My my. It's been nearly three months since I last posted! Since then, my engagement in Chicago presented three intense weeks of network testing, and a network architecture review in Seattle followed, which will wrap up in a couple of weeks.
I write this in the last week of actually being in Seattle proper, a great city in which I would actually consider living were it not much more expensive than Houston (per NerdWallet). This is the first city in which I saw that trees ripen with fall color from the top down rather than all over. The eventual full colors are breathtaking:
The "bipolar" weather, with clouds in the morning changing to a few hours of afternoon sunshine, is appealing, and the brisk temperature fills the sweet spot I've always lacked in Houston. The few days a year in Houston when leaden clouds hang about all day, and the temperature stays around 50F all day, are my favorite, and Seattle has plenty of them. There are evidently few snow days, if ever, since most of the precipitation is substituted with rain instead.
In recent tech-related news, the latest issues of 2600 had an article about the PirateBox, an open file sharing router software that can be installed on portable routers to let you share files, post on a forum, and chat anonymously on a wifi network generated by the router. It is great fun, as now I can carry with me an open wifi network on the long airplane flights to Seattle.
Above is my setup. The portable router is on the right. There is a 64GB USB 2.0 memory stick, which is plenty for quite a few movies, books, and collections of music. The router is plugged into an Anker PowerCore 21000 power bank, which, though it takes ages to recharge, might power this little router for a full day. I keep it on the entire time on the airplane. The actual software is a repackaged version of OpenWRT, and the default shell is ash which so far has prevented me from doing much on the actual device. However, I will shortly install bash and other tools onto the device at least to see whether anyone actually connects to it.
I also recently purchased a large ADS-B antenna for the piaware setup and placed it in the attic. This drastically increased the reception by several hundred percent, such that my station jumped from ~4000 to 1500 in the Flightaware rankings. It now receives an average of 500,000 reports from roughly two thousand aircraft, each day. Installing the Pro Stick Plus only improved reception slightly, by about five to ten thousand extra reports each day, because this version of the Pro Stick has an integrated bandpass filter. Here's the past setup, before the Pro Stick Plus:
I'm also planning a home network upgrade, to install a DMZ based on this guide and then place a Tor relay on the DMZ to avoid any compromises of the home network. This is especially important as recently my next-door neighborhood began using the network and reliability became much more necessary. As part of that I upgraded to a Netgear AC 1900 Router+Wifi AP, and plan to install a remote power cycling device to reboot the router automatically whenever the Internet stops working. The draft plan is below:
Definitely some room for improvement.
On the gardening front, I've decided that 2016 will never freeze and therefore that it is time to buy some basil plants online and plant them in soil on the balcony. Additionally, given that fruiting vegetables, even in soil, require more attention than the weekly-traveling worker can apply, I will switch to growing flowers, perhaps bee- and butterfly-friendly. The numerous honey bees enjoying the blooms of the one large basil bush on the balcony filled me with joy to the extent that I harvested the leaves just once and didn't bother with them for the rest of the season. What better way to continue with the bees than to plant a pollinator garden?
I write this in the last week of actually being in Seattle proper, a great city in which I would actually consider living were it not much more expensive than Houston (per NerdWallet). This is the first city in which I saw that trees ripen with fall color from the top down rather than all over. The eventual full colors are breathtaking:
The "bipolar" weather, with clouds in the morning changing to a few hours of afternoon sunshine, is appealing, and the brisk temperature fills the sweet spot I've always lacked in Houston. The few days a year in Houston when leaden clouds hang about all day, and the temperature stays around 50F all day, are my favorite, and Seattle has plenty of them. There are evidently few snow days, if ever, since most of the precipitation is substituted with rain instead.
In recent tech-related news, the latest issues of 2600 had an article about the PirateBox, an open file sharing router software that can be installed on portable routers to let you share files, post on a forum, and chat anonymously on a wifi network generated by the router. It is great fun, as now I can carry with me an open wifi network on the long airplane flights to Seattle.
Above is my setup. The portable router is on the right. There is a 64GB USB 2.0 memory stick, which is plenty for quite a few movies, books, and collections of music. The router is plugged into an Anker PowerCore 21000 power bank, which, though it takes ages to recharge, might power this little router for a full day. I keep it on the entire time on the airplane. The actual software is a repackaged version of OpenWRT, and the default shell is ash which so far has prevented me from doing much on the actual device. However, I will shortly install bash and other tools onto the device at least to see whether anyone actually connects to it.
I also recently purchased a large ADS-B antenna for the piaware setup and placed it in the attic. This drastically increased the reception by several hundred percent, such that my station jumped from ~4000 to 1500 in the Flightaware rankings. It now receives an average of 500,000 reports from roughly two thousand aircraft, each day. Installing the Pro Stick Plus only improved reception slightly, by about five to ten thousand extra reports each day, because this version of the Pro Stick has an integrated bandpass filter. Here's the past setup, before the Pro Stick Plus:
I'm also planning a home network upgrade, to install a DMZ based on this guide and then place a Tor relay on the DMZ to avoid any compromises of the home network. This is especially important as recently my next-door neighborhood began using the network and reliability became much more necessary. As part of that I upgraded to a Netgear AC 1900 Router+Wifi AP, and plan to install a remote power cycling device to reboot the router automatically whenever the Internet stops working. The draft plan is below:
Definitely some room for improvement.
On the gardening front, I've decided that 2016 will never freeze and therefore that it is time to buy some basil plants online and plant them in soil on the balcony. Additionally, given that fruiting vegetables, even in soil, require more attention than the weekly-traveling worker can apply, I will switch to growing flowers, perhaps bee- and butterfly-friendly. The numerous honey bees enjoying the blooms of the one large basil bush on the balcony filled me with joy to the extent that I harvested the leaves just once and didn't bother with them for the rest of the season. What better way to continue with the bees than to plant a pollinator garden?
