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Wednesday, November 20, 2024

Magneto (anatomy of a TOT)

 A british actor who mumbled a lot anyway, said that he needed a Magneto.
A fellow actor repeated the phrase, "Magneto."

OK if you're into accents, and explanations that make no sense,
have I got a video for you.

(Hint: the video claims that brushes act as rectifiers)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzNIyl-sNSQ


Apparently it's popular in India to make complicated videos.
We use diodes and transistors, But in ancient times they used 
motors next to other motors (AC motor + Commutator)
And that's as far as I'll ever get.
The very hot teacher in my 4th-grade genius class (it was only for a week or so)
made a generator motor from a magnet and a coil of wire.
(Later on in future years they made grapefruit and potato batteries)
But the demos were for flash and pizzazz, not to actually learn much, and
  I still don't know what a magneto does
(commutator or not)
Get an old guy to explain flyback transformers on old TV's, and wonder (ok that's just me) why a flyback couldn't go in a car to fire off spark plugs.
By Teravolt at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25423550

WTF, "Armature?"
Tease something to distraction,
Dump it suddenly,
And it really pisses them off.
(Sounds familiar, somehow)

*I* remember coils! Long cylinders with a cone on top, to be hooked onto something else and blamed for everything.
I guess one end of the cylinder hooked to an alternator (aka "magneto"?)
and the other end (the cone) to the distributor, but that's total guessing from a 7 year-old's memory.


crank the car, pull a plug, check for an arc, replace the coil/hit the alternator with a shoe


You prolly know how to subtract from a dollar to give change, and you wouldn't know what subtrahends and minuends are (dances on weekends?)

And so it is with any internet exposition I've found on armatures. A part of something that does something and produces a result, 
But I like the fourth-grade demo of the rotating magnet in a stationary coil, (or vice versa) better than knowing, uhm, what that web-page said.



if 2+2 is four, then 2^2 is four, and x^2=4 comes out to 2, 
I can maybe know what a "Magneto" is.
Someday.




Tuesday, November 19, 2024

Thumbprint (fail)

 First off, the paranoia of entering passwords while the ceiling creaks loudly with every new password, kind of defeats the purpose of passwords (making me feel more secure)
But forgetting that: 
I dragged out my finger-print reader from the dusty closet in a metal box,
Beeecause the nights are long, and I wonder how much of a hassle could it have been for me years ago when I locked it away in my "Vault"?
I bought it for the new windows, 
found out it was the Old windows, just harder to use.
Daily, several times a day, my event-log claims that "Hello for business" will not be used. It says, I'm good enough, but I don't qualify (somehow).
















And so, my account page is related.
I think.

All the sign-in options for face-recognition and stuff are grayed out.





Getting tidbits from the internet are no help.
But in my imagination, 
I'm not at home and my well-known passwords are all out there,
 like dirty underwear hanging in the breeze, 
but my thumbprint reader stalwartly protects,
 the last vestige of privacy I might still have.
But no, I'm not good enough.
"hello" (for business?) must be set up, for me to use my pin, 
or a reader (Login says).
Right this exact second I'd be happy just knowing the fingerprint-reader actually worked.
IF it worked, if it can authorize, 
maybe then I could waste tons more time 
getting "Hello" to wake up and say hello.
But I put it away, years ago, for a reason.
I just can't remember why.


Deep in the heart of my registry, and translated from windows 10 (It's different),
Were obscure settings I must have messed with to squelch the error messages from Hello-for-Business.
Well so stuff seems to work, for now.

Thing is, I don't trust the reader yet, if it's only as good as my phone's reader, which is pretty damn bad.
If this reader makes you (after a couple days minutes) retry and then rejects you, I can see maybe why I thought it was so pointless. Licking my thumb and wiping it on my shirt helps (I know, "ew")
But I just signed in, and the advice-givers say,
To use a local account, not your microsoft account, (I'm still verifying this)
and
to use netplwiz to tell windows to demand passwords.
My windows was free (I thought) because I was using a microsoft account.
I don't know how to switch back, but I won't bore readers with details unless it becomes a biggie-thing.

I changed my wifi password (what's the symbol for sarcastic "LOL"?)
and reached for the dustiest jacket I own, because it's cold.
A sticky label was attached "P: Purple" from an old UPS package.
They couldn't know my "Purple" anecdote, (could they?) 
"Town without Purple"
so I looked it up, "The Color Purple" on a UPS label.
https://www.browncafe.com/community/threads/what-do-the-colors-on-ups-packages-mean.375817/ (Why will you say that *I* am mad??)

Saturday, November 16, 2024

verifiable (ble?)

AMD adrenalin 24.8.1 runs decent 

24.9.1 and 24.10.1 are turtles by comparison.
Why??
I speak mostly of the CPU-Test inside Timespy in 3dmark

Nobody reads these but I want it written somewhere that the newer drivers slow my card down, at the same settings using the same test.


The 24.8.1 isn't running superfast, exactly, I've seen it run at 16700 on a rare blue-moon day. Plus, I should point out that this is only one part of one score.
But I've been able to prove to myself that the latest drivers slow the card down, and my only question so far is,
"Why?"





Taking copious notes and tweeeeking NB/SOC from a few reddit articles, and VDDP, I find that I already had optimal (for this PC) settings and my tweaks just slowed them down.
Me-in-the-future, ignore the internet, read your notes. (1.1 and 0.855)
I don't know right now what new feature they added to the drivers, but it slows my hoary card down. 


No one asked, but my "Power plan" seems to be stuck on "Balanced"



It's a piddly excuse but something I need to look into.
It's as interesting as scrubbing my tub in the bathroom.
I may never figure it out or if it makes a difference.
It took a video to type one line?
Bombastic.
It's worth a try, I just feel despondent. It should work.
"Device security" is ignoring me too.
What should I think??
Suddenly it's all decorative, non-functional


If some new setting broke my menus, or a service I used to use got switched off,
or it's because I'm using WiFi?
Get-AppXPackage | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}

Anyway the long line in Powershell to restore app settings seems to have worked.
So if it's innocent, the fix should be long-lasting.
If on the other hand something is messing with the menus, this problem will return soon.

QOTD:
In related news, Musk has something nasty to say about Google AI.
I'm not absolutely sure this isn't just propaganda.


My Atari 400 could run tiny programs in basic (Built-in or add-on, I don't remember)
And one of the programs was an 8-ball type program you could use like a calculator to get it to answer questions. 
The religious-type girl I knew then warned against letting computers answer questions, and someone with her scoffed that it was only some game (that I wrote, most amateurishly) but she was adamant, it smacked of satanic influences.


I also remember a Danny Dunn book from way before that, and the consequences of letting a computer do homework and especially, write speeches.
(The book had a happy ending though; The kid worked so hard programming the computer that he became smarter without meaning to.)
Switch to today, when AI programs will decide our right to be citizens.
He missed his calling being the evil-guy in some movie about Satan (EG Omen/Exorcist)



Cool passport photos:

The old flashlight trick (lit from below)
Plus, most of the photos have the person's head tilting down and looking up.
Face recognition is a form of AI, isn't it?
I wonder what AI thinks about faces generally.

Thursday, November 14, 2024

wishlists

 rare forks for hobos and rich people

These teeny forks, perfect for pocket or purse,
are cheaper up the street (or they were, many years ago)

Another Logitech mouse (because the perfectly good old one double-clicks)

Roach Bait. I've been buying spray cans forever that don't work.
Liquid-Bait works, unless something else is poisoning them (Giant cockroaches used to crawl through the front door to die)

My laundry-service keeps mailing me, but the laundry is too dirty for them anyways so I ignore them.

Dentures that fit (but that's pie-in-sky thinking)

A couple of $100.00ea. Batteries

And a TV that has a center-base, which is my only requirement (and they don't make them anymore, someone passed a law)

Horse Cack
(Witness my Router)
It's cheaper to stick on two matchsticks than a hunk of heavy metal.

and a wifi 6ghz scanner.

I'm scanning my wifi!
I'm scanning my wifi!
So I can remain unobtrusive and out of the way (for a while, anyway)
not sure I trust "Wifiman" yet.
There's a setup-signal on the entire 6ghz-band, or, wifiman is two eggs short of a dozen.



And maybe a smaller bed, 22-inches high total.
I swear it's damn near impossible to shop for beds online, although the problem would be eliminated in a bed showroom.
You'd sit your butt down on the real live bed, see if it had just the right bounce, drag out a credit card.
Would the saleslady be too good looking and distracted by the richer-than-god people who are waiting for her?


"Adjustable" beds costs as much or more than refrigerators. No.
   Cheap-ass cot on blocks?

Some beds (I'm thinking, "hospital") make you figuratively climb out of a swamp helplessly, it's hard to explain. 
Laying there motionless is fine, until you reach for anything on the stand at the head of the bed...
Swimming against the tide of the lumpy thing that has no bounce at all, and any angle is uncomfortable, until they pump you full of sleepy-time (chopped into tiny pieces because they would not want you to enjoy it too much)
So anyway that really large woman on TV laying flat on a rubber mattress and looking very surprised, always reminds me of beds without springs you can't move in,
 like in hospitals.
"Turn over" becomes this massive project.
Springs!!
Narrower.
High-up. (sort of)
Halfways-house for ex prisoners-bed.
(Fifties retro style)
I hate the picture, but it's sort of what I wanted, kind of.
Box-springs must be like those center-stands I talked about, endangered, rare.
bullshit.
Selling a piece of rubber is enormously cheaper than a spring bed, come out and admit it.

Home depot (yeeeers ago) had foam-rubber wrapped in cloth, green/plaid, for camping. NOW they just added a shitload to the price, gave it a fancy name.
Well maybe it's time I fished for dumpster models, I don't know.







The very few streaming experiences I have had deal mostly with binge-watching "Doctor Who" on a streaming service called DailyMotion.
It works, and I see a little more into what's what.
Are people gonna be like "https://screenrant.com/doctor-who-season-14-episode-5-dot-bubble-ending-explained/" soon?
Sutekh suketh (It's an anagram?)
I like the show generally, but these people deserve doctorates for their treatises,
PhDs in the "whoniverse."
The writer makes gargantuan plot-holes you could drive a Tardis through, like talking Babies never growing up, or a girl who can barely walk on her own, suddenly knowing how to use ladders quickly.
But apparently this one episode really ticked off fans.
I kind of surmise it's Disney 10-year-old fans (and 10-year-old fans from the 70's) vs old codgers. 
But I wouldn't really know.
ADD another word to the list, "Hegemony"



And I suppose just for testing purposes, I need to find the most crowded channel and stream something.
But for now I choose the semi-desert-wasteland of 6ghz.



Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Manufactured style

 wHEN A PERSON WRITES ANYTHING, *SKILLFUL* 

(what?) 

oh.

Skillful writers make the reader see the pictures in their head. 
I can't. I want you to picture the window in my router the way I see it, not how it looks online. Too small to really see much.

But first, my dream.

When phones can really do holograms,
(People will line up in the rain,
Mobs will rob)

I hate (jersey?) hats.
Icons of style

A rambling tangent (appearances matter) 

My waking dream was about pretentious people looking for a battered van, to look good in society (so they look like they've had many pleasant experiences.)
I am not sure why my character thought that pretending to buy old stuff was pretentious, because, (just as an example) "Antiques roadshow."
The old van could conjure up memories made by the original owners, as if they were filmed with an 8mm home camera, And people would admire them, being experienced and well-traveled.


"Popular Products"

The window in my new router is like that.
The window either never opens, or it's stuck.
Either way, it's totally pointless, like some necklace on a fat guy (I was gonna say "ring," but you'd misconstrue. And what have I got against "fat guys?"
Nevermind! ) "G∀MÆŽ" oooo, rebel



Inside the window are enticing shapes. That "07"-graffiti looking lump of plastic looks a lot like some added-on chip, taped down. (Disembodied-voice says it's a battery. Imitation, or ?? And Google is clueless too, on the numbers (eg) "/206"


There's a tagline "For those who...."
Tai'an Jinshui Village, Taiwan 365, China (o....k)
on the left (you can barely see "for those" in the photo.)
And if you pick the router up at the rich, stylish-wannabe guy's house, just before he yells at you, 
you'll see "...Dare (For those who dare)"
Ghetto-chic, pretentious, yeah but it's fun.
and who drops by anyway? No pretensioner here. 
(No cat-shitters, no Roombas,...)



?


Some of the router's settings are almost useless, forgotten. 
The very few battleground settings making a biggie difference overshadow the others, and the other settings you don't know about, might never have heard of, might mess things up.
A Pissant setting from nowhere special (DTIM, for example,) might dictate how fast a person connects, how often they're bothered with useless stuff.

The style the designer chose is "verbose," I suppose because it looks more important that way. The next (Lower-down) blog entry wonders about some of those settings.
But if you never bothered to *Touch* them, left them alone and only watched the biggie settings, would it matter?

People attracted to the router initially might be turned away from it, because it's inscrutable or the lights are too bright, the wrong color.

Can it do "Fuchsia?"
"Blush" & "Bashful"?
It's corpulent.
It isn't fast enough for them or doesn't have some trendy (for 2025) feature.
*I* like it but who am I.
The makeup-video people haven't been polled.



















Tuesday, October 29, 2024

Ble? (3.0.0.6.102_34491 and 37031) GT-Be98

Think of this version (until I edit it) like a notepad.

TX bursting is an option you'd think people would want to enable,
But it is a "Legacy" option from when you were kids and the internet was 1Mbps and no one heard of "Streaming" yet, and "Net Neutrality" wasn't a thing yet.
O, you want "Bombastic"? 
OK, it's for 802.11g and the gang, not AC/AX/Be, although sure as hell they could change this. But on my current router, it's dead, bury it.
(unless and until I have a better link, this one should do)

My wi-fi NIC is Qualcomm, my Router is Broadcom.
So the option in device-manager-Advanced, "Throughput acceleration"
needs more study, but (BIGgie guess) it should be disabled.
Why? 
It's too mysterious and undocumented. 
(In Primetime-internet, Speedtest doesn't care)


The VCI who? (o shit)
DHCP option 60 is great, don't use it! (whut?)
You (I) (OK nevermind) *People* might certainly hate their freebie router and buy another router for the ass-end of the router (are we clear?) but when you put two routers together like that, shit happens.
  


 



I still have to do an excavation in search of MTU size, which (inexplicably) 
is 1480. Yes, 1480 (FOD, pontificators)
No "MTU" for You!!!

A couple updated notes: The "HIDE SSID" is hidden, I can't find it anymore (it used to be right underneath "Enable radio")


Summarizing,
MTU was never there
Hidden-SSID *moved*,
And Group-Key-Rotation-Interval is lost at sea.



No tests on whether MTU size makes a whit of difference to a speedtest.
I mean, it *should* make a difference, you'd think, but maybe on slow routers

Missing so far: Setting the clock with no internet,
If it's so easy, why make you have to code it in a separate program??

I wonder idly about Radius servers. 
Every 1984 nightmare come true.
I guess I'll pass.

No server here, no business.
Being invisible and boring to hackers sounds easier,
but I was still wondering.
Is this a trend, a fashion-choice, or are hackers as eveil and unstoppable as they say (or is that marketing)? 
*I* can choose a password as well as any cloud-server, 
but I don't do certificates.
Very dated arguments that seem to point to Asus using (or used, a long time ago)
"X.509".
Now if only there were ways to obtain an x.509 certificate and stick it on a phone, and thereby pass the device beyond the pearly-gates of the router.
I can install certificates all day on the PC, (Because I need to, whenever a setting is changed)



--------------- 
dns-rebind protection, greatest thing since sliced bread, but it kills stuff.
(Or so I've read)


Wireless MAC Filter

I choose to accept specific people, and hope the router has enough sense to reject everyone else, but prolly not.
Gurus hate this feature anyway and say it's useless.
Well Fine, whatever.
Actually, After I chose to accept my own rig, it rejected it and I could not get back on with the PC set to "wireless."
Turning the filter off accepted my PC again, then of course It works.
 I just had one teeny thing set wrong. 
The list rejects the MAC addresses, 
because they're off by one byte.

Numbers (when discussed by smart people who talk funny)
are read backwards, LSB to MSB, and my LMSB (byte-group) was different,
(Between the purported MAC and the actual MAC it was using, (stop laughing!)
I'm not advanced enough to know which is which, I just know I'm unlucky enough to choose the wrong one for my MAC-Filter authorization-list.
The MAC-address that it likes, doesn't actually exist in any windows or router table, but if you're smarter than God (stG?) you can decode the mac you have, modify it to fit societal values.
Or I got lucky and picked it from some log, IDK.

Which is fine, whatever, but only just now did I find a combo it likes, two mac-addresses, ONE of them making everything work.
Binary
xxxx-xx00
xxxx-xx10
I can't show you the actual macs, but two different logs say two different MACs.
The AA-one and the AB one (the example below explains it more)

Since the phone says "I have no problems" it must be the multiple-macs on my PC-card, but none of them match one of the MACs.
I need a better link but "MLO" might be something that My card or my Router initially tries when hooking up the card.
AI Was all talky and too long to quote, and Now it's a clam. (Link)


Skip the history-of-mac-addresses, forget the math.
Eventually (with the two together in a list) it picked the right one.


If the quote is gospel (because he's parroting a book)
the "Locally administered" bit seems to be getting messed with.
"Locally administered" by who? 
In an authorization-table,
A person might need to add both the actual MAC
and the "Locally administered" one.
(But I'm conjecturing)



This useless bit wasted an entire afternoon, 
and I still don't know "even" from "odd" in hex
I belong to the church of Unicast (I think)
*But so does the wrong MAC-Address!!!(fac!)
Biggie red-herring, this.


Today I navigated the more twilight-zoneish settings  and my "balls to the wall" obscure-settings-quest continues.
So says some Guy

Making no difference (to him) doesn't mean it couldn't make a difference sometime, and will a person remember to toggle it again?
(Out of all the ten-zillion settings?)
Speedtest, what do you think? (If there's a difference, it's too close to call)
Movies, what do you think?
(I'm totally slaughtering my allowance but I'll edit this if it really matters)


Same-ol' "It works (unless it doesn't) YMMV"

An added on note:
A freebie streaming service called "Dailymotion.com" is letting me stream a TV episode, no commercials yet.
One of my really obscure settings causes the very occasional blip in the feed, like I lost the signal for a second or two.
Biggie Blip, then a teeny one,
way minutes later.
I prolly won't ever have an answer, but I am noting it in this log.
If only readers could/would comment.
Maybe blipless movies don't exist, or I touched something, I don't know.
O. It might have been a commercial. 
They're showing one now: (teeny blip) commercial.
Also, sometimes they mumble and subtitles would be excellent.
but the episode I just watched only had subtitles in Vietnamese.



I think I already wrote that neither Samba nor FTP work in "image backup" for me, but that could just be a wrong setting. They set up, they transfer stuff, backup starts and looks happy, then it errors out around 10 minutes into the mission.




My android phone used to take a long time to connect on another router, and then it seemed you could count to "10" slo   ly, and have it connect nearly instantly (it didn't sit there checking stuff)
The NEW router brought the phone back to slow connecting, although the PC didn't care.
I changed DTIM from the default "1" to an Apple-approved "3."

The next setting, "Beacon Interval," nearly no one tries to explain, but it's a fractional tweaker of the standard (55, 100, 101, 106, etc) with 100 being the default.
Is the default good enough?

Like algebra
He can't spell "manner" 
and there is no TLDR; 
unless "It depends"
is a bottom line
I might browse a factoid from a movie on a phone (e.g., do zombies eat meat on Fridays) but I'd never stream two movies, that's silly, unless I'm a cop surveilling something.
So believing this guy 100% would mean I'd never notice.
But another guy says the multicast-BSS (whatever) and disabling 802.11b
are helpful. 
Helpful how?
802.11b does not do 6ghz (does it?) And I wonder if they
factor in "OFDMA" (these articles seem dated)
2 vs 24 (geez)

"OFDM-24" it is, then.
It'll take a month of furtive streaming (so as not to piss off T-Mobile)
and *maybe* stream two movies at once, IDK, to make a value judgement.
(damn torpedoes, balls to wall, whatever)

I'd think 'better' is acceptable.
...I'll try Beacon-interval "200", leaving DTIM at 3, wait several hours and run a speedtest or stream something.
What these guys do NOT say, is, 
Qualcomm vs Broadcom (or no difference)
and client vs another client (or are we going for happy-mediums?)

Today the PC took forever to connect, even though the phone was already connected.
I have no explanation.
Starting up my desktop wi-fi-monitor program-of-the-week kickstarted wifi almost instantly (it got jealous?)
Changing a zillion settings and then guessing which one messed things up, is prolly not the professional's way, but I'll totally guess my beacon interval being raised from 100 to 200 didn't help.
But then explain the phone being happy? IDK.
Says the beacon interval salesguy.
(WHY have a virtual AP?)
Fucket, if 400 is worse then I'll know (won't I)
"VAP"???
"400" made it worse. 
Since I don't use "MLO" nor have ghost channels on every band, 
I'm changing it back to 100. 
I'm too old for this.

400 totally kills Everything right now. Oh. 
Taking time to write this paragraph at least got my phone back. 
No such luck with the PC yet.
Starting monitor-program:. . . .
nothing.
The wifi gods are PO'd.
AH! How long was that, 7 minutes?
It prolly has the unintended side-effect of hiding the network at least temporarily, unless an eveil hacker knows where you are and sits there waiting, hmm









It appears I actually (me, myself) set up "DNS over TLS" but I can't verify that on some status page, and I am no walking dictionary of obscure net-terms
("netstat-whut?")
I'm here, that's the bottom line (for now.)
Is some AI running in circles executing my convoluted DNS setup?
I wouldn't know.
(Should I add a second DNS? Prolly, but I'm afraid right now)
I'm off to read 




DFS status: state IDLE time elapsed 0ms radar channel cleared by DFS none
is directly from the inscrutable log.
I've been approved for DFS (I *think* that's what it said)
and
443 is "SSL," isn't it?
DOH or TLS or??
So confusing.
DFS none could also mean, no DFS channels were cleared.
"Cleared" is sort of an eminent-domain thing (We don't like Hippies here)
But I don't want to put words in the router-log's mouth.
I use DOH because windows wants it that way.
One day they'll maybe use TLS. 
I honestly do not know which is better.
VPN salesmen say "no."
(OK I guessed)

The truly evil use VPN's (I guess) not fancy-dancy protocols from Microsoft nor Asus, but then wouldn't NCIS/NSA/FBI/HS (*sigh*) Secret service, MI5, Mossad,
wouldn't they all focus in on VPN's? (linky)

I'd suspiciously eye ANY protocol insisting on using one single port to transmit covert data, it just makes surveillance easier (doesn't it?)
The truly lazy spy might just sit on one single port and read the news (or use "X")
(another Linky)
Open text messages ("the grass is green, the sunset is very red"
or a line or two in the endless Trump-jungle of news, uh, 
hmm
"John, Mother is very ill. Please come home." might be better, blend in.
Not stick out like a neon sign on port 443.





Less than 24 hours after I Updated the Firmware, another new version was released. 
  • 34491, which was original, then
  • 34508 which was yesterday,
  • 37031, today
Yeahbutt, do I need to reset-reboot-reset?

I did just that today, feeling overconfident, and lost everything dinky set up and culled from wise ones on the internet, so's I could start over with brand-new shiny-clean menus (The latest update changed them)
It's back, and over the next couple days I hope to bring the router's speed back up to its former glory. If it isn't already.

Tell me again why windows cares
which version of Wi-Fi 
that you use?

Trivial but:
Disable offload, vs Enable Offload, 
The controversy rages on
(Wi-Fi) Whatever.

right this exact second's settings
and I'm changing "Dns Rebind" to "enabled" despite a vague warning to leave it disabled. It's there, it prolly works, it's just, I wanted to wait til the other settings worked first.