Catharsis of the Bogue

Oddities, Profundities, Profanities and Dad Stuff

Category: Tech Stuff (Page 1 of 3)

Of water, Lego’s and laptops…

March 28, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Oh the 3 things that should not be in combination in the hands of a 7 year old.  I am writing this on my laptop, with an old keyboard from a desktop computer.  Why, because water doesn’t make laptop keyboards work.  At all.  This is not the first time one of my kids has spilt on my keyboard, but this is the worst of it.  The keyboard doesn’t even sort of work.  Let’s take the time machine back a few hours…..

{time machine music goes here with some wavy picture that evokes going back in time}

Windows Key on black laptop keyboard.

Windows Key on black laptop keyboard. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ok so here we are getting dinner ready for the masses, or trying to.  My youngest son runs into the kitchen, “Daddy I spilled your drink on your keyboard.”  “What keyboard?” said I, rushing to the electronics.  “Your laptop.” he says and my brain clicks into overdrive, giving orders for towels and screwdrivers as I powered the machine down and dumping it upside down to clear the fluid.

You see we have a bench against the wall at our dinner table.  I had the computer on the dinner table.  My son had a few legos on the back side of the table and he was climbing around and over the table.  Gravity took over and well the rest, and my keyboard, is history.

So after cleaning and drying the keyboard was dead but the computer works just fine, Albeit with another keyboard.  

Cut scene to a week later.  I bought another keyboard from the local thrift store that is about the size of my laptop so it is easier to take around, and it doesn’t have a cord.  It does have the pleasing clicking of a mechanical keyboard that somehow gives great feedback to how fast you are typing.  I kind of like it.  Cut to a couple of week later when Ebay finally comes through and I get a new keyboard for the laptop itself.  I took the thing apart again and installed the new one.  A huge mess of not easy to do as it turned out.  But I got it back together.  

Well the new keyboard works, but not quite like it should.  Sure all of the keys do what they need to, but it is not as secure as it should be so it is almost impossible to type on.  I still have to open the whole thing back up and secure the keyboard.  I just like typing on this other one so much I may not do it for quite a while.

To sum up, water and laptops do not mix, but for around $25 I got a new keyboard for the machine, and a wireless keyboard that I quite like.  It is one of those things that turns out well in the end, but what a hassle overall.  

What a waste of a weekend..

March 27, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Well now it is time for me to get back into some regular blog writing, now that my blogs are working properly again.  It has been a while since all of my sites have been actually loading and working correctly.  Apparently there were some problems that have been brewing for a while that I didn’t realize were problems.  I have all of my sites hosted through Hostgator (no I am not posting a link here, for reasons that will become clear) and they sent me a message about high server use last year.  I thought it was all taken care of after I killed a bad plugin on one of my WordPress sites.  

Apparently, it was not fixed.  Earlier this year I found that my .htaccess file had been held for ransom  modified by hostgator so that I could not write or edit the thing.  This wouldn’t let me install or run any security plugins or caching plugins that THEY RECOMMENDED I INSTALL!  I found this out but the sites were still working for the most part so I ignored it.  Sites would load slowly and I would get 504 (Gateway Timeout) errors more and more often.  I finally decided to start blogging regularly again and I had a hard time getting to this site to do it.

It was last Tuesday, now a week ago, that all 13 of my sites would not load and were constantly getting the 504 errors.  I contacted Hostgator and after about an hour on chat, I was directed to an open ticket from a year ago that I had thought was closed.  Well, after some back and forth and me reporting 2 different times about not being able to get into my sites, they finally ran a scan on my account. To my surprise, the scan covered 130,872 files and 13,936 of them were infected with malware.

Well that set up an exciting weekend at the computer for me, and not writing.  The malware was in the main wordpress .php files, plugin files, theme files, pretty much most of the .php files in my account.  After all of the fun, I had found 3 different forms of the malware, all of which were designed to create backdoors to my sites.  A fat lot of good it would do for anyone to break into my sites, with all of the state secrets and tubs of money that go through them.  Oh that’s right, THEY ARE ALL FREAKING BLOGS OR INFORMATIONAL SITES!

Ok, deep breath.  That rant will be over at CantankerousOldCoots.com later today.

Back to the fun, I found that reinstalling the .php files was the best way to get rid of the virus.  WordPress wasn’t a problem, and some of the plugins were easy to install.  Other plugins were not available, but replacements were, so they got installed.  Some of my theme files and plugins however, were no longer available.  You may  say, “Just find something else then.”  But here is the rub, over the years I have done extensive modifications on most of those themes and some of the plugins, so it wasn’t easy to replace them.  So I didn’t.  I ended up going through what seemed like 10000 files (I know it was less but I wasn’t counting) and manually deleting the malicious code from each one.  

It was a huge deal and took me most of the weekend to do.  Finally, on Sunday night, I finished and all of my sites loaded like they should have.  I spent Monday updating and working on plugins, some of which still had issues, but finally got all of them finished and working like they should.  And I got my .htaccess file back.  And finally the security plugins that I needed.

Hopefully, and I really hope so, all of this is finished and I can get on with my sites working and doing what they are supposed to do.  There are some very painful and creative things that I would like to do to these people that created this malware and got it all over my account.  I should write a book about that, it would rival a Stephen King.  But I digress, I will probably just leave it be and write more posts.

Relativistic Physics for 7 year olds

February 8, 2018 / / 0 Comments

This morning was interesting.  I poured my 7 1/2 year old son a bowl of cereal for breakfast while I was finishing making lunches.  He sat and ate for a few minutes and then he asked, “Dad, if someone from the future takes someone from the past on a time machine to the future, are they the same age or is one really old?”  Yea, ponder that for a minute.

English: Relativistic formula

English: Relativistic formula (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I sat there for a minute or two and finally said “Yes, to both questions.”  Needless to say he was confused.  So here I am trying to figure out how to explain relativity and time travel to a 7 year old so he can understand it.  Yea, his brain is unique.

I started with a bit of relativity, glossing over the theoretical science and math and got to “If you are on an airplane you don’t notice you are moving unless to look out at the ground, but if you are standing on the corner watching the plane it is going fast.  It is all how you are looking at the same thing.”  Confused look for a minute and then, “Oh, so it is like watching a car go by on the road.”  Bah, bested by a 7 year old.

“Yes,” I said, “it is like that.”  And then we get into what happens with time travel and people.  I hold 2 fingers up, one on each hand.  “OK, these are people and they are both 10 years old and they were born 100 years apart.  In normal time they would move at the same rate.”  As i move my fingers at the same time, “each gets older the same but they will never meet.  When the guy in the future goes to the past, he is getting older to himself, but hasn’t even been born yet to the past guy!”  Eyes began to glaze a bit but he stuck with it.

“Ok, if they both jump back to the future, the future guy is still 10 to himself and 10 in his world.  the past guy is 10 in his body, but 110 by his birthday?  Make sense?”  He looked for a minute and said, “So if they guy from the past goes to the future he is still 10.  Got it.”

Yea sure Tristan, you got it.  I am still waiting for a call from the school, either from his teacher, “What are you teaching this kid?”  or from the principal, “Your son got in a fight about time travel and how old he will be in 103 years.”  We will see what happens.

-Justin

Videotape and Memories, Some Things Best Left to Still Pictures

January 16, 2015 / / 0 Comments

I was watching a video with my 3 year old yesterday. It was the raw footage of our vacation to Disneyland last fall. I realized a few things while watching this. First I really need to edit the thing, I seem to have a lens cap problem and recording the inside of said lens cap. Second, although these are “precious memories”, are they really necessary? The video that is not the memories. Those are what is important.

I have always liked the idea of video cameras and the wonders of home movies. But many times I watch them and wonder if a slide show of still pics would be better. There is something that I like about looking at the split second captured in a picture. I like to remember what it felt like and what I was thinking when it was taken.

I know that you can still get all of that with video, but video is laced with noise and stupid comments that take some of the “remembering” out of the equation. It is kind of like reading the book vs. watching the movie, not as much imagination needed. Maybe they had it right before with 8mm movies. Sure they were people waving like mad at the camera but there was no sound and much more “remembering”.

Video isn’t bad. The kids especially love to see themselves having fun and sometimes it is great to sit back and be shown your memories. I just happen to like my still pictures. I like to be able to take some pictures with me and show them off. I can’t do that with video and don’t start emailing me with how ipods and iphones can have video on them as well as pictures, I don’t care about that. I don’t have the right setup to get the video off of my camera to the computer. Sometimes paper pictures are the best thing to have with you.

Not that digital photos are not the best thing that has happened since kodachrome film, I love digital pics.  I don’t want to get along without them.  I just get prints made at Costco.

Plan a weekend to go capture some memories, on video or in still pictures.

Justin

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