This blogaroo will turn 20 on September 5. I’d been thinking about calling it quits then, but I’ve decided to keep going until Trump is out office. Whether or not he has served his full second term.
Shared with you by a Times subscriber
Over at News From Mark Evanier, he’s been talking about the soon to end Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
The New York Times — for those of you who can pass beyond its paywall — has an interview with David Letterman about the end of The Late Show and this essay by critic Jason Zinoman about what it all means to us.
A NYTimes subscription comes with ten paywall-free links to share within each $30 4-week billing cycle.
Here’s the Letterman interview:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/05/arts/television/david-letterman-stephen-colbert-the-late-show-cbs.html?unlocked_article_code=1.g1A.9HWa.Q4Wa9-umbW4Q&smid=url-share
The Zinoman essay:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/05/arts/television/stephen-colbert-the-late-show-carson-letterman-leno.html?unlocked_article_code=1.g1A.SPFI.jUV67jIQBu1P&smid=url-share
Scan-dalous!
I could never deny being an obsessive fiddler with settings. I’m playing with every possible way of adjusting the Epson scanner. The automatic setting does some things almost as well as the Canon did.
The processing on this scan is bright and de-screened, while effectively reducing the yellowing of the paper. The problem is a sharpening filter was added, and I really dislike that.
Enlarge this image and you can see there are ridges around everything, including the lettering. If I could disable that, I’d be pleased with this quality. Yeah, I know. Picky, picky, picky.
This is how it looks with only de-screening.
Canary in the Data Mine
Here’s another insufferable explanation of further technical curiosity. I continue to run on the Verizon-supplied G3100 Wi-Fi router for gigabit internet service. Despite my concerns about security, I like being able to check on it from my phone.
Which I did yesterday, when the Epson ET-2985 unexpectedly spit out a piece of paper. Telling the printer in a commanding voice, “Eat your own output!” I have scanned the page.
Signal strength fair? Uh, the router and the printer are only six feet apart in the home office. Pulling out my phone and running the Verizon Home app, I saw the Epson printer was on the 2.4 GHz network. My best guess was the router, which is set to automatically move devices between Wi-Fi channels, must have kicked it off the 5 GHz network for some reason.
As I was looking at that, the app suddenly said the router was offine. Yikes. Yeah, it bounces itself every so often. That’s another complaint I have. I’ve seen error messages in the router’s log in the past that had me chasing down a possible bug in the firmware, but this time I didn’t see the error.
The time was near midnight, so maybe Verizon was running a maintenance routine. What’s interesting to me was the way the printer provided a warning of router trouble.
Heartening News
The results are here from my third and final time wearing a heart monitor since the ablation fifteen months ago. They’re “normal” and “100% Non-AFib.”
There were quite a few instances during sleep when my pulse dropped to 42 bpm. Another effect of being a former marathon runner. Which was also the likely cause of the persistent AFib I no longer have.
A slow heart rate isn’t always a concern. For example, a resting heart rate between 40 and 60 beats a minute is common in some people, particularly healthy young adults and trained athletes. It also is quite common during sleep.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/bradycardia/symptoms-causes/syc-20355474
Loki Strikes!
Loki, Thor’s wily half-brother nemesis, sabotaged the new printer. Less than a day after setting it up, there was striping.
A test print revealed a problem in the blue nozzle. I ran the nozzle cleaning maintenance process on the printer, thereby defeating the Norse god of mischief.
