another year goes by..

 haven't looked at this blog for a while - nothing has really changed, the world is in much the same state as before. The current occupant of the White House in Washington DC is even more obnoxious than the last time - the Americans are welcome to him and his nasty offsiders; we certauinly don't want him near here..

a tidy up...

 fixed the reading list. just finished ArduStep 1.1 PCB and sent gerbers to JLCPCB in downtown Shenzen - Board dimensions are an issue had to fix up the the gerber files again, I suspect KICAD is a bit wobbly with board margins in the PCB editor, I have not been able to make them stick on the PCB editor page.

Now on Amoxocillin and prednisolone tablets to clear the opportunistic bugs and bronchitis...first day I have felt vaguely human for a week or so!

and yet another years flies by..

 Ukraine is still fighting off the Russians with some small successes; Israel vs Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran etc is still going; the Palestinians are at the bottom of this pile-on.

Survived the radiation treatment with side effects, more explorations (colonoscopy/cystoscopy etc) have not found anything; still feel like crap most days..

moved domain hosting to Newsprout; it's OK, will update stuff eventually.

Another year passes

 The Russians are still trying to conquer Ukraine, not having much success. The floors are finished and the kitchen reno's are done..(Hooray!) Renumbered our boxen after relinquishing our /24 netblock back to APNIC - getting very expensive. Been irradiated for 8 weeks over Xmas/NewYear for prostate cancer, still feel under the weather, maybe it's just getting older..

Stuff happens...

 A while since anything was posted here... The Ukraine war is still going, COVID is still with us, we are surrounded by mud and sticky clay after having a major underpinning project started (still got the kitchen floor to be taken up and new stumps, bearers and joists fitted).

Could be worse - living in parts of NSW where it floods a lot...

 

just 3 days...

next Saturday, many people [if they haven't pre-voted] will troop off to their nearest polling place (usually a local primary school with enthusiastic sellers of 'democracy sausages', tea and coffee and cakes/scones/etc). After being offered how-to-vote papers of various hues by candidates volunteers, they will then get their name crossed off the paper hardcopy of the electoral roll, be issued with a small white paper and a very long green paper and make their way to a free cardboard space to peruse and put numbers on the bits of paper. After a quick check to make sure all the boxes are marked correctly, the pieces of paper are folded up and placed into the Ballot Boxes provided (cardboard held together with cable ties!).

They then trundle off to do the saturday shopping or pick up kids or goto the footy..

After 6 pm local time (1800hrs), the big job of counting up the ballots commences...

It seems an odd way to select the people who want to run the country for the next 3 years, but it works well enough for us... [voting is compulsory in Oz] 

Russia doesn't belong in Ukraine

 I never thought that I would see this in my lifetime.. Vladimir Putin is treating the West with contempt with his dream of "Greater Russia" and is relying on weak responses from the EU, NATO and the US /UK. Now the Russians have actively invaded a neighbouring country, Ukraine with an eye to creating a 1500 km. buffer zone between the Russian Federation and the EU/NATO.

A misstep by any major nuclear power or other major entity would start WW3..Then it's Goodnight Vienna..

Gunna be very hot; people will die from heat stroke and Covid and car accidents etc..

 A warm day in Melb. today.. hotter tomorrow and a stinker on Saturday (New Year's Day).  not much to say now, the country is going down the toilet, while the people who ostensibly run things 'don't hold a [hose|syringe|thought]. Funny, I haven't come across anyone who voted for these nongs..

PTV Myki website is garbage!

 If you want to lookup where your nearest Myki card retailer is located, you can't do it from the PTV Myki website!

Yet another instance of shitty govt. website design - for an overhyped, overexpensive system done by dodgy contractors and Vic govt. mandarins..  We could have had the oyster card system or even the opal card system from Sydney for a fraction of the price.

Page fiddling

Just thought I would add a blog list, but it didn't work. Link list does...strange.

We will have tomatoes out the back very soon!

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!