Friday Notes (Aug 29, 2025)

I’m beginning to think this Friday Notes series is a Sisyphean Mission. While I’ve managed to reduce the main pile of notes to almost nothing (or at least nothing I feel like writing about), there remain other piles.

Not to mention the way new notes constantly spring up like mushrooms in the shady damp part of the forest.

Fortunately, I enjoy writing these (in all honestly, because they’re easy to write). For a while, largely because of Substack, I thought they might end up being mostly what I posted here.

It hasn’t really turned out that way. The longer I’m on Substack, the less enthused I am about it. Not negative, but no longer excited. A lot has to do with its emphasis on the (paid) subscription model (from which it derives its income — no ads on Substack). My stuff is always free to read.

More to the point regarding Substack, on two levels, I can’t see myself paying for content (more than I already do with various streaming sources). Firstly, I find dozens of writers there worth reading. How do I pick which to support? Even small amounts spread over lots of writers adds up. Secondly, bluntly, worth reading isn’t the same as worth paying for. There isn’t any of it I would miss if unavailable. The main reason I read other blogs at all is that it’s easy and free.

A third reason is that the more posts I read, the less I get done of my own stuff, and sometimes that gets out of hand. I had to learn to generally stay away from the twitter-like Notes feed on Substack. Too easy to vanish an hour or two. Infinite scrolling is small-e evil.

In any event, seems like I’m not done with WordPress just yet.

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We had a cool July — cool in the temperature sense:

There was a sudden dip on the 15th followed by a slow rise back to warmer temperatures that took until the 27th. And then it cooled off again.

Here in August, as I write this, we’ve been experiencing unseasonably cool weather. So much so that yesterday morning I got out my electric heater because my hands were too cold for writing. Great sleeping weather, though, and infinitely better than the usual swampy August.

I’ve actually managed to do without air conditioning all summer so far, and it looks like I might not need it this year. I hate being cooped inside with closed windows. It’s bad enough in winter when heat is necessary to not die, but it has to get pretty bad — insupportably muggy, hot, and stagnant — before I’ll subject myself to chilled air.

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Among my favorite TV shows is one called Leverage. It aired on TNT from 2008 to 2012 and involved a crew of expert thieves recruited by a former ace insurance investor to help people who have been legally or illegally cheated.

It starred Timothy Hutton as the former investigator (who turned on his company when they wouldn’t pay for his dying son’s medical bills), and featured Gina Bellman, Christian Kane, Beth Riesgraf, and Aldis Hodge as the expert thieves.

The original Leverage (left to right): Aldis Hodge, the hacker; Christian Kane, the hitter; Timothy Hutton, the mastermind; Gina Bellman, the grifter; Beth Riesgraf, the thief.

The show was somewhere between the 1960s Mission: Impossible TV series and the 1980s The A-Team TV series. Each episode involved an almost prescient con job by a group of experts who not only operate quasi-legally but may be actively sought by various legal authorities from various jurisdictions.

It’s lighthearted and light, and I love stories about con jobs, so I really enjoyed the series. Bought all five season DVDs and even watched most of them again on Amazon Video. Highly recommended if you like that sort of thing and have never seen it. (Or worth watching again if you have.)

To my delight, the series was revived in 2021. Leverage: Redemption was minus Hutton, who was dealing with a legal accusation, but had all four “thieves”. Well, almost all four. Aldis Hodge only appears infrequently. His role in the group is filled by his foster sister, played by Aleyse Shannon.

The group now is led by Sophie Devereaux (Bellman), who had a will-they-won’t-they romance with Nate Ford (Hutton) throughout the original series. That series ends with them together.

The revival begins with her as his widow now and carrying on his legacy of a unit devoted to helping ordinary people screwed over by scams and/or Big Business. It ran for two seasons on Freevee, ending in 2023.

Amazon Video picked it up for a third season in 2025.

The revival, Leverage: Redemption (left to right): Beth Riesgraf, Aleyse Shannon (the hacker replacing Aldis Hodge), Christian Kane, Gina Bellman, and Noah Wyle.

I believe both shows owe their lighthearted and light natures to creator John Rogers and producer Dean Devlin. Those two are responsible for another delightful gem of a TV series, The Librarians (2014-2018). That one stars Rebecca Romijn supported by Christian Kane and John Larroquette (with early appearances by Bob Newhart, Jane Curtin, and Noah Wyle).

Anyway, the point is that something that’s always bugged me a little about shows like this — public or secret groups helping people in need — is their geographical restriction. This became most noticeable to me watching Person of Interest (2011-2016). They had an Ai helping them save the world (by monitoring everyone — the show offered some interesting discussion points). But they only operated in New York city.

Television does this a lot. It compresses the world into a single city or situation.

Leverage: Redemption is cool because they set up teams doing the same thing in cities around the world. Those other teams even factor into a few episodes.

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that’s a bit unusual in saving-the-world stories. The ethic generally leans more towards, “In a world gone mad, only one man/woman/dog could save them…”

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It seems the world has had its fill of my Babylon (anime) post from 2021 — all that activity that has been going on for months has petered out to nothing:

But quite a ride while it lasted.

With 5,593 views — nearly all of them in last nine months or so — the post became my third-most viewed of all.

It is a bit fascinating how someone will stumble over a post with almost no views and suddenly that post shines briefly (usually very briefly) for a day.

This post was an exploding star unlike anything I’ve seen. Tiny potatoes for those with thousands or millions of followers, I know, but something of an event in this neck of the woods.

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In my recent post Smoke Alarm Saga, I wrote:

So, three of the four new smoke alarms lost their minds. For a while, I tracked the intervals between their error-beeping thing, but there was no pattern I could see. It’s possible ambient air pressure factors in somehow.

When I wrote that post, I thought I’d tossed those intervals. I’d whipped up a quick Python app to hold the date/times and process them to give me a list of intervals. I wanted that as part of my argument that stupid company’s smoke alarms really were defective and should be replaced under full warrantee.

When it turned out the company was out of business and the company that inherited their phone number explicitly did not inherit their debts or warrantees, there was nothing to argue, so I deleted the little Python app. Which deleted the data, and I assumed I’d tossed the paper I’d used to record the times the alarms did their error thing.

But those paper notes turned up, so for the record, here’s part of what made the whole thing so nuts: the seemingly random time intervals between when a given alarm lost its mind:

The bedroom alarm (which was first to go and still is an active zombie): Twice in one day, then once two or three days later (these were before I began recording anything). Then intervals of (in hours): ~60, 20.2, 44.8, 86.6, 28.2, 26.2, 18.1, 10.1, 48.3, 18.2, 4.1, 20.1, 0.03. After that last one, I removed it from the ceiling and (supposedly) “disabled and discharged” it. Over four months later, it’s still alive, buried under towels in the linen closet, doing its beeping thing.

But at least it answers the question of whether the unit was defective. Clearly so.

The hallway alarm didn’t last long because I took it down as soon as it was apparent it was doing the same damn thing. As with the bedroom one, it went off twice in one day, then shut up for “4 or 5” days (per the note). Once it happened again, I began recording the hourly intervals: 30.3, … 9 days & 1.6 hours, 18.2. After which time, I took it down. As I wrote in the Saga post, it was quiet for a long time and only went off again after I put it back up on the ceiling. It went off more regularly after that, and I finally “disabled and discharged” it — to no effect for quite some weeks but it finally died the (apparent? who knows!) True Death.

The living room alarm (the third to go) was 13′ up, so it took a while to get the means to get it down (as described in the Saga). The time delay means I gathered more data than for the hallway unit. I hadn’t realized this, but all three followed the pattern of first going off twice in a short span and then settling into a highly irregular pattern of complaining. The hourly intervals here are: ~5 (this one didn’t wait long to get into the swing of things), 16.3, 2.1, 20.1, 4.3, 7.8, 14.1, 18.3, 68.5 (2 days, 20.5 hours), 6.1, 21.1, 3.0 (estimated), 3.0 (est), 6.0 (est).

My buddy came by with the ladder the next day. This one also finally died the True Death. Pressing their button does nothing, and they’ve been sitting out in plain hearing for weeks without making a peep.

But that bedroom one will not die!

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What did die a week or so ago is the display on my (only four-year-old) HP:

Not die exactly, but it became seriously difficult to use. Which isn’t a horrible problem, because I tend to use it more as a desktop computer — always hooked to power and my 24″ monitor. I do most of the work in the large screen, using the laptop display only as a secondary screen. It has mostly just my email app and some reference windows I keep handy for, you know, reference.

Funny this is that the machine had been running very hot, particularly in one spot, for a couple of weeks. I even elevated it above the desk surface for (I hoped) better cooling, but that spot still was uncomfortably hot.

Then the display adorned itself with all those horizontal pinstripes, … and that spot has been nice and cool ever since. I think one of the display driver chips must have developed a short that overheated to the point the short finally blew like a fuse. But that damaged the chip and gave it bad case of pinstripes.

Those pinstripes are actually parts of the screen being repeated over and over. The image above looks fairly readable if I squint, but when I open a window, its white background makes the pinstripes directly above into a cloud of white.

The Dell I had two laptops ago was a POS (see Bummer in the Dell). Won’t buy Dell again. The HP was a fine machine, I liked it, but it only lasted four years. That’s fairly long for a laptop, I think. It’s running Windows 10 (which I’ll need to upgrade to Windows 11 very soon now — support for W10 ends in October). Still, I’m ready for a new machine and won’t mind having a working second one.

I ordered a Lenovo. They sell what used to be the IBM laptop line. We used IBMs at work, and they were good. I’ve heard good things from multiple people about Lenovo. I’ve only gotten it just set up — still some work to do on that — but soon it’ll be time to make the official switch.

I’m not thrilled with Windows 11, though. A bullet that has to be bit.

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Speaking of laptops, I finally took apart that Dell POS to see if there was anything obvious I could fix. If you’ve ever opened a laptop, you know what a silly idea that is. Yikes, every cubic inch occupied. If you thought working on modern car engines is cramped, you should see the inside of a laptop!

Of course, I found nothing but did remove the memory and SSD so I can safely tender the machine for recycling.

One thing I learned is that laptops have big thick copper bars that snake around inside and wrap around the fans. They channel the heat to the fans. I wondered what they were at first but guessed their function based on appearances. Then I saw an image in a Lenovo ad that mentioned them. Yep, heat channels.

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Speaking of Windows™, I did not realize that Windows Search actually looked at images. Recently, I was looking for an image of Orange Earth (from this post but a larger version). So, I searched my PC for [*orange*] and got this:

The four at the top all have “orange” in their filenames, and the HTML files, the PDF file, and the RTF file all have the string “orange” in their text. The upper-left image is what I was looking for but in a larger size (but none were found).

What astonished me was the bottom two rows. Which are all images that have some orange color in them.

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As usual, I’m over my word count again, so I’ll leave you with a couple of meme images I’ve created recently for Substack:

Kind of speaks for itself, but the irony is that I didn’t include the brand name, UNRL, that inspired me to make it. I could recall seeing a four-letter “disenvoweled” brand name on shirts sportscasters wear, thought it started with “U” but drew a blank beyond that. My searches turned up UNCL (“uncle”) which is a brand associated with sports, so I went with it (though I was pretty sure it wasn’t the droid I was searching for).

Anyway, the disenvoweling of brand names and texting amuses me and reminds me of that bit Twain did.

This one is sheer plagiarism on my part. I saw the meme — crudely done and in a small format — and made a note to make one of my own. I forgot to include the title on the image: “It wasn’t a dress.”

Again, not my idea, but I really like it. All those times I’ve seen that woman icon. Heh. It wasn’t a dress. I’ll never look at that sign the same way again.

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Stay envoweled, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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