Tech & Geeky Goodness

It may be silly, looking back fondly on the days when I had to remember an eddress like “friend69%node.bitnet@tardis.univ.edu” or worse in order to send someone an email at a speed that was measured by baudrate ... and via a modem that one had to place the phone receiver on ... but in some ways I do. If I mistyped the eddress, or the server was down, or there was a problem of any kind in sending or receiving the email, I got a big ol’ BOUNCE message in return. If I didn’t get one, I knew my email had gone through.

These days, I send out email and wonder ... will it get wrongly trapped in a spam filter? Will it not get through because of blacklisting, because my domain has been forged in spamming? Or because I specifically am not on the recipient’s whitelist? Or do the various factions of the internet necessary to get the packets from point A to point B not speak to each other often or reliably any more? Or did the recipient receive my email, but is too busy/behind and has let it languish, forgotten? Or does the recipient just not want to talk to me?

Granted, not all of those questions would be answered under the old system ... but a lot of the guesswork and frustration wouldn’t exist.

What can I say? I am a confirmed internet dinosaur. Lynx and Pine and Archie and Gopher have different primary connotations for me than they do for most people ... Meantime, I’m tired of not knowing whether my email is getting through or not.

Now that I have your attention, may I –ahem– titillate you a bit more, by saying that to find out what I mean, you’ll have to follow me to the second part of this tease ... where the photographic evidence can be found.

For anyone unfamiliar with the acronym FAP, it refers to our satlink provider’s Fair Access Policy—we’re permitted 200MB of data download per “rolling 24 hours”, and if we exceed it, our internet access is severely throttled. As in, below dialup speed throttled.

So yeah, that’s why you didn’t hear from me yesterday. It gave me more space for thinking, however, so I will probably have something somewhat substantive to opine on soon. But not today—in fact, as I type this I am in danger of being left behind. What began as a promise to Snolf the First to take him to a Rush concert has turned into an all-family overnight Rushian adventure. It should be a lot of fun!

I’ve been kinda-sorta following developments in wind and solar energy, but not very diligently; I don’t expect to have a need for that kind of tech anytime soon. A Reuters article from yesterday sure caught my attention, though: Pioneers show Americans how to live “off-grid” claims that prices have dropped enough that both technologies are increasingly feasible for home use. And of course, the increasing costs of energy have upped the appeal. An excerpt from the article:

[Author Nick] Rosen estimates that there are as many as 350,000 U.S. households meet their own energy needs, and growing at 30 percent a year.

"As people are losing their homes, or finding the rent or mortgage too much to pay, they are choosing the off-grid alternative because it is so much cheaper," Rosen said

While installation costs for the solar panels, wind turbines, converters and batteries needed to power up an off-grid home were prohibitively expensive a few years back, improved technology and ramped up production has driven down costs significantly.

Popular solar-powered systems are made by Sharp Corp, Kyocera Corp and silicon Valley-based Nanosolar, among others, and according to the website Low Impact Living (click on www.lowimpactliving.com/), installation costs have fallen by more than 80 percent over 20 years.

"The cost is falling all the time as there is more and more manufacturing plant coming onstream. In fact, there may even be a glut in solar panels next year which would be very good news for the consumers," said Rosen. ....

Power utilities such as Arizona Public Service, the principal subsidiary of Pinnacle West Capital Corp, is among utilities in several U.S. states that offer subsidies to consumers planning to meet their own power needs, so as to ease demand for a growing on-grid customer base.

"Not only is it getting cheaper to generate non-grid electricity, but it's getting cheap and comfortable to set up your off-grid home, and there are even bonuses from your local utility company for doing so," Rosen said. ....

The cost of building such a home is little different from that of building any other home, and with a range of energy sipping appliances such as refrigerators, hi-fis and even hairdryers now available, the forced austerity associated with off-grid living is also changing.

"You can have hot showers and a cold beer," said [off-grid developer Lonnie] Gamble. "You have no water bill, no sewer bill, no power bill and you can harvest something fresh from the greenhouse ... why would you ever do anything else?"

Two things stick out from the article—only one of which is in the bit quoted. If one is completely off the grid, why would one be in contact with “your local utility company”? Seems to me the privacy gained from them not coming on to the property, reading meters and the like, would itself be worth going off-grid. Second, “trend analyst” author Rosen is quoted as saying that he doesn’t think as many as half of all American homes will ever be off-grid, which strikes me as an amazingly short-sided attitude, particularly for one in the trend analysis biz. If that stupid OPEC lawsuit legislation continues, and if the greenies keep the USSA’s reserves out of bounds, the resulting price pinch could be enough to tip a lot more people that way. And it is possible that the grid could fail or be taken out for a large part of the country, and in some way that would require routing around that in order to regain some of the niceties of modernity. Doesn’t take much imagination to come up with such scenarios at all.

Anyway, it’s good to see such a major leg in the self-sufficiency puzzle getting more interest.

With credit (or blame, if you prefer) to MAL for the inspiration, as well as the number one reason.

Sigh ... Well, I thought I had things pretty well in hand when I went off yesterday afternoon to meet up with MAL and head for the Big City. Alas, once again I was overconfident.

Yep, you guessed it: I attempted to upgrade my Linux OS yet again. That required more maneuvering than I’d anticipated, but I finally got all the preliminary steps completed, and slipped the install disc into my machine. Actually, I tried three discs—each of them sent to me from the Ubuntu Overlords (I think the real name is Canonical)—and failed with all three.

No matter what option I choose from the initial menu, after the "kernel active" message appears in white text, the screen goes blank; then, after a few seconds, the disc stops spinning. And nothing else happens. I had thought this was happening because the discs weren’t set up to handle my nice wide screen monitor; but today I plugged in an old monitor and got the same result.

I can’t download what I’d need to burn my own disc because it exceeds our satlink provider’s niggardly “fair access policy” limit. Exceeding that slows one’s connection to under dialup speed for 24 hours.

I really, really want to have a newer Kubuntu install on my system before I leave ... but I am completely out of ideas as to why I cannot get any of their discs to work in my machine. (Well, I know why the PC one didn’t work—I have a 64-bit machine. But neither of the 64-bit install discs work.) One more try and then I’m going to hit the bottle.

It’s certainly a major victory to be back online after nearly two days! Short story: our satlink company had a regional problem, and when it was “fixed”, that created another problem for a subset of affected customers. Yes, we were among those beset with that second problem. But, after many hours with tech support, our connection was finally restored late yesterday evening ... too late for me to have enough energy to offer my contributions to the party I’d scheduled. But now that I’ve had some time to get things properly set up, I hope it carries on from what was begun on 1/16 ...

I have used Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) for a very long time now. One thing I particularly liked about it is that the encryption not only scrambled the content of email, it obscured its length. I can recall receiving a long, encrypted message, and upon decrypting, a very short message was revealed. Similarly, long unencrypted messages were not noticeably, nor predictably longer than short ones when encrypted.

But that has changed; nowadays it’s fairly easy to gauge the length of an email by its encrypted length. At least, it is for me; I’m currently using KGpg, with my PGP keys that were generated a couple of years ago (don’t recall what version of PGP that was). What changed in encryption tech to cause this loss of file-length obscuring?

I tried several times to upgrade from the install DVD MAL got, but no joy. It appears to crash—every option I tried goes very quickly to black screen and stays there.

The good news is the old install still works just fine, so I can torment y’all some more while we try to figure out what the problem is. Ain’t computers grand?

According to the weather seers, a large snowstorm is going to assault our region beginning sometime tomorrow. I am also going to be attempting to upgrade my machine to Gutsy Gibbon.

So, it’s a pretty safe bet that I am not going to be online much tomorrow. So, happy December 1, and have fun and be good to each other! I’ll see ya when I see ya ...

I’m not sure that that’s the most accurate way to describe Prosper—although the home page’s title says “people to people lending” so I guess I’m not too far off. What an intriguing idea ...

Yep, you can peer into your genetic code, without a medical monopolist’s permission slip required, for just under $1,000 USSA. The company offering this deal is deCODE, in Iceland.

That title is meant to be warbled to the tune Who Knows Where the Time Goes? ... fortunately, email isn’t as flitting and fleeting as time. I am saddened to report that I am still having problems with the eddress associated with this domain.

That’s life in a neat, tidy package, isn’t it? It seems to be for me, anyway: at any point in my life, I’m making progress in some areas, some more than others; in other areas I seem to be moving backwards; and in a few others I have either deliberately or accidentally routed around what I originally thought was the best course. Step into my cozy kitchen for an update, if you dare (more like if you’re in need of a soporific). But first, for anyone wondering which eddress to use to contact me, my primary one at this domain is the best bet at the moment. More on that over a cup of coffee or tea ...