Moderately cool, and damp.
I’m sleeping in today, as much as my bladder, back, and kids will let me.
I don’t have anything on my calendar and nothing specific except the ToDo list, starting with Christmas lights. I do have to hang them every year. The HOA sends out nastygrams if you leave them up. And I do something different every year, so even the common elements probably wouldn’t be common for more than a couple of years.
In the mean time, here are a few interesting links to eat up some of your free time.
https://www.usgs.gov/news/landslide-risks-highlighted-new-online-tool
https://www.domesticpreparedness.com/site/assets/files/11020/navy_yard_book_9_12_19_final.pdf
https://archive.defense.gov/pubs/Navy-Investigation-into-the-WNY-Shooting_final-report.pdf
n
I replaced the brake switch yesterday. It’s a weird little thing.
It mounts where the brake pedal connects to the push rod from the master cylinder. It took maybe an hour including time spent looking in the shop manual, petting dogs, getting a beer, getting a small screwdriver, moving the van out of the carport, the actual job, and parking the van. The switch housing was cracked.
Oh, and First!
Morning everyone! Yes, it did feel good to sleep in. Bladder woke me one time, back the next. Time for some breakfast.
NB– if you are a legitimate commentor and your comment disappeared, try again, but refer to something specific in your comment. Our comment spam filter has allowed a couple of comments thru that, on review, were not offensive, but they were from first time posters and entirely content free. So I killed them.
I don’t want do discourage anyone from posting, but most of the humans here add a little bit more to a comment than the ones I killed. So if you’re sentient, please comment, but put an idea in there somewhere.
n
Dilbert: Robot Pronouns
https://dilbert.com/strip/2019-12-15
And so we start the gender wars.
Paul, congrats! And, you work about as fast xxxx slowly as I do. No dogs or cats in our household ATM, but I am reminded of our collie, who was normally very reserved when I was working. However, he liked to quietly crawl under a car, behind me, and either poke me with a cold nose or let out a little bark. Startled me almost every time. Loved that dog, but my beating heart didn’t.
Funny how animals are sometimes smarter than humans. I recently heard a smart and very well educated guy say the reason cats don’t rule the world is, why bother?
Dilbert: Robot Pronouns
I’m trying not to think about where the little robot emerged from the big robot’s body The implication is … well I don’t want to offend.
Over The Hedge: Space Heaters
https://www.gocomics.com/overthehedge/2019/12/15
George needs to move south for the winter.
Someone just explained that Summer doesn’t like cold weather. That’s the reason it goes south of the equator for the winter. 🙂
“What the Boris landslide means for the climate debate”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/12/15/what-the-boris-landslide-means-for-the-climate-debate/
“The fasmunist haters of democracy in Antifa have been rioting in London in protest at the landslide that the voters accorded to Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party in Thursday’s general election.”
“Like the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the election of Boris Johnson in 2019 demonstrates just how far the totalitarians in the “Democratic” and “Labor” parties have departed from their working-class roots, and how much they hate and fear democracy itself, and how much good reason they have to fear the common sense of the voters – especially those in the working class.”
I doubt that much will change in the UK. Defunding the BBC would be nice but, I doubt it.
I doubt that much will change in the UK. Defunding the BBC would be nice but, I doubt it.
I’ve heard rumors about the stunt that “Doctor Who” will pull in the upcoming season which would be an argument for defunding the BBC if even remotely true.
Currently 85F and am I hanging Christmas lights? No I am not. Instead I’m fighting networking issues with our TiVo Bolt, which insists it cannot see the router, despite getting settings from DHCP and having the correct DNS and gateway info. My router can see it just fine.
Wife was messing with Circle web filter just before it all broke, and pulling cables from under her desk (where the inet service used to enter our network). Claims the Circle isn’t blocking anything on the tivo but….
n NOT the way I planned to spend today.
Fifteen years ago Bob appointed me to be a Super Administrator on both this and his tech forum. As such, I had to delete some SPAM and sales posts. Appreciate, your same actions, Nick.
@slim, it’s weird. They are almost normal blog comments. No obvious spam content, no links, and even the user names are normal or right at the edge of normal.. no “freecasinochips. com” user names….
I’m not sure what their intent is. Maybe finding blogs where their comment goes thru for later spamming? I usually edit their text, changing spacing, fixing typos, etc to break any search for a specific phrase if I am going to leave it up for a while.
The other ‘tell’ is that they almost all take the form of “this is a great blog/post/information and I’m glad you posted it/gonna tell my followers/want you to give me advice but they never actually use a real instagram or hashtag or email so what’s the point?
The last 3 were nondescript enough that askismet let them thru and it stops almost everything.
Maybe it’s just the scammers refining their approach, trying to see how far back they have to take the message for it to get thru?
Anyway it seems pointless.
n
(First! posts are very infrequent here and are generally pretty funny to see and I know they’re tongue in cheek…)
Got my network issues resolved, fixing the main tivo bolt, the kodi box, and the tivo series 4 that will do OTA reception. The series 4 was coming up for renewal, so I needed to get it up, or decide to drop it. That was marginally important to do before I leave home, but none of this was on my list for today.
and yes, the network issues were all caused by my wife and the damnable Circle netnanny device. She made config errors trying to limit the kids’ access, and the device’s default behavior blocked my attempts to get the series 4 reconfigured.
That she made physical changes to our network at the same time she made the config changes just complicated and obfuscated the problems.
If you need a firewall/filter for kids, I can’t recommend the Circle. It’s billed as an easy and hands off tool, but it’s not if you have anything more than the most basic needs.
n
Gangs involved in biowarfare —
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/chinese-gangs-infect-pigs-swine-fever-criminal-meat-scheme
And using drones too.
n
Those non-content comments are preliminary comment spammers out reconnoitering the site. If they find their comment has passed muster, they will be back with more spammy comments. Which the Akismet comment filters will find.
That’s why you find those generic comments on older posts – not the current one (where all the action is). Finding them on old posts is a clue to their spammy origin.
Which is why I deleted a few comments that showed up at the end of Thursday’s posts. Note that comment spams are not from people that actually visited the page. They just automatically scrape the page looking for a form, then build a CURL/WGET type POST to submit the spam.
It’s also the way that contact form spammers work. I wrote about the general techinque a while back on my SecurityDawg site: https://www.securitydawg.com/how-bots-spam-contact-forms/ .
And, it’s why my FormSpammerTrap contact forms never get spammed by the spambots. It uses techniques that block the spammer from any successful CURL/WGET type of automated form submitters. I had one for WP comment forms, but it needs to be updated. I might get around to that project and reinstall it here.
Sausage dogs, in costume!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7794981/Sausage-dogs-owners-dress-festive-attire-Christmas-walk-Hyde-Park.html
n
Well, comcast sucks. Set my laptop to 192.168.100.101. Set gateway to 192.168.100.1. Set dns to 8.8.8.8. No joy.
Called comcast. Auto ai reset my cable modem. NoW I get Internet but real slow. Called comcast back several times. Each time we played the reset the modem game. Each time it is very slow and cannot event connect to http://www.ttgnet.com.
Bored now.
Accessing your modem should provide a status page. It will show the number of channels bonded and the signal levels. If you do not have the correct number of bonded channels you will not get desired speed. Also if the signal levels, power and signal to noise, are out of spec it will impact the speed.
Accessing your modem should provide a status page. It will show the number of channels bonded and the signal levels. If you do not have the correct number of bonded channels you will not get desired speed. Also if the signal levels, power and signal to noise, are out of spec it will impact the speed.
I did that too. Looked all hunky dorky to me.
So after the sixth modem reset by the technical support AI,I started crying to it. I figured if anything it would send me to the suicide prevention hotline. Instead it told me that I seemed to be having trouble and sent me to live technician in Bangladesh.
He asked me a couple of questions and then asked if a technician could come by Monday. I said Tuesday afternoon would be better and I now have an appointment from 1 to 3. He said that the cable line between the demarcation point on the side of my garage and my cable modem inside my house had a very noisy connection.
@lynn,
I now have an appointment from 1 to 3
That’ll cost you. Here in UK, if the fault is on your side of the NTE5 (Network Termination Equipment, type 5) which is a glorified socket with some passive components behind it, and is the official demarc between them and you, Grittish Smellycom will charge you 120 beer tokens, just to turn out. Given Comcast’s grasping nature, I make no doubt they’ll charge more.
Geoff
He asked me a couple of questions and then asked if a technician could come by Monday. I said Tuesday afternoon would be better and I now have an appointment from 1 to 3. He said that the cable line between the demarcation point on the side of my garage and my cable modem inside my house had a very noisy connection.
That may or may not be expensive depending on whether the line runs on the outside, installed by the cable company, or inside, installed by the builder.
You might try opening the box at the demarcation point and using a m/m coax splicer to hook the incoming wire directly to the line to the cable modem, no splitter. Home Depot has a tool to ID the coax connections using color coded terminators.
Make sure the splitter from the incoming cable company line connects to no more than the number of ports for which you are billed. The techs have to report what they see inside that box — most are cool about it, but the guy/girl might get in a hurry.
And, yes, you can open the box. I put a numbered seal on mine every time I open it so I know when the cable company has been out there.
My experience with Comcast is that they will provide all coax to the modem, but no cat beyond that. When they switched my neighborhood to fiber, they brought fiber to the demarc, and existing coax past there. Now, they are not the most NEAT installers, but I can’t really fault anything they did.
ATT came to install my fiber all the way to the media converter, which is in my attic. I had a pull string in place and helped the guy with the pull.
n