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Category: computing

Thur. Nov. 20, 2025 – do I feel sore today, why yes I do

Warm and moist. Ewwww moist. It was super gross and moist yesterday. It did get better later in the day. I’d be happy if it was NOT so gross and damp today.

I did my volunteer day at the middle school. We got a lot done. Sound kid graduates to High School next year and his crew don’t want to step up and do the main part of the job. I will probably be doing some intro classes next year in the hope of stirring up some interest in the crew position. Business continuity isn’t just for businesses. If you have a group and some people do the important and difficult jobs, but you don’t have anyone to step in if they disappear, you aren’t going to last as a group.

Today I’ve got home stuff and a couple of pickups to do. Routine stuff. Ordinary stuff. Probably some domestic bliss too. Ah well, some days are just that, ordinary.

So on an ordinary day, do ordinary stuff. Like working. Or stacking.

n

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Wed. Sept. 17, 2025 – this time for sure…

Cool again, but then warm again, and then HOT again. We almost got some rain around 6pm, which cooled things down as the front moved by, but it was 92F before that. And pretty humid too. Time for Fall to get here.

I did some things in the morning, doing some small things in my bedroom and closet that I’d been thinking about for a while. Just rearranging stuff really. There’s more to do, but I broke the logjam by finally starting. I hope. Then I fell down a rabbit hole with some network stuff.

I did get one ubiquiti access point configured. I have another that shouldn’t take but a minute, and then I’ve got to install them in the attic. The one that took some skull sweat wasn’t resetting, or configurable, or upgrading properly, so when that got resolved (by using a different ubiquiti tool) I was pretty happy. It’s a $400 access point I picked up at the goodwill bins for about $3. Yeah, getting that to work for me kinda rocked. The other came from my client’s house during one of the upgrade rounds, and it configured no problem.

What I can’t do yet is get them off my normal network, and I can’t get them to use an alternative DNS server. ATT doesn’t allow you to configure their router to use anyone but them, as they mine that and sell it. I’ve got several devices I want to stop seeing ads on, but can’t configure manually, so I need the wifi or the main router to assign an alternate DNS, whether that’s a pihole or 9.9.9.9 or some other ad blocking service.

I have been looking at used ubiquiti gateways and they’re pretty cheap on ebay, so I may just do that. Then I’ll have control over it at a whole ‘nother level. The added advantage is that I’ve already spent time and energy learning to use the ubiquiti stuff at my client’s house, so I can save some effort. The other choice is to change the way the APs are configured, and set them up as a portal (like in a coffee shop or business lobby) and connect the devices to them. There are additional issues there though, and I’d have to learn more about that functionality.

I’m bummed because I thought I’d just be able to config the APs to give out a different DNS server… and I just had another idea about how to do that which I’ll have to explore today… See, talking through a problem can help. The normal setup and use just passes the routers DHCP and DNS to wifi clients too.

In the afternoon I did my pickups, got stuff at the grocery store, and dropped the Ranger off at the mechanic shop. Then I walked home. D1 picked up D2 and took her to her Tues/Thur activity. Sometimes having minions helps.

Today I’ll do a bit more cleanup in the bedroom and closet, a bit more networking, and maybe a bit of other stuff. I do have a pickup locally, and I can take some stuff over to the shop using the Expy when I do that pickup. Even if it’s raining, the Expy will keep the stuff dry. Tiny little steps, but all stuff that needs to be done.

I’ve got a brisket to portion and freeze, so that will be adding to the stacks. It’ll also probably end up being dinner too.

Stack while you can. If assassinations aren’t enough to kick off the next stage, something else will.

nick

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Wed. May 7, 2025 – did WWIII just kick off?

Wet and cool in Houston today. Supposed to have gotten a bunch of rain overnight, but I haven’t confirmed that yet. It was misty drizzle most of yesterday until evening. Then it came down a bit harder. Nothing like some other parts of the state got though.

I was busy most of the day. Did a couple of pickups, then did my kid taxi stuff. Worked on my hobby website all evening. Didn’t even make or eat dinner until late, as I was immersed in what should have been a pretty straight forward thing to do. I am trying to add a simple store to my hobby site, with about 6 line items for sale. It looks oh so easy in the demos, but little tiny secret gotchas ate hours. And then some of it is fractal. I can’t test the function without a ‘sandbox’ to play in for payments. WP and paypal provide such a thing, but you have to sign up, get some fake credentials, and then install them in the right places. All while working in an offline copy of your site, so you don’t bork your deployed live site, or charge yourself real money while testing.

Every step of the process has a little bit of a learning curve, something that takes a couple of tries, or takes looking up. And when there is a very subtle bug like curly quotes break the module when it’s expecting straight quotes, but in a way that partly works, you can spend even more time looking for the issue or a workaround. In other words, this web mess is a pain in the fundament. 7 or 8 hours to add one page of copy and paste info, and one page of ‘store’ with 6 items for sale. Not my cuppa. No sir.

And at some point I’ll have to either do it all again, or figure out how to migrate the new pages to the live site. I’m sure that will happen without any glitches…

It is a new skill to keep the mind active. Learning is always useful. So I keep telling myself.

Stacking up the new skills. I should be stacking potassium tablets… oh, right, already did. I should find them and make sure the kids have the correct dose. F me, who had “potential nuclear exchange” on the card for 2025?

Stack it high, and stack it deep. Anything can happen, and it usually does.

nick

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Fri. Dec. 6, 2024 – on this day nothing much happened.

Cold. Temps were dropping when I took the garbage out last night, and I expect the cold came back. We’ll see, but I’m thinking “cold”. It was hot and wet, although not actually raining yesterday. Grey most of the day. Might be the same today, except cold…

Did some stuff. Mainly replaced and reconfigured some gear at my client’s house. It should have been quick and easy. It wasn’t. The control system moved from a traditional IDE that any programmer might be familiar with, to a sort of drag and drop web based automagic atrocity. It’s very object oriented. It builds the connections in real time on the fly, based on what you tell it about each of the objects. But you must do it in the correct order, no skipping steps, no editing to make a simple change, deleting the old before it will let you populate the new. And it’s completely opaque and backwards.

Swapping one piece of gear, with only 5 attributes, maybe 6 if you count where it “virtually” lives, with another almost identical piece, with the same attributes should take minutes but it took hours. Edit which IP addy the controller talks too, add the addresses of the connected gear. That’s the OLD way. The new hotness is much more tedious.

The software doesn’t recognize that the hard wired PoE version of the hardware is essentially identical to the WiFi version, just a different IP addy. Had to delete the old, add the new, then re-connect all the virtual patching between the controller, the new expansion box, and the TVs connected to it. Straightforward if annoying. BUT I had to also delete the objects representing the TVs before I could re-add them, so I lost what THEY were connected to. Had I known, I’d have looked and noted the connections before deleting. As it was, my partner had to connect remotely and re-do that part of the setup, and I confirmed that it was talking to the hardware and actually doing the things, there in the rooms. One hour job turned into 4 hours and I needed remote help.

The new hotness is like a straightjacket.

And the gui to do all the attribute setting was designed by mac fanbois, so no scroll wheel, no right click context menus or drop downs. Instead of window sliders, you have to click and flick to move the lists and they move OPPOSITE the way you’d expect. To add injury to insult, all the icons are unique to the app and don’t have tool tips, it’s all done in shades of grey, and the visual clues like highlighting, “busy” indicators, etc are either very subtle, or positioned in dumb places.

I’ve used other software to configure and “build” virtual control systems using drag and drop, graphical tools. Drop your component on the drawing, edit its attributes, draw lines to connect it with other “blocks” or components to describe interconnections and signal flow. Very discoverable. Very intuitive. Like using Visio, but the blocks all are hardware or hardware modules and they all actually do something when the drawing is ‘compiled.’ This POS has none of that. Reinvent the wheel. But this time, it’s square, and only rolls when the surface it contacts has the right shape.

Bah. I’m not a programmer for reasons that should be obvious. We got it done, and my client is back up and running again. Fighting the tools is teh sux tho.

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Today I’ve got some pickups to do. There is lots of stacked up domestic bliss waiting too. Should be a full day. Longer and fuller if it’s raining.

But I’ll have some more stuff for the stacks, some more hobby stuff, and some more radio stuff both to use and to sell. Those are good things.

Kinda like stacks. Good to have. Useful.

nick
Today

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Tues. Nov. 26, 2024 – more “vacation” work to do…

Cool and clear, but supposed to be warmer than the last couple of days later on. It was another beautiful day. Sun was warm, and there was a nice breeze.

I mostly worked on getting the dockhouse back together. More insulation and wainscotting was installed. More electrical was replaced. I did change a couple of things, and added an outlet to the wall that didn’t have one. We’re not quite code compliant, but we’re closer than we were. One more day and I should be done with the work I can do until I get the base board and chair rail molding.

If I finish, I’ll switch to networking, or the vent fans for the baths, and kitchen. Wife is working from home, and Starlink is mostly adequate. The latency messes with her VPN and the servers/databases at her office. Plus it’s not as fast as the fiber at home, so her expectation needs a bit of calibration…

Dinner was bambi burgers courtesy of my fishing buddy. He got a nice buck this week so there might be more coming my way soon. Kids love it. He mixes beef brisket into the ground venison for burgers and chili. It’s very tasty.

I’m making progress on my list, but the pace is still slow. Hopefully I have enough time.

And enough stacked.

nick

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Tues. Nov. 5, 2024 – a day that will live in infamy…

And it will be a damp, dreary day. Maybe. Depending on where you are. Yesterday the forecast called for rain, and we got it on the west side of town. On the east side it was sunny and warm. Until it rained out of the clear blue sky. That happened to me several times as I drove all over town. And most of the rain was fairly light squalls. Some places got plenty and pretty steady, but the high winds kept the weather moving around for most of Houston. I kinda expect today to be similar.

Started the day with my volunteering at the kid’s school. That ate a couple of hours but real progress has been made and I think they have a good starting point to work from. I’ll end up back there a couple more times I’m sure, but I’m not doing much until after they get through this performance.

Did a couple of pickups, but the rain kept me from doing my dropoff. Maybe today if it’s clear. Then it was kid taxi service and leftovers for dinner.

I’m getting tired of writing about not getting my stuff accomplished, I’m sure you guys are getting tired of hearing about it. I’m rationalizing it as a counter to the other prepper blogs where they are always trying a new recipe, doing a gear review, or reporting on homestead life… yeah, that’s it, I’m a counter balance…

I will be voting today. I encourage everyone to vote, no matter their politics. If you are undecided or don’t care, vote for Trump. He’s the only non-politician to run in decades, with a real chance, and that alone should get your vote. Will he be effective? Will he be able or allowed to do the things he’s promised? Dunno. Most of them don’t deliver on any promises (first 100 days to solve the “healthcare crisis” anyone??) but he delivered Supreme Court justices that have a Constitutional orientation and that has a chance to shape the USofA for decades. It’s a needed swing of the pendulum. The body politic has swung too far to the left, and has to swing back toward the middle, or things WILL come apart.

I think they’ll come apart anyway, but maybe this way it won’t be as ugly.

That said, my prediction is the deep state abandons kamel, because someone realizes the cheat will have to be too big, and they can just wait 4 years… and Trump wins. Then the economy gets crashed. Don’t think that’s possible? What if the Federal Reserve, which is NOT a government agency, raises interest rates 2, 3, or even just 4 points? They blame Trump for the resulting problems, blame the right for the Left’s violence, and run a Jesus candidate in ’28. I can make an arguement either way at all of the inflection points in any scenario I can come up with.

Maybe they don’t CARE if everyone knows the fix was in. They didn’t seem to last time. So the cheat is massive, undeniable, and their stance is “suck it, btiches”. — Civil war, cold or hot, results.

Maybe there are enough big money people to keep any financial shenanigans in line, and the economy gets a Trump boost. The left won’t allow that to go unpunished so expect violence. Civil war- or just constant terrorism and insurgency. Bombings, fires, riots. Infrastructure destruction… BLM and antifa were training actions. They are funded and organized, they have training cadre with experience.

I don’t see any scenario where things are better after the election, no matter who “wins”. Heck maybe Kamel is their fall guy, so they can go back to white men when they’re done blaming her for the economic collapse and sectarian violence that erupts. That would be an outcome I don’t think many people have considered…

There will be violence. There will be disruption. There will likely be death and privation. People on both sides have been gearing up and have been drawing lines in the sand. People on both sides are radicalized. All that energy is crying for a release.

And don’t forget that our enemies will work for their own benefit- while US attention turns inward, all hell could break loose internationally, which WILL affect us as supply chain issues… and foreign entanglements. Lots of money to be made in war, and war is a traditional way to reset your currency and repudiate your debts.

Could be I’m just a doomer and it will all be fine. Good luck with that. I’m working to make sure we get through this coming time and emerge safe and sound, and maybe even better. I’ve been encouraging all of you to take whatever steps you think are prudent, and I hope you have. There are still Romans in Rome. Mongols in China. And Brits in the UK. We’ll still be here when it is all in the past. Some of us anyway.

The ship of State doesn’t turn on a dime, and this great country has “a lot of ruin in it”. Timing the collapse is as hard as timing the markets.

Be ready for tomorrow, and one year from now, and 5 years from now, and the rest of your life…

And stack, because that is one thing you can control…

nick

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Fri. Aug. 2, 2024 – enough slackin’, time for work

Hot, still and again. But it’s the humidity that is killing me. Just standing still outside, in the shade, with a breeze, and I had sweat trickling down my spine and sternum yesterday. My thermometer said 101F, in mixed sun and shade. Dunno what the actual RH was but it felt like 95%. Probably get that again today.

I didn’t do any work during the day yesterday. I spent several hours just sitting and talking with my buddy up here. I did do some of it while moving some of the stuff out of my truck bed, and sweating with that little exertion, so I feel like I made the correct call about doing any work outdoors. I still could have done some stuff inside though.

Late in the day I did the string trimming, and I ended up blurry and soaked to the skin with sweat. Had to shower and it took a while to cool down. I was dumb, and pushed just a tiny bit too far. Good warning for taking it easier though.

Today I’ll be unloading the rest of the truck, picking up some posts I bought up here to use for dock repair, and doing some other stuff, indoors with A/C, as a break. I might even do laundry.

That should be enough to wear me out. The humidity is crippling. Well, very limiting at the least.

Working to improve my situation… and stacking stuff against future need. Like most days.

nick

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Thur. Aug. 1, 2024 – time marches on, gonna be school starting up soon…

Hot and humid, but first merely warm and humid. Supposed to be clear for a few more days, so the sun will heat it up soon enough.

I spent yesterday fixing my mower, and cutting the grass. I did my yard, and the HOA park next door. Took a long time as I had to go slow and take less than full swaths so I didn’t bog down the mower. Grass was really tall and thick.

Today I’ll probably trim and blow to finish the yardwork. Might try to burn some of the slash pile. Will find some projects that don’t involve baking my brain later in the day…

The world continues to get weirder, and march to war. Anyone got a good article about increased export controls? Heard someone mention it in passing as part of the difficulty for their business in this economy. Depending one what’s restricted, I’ll add it to my list of indicators that war is coming.

War or not, preps are a good thing.

nick

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Tues. July 30, 2024 – Still home, but not forever…

Sunny and hot. Again. Dripping sweat hot. Again. Summer is still here.

Yesterday I started my day sweating in a storage unit. Got that job done, and decided to see my main auctioneer. They are still swamped with their own items, so I’m still holding off bringing them more.

Hit the Goodwill bins on my way home. Didn’t get much, but did pick up a couple of things for me, and a couple for the auction. Went to dinner with my sibling, and had a nice chat. W and the Ds are at her parents’ house for the rest of the week, while I’m headed to the BOL to work.

So today I’ve got pickups to make, supplies to buy, a truck to load, and a dog to drop off at a friend’s house. Then I can head out. By the time I get all that done, I might sleep here and head up later. I don’t want to shift another day, as it’s easy to slip the days… and I don’t know if we’ll have a sunny day later. Or in theory, I could take the wife’s minivan…

I just hope I am not dripping sweat the whole day.

I’ve added a couple of solar panels and an inverter or two to the stacks. I’m bidding on an inverter/charge controller and another panel today. I want to start slapping some sort of solar power system together, so I can start finding the unknown unknowns… as solar has moved up my list. I still need a good source for batteries though. Several of my lead acid leftovers no longer take a charge. Something is sure to pop up soon.

And I’ll stack some more when it does. Stacking is what I do.

nick

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Tues. July 23, 2024 – doing my civic duty…

Hot and humid. Got some rain in the afternoon yesterday which cooled things down a bit, depending on what part of town you were in. The area around the BOL reported about 4 inches in one hour… lots of regional and local variation in weather in the Lonestar state. I got a lot while driving around, but almost nothing at home.

Spent the morning poking at my non-prepping hobby club website. Learned some things. Got good tech support from both hosts, voice with india at homestead.com and chat with [somewhere probably not the USA] at bluehost.com. Both addressed my immediate issues although bluehost did a bunch of stuff without asking or telling me what he was doing. I had to figure it out afterwards. (he cleared my 301 redirects, and one of them was still needed.)

There are a lot of quirks in the whole, domain registrar/internet hosting service/SSL issuers/wordpress landscape. I’ve got one external link that gets a “/” appended to it, which breaks it. Dunno if it’s wordpress or my browser “helping” but it only happens with that one link. Had to add a trailing space to the xxxxx.pdf link to keep it from happening. And when I uploaded the xxx_xxx_xxx.pdf to my file system at the host, (to avoid having to have the external link and getting the security warning) something stripped out the “_”s in the file name which I didn’t notice, which broke the linking… found that and added them back in to fix it.

And after straightening out the residual redirects at the old host, I eventually discovered that somehow the old site had one nameserver changed to bluehost. A script must have done it when I changed the nameservers for the subdomain that I eventually transferred to the new host, bluehost… that’s been screwing me up since the change, I just didn’t know what was screwing me. Hopefully today everything will have propagated.

Because last night the site didn’t work at all on old IE. No idea why. Don’t really care, but someone might still be using it. Works fine on Firefox on windows and mint linux. And mostly works on chromium on linux.

———————-
During my troubleshooting I was running tracert and noticed that the second hop outbound is always followed by 3 or 4 timeouts before it continues. I think ATT fiber, which is really good old lightspeed.sbcglobal.net underneath, has an issue somewhere…

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms dsldevice.attlocal.net [192.168.1.254] 2 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 172-14-48-1.lightspeed.hstntx.sbcglobal.net [172 .14.48.1] 3 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 71.149.23.112 4 * * * Request timed out. 5 * * * Request timed out. 6 * * * Request timed out. 7 7 ms 7 ms 7 ms 32.130.16.255 8 * * * Request timed out. 9 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms 141.101.74.203 10 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms host77.ipowerweb.com [66.235.2xx.xxx] The 7th hop is always the same to the 4th quad then more hops... and there are usually several timeouts before it finally starts working toward the destination. Something regional at both ends that is broken?? They may still have sites down from the storms, they have temp gennies still connected to boxes in nearby neighborhoods. ------------- I am learning things. I wish I wasn't. I've got plenty else to do. And today, I'm doing my civic duty and reporting for jury service. City of Houston courts this time. The summons says it will take all day and to bring a lunch. Joy. But that's part of being a good citizen, participating in the process. I just have a particular aversion to stripping off all my weapons and tools and then walking around downtown. Oh well. We'll see how it goes. While I'm reading a book in the jury room, y'all should be stacking so you don't end up lacking... nick

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