Category: Computers

Travel Prep 2018

March is here again, and with it come plane tickets and a host of technological projects.

First, my ancient iPhone 4s finally gave out. It has a hardware error stemming from an issue with the WiFi antenna. I cannot connect to WiFi at all, which means I cannot disconnect the phone from Find My iPhone, which means I cannot even reset it to factory defaults. Maybe I will get around to finding a SIM card with a data connection so I can fix at least some of these issues, but for the moment, it is simply out of commission. Enter, “new” iPhone.

My iPhone 4s was the first iPhone I ever purchased, and I purchased it Factory Unlocked (which was not a common, nor inexpensive thing back then) and it was with me through three US cell carriers until I finally switched back to Verizon and CDMA service, and a new iPhone 5s. The 4s then permanently became my Ecuadorian phone, replacing a refurbished 3GS I had purchased in the meantime, and I would just keep my Ecuadorian SIM card in it and add a few dollars to my prepaid account every time I was in the country. And the 4s outlasted not just that old 3GS, but the 5s as well. That phone’s battery exploded when I was in California in 2016 and I upgraded to a then-band new iPhone 7. So it has been the Ecuadorian 4s and the North American 7 until today, when my refurbished iPhone 6 arrived.

One of the things I have learned with all these generations of phones is that SIM cards keep getting smaller. At one time, I had what we referred to as the Nokia “Brick” phone (those indestructible candybar phones that we still give to our Youth World interns in 2018 because the cockroaches will be calling each other on them after the nuclear war). That phone had what most people would call a full-size SIM card in it (although that’s technically a “Mini” SIM). I purchased a SIM card cutter way back in the day to slice it down to fit in my 4s, which required a Micro SIM. And that card just got sliced down again with a new cutter into a Nano SIM  for the iPhone 6.

Restored from the 4s Ecuaphone backup, it will be all ready to use when I step off the plane. Or at least it would be if I ever managed to have any saldo left when I finish hosting a team. Hopefully I’ll remember to turn off my cellular data instead of blowing through all my saldo before the team even arrives, which I may have done… two years in a row. My Quito Quest pareja, Caroline, gets a little frustrated with this phenomenon when all outgoing phone calls and texts have to be on her phone until we remember to send someone to the Farmacia to recharge my saldo. I could solve all of this by just using one of the Nokia phones. But what can I say? I am spoiled.

The other tech project has been updating my website. I generally renew my hosting and domain registration in February, so that has been done for a couple of weeks, but parts of the site have been broken for a long time. The DNS records were a little wonky, probably since I switched hosting providers years ago, or possibly since I added Google Apps. At any rate, if you got here by putting a “www” in front of my domain name, then my update worked.

The site was also running a WordPress theme that was at bare minimum 5 years old, and had survived heavy coding updates I did to it throughout that time. The bulk of those coding edits were to incorporate a head image randomizer, the thing that makes the top image change every time you visit the site, click “Refresh,” or go to another page within the site. This option is now something that’s built into the WordPress software. I was just doing it before it was cool, thanks to some PHP script found and then reworked by Mike Turner. The result of all this was that as the underlying software has changed and modernized, my theme would not even display my blog posts on the front page anymore. Obviously, you’re reading this, so I’ve corrected that error. For the moment, I have done this mainly by changing to a less archaic WordPress theme. It will probably change again as I get annoyed at searching for post dates off to the side. But at the moment, I am simply happy that there is no quest required to access my content, or even my site anymore.

Power

I just realized I haven’t mentioned the current electricity situation in Ecuador on my blog. My apologies.

We’re having rolling blackouts right now because Ecuador is simply running low on electricity. All the power here is hydroelectric, so because of the recent lack of rain (though the President’s propaganda machine is blaming it on all the past regimes) this is a measure to conserve energy and not totally use up what we have.

It’s a little obnoxious because a big chunk of the time that I have office hours built into my schedule, there’s not power here. My house is in the same sector as the office, so the electricity is always out in both places at once. This requires a lot of thinking ahead, particularly because my job involves writing (which I do on a computer, which needs power) and web updates, which involves more writing and communication (e-mail, thus computer, thus power). For instance, today I had a Quito Quest meeting at 9am, which ran past 11:00am, when the power was scheduled to go out today. That meant making sure my computer was charged, all my e-mails were sent, and everything I needed to work on was downloaded already. I then proceeded to go home, take a shower, and go to Supermaxi (grocery store) and lunch while the power was out, and worked on writing an article that didn’t require internet access to complete.

I won’t lie and tell you I haven’t complained a little bit about this, especially since there are days when I’m working at the Youth World office in the North with no power, then return to Lourdes’ house in the South just in time for the power to go out for three hours there. But really, I could certainly have it worse. Although it makes me even more behind on my blogging, it does remind me to be social and not spend my entire life behind a screen. It is a little funny though, when I get voice mail messages from home making sure I’m still alive.

Some vague updates on my life: I’m working on finally finally getting my completed Casa G article into a publishable format with some pictures and other fun stuff, and running with a new theme on my La Red article so that the writing portion of that can be finished this week as well. Tomorrow (Wednesday) my friend John Andrew (who has been working with International Teams in Guayaquil) will be coming up to Quito to hang out for a while, Thursday is Thanksgiving (obviously) so all of the Youth World crew that are in town will be celebrating at Laura’s house, then finally on Saturday the Jensen family and us three interns ‘s will be heading to Mindo for a short retreat. Hopefully that will mean lots and lots to write about, and that I will have some time to actually do that and post it.

A Pair of Insignificant Achievements

(^No pun intended^) J.K. Rowling always posts her high scores in Minesweeper, so I am posting my online card-playing achievements.

I’ve been playing a lot of FreeCell lately. I’ve gotten pretty good at it. This image is actually a little behind now. I’m up to 103 or something. But here is my 100-game perfect winning streak in FreeCell:

FreeCell 100-Win Streak

To follow that up, my mom doesn’t understand my Hearts strategy whatsoever. That’s probably because there are times when it fails miserably. But when it works, I pull off feats like this one, displayed below. You’ll notice that I shot the moon to start and to finish the game, with a total of six hands where I took 0 points, and almost a third time shooting the moon on that eighth hand (one card short).

Hearts

Yes, Honey, They're Brothers

Colin and I should be on HGTV.

Brothers can be completely different, get on each others’ nerves, and be super-competitive. All of that can describe Colin and me at some point past or present, if not in an ongoing sense. But brothers- in this case we– can totally be on the same wavelength sometimes.

Colin’s drums have been in the FROG1 for several weeks now, to give him more room to jam with his friends. With about half of my guitars and both of my amps up there for roughly the same reason- just to get them out of my room- and Daniel’s and Jacob’s guitars and guitar cases sometimes present, it’s been a pretty hazardous place to be lately.

So between a general desire to be able to safely navigate the FROG and complaints from everyone in the house, Colin started cleaning it up yesterday. This was also motivated by the addition of a powered mixer and two speakers.

For those of you not really into sound equipment, that’s basically a small, portable all-in-one PA system designed with microphones and instruments in mind, but with enough cables and adapters, you can hook anything into it: TV, Xbox, iPod, computer… you get the idea.

Without asking what the vision was or the plan of action for getting there, I joined in the cleaning. It was obvious to anyone that the room simply needed to be cleared out, rearranged, and organized if even a fraction of its contents were to remain and the room was to become easily traversed. But it was obvious to the Peck boys the potential this room now had to become what Kelli would call a “man cave.”

First order of business, pack up the instruments. Fortunately there was only one guitar present at the time that did not belong to me, so all the cases were handy. The air hockey table was pushed against the window and all guitars placed underneath. The Foosball table was pushed against the daybed by another wall and the chairs pushed up against that. Amazingly, this caused a sudden hole in the middle of the room from which to work against the remaining chaos.

While Colin set up his drums (and I think he finally has all his drums and cymbals set up together, which takes quite a bit of space) I began clearing off the computer desk, mom’s drafting table and the shelf behind the drums where the VCR2 was located. We finished at roughly the same time, with a net result of extended the open space and having two more surfaces to work from.

Before I knew it, Colin was pulling an old TV cabinet out of the closet. We have these two huge closets in the FROG where the roof slants down on either side of the dormer where the daybed is located. One is used to store camping and sewing equipment and the other is used to store Christmas decorations and old toys so that any of the above are accessible at shorter notice than they would be if they lived in the cubby3. The particular TV cabinet that Colin was pulling out is a pretty small, cheap, black shelving unit and formerly where the family TV downstairs lived. It is only a couple feet tall and the TV sat on top with the shelves underneath storing movies and Super NES accessories. When my parents replaced it with a nicer piece of furniture, I talked them into keeping it in case I ever finish college and leave and want it.

Colin got the powered mixer set up on top, with the Xbox 360 on top of that, and I set up the VCR and Gamecube underneath, running all the cables and putting four generations’ worth of video games into their respective cases as I went. Colin set up the speakers and with a couple of really useful adapters, I set up my laptop on the drafting table and connected it to the mixer, thus enabling me to stream music from my desktop in my room over the wireless network and play it through the newly-re-erected sound system.

With the furniture back in place, I thought we’d be finished. But Colin mentioned a general desire to have his computer up there for recording purposes. I figured we might as well get that done while we were on a roll, so with some quick thinking and some maternal advice, the drafting table was folded up and moved to the corner where the computer desk was. The computer desk was taken downstairs and placed in my van for transport to Albemarle Music (more on this below). The other closet, this time the one with the Christmas decorations- including tree- was accessed, cleared completely out, and a folding table removed from the very back, from behind about two dozen boxes and really heavy wooden shelving unit.

The folding table was erected, fitting perfectly against the wall between the end of the TV cabinet and the door, and about this time, Daniel showed up intending to pick up his laptop and leave, but staying to help move Colin’s (monster) desktop computer from his room to the FROG. This was quite an adventure because though Colin’s room and the FROG share a wall, you have to go from Colin’s through the upstairs hall, down the stairs, through the foyer, den, kitchen, and back hall, then up the other set of stairs to reach the FROG.

With the computer set up and the chairs replaced, we transported ourselves, the desk, and our moving and staging skills to Albemarle Music. We initially moved the couch in the office, then moved it back when we realized its new angle made the room feel much smaller. With the desk placed against the back wall, we moved the office computer off the counter and now have a much more professional-looking space and enough surface area for three people to eat lunch at once.

In summation, we’re awesome and so is the new man cave. Pictures are forthcoming, and if anyone wants an air hockey table, let me know.

 

1FROG is a real estate term in this region that’s become pretty ubiquitous in tidewater area vocabulary. It stands for Finished Room Over Garage and is what most of the rest of the country would refer to as a “Bonus Room.”
2Yes, believe it or not, we still have a VCR. It wasn’t that long ago that it got a lot of use for watching Disney movies with all my female friends- one in particular- and now mainly serves to extend the coaxial cable from the wall to the TV and as an extra set of RCA inputs for gaming systems.
3The cubby is an eccentricity of our house. Despite two attic access doors, one in the FROG and one in the upstairs hall, because of their precise locations the attic is still pretty inaccessible, and the cubby serves as our attic. It is basically a crawl-space-sized hall stretching from an access door at the top of the FROG stairs back over the rest of the house.

Across Two Februaries

Oh come on, I’ve made worse references.

Tonight I did some dp.n maintenance. I now own my domain for at least the next two years. I have no recollection of whether my hosting package automatically renews or not, so the site may still dissapear in five more days. I’ll try to pre-empt that.

I also upgraded my WordPress software. That’s basically everything that you’re looking at. I used to write 100% of my own code, and now I’m lazy and let blog software handle my posts, layout and pages, subpages, and photo gallery. Do I feel any less hack? Not really. I could still do it the hard way if I wanted.

I backed up my entire website, plus an additional WordPress backup, PLUS I imported it to my wordpress.com account (the software comes from wordpress.org, which is functionally an entirely different entity). I was getting ready to manual install the software and then I had an incredible idea. What if my host’s control panel would do it for me automatically? Turns out my hunch was right, and rather than spending the next three hours hacking away at code and uploading it all, here I sit with a new install of WordPress on my server, and all it took was three clicks and about 40 seconds.

At any rate, it probably looks no different to you. No changes even for those (few) of you who login to leave comments. My control panel is organized a little differently (different, not better). My posts will have a couple more categories to go into (I had reached the limit of number of categories I could have in the previous software version, but that number has since been increased). But no automatic aesthetic differences.

So was I prepared to upgrade, even before I knew it would be easy? Well, basically the entire reason I upgraded my software was to get rid of this annoying little message that told me every time I logged in that I needed to upgrade from version 3.1 to version 3.7. And the first thing I did when I finished was login to WordPress and glance up at the top of my dashboard.
Frakking message is still there. It now just says I need to go from version 3.7 to 3.7.1. Manually. Yeah right.

In fact, it will probably be right around February 2011 that I bother to make any major changes, when domainsite and intersabre start reminding me that my domain is going to expire again. But it has definitely been fun to look through all my files as they downloaded through my ftp client and take note of all that I’ve written, all that I’ve learned about web hosting, software, plugins, and writing since February 16th-ish last year. And certainly to think about all the things I’ve had to write about since then: Hospitality, smiles, children, airplane rides (ten), different countries, states and a districts, a dozen new best friends in an 11-hour range of time zones, a jungle, unexpected returns to favorite places, a new instrument, a new language, brothers, a brother, my brother and bros (nope, not a typo), and the Truth that permeates every one.

Figures

So about 60 hours after I just reinstalled Windows XP Professional on my desktop, Windows 7 is getting released as a Beta. If I’d known that, I would have just waited two days.

Oh well. I may still put it on my second hard drive. I need a new project, and I’ve never Beta tested a new operating system. And if anyone else is interested, you can download the Beta from Microsoft here, starting tomorrow (January 9, 2009) afternoon.

Fresh OS

My desktop computer is about 4½ years old. As I told John once, when he asked me what brand it was, it started out a “Dell,” but now it’s a “Dan.”

In the time I’ve owned it, I’ve upgraded the RAM (still not enough, but more than my laptop that runs Vista) and the monitor, added a second hard drive, dual booting with Fedora Core 2 Linux, and installed a DVD burner, a legacy Zip drive (for kicks) and a superfluous amount of peripherals (did I really need a Skype phone? I’d like to think so). And once before, and now once again, reinstalled the operating system.

Most people either don’t need to do this or they don’t know that they do need to do so. Or, like my parents, they’re lucky enough to live with one or two people (in this case Colin and me) who recognize when this is a viable option. As for me, I reinstall my operating system instead of paying for anti-virus software. I figure I come out monetarily even and intellectually better for this strategy. Thirty bucks a year that I haven’t paid for the last 3½ years is worth more hours of my life than the relatively short time it takes me to 1) keep my Registry and Microsoft Configuration in an organized, virus/mal/spy-ware-free state and 2) give the operating system a fresh start twice (and hopefully never again) over my computer’s life. Even if it wasn’t worth it simply in time, I get practice in doing things manually and identifying what really needs to be on my system and what doesn’t.

In fact, just in the time it took me to write this, I’m up to 96% of my primary hard disk drive formatted and ready for a new copy of XP Pro. It hasn’t slowed down my blog writing, and this time through the reinstall preparations, I learned where some of my favorite programs store their files and managed to back up a huge amount of files, correspondence, and other writing, aside from over 20 gigs of music and 14 gigs of pictures that needed to be added to my archives anyway.

My procedure is down to a science at this point:

  • Make a copy of “My Documents” (including “My Pictures” and “My Music”) on my External Hard Drive (I’ve learned to keep everything actually organized within these directories for just such an occasion as this)
  • Move all objects on my Desktop to a copy on the External HDD
  • Create a copy of my Thunderbird and Skype profiles from the Application Data directory, also placed on the EHDD
  • While this is all moving (USB is only so fast, and this generally takes upwards of an hour), download install files for all the multitude of awesome, free software I have and collect them in a folder for quick reinstallation purposes. This includes drivers for my wireless internet adapter.

    • Two things I forgot to do were uninstall Microsoft Office from my computer and to write down my computer’s name. I don’t think Microsoft is going to notify me that I’ve exceeded my licenses for Word since still only two computers will be using it (desktop and laptop). We’ll see how that turns out. And it’s not overly important to have the same computer name. In fact, I have a couple of friends who would specifically not recommend it. I just don’t like having to learn a new computer name for those times when I’m searching for files, shared drives, or printers on the network (although if I needed to write it down, I guess I didn’t learn it very well). However, it was easy to retrieve from my laptop. Just looked up my laptop’s default printer, which was the one attached to my desktop, and took my desktop’s Computer Name out of the address.

    Now the reason for all of this is that I had a very obnoxious virus on my computer. I know how to remove it both with automated software and manually, but I don’t like clogging up my system with one-shot anti-malware programs any more than I like clogging it up with the actual malware, and I’m just to lazy to remove such a huge chunk of information from the Registry as that which “XP Antivirus 2009” puts in there.

    Aside: If any of you ever see “XP Antivirus 2009,” don’t believe anything it tells you. I was fortunate enough to be able to recognize it as fake anti-spyware that puts more fake malware on your computer and then claims your computer is infected and asks you to pay for the full version to remove the fuax adware. It’s also hard to eradicate, and annoying as sin with its little pop-ups on your desktop. Add this to my laziness, and here I am reinstalling my OS. I also figure that it’s probably not the only thing that has slipped through my (very tight, but not impervious) manual computer security.

    Annoying as it is to wait for 3 days or so as Windows update catches up to the current level of updates (there are good and bad things about strictly successive updates), it’s refreshing to look at my clean desktop and know that even with half a decade of dust built up inside it, it’s basically functioning as a brand-new right-out-of-the-box machine. But this time around, I’m definitely putting at least some free anti-virus software on it like a normal person. I hope the next operating system I install is Windows 7.

    UPDATE: Here I sit at 2:49 am watching update 13 of 48 install itself. And all of these have to install before I even get to XP Service Pack 3 and the updates since then. But so far, so good, and the only thing I’m still fighting with is the display settings. Amazing what this thing does on its own.

    UPDATE 2: And here I am at 3:07 am, downloading Service Pack 3. And believe it or not, I’m typing this from my desktop, not the laptop. Already functional.

Whole New Computer in 3 Steps

This isn’t exciting to anyone but me. But it deserves to be recorded.

First off, I tripled the memory in my computer tonight. I’m actually ashamed (as a geek) how little RAM I had in my otherwise surprisingly powerful 4-year-old desktop. When asked what it is, I tell people that it started a “Dell” and now it’s a “Dan.”

I also fixed a rather large audio problem that involved iTunes coming through my Philips VOIP phone and Skype emanating from my speakers. The first attempt made ALL sound go through only the Skype phone, and only when a call was in progress (Alltel is going to wonder about all the “Unidentified” calls to my cell) despite all sound supposedly being directly only to the speakers in my Control Panel. The long and short of it is that I eventually won. It always gives you a sense of superiority when you outsmart the computer, especially when it involves sucessful international phone calls and a properly functioning iTunes, both coming through only the intended device.

And finally, my flat panel monitor arrived this afternoon and was installed this evening, freeing up my old CRT for Colin to make a dual monitor configuration (and waste a ton of electricity, but look cool doing it, what with the Matrix screensavers) and freeing up my desk to actually do homework here this semester. And by do homework here this semester, I mean do homework this semester.

New Site/Blog

If you are reading this, you’ve either actually found my new e-home or you’re on facebook. In the case of the latter, cruise on over to www.dannypeck.net and you’ll see my brand new site, which at this point is mainly my blog. I’ll be working on changing that in the coming days, but this is going to be the home of all my 2008 Ecuador updates, so check it out regularly.

I also have a new e-mail, danny@dannypeck.net so send me something and make me happy (and let me know I am a good hacker and have actually got it working)