2019 Holiday

Thanksgiving 2019

Social Media Wars

The Battle of 2016

In 2012 and 2013, social media use skyrocketed. Facebook reached a billion users and went public. There were over a hundred billion Google searches per month. By 2014, both tech giants had acquired smaller companies ranging from advertising exchanges to services like YouTube and Instagram. The platforms were able to directly capitalize on the data consumers gave them in order to help companies target those same people with ads.

Russia weaponized these capabilities by using digital tools to try to influence an election.Starting in 2014, a Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency - or IRA - promoted propaganda on social media in the U.S. Jacob Shapiro, a professor at Princeton University, found that by 2016, the Russians had started 20 campaigns in 13 countries. And Russia didn’t just target individuals on social media. Russian military intelligence, often referred to as the GRU, tried to push propaganda into the larger media ecosystem through fake personas, think tanks and “alternative news.” The GRU also strategically leaked hacked information via WikiLeaks and direct messaging journalists at opportune moments of the 2016 campaign.

 Facebook estimated around 126 million people may have seen content from an IRA page. Twitter announced it identified 3814 IRA-controlled accounts and notified 1.4 million people they may have been in contact with one of them. Propaganda articles were published in at least 142 alternative media outlets. After 2016, the social media companies removed accounts that were run by foreign operatives, built partnerships with fact checkers to flag fake news and have instituted voluntary policies to label ads. While the tech companies have made efforts at transparency and blocking foreign interference, no new laws or regulations have been implemented to govern digital political advertising as a whole. Read more: https://wapo.st/32Muv0H.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZX7B33XQgGl4EC6tlGzn6CM-X3Q32YA2/view

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/18/how-russia-weaponized-social-media-got-caught-escaped-consequences/

Ugliest Mustang

Impeachment Inquiry of 2019

Slavery in America

From 1619 to 1808 slaves were imported to the colonies. The first "20 and odd Africans" were captives removed from the Portuguese slave ship, San Juan Bautista by the privateer English warship, White Lion with Captain Jope. The slaves were destined for Mexico but commandeered in 1619 and taken to Jamestown.

This importation of slaves continued for almost two hundred years. The Slave Trade Act of 1794 was a law passed by the United States Congress that limited American involvement in the international slave trade. It was signed into law by President George Washington on March 22, 1794. In 1808 a federal law was finally passed Prohibiting Importation of Slaves and making it a crime.

The DOMESTIC slave trade within the U.S. was unaffected by the 1808 law. By 1860 there were 3,953,760 slaves in the United States (as reported to the census). The census of 1860 was the last in which much of Southern wealth was held as slaves—still legally considered property.

Woodstock

In 1969 as a newbie in television production I always pulled the shifts those of experience did not have to work. Nights, holidays, weekends, etc. However, in that year I watched a man walk on the moon live on 20 monitors and a month later, since I had to work, could not go to most concerts and festivals. Every night it was my job to work the news. I got to see Walter Cronkite cover every story. This is one I had no idea would be such a lingering narrative to my time. I was 19 years old. Today nobody knows how many people went to "Woodstock". Estimates are 450,000. But if you ask over one million claim to have been there.

True Story About Betsy Ross

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betsy_Ross
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Union_Flag
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_United_States

Ross was merely one of several flag makers in Philadelphia who is historically documented to have made the earlier Grand Union Flag for the Continental Army, along with many other ships' colors, banners, and flags which were advertised in local newspapers. 

Francis Hopkinson designed the first official American flag. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Hopkinson

Mary Young Pickersgill (1776–1857) made the 1st flag of 15 stars and stripes in 1813, begun at her house and finished on the floor of a nearby brewery, along with a smaller flag then seen by Francis Scott Key on Fort McHenry.  It is thought that Betsy Ross' only contribution to the flag design was to change the 6-pointed stars to the easier 5-pointed star.

Independence Day

Basic laptop

Today I purchased an Acer Cloudbook 14 for $30 ...

No AC, battery dead, physically in good condition. I ordered an adapter for $6.95 on eBay.
The notebook has a 32GB eMMC solid state hard drive and a SD card slot. Intel Celeron N3050 dual core 1.6GHz w/burst to 2.2GHz CPU with 2GB DDR3 RAM. 14" TFT display, webcam, stereo microphones, 802.11 ac WiFi and Bluetooth enabled on Windows 10 Home OS and Cortana voice response. The absolute minimum basics for a laptop running Windows 10 Home.

 

Today (June 17) I received the AC adapter. It works!

This how fast Windows 10 booted...

After installing Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS

Same boot time: about 40 seconds. 

Streaming CBS News: w/Ubuntu

After day one Windows 10 started updating and left the hard drive with less than 5GB of space. I loaded Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS "minimal installation" and managed to boot up the OS with 21GB of hard drive available. I then loaded the smallest programs I could find to manage streaming audio, VLC media player, webcam and tweaks to fine tune the touchpad. I still have 20GB of space.

As a streaming media player it works just fine. My home desktops do all the work and the laptop is just a portable TV. With a Roku account I can see many programs and movies, local news streams live broadcasts and the internet archive has thousands of old movies free.

The easiest upgrade I've ever done. Insert one 512GB miscoSD card. I have an embedded PC with eMMC 32GB hard drive and 512GB of storage on a removable drive. Literally no moving parts except opening the display. Battery provides an average 10 hours operation.

Miles Per Gallon

In 1969 I bought my first NEW car. 1969 VW 1500 beetle. I added wheel adapters and "red-line wide oval" tires mounted on 14 inch '68 GTO rally wheels.

The base price was $1899 - I added AM/FM radio, tapered tip exhaust pipes and undercoating. Final price - $2001.00 It got 29 miles to a gallon. In 1969 gasoline was less than 40 cents a gallon.

Today I own a 2018 KIA Soul. $20,000 and it gets the SAME MPG. But it has 4 doors.

Television in 2019

How to get free TV

FreeStream Media Box:

An android device capable of streaming content to your television. A copy of Kodi (formerly XBMC). Several pre-loaded addons for Kodi that allow access to illegal-streaming sites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodi_(software)
Kodi has attracted negative attention due to the availability of third-party plug-ins for the software that facilitate unauthorized access to copyrighted media content, as well as "fully loaded" digital media players that are pre-loaded with such add-ons. Freestream and Kodi are legal but the use of the add-ons creates copyright infringement. Freestream does not have any legal deals to stream any content. Your friend is being told about the advantages of using illegal-stream addons through Kodi, a free media center application installed on his 300 dollar device. It comes down to the content, and whether the source is properly licensed. If it's not, you are arguably complicit in the violation, and if you trusted the service you got the content from, that's just a defense. That being said, if there's a service distributing content for free that they don't have permission to distribute, they are going to be viewed as the problem more than your friend.

Barry Diller tried this in 2012 with Aereo. On June 25, 2014, the Supreme Court ruled against Aereo The Court found that Aereo infringed upon the rights of copyright holders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo

Personally, I have 5 TVs, all of which have their own antenna. The television broadcast signals are transmitted over 45-860 MHz of radio frequency. I have been experimenting with home made antennas since 2009. Very much like the 60s the direction is critical. Old rabbit ears are among the best indoor antennas.

Ironically, my wife who complains every time we get random interference, purchased online two so-called HD antennas for WAY MORE than they are worth. Indoors they sucked. We then discovered the company has no return policy and we were stuck with them. As a test, I mounted them on ten foot PVC pipe and attached to my privacy fence beside the house with a clear shot due east. To protect them from rain I slipped one quart ZipLoc bags over them. Outdoors they work GREAT!.

The only drawback is that VHF signals are not picked up as well as UHF so I added an old antenna to the mix that was once on the roof pointed to channels 10's old tower in Tarpon Springs (BTW they have moved to Riverview now). This improved 8, 10 and 13. Now random interference only happens rarely and I swear it happens when a cruise or cargo ship travels down Tampa Bay in or out of the port between me and the TV towers.

Any antenna that picks up the 45-860 MHz range is good. There is really no such thing as a HD or digital antenna. The signal they receive might be HD but an antenna is an antenna.

Devices like Roku, Chromecast, Amazon, etc. require a computer to get the signal and are cheap compared to FreeStream. They are basically the same technology without the illegal add-ons. I look for free stuff. Broadcast TV is still free and growing every year. Right now I get eight channels with nothing but color bar test patterns and I know soon they will have programming.

In 2009 I made a bat-wing antenna based on a YouTube video (dimensions are critical) and placed it on my roof (my house still has a mast from the 60s and coaxial cable to indoors). I was surprised at how well it worked. Unfortunately, I made it from wire coat hangars and within a year the rust began to reduce its effectiveness. (By the way, I don't climb up on my roof anymore after my ladder broke and almost killed me). I discovered that a metal loop exactly 7" in diameter works almost as well. I bent coat hangars into loops at the center and the leftover metal into straight lines very much like rabbit ears. When placed with the loop facing the TV antennas I can get 60+ channels.


My hardware to make the antennas  includes a balun. This attaches the cable to the antenna. I bought 10 of them on eBay for $9.99. The other expense might be for coaxial cable. I happened to have much on-hand from previous cable TV and even some free left-overs from places I worked.

Direction is the key to best signals. I'm lucky that Riverview, Florida has most of the good station towers. You can use AntennaWeb to find what's near you. Click the box to claim your antenna will be 30 feet above ground.

https://antennaweb.org/Address
To see what MIGHT be available  look up your zip code here:
Create a new channel lineup to broadcast TV:
https://titantv.com/
They show ALL the sub-channels!