class on how to use it the other day and it was my first introduction to the new machine. I've used older ones, so I was familiar with the process, I just needed to learn the ins and outs of the new software. All of that is just prologue to compare the old software I first used to the new version. The interface of the old software was meant for people who knew what they were doing. You had to set measurements and values yourself and were responsible for making sure the machine was cutting where you wanted it. The new software had a detailed step-by-step process built in that prevented the user from moving on to the next step without completing the current step, either by inputting they had done it or a sensor on the machine showing it had been completed. This was great as it meant...

 On Surviving the Great Internet Outage of 2025 I'm calling it the Great Internet Outage of 2025 at least until the next one. The going conspiracy theory is that it was somehow Musk who cut off the internet to Juneau, Alaska a few days ago to try and get more people onto Starlink. Probable? No. Would he do it though? Probable. The exact moment I noticed my connection was down was when I spotted a notification from a Discord channel dedicated to my favorite podcast, "The Film Reroll." As the podcast uploads very irregularly, an update from that discord meant either there was a new episode, or something worth noting had happened to one of the hosts. So I clicked. The post didn't load. I checked my connection status. The internet was out. I could only watch as the YouTube video I had up playing music slowly reached the end of the buffer. Then silence. I immediately checked my phone to see if it was just my computer, my router, or a bigger problem. Cell service was out. T...

 On Avatar Being the Next Star Wars or Marvel Maybe Star Trek is a better comparison. It's the twentieth anniversary of Avatar: The Last Airbender. The not-quite-new Avatar Studios under Nickelodeon has announced their next series, Avatar: Seven Havens. Avatar Studios was established in 2021 to make more Avatar shows. A few years ago they announced there would be some movies too. As for any of these pieces of media to actually materialize, it feels like they've been frozen in an iceberg. Over the past twenty years, there have been books, comics, games, and an ongoing Netflix adaptation of the original show. There were even Lego sets around the original run of Avatar. What's missing are more actual movies and shows. Basically, Avatar is getting the franchise treatment, but for some reason really slowly, almost hesitantly. The original Avatar show is perhaps the greatest animated show of all time. It's the greatest I've ever seen, but I admit that's a limited samp...

 On A Story About People Falling Over on a Family Trip After some political posts, I want to get back to some funny stories. A few years ago, my family took a road trip through Pennsylvania. Along the way, we stopped somewhere in the middle of nowhere at a covered wooden bridge. That was apparently the big thing to see in the area. An old bridge, but this one was covered with a roof. Very historical. Anyway, we weren't the only intrepid explorers of rural Pennsylvania who made the trip to see the old covered bridge. A group of twenty or so Vespa-riding tourists pulled up after us. Now, these were American Vespa riders. They were middle-aged and older, and not one of them had experience controlling a small moving vehicle traveling at medium speed in their lives. By the looks of them, bicycling was right out. When they had finished their tour of the covered bridge, they got back on Vespas, something that took some coaching from the tour guide. One lady, in an attempt to remain uprigh...

 On MAGA, Thought-Terminating Cliches, Cults, and the Real Meaning of "TDS" I recently had a very negative interaction with a MAGA supporter online, the details of which I won't go into here but are all still public on my Facebook page. Rather than focus on the hatred the person had toward my Jewish ancestors and myself, I want to focus on something he kept repeating, and something I've seen repeated recently by MAGA supports about anything critical of them, trump, or nazis. Funny how they already lump all those things together even if not relevant to the conversation topic. They write, or rather shout by typing in all caps, "trump derangement syndrome is real." The phrase is sometimes shortened to TDS, though that will always be The Daily Show to me, and The Daily Show is very, very real. If you want a more detailed explanation of the phrase, see its Wikipedia page here:  Trump derangement syndrome - Wikipedia . The short version is that it's used to di...

 On Felon 47 Being the New Pharaoh Akhenaten It's easy to make parallels of trump to Hitler and other evil dictators of the modern world as many have, but what about the ancient world? There are plenty of terrible kings of old that he can be compared to, but perhaps the one most associated with extreme change opposed by their subjects is Akhenaten, an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh that ruled from roughly 1353 to 1336 or 1351 to 1334 BCE. Already you can tell what we know about the guy is fuzzy. Some of that was intentional on the part of the ancient Egyptians who were slightly less ancient than him. Akhenaten is known for making quite a few changes in Egypt during his reign. He abandoned their traditional polytheism that was welcoming of lots of gods and instead forced a monotheistic worship of a god called Aten onto his people. He even changed his name from Amenhotep IV to Akhenaten, which meant "One Who is Effective for the Aten." Worshipers of other gods were persecuted und...