Category: oddities

In Uruguay? This app’s not for you.

We bought a Kindle Fire from Amazon. Turns out to be useless for much more than reading books, but that’s OK because it’s good for that. And it promises more, like Android apps you can download for free.

It occurred that it might be useful to have a little note-taking app on the Kindle. You know, waiting for 50 people in front of you at the bank, reading a book, get an idea…. You can find plenty of free note-taking apps ready to download. So I tried.

It told me it couldn’t download because I didn’t have a credit card on file (which I do), then it wouldn’t allow me to enter a credit card.

So I tried on the computer – sorry, the Amazon app store said, your region can’t buy apps from us. No problem; logged in through a USA VPN, only to find it wouldn’t accept a cookie that Amazon requires.

So where to find Android apps? Google! Alas, Google and Amazon do not play together – the Amazon Kindle is sort of a bastardized Android device, and to keep the price low they didn’t get a Google license.

So this morning I delved into a murky world of Android dead-ends and non-starters, rapidly realizing it was not the best use of my time.

The original note-taking app

And realizing as well that I already have a perfectly functional note-taking app. That even works when the Kindle’s battery is dead.

Will kill for food

All my life, so disconnected with the meat part of my food supply that I’d never killed anything other than a fish to eat. Yesterday changed that. The three boys of friends’ seven suckling pigs were destined for the parrilla.

Click (or don’t) to enlarge images.

These three pigs brought their total to five so far. With experience and other adults the process went faster – but still very time-consuming. Removing the bristles is a lot of work.

Fresh pig ears and tails for the puppy.

From anus to windpipe, everything must go. Weird at first; by the third, I was used to it.

Liver and heart examined by kids. Quite an education.

Go figure

A couple came by our house last night. We’d never met them before. They’ve been vacationing here for two weeks. They’re opening a restaurant in March. They invited us for the opening. Their restaurant is in Rosario, 700 km from here.

36 Million people live in Argentina, over 15 million of them in Buenos Aires province. A million live in Rosario. We’ve been to Rosario before, but only for an hour-long bus tour dinner stop.

The only other in-country Argentinians we know both live in Rosario. One is their business partner Susana, who we know from Mexico. The other is Keri, who we met years ago in Buenos Aires – through friends in Hawaii.

We’ll probably go.

Data zen

Before we left the U.S. in a pickup truck, I scanned my letters to my parents from the 70s and 80s, carefully saved by my mother, and got rid of a small pile of paper. A few months ago, I turned those megabytes of scans into one 86 kb text file (and for the first time actually read the letters again – some useful insights).

Tracking book production for the last several years, I have accumulated 14.7 megabytes of documents. All jobs are complete, and paid for, and I realized I only care to preserve four bits of data: date, quantity, item, supplier. Which fits in a text file of 3,653 bytes.

Instead of five or six minutes, I can’t even blink in the time it takes to back up that information to a server halfway around the world.

Back to the future: text files.

When thinking fails

I spend an afternoon learning, at a business that deals in renewable energy installations: solar, wind, sunflower biofuel, deep and shallow earth climate control, 10:1 efficient LED lighting. New ideas. Stimulating.

My mind boggles, wanders, speculates, contemplates the most energy-hogging device we own. How much solar and wind energy, I wonder, would it take to power our electric clothes drier?