Timing Bubbles
“The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”
John Maynard Keynes
Set up Windows 11 without an annoying Microsoft Account
Being required to connect to the internet while installing Windows 11 has been one, in a long line of reasons, why many users refuse to update to the new OS, even though it has been out for 4 years (since Nov 2021). After finally reaching an adoption rate of just over 50%, it has since dropped to 49.08%
The most popular bypass to having to log in with an internet connected Microsoft account was to use “oobe\bypassnro” which, when typed into the command prompt during the Windows 11 setup experience, would enable a button that let you skip connecting to the internet
Unfortunately, Microsoft is removing that trick, but user @witherornot1337 on X found that typing “start ms-cxh:localonly” into the command prompt during the Windows 11 setup experience will allow you to create a local account directly without needing to skip connecting to the internet first.
Or you could, you know, actually give customers what they want instead of the kind of backwards thinking that gave us the universally hated Windows 8.
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The Old Church Free Halloween Organ concert
Michael Barnes, a professional pianist and organist, and has been Senior Organist at Westminster Presbyterian Church since 1992. He puts on his Halloween concert during the free noon Wednesday concerts at the Old Church in Portland at this spookiest month every year. He plays spooky music from Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor BWV 565 all the way to sing-a-longs of favorite tv theme songs.
This year’s show was Wed, Oct 22nd at noon (video not up at the time of this posting). Here’s the show from 2024.
HAGAMOSphere
The HAGAMOSphere is a spherical drone prototype with eight propellers mounted on a cubic frame,
allowing it to move both horizontally and vertically while maintaining level flight- like many thrust vector systems.
It is also designed to roll around on the ground by housing itself inside a geometrically shaped sphere guard.
X-ray backscatter with compressed sensing
Compressed sensing is an image/signal processing algorithm that allows you to re-construct an image/signal even when you’ve lost up to 95% of the samples. It’s so good that it can even be cranked up to restore images even above what would normally be the Nyquist limit.
Applied Science walks through using an X-ray backscatter device to reconstruct images as near to x-ray vision as you can get at low doses.
Links:
- Robert Taylor paper on Compression Sensing in Python.
- Steve Brunton’s introduction to compressed sensing
Oregon has the highest rate of mental illness in the country
The study ranks Oregonians, youth and adults, as having the highest prevalence of mental health challenges among residents of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Mental Health America’s newly released 2025 annual report.
Despite complete Democratic party control for over 30 years and spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year – the latest annual report on mental health shows Oregonians have the highest rates of mental health issues in the country. Rates have increased every year for the last 5 years and Oregon has been above national averages since 2015.
How many Oregonians suffer from mental illness? 30% of the adult population.
There’s lots of finger pointing. Many blame normalizing homelessness and living on the streets for people who often struggle with addictions and mental health issues. Others point at attempts to normalize mental health issues and neurodivergence as simply ‘lifestyle choices’.
No matter how you look at it, the decades of policies we have today are clearly failing – and failing worse than anywhere else in the country.
Welding class
When I was on a 8 week sabbatical a number of years ago, I took an artistic welding class. It was a ton of fun. Sugar Metal Customs does custom ironwork, but also teaches some classes from making metal roses to giant metal flails for your medieval fantasies.
Maybe pick up a skill that AI can’t replace?
Balatro can never become a real gambling game
Balatro will never be sold to any gambling companies or casinos. Ever. Even after its creator dies. Why? Because LocalThunk is so against that idea he’s written it into his will.
How bad are Portland’s progressive block leaders? This bad
Portland council’s openly socialist progressive bloc (Candace Avalos, Jamie Dunphy, Mitch Green, Sameer Kanal, Tiffany Koyama Lane, and Angelita Morillo) has been voting in lockstep.
As part of an Oregon Ethics Commission investigation to see if they violated either city and state law on negotiating outside of public meetings, a huge block of Teams messages has been acquired by public records request by Willamette Week. It reveals councilmembers discussing plans for government appropriation of buildings as well as airing grievances and annoyances at their colleagues as well as constituents. Even worse, they make it clear some of them lack even the most basic governance knowledge.
For example, on July 9th, Candace Avalos sent out a link to a story about the office tower Big Pink selling for $45 million – an astronomical collapse of 88% in value (It was last purchased in 2015 for $370 million). This was the exchange:
Dunphy: $45 million dollars? THAT’S IT??? Holy shit are we in market correction mode.
Candace Avalos: What does market correction mode mean?
Dunphy: Meaning that our real estate prices have been wildly out of control, and that the values of these buildings don’t match their worth, so now we’re seeing prices reduced to firesale levels, which will reduce property taxes etc
Candace Avalos: Reduce property taxes and therefore revenue the city gets?
Dunphy: Yes. Plus it will impact the evaluation of value for other buildings in the area,
Dunphy: It’s not inherently a bad thing, it’s not great, and we all knew our real estate prices were detached from reality, but this kind of a market correction can hurt. I’m less concerned about the biggest buildings be devalued, but it could have ripple effects to individual homes or condos etc
Candace Avalos: Forgive my ignorance here because this is NOT my area of expertise, but isn’t it good for these prices to go down? And if buildings are this cheap we can capitalize and do more buying as a city like we did recently with those 3 apartment buildings?
Dunphy: There are definitely some opportunities that could be beneficial, yes.
Candace Avalos: People’s individual homes have skyrocketed in value, making it so much harder for new people to get homes, so don’t we want them to go down?
Dunphy: Well, the problem then becomes having homeowners “underwater,” where the value of their home is worth less than the outstanding principal on their mortgage, so they won’t be able to refinance. There’s also a lot of these larger buildings that are owned by retirement accounts, so if the value of their portfolios decreases, retirees would see their investment portfolios decrease rapidly.
Candace Avalos: Hmm ok I see
This is a city councilmember, in charge of Portland’s $8.6 billion dollar budget, that doesn’t understand even the most basic concept of a real estate correction (one of the worst corrections in the entire country) and how it will utterly decimate the budget they are making. Instead, they look at it as an opportunity for the government to buy up buildings for their social programs cheaply.
VR bathrooms
Jake Welch has been capturing 3D scans of unique bathrooms (largely around the New York area).
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