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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.

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On the home stretch!

After a week or so of work, we’re getting a lot closer to being finished with the big jobs in the garage.  The floor is looking pretty good; we still have the last section to do but that should only take a day.  Lisa will be the first to get to park on the new floor this afternoon when she gets home from work.

The epoxy paint seems pretty tough!  I slid the deep freeze across the floor to get it back where it belongs.  It’s usually a pretty big PITA to move around, because there are no slides or even feet on the bottom – just bumps in the sheet metal on the bottom.  It left a trail of light gray that just wiped -ff — I think it was just concrete dust from previous moves, maybe with a little appliance paint.  No damage to the floor, other than knocking off a few of the decorative flakes.  After a quick swipe with a damp rag, you can’t tell where the drag marks were.  I don’t know if I mentioned it in my previous posts, but after MUCH research I decided to just go with the Rust-Oleum epoxy garage floor paint.  It was readily available (Home Depot had it on the shelf) and not as expensive as the other options I was looking at — which means, if it starts coming up in a few years I haven’t spent $2500 on the floor like one of my neighbors.  Yes, his does look better and he had other people do the work…  but hey, I’ll spend some time and effort to move a decimal point!  I figure I have spent well under $400 on this, including the grinder rental and painting supplies.

I wanted to have a utility sink installed, but the quote from the plumber to do just the bare minimum work so I could do all of the actual installation and drywall work…  well, it was simply insane.  I guess we’ll run a hose from the laundry room when we need water out there.

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Why, yes… this IS my first rodeo!

Lisa and I took Lauren, Holly and Burke to the River City Roundup rodeo last night.  It was the first time any of us had been to a real rodeo…  a good time was had by all!  The two little ones got cowboy hats.  We saw the animals in their pens for 4H judging; the little ones were pretty jazzed to get to see and touch the sheep, goats, and cows.  They also got to see some pigs (mainly tiny little piglets) and barnyard fowl — ducks, a goose, chickens and a rooster.    I didn’t get many pictures because riding herd on the kids kept us hopping.  They enjoyed the rodeo events, as did Lisa and I.  It’s pretty fast paced, not much time to get bored waiting for the next event!  I think the two little ones will be naturals for mutton busting in a few years.  That was hilarious, and it looked like the kids were having a blast!  On the way out, Lauren pulled a loose tooth — another first for her, she’s never pulled one of her own before.

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The garage madness continues

The past few days have been a lot of work.  Friday afternoon I rented a diamond grinder from Honeyman Rent-All and spent several hours grinding the floor.  I had to completely empty everything out of the garage into the driveway and yard.  Of course it all had to go back inside when I finished around 1 AM.

The diamond grinder was pretty easy to use.  It’s a little noisy, but not bad enough to get the neighbors complaining.  The hose connects directly to it to keep water flowing to keep the heat and dust down.  I was able to do all of the grinding, rinsing and squeegee-ing in about 4-5 hours.

Saturday I rinsed the floor and used the citric acid from the Rust-Oleum epoxy paint kit.  Probably unnecessary, but I had no other pressing need for two bags of citric acid.  It also cleaned up the inch or so that the grinder couldn’t get right up against the wall.  Then I spent another hour or two rinsing the floor, followed by the squeegee.  After the second round I used the shop vacuum to get it as dry as possible.  It’s looking pretty darned good right now, so Sunday will be painting day.  I have prepped both sides, but the third bay will have to wait.  I simply can’t empty everything out of the whole garage for a week.

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Garage clearing

I’ve been working on the garage for a few weeks now.  Phase 1 was to empty out the third stall, pitch what I could, get rid of some old shelves and organize.  The results, while not perfect, were quite satisfying!  I was able to move the workbench over to the third stall, meaning I can walk around the back of the truck now to get to it.  There’s enough room to actually use the workbench.  Alli & Tom got the old wooden toy shelves we built back in 1984, and Andrew & Liz got the old steel cabinet from Grandma & Grandpa Foss’ place.  There is still some work to be done, but it’s a lot more organized and less of a disaster area.

Phase 2 — I’ve been cleaning out and de-cluttering Lisa’s side of the garage.  Last night I emptied everything out, vacuumed, degreased, and washed out that side.  It’s looking pretty good.  I’ll probably do the same to my side some time this week.  I also replaced the bottom seal on the double door, and will be sealing up other air leaks over the coming weeks.  I’d like to make the entire garage as weather-tight as I can, so that we can keep it reasonably warm in the winter and reasonably cool in the summer.

Phase 3 will likely be etching and epoxy coating the floor, one or two stalls at a time.  I’d love to be able to mop out the garage during the winter.  Toward that end (and others) I’d also really like to get a utility sink/wash tub out there.  It would make it so much easier for filling buckets, washing cars, mopping floors and washing up after working on dirty stuff.  I’m hoping to find that there is easy access to the plumbing connections needed for that, without hanging the sink somewhere inconvenient.

I figure we’ve got a ton of space out there, it would really be nice to be able to use it all!  I only wish I had taken the time to paint the walls and maybe even the ceiling during the first round.  What I really need is a big storage unit for a month or two, so I can move all the junk out of there for a few weeks and do it all without having to work around ladders, lawn tools, power tools, cabinets, bikes, and all the other stuff out there.  Needing to have everything back in the garage every night is a severely limiting factor.