Picked up the screws, finished the top plywood and put down the salvaged carpet. I didn't finish the hidden space, I just have the front laying against it. Don't need that done right now so I'm moving on to cleaning and other projects.

One of the 'other' projects was a quick stand to put the wine fridge on. Makes it easier to get stuff in/out with it not on the floor and gives me a little storage space underneath. Could panel that in too and make another secret area!

Midget approved!

Useless and/or outdated documents that were hard to get:

Fight night tonight, two of our guys ended up fighting... and both lost. Ironically the first guy lost to a dude from Raleigh Krav. Yea, a Krav guy took down Trevor's fighter. Ha!

While I was watching the fights, the woman was at the awards banquet with her trainer getting her 5th place (for the season) ribbon. Not bad considering she only rode in half the shows. Had she rode all the shows and kept up at her same level of performance she would have come in 3rd.

Good progress on the basement project today, probably 85 0one at this point but I'm out of screws to lock the plywood down as well as I would like. I need to do that (after a Home Depot run) and try to cut the carpet scrap to fit and then work on the front cover. I've got the plywood cut already, just need to figure out how I want to attach it so it's easy to get off but still hides all the secret stuff. The stairs are sorta ghetto made out of drop, but they're extremely solid.

Purge valve replaced in the truck. Took all of 7 minutes start to finish. For once GM couldn't have put a 'known to fail' part in an easier to access location. That's almost as good as not using shitty parts to start out with. Almost. If it's not this, and it's not the evap canister solenoid I already replaced then it's time to take it to a mechanic to have them smoke test all the evap lines looking for the leak. At least I've already done $300+ worth of 'repairs' that they would have tried first and not fixed it and I'm only out $50 so far.

Awesome match for me tonight. No need to go into details on why I jacked up the last stage, again, but overall I was happy with my performance. I wanted to shoot all 5 middle targets on a stage on the move and I managed to do that and nail the reload pretty well.

Officially 'moved in' to the RAV4 today. Moved my get-home bag and all that sort of jazz into the space under the rear deck. I did end up pulling out the plastic tray under there, gave me a lot more room. Also, the spare tire was loose and I think that's the noise I was hearing; the tire shifting around on the styrofoam spacer. Must be in the frequency range I could hear, always sounds like something is rattling around back there under lateral loading.

Doesn't look like all that much work, but it took dad and I a good chunk of the day to build out this storage floor thing in the basement. The idea is to make a solid flooring above the dirt to store stuff on rather than laying it on the plastic. Necessary? Probably not. But it's a good project and I think I can make some secret storage compartments in this thing.

I went and picked up materials for the first version of this, but the woman ended up vetoing that idea. Fortunately most the materials could be reused for this design, so the amount of stuff we had to get at Home Depot today was minimal. Except the plywood decking I didn't get yesterday. That crap is expensive.

Range work day. I think we did pretty good, got all the plate racks fixed up and painted, all the swinging targets welded up and painted and the brush around the side berms cleaned up. Should have taken a before picture, but as they said just wait a month and it will be all shot to hell again.

Running the welder and the grinder off the generator worked as well as we had hoped, so that's good news. After the apocalypse we can run around welding stuff.

The basement waterproofing thing on Thursday went OK, it took about 3 hours longer than planned so I didn't get to go the Jeff's shooting class as I wanted to. That sucked, it's the first one I've missed since I learned he was doing them. Guess I'll just have to make next month.

Our goats are smart:

I spent the morning sorting out and throwing away boxes of crapola I've had stored in the hall closet. I must have tossed 200TB of RAM... all in 512mb DIMMs. Some of this stuff dates back to nVidia, not sure why I've held on to it for the last, uh, 8 years. Time to go!

I also decided to clean up my desk. This may not look like much but getting all the wires under control so I can easily switch the monitor (and it's USB hub) and sound from the laptop to the NUC is a big win. I need a 3-wire audio extension cable if I really want to get my EQ out of the way. Currently it has to sit close because the cable is very short. I made the best use of gaffer's tape I could.

The downside of all this cleaning is that instead of boxes of crap everywhere I have pulled out what needs to be kept and organized and there are piles like this that need to be tackled. Hard to ignore stuff when it's laying out in the open.

Really nice outside, decided to go for a quick ride just to move some oil around in the bike. I had already put fuel stabiliser in a few months back so I had no excuse for that this time. Quick trip out to Jordan Lake and back.

Went to listen to this album in the car on Friday, then realised I don't have it on the phone, then realised I don't actually own it. For some reason it was much cheaper to buy the actual CD than to get it on iTunes. I still have a CD drive so ripping the CD is pretty easy, I'll take the cheap route.

Assembled the outdoor burner my parents got me for giftmas. Now I just need to figure out what to cook outside. Mostly fish is my idea (to keep it from stinking up the house).

Preparing the dirt room for the work next week and I had to remove all of the electronic stuff out of the way. Router, DSL, core switch, pi server, etc all had to find a new temporary home...

Windows activated and I didn't have to resort to calling in and typing in 80 numbers. Woo! Guess not activating a serial for a couple of years reset the "make the guy call in and do it by hand" counter.

Also on today's (completed) core list: replace broken switch on puzzle lamp, pressure wash off the road salt from the vehicles, winterize pressure washer/spare generator/power wagon, empty ash from wood stove.

Got my license plate, year tag and the fast pass transponder all for the RAV4. Maybe I'll actually drive it at some point now.

So yea... about that fan replacement. I drew the little diagram of the system so I could lay all the screws out, took it apart super slowly, replaced the fan (which fit perfectly), put new heat sync compound on the cpu and bolted it together. And... nothing. Took it back apart and it was clear that I had broken at least one of the ribbon cables. I figured the keyboard wasn't going to work after I was done, but I also must have broken one of the motherboard connections because it was just stone dead. So, I pulled the RAM and SSD and tossed the rest. The articles on the web said you're likely to break it when you try the repair. Guess they were right.

BI can't live on the NUC, it doesn't have the power to run it all. I checked CL looking for the cheapest i7 based desktop I could find. There's a guy who sells referb Dell gear who had what I might want for about 360. Not horrible, but not good either.

There was one guy who had an Optiplex 990 with 16gb of RAM and a 256gb SSD advertised for 275. I offered him 200 without the SSD and he accepted. In trying to figure out where to meet, it turns out we both work at Netapp, so he just came to my cube with the system at lunch. Destiny?

I've had to reinstall Windows, I didn't do the sysconfig trick to ready the drive to be moved to a new system while the HP was still alive and it would not boot at all in the new Dell, crashing about something missing. Booting from CD and trying to repair a few times was futile so in the end a full wipe was required. I had the BI configs saved off on the NUC so that was good and most of my other content was on the USB drive. I lost the centos VM I use for image processing but it turns out the old copy of it was still on my macbook so I just copied it to the new Dell. At this point everything is up and running, SP1 and the drivers installed, about a zillion updates done, etc. All that's left is to call in and activate windows since I can't do it online anymore.

The system is pretty fast compared to the old laptop. The 3.4ghz CPU only benchmarks 30 faster, but overall the new system is just screaming. With BI running and all cameras going the CPU is at 17 during the day, about 30 at night. That's vs the 70 day and 100 night usage of the laptop. Maybe it's everything else too, perhaps the memory is faster and the IO is faster? It's the same SSD, and I'm actually dumping BI video directly to an old SATA disk instead of to the SSD. So it should be slower if anything but it doesn't appear to be.

That's also of note, I'm not using the new USB disk I got, I've pulled a 1TB and a 750GB SATA disk out of an old Dell desktop and repurposed those. I've had this core duo Dell tower system from... uh when Apple bought PA-semi. So it was in the scrap pile 7 years ago or more at this point. It's pretty useless, other than as a donor for SATA cables and old drives. The Dell drive carriers haven't changed at all though so the 360 carriers pop right into the 6 year newer 990. All that going to the SATA drives are clips and backup so if I lose one it's not a big deal.

The old Dell 360 had a hardware RAID card in it, but one of the 1TB disks had failed so I didn't bother moving the card over. I won't scrap it, but no reason to try to stuff it into the new box which has on-board RAID should I find myself with matching drives.

Also, my NV CCW permit showed up today.

Also also, something just broke with the journal software. Trying to figure out what's changed in something that doesn't change...

The software was choking on the percent signs in the text. Somehow it must be interpreting the text as it passes it from one file to another? That's odd, it's just doing a read and then a print... better figure out how to fix that.

%

hi %

quotemeta for the win.

Unrelated to anything, I fired up Apple maps because google maps was updating. Seems I haven't used it in a while since these are the locations most recently looked at in the app:

The replacement HP fan should be here today. Guess I know how I'll be spending my weekend... or maybe a night this week. Will be nice to get the camera system back to 100%.

Hopefully the last day we're stuck at the house due to snow/ice. It's a balmy 22F out there now, up from the low of 10F when we got up so that's something anyway.

They updated the prediction to 10" of snow, we got about 1/2" or so but lots of freezing temps and stuff so we've been stuck inside most of the last few days.

The fan in the HP laptop that runs all the cameras died, that's what has been causing all of the issues. When the fan stops the CPUs overheat and it cuts the clock rate down to about 1/3 max which makes all the apps freak out. I installed an app that lets you see the CPU temps and speeds and such and that's how I finally figured it out.

One popular fix for the fan issue is to blast it with compressed air and get all the junk out. I don't have any (and due to the ice I can't go get any) so I just used the vacuum cleaner and tried sucking the junk out the exhaust port. It worked for a while, but the fan still dies after a bit. The real fix of replacing the fan is a 4+ hour job according to the interwebs and I can see why, you have to totally disassemble the laptop to get the heat sync assembly off to replace the fan. There is also a high probability that you break something in the process but I've ordered the fan, have to try it. Might get lucky and $20 in fan and heat sync compound fix my issues.

I switched the NUC over to be the camera server for the moment, not seeing the pets was upsetting the woman. It doesn't have the CPU to be able to monitor and record, so I just turned off recording for now; she can at least watch them live and that's most of what matters.

Since I've had nothing but time, I've learned a lot more about Blue Iris and I think I've found the secret to keeping the $30 cams online. They would sometimes lose their mind according to BI, but if you logged into the camera itself it was happily doing it's thing. No "500 internal server error" to be seen. The trick (found randomly) was to turn off the hardware decoding for those cameras. Use the CPU only to decode those and it's fine. Turns out that even with the special Intel GPU stuff it only helps if you have a few cameras. After 2-3 the GPU is slower than the CPU and it actually hurts performance. You can use really high-end nVidia cards to do it, but the laptop doesn't have such a thing.

This morning I was noticing the pi system was running really hard which makes no sense, it just does the journal, DNS and NTP for the most part. Turns out that 3 of the cameras must have used the auto-proxy config info from DNS and were running via the squid proxy still setup on the pi system. No idea how that happened other than the software is now on Windows 10 Instead of 7, perhaps it was trying to help out? I pulled the auto-proxy stuff out of DNS and shut down squid and bounced the windows box and the cameras in question, that should clear it up.

I got into the San Lee Gun Club. I wasn't in their first round of picks, but even 2nd round picks get to play! :) Guess I know where I'll be going on Sunday when the woman is riding. Unless it's actually snowing like they're threatening. Hard to believe, it's currently 58F outside and they're predicting 30s over the weekend (with lows of 6F). Six? Are we in Fargo?

The goats are getting some enjoyment out of my parents Christmas tree. At least it's not going to waste. Not sure if they can eat the whole thing before it dries out but I bet they'll try.

Testing the journal software to see if it rolls years correctly.

OK, it mostly works except the 'last 30 entries' generator doesn't jump back a year, it only scans the current year's directory. Easy enough to fix, not sure it's worth it because to really fix it I wouldn't just go back 1 year, I would technically scan back through all years because if a year had less than 30 entries somehow then I would have to keep searching for more to get the 30. Pretty unlikely but if I was actually going to fix it I wouldn't want to fix it half assed. Better to just leave it broken like it is and give me something to write about on January 1 of every year. :)

The year starts out with nonsense. The woman's mom got my a "gun shaped pancake former", and it makes these:

Seems pretty damn inappropriate to me, but I guess that's all they know I do.

Sneaky drove up to Iowa to pick up an antique tractor he's going to restore and sell. Interesting hobby. He's made it up in spite of the snow and has it loaded up, now he's just got to haul it home.