Author: Dale

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It pays to shop around…

I need to upgrade the wifi router in the house.  The old Linksys WRT54G has been working for years, but it just can’t handle HD video streams.  So, I went shopping for a new Linksys E4200 V2, which is supposed to be the baddest, fastest one out there.  Dual band, 900 MBPS and all that.

Best Buy has the E4500, but I don’t want that one — it requires a constant connection to Cisco.  WTF?  Newegg was the same, only the E4500.  No thanks.  So I looked on eBay and Amazon.  It seems that they go for $125 and up new, and around $80 or so on up used.  I’m not in the mood to screw with someone else’s used router, so I was looking only at new and factory-refurbed.

Then I find the Linksys on line store…  factory refurb, 30 day warranty, $79.99 with free shipping.   Sold.  Anyone want a nice, current generation WRT54G already loaded with DD-WRT?  I have one for sale cheap.  🙂

 

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A nice trip to dinner

Flew up to Norfolk tnis evening with Steve (my brother in law, just in case someone other than a family member ever reads this). The flight up was nice and smooth, and I managed a nice greaser of a landing. We taxied over and had dinner at Barnstormers. We flew back to Millard and fought the cold to get the plane tucked in for the night.

Good weather, good flying, good food and good company. Can’t ask for much better than that!

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Greylisting for the win!

I’ve seen a dramatic drop-off in email spam since implementing a greylist program a couple of months back.   As odd as it may sound, greylisting works by initially rejecting all new incoming email with a response indicating a temporary rejection.   A “real”, legitimate mail server will retry sending the email after a few minutes.   A spam-generating virus program running on a hijacked computer generally will not.   As a result, nearly all spam email just simply goes away…   and none of the “good” mail gets lost.

The system keeps track of senders that have successfully delivered mail, and adds them to a whitelist of “known good” senders so that future mail from those senders doesn’t get delayed.

This system has allowed me to retire a very long list of filter rules to try to catch spam.   The amount of time I have to spend dealing with it has dropped from a couple of hours per week to a few minutes per week.   It’s not perfect — but then, nothing is.   My employer spends tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on anti-spam technology, and I still seen one get through every once in a while.   For zero cost and near zero hassle, this works pretty well.

 

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Just too cool.

I was using my new-ish Owon DS7102V scope tonight to troubleshoot a problem with a PicoKeyer firmware function.  After I got it fixed, I took a screen shot to show just how impressive the capture buffer is on this thing…

Yes, that’s “DE N0XAS” in Morse code, sent at maybe 15 WPM.  I set the scope up for single-shot capture, then saved the screen image to a USB drive.  Suh-weet.  I don’t think I posted these before, but here are some from when I was testing the ID-O-Matic II audio.

The first shows the audio wave form — a nice approximation of a sine wave.  The second shows the scope’s FFT function, with two cursors (the vertical purple lines) showing the fundamental at 800 Hz, and the second harmonic at twice that.  The third shows the cursors, now horizontal, showing that the second harmonic is about 33 dB down from the fundamental.  Again…  suh-weet.  Not at all bad for a sub-$400 scope.

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Night currency

I hadn’t been out flying for a month again, for various reasons. The past week has been pretty much constant high winds; 18 kt gusting to 26 (that’s 21-30 MPH)   was not uncommon from sunup to sundown and through the night. Finally this morning was nice, with about a 6K wind according to the METAR.

I flew a short distance to Scribner (KSCB), which was built during WWII as a bomber and P-47 training field. It was also camouflaged so well that visiting pilots couldn’t find it. One of the old runways served as a drag strip for many years, but that’s long gone now as well. The long runway is 17/35, the short one is 12/30. As there was no other traffic around, I purposely picked 17 to get in some crosswind landing practice. Then I headed back to Millard for a few laps around the pattern, and by this time I had a choppy (though not abusive) crosswind there as well.

I turned the plane over to another club member, then came back about half an hour after sunset to start preflight again. As I started my taxi from the hangars, it occurred to me that not only had I not done any night takeoffs or landings since May, I’d never flown at night without a CFI. Oh well. Conditions were nice, about an 8 knot wind straight down runway 12. I did four laps, full stop and taxi back each time, and each one was better than the one before. I did a short-field on the third lap and soft-field on the fourth… held the nosewheel off for close to a hundred yards after touchdown.

So, just under 3 hours in the plane for me today, I’m legal to carry passengers after dark again, and another Nebraska win in the books. Doesn’t get much better than this.

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Fixing my Droid 3 global keyboard

Recently the keyboard on my Droid 3 has been misbehaving. I finally took a little bit of time to clean it out with some alcohol and compressed air. Works like a charm!

Of course, then I took a little time to play with voice recognition. I may not use the keyboard again. I did this entire post using voice recognition and did not touch the keyboard other than to make a few punctuation corrections.   I also used the new word press Android app — it’s a little buggy, but seems to work okay for the most part.