My family’s coming to town for Christmas, so I went looking for things to do and places to eat. The most amusing thing to show up was this Freedom Festival, which turned out to be an ad for Diaz Brothers Bail Bonds.

Perhaps someone will want this to help make 2015 brighter…

It turns out that Rolling Stone has all the honesty and integrity of Penthouse Letters. Or perhaps less.

I hope no one was surprised.

The details of the Toys-For-Cops program have been neatly sorted, and while almost all of it is appalling and ridiculous, these two jumped out at me in a quick scan:

Monterey County Sherrif Dept:
    COFFEE MAKER,AUTOMATIC        2   $1,081.52
Monterey Park Police Dept:
    PISTOL,CALIBER .45,AUTOMATIC  5     $293.55

I think we’ve found the world’s worst .45 pistols, and the world’s best coffee-makers.

My own local cops got an MRAP and 30 M-16s, so those vegetable-pickers better mind their manners!

The basic four-strand round kumihimo braid, Maru Yottsu, is a quick and easy way to create a strong braid with simple color patterns.

It’s not a Japanese invention, however, since pretty much every culture in the world figured out how to braid four strands together shortly after the invention of string (or perhaps before, if they had long hair). It can be done on a rope-making stand, a cardboard disk, a marudai, or just with your hands.

Weavers think of it as a way to create tassels and cords, weekend warriors think of it as a way to make tactical climbing rope, and one clever fellow recognized a completely different use, in a comment at the weaving link:

DIY Speaker cable leads. No I’m not kidding.

Weaving four insulated smaller wires in the B-A-A-B pattern results in an Interlaced Dual Twisted-Pair cable. In your example, white would be one twisted-pair, orange is the second twisted-pair. This weave pattern yields a cable of lower electrical resistance, while providing noise rejection that a single thicker wire doesn’t have. Key for high-current delivery and/or to low impedance speakers (exotics, cars). Also great when you only have smaller gauge wire than you want for your application.

...

To get the Interlaced Dual Twisted-Pair noise cancellation, once the weave is done, you cross connect the twisted pairs. Which means: join one white and one orange at one end, join the same two wires at the other end (continuity meter), then join the remaining white-orange wires together at each end. Run your positive/live through one of the new white-orange pair, and the negative/ground through the other.

Extra credit to the guy who built an oversized marudai out of tires to make a 12-strand climbing rope for Crossfit.

[Update: finally found the page I was looking for in The Ashley Book of Knots, where he describes both the finger-braiding method (#2999, 4-Strand Square Sinnet), and using a table (#3037, #3070) that’s basically identical to a marudai. Amusingly, where marudai braiders are extremely finicky about the smoothly-polished texture of the table’s surface, Ashley drives 1-inch brads into the edges to keep the strands neatly separated.]

Everyone started playing WoW again, and while I had left my accounts lapsed for the past two years, on discovering that I didn’t have to buy the previous expansion, I reactivated an account and started playing Mists of Pandaria. Maybe when the next expansion comes out, I’ll play Warlords of Draenor. :-)

The Surface Pro 2 handles the game just fine, although the small high-DPI display takes some getting used to, and the keyboard has a tendency to treat the “w” key as a toggle (only in this sort of game; some firmware limitation on really long keypresses, I suppose).

I still have the Asus gaming laptop I bought a few years ago, and while it’s not an everyday portable, it’s ideal for our weekend food/gaming parties. However, when I transferred the updated client over and started playing, I was reminded that load times exist. Asus shipped a nice pair of 7200 RPM drives in it, but everything starts up so slowly compared to the Surface.

So I bought a pair of Crucial MX100 512GB SSDs; I could have bought smaller ones, but $190? Sold! They even come with an Acronis license to do the data transfers.

Why the Crucial, besides the price? I’ve had a 960GB M500 in my Mac for a year and a half, and it’s been fast and trouble-free. The Amazon ratings agree.

[Update: oh, yes, that’s much nicer. Also significantly faster for video editing in Premiere]

I’m guessing that after a few more muggings, this little snowflake won’t be quite as sympathetic:

"Who am I to stand from my perch of privilege, surrounded by million-dollar homes and paying for a $60,000 education, to condemn these young men as 'thugs?'" asks Friedfeld. "It's precisely this kind of 'otherization' that fuels the problem."

Police also aren't the solution to the problem, Friedfeld argues.

"If we ever want opportunistic crime to end, we should look at ourselves first. Simply amplifying police presence will not solve the issue. Police protect us by keeping those 'bad people' out of our neighborhood, and I'm grateful for it. And yet, I realize it's self-serving and doesn't actually fix anything."

Friedfeld suggests that the "privileged" adapt to normalized crime, until the wrongs of the past are righted.

I suggest to Friedfield that it will be my privilege to respond to “normalized crime” with 230-grain hollowpoints, because his blaming criminal acts on the “wrongs of the past” makes him a bigoted racist idiot.

Having no real interest in hunting down an out-of-print, limited edition handmade book containing computer printouts, I wanted an alternative to Rosalie Nelson’s set of patterns for Edo Yattsu (often written “Edo Yatsu”, which really sounds more like “Tokyo Punk” than a braiding sequence).

So I wrote a script to generate them. Except that even after finding and excluding the color inversions, I had 26 compared to her 24. I’m pretty sure she excluded the two 180° rotations that are not also color inversions. If you’re braiding directly onto a loop, you may want the alternative versions.

Large collection of pattern GIFs below the fold, using the standard Carey diagram. When I get a chance, I’ll change the script to generate PDFs as well as GIFs.

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