Notes From The Cave

Interesting, the general is changing its logo.

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Zeynep Tufekci, So What About That (Self)-Coup?

It’s absolutely plausible to me that even more Republicans would have joined this blatant attempt to overturn the election and that their base would mostly have been fine with that. The (self)-coup train wasn’t something that was just for show; it just wasn’t close enough to work this time.

Which is why there must be consequences on the Republican party. Either it needs to do some serious cleanup beyond Trump, or it needs to be further ostracized.

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Tommy Lasorda, legendary Los Angeles Dodgers manager, has died – CNN

Among my oldest memories are from the seventies watching the World Series, which seemed to always be the New York Yankees versus the Los Angeles Dodgers, with my grandfather and grandmother. Even though my grandfather had strokes that left him speechless he was my father figure and so these are fond memories. My grandfather grew up in Milwaukee and so a fan of the Milwaukee Brewers but the Yankees were the villain and the Dodgers the hero for us during these games. Of course Lasorda was the manager of the Dodgers during those games, so news of his passing brought back these memories today.

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It’s amusing and sad to finally see so many Republicans jump off the sinking ship after it hit the iceberg. All through the last four years my question to Republicans has been, what is your line that Trump could not cross? We found the line was literaly no less than an attempt to overthrow the government of the United States. And these are people who call themselves patriots? If they really want to do the right thing they should resign.

The thing is, it doesn’t really matter now. What’s going to matter is when in four years and the Republican Presidential primaries start does the party push back against Trump and any who follow his playbook, or do they do all the same things again? It already started when Congress finally reviewed and accpeted the Electoral College results.

At this point I think the lust for supremacy is what Republicans are all about. They could not take a principaled stand until literally forced to by an attempted coup. I for one right now cannot imagine how I can ever trust anyone who is Republican and desires the power of federal office. We cannot let Republicans re-frame the story in a way that does not make them culpable in what happened on January 6, 2021, for they built the platform upon which Trump and his followers spoke and acted, starting with birtherism.

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What frightens me the most is people not taking the threat Trump poses seriously enough. POTUS is considered one of the most powerful positions in the world for a reason. He removed many of the civilian positions in the defense department for a reason. We got to stop thinking it’s not possible and instead identify the worst thing Trump could do between now and January 20, 2021 and prepare counter measures.

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What ought to be clear to Congress, the DOJ, to the Armed Forces, and anyone in power that is not associated with Trump that IF Trump is NOT removed from office now that at a minimum they must prepare to act swiftly to respond to the actions of this rogue President. Anything less is at best negligence. Trump is a hostile and threat he poses needs to be take seriously. No more “what harm can he due” attitude from anyone in power. Up to this point not enough people have accepted nor acted on the threat Trump presents.

And for the world’s sake, find some way to get the football away from him!

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As a long time blogger I wonder some time about how blogging has contributed to the current state of politics in the United States. Blogging made it easy to publish to the web and thus made it easy for nearly everyone to publish their opinions. The problem it seems to me is that we have begun to value opinions more than facts or even truth. Trump and his supporters are so firm in their opinion that the election was stolen from him that they think their opinion is fact, and that because something could happen, it did happen, which is the definition of a conspiracy theory.

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Recently I was describing the Raspberry Pi 400 to my wife by asking her if she remembered the Commodore 64 because the Pi 400 is basically a keyboard with a computer beneath. I told her that for nostalgia purposes I was interested in the Pi 400, but frankly I am not sure how I would use it. It really doesn’t make sense to use the Pi 400 headless like I do my other Raspberry Pis.

All this is preamble to point you to my retro computer that sells a case that looks nearly identical to the old C-64.

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IRS relaunches ‘Get My Payment’ tool to track $600 stimulus checks

This seems to me to be a great opportunity to get hacked and get one’s identity stolen.

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I am using a Raspberry Pi 4, which I call daenerys, as my desktop personal computer during the work day, which I access from my work provided computer using VNC. By using this Pi 4 I can access the Internet from my desk without going through the corporate Internet proxy.

I built daenerys in a Flirc case, which looks really nice and provides passive cooling, and it boots from a SSD in an Inateck case. The SSD gets power from the Pi and so under normal load I would see temperatures at hover around 55 degrees celcius, which is well below the 85 degree threshold that causes the CPU to throttle down.

Over the holiday I built another Raspberry Pi 4 (arya) in a MazerPi case that has a fan. The fan draws power from the GPIO pins and has two modes, high speed if plugged in to the 5v pin (PIN 2) and low speed if plugged in to the 3.3v pin (PIN1). To complete the picture, ground is plugged in th PIN 6.

The MazerPi fan just stays on all the time, I am not aware of a way to control the fan so that it only comes on when a certain temperature threshold is past. I first plugged the fan in to one of the 5v pins and found it loud enough to be heard, although not terribly loud. When using high speed mode the CPU temperatures were in the mid to high 30 degree range under normal load. When I ran Octane 2 it then crossed 40 degrees.

I decided to try the low speed mode, which is quiet enough to not hear unless one concentrates. Temperatures where in the 40 to 45 degree range, which is plenty good.

At this point the thought occurred to me that it probably makes sense to use the case with the fan for the Pi that I am going to use every day rather than in one I am going to use as an accessory and thus I removed the SD card from arya and plugged in the SSD from daenerys and it booted right up. (BTW, note that in reality a computer host name is associated with the boot drive and not the actual computer, so daenerys is really the 250 GB SSD drive while arya is a 256 GB SD card.)

Finally, I decided I wanted to try overclocking daenerys, which given the fan should be safe. Normal speed for this Pi4 board is 1.5 GHz, so I decided to overclock it to 2 GHz. Performance is noticably faster. At 1.5 Ghz daenery’s Octane 2 score is 8098 and at 2.0 Ghz the score is 9777. Neither score is fantastic, but good enough for the type of web browsing that I do.

When you overclock a CPU it will run hotter and that can cause failures. In the MazerPi, with the fan in low speed mode, and the Pi 4 booting from a SSD and overclocked to a max frequency of 2 GHz and a minimum frequency of 1 GHz I am seeing temperatures ranging from 46 degrees to 55 degress, which is about the same as well using the Pi in the Flirc case but not overclocked.

The net result is that have “upgraded” daenerys to a faster processing speed that provides better performance while maintaining a good CPU temperature and so far after one full working day it has been stable. The MazerPi case cost only $8 and is easy to assemble with help from a video I found on YouTube.

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