Thursday, September 11, 2025
Some musings on the Metric system
I just watched this amusing video “Why Didn't America Go Metric? Now I Finally Get It” where Busted Knuckle Woodworks goes into the history of the matric system and why the US doesn't use it. Yes, it goes into the whole “pirates stole the metric system from the US” story, but it also mentions the late 1800s Pyramid Power movement that also put the kibosh on the metric system here in the US (and one I had not heard and sadly, such mystical thinking is still very much in the main stream). And it's interesting that the Imperial System is still in main stream use in the UK.
But one advantage I see for the Imperial System is that it's mostly based on factors of two and three, like two cups per pint, two pints per quart, three teaspoons per tablespoon, and three barlycorns per inch. The downside of that advantage is the sheer number of units available, like drams, furlongs, pennyweights and gills. I don't think it's that bad though.
For instance, the chocolate ice cream recipie I've been using contains the following ingrediants:
- 1 cup whole milk
- 1 pint heavy cream (or 2 cups)
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- ¾ cup sugar (using 1 cup makes the ice cream too soft in my experience)
- ¾ cup cocoa powder
In the metric system, you get some really weird values though:
- 237mL whole milk
- 474mL heavy cream
- 5mL vanilla extract
- 150 grams sugar (using 200 grams makes the ice cream too soft in my experience)
- 72 grams cocoa powder
I think the amount for cocoa powder is correct, as I found answers from 75‥95g of cocoa powder per cup, and as I like chocolate, I used ¾ the upper value.
I suppose one could get by with:
- 250mL whole milk
- 500mL heavy cream
- 5mL vanilla extract
- 150 grams sugar
- 70 grams cocoa powder
for more “round” amounts in metric. I do wonder if such rounding up (or even down) might affect the results though (probably not). Personally, I find the Imperial version easier to remember, but that might be bias on my part.
Sunday, September 07, 2025
There's a van Gogh joke in here somewhere
Bunny went to the local Michaels Craft store to pick up a project, and she returned with a small gift for me:
![[An image of a pencil eraser in the shape of a human ear] “'Ere you go! Earase to your ear's content!”](/2025/09/07/earaser.jpg "“'Ere you go! Earase to your ear's content!”")
An eraser (or as it states on the package, a gomme à effacer) in the shape of a human ear. And it also appears not to be for kids between newly born and 12 years old if I'm reading the small graphic icon in the corner of the package correctly. Maybe not for kids less than a year old? I don't know, it just has a small kid face with the text “0–12,” encased in a circle with a slash.
I … don't know what to say, other than “Thank you!” but aside from that … I have nothing.
Saturday, September 06, 2025
Notes on an overheard conversation of two people opening a package
“Oh, it's a mug from Sunny Farms, in Sequim, Washington.”
“It's pronounced ‘skwim.’”
“Pardon?”
“It's pronounced ‘skwim.’”
“So, you're saying the ‘E’ is silent?”
“Yes.”
“…”
“It's Washington! What can I say?”
Saturday, August 30, 2025
Notes on an overheard conversation between a prescriptivist and a descriptivist
“I'm going to the grocery story, so if you wake up from your nap and I'm not here, that's where I will be at.”
“No. Don't say that.”
“You don't want me to go to the store?”
“No, don't end your sentances with a preposition.”
“Really? How should I have said that?”
“‘That's where I will be.’ You don't need the ‘at.’”
And the next thing you'll tell me is to stop splitting my infinitives.”
“Pththththththththt.”
Friday, August 29, 2025
Some more notes on the “wireless service unit”
After much experimentation, I found out that the “wireless service unit” the Monopolistic Phone Company sent us to replace the DSL does in fact support multicasting, although it's a bit more pedantic about it than any other router I've encountered so far. The address I used to use, 239.255.0.1, falls into the “administratively scoped” category of multicast addresses, and I picked it because I wanted a multicast address that was scoped. The “wireless service unit” isn't something I fully control, so it rejected that range of multicast addresses. In fact it appeared that it didn't like any multicast address that could, in theory, be routed.
Of course it exhibited different behavior with different blocks. Most of the blocks it would work for just under five minutes, then fail. I found this out by writing some very simple programs—one to send some data once per second to a multicast address, and one to receive the data. I would run the sender on two computers, and the listeners also on the two computers. Both the listeners would receive data from both senders, and then as they approached five minutes, they would only receive multicast packets from the sender running on the same computer.
It was only when I switched to using the one non-routable multicast address block, 224.0.0.0/24, did things Just Work™. 224.0.0.0/24 is categorized as “local subnetwork” and is not routable.
Sigh.
So now I'm able to use the multicast program I was using before, since it was always local to my home network anyway.
Other notes about the “wireless service unit”—it's reporting pages suck. There's the “event report” page, which dumps data like:
| No. | Data/Time | SoureIP | DestinationIP | Proto | Reason |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2025/08/… | XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX | XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX | TCP | Generic Discards |
| 2 | 2025/08/… | XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX | XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX | TCP | Generic Discards |
| 3 | 2025/08/… | XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX | XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX | UDP | Generic Discards |
| 4 | 2025/08/… | XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX | XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX | TCP | Generic Discards |
TCP and UDP traffic is being stopped, but what TCP and UDP traffic? No indication, and there's no way to configure what is logged. Lovely.
The other log report is the list of current NAT sessions. It's more useful as it includes source address, destination address, NAT address, protocol, port numbers, and lifetime, but the table itself is capped to a maximum width, so making the browser window wider doesn't show more columns. Horizontal scrolling for the win? I guess? Sigh.
The port-forwarding feature is wonky. On my old router, I could set incoming packets from the Internet to TCP port 22 to be forwarded to my development machine. On the “wireless service unit,” however, setting that up means all traffic to TCP port 22 gets forwarded to my development machine, even on the local network! I mean … yeah … it works, but it's not public traffic that gets forwarded, all traffic gets forwarded. I can work around that but it's annoying.
The “wireless service unit” has also spontaneously rebooted itself a couple of times. Not enough for a pattern to emerge, but enough to be very annoying. And one time it failed to obtain an IPv6 address (which shouldn't change in my opinion but then again, I don't run the Monopolistic Phone Company) and I had to power cycle it to get IPv6 back.
And I can't shake the feeling that it's doing something to my DNS queries, even though I'm running a local DNS server …
Wednesday, August 27, 2025
My post about banning a Chinese web bot? Apparently, that was really about me being shadow banned from Hacker News … which is news to me
Oh my! This is hilarious:
Developer gets shadowbanned by Hacker News and asks for a real IP ban instead
Sean Conner discovered he's been shadowbanned from Hacker News and would rather just be banned at the IP level if they don't want him there. SEAN'S BLOG POST | HACKER NEWS DISCUSSION
I can see how the author might get that from if they only read the headline on Hacker News, but (to his credit) he spelled both my first name and last name correct, so he must have clicked through to my post (where my name shows up at the bottom of the page) but not read the actual post.
Wow!
But given the author writes about AI, perhaps he had his AI write the summary for him. Given the two errata he mentions about his previous newsletter, if he does use an AI, perhaps he needs a word or two with it …
Monday, August 25, 2025
A neat idea, but I can see this leading to the Balkanization of the Internet
I did not expect my recent post about blocking a Chinese web bot to generate such a large discussion at Hacker News and to a lesser degree, Lobsters (for the record, I did not submit my post to either site). Reading over the comments at both sites, I think my favorite comment so far is:
"I'm seriously thinking that the CCP encourage this with maybe the hope of externalizing the cost of the Great Firewall to the rest of the world. If China scrapes content, that's fine as far as the CCP goes; If it's blocked, that's fine by the CCP too (I say, as I adjust my tin foil hat)."
Then turn the tables on them and make the Great Firewall do your job! Just choose a random snippet about illegal Chinese occupation of Tibet or human rights abuses of Uyghur people each time you generate a page and insert it as a breaker between paragraphs. This should get you blocked in no time :)
Hacker News comment on “Bro, ban me at the IP level if you don't like me”
There's also the 1989 Tiananmem Square massacre, Falun Gong persecution and last but not least, that Xi Jinping looks like Winnie-the-Pooh. I was considering the idea to include such information in each post, but then in a follow-up comment to that one:
I just tried this, i took some strings about Falun Gong and the Tianmen thing from the chinese wikipedia and put them into my SSH server banner. The connection attempts from the Tencent AS ceased completely, but now they come from Russia, Lithuania and Iran instead.
Other Hacker News comment on “Bro, ban me at the IP level if you don't like me”
Russia and Iran don't surprise me, but Lithuania? Weird. But ultimately, yes, I get China to block me, only for them to outsource their scraping to other countries.
Sigh.
