Moontanman

...and tan.

Tan too.

Arnold Shwarzenegger said in his emotional video clip yesterday that American democracy is like this Conan sword he's holding, that US democracy will get stronger with each tempering (Capitol raid) just like this sword gets stronger with fire and water. It was a very good video and much needed in light of current events but he forgot about one crucial thing which renders his clip a scary cliche - the sword is a movie prop.

Missed that, heard old Diana Ross songs.  How many years left?

Cool looking worm! Thanks for posting. 

They say it's very important not to put one in your mouth, I wonder where they have that problem... 

Har! 

Yeah and I like it! 

Everywhere I go, there I am.  

I'm damn sure glad I don't live there! 

Coldest I've known is 0f. I could feel my finger tips sticking to metal outside when I touched it....  that's crisp.  

I've had -22 before.

After a few hours it went away and didn't return. 

That reinforces my impression of a hardware issue.

It is a four year old laptop that had been sitting for at least three years before my main computer failed on me due to cooling fan issues I have yet to resolve. 

I trashed it and bought a new fixture for less than the ballast cost me. It's a T12 but it gives off plenty of light.. 

Try looking into LED replacements for the T12 fixture, they are available online. LED's will give you more eye pleasing color rendering (look for 80 CRI or 4000K color temperature) and you will quickly get return on your investment as they consume a fraction of the energy of the traditional fluorescent or incandescent fixtures (easly 100+ lumens per 1 watt with the new LED emitters)

I have 750 LEDs of various colors on the aquarium for plant growth but the light makes the fish and plants look funky. The Fluorescent is just to make the light look more natural. Plants require light that is not particularly pleasing to the eye, mostly red and blue, so the LEDs are mostly red and blue. With marine tanks it become even more important to have very blue shifted light, shallow water plants and corals still use red light but below 33 feet there are no red wavelengths. If you cut your self diving lower than 33 or more feel your blood looks fluorescent green. 

Thank you for your advice. 

Spare (dispensable! i.e. with non-important data) SSD 120 GB with a fresh installed (i.e. "just now", from scratch! just before use!), is always a good idea. If you were infected ("the main system") by novel virus, no antivirus will find it, and you don't know what kind of backdoors were installed on it (if it was truly virus/hacker attack).. Viruses/hacker attacks disable antivirus and firewalls. They can do that because they gained admin/root privileges.

It is better to not too accustomize with an operating systems..

I am swapping Linux 4 times per year, and in between there are special "erase all to permanent zero", one per month or so..

Learn how to backup entire browser (cookies etc.) from file system.

It should be in hidden folders:

%USERPROFILE%/AppData/Local

and

%USERPROFILE%/AppData/Roaming/

(both are important!)

Copy them from Linux Live pendrive to another device e.g. pendrive.

This way you can even use web browser data (logged sessions) from Windows on Linux machine, and vice versa, if you did everything properly.

Copy them in an appropriate places on a new fresh system..

You need to create Linux Live pendrive first, somewhere (obviously not on compromised machine!)

https://www.kali.org/docs/usb/live-usb-install-with-windows/

(Linux can read Windows NTFS files and folders, even without admin privileges, attempt of reading Windows NTFS folders on Windows, which are only accessible by admin, will fail)

Most people are never ready for "Winter is coming".. You don't know when winter is coming.. Unlike true winter which is pretty regularly (so people started making food for it)..

Damage of disk, this way or another, will happen sooner or later..

Thank you for your advice. Sadly that is far outside the realm of possibility for me at this time. I think the problems i am having are a senergy of a bad mouse and unused files cluttering up my computer. If it is a virus as you say then I am screwed but I know you guys will miss me. 

Try Brave

Opera is a web browser similar to Chrome, although a little slower.
It was originally very compact but now has gained all sorts of extensions, and is available on multiple platforms, such as Windows, iOS, Android, etc.

Oh boo hoo.
Its been -15 here for the last three weeks.

I think you'd better talk to JCMacSwell about that cod, Strange.
Won't find much cod in Moony's neck of the woods.

You got me mouth watering until you mentioned the tadpoles. 🙀 Hello. We've never met before.

The fish were far too small to eat... 

Interesting, I just cleaned up the heatsink and replaced the cpu fan. I didn't remove the heatsink from the motherboard and the fan was just screwed into the fins of the heatsink. The heat sink was full of fluff and dust but a vacuum cleaner and a soft brush removed all traces of the stuff on the fan and heatsink. 

The fan will not run despite turning freely, I thought maybe the fan frame was being torqued out of shape when I attached it to the heat sink but I made sure it still turned freely. I guess i could have received a bad fan, I'm not sure how likely that is.

I am still amazed at how empty the tower was, it's been a good ten years since I worked on a computer, maybe that is why there seemed to be so little "stuff" in the tower. 

Did you  send it in to be repaired?

Let us know what they do to it if you did 

Not yet, it will be a few weeks but I will let you know what was wrong. 

Is there a problem if I post a link to my story here? 

Look out for a pop up that appears every couple of months inviting you to reactivate Secure Search. It defaults to 'activate' so you have to clear the tick box.

Good luck to you Moon. Nothing better than a grandchild to raise your spirits!

Don't get too used to the 'beach' lifestyle.
We'll have to start calling you SUNtanman.

The ocean is probably a coule hours from where I am, I live close to the ocean in NC!

Sandbox no. 6 Test by  carrock.

Halfway down are links. Not sure if its what your looking for though.

Life interfered, no room for it now. 

It would be a good way to keep busy, and get yor mind off things.
When you're ready, of course.

I live in an apartment now, no place to really work, it makes a huge mess to make such a background. 

Where do ghost lights go when their natural habitat is destroyed? 

Probably removed the sign/reflector the light was bouncing off of when they removed the tracks and road. I don't know where ALL the ghost lights go, but the bad ones go to prism. 

I've seen the Maco light, several times, I do not know what it was but reflector it wasn't. I always figured it was some kind of electrical phenomena associated with the RR tracks. Not everyone could see it even when others did. It was weird enough to make a sceptics hair stand up... it did mine. 

I often wonder if it would still be there after the tracks were taken down but the area is lighted now with street lights and no way to see such a dim red glow with the lights drowning everything out. 

To be fair the amount of lighting in the area seems more than a bit extreme, I wonder if the light has something to do with that. It was nearly 50 years ago now but if I remember correctly a news crew managed to film it once but that could be wishful thinking on my part.

It was weird! I used to spend a lot of time fishing at night and coming and going to the beach at all hours of the night and I never saw the streets this deserted. Wilmington, NC has 117,000 people, the county has 229,000 people including Wilmington, not exactly metropolis but it seemed like no one was home the morning of the 1st. 

Even more troubling if you woke up to find Rod Serling standing over you, saying ...
"You're travelling through another dimension, a idmension not only of sight and sound, but of mind ..."

Get yourself checked out, and get better.

I'm fine now @MigL, weird experience for sure. If I had seen Rod Stirling I think I would have vapor locked! 

Did you contact them about it? Maybe they'll add you as a reference or something.  What do you write?

It was my ghost rider story, It's in my blog herehttp://blogs.scienceforums.net/moontanman/2010/09/06/night-flight/

For that range, you can use the estimate of  L/L_s = (M/M_s)^4,  where L_s is the luminosity of the Sun and M_s is the mass of the Sun.   75% the luminosity gives 93% the mass.

Cheers Janus

Thanks @Janus, it surprised me how fast luminosity drops off with such a small decrease in mass. Can the life time of the star on the main sequence be figured from the mass being 93%?