Hard Drive Magnets: mount a Cree 30W LED spotlight on a dirt bike

I bought one of these Cree 30W LEDs

note i've attached a Hard Drive Magnet to a rubber doorstop and bolted the Cree to that

fits in my hand (see the magnet?)

I mounted a frame on my bike - made from a small folding stool frame, a piece of wood and some convenient iron based attachments - note the pipe clamps near the sunglasses. Note also the yellow stretchy holds the frame down against the faring - YMMV

after i place the spot on the frame i just clip on my power cord

I have so much wire because it doubles as a workshop or emergency light if i have a breakdown at night

then i just plug it in to the 12V socket i previously installed

those rare earth magnets - they are versatile and, for now, cheap because there are a lot of hard disks out there that are dead or dying

p

Thai coup 2014

not much out there in the MSM has any value on this issue or anything much else about Thailand

but I've found a couple of things interesting

this one:



and the Economist:

[...] In late November the king signed a decree mandating that all decisions by the powerful defence council were subject to veto by the crown prince. The council includes the service heads and the permanent defence secretary. The heir apparent is now, in effect, their boss [...]

Al Jaseera:

If Thailand’s royalist elite can learn to live with democracy, the country may be able to move forward. The alternative is that Thailand’s crisis is settled with violence and bloodshed rather than compromise and negotiation

The Diplomat:

The fear of losing hard-won privileges to the rural masses is a very real one for the royalist elites, sections of the military and many middle-class Bangkokians


i'm interested in this organisation: The Thai Crown Property Bureau

this was a quick (few hours) assessment of this material:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Property_Bureau
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirayu_Isarangkul
http://www.forbes.com/sites/simonmontlake/2012/01/20/in-thailand-a-rare-peek-at-his-majestys-balance-sheet/
http://politicalprisonersofthailand.wordpress.com/2014/05/24/thai-monarchy-a-factor-in-dispute/
http://robinlea.com/pub/JCA-Thailand-the_good_coup/08-The_crown_property_bureau_and_the_crisis_of_1997.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maha_Vajiralongkorn

please correct any errors and notify me of corrections

pop

Wanted: Thai Architect

Here's a house in Nakhon Si Thammarat that was started but never finished - perhaps because the owners were wiped out by the Asian crisis of 97/98.

note the 4 large car-ports on the road.

note how thin the floors are though the framing seems ok

if i could figure out how to complete the house, and how much that might cost, I might be interested in trying to do it.

Anybody out there?

p

Teach your grandmother to suck eggs

I heard a conversation which went something like this...

Grandson: "Grandfather, first you have to set the page properties"

Grandfather: "No, first the font. Don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs"

Grandson: "Don't teach your grandson to implement an app that sucks 100 million eggs at once"


p

ps

great recipe for noodles

put on the kettle

get a biggish noodle bowl

crack a country fresh egg or two in the bottom - living in Thailand makes this easier and cheap

open one of those not to cheapo instant noodle packets

empty the flavour sachets into the bowl and deposit the noodles on top

sprinkle in a handful of frozen veggies and slice in a couple of nice hot Thai chilies

add just enough water (any temp) to cover the eggs and zap it in the microwave til the eggs are cooked - like 2 minutes top

pour in boiling water and cover for a few minutes

tease out the noodles, mixing in everything

cover or eat when ready

yum

p

I just love Nakon Si Thammarat

I just love Nakon Si Thammarat

see how young these kids are - primary school kids riding a motorcycle

May, Not far from Pak Nakhon

p

Salon on Rice

Salon, Elias Isquith, on Condoleezza Rice

[...]what I’m arguing is that our mainstream political debate is so saturated with unstated assumptions about our inherent goodness, our natural righteousness, and our basic decency that serious war crimes, when committed by American politicians, are sanitized as matters of differing opinion. (And in Rice’s case, it’s not as if we can pretend that she was somehow only tangentially related to the administration’s worst crimes — here she is, back in 2009, defending torture with the Nixonian logic that nothing a president commands in service of national security can possibly be illegal.)

As if to make my point for me, the New York Times recently ran an Op-Ed from Timothy Eganin which Rice’s failures and mistakes — which, remember, cost perhaps as many as 500,000 human lives while wrecking millions more — are dismissed with a chilling breeziness. “Near as I can tell, the forces of intolerance objected to her role in the Iraq war,” Egan writes (apparently unaware that the magic of Google allows him to find the protesters explaining their objections in their own words). “The foreign policy that Rice guided for George W. Bush,” Egan continues, “was clearly a debacle …

I lived it, many did

she was an evil creature from an evil group of animals, thoroughly evil - shame on the world for not demanding she and her Bush administration conspirators be tried in criminal courts and then locked away

p

cat saves boy from dog attack

amazing and wonderful

who cares what the cat's motive was - the effect is cool



story via ABC

p

Climate change proved wrong, false, etc

Climate change? Are you nuts?




p

awesome model of the universe

check it out




(i got it from Ethan Siegel here, but he got it from here)

p

why google sucks

google ranking is now so hideously bad that when you search for a location in google maps you are flooded with commercial results to the extent that the actual true information does not even appear


commercialisation has ruined google search

it's a pity because it was overly early commercialisation of search that screwed most of google's competitors

now we are left with little choice - bing is as bad because it tries to emulate google

the rest are trivially weak in results

ho hum

p

ps, someone else thinks google sucks - let's face it, google is now just another vampire squid sucking the life out of us

the evil of "House of Cards"

been watching a couple of series of House of Cards

what really irks me is that it leads the viewer to believe that evil in the US system is due to a small number of sociopaths

fact is - the whole lot of them are evil - in every way, as evil as you could possibly experience in your most frightening nightmare

evil

self serving

deluded

but utterly evil

scum

slime

antithesis of anything and everything good

p

silent but deadly...

i just love motorcycles

i sold my pig - VT750 Honda in Sydney and replaced it here in Thailand with a 200cc dirt bike which i totally love - it's no pig, it's light and agile and it's fun to ride

but every once in a while i see a bike that i'd just love to have - earlier today it was a KTM 690 Enduro but then i saw this:

read about it here

p