While those of us here in the states celebrate our country’s 250th birthday, Projects from the Bottom Drawer celebrates a much more humble acheivment - that of it’s 5th birthday.
On July 4th, 2021, I set up pygg.xyz as a way to move my personal dealings off of a very breached gmail address. It had recently been in the 2021 LinkedIn breach, something I still get fallout from 5 years later as mailers insist that I’m actually a business and do I need help with employees/receivables/publishing/etc.
At the same time, I decided to re-open this blog - it had been hosted on blogger.com. I quicky found that .xyz domains had little trust in the internet world and set out on a search for another porcine-related site. Wereboar.com had recently been released by it’s owner, so I made the purchase and here we are.
Pull up a chair, have a slice of cake, and thank you for joining me these past 5 years. I hope to present strange junk and weird projects for many more.
When I set the documents library up, I didn’t give enough thought to the naming conventions. Before I get deeper into things, it’s time to correct that. I’m making some small changes to where the docs library resides.
You’ll still be able to find the new docs library at https://wereboar.com/docs/ - the same as before, but there are now two folders: public and protected.
Public is just that. Documents I can share. Everything that used to be in wereboar-documents is now here, and you can simply edit your URL to go to the new link. Protected is documents of interest to what I’m working on, but can’t share for whatever reason - primarily copyright. These are password protected but will be moved into public if the situation allows.
If you happen to find anything broken, please let me know. I’m going to do a couple rounds of searching to make sure I have everything cleaned up, but this will take a few days.
Here’s a piece of relatively useless but interesting information - at the time I wrote this line, there has been 805,545 view on this blog. The most popular post is the 2025 Hamfest list: https://wereboar.com … mfest-and-show-list/.
I’ve added some new documents to the library, and I’m going to try and create a new zip every quarter (or so.)
This archive contains all of the documents I’ve collected for projects - at least ones that I can share. This is currently about 400MB, and is a zipped archive of zipped files of many different kinds.
Note the Drive link provides you a .7z file with a simple password: 123456 - this is to keep a certain website from complaining that oh no there’s words in that document I recognize and you can’t do that!
About a decade ago, I interviewed at a small company in a large town. They wanted a tech, and called me via a recruiter. They wanted me to do a test, which I declined at first, but eventually said “yeah, ok, why not.” It was a basic electronics test, and I passed 100% with one question that we had to discuss. We eventually came to the conclusion that yes, their document was rather poorly copied and my interpretation of the symbol used was acceptable because it looked like that.
The interview went well. I was able to competently talk to them about products and technologies, about what they were doing, and how I could possibly integrate myself into that. They stated that if I wanted to explore other avenues of experience, like PCB design or circuit analysis, then they were more than happy to allow that. It really seemed to be a good fit, and I went away feeling good about the interview and my prospects.
A few days go by, and I’m called and offered the job. I’m told the pay rate - base is a few cents more than I made at the time, but that’s not worth the longer drive and hours the company would need, nor did it take into account other payments my current employer gave (and had given) for many years, payments that I could reliably count on and they offered right up until the day the owners had to retire because they couldn’t do it anymore. Things I had mentioned during my initial screening with the recruiter. I was being offered about $1.70 less an hour for this job, and it didn’t include that this company had a higher insurance premium.
I turned it down at that rate but said can we talk about that? No, that was the offer. Take it or leave it. I left it. There was no arguing, no crying, no nothing from the employer. Not even a chance to negotiate. I did end up speaking to the employer a few months later when some things changed in my situation, but they were frosty. No problem, I understand, thank you for taking the time to talk with me.
Fast forward to 2025. A friend and I are going to a hamfest in Southern Ohio. This guy knows people at the company in question, I believe he went to school with some of them. He had done some consulting work for the company, so he was familiar with the people and the owner and talked to them at times. For some reason, during our drive the company came up as in they didn’t offer anything. I can’t remember how we got started on that but this is something on how it went:
Friend: They were mad when you turned that down.
Me: What do you mean?
F: Just that, they were totally p**sed that you didn’t take that job. They were mad. You were their guy, and when you didn’t take it, it really made them angry.
M: I was their guy?
F: Yeah.
M: You know why I didn’t take it.
F: Yeah, it didn’t pay anything. I told them that too.
M: What did they say?
F: They said “That’s what this job pays.”
M: Really?
F: I told them “Well, that’s just not enough, is it?”
The conversation kind of continued along the fact that friend couldn’t get them to move off that “this is what we pay” line of thinking.
So I was their guy, but “that’s what the job pays?” So even if I wasn’t their guy and was just “Hey, I think we can work with him” I’d get the same amount? What? I don’t understand that. I was ready to step into that role, but the company was just “Well, we have a set rate and it doesn’t matter if you’re the god of your discipline or if you’re just some dude.”
It’s probably for the best that I didn’t take that role. It would have been a lateral move for the most part, with company conditions essentially trading like-for-like. It probably would have been interesting, but I wasn’t willng to take a time and pay cut for the job at the time, even though I think we might have been able to work together later. So there’s not many tears shed here, just a “Hmm. What if?”
But the thing I still can’t get over is that attitude. Why even bother if you’re not going to negotiate for the things you want? Why not tell me this up front if you have a set number already chosen? I would have said “No, I’m sorry, I make more than that and we shouldn’t waste our time,” but…time was wasted and people got mad, all because “their guy” decided that being that guy didn’t pay enough - or even what he had at the time.
C’est la vie. Life moves on and we learn what to ask and when. I know they hired someone, but I wonder if they learned what to ask.
We mostly toured the buildings, but I went away disappointed as there were no test equipment vendors present - in fact, the only real TE vendor there was Bird, but they aren’t selling to me. The guy I was with was interested, however, as he needs a commercially available handheld SpecAn that isn’t a Chinese company.
I did pick up a few things here and there, but not much. Mostly rain discount stuff.
Here’s what I saw at the show:
A meter with the Niagra Power sticker on it.
Did I photograph this already?
I took it home. Gotta have a voltmeter at a show.
One Dollar Rain Discount. It has a burning smell.
UNIX, anyone?
110VAC single phase. Unusual.
Lots of reel-to-reel players.
A very precise balance beam scale.
Stacks of stuff, why we are here.
We left probably close to 1PM, as many of the flea market vendors had started to pack up. I skipped Sunday as there wasn’t anything I wanted to see, I was aching, and I wanted to play with some of the things I bought.
Next show is Breezeshooters in Butler, PA. See you there!
Friday turned out to be a just slightly damp day at the show, we had a little rain but it cleared off quick. We toured the flea market, and saved the buildings for Saturday due to the forecast of heavy rains. The steak tips and mashed potatoes vendor wasn’t here this year, so bourbon chicken and a banana milkshake subbed in it’s place.
This year, the mobile AM CB stuff was almost all gone save a few units here and there. Hobby-level test equipment, i.e. the EICO/Knight/Heath/etc. was almost not present, save for a bunch of those crappy RF generators that no one really wants - the bridges and tracers and things are pretty much no longer for sale. At least, not at Dayton. Of course, the piles of plastic radios and old televisions are long gone, and even the big boat anchor radios are vanishing. I think I saw maybe 1 Hallicrafters S-38 unit for sale…
Things are changing, but there was still a lot to see:
A nice A-K speaker.
A basket of Apples.
Just some audio stuffs.
A nicely restored cathedral radio.
Choke the Chicken…not here please.
An old Data Precision meter.
Many DEC Rainbow computers.
New, old-stock desoldering irons.
My favorite brand of tools?
Designed for butane flow measurements.
Some tunes for the ants.
No idea what this model was.
Someone's pride and joy, dumped in a bin.
I eventually took the scope for $1.
The old way of measuring standing waves.
Just some random HP things.
Ok, if you insist.
Loudenboomer!
Some info on the Loudenboomer.
Would you like to play a game?
It's not tourist season without a thumb.
Some military equipment.
Telephone B.C. (Before Cellular)
How many of these were made?
Moto comm analyzers.
A really nice condition scope.
Some old computing horsepower.
A really old opto counter.
This scope was in bad shape elsewhere.
Parts. I took a few transistors.
High voltage?
Used to be piles of this stuff.
These are vanishing as well.
Some more radios.
And some more radios.
A scope that was part of a school course.
Even if it was good, this showed bad.
Some sort of receiver.
A tape deck. Friend wanted it, you carry it!
Lots of these, no one wants.
Some of those funky round speakers.
I took the Sabtronics unit for a sawbuck.
Semiconductor testing devices…in peach.
A Shango Special.
I have no idea.
A table full of stuff.
Hallicrafters SX-62.
It's a radio that's a table that's a radio.
Teletypes for your 110 baud needs.
A cool old terminal.
daytonf26-terminalsettings-wereboar.jpg
The only signal tracer I saw.
A giant TRF radio.
A nice looking TRF unit.
Warm soda and melted candy anyone?
Surprising, more W-J stuff this year.
Some W-J stuff.
We spent pretty much the entire day, heading out at 4:45 a few minutes before closing. We went Saturday as well, but I skipped out on Sunday.
If you want to mail order a Dayton Hamvention ticket, now is the time! You have until May 1st, after which tickets will be held will-call at the gate. This is for domestic orders, international orders are being held will-call right now.
Mail order ticket sales have ended. All sales are now will-call.
Recently, I decided to dip my hooves back into the cesspool that is YouTube. I’ve tried this before and failed, so I wasn’t terribly expectant of results. I’ve have some friends jonesing over it and wanting to see how I worked on things. There’s money in them thar vid-joes! I guess, so why not try it again?
Dealing with any of the big engines is a deal with the devil where you’re eventually going to lose. They hold all the cards, and even if your hand is good, theirs is always better because they can simply draw new cards until they have a better hand. They are the dealer, the player, and the paymaster. I already knew this, and this time was no different. I’m presenting this not as a whine, but as “don’t do the same thing over and over and expect different results.”
To start, making money on YT isn’t the easiest thing in the world. You’re bound by restrictions - content and imagery are big parts of that, but the biggest part is the subscriber base. You don’t start getting payouts until you reach at least 1000 subscribers with so many watch hours on your videos. You do this by allowing advertisers to buy time within your video, so right in the middle of an important part of the work, you get an ad for Fountain Spew, the latest dohickey that would make Ron Popeil go “ewwwww,” or Senator Bedfellow’s re-election campaign. If you’re unlucky, you get ads for things like Yaoi. Ask me how I know…And you see these ads over and over and over. You have some control over how many, but certain ads are forced on videos, including the obnoxious pre-roll ad. But…there’s no guarantees that there will be an advertiser wanting to put an ad on your type of video. Even if you’ve monetized your video and put an ad every 5 minutes (yes, I’ve seen videos like that) there are absolutely no givens that an ad will play. If your viewer has adblock installed, it doesn’t matter - no ad is played and YT knows this, so no money is made. YT knows this from the start because the pre-roll doesn’t play…why they haven’t simply implemented a “Adblock detected, you can’t watch this” system is beyond me. I guess they know that if they do this, it’s going to destroy a good portion of their userbase, but is that userbase doing anything other than watching? That’s a real dilemma and I’m not here to discuss the semantics of it.
Regardless, I established that there was probably no way I was going to make money on this kind of venture without really providing some sort of content that was polished and easily consumable, and I simply don’t have the hardware or time to capture and edit down video. What computing hardware I do posess is dedicated to particular purposes rather than general processing, and that isn’t going to change. There are channels out there doing that kind of work, two of them that I enjoy (Shang066 and radiotvphononut) are very organic and shakeycam in their presentations - but they also have been around long enough to have enjoyed the older YT that was less restrictive.
The fun begins.
All of these things that follow I understand because everything online has been weaponized, but it makes it difficult for those of us that just want to use your services. Doesn’t make it any less painful, however.
The first difficulty I had was actually trying to make an account. Used to be that you just created a gmail account, attached a YouTube account to it, and you were done. I can’t remember if those were separate systems, but now they are, even though they fall under the same general account login. This is probably something we can thank Big G’s hysterical need for social media and the entire “+” mess that they tried for. You can still easily make a gmail account, but now you need to attach other things to it, including a phone number otherwise you can’t verify that you exist, attach another email to it, and then it unceasingly insists that you give it your home address. Now that you have a gmail account, you can go to YouTube and create a channel. You have to create a channel to do anything now on YT, including just comment on a video. Channel has been created, now the fun starts.
Immediately, you’re restricted to 15 minutes or less uploads, and you can’t stream. Ok…what I do is probably more useful as a long-form video or a livestream. Livestreaming makes a little sense, you don’t have any subscribers so there’s no reason to stream, but you need at least 50 to open that up. The other restriction, you need to provide some proof that you’re real. Apparently a phone number that they already have (and was once attached to an Android account) doesn’t count towards this.
Here’s where I ran into problems on my first attempt a few years ago. At the time, the only real way to prove your identity was to photograph your ID and let them fondle it. I reluctantly did so, and was never able to get them to verify the ID and release account restrictions. After about 6 months of posting little videos and not getting anywhere with having restrictions released, I gave up. The stuff I posted gained no subscribers in that time, even though I promoted where I could, and even watch time was very small. I assumed that being uninteresting was probably 95% of the problem, with the other 5% being the logistics of actually getting YT to provide your content to people. I couldn’t gain any traction to even get feedback, and even friends didn’t subscribe because most of them just bookmark the people they want to watch because they don’t like the system.
I deleted this channel and just said “Ok, thank you. I’m sorry, it didn’t work - it’s me, not you.”
This time, I was able to actually verify that I exist and I’m an adult because they allow you to do a short selfie video. I did so, and the next day restrictions on length were lifted. Age restrictions seemed to be lifted as well, I guess there aren’t many 17 year-olds out there with white hair and a beard. Great! Still can’t stream, but let’s build some subscribers.
I posted a couple of videos - one about testing some parts with a new piece of test equipment I have, and another long-form video about working on a device. Nothing fancy, just trying out the platform. It’s not polished, and I sound like a dead pig at the bottom of the ocean, but it is what it is with the hardware I have. Better stuff can come later. Yeah, they go up, no issues, but of course the people that asked me about making videos don’t have accounts so no one subscribes. Well, my bestest friend in the whole world does, but he’s that kind of guy. So I have one. Great, let’s do some more. You’re not going to get an audience without doing something, and I wanted to do something. I figured out what hardware I had would work for this, and a way to easily trim these long-form videos down to a manageable length. Let’s roll!
My ability to use that channel suddenly starts to degrade. I can log in, but actually getting to the dashboard becomes erratic. I start getting lots of error messages until there was nothing but error messages. This seems to be a common thing with YT studio, but no one else I knew that made content was having this issue, even the complainers on that alien site didn’t have anything to say about it. I tried for a few days to make it work but things just … weren’t anymore. I couldn’t edit, view, see, or manage anything. There’s no one to offer help, so I just deleted that and started over with a new channel with a similar name.
Try, try again.
I was able to upload some stuff to this and it seemed to work. However, I had a streaming audio source playing in the background. I like to listen to something while working, and I usually have Music Lake or Space Travel Radio playing. Both of these channels are low-key, low-beat, calm music that goes well with trying to concentrate on something in front of you. I had Music Lake playing, and of course the mic picked up small bits of it.
One of the things you need to remember about anything online is it’s all a weapon. Music, or your use thereof, is a very evil and dirty thing when it comes to video. The music industry got a shock when MP3s came about and suddenly it became easy to share songs. It got another shock when artists found out they could simply bypass the record companies and publish their own music on platforms like YT and other places. To that, the entire industry is now so scared that you might play 30 seconds of a music clip inadvertently in a video and collect 0.00000000000385 cents doing so, that they will blast your channel into oblivion instead of looking at that content and going “Oh, yeah, it’s just a radio playing in the background.” They’ve always been anal about music played in public spaces, but now it’s really real - you can lose an entire body of work because you accidentally played a minute of some crap pap pop poo in your video.
Back to my situation. YT detected 3 instances of something in the background. While it claims to have identified them, it stated that the creator had generally issued a license for this to be used on YT, but this would, to wit, prevent monetization of a video if such a thing were to happen in the future. So, if I want to do this, I can’t even listen to anything. I have to sit there in silence, working on a device. This isn’t going to work for me.
Then we move on to the actual content of the videos. You’re not going to sit there and watch me solder parts and run wire for two hours. It’s not going to happen, and you don’t need to be nice about it, I understand. I wouldn’t watch this and I’m the one doing it. There’s just nothing interesting about the in-between parts, the good bits are the before and after pictures and a discussion of what happened, not watching someone take 30 minutes to figure out why the previous owner of a device did what they did, like they did it, and try to reverse it. You can’t see it up close because it’s deep inside a chassis, and that’s all there is to it. Let’s not even get into the logistics of the things I work with. Pull out the soldering gun to do a big chassis joint? That looks like a firearm and YT isn’t going to like that! The site is so scared of that sort of thing that they will happily de-monetize you if your car’s handbrake happens to look like a firearm in a video - and you’re stuck in support purgatory fighting with LLM responses to your argument.
I take that video down and put up some placeholder posts until I can figure things out.
Yesterday, I get an email from Big G. (no, I’m not saying their name.) “We can’t verify you’re an adult. Please submit more information.” My account is now limited to safe search, and other restrictions for underage individuals has been turned on. I can’t undo this, it’s a permanent thing unless I provide more information to them. This is where the services disconnect comes from. Mail and YT are operated as separate entities under a common umbrella, even though YT really does provide the back-end login services as I understand it. So the video I provided to YT doesn’t count for anything else.
Another selfie video, or preferably a credit card or your ID. They really want your ID, they just won’t say it. Remember the time when this company said don’t use your real name online? Well, too bad, now you need to provide a sample before we’ll allow you to use our service. At this point, the pain in actually getting the account setup, the crap with music clips in the background, the suddenly error’d account, and the desperate wheedling from G about my age is just more than I want to deal with. I can’t even keep the account open without restrictions, so I close it. wereboar-projects is deleted, and I’m not going to recover it. There are only so many hoops this trained boar will jump through before I get tired and go home.
What now?
There are other video platforms, but can you name them? One of them, a site called Rumble, is someplace you may have heard of. Maybe. It’s kind of a odd place. Not what I’d call conspiracy laden, but it certainly attracts a different crowd and it’s known as the site where you go if you can’t use YT. That’s neither bad nor good, and there is plenty of other content there, but they do the same curation and content striking as YT. My videos would be flagged in the same manner. There’s another one, called Brighteon. Bet you didn’t know that one existed, did you? This is where the stranger things go. Again, not bad…just not really someplace that’s going to attract attention, and not where I need to be. They are very hands off on moderation, saying they rely on you to make sure you are providing the proper licensed content. That just tells me that you’re going to get served directly instead of getting content strikes, and I’m not willing to deal with that at all. Again, neither good nor bad, it just has it’s own audience. It’s just not my place. There are even more that go farther down the rabbit hole. I’ve seen those like I’ve seen a rare coin. Maybe once or twice in my life.
I don’t know if what I’m trying to accomplish is video-compatible…but who knows, maybe it will stick. I’m going to try again with an established email address that I don’t use for anything else these days, one that’s been around long enough that there shouldn’t be any question as to the age of the owner. There’s a few videos posted, check it out: https://youtube.com/ … bottomdrawerprojects. To go along with that, I registered the domain bottomdrawerprojects.com, which will direct you to the top level of /projects.
So…stay tuned, more good junk and projects on the way. Dayton is coming up, Breezeshooters soon after, who knows what we’ll see!
Thank you for your time, and I sincerely appreciate you coming to hang out here on projects.
I’ve added some new documents to the library, and I’m going to try and create a new zip every quarter.
This archive contains all of the documents I’ve collected for projects - at least ones that I can share. This is currently about 430MB, and is an archive of zipped files of many different kinds. Grab a copy here:
