Forget MAGA -- Focus on MACFA

I had planned to write another of my silly “Forget MAGA...” posts^{1, 2}. The new post would have called for a focus on MACFA, or Make All Commodes Flush Again. This was something that Trump himself promised he would do.

But when I looked for background material and sources, I came across a recent Slate article³ that reports on the great progress that was made in low flush (LF) toilets. According to the article, the newest models can flush effectively with as little as 1.28 gallons of water.

I believe it. I can flush my toilets with a two-gallon bucket half filled with water. But the bowls remain nearly empty after that, so I suppose it takes another half gallon to refill the bowl.

The article explains that the earliest LF toilets used 1.6 gallons as does my newer fixture. However, they didn’t flush away all the solid waste; Trump himself said the operator had to flush “10 times.” “Not me, of course,” reports say.

So, have we Made All Commodes Flush Again? It would seem so. But I remain skeptical. I’d expect that the gradual accumulation of crap (quite literally) and minerals would reduce the water velocity in a low-flow toilet. And flushing is all about water velocity.

I can recall how well our 1.6 gallon toilet flushed. The water would almost totally disappear the moment I pressed the handle. But now it’s just like any other old-fashioned toilet in which the water rises before anything solid goes down.

When the commode was installed, there was a bumpy patch at the bottom. Now I wonder if the toilet was used or defective and that the bumpy part was scale or corrosion that was painted over.

Earlier today, I used my improvised drain clearer (an old bent coat hanger) to scrape at the entrances to the trap and siphon jet. The toilet flushes much better now. I’ll clean the visible portions with a pumice stone later tonight.

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¹ Forget MAGA -- Focus on MATA https://ludditegeek.blogspot.com/2025/07/forget-maga-focus-on-mata.html

² Forget MAGA -- Focus on MEGA https://ludditegeek.blogspot.com/2025/07/forget-maga-focus-on-mega.html

³ https://slate.com/technology/2025/02/toilets-low-flow-trump-environment-cost-savings.html

Define Emacs as Editor in Altap Salamander

I’ve been a devotee of the Servant Salamander / Altap Salamander file manager¹ for decades. I migrated from Norton Commander (NC)² soon after I started to work on a multi-tasking OS, Windows NT.

Likewise, I’ve been a fan of the (extensible) text editor Emacs³ for decades, having given up on Brief⁴, eventually. While on WinNT, I stayed with Brief a long time. But I seem to recall that Brief didn’t respond well to having one of its open files changed by another application. (This rarely happened in environments that it was designed for.)

Norton’s F4 key invoked a built-in text editor to open the selected file. The Salamander F4 key is configured to use Notepad.exe to open the selected file. But it can be configured to use other editors based on the selected file’s extension. I configure F4 to use Emacs for all text-like files.

Once I open Emacs, I like to keep that instance open for as long as possible. That’s because I build up a history usage, including:

• Regular expression searches
• Kill ring contents
• On-the-fly macros

Switching to a new Emacs instance is a major interruption to my workflow.

Enter Emacs server. Emacs includes a server that can open a file in a running instance when invoked from an external application, such as Norton, ...er, Salamander. This allows a user to edit new files while maintaining the previous Emacs instance.

To use this active server process feature, you’d invoke Emacs with this command⁵ (all entered on a single line): C:\Path_to_Emacs_bin\emacsclientw.exe -a C:\Path_to_Emacs_bin\bin\runemacs.exe

But I find that configuring Salamander’s F4 to call the Emacs server to be difficult sometimes. In fact I spent an embarrassingly long time yesterday trying to figure it out. But it’s not at all difficult if you really understand two things:

1. Only the Emacs executable should appear in the Custom Editor Target box; any switches go into the Arguments box before the $(Name) parameter.
2. Emacs doesn’t like file names that contain quote marks. So if there’s a space in the path to the executable, you should specify the 8.3 name and not the path seen in Explorer.⁶ Please see the figure below.

I’ve heard Emacs gurus advise against installing Emacs in a location other than the default. The default on Windows currently is C:\Program Files\Emacs\emacs-30.1\. And I followed that advice unfortunately. But it caused me a great deal of grief, because it forced me to surround the paths in quotes and was incompatible with the server process. On my previous computers I had been installing Emacs in C:\Users\Public\Programs, which all users have access to and conforms to the DOS 8.3 file name format. That’s why this error is new to me.

So here’s advice from a wannabe guru:

• Follow the instructions above to configure Salamander’s F4 to invoke Emacs if you already have Emacs and Altap Salamander installed.
• When you install Emacs, change the installation location to ensure that the path is made up of only alpha-numeric characters and that all users will have Read and Execute permisions.

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¹ https://www.altap.cz/
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander
³ https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief_(text_editor)
⁵ https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Emacs-Server.html
⁶ Eli Zaretskii, https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-emacs-windows/2014-04/msg00013.html

Putin in Alaska

Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to meet with President Trump tomorrow. Many political analysts already view this as a victory for Putin, or at least a concession. But I disagree.

It would be a major concession if he were hosting the meeting on Russian soil. Instead, he’s allowing Trump to host the meeting, in effect giving the other “home field advantage.”

It’s no secret that Trump wants to receive a Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe he would even be willing to arrest Putin for war crimes. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has a warrant out for his arrest.¹ With Putin outside Russian borders, an arrest shouldn’t be too difficult.

But certainly Putin is aware of this; already he will have planned his next moves. Perhaps when the Russian Empire sold Alaska to USA², they included a clause in the treaty that would allow Russia to regain ownership under very special circumstances. Such a clause might read, “Be it enacted and declared by the authority of these presents, that if the Sovereign of the Russian Empire, being the lawful ruler thereof, shall within the term of fifty-seven thousand (57,000) days and one week from the date hereof personally repair to the lands, tenements, and hereditaments herein described, and there, in the presence of two credible witnesses, shall utter the words ‘I have a red pencil box,’ then, and forthwith upon such utterance, all right, title, and interest in and to the said premises shall revert to His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of all the Russias, his heirs and assigns, to be held by them for ever; anything in this grant or elsewhere contained to the contrary notwithstanding.”³

The day of August 15, 2025 should be an interesting one.

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¹ https://www.icc-cpi.int/defendant/vladimir-vladimirovich-putin
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Purchase
³ This fictitious clause was synthesized with Copilot 0.4.2.0 on Windows 10 using the prompt, “Please rewrite the following content in legalese that might have been in use in 1867: If the ruler of Russia should visit this place in 57000 days and one week and say ‘I have a red pencil box’⁴ the territory shall revert back to Russia.”
⁴ The phrase “I have a red pencil box” comes from an episode of Benny Hill.

Cold in Summer; Hot in Winter

Why do most folks set their thermostats lower in Summer than in Winter?

I’ve seen summer settings at 68°F (20°C), while winter settings are at 75°F (24°C).  What do they expect the HVAC system to do when it senses an indoor air temperature of 72°F (22°C)?  Should it heat the room?  Cool it?  It’s a paradox.

Engineers who design thermostats have a simple solution for this paradox – they let the user figure it out.  They provide a Cool/Warm setting, which tells the device which setpoint is active.

This doesn't make sense to me.  Not only is it a paradox, but it defies the way people perceive air temperature.

For example, if it’s 18°F (10°C) cooler inside than outside, you should feel much cooler when you step inside. So if the outside air is 91°F (35°C), you should feel much cooler with a summer setting of 77°F (25°C).  And if the humidity is even slightly elevated, it will feel even hotter outside and cooler inside.

Similarly, if it’s 36°F (20°C) warmer inside than outside, you should feel much warmer when you step inside. So if it’s freezing cold (32°F or 0°C) outside, you should feel much warmer with a winter setting of 68°F (20°C).

But it seems that people no longer trust themselves to acclimate.  Heat has been a standard offering in automobiles for over 50 years – it’s free, a by-product of the combustion engine.  The default setting in wintertime is maximum heating, even though the riders wear coats.  And nowadays, nearly every automobile has air conditioning, and the default summertime setting for it is maximum cooling.  Climate control in automobiles mostly is “open loop,” meaning that the system does not monitor the air to see whether the setpoint has been reached.  It just keeps heating or cooling.¹  This is in opposition to indoor heating systems, which are closed loop.

The other drawback to the “low setpoint in summer, high in winter” method is that it’s more wasteful.  It’s like biking uphill into a headwind.

Here’s where I brag about the setpoints I use – feel free to roll your eyes.

In summer, I’m fine with the window units set to 77°F (25°C).  However on cool humid days, I might switch the units to dry mode, even though it doesn’t work as well as a dehumidifier.  In Winter, I use a setpoint of about 64°F (18°C).  Plus it drops an additional 2°C (or 3.6°F) at night in “setback” mode.²  Usually I get up before the furnace turns itself back on, so I experience a warming as I prepare tea / coffee, feed the cat, etc.  That slight warming helps me acclimate to Winter.

Would you like to save money and reduce your ecological footprint?⁵  Then try this:

If you live alone, try a higher setpoint at home in summer.  Wear a light sweater at work or while shopping.  Limit the use of A/C in the car.  And in winter, do the opposite.  Try setting a lower setpoint at home, dress lightly in layers.  When in the car, remove outerwear and limit the use of heat.

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¹ Some luxury cars provide closed loop climate control.  Indeed, I drove an old Audi whose heat and air conditioning seemed to stop working after about twenty minutes.  I don’t really know whether they were closed loop or was just broken.  Either way, it was difficult to get used to the effect.

² It’s a German-made boiler, which means the fundamental temperature units are Celsius.  It provides a Fahrenheit display for most things, but not for the setpoint, which is “programmed” by setting DIP switches ³ on the thermostat’s circuit board.

³ A DIP switch ⁴ or Dual In-Line switch is really a set of switches packaged into the standard outline of an IC. And while ICs have gotten 60% smaller over the past three decades, DIP-switches have retained the same bulky outline of the chip packages they were modeled after.

⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIP_switch

⁵ What is Ecological Footprint?  Click here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_footprint

⁶ Try the footprint calculator at https://www.footprintcalculator.org/