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The Fixer archives

When you need work done, ask the old guys

An even dozen mailboxes are clustered where the gravel road meets the paved one. A large, very old, rotten timber holds up 8 of them while the other four perch atop various posts that are as individual as the homeowners who added their mailbox to the row. In all, a very random collection with only one at the US Postal Service mandated 40″ height.

Last Monday we all received notices from the post office that our mailboxes needed to meet the 40″ minimum. I responded with printed notes in each mailbox inviting all to a work party at 0900 […]

infected … again

I apologize for the absence. I tried visiting an interesting-sounding article at some new ‘prepper’ website only to get my computer hopelessly infected.

I lost a few days to installing a new operating system … and, sigh, ugh, rebuilding one link after another.

My e-mail is still not functioning.

Dang.

I would rather run power tools through lumber than play games with computers.

ALERT: It is worse than hot out there

Many of us have noticed that the sun seems intense this summer. A friend who works outdoors says he actually feels the sun abnormally burning, boring-into his skin.

Another friend called yesterday reporting that their sophisticated photographic hobby drone refused to fly. It reported that:

the electromagnetic field was too intense for the drone’s controls to operate.

That took him to the Internet for investigation. Which, in turn, set him contacting friends to warn them about this intensity spike in solar energy reaching us.

The Environmental Protection Agency publishes maps quantifying the intensity of sun rays striking our Earth.

[…]

Inventing a calendar

Who came up with this stuff? *

A calendar based on a 365-day common year divided into 12 months of irregular lengths. 11 of the months have either 30 or 31 days, while the second month, February, has only 28 days during the common year. However, nearly every four years is a leap year, when one extra – or intercalary – day, is added on 29 February, making the leap year in the Gregorian calendar 366 days long. The days of the year in the Gregorian calendar are divided into 7-day weeks, and the weeks are numbered 1 to […]