Ryan's Wisdumb

What comes to mind when I say, "Philosophical Society"?  For me it conjures up images of the famous Royal Society with groups of gentleman scientists gathered in a grand room lit by candles with overstuffed chairs and dark wood paneling discussing the leading scientific theories of the day while contemplatively puffing on a pipe.  It's a romantic image and probably has little basis in reality but I would have loved to be a fly on the wall listening to the likes of Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Michael Faraday and Ernest Rutherford discussing their theories and breakthroughs.  In my mind, science in the 17th through 19th century was largely accessible to the average person with some curiosity about the world around them.  The body of knowledge to draw on was limited and a lot could still be learned with simple experimentation.  Many of the scientific breakthroughs of those eras came from wealthy men who had time to pursue scie...

  It's been a while since I've had a good rant.  At least publicly.  Much like a volcano that slowly builds up pressure over time until there is a massive explosion, I have been absorbing the stupidity, faults, flaws and outright incompetence of the various products I interact with daily, and now it is time for me to erupt.  If you recall, Spotify was the target of my last good rant about software development .  Today's rant is brought to you by Yahoo! I have been using Yahoo! since the very early days of the World Wide Web.  I remember when it was hosted at akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo.  It was an innovative idea, and I immediately set it as my homepage in my NCSA Mosaic browser.  At the time, there were no other web-based aggregators of content (at least that I knew of) and Yahoo! provided a great starting point for finding content I was interested in (kids- this was before Google even existed).  For a fun trip down memory lane, take a look a...

 I just got up and running with a new DIY project that absolutely amazes me.  It is called BirdNet-Pi and it is a software package running on a Raspberry Pi that uses AI analysis of audiograms to automatically identifies birds by sound in real time.  It is designed to run 24/7 and collects data on all of the birds it hears around your house.  It can even generate notifications that I can receive on my cell phone so I can come running if it detects a bird I haven't seen in my yard before.  Almost as amazing, it is a free, open-source project! I was clued in to this project by a Facebook ad for a BirdWeather PUC  (shown above).  This is a standalone device that does much of the above- listens and identifies birds that it hears.  It is fully integrated with the BirdWeather website and shares its data to the BirdWeather database.  You can look up real time ID results for any PUCs that are shared on their map.  Pretty cool!  I wanted one...

  Do you have a portable power bank that doesn't seem to perform as advertised?  Do you suspect you are not getting the Watts you paid for?  You're not alone.  Inspired by your local news team, Channel Wisdumb went undercover into the seedy underworld of power bank specsmanship to uncover the truth.  What we learned will shock you. By publicly admitting this, I am risking my career.  I may be asked to turn in my electrical engineering badge and soldering gun.  I admit this here as a public service so others don't make the same mistakes I did:  I was dumb.  I wasn't thinking.  I know better.  I expected a 30000mAh rated power bank to be able to completely recharge my 5000mAh phone from empty about 6 times.  When I could only get about 1.5 recharges of my phone out of that battery, I knew something was as fishy as a tuna cat food tin floating in a vat of sardines.  I decided to dig deeper.   (Ok, that's it for the ...

  I'm back!  I hadn't intended to let my blog go this long without any posts, but life got busy.  Work picked up so I have been back doing my day job nearly full time.  I still don't have the guts to just retire and try to live off of investment income. [sigh]  Last September, I got recruited for the position of Scoutmaster for my son's Boy Scout troop which further added to my workload.  I had a lot of concerns before accepting the position about how much time Scoutmastering [if it's not already a verb, I am making it one] would require.  I was worried it was going to be a huge time sink to do the job the way it needs to be done.  If I accepted, I was going to give it my all and not cut corners, shirk my duties, or put in minimal effort.  It turns out, my fears about how much time and effort the role requires were justified.  But... I am enjoying almost every minute of it!  You, my dear readers, are the ones who are paying the pric...

I guess I need to modify my definition of "old car" to be more inclusive so I can blog about life with my 2018 Nissan Pathfinder and avoiding ridiculous dealer charges when something goes wrong.  To me, a 6-year-old car doesn't seem very old, so henceforth "old car" shall refer to any vehicle I own that is out of warranty.  That ought to cover it. You may recall from my car shopping posts that Android Auto was a feature I really wanted in my next car, primarily for using google maps on road trips and being able to run it from the infotainment screen rather than have to mount my phone somewhere and operate it off of the small phone screen.  Nissan did not include Android Auto in the 2018 Pathfinder.  Maybe this was for the best, as most Android Auto systems deployed in that timeframe used wired connectivity only and did not support wireless, and I really wanted wireless Android Auto support so I wouldn't even have to take my phone out of my pocket when I got...