Towels redux

by

I’m not sure if this is evidence that I have been getting more particular about tidying as I age, or that if I had a wife: she would have buried me in the yard by now for driving her mad with such actions. Also, I blame Google search results and Mari Kondo for inspiring this solution.

Standing towels

The brown towel being used to dry stuff is representative of most of my kitchen towels, basically from the ‘last’ time I had moved. The red was originally meant to rotate with them but rather spent most of its life in my changing closet towel shelf. This time it’s ended up my front line towel for hand washing. I forget how old the white one is, but it was found in the utilities and got a trip through the washer with the rest before being appointed mess duty.

Hmm, this makes me wonder if the coffee tray repurposed from organizing my bathroom counter (drawers ftw!) might make a useful towel wrangling, or if it’s better reserved for my red tea set.

25 years and moving on

by

About twenty five years ago, I wondered how well Internet Connection Sharing might work. Well, I did see it work for about 5 minutes until I hit the power cycle test. Then I remembered it’s been that many years without any experience showing that windows should be used as a piece of routing infrastructure.

The first experiment resulted in losing Remote Desktop to Cream and having to fetch an HDMI cable and juggle over my keyboard and mouse. Okay, that’s fair enough, it was a 50/50 shot if I was clicking share on the right interface.

Second experiment actually worked great. Sharing the wireless interface caused Rimuru to gain itself an acceptable DHCP response and route traffic through Cream at 192.168.137.1 and was placed on a similar subnet, complete with access to the one true gateway. Cream’s fan when into hyperdrive but otherwise it was effective.

Third experiment was a fireball. Decided to reboot Cream and verify that it came up, it is my file server after all. At which point everything ceased working and regardless of actions taken, Rimuru can’t get a response from Cream. The only way that Rimuru seems to regain network access through Cream’s Ethernet port is to break out Shion, remote to Cream over the wireless, and toggle the sharing property off and on again on the Wi-Fi interface.

So I think I can say that ICS is a good ad-hoc solution. The kind where you’re in a closet and need an Ethernet to wireless thing and don’t have a Raspberry Pi handy, except most laptops no longer come with wired network adapters. Having failed the great reboot test, I am declaring it ineffective for my purposes versus switching to a mesh network.

Ya know, I’m reminded that letting Cream remain on Windows 10 instead of wiping it out for a load of FreeBSD or Debian was in itself an experiment. Yeah, I guess asking more than Plex and SMB was too much for this experiment. But I suppose I’ve gotten a lot of use out of this little NUC. Even if there’s been plenty of times I’ve wanted to turn it into creamed corn.

Two yeses and a no

by

No, I didn’t need to buy new kitchen towels.

Yes, I bought these because they’re pretty.

Yes, all my old kitchen towels are pretty as a brick through a window.

The L-Shaped Beast

by

The new desk is now largely operational, although it’s going to be a while before a proper chair mat arrives.

It’s amazing having the room to pull the desk out enough to be able to access cables. Not to mention, you know, having an actual study instead of a tiny ass desk crammed next to a couch or a bed.

I’ve made use of my host of binder clips to help secure cabling and keep it mostly out of sight, while taking advantage of the space to have a much easier time swapping cables between Rimuru (desktop) and Shion (laptop). Unlike my old desk, the monitor arm even has enough room to clamp on the desk instead of getting all edgy, lol.

Amusingly to me, Rimuru doesn’t connect to Wi-Fi despite it being a feature of the replacement motherboard. So for right now the gaming focus will likely remain on Steam Deck. In any case, Shion is happy as a clam and gets decent 5 Ghz everywhere in the building. In the long term, I might see if my aging Asus plays nice with younger models since it supports their mesh mode or just wait until Wi-Fi 7 is a thing.

Anyway, I’ve rather missed having an actual desk space with mouse, monitor, and keyboard. Shion and Nerine serve me well for most computer tasks outside of gaming, but there are times where the dire lack of places to sit and work is irksome. For bonus points the L-shaped beast provides ample room for all my stuff and provides a similar layout to my space at work.

by

Watching this, I’m reminded that Caroline is both crazy and awesome.

Also the beginning of the video is pretty damned perfect.

It also covers quite a few areas, worth watching IMHO. Different people will react in different ways and pressure points when living alone, like for example one of mine is the side effect of having to do everything yourself. It causes me to put more focus on cutting up house work into smaller tasks and in my experience, often makes for more negativity when life is closer to hurricane mode than pouring.

Actually, this reminds me: I should probably buy some shorts for working around the house 😅.

Fine print

by

In taking a gander at the fine print on my home insurance, I’m honestly not sure if it’s genius or horrifying, some of the details that have been encoded about the perils insured against and those excluded. In any case, I’m really glad it covers the things I’d be interested in, and that I didn’t grow up to be a claims agent or something like that because I’d go crazy Catch-22 style.

For example, if a passing drone was to malfunction and fire off an anti-tank missile at the dwelling, this should be covered in the sense of ‘Aircraft’ including both space craft and self propelled missiles and other text on the subject. But pretty much anything that can be construed as an act of war is not, so if it was an invading power or civil war instead of a accident the insurance company could say tough.

And then there’s the whole definition that the discharge of a nuclear weapon is excluded and even an accidental discharge of a nuke will be considered a war like act for insurance purposes. On one hand, I’m not sure you can blame folks for encoding that in a policy this side of the Cuban missile crisis but on the other hand, I kind of giggle snorted from the horror. But to be fair while “Explosions” are an insured against peril, a nuclear discharge may be a bit much. Also I’d like to think most people would have bigger problems in the event of such an incident than filing claims.

I can never tell if the world is better or worse off that I can’t doodle the strange and random funny junk that my mind can visualize…..

Breakfast for dinner and gas on the range

by

After executing breakfast for dinner, I’m reminded that if I ever had to teach someone to cook, why I’d use eggs as an early lesson: they’re easy. Also reminded that a tamogoyaki pan has been on my wish list for quite a few years now, and that making eggs are one of the few times that I prefer non-stick cookware.

Pretty much if you can avoid putting egg shells in then pan: you can scramble or fry eggs. Quality may vary wildly between how fluffy and rubber like they turn out, but by and large they’re idiot proof. About the time they’ve started coagulating you probably hit temperature enough for them to be relatively safe to eat, and a new cook is more likely to overcook eggs and have to scrub the pan than they are to generate food poisoning from overly runny eggs. Making eggs are pretty tolerant of being cooked quickly at high heat or slower at low heat, and coagulate rapidly enough that it’s a good lesson in “Hey kiddo, don’t walk off while you’re cooking!” Plus if you add enough cheese, you’ll probably have something edible unless you chip a tooth 😅

Having spent a life around electric ranges, I’m beginning to understand why my mother and most folks I’ve known prefer gas stoves. At first it felt like relearning how to boil and simmer all over but I greatly appreciated the speed savings for making pasta, my first home cooked meal here. The rapid heat control is rather nice for making eggs, especially if you tend to favor the hot and fast approach to scrambling. Making me happy that my first eggs cooked on gas came out both nice and quickly. Plus, compared to the stoves my mother described (or worse, learned to cook on back in the ’50s), any gas range made in this millennium is an auto igniting electric. So even a schmuck like me can use one, lol.

A good first

by

Today’s the first time outside of gaming contexts that I’ve encountered someone familiar with Metal Gear Solid. Wow, it’s only taken about 20 to 25 years….lol

Wi-Fi signal strength

by

In Googling about how devices classify the signal strength to the number of bars on a Wi-Fi icon, I came across this wonderful page from Dong Knows Tech. I think that I might clip this to my notes for ease of sharing, as it gives a nice balance between what someone may want to know without going to deep into the maths. Which over the years, I’ve mostly learned to just pay attention to as doubling and halving of power, because smarter people than me created radio stuff. That page also gives good re-enforcements for the less savvy, that while more dBm is better the difference between two values in dBm isn’t a straight line: it’s curvy. I especially like how it explains the difference between broadcast power and received signal, because most normal people don’t use negative numbers as often as us code monkeys do.

Also was helpful for me since I’ve now learned how to bring up the data on my Mac without having to pop over to system information. Sitting in my dining area off the kitchen, Shion gets a respectable enough -74 to -77 dBm — now consider, my 10 year old Asus is literally across the house and on the second floor. Making me at the furthest point from my router that doesn’t involve sitting in front of the fire place or stepping outside onto the patio. My dining area is actually the worst point inside despite the fireplace being further from the router, because the stairs and kitchen cabinets lay in between: that is to say, my fireplace has better line of sight but worse distance to my router; my dining area has shorter distance but more obstacles in terms of pipes, studs, and drywall, and you know an actual floor/ceiling instead of just looking over the upstairs railing. The dBm value is a good read of this, as standing in front of my fireplace, Shion reads about -62 to -67 dBm.

For me, I’m finding that the 5 Ghz Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) from my old RT-AC68 is good enough that I am getting usable signal virtually everywhere in my home. On the 2.4 Ghz band, devices show full Wi-Fi bars pretty much everywhere when scanning for networks. Most of my devices are on 5 Ghz, so I’m finding a lack of reason to shift. I was a little concerned about what the modem’s location would do to signal if my router is next to it.

And then I remembered, I used to have to put an entire apartment building between me and my Asus before my phone’s Wi-Fi crapped out 😂

Coffee

by

There is nothing like the sweet bliss of coffee in the morning. I almost wish I had brought my phone downstairs, I’d grab one of my smile 😄