Well, the roof doesn't leak now!

 Here it is nearly the end of a not very good year for most of the planet..At least the kitchen/family room roof doesn't leak any more! I am now working on a major shed cleanout and fitting new shelving, however not sure that I can get everything that came out back in again! The Shed roof needs repair, I need to seal up the gap between the corrugated iron roofing and the brick wall capping and refix some of the sheets with roofzips.

We did get the NotBN working in October with a sane ISP (Newsprout) who were able to setup the routing and BGP for our public IP /24 network. Hooray!!!

Have done with Facebook (again); it vacuums up too much time and I spent a lot of fruitless effort trying to get it to work the way I wanted, but the Zuck machine kept sending me 'suggestions': cancelling them was a real chore. Actually, I never did understand how it was supposed to work. Instagram is even more enigmatic; I got some photos onto it, but was never able to find them again.. My siblings and children seem to spend a lot of time on it, but maybe they are more efficient! 

roof finished, still no NBN

 The roof is finished, the back room is drying out slowly.. Still nothing from TBS about our NotBN service or the phones; If these services were critical to life, we would all be dead by now....I don't know why I am bothering waiting for Telstra..we may just pull the request and seek another solution altogether.. 

Rainy blues

We had a load of Colorbond roofing dropped into the front garden last week, now we are waiting on the guttering and flashing to arrive along with the roofing guys from Ridgways, and for it to stop raining long enough for them to do the roof! 

The insurance guys came and looked at the interior damage which is worse than we thought, new room lining, carpeting and flooring in part...gunna run into serious money.

Meanwhile back at the network, still waiting on TBS to fix the phones and the proper NBN connection..However, with all the Covid-19 stuff going on, I am not holding my breath.. 

DTV/DAB+ wobblies

We have an older Panasonic DTV (that does HD) but the signal from Mt Dandenong is a bit borderline here (noise, pixelation). I added a 4G filter ahead of our antenna amplifier/splitter, got rid of the the 4G crud, but reduced the signal. Maybe time for a better VHF only TV antenna (cf Silicon Chip Feb 2018). We disn't have this much trouble when we had old fashioned steam analog PAL colour tv transmissions. Likewise DAB+ radio is very fussy compared to plain AM/FM..  

Still waiting on Telstra Business Systems to hook us upto the interwebs and get the phones reconnected...

temporary NBN

We now have a month-to month NBN connection via MyRepublic to save on the cost of Telstra 4G router connection (handy but slow - 200Gb limit). Still waiting on Telstra Business Systems to progress our phone porting and network connection..We'll see how it goes..

Email is back (more or less)

from yesterday, we have email! Arranged email hosting with carringbush.net (who seem to be on the ball with Web, email, DNS etc) and redelegated our domain to their DNS servers. some farting about with Thunderbird and it all appears to go ok. A small win!
Still no joy on the phones or NBN connection..

Waiting, waiting...

Have cancelled the iiNet arrangments, despite the best effort of a young chap in Corporate, they seem to be unable/unwilling to at least get us back to where we were on May 20 in the morning (pre NBN).
I have arranged a 4G mobile router which is plugged into one of the switches; at least we can get the gmail and banking and such. I am arranging with the local Telstra business shop to do the phones and they are looking at a connection that gets us back on the email/dns/web service wise via the NBN. Anecdotally, NBN FTTC has a rather spotty reputation especially with installations to older wiring in established areas...

Downgrade with NBN

The NBN guy arrived last week, redid connections in the pit out the front, and confirmed that the white NBN box that arrived from iiNet was talking to the NBN; we then found that now have no phones (iiNet dropped the ball on porting the numbers from Telstra), no email, no DNS, no outgoing Web server connectivity) (iiNet just plain lied when we enquired about upgrading from a working ADSL2+ service with routing, saying they could do this, no probs)What we got was some strange NAT thing (sans routing) on a scungy TPlink VR1500v cheapy router (also from iiNet), which allows  you to visit some web sites; that's it. They then claimed that they [iiNet] were unable to route our traffic anymore because 'NBN was different'. I had to complain on their FB page comments, just to get a response..

We are now looking for a local technically-competent ISP to get back 'on the air' as it were.
An old friend of mine who also has an NBN connection through iiNet, moved house recently, when he got reconnected, iiNet had managed to mess up and lose his email accounts, only after he complained on FB, did something get done to fix the problem.
iiNet long ago were the bees knees of ISP's, but since they got taken over by TPG (an iffy bunch, at best), the whole operation has gone down the toilet..

some words from our economists...

http://covid19openletter.net/

Some of our leading academic economists have written an open letter to Scotty from Marketing and his colleagues in the "National Cabinet" to bring rationality into the CoVID-19 vs the Oz economy debate. Various airy-fairy ideas are being floated by the usual suspects from the FilthMuck press and the lunar Right.  I would like to see News Limited, its acolytes and boosters given the Boot from public life here until they learn to conduct themselves properly, but I can't see that happening any time soon. I might add that the lunar Left here is nearly as bad.. What happened to civil debate here...   

it's very quiet for a main road

The Boss is now working at Newmarket, so she has to cross the road to catch the bus (404) to work. Normally, you take your life in your hands crossing over Ascot Vale Rd at 0700, dodging cars, SUV's(penis-subs), semi's, buses cyclists, but at present you could do a little dance in the middle of the road and not see anything travelling!

no more than 2 people at a time..

had to go to an appointment in Moonee Ponds, streets are empty, most shops are shut - it's all a bit "On The Beach" at present. Scotty from Marketing is making vague noises that it could get worse, but dropping it on state and territory govts. to do the heavy lifting..

Winging it..

I keep getting this uncomfortable feeling that Scotty from Marketing and his mates are just winging it and putting Parliament off until August/September/whenever is not the best way to proceed.. Serious trust deficit here.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, we are isolating like mad, will get to see the outside world while shopping at a 1.5m distance (makes it hard to reach the shelves!) and hand-washing while conserving bog-roll.

Covid-19 stats

A friend just sent me this interesting link: https://ncov2019.live/data (ongoing coronavirus/covid-19 stats from around the world)..

And its only just started...

the Mediapocalypse is upon us!

the headline on the front of The Age today screamed '150,000 could die' more or less...
not helpful if the aim is to make the population alert to the very real dangers of corvid-19 infection, but not alarmed..
Meanwhile, bog-roll is still hard to get; unconfirmed reports are claiming that hoarders are selling toilet paper on eBay at vastly inflated prices..

The coming bog-roll apocalypse

Now that we are facing a scarcity (in the shops) of loo-paper, despite the fact that our stalwart local paper makers are running 24/7 to keep up with demand, one wonders what will be next to be "scarcitised" by the meejah, social and 'normal'... many of our folk here from overseas, particularly the Middle East, having had appalling experiences of disruption and shortages of everything during times of trouble, will understandably be stocking up. Their neighbours and friends are seeing them and doing likewise..
I hope that everything settles down soon, and the number of covid-19 cases starts to diminish as in China, apparently.

The interwebs appear to be working again

our ancient TP-link ADSL2 modem/router died yesterday after trying to cope with intermittent outages either line-related (lotta rain recently) or iiNet digital indigestion. We have another ancient device (billion) borrowed from one of the kids, but is is rather slow. Don't really want to buy another unit, as the fabled NBN is supposed to be here on 7 May next...

more on the Social Meejah

after a conversation with a colleague, I thought I would approach Facebook/Instagram in a more stealthy mode.  This seems to work and there does not appear to be the avalanche of crap that appeared in the 'news feed' earlier. Will see what happens once all the rellies are linked up (not sure if that is the right term)
What is interesting is that there is not much help with the web interfaces of these sites, very minimal for those of us who are used to 'proper programs' 

Managed to get most of the rellies reconnected again, and I connected up to the 'InstaGram' thingie, hard to put pictures on it unless you are on your smartphone, which seems a bit limiting to me ( I'm probably not the target customer base..)

The Continuing adventures of Julian Assange

El Reg commenter proffered this link: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/02/your-man-in-the-public-gallery-assange-hearing-day-2/

I have no particular brief for young Julian, but perhaps Dutton and Scottie from Marketing should consider repatriating him..

The Economist and Climate Change

The Economist 'newspaper' magazine publishes an email newsletter on Climate Change - well worth reading; the image above is featured in it and is described as:
"The stripes on our banner were developed by Ed Hawkins of the University of Reading. They represent the years from 1850 to 2018 and the colour marks each year’s temperature, compared with the average in 1971-2000."
I think it shows the post industrial warming quite dramatically..

Aaand we're back!

A while back I had a blog here on blogspot; but it was killed off as part of purging bad stuff from large social media sites..

This will be the non-tech site, about books and stuff..