Chasing the CIA

Head Rambles Posted on by 3

I am breaking a little personal rule here.

I try not to post consecutive scribbles on the same topic but what the hell. It’s my site and I can break the rules if I want to.

Yesterday I toddled up to Dublin to get a couple more Powerline plugs. These are little devices that transmogrify wireless signals onto the house’s power circuit. It means that I don’t have to run cables all over the place which is a bit of all right.

So I unpacked the two plugs and matched them to the existing plugs [to stop the neighbours snooping]. All fine and dandy.

Armed with one of the plugs I marched up to the attic where the front wifi once broadcast from. I fired up my mobile phone which has a little wifi sniffer on it. There in all its glory was CIA-Front signal! [before you ask – Curratech Interweb Access!] What the fuck? I had brought up the old router so where was the signal coming from? I brought up my laptop and connected to the signal. It connected all right but that was it. No Interweb or anything.

So somehow I was connecting to a wifi that didn’t exist. I know that because the router was lying on the floor unplugged. Do walls have memory? Was this some previously unknown property of granite boulders? Was the signal just bouncing around the room in a perpetual motion for the last few months?

Sadly I found the solution to the mystery.

There was another router I had forgotten about [newer that the unplugged one]. It was buried under a pile of books and was quite hot. I connected it to the Powerline and all was well. CIA-Front was back in action.

So I pootled back downstairs, connected to my CCTV and told the camera to connect to the front network which is a lot nearer than CIA-Back. Fuck me but it woudn’t connect. Why? I don’t know.

In desperation I connected the camera by cable to the fourth Powerline plug. That didn’t work either. If the fucking thing can only use wifi why the fuck did they include a network socket? It wouldn’t switch off the wifi.

Suddenly the camera decided to connect to the Front signal. Again, I don’t know why. It’s still disconnecting regularly.

I think I am going to have to move the camera nearer to the router.

But that means removing the connectors from their nice safe dry spot under the eaves.

Fuck!.

Bloody moths

Head Rambles Posted on by 10

I continue to have fun with my CCTV camera.

The cable I was waiting for finally arrived yesterday so it was time to start some real tests.

Until yesterday I was testing it indoors with the occasional test looking out a window. That worked up to a point but the main problem was night testing. After dark, with the camera pointing out the window all I got was an image that looked like there was a car about to hit me – just two very bright spots and nothing else. The infra-red was reflecting off the glass and was blinding the camera!

So I set up the camera at an ideal spot at the front of the house. The cable connectors are nicely tucked up under the garage eaves so are weatheproof. Even better, the camera is almost invisible as it’s in a shrub.

The first problem was that the wifi is quite weak there and the signal drops out quite frequently. That’s fixed just as soon as I bring my other wifi system back on-line, but I have to buy a yoke for that.

The second problem arose after dark. It was grand for a while until there was a puff of wind. That made a few leaves flutter and they are just to the side of the view. The camera started recording and also it switched on its foodlights. All hell broke loose. The floodlights attracted a moxy load of moths who all gathered in front of the camera. Of course the camera detected the motion and stayed recording, and I started getting incessant fucking warnings on my phone that the house was being invaded. I had to switch off the whole system as it was pissing me off, not to mention being a probable problem for aircraft navigation. It is really fucking bright.

So I have a few things to iron out. First of all I have to trim those twigs and leaves that are in view in case there is another puff of wind [it has been dead calm here for a long time. So much for using wind power?]. Also I have to buy that yoke to reactivate my front wifi system.

Then I have to find out how to deactivate those floodlights and get it to use infra-red only. Then I discover if moths are attracted to infra-red!

I have discovered that I can’t set sensitivity [bad] or field of activity [bad]. I can save selected video files but have a hell of a job downloading them [not so good].

Apart from all that it works well.

An interesting twist on Climate Change

Head Rambles Posted on by 10

I was browsing around and came across a post on Foggy Mirror.

Down at the bottom is an Adendumadodad [as Mac calls it!].

Finnish study finds ‘practically no’ evidence for man-made climate change.

Now surely this is excellent news? No more worrying about CO2? No more carbon taxes? We can go back to fossil fuels? No more fines from the EU for failing to meet arbitrary “targets”? The Swedish Idiot-child can go back to school and all children can now sleep in peace in the knowledge that their parents aren’t fucking up the world after all?

Yet, apart from Mac, I haven’t heard a whisper.

The global scientific community should be breathing an enormous sigh of relief and the research should be front page headlines around the world, yet there is nothing. Here is an obvious and plausible cause of climate change found by two different universities but nobody seems to be interested.

Could it be that they would have to roll back on taxation with complete loss of face [and handy revenue]? Could it be the enormous damage it would do to the industry producing solar panels, electric cars and bird mincing windmills?

Is it so impossible to admit they are all wrong?

On being redundant

Head Rambles Posted on by 6

I don’t know if it’s my imagination or not, but something odd seems to be happening with my emails.

For the last weeks or so, I haven’t been receiving any.

The odd one does appear all right [and some of them are very odd – why the fuck would I want to invest in a block of apartments in the UK? As if I had twenty thousand or so to risk on a spam mail]. Ashley Madison is also very keen to have me rejoin join but after their being hacked there is fuck all chance of that.

Now normally I would get a couple of dozen mails a day from each of the sites I look after, giving little reports on who is trying to gain entry or how many other hack attempts there had been, but suddenly my system has decided that these are all spam and is treating them as such.

In fact it as decided that nearly everything I receive is spam and treats it accordingly. So now I have to check my Spam folder before checking my Inbox. That sort of defeats the whole purpose of filters?

Now I well appreciate how people have grown tired of me and have stopped writing to me. After all, I have been living with myself for nearly seventy years and I grew tired of me a very long time ago. But my fear is that if, in some unguarded moment someone did decide to write and I missed it then that would be a bit embarrassing?

Even stranger is that every now and then a little message flashes on my screen giving the barest details of a new mail, such as who it’s from and its subject, but when I go looking for it I can’t find it anywhere, so one again I miss out on another offer of Rayban sunglasses or that little pill that will give me an IQ in the thousands. It seems that some mails just get deleted and vanish into the Black Hole.

So if you do write to me and I don’t respond you now know why.

You’ll have to write a letter instead.

Invasion

Head Rambles Posted on by 1

I did a bit of hedge cutting the other day.

That sounds very fancy and conjures up images of a nice neat hedge, but it was actually a case of hedge-hacking. I had to remove about three feet off the top and off each side. The hedge now looks like a head of hair that has been cut by a blind man wielding a blunt pair of scissors. This of course meant a garden full of mountains of cuttings. I couldn’t be arsed to clear them up so I left them.

Yesterday I decided to shift all the detritus so I filled the first barrow-load.

Now stuff like that gets dumped in my “land-fill” site in the North Woods. I wheeled the barrow down the path and found my way blocked. Where there had been a path between the banks of nettles and brambles there was now a wall of tree trunk and knotted massive ivy growths. Fuck! A tree had blown down at some point and brought all its coat of ivy with it. The path was completely blocked.

I examined the mess and decided there was no way I could cut my way through it. It would be a long job as the tangles meant I couldn’t use a chain saw and everything would have to be cut away by hand. Not a fucking chance!

I had a look around and realised that it might be possible to hack my way through the undergrowth and bypass the fallen tree altogether. Problem solved. I could just leave the tree to rot. I started hacking and made great progress.

I broke through finally and found myself in a lovely glade that was clear of all weeds apart from a carpet of ivy. Fantastic! I spent the rest of the afternoon collecting all the hedge cuttings and barrowing them through my new path into the glade where I dumped them in the far corner.leaving tons of room for all my future garden rubbish.

Then the thought crossed my mind.

Had I in fact broken through into my neighbour’s land?

It’s done now anyway.