Where I live there is a new waste collection company. They require garbage to be picked up in bins like these.

They each hold 95 gallons. Of course, that’s if all of your garbage was liquid -- which it will never be.

We are a family of four, and I could only swing a single can if I took the other larger stuff that we throw away, and compress it, by drawing all the air out of the bag with a vacuum cleaner.

I have broken down boxes and larger stuff in 55 gallon bags from Sam’s Club. I was able to put them at the curb, filled with light stuff, and the other company would just toss them in the truck no questions asked. But we can't do that anymore.

Fitting all of that in one 95 gallon can was not working. I decided to spring for the extra can. It is $65 dollars a year to lease it, and $15 a quarter for collection.

Bottom line, it’s a pain in the neck. This change costs the taxpayer more money in the end, it’s just not collected in taxes -- it’s collected through the waste removal company. But I’m sure it looked good on paper. It saves the county money, just not the residents.

Anyway, because these garbage carts don’t close with any kind of seal, they can get quite nasty before the weekly pickup day, flies and whatnot.

I’ve seen many options to keep this from happening. One of the most interesting was taking a feminine napkin (maxi-pad) soaking it with Pine-Sol, and sticking it to the under part of the lid. While I’m sure this works, it seems like a real pain, because the pads will need replacing frequently. Also the cans that we have are black, and this is Florida, so they’re going to be extremely hot most of the time.

Another interesting option was this.

This was a great option, because it doesn’t require too much work. However, you’ll have to remove the laundry bag before collection. Because of the way the truck picks up the can, you’re likely to lose your laundry bag and bungee cord.

So, I came up with my own method, stainless steel screen. I know that most people don’t have this laying around -- but I do. I originally bought it to make sand sifters for shark’s teeth at the beach. They came in a pack of four 11” x 14” pieces. So, I had plenty left over to use for other stuff.

After looking at the can, there is only one place where flies can get in (with the lid closed). There are two vents at the back of the can. So, I decided to make screens to cover those openings.

I secured them with "stingers" those little framing screws that are super sharp. That's why they call them stingers, because when you reach into the bag they sting you!

This appeared to be a great solution. No pieces to replace, easy to make and install, problem solved right?

Well, not so simple it seems, I didn’t realize that the curved part was literally where the screens would sit down.

The screens needed to be modified. So I came up with this shape. I already installed them but they are shaped like this.

Here's what the openings look like now with the modified screens installed.

No flies are getting in now!

I now have a solution that doesn't require babysitting.

What do you think?

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The reason I ask this is simple. The Chinese have developed an AI engine that is supposedly 10-times more efficient than its US counterparts. But is that really true? I can’t be sure, I have never seen the system in person. But look at the date of the DeepSeek-R1 was released to the public.

DeepSeek's success has already been noticed in China's top political circles. On January 20, the day DeepSeek-R1 was released to the public, founder Liang attended a closed-door symposium for businessman and experts hosted by Chinese premier Li Qiang, according to state news agency Xinhua.
Liang's presence at the gathering is potentially a sign that DeepSeek's success could be important to Beijing's policy goal of overcoming Washington's export controls and achieving self-sufficiency in strategic industries like AI.

However, I do know this. I ran a Meta Llama AI model at home on an older machine I had laying around. It was an i5-2500K with 16Gb of RAM. I slapped in an SSD, installed Ubuntu Server, and ran the AI model. Was it slow? Oh... yes! It took about 15 minutes to formulate a simple answer to the prompt, “How are you doing today?”

What did I learn from this? First, I learned that none of the models that you are able to run (for free) that I could find were capable of going out to the Internet to gather data and bring it back. They could only formulate answers based on the data set they already had. That data is downloaded when you started it up. So, you couldn’t ask it about anything that just happened. That’s not to say that you can’t do that with Micro$oft’s commercial AI model, or the commercial version of OpenAI. I’ll have to cover that in another post.

Second, I learned that what I was running was seriously slow. But it wasn’t slow to the extent that I would need billions of dollars to build a data center of my own to make it fast enough to be useful. I could have spent around $1,000 dollars and put together a purpose-built machine that would have made it fast enough for me to use it, at least one-on-one.

Now if I put it on the Internet it would get many more hits, and become bogged down quickly, but that’s not an issue for development, and development is where all the money is being funneled to in the AI space.

Where am I going with all this? I still believe that there’s some hidden angle to AI. There a hidden element of fraud lurking just beneath the surface. I have a few theories on this. The first of which is this:

AI is likely just a new gatekeeper tool. Who controls the AI? Who programs it and teaches it? More importantly, who keeps info from it?

AI is going to do precisely what the people in charge want it to do, otherwise they wouldn't start putting it out there, and have people running around to hype it.

If it mattered in the ways many are describing -- they would never allow access to the masses. And in the form the masses will be allowed to access it -- it will be strategically manipulated.

The Internet was hyped in precisely the same way that AI is being hyped now. “All the information you could possibly need. You won't need a lawyer -- because you can look up case law.” “All of the world’s information right at your fingertips.”

But what did we get in reality? A censored and lame version of what was initially “sold” and hyped.

AI will likely be no different. AI will be the new “expert” in the room, or in all rooms.

Only, AI is not an expert, and those who program it will make sure that it does a much better job of censoring truth and hiding the misdeeds of those in power.

People are to trust AI to the extent that it becomes rather unquestionable. After all AI is like a digital Dr. Strange, it’s already run all the simulations -- and this is the only path in which we win and save humanity. Oh, and it says you’ll own nothing, be a slave, and live in a 15-minute city. 🤣😂

Sure, AI will take the jobs of people in call centers, because in reality they were just another kind of gatekeeper. You're not supposed to get to get ahold of a real person -- because they might actually be able to help you. However, it’s likely that you agreed to this kind of “non-service” in the contract you effectively signed when you agreed to pay for the service right?

There was a game my kids would play called Unturned. It would peg out the GPU on any machine that you ran it on. It didn’t matter if it was a brand new $4,000 video card, it would peg it out and the game had super cheesy graphics. I was joking with my kids, I said, “I bet Unturned is really a backdoor for Bitcoin mining. You play this lame game with cheesy graphics, meanwhile you’re really paying the power bill for someone to mine Bitcoin on your hardware!” Of course, I was joking, but others were wondering the same thing! I even looked it up once, this is what I found:

And this post.

However, this got me thinking about AI and Big Tech -- and the billions of dollars they’re promised by the US Government under the Trump administration.

Here are a few spitball ideas that could make the AI industry completely implode (more than it has in the last few hours of 01-28-25).

1. The Chinese AI engine is on the Internet, and is really just a crafty API for OpenAI, or the Microsoft AI? After all, they say it’s “on par” with OpenAI and Microsoft AI -- what if it is OpenAI and Microsoft AI on the back-end?!

   === UPDATE 01/29/25 === My prediction might not be too far off. See here.

   Microsoft, a close partner of OpenAI, is reportedly also investigating the issue after its researchers noticed individuals potentially linked to DeepSeek extracting large amounts of data from the AI firm’s application programming interface [API] last fall, according to Bloomberg.

   White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks claimed Tuesday that there is “substantial evidence” that DeepSeek used distillation to pull information from OpenAI’s models.

   “I don’t think OpenAI is very happy about this,” he told Fox News. “I think one of the things you’re going to see over the next few months is our leading AI companies taking steps to try and prevent distillation.”

2. The Big Tech firms are using most of the investment money to mine Bitcoin, and they run the AI on a fraction of the total computer power being consumed by their AI ventures. They’ll walk away multi billionaires without anyone really being able to prove that they did it. After all, fleecing the US taxpayer is a form of art in the Big Tech space. Results don’t matter so much.
3. The Chinese just exposed the American AI industry’s scam -- effectively pulling [investment] money from the US AI industry (by illustrating the excessive amount of computing power “required” by US tech firms). The Chinese are actually working on real AI -- not just some elaborate scam.
4. The US Government (taxpayer money) steps in and backs US Big Tech firms in the AI space, allowing them to keep the scam running -- only now with government funds.

When the Chinese government funds an effort, who benefits? The Chinese government, right? Not the Chinese people (as a whole).

When the US Government funds and effort, who benefits? The US Government will own the AI space -- because they’re backing the development. Does that sound like a good idea to you?

Is any of this real? Who knows, but at this point it nothing would surprise me.

What do you think?

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And so It Begins

Anyone old enough to remember “The Y2K Crisis” understands how silly and overblown the whole thing was. Well, at least we all do now. But at the time there were many people who were seriously worried that there would be apocalyptic ramifications -- because of a two-digit year limitation in date codes.

Many computer systems measure time and date using Unix time, an international standard for digital timekeeping. Unix time is defined as the number of seconds elapsed since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970 (an arbitrarily chosen time based on the creation of the first Unix system), which has been dubbed the Unix epoch.[6]

This was not really much of an issue, because it could be easily remedied in software. Some older devices that ran strictly firmware, could have an issue, VCRs and some older employee time card systems. Very old mainframe systems did have some issues, but these were limitations that were known about for a very long time. The date limitation didn’t come about all of a sudden. Anyone familiar with computer programming already knew about these limitations.

There were always weird limitations caused by addressable memory areas, and number precision. There time zone limitations with FoxPro databases, if you exceeded 99 time zones the database would start, then immediately crash. I actually ran into that issue in 2007 when Micro$oft released an update to change the Daylight Savings Time for March 11, 2007. They came out with an all-encompassing update, covering all time zones around the world. The update added a massive amount of time zones to the system. I applied the MS Daylight Savings Time update to a Windows XP system that was used for a Northern Computers/Honeywell card access system. It caused the FoxPro database to crash. I was able to get it working again by going into the Windows registry and deleting additional time zones that were added as a result of the update.

Again, these were not new things.

But the governments of the world had to take action!

There was a bill passed n 1998, the YEAR 2000 INFORMATION AND READINESS DISCLOSURE ACT. Followed in 1999 by H.R.775 - Y2K Act. Of course there was other legislation in many countries relating to the Y2K scare and even a UN Year 2000 Team.

The governments of the world were taking this very seriously and you should too. Be afraid!

Gaslighting

In 1999 the term “gaslighting” wasn’t as popular as it is today. The term gaslighting didn’t really take off until around 2015.

Here is a definition: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/gaslighting

Gaslighting is a very specific form of emotional abuse and mental manipulation that disrupts your ability to trust others and yourself. While the term has gained popularity online, in reality TV and other pop culture avenues, it’s also a term that’s often over-used to describe other kinds of bad behaviors, like lying, guilt-tripping or shaming.

Basically it’s lying to people to make them do what you want them to do, or at the very least, make their actions more predictable. But this was all done for your safety...

Nobody was more guilty of gaslighting than the media. Sure politicians were in on it as well, but they were sparse, not nearly as coordinated as the media. Most newspapers (which people still read at the time) and TV broadcast news ran stories about how scared people were.

It was interesting, because if you watched a whole Y2K news segment, or read an entire Y2K article -- towards the end -- they would always downplay the seriousness of Y2K. However, they know that most people aren’t going to watch the whole segment, or read the entire article. Thus they were gaslighting.

The stories would have headlines like, “People are Scared for Their Future” or “Many Believe That Y2K Could Lead to A World Crisis.” They were continually pushing people’s fears -- not what the likely outcome would be. Not only that, they were pushing the fears to the very people who were the least informed on the issue, people outside of the IT world. They didn’t interview programmers, no they interviewed random people on the street. Because those random people are the best “sources” for accurate information right? Man on the street interviews are good when you want “REO Speedwagon” style information, someone heard something from someone, who heard it from a friend.

Basically all stories that revolved around a very serious “crisis.” Sure you can party like it’s 1999, but at midnight right after the ball drops -- shit’s going to get real, and you might just be wading around in the dark, because the power will probably go out too -- not just where you are but everywhere.

I was an auto mechanic at the time, and there were many people worried that their cars might not start. I asked them, “Have you ever had to set the date in your car?” to which they would reply, “No...” It was obvious that it made no difference for anything that kept time based on 12/24 hour time only. It would only effect (some) devices that had a “date/year” associated with their time keeping ability. Ever wonder why most car radios don’t show AM and PM? It’s because you’re going to drive the car -- you’ll be outside in the car -- you’ll know if it’s day or night.

When the whole thing when down without even so much as a fizzle. Nobody called out the media on their nonsense. Of course they had all the articles out there claiming that it was going to be no big deal -- but that was two-thirds of the way through articles -- with a misleading headlines.

The Y2K scare created a global panic, but as midnight came and went on January 1, 2000, no computer glitches were reported. Cynics attributed the hysteria about the bug to computing companies cashing in on a nonexistent problem. In an age uncomfortable with its reliance on technology, the end of the millennium was bound to create superstitious fears. Whether the Y2K problem was solved in the nick of time, or was not really there at all, will probably never be known for sure.

20-Years On, We Get COVID-19

That is why it seems to me that the Y2K Scare was the “dry run” leading up to the COVID-19 Scare. Scaring people into a manipulable position was what Y2K was all about. Crisis management -- when there’s no real crisis. There were no officials that really believed that bad things were going to happen. It was all a ploy. The response is what it was always about. Where would we be if the government didn’t swoop in and save us from the impending crisis that was joked about decades before hand by most programmers?

Fast forward to 2019, 20-years later, and what happened? We had the "COVID-19 Scare." Video of people falling over while walking down the street in China (this was played over and over on cable news stations). “Don’t wear a mask -- no you’d better wear one!” – Anthony Fauci

“We’re in the middle of a pandemic and everyone should quake in their boots. The invisible enemy is coming for you!”

Meanwhile, people are told that they might experience flu-like symptoms, and should stay home and self isolate. Drink Gatorade and eat Saltine crackers. All of this while simultaneously claiming that the pandemic will take countless lives.

This went on for more than a year, then “officials” started walking things back a little. Until eventually COVID was nothing more than a seasonal bug.

COVID-19 was always about the response and never about the virus.

The proof of this is how nobody seems worried about COVID anymore. Of course this is explained away as “Viruses become less virulent over time.” Really? Then why push the Flu vaccine like a crack dealer on a street corner? Why force hospital workers to get the Flu vaccine, or face layoffs? All this -- before the COVID Scare?

The Flu has been around for a long time. Shouldn’t it be less virulent by now -- kind of like how COVID is now? After all, it was the world’s most deadly virus just a few years ago?

Now they're coming on with the Bird Flu nonsense. Just in time for another Trump presidency. How convenient.

What do you think?

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We all see cars on the road with fogged and crappy looking headlights right? But headlights are insanely expensive (at least from the dealer they are). And so, many people just drive around with their high beams in an attempt to have light cut through the milk carton like somewhat opaque plastic covering their headlight bulbs.

This is what mine looked like.

My car is a 2008, so I figured it was time to get some new headlights. I found an aftermarket set on Amazon for around $133 after tax. I didn't even price them from Honda, considering they quoted me just under $600 for a single CV shaft -- that's just the part, not installed.

I was teaching my youngest son about how to approach working on something that you've never taken apart before. I let him know that there is no better blowout diagram than just looking at the replacement part.

That's also where I found out that I'd have to remove the entire bumper cover, because one of the screws that secures the light, is right below the light and under the bumper cover. What I didn't know was that there is a bracket that's mounted to the bottom of the light assembly. It was not visible without the bumper cover removed.

If you would like to see a video on how to remove the bumper cover and headlights this is probably the best one I've seen. I didn't listen to the audio, I just forwarded through it to find out if there was anything weird that I was unaware of. Oh, and the two screws for the bumper cover that are at the bottom left and right side both broke off inside the speed-nuts. My car has never been driven up north, it's just never had the bumper cover removed. I don't know why they used fine-thread screws for something that's going to get wet frequently. Usually they would use something with course threads so it can rust, but still be worked loose. The other screws are course thread, the ones around the fender well and such.

Here's my car with the bumper cover removed.

Here it is from the other side with the headlight assembly removed.

Here is the new headlight assembly vs the original.

Here you can see where the headlight with the dust boot removed showing where the bulb would be inserted.

The bulb retainer clip from the aftermarket light was poorly made. It was as if they fashioned it from a paper clip. It was seriously weak. Like the bulb might rattle with it fastened.

Here's what the original bulb retainer clip looks like. It was made out of stainless steel. I swapped the aftermarket clip for the original one. I also had to replace the latch part that it the clip locks into opposite the hinged side. Both the clip and the latch part are held on by screws, so you can remove them relatively easily. You just have to be careful not to lose the screws. They can fall into the headlight assembly.

I also ended up using the original bulb dust covers as well. The originals are made of a higher quality rubber. The aftermarket ones were made of butyl rubber, like a rubber mallet. You know the black rubber mallets that smell strangely like barbeque sauce when they're new. I don't think that's the best kind of rubber to be using around super hot halogen bulbs.

After I moved all the parts over, I got the headlights in, and installed the bumper cover, and was good to go! Or so I thought. If you view the full-size picture, you can see that there is fog on the lower left side of the driver's headlight.

These kinds of headlight assemblies have air vents in them so that they will be able to equalize internal pressure with atmosphere. The halogen lights cause the air pressure within the assemblies to fluctuate (because of heat). Without vents the lights will fog up on the inside. When it's warm outside, or you've been driving the car, the lights are on whether daytime running lights or headlights, light assemblies heat up. When it's cooler outside, and the humidity is higher, the assemblies cool off and draw humid air in.

I looked at the old headlights to find the location of the vents. They're up at the top by the side marker lights, facing toward the rear of the car. You can see the little dust cap to the right of the side marker bulb opening.

I removed the dust caps to see what the assembly looks like when they're removed.

Here's the two parts that make up the vent cap.

Here's the little tube that extrudes from the headlight assembly (on the new headlights). THERE WAS NO HOLE IN THEM! I poked a toothpick into the tube and it just bottoms out equal to the length of the tube. :-|

Looking at the old headlight assembly you can see light through the little vent hole with the cap removed.

I was a bit panicked, because with the headlight assemblies installed already, there was no good way to drill a hole into the new assemblies. However, one of my Christmas presents (from my wife) saved me! It's similar to a Dremel tool, only it has a chuck like a miniature drill. It also came with (3) drill bits, and a flexible attachment. I used the largest drill bit that was somewhere between 1/8" and 3/16" right about the size of the hole in the original headlight.

Once I drilled the holes, I installed the dust caps, and let it sit for a while with the dust boots off for the headlight bulbs, leaving the headlight assembly open to air for a while in the sun. No more fog on the inside of the lens, and no more fog after driving the car multiple times over a series of days. The temperature has been below freezing with 100% humidity outside, frost all over the car. Still no issues.

Aftermarket parts like these are definitely sub par. Also, never throw away your old parts before you've moved over necessary parts from the old parts to the new ones. I would have never even thought that the vents wouldn't have been installed, much less that the vent holes weren't even drilled.

It's all good now though, and I should be set for another 5-10 years or so.

Note: If you're having trouble with a headlight on one of your vehicles -- and don't want to remove the entire assembly to install another vent, they actually sell vent kits on Amazon.

Hope this helps someone.

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I woke up one morning, and began cooking breakfast so we could all go out for the day and get food for our Thanksgiving dinner. When I opened the freezer, I noticed that all of the ice was stuck together. The refrigerator compressor was running, but the evaporator fan wasn't running. It's an older GE fridge that was in the house when we moved in in 2011.

I have replaced the evaporator fan motor once before on this refrigerator. I found the motor in my Amazon order history, and got another one on the way. In the meantime, I need my fridge to keep working. So I decided to rig it with another fan motor for the time being.

The original fan has some weird voltage listed 9.75 Volts DC 3.25 Watts. They're variable speed motors, kind of like the 4-wire fan motors that they use for a CPU cooling fans.

I don't have anything like that laying around, but I do have a Nidec fan that came from the top of a computer server rack! It's 12V DC 1.4 Amps, it will move some serious air, also it's around the same diameter as the stock fan.

I pulled the evaporator fan housing out of the fridge, lined up the Nidec fan in the center of the air outlet, marked the housing and drilled 4 small holes to mount the Nidec fan. I used some rubber grommets between the fan housing and the fan, in the hopes that it would keep it from being too loud.

Here it is installed.

Now all that was left was some way to power the fan, and get it to run when the compressor was running. I figured that the original control circuit was still functional, so I wired the fan power to a 12V DC relay, then ran power from my power supply through that. I used some of those little magnets with hooks on them to route the wire and hang the relay.

But it didn't work. Apparently these variable speed fans have a tach signal that comes back to the fan's speed controller, again like with a CPU fan. If the controller doesn't get a tach signal back, it kills power to the fan. So my new fan started and ran for about 30 seconds, and would then shut right back off again.

However, I'm not one to give up so easily. I went to the next step and decided, I'll just use a 120V AC relay, and parallel the relay coil to the power for the compressor. Problem solved. In this picture you can also see the power supply I'm using. It's way overrated for the load, but that's OK because with switching power supplies they only use what you draw (with the exception of control circuitry) which is negligible.

To connect to the power wires for the compressor, I used those T-Tap connectors. They make some that have a female spade terminal built in. These are great, because you can use them without having to hack up the appliance's original wiring harness, and when you're finished you can just unplug the spade terminals and you're done.

I just used 22 gauge 6 conductor wire to power the fan, because it is small enough to allow for the door to still seal well. I just opened the jacket where it exited the fridge, so it was flat.

With everything in place, it was time to test it. Did it work? Oh yeah, it worked and the fan moved about the same amount of air as the factory fan!

The only downside was the noise. That Nidec fan is LOUD. Whenever I was on the phone with and I was in the kitchen, people would say, "Where are you? It sounds like you're in a server room." I had to let them know, it's just my refrigerator since I've rigged it.

Of course, I didn't want to leave it that way (insanely loud) so when the new fan arrived, I went ahead and put that one in.

Everything was looking good. But when I went to test it the fan would never start. Long story short, the main control board for the fridge was messed up. I looked online and found some information on the board. I don't have a schematic for the fridge, so I was looking for a video that might show a picture of one -- and I finally found one!

It might be hard to see, but there are four wires that go to the evaporator fan motor.

13V DC (Red)
Common/Negative (White)
Speed Control (Yellow)
Tach Signal (Blue)

The yellow wire is Yellow with a Black sripe at the control board, so I could test for voltage there (it changes from yellow/black to yellow at the fan connector). There was 13.2 volts there at the control board, but for some reason as soon as you put a load on it, it would drop to near zero. The power supply built into the control board was bad.

Now worries, I found that I could hotwire the OE fan. Worst case I would have to put the Nidec fan back in and rock that until I saved up for a new fridge.

To test the OE motor, I used a drill battery that is 12V DC. If I powered it with the red and white wires, then also put 12V DC on the yellow wire, the fan would take off at full speed. So that's what I did. I just ran two wires to the fan, negative and positive, and jumped the red and the yellow together. So now the OE fan motor will work, powered externally, with a relay to turn the fan on and off.

To make it look nice, I hung everything behind the fridge using those little magnet hooks. For now that's how I'm going to leave it, because everything else on the fridge works correctly. The temps read right, the automated airflow damper for the refrigerator side works, and the ice maker and water dispenser are all working fine.

Good times.

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