Fettled any computer stuff today?

[Feanor]

I have 2 AAISP FB2700 firewall devices here: The unit in service, and a backup.

The thermal management in these is poor, and they run too hot.
The cheap internal 5v PSU is usually the first thing to die.
They issued a 'modification' some time back, which was the same PSU with the switching transistor extended out of a hole in the plastic casing with a half-hearted heatsink on it.
Yes, really.

After multiple PSU failures, I've given up on the internal PSU and fettled them to use an external 5v PSU thusly:


FB2700 by Ron Lowe, on Flickr

The running temperature is now much lower in the case, and PSU-swapping is trivial.

In mind of the Soldering Iron threads, some may notice the use of my elderly Weller PU-2D iron here. This is on account of my normal kit being out on loan to my Brother Dear, and not yet returned!

[Mr Larrington]

Made my scanner work.  Or not, as it appears to have some inbuilt SCIENCE that stops it from scanning banknotes.

[Phil W]

Made my scanner work.  Or not, as it appears to have some inbuilt SCIENCE that stops it from scanning banknotes.

They do, a friend worked on some of that tech.

[ian]

Made my scanner work.  Or not, as it appears to have some inbuilt SCIENCE that stops it from scanning banknotes.

Yes. Banknotes have something called the EURion constellation* – the scanner spots this super-secret stenography hidden on banknotes and gently spanks you for your tentative turpitudinous temerity.

*they have some other stuff they don't advertise, so even you do manage to copy, the results are missing some secret sauce they can detect.

[Kim]

Yes. Banknotes have something called the EURion constellation* – the scanner spots this super-secret stenography hidden on banknotes and gently spanks you for your tentative turpitudinous temerity.

ITYM steganography.  It's like stenography, but with thagomizers.

[Mr Larrington]

I promised a picture of a five-dollar bill to anyone who could provide me with some chap's surname for entirely innocent purposes.  My grate frend Al replied within two minutes so I wanted to send him a picture of a crumpled twenty from my wallet instead, but had to make do with a stock photo snarfed from Wikinaccurate chiz.

[ian]

Yes. Banknotes have something called the EURion constellation* – the scanner spots this super-secret stenography hidden on banknotes and gently spanks you for your tentative turpitudinous temerity.

ITYM steganography.  It's like stenography, but with thagomizers.

I do. Mobile phone thumbs and autocorrect. For which there doesn't seem to a be a word.

[Greenbank]

I promised a picture of a five-dollar bill to anyone who could provide me with some chap's surname for entirely innocent purposes.  My grate frend Al replied within two minutes so I wanted to send him a picture of a crumpled twenty from my wallet instead, but had to make do with a stock photo snarfed from Wikinaccurate chiz.

I don't think the technology is built into cameras, my iPhone had no problem taking a picture of a £20 note just now (although it's not going to have quite the same resolution as a scanner).

[Ham]

No, your reply wasn't blatant name-calling but it was at that level and completely irrelevant to the question that was asked.

> ... you are happy creating a fictitious Yahoo account...
It was created so long ago that there was no requirement to confirm that details entered were genuine.  It's the only reason I maintain the account.

Irrelevant? without going in to the detail (which it sounded as if you didn't want to hear) I invited you to examine what appeared to be your bias against Google as compared to Yahoo. As for "fictitious" details, you don't even need a google email address to open a Google account (and, through that access Google Photos unlimited image storage at 16Mp or below).

There's no need at all for you to have a reason not to use Google if you don't want to, but I seem to have upset you by pointing out the apparent inconsistency, for which I apologise.

[chrisbainbridge]

Not so much today as over the last week.

Installed one new Win 10 machine to hold our database.  Went smoothly.

Installed my new Win10 machine.  all but one other computer could see the new machine.  The only one that couldn't was the only important one!

installed Dragon 15.3
installed Office 365
both went smoothly but cannot get any of my custom commands to work!!!!  Apparently the Microsoft Word 16.0 Object Library is not being shared with Dragon!!!!

I therefore face doing a complete Office removal and re-install to try and solve the problem and hope that works.  Working that out has taken about 18 hours of effort for zero benefit!

Another company told me I needed to pay £500 to upgrade their software to use Win10.  Took a chance and it works perfectly!!

[David Martin]

I had made the crazy suggestion at the cycle forum meeting that we build an active map for our stall at the Cycling Scotland conference in our home city. A big board which when you touch key points would play a video of that location.

Raspberry Pi Zero based with a plethora of MPR121 capacitance sensors (google banana piano for an idea).

Rolled it all up and here it is - seemed to work very well and only needed rebooting a few times. That was worrying as I was not in attendance after switching it on the first time.

20181106_092017 by David Martin, on Flickr
and the back part way through wiring it up and testing.
20181104_233101 by David Martin, on Flickr

[Kim]

That's probably more effort than anyone at the council's put into molishing cycle infrastructure.

[ian]

Optimizing my wifi by moving the other box upstairs (which I've been meaning to do since forever). Carefully positioning means it now manages to give an acceptable signal in the remote command centre and – finally – decent wifi coverage upstairs, including my wife's office so she can't keep complaining. And I can listen to the Sonos thing in the bath. Hopefully. This is what happens when you buy a house made out of bricks and asbestos and proper stuff, rather than timber and plasterboard.

[Morat]

The foil backed plasterboard isn't great either :/

[Mr Larrington]

The gearshift attached to my Logitech steering wheel decided gears 1, 2, 5 and 6 were no longer required.  Some unmantling revealed a plastic collar which had slid down the shaft and was preventing sideways movement.  Superglue FTW, though I wish I'd spotted it before removing the other fifteen screws.

[Chris S]

I guess we reached WiFi saturation. Coverage around the house has never been great here - which I can't really fathom because we live in a spit-'n-tissue-paper new-build box that only has solid outsides - the internals are mostly cardboard.

Anyway - we've also developed an interest in indoor cycling, which is quite demanding in all things radio; WiFi, Bluetooth, ANT+... oh my word; it's a wonder all our hair doesn't fall out with all the emissions round here.

So I upgraded us to a mesh. We're not rich enough for Google Mesh, so we went for the BT ones. It's hard to prove negatives - but so far, no drop-outs, and plenty of bandwidth availability, even in the bog.

I also retired the Raspberry PI that was running dnsmasq and pihole. Adblocking is OK I guess, but it habitually caused the TV to crash while watching "Why does my Smart TV keep crashing?" and "Why won't my ANT+ connect to my trainer?" You Tube videos, and it also severely inhibited fboab's current hobby - "Shopping for things in China".

There were three networks here - for work reasons that have now gone away, so I was able to reduce the number of networks to two; the second one being largely fictitious by virtue of only living inside a hyper-v server, which means connections between Random Device A and Random Device B are much much simpler, and apparently quicker.

I also fixed the camera in the garage. It plinged annoyingly whenever anyone went in there (bike fettling, or apple-fetching) but didn't send any "FUCKING HELL, CHRIS - YOU'RE BEING ROBBED!!!!1!" videos to my long-suffering email. Mostly that was because the SD-Card was full, but it needed to be shown the new WiFi anyway, so it's now all working fine again.

We're still occasionally finding things that haven't been shown the new WiFi, y'know... things like:

fboab: "Did you update the Aria scales?"
me: "Fuckit"

but we're getting there, in a wholly first-world, "why does all the Tech hate me?" kind of way 

[Kim]

I guess we reached WiFi saturation. Coverage around the house has never been great here - which I can't really fathom because we life in a spit-'n-tissue-paper new-build box that only has solid outsides - the internals are mostly cardboard.

Foil-backed cardboard?  That appears to be a thing...

[Ham]

I thought I'd look at what this "mesh" is all about...

Think about where the router is located in your home. Probably in a corner, close to where the internet service enters your home. The problem is, that far flung corner is the worst location to place a router if you want fast Wi-Fi throughout the house. The farther you are from the router, the weaker the signal, which leads to dreaded dead zones and buffered videos.

Ah, thank you for asking, it's a Ubiquiti access point connected by wire to the virgin router and located under the stairs pretty much in the middle of our brick built victorian house at ground floor ceiling level. Don't think mesh is for us. The weak point is the SEEKRIT BUNKER at the bottom of the garden, served by a plug in repeater half way down (plugged in when needed). That would be good to improve if I could.

[Kim]

I thought I'd look at what this "mesh" is all about...

Think about where the router is located in your home. Probably in a corner, close to where the internet service enters your home. The problem is, that far flung corner is the worst location to place a router if you want fast Wi-Fi throughout the house. The farther you are from the router, the weaker the signal, which leads to dreaded dead zones and buffered videos.

Ah, thank you for asking, it's a Ubiquiti access point connected by wire to the virgin router and located under the stairs pretty much in the middle of our brick built victorian house at ground floor ceiling level. Don't think mesh is for us. The weak point is the SEEKRIT BUNKER at the bottom of the garden, served by a plug in repeater half way down (plugged in when needed). That would be good to improve if I could.

Fibre to the shed and another Ubiquiti.  You know it makes sense.

[ian]

Notably, now I have different SSIDs, zero devices in my house seem to have chosen to connect to the obligatory 'router under the stairs'* preferring to connect to the box in the bedroom to which they always seem to get the better signals. Presumably, wifi gets through wooden floors easier than masonry. The only issue we have is my wife's laptop in her office right next door to the bedroom. That, predictably, seems to be down to Windows as her Mac works fine (as does the Sonos and other devices, but her Windows laptop periodically drops signal and as I can't remember and lack the motivation to wrestle with Windows these days I gave her the spare powerline adaptor).

*and in our 1960s house, the hallway is basically a large brick box so the signal has to get through a thick wall to reach any actual device.

[Mr Larrington]

New video card arrived to replace b0rked one.  Took far longer to unplug all the string under the desk than it did to install the thing once the PC had been retrieved from under the desk.  Gigabyte's take on the Nvidia RTX 2070 which, AFAICT, consists mostly of fans.  Further sub-desk grovelling later and it works!  Except for even yet more sub-desk grovelling to reseat the keyboard cable, which is connected via a chunky PS/2-USB adapter because the PS/2 socket on the mofoboard either doesn't like the keyboard or just plain doesn't work.

[Chris S]

New video card arrived to replace b0rked one.  Took far longer to unplug all the string under the desk than it did to install the thing once the PC had been retrieved from under the desk.  Gigabyte's take on the Nvidia RTX 2070 which, AFAICT, consists mostly of fans.  Further sub-desk grovelling later and it works!  Except for even yet more sub-desk grovelling to reseat the keyboard cable, which is connected via a chunky PS/2-USB adapter because the PS/2 socket on the mofoboard either doesn't like the keyboard or just plain doesn't work.

Awesome. Now play Elite:Dangerous or similar on Ultra and you too can experience the Boeing 777-a-like fanathon.

I've discovered a bonus extra to this. When I start my HP 320e server up, and it does a full fan test, after a few seconds I realise my (tiny) office is a swirling cloud of dust - whereupon I may start sneezing. Computers clearing their throats is a frequent source of entertainment, hereabouts.

[pcolbeck]

I redesigned the core network for a major airport. Now all I have to do is write the design up, and come up with a plan to implement it without disrupting aircraft movements or passenger experience. This may take quite a while  ....

[ian]

Why don't you actually design it like an actual airport? So instead of connecting A to B, connect A to B, via GHFSERBNSJIUEYR and S. Don't forget there are bonus points for each escalator, and remember, the data must be slowed to go through an inescapable slalom of duty-free tat.

[pcolbeck]

Why don't you actually design it like an actual airport? So instead of connecting A to B, connect A to B, via GHFSERBNSJIUEYR and S. Don't forget there are bonus points for each escalator, and remember, the data must be slowed to go through an inescapable slalom of duty-free tat.

I'll suggest that, they might like it