Wow, it’s a sting in the tail of summer – three weeks into autumn, and at the autumnal equinoxe, it was 37C on Tuesday last week, 33C the next, 28degC today. It’s hot! It’s slowly cooling down, thank goodness, but we’re still looking at high twenties for the rest of this week. Our summer 2022/23 was actually quite cool, in the sense that we had no days or 40C or above. That’s a bit unusual, and I’ll take it, but I don’t think it means that global heating is not happening.

As well, it’s been dry! I think the figure was 1.4mm of rain for the entire three months of summer. I don’t like that. We need rain.

PS: last night we had rain, rain, rain! 38mm on the second last day of March. Whoopee!

The warning, this morning, that unless something is done to change our CO₂ emissions, i.e. our greenhouse gas emissions, then we’re going to exceed the 1.5degC increase in our average temperatures and permanently damage the entire Earth’s climate, for the worse. This is serious!

Yet the big emitters and the coal and gas industries are barrelling along as if nothing needs to change. Glencore, the big company wanting to develop a huge coal mine in the Hunter Valley in NSW, is fighting tooth and nail to start digging. The only thing stopping them are the Aborigines opposing the plans.

Personally, at age 76 I won’t live to see the worst effects of climate change, but I’m afraid it’s too late. Money rules! Money will override all other considerations and mining and petroleum will go on, as long as people demand share returns for their superannuation funds. This is the point, we all want change for the good, as long as it doesn’t adversely affect us. T’was ever thus.

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Anyone who reads this blog knows that I am left wing, so left wing that I’m to the left of the present government, the Australian Labor Party. when I swim, I swim in anti-clockwise circles. I have to ask pilots of aircraft to apply a bit of right rudder. I loathe the conservatives, the Liberal Party in Australia.

How anyone can support a party which knowingly broke the law to take vindictive action against low income earners in the infamous scheme which has become known as Robodebt is beyond me. The result of this infamous scheme was that at least several people committed suicide when they were pursued by government appointed debt collectors, when they didn’t actually owe any money! The relevant ministers knew they were implementing an unlawful scheme, yet they chose to ignore the law and continue. As a result, people died!

The reason I mention this is because I’ve just heard, this afternoon, on the PBS News Hour (a US publicly funded broadcasting organisation, so reasonably credible and impartial), something which I didn’t know, and I bet you didn’t either.

It’s that after Ronald Reagan’s win after Jimmy Carter’s (Democrat) term as president, the Republicans wanted some good news to announce at Reagan’s inauguration. At this time, the Iran hostage crisis was in progress, where all the staff of the US embassy in Tehran, 52 people, were held hostage, violating all the rules of the Geneva Convention.

The hostage crisis was nearing its end, with negotiations having presaged the release of the hostages. But the Republican administration and Reagan’s new Secretary of State ordered that the release of the hostages be delayed until the day after Reagan’s inauguration ceremony! The hostages were formally released into United States custody the day after the signing of the Algiers Accords, just minutes after American President Ronald Reagan was sworn into office.

What a low act, and in my opinion, typical of the low acts that conservatives in any country will go to. I loathe conservatives for reasons like this.

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I’ve just found out, today, that a photography web site DP Review, a site that I’ve been avidly reading since the early ’00s, is to close down on 10 April. Damn! This is like learning that the ABC is to shut down, or any similar web presence that has been a part of our lives for a long time.

DP Review was started by a British guy, Phil Askey, in London in 1998. I found it during the early days of digital cameras and it’s been one of my favourite sites ever since. I visit it daily.

Unfortunately, very unfortunately, it was bought out by Amazon and moved holus bolus to Seattle in Washington State, USA in 2007.

As we should have expected, Amazon has decided it has to close, as a result of massive staff cuts through the whole company. DP Review only has 14 staff, for goodness sakes, but Amazon management don’t care about small things like that.

That’s bad enough, but DP Review has a massive database of camera information, technical specs, cameras tests and the same for lenses. Surely this can’t be lost to us? Surely even the 200lb gorilla that is Amazon couldn’t trash this information? We can only hope.

(PS: apparently a dedicated group are frantically downloading as much of the web site as they can before it disappears.)

An item on Petapixel about landscape photography, a series of three YouTube five minute episodes by two British landscape photographers. Yeeeaaah, right up my alley.

It sparked my memories of my 2008 trip around Dornie, Applecross and the Isle of Skye. What a fantastic trip that was! I took hundreds of photos and I’ve brought a few out to show. The opening shot was on a day so windy that I could hardly hold the camera upright on the tripod.

I sure wish I could redo that whole two month trip.

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By the way, I shot around 1,000 High Def video clips on the trip, and they’re still on my hard drive labelled Video. Problem is, the drive has failed. It’s not making clicking noises luckily (a sure sign the heads are contacting the disk surface, disaster). It’s actually totally silent, meaning I think the motor has failed. This can be fixed and the data retrieved, I think. But at a cost – maybe $500 or more. The failure happened nearly a year ago and I still haven’t made the move to get it fixed. I do have a backup, so it’s not urgent, but as the faulty disk is 3TB and has hundreds of more recent video and images, I don’t want to lose it.

As disk sizes are becoming so large, backup is difficult. I’m actually thinking I may need to buy a RAID array which has redundancy built in, to guard against these failures. I’ve actually got 4x 4TB drives brand new awaiting a drive aray, but cost is a factor.

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By the way, I bought a 1TB micro-SD card last week, from the Wish.com web site for $8.80!

I’m always suspicious of these ultra cheap things as they can be made to look like 1TB, but only format to 100MB or similar. This one seems OK so far, but I’ll make sure it’s trustworthy before I, er, trust it.

Aaah, the tail end of summer, and it’s cloudy outside but still warm enough to have the aircon on. It looked a bit like rain earlier, but no such luck. Damn, more fine weather. ~:(

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This is crazy, and almost immoral. The Reserve Bank (Australia’s central bank) has raised interest rates for the last ten months in a row, from a low of 0,1% in 2010 to 3.6% now. They’re doing this to try to kill inflation by reducing demand. That is, if people don’t have the money to buy goods, then the demand will fall and the prices must either stay steady or fall. That’s the theory.

The effect is that home loan interest rates charged by the banks have risen sharply. When the Reserve Bank rate was 0,1%, the banks were encouraged to make as many housing loans as they could. This was supposed to lift the economy by increasing demand for building services and materials.

What’s more, the governor of the Reserve Bank said a couple of times that he didn’t expect the prime rate to rise before around 2024. The result was that people rushed the banks to take out mortgages at this bargain rate, with the expectation that they would have at least three years to get established.

But now they are being crushed by this sudden rise in the rate. People took out huge mortgages (as they have to be able to afford a house in Sydney and Melbourne) but now, relatively suddenly, they’re finding their repayments have risen to alarming levels. Many people are finding they can’t make the payments.

I don’t have any qualifications in economics but I think this stinks. The effect is to remove money from the economy, sure, and hence reduce demand, but the money is just flowing to the banks in the form of higher loan repayments. The banks are laughing all the way to the bank, so to speak. They are reaping bumper profits.

This is immoral. With the aim of reducing inflation, the Reserve Bank is severely hurting ordinary wage earners, to the extent that many, many people are finding they can’t afford the basics such as school expenses, sport costs, transport and even food. Pleas to charities have risen dramatically.

Yet the rise in interest rates has no effect at all on wealthy people, even increasing their wealth by rising deposit rates and investment returns. The reserve Bank’s policies are regressive, hurting the lowest income people yet helping the highest income people.

A solution to this was in an article last week. If the Bank wants to remove money from the economy to reduce demand, instead of funnelling it to the banks, why not introduce a temporary method where are certain percentage of people’s income is diverted to a government regulated savings account. This would be quarantined until some time in the future when the funds “saved” would be released to the individual, to be withdrawn and used. It would be similar to superannuation, just with different rules about withdrawal.

This would reduce demand in the same way as now, but stop the money flowing to the banks as windfall profits.

And there’s the answer: the banks and other wealthy institutions have tremendous power to persuade governments to do what they want, not what’s good for the customer. Such common sense would never get off the ground. Phut!

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That’s interesting. I named this post with a phrase I use sometimes, hotch potch, meaning a mixture, and looked it up in Etymonline.com (as I very frequently do). They don’t recognise hotch potch but this is what they say:

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Anyway, I was going through my Downloads folder just now and thought I’d do a post showing the hotch potch of things I’ve kept in the past few months and years.

First, I came across a website that shows all the undersea data cables around the world. Wow!

Next, a nice picture:

A computer Central Processing Unit (CPU). All those pins are connections to the silicon wafer embedded under the small blocks in the middle. The overall dimensions are about 50x50mm, but the silicon wafer with all the billion transistors or more that do the job is about 10mm square.

More later.

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It’s nearly 5.30pm, when I move to the meals area table to watch Hard Quiz on the ABC. I’m a bit addicted to this program and as far as I know, I’ve watched every Wednesday night episode. Yet most of these early (before the news) daily episodes are new to me. How come? Have I seen them and forgotten them? Anyway. I enjoy this show.

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I’ve been testing my model locomotives on a 12V battery last night, and here’s a couple with their skin off:

This is another bought loco with DCC decoder already fitted.

Nearly ready to start laying track. Lucky I live alone — my dining table is covered edge to edge with train stuff, magazines, books, electronic parts, tools, you name it. I just push a bit aside to make room for my dinner plate. Hah!

Well, as I sit here in the air-conditioning with fans on and 37degC outside, it’s the first day of autumn. To readers in cooler and wetter climates, would you believe we only had 1.4mm of rain in the whole three months of summer. That’s pretty dry.

However, it was a relatively easy summer to endure, if that’s the right word. We had no maximums of 40deg or above, whereas we usually get two or three in a typical summer. So it has been quite pleasant.

But to cap it off, we’re in the middle of a heat wave at the moment – we’ve had maximums of 35C or above for the last five days, and tomorrow will be 37C too.

Summer is my favourite season, although I love Spring as well, with its cool dewy mornings in October and November. Luckily, we have one every year!

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I continue working on my model railway, although I admit it’s still mostly only on paper (or more correctly, on a screen).

I found this layout on the web, with no details whatever, and especially with no dimensions. It took me a long time to work out how to size it, and the result is shown above. The top part of the L shape is 2.385m and the left side is 2.05m, which are workable dimensions.

The coloured rectangles are the sizes of base board that I plan to use. I’ll build the layout in sections, then bolt the base boards together when in use. You’ll notice the white dots on the tracks along each join line of the base boards. These are breaks in the tracks, which will have to align precisely when the boards are bolted together.

This is a bit ambitious and fraught with potential difficulties in getting the tracks to line up along the joins. I may have given myself a source of ulcers. I foresee being able to get one part of the track to align properly, but being unable to get another part to line up.

I’ve been thinking that it might be easier to make the sections bigger, that is, two base boards in one. Hmmmm.

Here’s the track on its own:

I’ve realised that this layout incorporates two reverse loops, one on each leg of the L. I think it’s only the inner pair of tracks, but each will need to include an automatic reverse loop switch. The problem arises because when a powered pair of rails rejoins the main line through a point, the polarity of the rails must be reversed as a train goes through the point. It’s done by an electronic circuit:

I’ve bought the bits for one of these from Silicon Chip magazine in Sydney, but I’ve realised I need two. I’ve also had a box of 25 x 1m lengths of rails on my shelf for a few years. I thought that would easily be enough, but by the magic of my railway design project, I find I need 50.86m, so I’ve had to buy another box of 30 lengths (at a cost of $237).

Here’s the latest count of locos:

This will be a very strange working layout. I’ve got a mix of US diesels (the two Santa Fe models, the blue/white Electromotive and the blue Conrail), an Australian livery diesel marked BHP Billiton from the Pilbara iron ore mines, and two UK inter-city and suburban railways (the blue/yellow Metronet and the dark green Dragon). It would be hard to think of a location where all those came together!

I don’t plan to even try to make a consistent location. I’ll just make a completely fictional scene, with a mix of industrial and suburban localities. You’ll notice – no steam, either. I’m not interested in “old” stuff. I only want modern diesels.

This is a rich man’s hobby. I haven’t kept count, but I estimate I’ve bought around $3,000 worth of bits over the past seven years. I think I’ve got everything I need now, although a model railway is NEVER finished. I’ll probably continue buying bits and pieces. A man can never have enough locos and rolling stock.

Stop Press: I’ve found this picture:

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It feels as if Ive got everything except the energy to build it. I wish I was a power supply and could plug myself in to 240V on the wall. I feel so tired all the time. I’ve been tested for thyroid and found deficient, so I’m on the fourth day of thyroxine medication for it. It takes a couple of weeks to work, they tell me. I hope it works soon.

I had my fifth COVID vaccination on Sunday, the booster to cope with the Omicron-variant. Fingers crossed, I haven’t had the virus. I only know one person who has, and she said it wasn’t too bad. That’s good to know.