Computer

Things, were so quiet, then Karma came for the weekend.

~ Ron Walker ~ 18 Comments

Regular readers, are thinking it’s some juicy craziness in the trailer park. No, apparently things have been too quiet. Karma has had nothing to do, so she came to stay with me, for the weekend. A three-day weekend! Maybe it’s my punishment for neglecting to blog.

I forgot to renew the blog

It seemed to start Friday. In 11 years, I have never forgotten to renew my hosting on sites. I have broken my perfect record, someone (cough) forgot to renew the blog. I don’t do the auto renew thing. It’s easier for me to  pay it per year. Some may have visited and were not able to access the blog, my apologies. It took two days, to get back on all the name servers. The invoices and reminders, had been going to spam. That crisis is now solved.

Friday, I decided to upgrade the arcade. A recent notice advised they were changing a component, and if you didn’t apply the updates it would cease to function. The deadline was a couple days away. Of course, that little endeavor ended badly. The update went south, the backup I had? Would not take (corrupted). Hours of work, still no joy. I am installing another arcade now.

All my regular support, was lazing around.

Have you tried, “Rebooting”?

Reboot : Not, my, problem. I don’t do, Karma.

Saturday, I relax and continue working on the arcade project. Then the CD-Rom on the main machine went crazy when I booted up for the morning. It started a dull clunking noise, as if the laser was re-positioning back and forth. Then the tray opened part way and the computer locked up. That forced a hard shutdown, which most of the time I’m lucky, and have no ill effects. This time? It scrambled the Apache server, on the machine that handles the security webcams. Thankfully I had an image from a couple days ago, and in 4 minutes, we were back running properly (with the CD unplugged). That felt good. However, with Karma, nothing good lasts forever.

Sunday. The first morning of the new time change, the weather station was offline. I didn’t have the wireless console/receiver on the wall, that communicates with the RaspberryPi, which runs the weather site, set correctly to change the time. (That was a mouthful) So the Pi decided to pout, about the information suddenly being from the future by one hour. I reset everything and we’re back running.

Karma’s parting shot

Monday morning. Surely, since the weekend is over things will get back to normal. No. I start this entry and attempt to back-space. Several key strokes later the key bottoms out, and refuses to come back up. Have you ever tried working on the keys? The regular ones are fine, the larger ones all have a bar or spring under them, sometimes both. It is an exercise in madness. I did manage to find a manufacturing defect (plastic burr) that I removed, and it started working fine. Maybe Karma thought I was busy, and just left me a parting shot. Or was it some type of philosophical, Freudian, gesture. “Backspace”, you can’t go back? You can’t back up, and erase your mistakes?  Or heaven forbid, I’ll be back!

I leave you with my broken site graphic that I use sometimes.

Comments always welcome,

My first SSD drive, Incorrect temperature reading.

~ Ron Walker ~ 8 Comments

This is a post of a technical nature. I had difficulty finding information on the extremely high temperature being reported from the drive. So I wanted to post this, in case anyone else were to run into the same problem. This is my first SSD drive. Purchased from New Egg, it was $30 total. I didn’t get a mounting adapter for it, so I used Velcro to hold it in a place where it gets excellent air-flow. Much better than if it was in a bay adapter.

IMG_20180216_132334583.jpg
60GB Patriot Flare 2.5 inch SSD 7mm thick.

I don’t think I will ever go back to HDD for my OS drive. It does load so much faster on boot up, 50% faster than before. Loading programs? Can we say, “Click, BANG!”? Loading of Chrome has gone from about 15 seconds, to 2 seconds. All of my programs load fast. This is a FLARE 60GB SSD this drive, to be used  only for running my main OS.

Freak Out Time!!

I like for things to run smoothly, if possible. So, I decided to check the operating temp of the drive, using a software utility in Linux. Most computer techs go by Celsius, I still think in Fahrenheit. When my eyes stopped on the temperature reading, I noticed 99 C, heart got a bit faster, still thinking in Fahrenheit. Then gazing to the next temp (in Fahrenheit) it read 210 F. At that moment, I thought the drive may try to live up to it’s name. (Flare)

We all know, once you let the smoke out of those components, they tend to stop working.

I nearly killed myself trying to shut down the computer, and unplug the power at the same time. Cautiously touching the drive, it was cool to the touch. At this point, I’m doing my best impression of a police K-9 frantically searching for drugs, only I was expecting the stink of smoldering components. We all know, once you let the smoke out of those components, they tend to stop working. It then struck me, if Michelle had walked in at that moment, she would assume I needed to be committed. After not detecting smoke, or a burning odor, I tried other temperature detection software, it reported a proper 32 C. Just like the other drives in the case.

Not much rattles me, except maybe electronics, running at nearly the temperature of boiling water! I found it humorous also, that the software was reporting “Disk is OK”. Now, that was funny. Perhaps, it should have read, “Please put flames out, hit Enter when ready”.

Selection_001.png

The REAL temperature of the drive displayed below. Apparently, the sensor in the Flare SSD doesn’t jive with the program I have, to read the disks temps.Selection_002.png

 

It’s over and finished now, I can put away the defibrillator paddles! :)

Have a little Pie with your Internet. Zero calories to boot!

~ Ron Walker ~ 23 Comments

I know many don’t care for technical type posts as a rule, but just in case someone happens to be searching for information on a RaspberryPi, they can see the set up I have made.

I thought I would try one of these small computers that were developed in the UK just a few years ago. They are very small, some can be had for as little as $29 bare bones. I wanted a better one so opted for the newer version. Raspberry Pi 3 B. This one has a quad core processor that runs about 1.2-1.6ghz. It has 1GB of on board memory you share with video. (4) 2.0 USB ports, Wireless, Bluetooth HDMI and Ethernet. A lot packed into a small computer slightly smaller than a playing card. Michelle ordered this for me as a late birthday present. She ordered the deluxe Kit, which is more at around $69 but comes with everything including a fan, and SD card 32GB, HDMI cable, power adapter.

  • 1.2GHz 64-bit quad-core ARMv8 CPU, 1 GB RAM
  • 802.11n Wireless LAN, 10/100Mbps LAN Speed
  • Bluetooth 4.1, Bluetooth Low Energy
  • 4 USB ports, 40 GPIO pins, Full HDMI port, Combined 3.5mm audio jack and composite video
  • Camera interface (CSI), Display interface (DSI), Micro SD card slot (now push-pull rather than push-push), VideoCore IV 3D graphics core.

You can get a kit with everything but the micro SD card, for around $49.

For something to play with it is fun and interesting. Much cheaper than a desktop. It runs  various Linux distributions which are free, the most popular being “Raspian” which is a mix of some Raspberry programs and Debian Linux. You can install Ubuntu or other Linux flavors. It has an HDMI port so you can hook it to a monitor, I don’t have a monitor with HDMI so I am using VNC to connect into it and use my computer monitor. Parts are cheap for the Pi, a simple case around $5-$6, power adapter $8 or cheaper, 32 GB SD card, if you want one that big. $14 at Walmart. The latest Pi with all the above listed features, just the board is $34. Webcam for it that plugs onto the board with short or long ribbon cable is only about $19 for a 5 mp or $26 for an 8 mp! I am going to save up and get me a 5 mp camera. Which brings me to the only shortcoming.

Shortcoming: The only thing I found wrong with it was limited webcams that work with it. It is hit-and-miss. Some super cheap USB cams work, some don’t. Unfortunately, none of my cheap ones work. But I can solve that with a Pi camera for what I pay for a cheap USB cam.

I have posted to the forum from it, after all it is a full Linux computer, just small and not super charged. You won’t do video editing I don’t think (but I bet I try). It has office software, mail, chromium or Firefox browser, just like larger computers. You can install what you want just like from a normal Linux computer.

I got this one to learn on, I wanted something that could run my weather station 24/7 and not use the main computer for that. So this tiny machine can sit on the desk off to itself and happily monitor the weather station and generate the pages and upload them to the website. I am still working on it, Trying out a simpler weather software. Anyway… here are some pictures of it’s size. This one is in a layered clear plastic case, with a tiny fan to cool the CPU. It currently is running wireless on the WiFi here in the house. The pictures and a video may show it with an Ethernet cable. I used that to set up the vnc and configure the wireless. The only cable running to it now is the weather station.

It’s small!! Just un-boxed it.

We have the case assembled and on it now. You can stack them one atop the other with some cases. Note the small, half-dollar size fan.

My car-keys look nearly bigger than the computer.

Future plans: Since it will run 24/7, I plan on

Running the weather station.Setting up a service on it to monitor my websites and alert me by email. Seems my “free” monitoring service, isn’t too reliable notifying me at times.A Time lapse, and picture upload program, for the forum, blog, and Wunderground weather service. It already uploads weather conditions to my Wunderground reporting station every 5 mins. Currently It updates the weather web page of my website every 10 minutes.

It seems to run very snappy for a 1.2-1.6ghz. It is running a server and SQL database, without noticeable lag. It is using about 400mb of the 1GB of memory when running the graphical interface through the monitor, but just running as a machine, it is using about 150mb of memory. Running cool as well. 36c

I scrounged around and found a Blue-tooth keyboard we aren’t using, and a wireless mouse. I stopped by the thrift store last week, there sat a 14 inch monitor for $10. I was pleased to see it worked being just $10.

Now I can say, I have Raspberry Pie (Pi) in my office. I just hope it doesn’t attract ants.

Comments welcome,

Note: I receive no compensation of any type, for mentioning, linking to, or posting about an item. All references are for informational consumption.

Massive Global Ransomware Attack Underway

~ Ron Walker ~ 19 Comments

This is a late post, I was prompted to do it after seeing it mentioned on the news again this evening.

A form of Ransomware seems to be gaining momentum. Please make sure that you are up to date on any Windows updates. I would recommend extra careful Internet usage practices for a while. Resist opening, or clicking on links that are in emails you receive. Be cautious of any documents someone sends you, that you are not expecting.

How to Protect Yourself From the Vulnerability

According to Microsoft a fix for this vulnerability was released on March 14th for all affected versions of Windows. If you are running Windows and have automatic updates enabled you should be okay. If you don’t and haven’t updated recently you should update to the most recently released version immediately. It is important to note that unsupported versions of Windows, like XP, did not receive this security update. Those systems should either be isolated or shut down.

Source: Wordfence Security

Comments welcome,