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.
Overclocking A Raspberry Pi 4
I am using a Raspberry Pi 4 (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 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.
Moments of panic this morning as I tried to use my Airpods and found them dead, dead, dead. The really odd thing is that they wouldn’t start charging via the lightning cable and Anker charger I charge the iPad Mini with, but once I pulled another cable and plugged in to a different charge it worked. Not sure why this matters, but the Anker is a 100W PD GAN.
The official images of the Raspberry Pi OS are still 32-bit but there is a beta 64-bit version that I have been using on an SSD connected to a Raspberry Pi 4. When the 64-bit version was first released RealVNC Server was not available so I have been using x11vnc to remote connect to the Pi. Today I learned that RealVNC Server is now available for the beta but has to be enabled via the terminal using raspi-config, so I switched. I don’t know whether anyone else will find this useful, but it feels like RealVNC is faster than x11vnc.
Find all the reaction to the Trump recording humorous, as if it matters. It’s the same type of thing the House impeached him for, but that did not matter because 70+ million people voted for him anyway.
Republicans want to believe everyone is like them and at the same time if Trump is not re-elected they will never win another presidential election.
Remember when 2020 was a punch line?
One Term Presidential Mirrors
I think it’s interesting that CNN is airing a documentary about the first modern outsider elected President before Trump, Jimmy Carter. When I think back about Carter’s years as President I think what happened is that he showed us reality that we did not like very much. It’s no wonder then that he lost to a professional actor and that in many ways we have been living in a delusion that has been amplified by Trump.
Why would the rock-and-roll set flock to a man who, as president, is remembered today as being a micro-managing, straight-arrow engineer who failed to inspire or understand leadership? The reason is that in his prime, Jimmy Carter was cool. He championed a kind of political populism that was extremely attractive to Americans disillusioned with Washington in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. Sick and tired of elected officials who betrayed them, they found a refreshing change in Carter, a former peanut farmer who was seen as an anti-establishment outsider. As Bishop Michael Curry recalls in the documentary, “We were coming out of the Watergate era and looking …to be a country of integrity again.”
The problem with the quote above from Bishop Curry is that I am not sure the United States has ever been a “country of integrity.” I think some of the founders had this aspiration but failed to see the log in their eye of supremacy is the forms of slavery and colonialism.
To me the greatest irony of the Trump presidency has been that part of the campaign slogan, “Make America Great” is a good and right aspiration but demands a degree of introspection on what is greatness and who determines greatness.
P.S. I observe that it seems all one term presidents of my life time became one term because that were a mirror reflecting ourselves that we did not like very much. Our egos much prefer the myths of our false selves than the reality of our true selves.
It’s 2021 and now time to face reality.
The current economy is not about employment and it’s certainly not about the stock market, it’s about wages. Employers do not want to increase wages or provide full time employment.
A year later unfortunately we went in the wrong direction and now the economy is about employment and wages.
I don’t know if it’s a metaphor, but yesterday’s rainy winter day gave way to today’s sunshine.
I like to do little projects during my week long Christmas holiday so this year I did a redo of a project from last year and built a new Raspberry Pi 4 and configured it to attach to my iPad Air via a USB-C cable. I don’t intend this particular Pi to serve a role on our home network, so I will also use it for other projects. I had have created an outline for my tech experiments in which you can view my project notes.
I’ve created a page of Books That I Read In 2020 that lists what I read in reverse chronological order and I wondering whether I should change that to chronological order. What do you think?
The Jed Hoyer regime is not starting well in Chicago when it communicates b.s. like this. I see zero ways in which the trade of Yu Darvish to San Diego for little in return helps the Cubs in 2021. Maybe the Cubs will be competitive in the N.L. Central by default, but they won’t be competitive outside their division.
I dislike rainy winter days like today. I wish we had a fireplace, but the Christmas tree lights are nice.
I moved to the Detroit, Michigan area 31 years ago, and one of the benefits of that is the ability to attend the annual Great Lakes Invitational college hockey tournament that Michigan Tech hosts. Over those years I think I did not attend three but never until this year, due to COVID19, has there not been a tournament.
I am drinking my first Starbucks Latte in I don’t know how long. EOM.
We got a white Christmas.
Now that Apple has enabled one to use a mouse with an iPad they have to enable them to use external monitors in a manner similar to notebook computers. Right now you can mirror the display to a monitor and that display is larger but it does not fill up the entire screen. When I connect my iPad to my 24-inch monitor I want to have all of the screen space available to me.