Triage

 

What do you do when a 16 year old laptop shows signs of loosing critical functions?

I'm not talking about the little things like:

The SD card reader not working. - The contacts in that thing wore out years ago and I've got a workaround for it.

The battery has worn out so bad I can only unplug it from shore power for about 15 minutes. - Hasn't been that much of a hassle since the laptop spends 99% of its time sitting on my desk out in the barn whereI can keep it plugged into shore power.

The finish is flaking off, and now the case itself is getting worn away from countless hours of sweaty palms. Sweaty because, in case you didn't notice, the laptop lives out in the un-airconditioned barn where it can get a little warm in the Texas summer. - Other than little black flakes stuck to the heel of my hand, no big deal.

Support for Windows 7 ended in 2020. - Actually a relief. If it ain't broke just leave me the fuck alone with your damn updates!

Or the fact that the screen has two horizontal rows of dead pixels (just below the password box), - I'm just carefull to not fold the screen down anymore in case that makes it worse.

All minor little things I can live with.

But now a more critical issue has popped up. The keyboard is failing.

At first it wasn't too bad. Occasionally I would have to re-enter a password with 'view password' turned on, or go back and re-input a value in a spreadsheet cell.

I eventually learned to use the keypad to enter numbers rather than the top row which seemed especially bad. But that only helped for just so long as things gradually got worse.

I have one particular password that is 17 characters long, about typical for me since I was trained to be very security conscious. But on top of that it's a double-entry password setup which requires me to input the password correctly twice before encrypting the backup. To make it even more interesting, there's no 'show password' option so, while I can see asterisks popping up with successful keystrokes, I can't tell if the keystroke was properly interpreted, which was now a new issue with my old, abused, and decrepit keyboard. I kept count recently and it took eight trys, 16 entries, to successfully encrypt the backup.

--- OK, time for one of my password rants here. (I have several tants in my password/security box tucked up on the top shelf of the closet, but today am only pulling out one and dusting it off.)

Security policies are always harping on and on about using a mix of upper-case and lower-case letters with numbers and special characters thrown in, all in an effort to confound password crackers.

That's just bullshit. Well, it's at least a little bit bullshit. The major exception to bullshitedness would be if you use proper words or proper nouns as a password - which you shouldn't be doing anyway since the English Wiktionary has all those words and many of the proper nouns in its 1.5 million entries. All of which are in convienent digital form which makes it easy to load the whole damn thing into a password cracker program. From there, depending on the platform it's running on, the craker can whip through the whole thing in minutes when testing a password - typicly one of the first things a cracker tries. In that case throwing in a special character or unusual capitalization will prevent the cracker from successfully using its initial library of words and common passwords like 1234 and password to crack the password before you can even blink. A special character or two will force the cracker to start using the brute-force algorithm which takes longer.

But my original point is, the cracker's algorithm already has to use all 94 posible keyboard characters and gives each one equal weight. Makes no difference if my password is grixos or gR8*0$, the cracker will take about the same amount of time to work either one of them out.

A more confounding strategy against crackers is password length. For example, using a sampling of all 94 posible keyboard characters, which is exactly what the cracker does by default, a 1 character password has 94 posibilities that must be checked, a 2 character password has 8836 posibilities and a 4 character password has over 78 million posible unique combinations. It's a logarithmic function, 94 to the power of (character count).

78 million sounds like a lot but a mediocre computer can run through that in minutes, a fast computer in seconds.

At 16 characters, the current recomended minimum length for a secure password, the posible combinations jump to just over 37 nonillion, thats 37 followed by 30 zeros. (I have one particularly sensitive password that is 23 characters long which is a little more than 24 tredecillion - 24 followed by 42 zeros - posible combinations. Yes, it can be cracked but would take a huge amount of computer resources and time, so would be extremely expensive and not worth the bother because there's lots of easier passwords to crack. Thieves will choose the unlocked car over my locked car with security system warning light flashing in the windshield most every time.)

So the cracker doesn't know that I'm not using any numbers or special characters in my 16 character password and still has to assume all 94 posible characters in each of the 16 slots.

BTW How the hell can someone memorize a 23 character password?!

My method for creating secure yet memorizable passwords is not that hard. I just take a phrase that means something to me, but obviously avoid commonly known things like Hamlet's 'to be' soliloquy, and build my password out of the first letters of each word. An example I used to use when teaching this stuff was GutbocfueS,awat0 It's a 16 character password that appears to be unmemorizable gibberish until you type it in while chanting (in your head of course, not out loud) 'Grandmother used to bake oatmeal cookies for us every Saturday and we ate them outside'. Capitalizing Grandmother and Saturday is a no-brainer and changing the final 'o' to a zero is pretty natural. Throw in a special character, the comma, at a natural if not gramaticly correct spot, and you have a password that not only hits all the security cryteria, but you can remember it without having to write the damn thing down on a sticky-note tucked under your keyboard.

As for "guessing" passwords like you see all to often on TV, it's usually not quite that easy, but does happen because people seem to think they're being clever using a significant date - most of which are public record, or a dog's name - which is plastered out there on social media somewhere.

I could go on here but - - - well - - - nope, nope, I'm not a certified cyber-security specialist, at least not any more, so I'm done.

--- Back to the triage.

At this point of fail-age (that increasingly dodgy keyboard) any normal person would wipe the laptop - not just delete files but overwrite everything - (in my case all data actually lives on encrypted USB sticks, not on the internal drive, so wiping consists of removing the sticks, which also activates the encryption), scrap it, and Amazon a new one.

But my laptop has some irreplaceable features. Some things I would have to pay a licensing fee to replace. Some which can not be replaced, and some which can now only be licenced via a bank-account-sucking subscription and are only accessable online, which is not an option at our internet-less house.

Things like Sketchup Make 2017. A free, offline, 3D cad program that's no longer available because a cloud-based subscription service has replaced it.

Delorme Topo mapping system which doesn't exist anymore since Garmen bought them out and scrapped all the Delorme electronic products.

Adobe Photoshops Elements which came with a camera I bought decades ago.

And Microsoft Office which is perpetually licenced on this particular laptop as a home-use version through my former job. I haven't used Project, Power Point, or Outlook since I retired, and haven't used Word all that much lately, but I use the crap out of Excell.

Yes, I can get a new basic laptop for $500 to $800 dollars. MS Home Office, which includes Excell, for a one time payment of one to two hundred dollars depending on the version. There are alternative free off-line 3D cad programs out there if I'm willing to deal with the learning curve. I can get a fresh Photoshop Elements license for $100 every three years. And do I really need a mapping program on my laptop anymore when I already have 3 or 4 different ones on my phone?

It's a given that one day I'll have to bite the bullet and do something like that,

but for now, for less than $12, I Amazoned a generic USB keyboard, sat it right on top of the laptop's failing keyboard, plugged it, and that quick had a fully functional keyboard again.

The USB hub I bought with it so I didn't have to lose one of the laptop's 3 onboard USB ports to the keyboard, one of which is permanently occupied by a mouse dongle because this old laptop has no bluetooth capability, cost me a couple dollars more than the keyboard!

So, back in action - at least until the next failure.

Getting a Little Claustrophobic

After the unusually wet early summer we had and the improved growing conditions that came with it

things were getting downright claustrophobic around here a few months later! (I could have picked a better vantage point for this photo. That corner of the concrete pad on the right is actually on the edge of a drop-off that's more significant than the photo reads. If that bench was down on the ground in the middle of the photo the vegetation would show as a foot taller than the back of the bench.  Oh well, too late for a do-over now.)

A point (claustrophobia) that was driven home the other morning when I saw a couple of deer come up out of the pond and attempt to cross the meadow there in front of me.

Even after the usual late-summer dry spell and growth-stunting brutal temperatures, except where we keep a fire-break mowed down around the barn, much of the meadow was chest high to me, which meant chin high to the deer (we don't grow them as big here in the south because they don't need the body-mass to survive brutal winters and smaller means less energy expended, which translates to less food and other resources required, which translates into better survival rates.)

Out of deference to the polinators feasting on the bio-diverse variety of plants afforded by a meadow pretty much left to nature (sort of unusual here in cattle-country where grazing and haying call for more mono-cultured pastures) I usually don't do the annual shredding of the meadow (otherwise the surounding forest will creap in and take over) untill things have gone dorment in late November. Timing the shredding for then opens things up in time to give the spring wildflowers a chance to thrive without removing viable polinator habitat.

The other side of that pollinator coin though is that the tall plants also surpress the ground-hugging browse used by other animals, deer included.

So when I saw those poor deer hopping like rabbits, one hop at at time with a break in between to get reoriented (As prey animals they don't like not being able to see their surroundings), as they tried to cross the meadow to get to the treeline, I had to admit it was time to shred, regardless of what the calendar said, or the number of flowers still out there. (There's another flower-rich meadow on the far side of the pond that we never touch which means it's not like the pollinators would be shit-outa-luck. At least not for a other 10 - 20 years. Because we don't shred over there the meadow is slowly shrinking as the woods move back in.)

---- OK, fair warning. If you want to jump past the unneccessary details and one 'wandering off on a tangent' and get right to the point of this post, skip on down to the last two photos ----

Not being rich hobby-farmers coming out here on the weekend for a break from their big-city jobs we don't have a shiny orange Kabota ($25,000) or a hydrostatic-drive Mahindra ($26,000), or a bragging-rights green John Deer ($33,000) with their push-button controls and fancy electronic dash-boards.

I can use this photo untouched because that's Mom over 20 years ago and she's gone now.

We have a Jinma ($9000). A 1950's design built in a 1970's era factory with 4 switches (for lights we never use), 5 gauges (only 4 of which actually work), 4 foot-pedals (one a two-stage clutch with a spring strong enough to flip you right out of the un-shock-mounted seat if you're not braced just right), and 9 levers (including a shifter that takes two hands to operate).

We used to use the tractor quite a bit when we were developing the property but not so much anymore. Now it gets fired up maybe a couple times a year.

And no, the old beast doesn't actually have over 12,000 hours on it! At 3 to 4 MPH that would be 36 to 48 thousand miles all on our little 14 acres. That's insane! It's just that ever since she was about a shiny new 4 weeks old the hour meter spins like the false promises of a slot machine.

By the way, the tach hasn't worked for years either, except for about halfway through me using her this time. Then suddenly the needle jumped up right where it should be and tried to convince me it’s been working this whole time - Nope. I'm not buying it -

She spends the majority of her time chilling out in the tractor barn. Which is a pretty fancy thing to be calling that ragged out mess down there in a far corner of the meadow.

We put the tractor barn up about 22 years ago. The first structure we built on the property.

At that time this Water Oak a few feet from the back wall was a 6 foot tall, 1.5" diameter sappling and we just left it there. Now it's pushing 50' tall, is  22" in diameter,

and has been seriously abusing the barn's roof for quite some time.

But I have to give credit to Clearspan, the makers of the barn. Thought the door zippers, actually the stitching of the door zippers, failed fairly quickly, the barn fabric made it to and beyond the 15 year warranty before the translucent center panels of the roof gave in to the abuse of the Water Oak. (The solid parts of the cover, with the exception of the lower half of the door flap which the summer storms finally shredded this year, are still in great shape.)

We could have an arborist come and remove the tree, buy a new cover (the metal structure of the barn is still in remarkable condition), and pay a crew to come remove the old one and put the new one on,

but instead we just throw an old tarp we already had laying around over the vulerable bits of the tractor.

For a long time I didn't even do this, but a couple of years ago when I dragged the beast out of hibernation the transmition was stuck in 2nd gear (it's a shuttle-shift so I still had my choice of forward or reverse). Apparently water coming through the tattered barn roof had infiltrated it's way into the gearbox and rusted everything tight.

There used to be a fiberglass sun-shade on the tractor, see previous photo of Mom, that deflected the water away but a while back I ran it into one too many low branches and finally broke it to where it was trying to use the top of my head as a support. And, like everything else about this tractor, that thing is heavy!

It's a testament to the enduring utility of the generously sized square-cut teeth, loose tolerances, beafy shifter forks, no fancy sycro's or clutch plates, in other words of the 'crude' engineering of the old days, that after draining the milky oil/water crud out of the transmision, topping it up with fresh gear oil and driving it around for a couple of hours, everything broke loose, giving me back all three gears.

Reminds me of those early 20th century, crude, noisy, dirty, but supremely reliable - and repairable - engines used to power irrigation pumps, oil wells, small factories, generators, ships, ferries, pretty much anything you could think of, in all corners of the world. Some of which are still running today a century later.

In fact in the 80's I used to drive past one of these still powering an oil well, probably running directly off the sweet crude it was lifting out of the ground, near US 77 somewhere between Norman and Pauls Valley in Oklahoma. Once running with that distinctive thump of the single cylinder firing every second and a half, it was left on its own to do its thing around the clock, getting checked on every few days or so.

EMP will take out our vehicles, the washing machine, our phones, WIFI, banking, traffic lights, smart watches, but our tractor will still be running!

Damn! OK, I'm back. Went so far off on a tangent there I had to ask for directions back. Something that took a few more points off my man-card.

So anyway, back to claustrophobia.

To fix the issue I loaded the tractor battery, which lives on a battery-keeper in the main barn, onto the lawnmower, - what? You didn't think I was going to carry a heavy-ass group 27 battery down to the tractor barn by hand did you? -, heaved the damn thing into place (not easy at 58 pounds with the front-end loader bucket in the way), hooked it up, and with breath held, pulled the throttle open about halfway, leaned on the glowplugs for about 15 seconds, and hit the starter.

Two of the cinders were a little reluctant at first, but under the can-do insistence of the third cylinder, the frame shaking thump-hiss-hiss thump-hiss-hiss was soon converted to a sycronized, we're-ready-to-go-forever fast idle.

Shit! Now that it's started I guess I really have to do this.

"This" initially involves wrestling the mower-deck onto the tractor's 3-point

then struggling to get the PTO shaft stabbed onto the tractor's splined PTO take-off and locked in place.

This usually - always - involves a generous amount of WD40 to get the shaft-lock unstuck (the black ring turns maybe an eighth of a turn to release the lock), then, with eveything nice and slippery from that along with all the other oil and grease that oozes from old tractors, trying to get the shaft splines, flopping around on a universal joint like a newborn's head, lined up with the takeoff splines then shoving the whole thing home, all the while holding the shaft-lock ring open against a pretty damn strong spring.

To make it even more interesting, the PTO take-off shaft can 'drift' while you're screwing around down there,  especially when the gear oil is still cold, and with enough torque on it, the PTO shaft you're trying to line up with the take-off can spin the mower blades, which spins the shaft, which miss-aligns the splines, which results in a lot of grunting and cussing.

And all this has to be done while you're contorted into the space between the lower link arms and the upper link turnbuckle while trying to work around the obstruction of the take-off shield.

Yep, it would be easier if that shield were removed,  much easier. But have you ever seen something get sucked into a PTO shaft spinning at 540 RPM by a very torqy engine?! That's why there's so many one-armed farmers gathered in the morning around 'their' table at the waffle house. No thanks, I'll leave the shield on.

As usual, I eventually manage to get everything hooked up and ready.

Then it's three hours of circling, dodging trees and the two septic system cleanouts, trying not to tip the tractor over on the banks around the pond, dragging tools out (this time one of the lines on the hydraulic pump started weaping more than normal so had to be tightened, and the tailwheel of the mower deck quit castoring and had to be broken loose and regreased), keeping a close eye on the gauges, and just generally trying not to bust anything, to turn claustrophobic into this.

I barely had time to put everything away again before the deer were out there nibbling on the freshly exposed browse. 

Halloween Display is Up!

 Yep, that whole drug lab/police raid scene has been dismantled for something a little less violent and more ghoulish.

It all started

with this magic shop/haunted house

I built back when The Surgery of 2023 had temporarily reduced my lifting ability down to a handfull of popcorn. A small handfull of popcorn.

After a few years of being tucked away in storage it got drug out a couple weeks ago as the perfect starting point for a Halloween display.

But of course I couldn't just stop there!

So I Amazoned some asorted ghouls, ghosts, and other bits (I already used up a bunch of them before thinking to take this photo),

and with some paint, glue, and glitter spruced a few of them up.

Then I dug around in my Bins-of-Crap and came up with this wire-n-paper tree.

You know how there's two schools of thought about tinsel (yeah, don't ask me how tinsel made it here to Halloween because I have no idea. It just did.), the one-strand-at-a-time (and do it neatly damnit!) sticklers and the just-throw-a-handfull-at-the-damn-tree-and-call-it-done anarchist hippies?

If it would have worked I'd be with the hippies and tossed a couple of handfulls at the damn thing. But it wouldn't, so I ended up painstakingly gluing one strand at a time onto carefully selected branches untill it seemed like enough - or untill I'd had enough - I'm not really sure which it was.

Of course you can't have a Holloween tree (is that even a thing?) without buzzards (that I had to paint myself since they only came in bright-metal)

and a murder of crows.

These came in black, I just had to add some highlights and, even though you can't really see them, red eyes.

Add a base made out of some stacked foam covered with brown wrapping paper, some buzzards and crows hanging around, a few ghosts for ghoulish measure, and you have a Holloween tree! (I don't care if that's not really a thing yet, I'm starting a new tradition damnit!)

Not one to learn from experiance, I then, one persnickety strand at a time, tinseled the hell out of the haunted house and finally pumpkined, ghosted, vultured, crowed, and black-catted the crap out of it.

Things are starting to get outa control here! But that’s never stopped me before - -

OK, I'm not sure how this Christmas truck got in here but it has been commandeered by the resident witch who is taking out civilians with it.

Speaking of buzzard food - I mean eviscerated civilians - - -

And every respectable haunted house has to have a graveyard. After all, there's got to be someplace to put all those unfortunate civilians.

OK, getting closer now. (The penciled rectangle on the bench represents the inside dimensions of the display case.) 

But wait!

Poking around online I came across this Haunted Forest canvas-on-frame print, at Walmart of all places.

It's actually a quite effective backdrop in its own right,

but when did that ever stop me from meddling?

I mounted some LEDs face down on an appropriately sized circle of white, open celled foam. This acts as a diffuser, spreading the light out.

Then mounted the foam circle in just the right spot on a backer (actually just a trimmed down file folder), and mounted the backer to the back side of the haunted forest frame.

Lights off

Lights on

And the effect is quite dramatic, even if I do say so myself.

Sleaking of lights, I ended up using a lot of them in this display, my whole supply of 12V LEDs as a matter of fact, to get everything to where we were happy with it, but we think it turned out pretty well. (In my opinion the video at the end gives the best view.)

Now I need to dust off that Victorian house and start thinking about a Christmas display.

Maybe tomorrow - - -

The Hidden Costs of Autism

There are some costs to being autistic, especially when both of you in the houshold are on the spectrum, that you just don't think about - untill they happen.

The other day the drum-bearing, probably the inside bearing since it's right behind the seal which had probably been letting water slip by, on our front-load washing machine failed. No warning. No slightly unusual noise getting louder over time. Just suddenly a full-blown classic failure - the machine sounds like a jet engine during spin cycles.

A loud jet engine!

Loud enough that I couldn't deal with standing at my workbench during wash-loads, having to wander off and find something else to do untill the commotion was blissfully over.

The replacement bearing kit (two bearings and a seal) is only about $30 but the repair itself requires a full teardown/rebuild and takes an experianced person with the proper tools a good 4 - 5 hours.

Me? Longer obviously. Probably twice as long.

And I just didn't feel like tackling that job.

Because of the labor involved getting it repaired on site by a 'professional' is around $450. Not great, but still about half the (today's) cost of the machine. 

But then again neither one of us is emotionally prepared to have a stranger in our house for that long (The Wife usually goes for a drive when this is unavoidable but this would require a full-blown road-trip!)

 So instead we scraped our 12 year old ($700), otherwise perfectly functional washer and bought a brand new one ($1000). Not the most financially responsible course of action, but one that we were willing to pay for because was a lot easier on us emotionally since the delivery people are only here for 5 minutes. 

Yes, The Wife still makes herself scarce when we hear the truck at the top of the driveway. But I can deal with it reasonably well because it's a technical interaction rather than a social one and those hardworking independent contractors have many other deliveries to make before earning enough for their families to make it through another day, so they don't hang around any longer than neccessary.

That was 24 hours ago.

By my count the new washer has done 4 loads already. The US average for a family is 6 loads per week. Around here we easily hit a weekly average closer to 10-12.

Sidebar: I know the failed washer was 12 years old because, looking back through our water consumption data (we have a meter, a private meter for our own use, on the well.), 12 years ago we suddenly went from an average of 110-120 gallons per day to 60-70 when we replaced our rusted out top-load machine with a much more eco-freindly front-load.