A Crummy Commercial

I got this email on Friday, May 22, 2026 from WIEC (Washington Island Electric Co-op): I have seen those poles lying there by the side of Airport road just north of the Airport itself.  They are both wooden poles but each has two steel crossed arms.  If I had known what was up and had had my new cell phone I could have grabbed a picture :) It's good to get a heads up on a power outage but what'll I do without my internet.  My laptop could work briefly but not for 8 hours.  The Starlink internet uses a fair amount of power, at least 25 watts, so I don't have any kind of inverter / battery combo that could power that either. I'll have to actually take a walk, read a book or take a ride or ?  Wednesday is a bad day to go shopping at Mann's store as they are often out of the sale / fresh items.  It'll be like experiencing the dark ages !  :) Here's an idea: an 8 hour warmup for Field Day ?  I could get out the tent, put up some wire to trees, put the ...

I was toying with the idea of planting a garden this year.  The old garden has become overgrown with trees blocking the sun and bittersweet everywhere (NEVER plant bittersweet !).  But it did have a fence around the outside to keep the deer out. This year I was thinking of moving to new ground with good sun.  Usually I wait until after Memorial day before planting just in case there is a killing frost.  But then I saw this picture from the trail cam (I moved it to a new spot, pointed it north): Zooming in and counting them (I gotta increase the resolution to high): I count 6 deer - with 6 deer around I would have to either put up new fencing or move the old fences or the whole garden would just become a salad course for the deer.  I've seen nice patches of wild asparagus just be decimated by the deer.  This year they are even cropping some of the ramp greens in the woods.  Unfortunately my Dad gave away the electric fencer that we had for the sheep....

jacksonharbor@att.net was the email address I used for the beginnings of the kit business.  The island was still dialup internet service then.  I had signed up for ATT Worldnet which had an 800 number that you called into - they then charged you for every minute of connect time on a monthly basis.  I remember one friend emailing a greeting card attachment that cost me like $4 to download !  But overall it wasn't that bad a deal until ATT dropped Worldnet - there was no way to keep my old email address :(  I've mentioned this before: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/04/when-internet-changes-its-usually-for.html So when I finally got this new cell phone going I thought:  hey, sign up for a free att.net email address !  I had never been able to try this before because you had to have cell service to get an att.net email address. So I tried it and got this: I then tried sending a message to jacksonharbor@att.net via gmail and got this: so I don't know what...

Previous mention: getting rid of DSL here: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2026/05/shedding-load-or-may-4th-be-with-you.html Although Starlink has already emailed that after my trial period the monthly rate will be increasing $5 to $55 per month :( But in happier news, May 20, 2026 was the last day of landline service from Frontier.  I finally was able to get my old home landline number transferred to Mint Mobile.  If I had known it was this much of a hassle I would have just dumped the landline number and gone with a new one.  Frontier got to charge me for another week or so of landline service, is any big company that mean that they would lie just to get a few more bucks ?  I hope not, probably just some disinterested employee ?  Anyway it's done ! Strangely I still have landline dial tone on May 21st but probably that will be gone soon. Having cell phone service is weird though for a first timer like me,  it's like the cell phone is a new body part that has ...

I *should* be doing any number of other things but I bought a trail cam.  A Muddy Pro-Cam 16 - it was the cheapest "name brand" trail cam I could find on Ebay that would mail it.  Nicely both batteries (8 AA) and an SD card were included as a bundle.   Here is my first shot - the quizzical look is because I was trying to set the date and time which obviously I hadn't done :)   Depending on how well it works I might buy another one as a sort of security cam, pictures being so worthwhile these days.  As with most anything there are zillions of options, many seem to be cut-down cell phones which can be hooked up to a wireless cellular network - but those are a LOT more expensive.  Here is my first deer, yesterday afternoon not too long after setting it up: At the very least I will get some exercise walking out to the camera every day to check for any pictures.  I used the included strap to belt it to a tree near a deer path.  Here is how it...

A Roz Chast cartoon in The New Yorker - the bearded prophet carries a sign which reads: "THE END OF YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM IS NEAR": source:  https://media.newyorker.com/cartoons/6a0387dc4ca8f0266f755ca3/master/w_1280,c_limit/a61789.jpg I thought of this in connection with both Android and Windows (what'll Windows 10 users do when the extra year of support on Windows 10 is up later this year ?). I just got a new Android device, it had version 15 - of course right away it wanted to update to version 16.  And I *think* I might get another version updated to 17 - and that's it. But the problem is that the apps are jealous of the latest OS version - they want it to be a certain level or that's it, no dice.  With a previous Android device support ended at Android 11.  December 2025 this broke my banking app.  So I wasn't able to deposit kit checks via the app, I had to mail them in to the bank :(   Now I can use the app again on the new Android device versi...

I just had to post this picture of Charles P. Steinmetz in his 1914 Detroit Electric car: Outside the car are Marjorie, William, Joseph Jr. and Joseph Hayden Sr. - they were Steinmetz's adoptive family.  Maybe Mom Hayden took the picture ?  :)  That car had a tiller and could be driven from the back seat.  It didn't go that fast or far but Schenectady wasn't that big a town then. Here are a few articles on the car, Steinmetz and GE: https://spectrum.ieee.org/charles-proteus-steinmetz   The original Steinmetz car was found and restored:  https://www.union.edu/news/stories/201404/Shifting-gears-A-new-home-for-Steinmetz-car A Steinmetz bio:  https://archive.org/details/steinmetzenginee00klin   The General Electric book,  Men and Volts : https://archive.org/details/menvoltsstoryofg0000john Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm