• Category Archives Computers

  • Imagine a life with no computers……ahhhh……bliss…..

  • Windows to add SSH

    Posted on by beno Comment

    Wow. Only about 20 years too late.

    http://betanews.com/2015/06/04/microsoft-ssh-support-coming-to-windows/

    Windows users who want to access another device via SSH (Secure Shell) have to rely on third-party tools to get the job done, as there is no built-in support for it in the popular operating system. Azure CTO Mark Russinovich has revealed that he uses PuTTY for such tasks, which is also the SSH tool of choice for plenty of other folks, myself included.

    PuTTy user checking in.
    Oh, and just so we are clear Gary… even when it’s added, I’m still going to use PuTTy….


    Computers

  • Patio cover

    Posted on by beno Comment

    When you get some solar panels, (more on these in a future blog) you need somewhere to put them.

    new patio video grab

    I’m watching the guys build it right now in real time….. Very very cool…

    The cool thing is that I am not that distanced from the tech that I can still appreciate just what has gone into making this view possible.

    Perhaps distance is not the right way to put it… More a case of both I am old enough to remember a time when there was no Internet and when there was not streaming video over the Internet!
    Perhaps it has also got something to do with the fact that the computer that is streaming the video was a gift from a mate and it’s running Linux which I installed and only know how to do that as a result of knowledge handed down to me from another mate.

    People are important. Skills are important. People teaching other people those skills is very cool.

    Its a patio cover. I’m watching it getting built over streaming video from my house. Crazy.


    Computers Life in the USA

  • Software causes plane crash

    Posted on by beno Comment

    We knew, we all knew (well, all 5-7 readers of this blog) that this day was coming….. Still, its pretty sad when it got here….

    A software misconfiguration caused Airbus plane crash.

    http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/airbus-confirms-software-configuration-error-caused-plane-crash/

    “The black boxes attest to that,” Lahoud told Handelsblatt. “There are no structural defects, but we have a serious quality problem in the final assembly.” The error was not in the code itself, but in configuration settings programmed into the electronic control unit (ECU) of the engines.

    So there you have it. 4 people are dead due to a software misconfiguration.
    Not a glitch, not a bug, but a simple human error of putting the wrong parameters into the wrong variables.


    Computers

  • Aircraft tracking – VPN

    Posted on by beno 1 Comment

    First up, you can all just be grateful that I have not been blogging about all the fun and cool things I have been learning and doing on the subject of plane tracking….. we would be up to part 49 by now otherwise.
    (Heh, BA, if you’re sick of IoT, mate, you would be REALLY sick of hearing about my plane tracking adventures!).

    Anyway, just the one comment here…..

    Had the chance to put a receiver in Las Vegas at short notice. Managed to get it all together pretty quick and off it went.
    One of the software guys from work was visiting his brother and installing it there.
    They got it installed (just propped in a window for now) Ok, but the ‘fun’ started when they went to open up his cable modem to allow my system to get to the plane data from the Raspberry Pi computer at his house.

    The brother forgot the admin password, so they had to reset the router, this caused issues with the whole family’s wifi and such.
    I felt really bad… I mean, the guy is hosting my setup out the goodness of his heart. Yes, he’s interested in planes and radio and computers, but it is not nice to tick off the family and cause some stress for my co-worker.

    There has to be a better way.

    My new router has a VPN setup. Its a Virtual Private Network server. In other words, I can set up a private network of plane trackers based around this new router at my house.
    This is the key to my experiments at the moment. The plan is to get each Raspberry Pi to connect from wherever they are, back to my router and thus my network.
    The big deal is that you do not need to access the cable modem at all. Each Pi will truly be a plug and play (or in my case, track) installation.
    It also means I do not need to put a fixed IP address in the Pi that matches the host network in order for the port forward rule to work!

    We are thus trying to configure the VPN (PPTP – yeah yeah, I know, It is weak security, but it is secure enough for what I need) on the Pi and get it to auto connect at boot and after any network glitches.

    This should mean that it is a LOT quicker, simpler and hopefully more reliable to deploy tracking setups.
    Hope to test it at another co-workers house that lives near a local airport (French Valley)…. I don’t want the first test install to be very far away!

    Lastly, the older Pi has had a price drop from 35 down to 20 bucks. At the moment, that price drop has not trickled down to the likes of Amazon, but hopefully in a month or three it will. This should bring the cost of a tracking setup down to around 40 bucks total.
    Still expensive, but the price drop is about the same cost as the plane radio, so that really helps.
    I am still working on the antenna side of things, and that’s another for blog another day.


    Computers

  • Faster Faster

    Posted on by beno 2 Comments

    We finally have ourselves a nice fast router (read my last post), so its time to up the Internet speed.

    Hit the Verizon website. (Have I mentioned how I don’t like talking to people on the phone?).
    Huh, look at that, if I bundle TV with Internet, the price goes down a whole bunch….. yeah, until you click ‘checkout’, then, and only then, do they tell you that you have to pay around 15 bucks a month rental for the TV decoder, so the price goes up to the same as the Internet only price.
    Seems to me that’s just dishonest. Bait and switch anyone?

    On top of that, if you log into ‘My Verizon Account’ web portal, the Internet price is around 20 bucks a month more than the ‘New Customer’ price.
    So yeah, Verizon wants to punish you for being a loyal customer…..

    Thing is, I want that faster Internet sooooo bad….. I click the “Add to cart” button.
    The website times out before the purchase can be completed.
    Try again.
    Same thing. Time out before purchase.

    I pick up the phone and talk to the lady.
    We make it super (but politely) clear that I do not want TV or phone, I just want to bump my Internet speed…. Oh, I also don’t want a new router (They want to charge monthly rental on theirs, and I already have a perfectly good one!).
    She agrees and we progress. I tell her about the existing vs new customer pricing and she gives me a 10 buck a month discount for 12 months. That’s more like it…. Almost worth talking to a human on the phone (shudder).

    I hang up the phone, an hour later, my Internet is flying.
    2 hours latter, I get an email with the tracking number of the Verizon router I did not ask for (and a note to tell me that monthly billing on the router will start in 10 days).

    The silver lining to all this?

    Check out dem Internet speeds…….

    speed test 1

    speed test 2

    speed test 3

    speed test 4


    Computers