dickie

This blog has been copied to 04202030.com Listed has announced it will shut down on December 31, 2026. When it does, the public blogs hosted here disappear. So I had this one archived and rebuilt somewhere I control, and that copy is now live at 04202030.com/blog. This post is about what the archive job found, because some of it was not what either of us expected. The profile was not showing all of it The profile at listed.to/@dickie lists 30 posts. It has 96. The profile is a window, not a...

Genocide prevention available at participating locations. Restrictions may apply. For decades, Holocaust education in the United States has carried a promise larger than remembrance. We are told to learn the warning signs so it does not happen again. Dehumanization. Group persecution. Forced displacement. Attacks on civilians. Deliberate deprivation. Political rhetoric that turns an entire population into an enemy. The point is supposed to be prevention. The United States Holocaust Memorial...

How many Jews were killed in the Holocaust? The standard answer is about 6 million. But 6 million is an estimate. And an estimate is an invitation to question it. I think the number may be high. I could be wrong. That does not mean I think the Holocaust did not happen. It means I do not understand why a historical estimate should suddenly become immune from the ordinary question: How was it calculated? Auschwitz is a spectacular example. For decades, 4 million was the official number asso...

Liking Nick Cave is like getting caught reading your own poetry at a funeral. Nick Cave sounds like Dracula got divorced and immediately bought a piano. Every Nick Cave song begins somewhere between “the rain fell” and “God has abandoned me,” then somehow gets less cheerful. Nick Cave could sing the instructions on a fire extinguisher and make you feel responsible for the fire. I like Nick Cave, but only in private. Some music is between you, God and your browser history. Nick Cave is what happ...

Standard Notes announced that Listed will shut down Dec. 31, 2026. For anyone using Listed as a public website or blog, the consequences are straightforward. Public blogs, previous posts and guestbooks will no longer be accessible. The posts themselves will remain privately stored in Standard Notes, but the public publishing layer will disappear. This creates a problem for one of my projects. It also provides a remarkably good test of its architecture. Why I Was Using Listed I use Standard ...

For much of the Gaza war, warnings that Palestinians could eventually be removed from the territory were dismissed as speculation about an unstated Israeli objective. That argument is becoming much harder to sustain. On Sept. 2, 2026, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Israel was seeking President Donald Trump's support for Palestinian migration from Gaza. Katz said there was "no real solution for Gaza" without migration and that Israel was prepared to move Palestinians "by sea, by air,...

There is something profoundly revealing about a government with overwhelming military power warning a devastated civilian population that children flying kites may bring assassination, airstrikes and evacuation orders. But the kite story becomes even more revealing when placed beside what happened only days earlier. On August 17, U.S. envoy Jared Kushner met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after holding rare talks with Hamas leaders in Egypt. The purpose was to salvage the stalled Ga...

TL;DR: My watermelon fascination began during Lent, when watermelon became an ideal food for breaking fasts and took on associations with Easter, renewal and abundance. Watermelon tourmaline then connected the fruit to geology. Several melons produced accidental heart-like patterns when cut, one rind was dried and preserved with silica gel, and the curiosity escalated into a database, refractometer readings, microphone recordings and software that detects and analyzes individual thumps. Watermel...

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ YOUR GPU IS NOW AN EXPENSIVE TYPEWRITER │ └──────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Modern software companies have spent decades trying to make computers look less like computers. Smooth icons. Rounded corners. Soft gradients. Friendly animations. Buttons that gently pulse while uploading your private life to seventeen analytics companies. The Text art tools directory is for people who reject this cowardice. It contains tools for...

Databricks just published one of the more useful looks at AI coding agents because it asks the question companies should actually care about: not “which model sounds smartest,” but “which one can fix our code without lighting money on fire?” The post, Benchmarking Coding Agents on Databricks’ Multi-Million Line Codebase, is worth reading because it moves the discussion away from leaderboard theater and toward real engineering work. That distinction matters. Public benchmarks are useful, but t...

These are my go-to boots. https://www.danner.com/tachyon-8-black.html. I first bought them because I needed a wide boot. That was the non-negotiable requirement. They also had to be lightweight, comfortable, and usable in hot weather, but “comes in wide” was the first filter. Once you need wide boots, shopping gets less like browsing and more like checking whether any company remembers that feet can be different shapes. The Tachyons fit the job well. They are light, comfortable, breathable, a...

The honest solution is not “open borders” or “deport everyone.” Both are slogans, not systems. The real solution: Secure the border first, because law has to mean something. End illegal labor by punishing employers more than workers. Mandatory E-Verify, real audits, felony-level penalties for repeat corporate offenders, and no more “oops, the subcontractor did it.” Stop pretending America needs unlimited low-wage labor. Raise wages, reduce welfare traps, push able-bodied citizens back toward...

Public education is amazing. I'm told it's the most important thing in society. That's why I have to pay for it whether I use it or not. Then I homeschool my kids, so I get to pay for it again. The public school family gets teachers, buildings, buses, laptops, sports, breakfast, lunch, summer food programs, counselors, administrators, and administrators for the administrators. The homeschool family gets a tax bill. And if you ask for some of the money allocated for your own child, everyone...

Watermelon is one of those fruits that feels too obvious to need an origin story. It is summer, cut into wedges. It is seed-spitting, sticky hands, red flesh, green rind, picnic tables and grocery store bins. It seems like it has always been exactly what it is. But it has not. A 2021 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, titled “A chromosome-level genome of a Kordofan melon illuminates the origin of domesticated watermelons”, argues that the closest known wild relative of d...

A 3-Layer System Pre-Cut Selection + Cut Quality × Perception Factor = Experienced Score FINAL FORMULA Experienced Score = ((Pre-Cut Score × 0.30) + (Cut Score × 0.70)) × Perception Factor Maximum score: 10.0 1. PRE-CUT SELECTION SCORE (0–10) Measures how good the melon looked before cutting. Category Weight What To Look For Field Spot 20% Deep creamy yellow, mature, dry-looking Density / Weight 20% Heavy for size, dense, solid Shape 15% Symmetrical, even round or oval Rind ...

We were not even supposed to be hiking Old Speck that day. The original plan was a completely different mountain. Nice weather. Quick hike. Nothing complicated. Then somewhere along the drive I realized I was not actually heading toward the trailhead we had talked about. I had unconsciously started driving north toward Mount Washington. Not because we had planned it. I genuinely had not even considered Mount Washington as the destination. But Old Speck and Grafton Notch are in basically the ...

There’s a small roadside pipe on Mt. Mica Road in the Buckfield–South Paris area where people quietly line up with jugs and bottles. That’s Cooper Spring. At first glance, it doesn’t look like much. Just a pipe coming out of the bank. But it sits in a place with real geological weight, and the water coming out of it reflects that in a measurable way. Where it comes from Cooper Spring is at the base of Mount Mica, a pegmatite formation that played a role in early mineral discoveries in the Un...

“Message to Pretty” by Love is not a conventional song. It’s brief, fragmented, and intentionally unresolved. Found on Forever Changes (November 1967), it functions more like a passing thought than a complete statement. An Interlude, Not a Narrative The track runs under two minutes and feels unfinished by design. On Forever Changes, several songs act as transitional pieces rather than fully developed ideas. This one interrupts the flow rather than advancing it. It mirrors how a fleeting thoug...

I’ve come to a firm and deeply considered career conclusion: I will never accept a job that has the word “Secretary” in the title. Not now. Not later. Not even if it comes with a corner office, a pension, and a ceremonial pen set. This is not about qualifications. I could probably handle the responsibilities. I can send emails, attend meetings, and look serious while someone says “circle back.” That is not the issue. The issue is branding. “Secretary” sounds like a role where, at any moment,...

How the date of Easter is determined Easter is what the Church calls a “movable feast,” meaning its date changes each year based on a defined rule rather than a fixed calendar day. In Western Christianity, the rule is as follows: Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon that occurs on or after March 21, which is treated as the spring equinox for ecclesiastical purposes. There are two key technical details in that rule. First, the “full moon” used is not the exact astr...

MODULE: WATERMELON SELECTION AUTHOR: dB33p REVISION: 1.0 STATUS: STABLE OBJECTIVE: Identify a structurally sound, high-confidence watermelon. Reject all inconsistent units. FIELD SPOT (PRIMARY SIGNAL) Locate ground contact area. Deep yellow / orange → PASS Pale / white → REJECT No field spot → REJECT NOTE: Field spot confirms maturation time on ground. MASS / DENSITY CHECK Lift and assess relative weight. Heavy for size → PASS Light → REJECT NOTE: Higher density correlates with in...

Lobster Radio Node Current System Documentation Overview Lobster is a queue-driven audio beacon and radio-style automation node. It combines locally scheduled WAV playback with Spotify Connect playback, Mount Washington forecast insertion, system status visibility, and a browser-based control interface. The system is designed around a simple operational model: Spotify runs continuously as the background audio source the loop periodically ducks Spotify and inserts local audio queued WAV fil...

As war expands across the Middle East, the official language remains familiar. Leaders describe their side as defensive, necessary, and morally justified. Their enemies are cast as barbaric, irrational, or genocidal. But from Gaza to Iran to Lebanon, civilians keep dying under bombs, in collapsed buildings, and amid shattered infrastructure. For many watching the region now, the conflict no longer looks like a contest between good and evil. It looks like evil vs. evil, with civilians trapped in ...

Overview (Key Operational Facts) This system is a headless Raspberry Pi 4 audio node used to broadcast mixed audio through a low-power FM transmitter. Core behavior: Spotify audio source using librespot DTMF beacon transmission every 420 seconds Text-to-speech announcement after the DTMF ALSA dmix software mixer allows multiple audio sources simultaneously USB audio interface (C-Media 0d8c:000c) drives the transmitter 48 kHz audio pipeline Spotify bitrate set to 96 kbps Operational tuning:...

Preservation and Adaptive Reuse Proposal Mount Washington Summit, New Hampshire Prepared by: dickie Date: February 2026 Submitted to: Mount Washington Commission Executive Summary This proposal recommends the preservation, documentation, and adaptive reuse of the Edwin Howard Armstrong radio tower site on Mount Washington summit. The Armstrong tower represents a historically significant telecommunications structure associated with early high-altitude radio transmission research and the ...

In October 1937, a small crew of eight men climbed to the summit of Mount Washington to erect a radio tower under the direction of Edwin Howard Armstrong, inventor of frequency modulation (FM) radio. They spent three weeks on the summit and were able to work only five days due to severe weather. What they built became one link in one of the most ambitious radio relay systems ever constructed. This system was the Yankee Network’s FM relay chain. It stretched nearly 300 miles, from Alpine, New Je...

Link: A Brief History of Barbed Wire Fence Telephone Networks This article explains how farmers and rural communities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries used existing barbed wire fences as improvised telephone networks. By connecting battery-powered telephones to fence wires, they created cooperative, decentralized communication systems without central exchanges or monthly fees. These networks allowed isolated households to share news, coordinate farm work, and communicate across distanc...

100–119 Core Status / Actions 100 OK 101 YES 102 NO 103 WAIT 104 STOP 105 GO 106 DONE 107 REPEAT 108 CONFIRM 109 CHECK 110 VERIFY 111 READY 112 MEET 113 ARRIVED 114 LEAVING 115 DELAYED 116 CANCEL 117 START 118 END 119 STANDBY 120–139 Assistance / Condition 120 HELP 121 NEED ASSISTANCE 122 SAFE 123 INJURED 124 LOST 125 FOUND 126 TRAPPED 127 STRANDED 128 SEARCHING 129 RESCUE REQUIRED 130 EMERGENCY 131 NON EMERGENCY 132 MEDICAL 133 MECHANICAL ISSUE 134 GEAR FAILURE 135 POWER LOW 136 BATTERY LOW ...

Mount Washington has never needed advertising. The 6,288-foot summit built its reputation through wind, ice, and an ability to humble anyone who approaches it casually. For generations, the mountain has served as a scientific laboratory, a proving ground for winter travelers, a communications platform, and, at times, a seasonal city suspended above the clouds. After visiting the summit during a rare period of calm in February 2026, I found myself asking a simple question: Is Mount Washington ...

Choosing a programming language has always been a learning decision as much as a technical one. The first language you learn or the next one you adopt shapes how you think about problems, how quickly you gain confidence, and whether programming feels approachable or overwhelming. Today there is a new factor that did not exist in the same way before. Programmers are no longer working alone. AI tools are now part of the development process, helping people explore ideas, test logic, and build soft...