Mister Whoopee explains the economic failure of windmill power, and the dangers. These include noise, bird shredding, and cancer.
Wait. Maybe I shouldn’t jump to false conclusions.
The world needs more cartoons with a walrus and a bird.
Category: Tech
Muted Phone Talk
Despite claims that the Trump Phone is shipping, the product is nowhere to be seen, other than the single unit that NBC holds. For now, we should assume it’s a pre-production sample.
https://boingboing.net/2026/05/22/no-sign-of-fabled-trump-phone-in-the-wild.html
Until regular customers start receiving their Trump phones, it seems likely this is yet another Trump Scam.
Trump Mobile CEO says the phones are shipping. The terms and conditions say it doesn’t have to.
https://mashable.com/article/trump-mobile-t1-terms-conditions-never-release
Celebrating 11 of the 13 Colonies
NBC has gotten hold of a Trump phone. Wait. What’s this? It has a headphone jack!
Why isn’t there a Trump Edition iPhone? It would have been much easier. Because it would have harmed the Apple brand.
From IEM to AI and AIM
Jack Kirby now has a New York street named in his honor.
Advanced Idea Mechanics, AIM, was created by Jack Kirby to oppose another one of his creations, SHIELD. An organization of brilliant, amoral scientists and engineers, wearing outfits lifted from Dr. No, AIM didn’t see itself as being necessarily evil or good. It was simply working for itself, as if the only goal of the Manhattan Project in developing and testing the first atomic bombs had been to prove it could be done.
Where AIM screwed up was in creating Modok. He was supposed to serve the aims of AIM, but he quickly dominated them and took over the organization. You can see where I’m going with this, regarding Artificial Intelligence.
Right now I’m listening to American Top 40 on SiriusXM, with one of my ten pairs of inexpensive wired IEM earphones. I enjoy making comparisons between them.
Today’s listening selection is with the first version of the 7Hz Salnotes Zero IEM. (There’s a second version that I also have.) I came upon this website with a review of the Salnotes that I hadn’t seen before.
https://audioreview.frieve.com/products/en/7hz-salnotes-zero/
Frieve Audio calls itself, “An audio company and product meta-review site that surveys dozens of sources worldwide and publishes reviews that can be treated as final conclusions.” I’m pointing this out because Frieve is obviously a work of AI that’s dependent upon other sources, most notably Audio Science Review.
The process of AI’s recursive consumption and regurgitation of its own sh*t will eventually prove the old adage of garbage in, garbage out. If it isn’t doing that already in some areas of interest.
Scotty, We Need More Bandwidth!
An idle thought I had was about the transporters on Star Trek. If matter is digitized in some way and transmitted over an analog frequency through space, the data rate needed to pull that off would have to be incredible.
So, what is the current SOTA data rate from space? No surprise, it’s with the James Webb Space Telescope.
The maximum throughput is 28 Mbps, equivalent to the best ADSL Internet service. There are also a couple of side channel links running at dialup modem speed.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/james-webb-telescope-communications
However, during the Artemis 2 Moon mission, the data rate was almost ten times faster. By using lasers, communication ran at a maximum of 260 Mbps.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20250010065
Which is still well below the download speed I’m seeing right now from the porch.
In November, Voyager 1 will achieve the amazing milestone of being 1 light-day away from Earth. What’s the current data rate between Voyager 1 and Earth? An extremely modest 160 bps download to Earth/16 bits up.
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/instruments/
In other space news, the Perseverance Rover is about to complete a total of 26.2 miles, a marathon distance, on Mars.
By using the Mars orbiters for communication with Earth, the Perseverance data rate is up to 2 Mbps.
https://www.l3harris.com/sites/default/files/2021-02/L3Harris-IMS-EO-Sellsheet-Rover.pdf#
What Say Thee, AI?
Dear Google Search AI: Can Cloudflare interfere with IMAP?
Yes, Cloudflare can interfere with IMAP (and SMTP/POP3) login if the mail subdomain is proxied (orange-clouded) in DNS settings. - Cloudflare's standard proxy only handles HTTP/HTTPS traffic, so proxying mail traffic blocks the connection, causing login failures in apps like Outlook or Gmail. - In the Cloudflare DNS dashboard, ensure the A/CNAME record for ://yourdomain.com is set to "DNS Only" (grey cloud) rather than "Proxied" (orange cloud). - Correct Mail Subdomain: Ensure your email client uses a subdomain (like mail.example.com) that points directly to your mail server's IP, not the proxied root domain. - Verify MX Records: Ensure your MX record points to a hostname that is not proxied. If you are seeing errors, it is likely because the mail client cannot reach the server's actual IP address.
That seems to be the likely cause of the problem I had today. With this in mind, I should be able to change the server entry for my e-mail accounts in a way that will avoid interacting with Cloudflare.
But wait, there’s more! Accessing the site on Firefox has this problem:
Error Code: SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP
Everything is still, after all of this time, so freakin’ delicate with computers and the Internet. One little tiny thing can cripple everything. As a learning experience, I will stay away from Cloudflare, once and for all.