Category Archives: rant

So Cal Fire Perspective

personal, rant

Fire on the I-5 Camp Pendelton
The headlines on the East coast newspapers read something like: ‘California Coast ON FIRE’ & ‘SoCal Burns!’ :| You can imagine the 1.2 million phone calls this generated as opposite coast families call in a panic.

California is a big ass state. ;) If you were in Malibu and drove to the city of San Diego – it’s about 150 miles. That’s a trip from Boston, MA to Bridgeport, CT. Orange County (where 1 major fire is burning) is only 200 square miles smaller then the state of Rhode Island. San Diego County (where several major fires are burning) is 20% smaller then Connecticut. San Bernardino County (I-15 fires and still in ‘So-Cal’) is as large as the states of New Hampshire and Vermont combined. That’s 20,000 square miles, or 12,800,000 acres. The so cal fires are roughly 200,000 acres burned so-far. Yes, that is a lot – but the whole coast is far from ‘ON FIRE!’

Contrary to this argument is the above picture that we took from the I-5 heading down into San Diego on Tuesday night. They shut the highway down shortly after to start a back-burn. Camp Pendleton is just miles of wild desert brush. Because no homes, property, or military personnel were in danger they just let this fire burn itself out. Here it certainly looked as if the coast was on fire. Three miles of it anyway.

I pushy, no workie.

ham radio, rant

I bought an Icom IC-2200H mobile 2 meter radio right after I got my license. It was the same price new as many of the used ones shipped via ebay. I’m still not sure why 3 year old radios sell for $20 less then brand new ones :confused: – and why people don’t take into account the $16.95 worth of shipping. For $4.05 more, you’re better off with a warranty – here’s why:

Several times when I was just getting the hang of using the radio I would push to transmit and nothing would happen. I would look down at the radio and be like – huh? Then I would push to transmit again and it would key up no problem for the rest of the day. I chalked this up to my inexperience with the unit.

A few months went by and it did it three times on one occasion. I was having a nice conversation on my way down to the shop. I was talking away and I heard the other person on the repeater over the radio key up and say something like: “Are you still there? Did you hit a dead spot??” While I was squeezing my mic and chatting away to no one apparently. “What the hell?” I keyed the mic up again and described my problems. Later in the QSO it did it twice more! At this point I knew something was wrong and it wasn’t my new license.

I brought it back to the good people of HRO in Anaheim, CA. They tried patiently to repeat the problem while in the store. I must have keyed up 100 times on some poor simplex frequency. :| I couldn’t get it to happen under controlled conditions. This is no surprise to me as a computer technician. :p

IC-2200 Push to talk PTT fail.
I offered up a solution. If I could get a picture of it in action – would that satisfy the warranty repair folks? They agreed and for the next 3 days I drove around with my digital camera practically guaranteeing that it wouldn’t fail anytime soon. :) I left the shop and made a call on the way home to the local SOARA repeater. I looked down and there it was! Red light on the microphone – NO transmit on the display! My IC-2200H had a PTT problem.

I pulled over, snapped some shots, and went to HRO the next day. They sent it right out to Icom for me and I had it back a couple weeks later. It came back with no real explanation of what was fixed – but that something WAS repaired. So, if you have experienced this problem: 1. It’s probably not your imagination. 2. It’s NOT the microphone. 3. Be glad you spent the extra $5 on the brand new rig. 4. I hope you get it fixed as quickly as I did.

No brainer geek choice.

rant, rave

compact fluorescent bulbAbout 12 years ago compact fluorescent bulbs came on the market. About 8 years ago I replaced every light bulb in my apartment with them. Why? They run a lot cooler and use a lot less electricity. This is not saying that you should go off into some enviro-friendly psycho recycling tirade. Just stop buying incandesent light bulbs please.

I have only had 1 of those lights ‘dim’ in 12 years. It still works, but it takes too long to come up to full brightness. I just replaced it and wondered why everyone seems to still be using edison bulbs.
Of course now that I think about it. The small amount of mercury these lights require to function should probably be noted before you dispose of them…

Coal power or heavy metals – ehh, you can’t win’em all. :|

Report abuse, then ban their IP.

rant

Report Abuse?Seeing as I manage a handful of WordPress sites, I often have to deal with comment spam. When I was running MT the main problem was that I didn’t have the tools to prevent it. Key words only go so far. If you ever wanted to post about the time you tried a male enhancing drug after a trip to a Vegas whore house… :| Well – no one would be able to comment about it without mentioning 20 of those key words and getting the comment sent to spam hell.

I still have some blacklist words and some common spam words setup in WordPress. The most effective technique is closing comments after 90 days and if you have more then 1 link in your comment it goes to automatic moderation. I’ve been very happy with this setup. There is usually only a handful of comments waiting in my moderation bucket with ‘real people’ able to post on the site instantly. Only the occasional spam squeaks by and lands on the site.

Yesterday I received several notifications of new comments. I took a glance and went right to ‘action stations’. :p Twenty or so spammer comments had already been posted so I used WP’s ‘mass edit mode’ to whip them out of there quick. I then turned ‘always moderate’ back on and noticed that they were all from the same IP range. The most spam I’ve received in the last year from one location – great. :|

I went to the host website and they looked receptive to reporting abuse. I don’t know if comment spam from an IP switching bot is in their Terms of Service, but I gave it a shot. This morning another full battery of 50 comments hit my bucket. Time to ban people.

inetnum: 85.255.112.0 – 85.255.127.255
address: Inhoster
address: Poltavskij Shliax 24, Xarkov,
address: 61000, Ukraine
phone: +38 066 4633621
e-mail: support@inhoster.com
remarks: Abuse contacts: abuse@inhoster.com

Report abuse, then ban their IP… Then post all of their info on the net listing inhoster.com as spammers.
Sounds good to me. Comments are back on. :)

I updated WordPress and I’m not sure why…

rant

This was one of those upgrades where I should have checked what’s new. I should have made sure that all the new stuff I really wanted. Long blog entry short. It took me about 2 hours to disable the ‘new’ upload image thumbnailer. I never upload anything to my site that I haven’t already sized. The thumbnailer makes 192px sized photos of everything you upload (filling up your image folder with bunk). It indexes them into the database, which is nice – but how do I get the 150 OLD photos in there?? :confused: Then when you ‘drag and drop’ them into the editor it eats your hspace and vspace tags. So all of your cool thumbnailed, indexed, ID tagged pictres look dumb flush up against your text… /rant :mad:

The old upload.php is stil there – but not listed in the menu.php. I dropped it back in there and removed the inline-uploader crap from edit-form-advanced.php. Look at that! It still works! :D I then turned off the WYSIWYG editor in the options – as I’m a crotchety old man apparently.

So I finally hacked my Tivo.

creativity, rant

TivoYeah, I know – about time. :P My used Series 2 has been pretty good to me for about a year now. Just before Christmas we lost power in the middle of some heavy Tivo usage and she didn’t boot right back up. I was sitting at the ‘just a few minutes’ screen for more then a few minutes. I tried hitting the enter key on the remote. I’m still not 100% sure what that’s supposed to do. :| After some time and a reboot – it came back up.

It was a three days before our New Years WRC Party and Christine calls me from home. “The TV is black and the Tivo guy won’t come up.” I have her pull the plug and ‘reboot’ it. Tivo comes back up, but not for long. The morning of the party it takes a black screen nap again. Now I’m worried. I can’t stand just pulling the plug to turn it off, so I reach down and power cycle the UPS.

I know the Tivo is a Linux PC and I know it could be giving me WAY more information then: “Almost there! Just a few minutes…” I think the drive is probably beat, and it’s about time to crack the case anyway. I print out the Hinsdale Guide and download the MFS Tools Boot CD. As long as you can master / slave drives and type – you too can handle this.

The first task was to get the Tivo apart and get an image backup. It took some time to prepare a fat32 drive for where the image would transfer to. I forgot how long it takes a 40GB drive to format in DOS. :D Once the image was transferred, I copied it onto my new Western Digital 160GB. Unfortunately the max drive size the ‘stock’ Tivo can see is 137GB, but at $1.75 a gigabyte it’s not too much of a loss. Plus no drive really formats out to it’s ‘listed’ size, as I have several 112GB “120’s” kicking around.

So now I’m rocking a 136 hour Tivo! :D I removed the /tvbin/modemtest file so it shouldn’t hang at boot anymore, plus I don’t use the modem to connect to the Tivo service. Having a fresh drive to store 5.6 days of programming should make me stop worrying when either Christine or myself decide to grab 2 seasons of something. The next step is to load telnet and some other utilities so that I can monitor drive space and get into some other fun Tivo hacks.

Oh, and one final note: The Speed Channel can suck it. They have no plans to carry WRC this year. This is THE main reason I pay $28 a month for digital cable. I hope OLN can pick up the pace – but I’m not paying $300 a year to watch one week of Dakar… :(