Thinking technology can or should be capable of getting beyond the current security protocalls without biometrics which isn't particularly all that secure, imo, anyhow. The pin # seems like a move in the right direction.
It would be good if we could recognise that humans aren't machines. A password like "bigfatstripeycat" would be easy for me to remember because, well, I have a cat that's big and fat and stripey. But it doesn't satisfy the current password fetishists who insist it has to have a capital letter, a small letter, a number and a punctuation mark. So maybe I end up with Bigfatstripeycat1!, which rather defeats the purpose of the password requirements but notionally ticks the boxes. Except when I try to remember my password I can't remember if I ended it with 1! or 2@ or 111! or something else, so I have to write it down somewhere. A dictionary attack would take a while to come up with bigfatstripeycat because there are so many words and so many permutations of multiple words, and of course I might have chosen BigFatStripeyCat, or added my cat's actual name to the end of it or something else. It's still long enough that a brute force attack is unrealistically slow but memorable enough to me (which is what matters) that I don't have to go through the "I forgot my password" process every single time I want to log in. But we've got this idea that a password that looks like someone rubbed some balloons and tried to spell the sound it made is secure. And it is secure, so secure that even the authorised user can't log in because no human can remember a password like H7eujd01jK3ye8j#wK9w, let alone remembering a different one for every single system they use. And even if you could remember some of them you'd struggle to continue to remember them because the system expects you to change them every 30 days. So was H7eujd.... your current password or your last password, and was it for your banking system or your credit card? So now you need a password manager, which puts them all in one place and creates a single point of failure that would compromise them all in a single hit if anyone managed to break it.
My second ceiling fan is installed, connected and working. I needed to cut into an existing wire to make a junction to power it. Which is easy enough to do, except the only obvious places to put the junction box were difficult to get at. In the end I ran the cable a few extra feet so I could put the junction out of the way of where I know I"m going to need to run a load of extra wires, mounted the J-box to a ceiling joist and cut into the wire. Part of the process was rerouting the wire, and I found that the detour left the wire just a few inches too short. So I disconnected one of the lights from its temporary connection, which was a nasty hack tapped into another circuit because the cable wouldn't reach where I really wanted it to go, installed another junction box and connected it all together. It's handy because the first junction box is also well placed for another wire that's going to need to tap into it, which will power the ceiling fan once I can figure out how to access the ceiling cavity without making ugly holes. Once I get that done my project to disconnect all the knob and tube will be complete. So now the one downstairs light is connected to the circuit that powers the downstairs light, the new ceiling fan is wired and working, and all is well in the world. Except for the sudden appearance of a load of flying ants in one of our enclosed porches. I have no idea how they got there but did find out they really don't like Raid. So now I have a lot of dead flying ants on the floor in my enclosed porch. Perhaps tomorrow afternoon's job will be to get the shop vac out there and get rid of them all.
Discovered this morning that my new cellphone doesn't have a earphone jack. Tried to use my earbuds but while I could hear them they couldn't hear me. Ended up just putting the phone on speaker. That worked. Was told I could get wired earbuds that plugs into the micro usb port. So tomorrow I'll have to make a run to Best Buy and order some.
After church today my wife swept out the side porch and got rid of all the dead flying ants. A few of them were still alive but I'm not quite sure how - they weren't in good shape and I'm amazed the insecticide hadn't finished them off. Then we fitted the air conditioner to the window. We're trying it in a different window, which means the road-facing windows can stay closed through the summer. We didn't put it in its current window previously because we weren't sure if the cooling would spread as far as our living room but with ceiling fans in two adjacent rooms we're hoping the cool air will spread much more easily. So far it seems to be working. I had to cut a few new braces for it - the manufacturers who stress how important it is to create an airtight seal make it literally impossible to achieve anything like an airtight seal because they can't even get the side fins to fit right, but cutting a few pieces of wood to reinforce the side fins, seal off the last air gaps and offer a little more soundproofing works wonders. Then comes the tape to fill the gaps in the corners where nothing fits right and the sealant to fill the gaps between the main unit and the side fins. That side of the house faces some trees so I hope we don't have a problem with bugs getting through. Aside from fitting the air conditioner today has been mostly a day of rest. It's good to have a breather, it feels like we've got a lot done this week. Maybe tomorrow I can start pulling cables from the guest bedroom under our room and press on with that project.
You can probably get an adapter that lets any earplugs plug into the USB port. It would mean you could keep your existing earbuds, if that's of any value to you.
I had thought of that. Will still hit Best Buy later today. They will be better able to figure out what I need and get it ordered for me. They've done things like that for me before.
Went out for a run today. I did sprint repeats a few days ago which hurt less than I expected the following day. Today I had thought to do more sprint repeats but decided to just jog around my normal route. I didn't feel very strong starting out but once I'd got warmed up I felt much stronger than I expected and ended up setting a new personal best time around the loop. When I got to the bottom of the hill at the very end I was undecided whether to jog up the hill or not. It's a fairly steep hill and usually I walk it but today I figured I'd jog and just keep an eye on my heart rate. I managed to jog all the way to the top although I did trigger my heart rate warning alarm from my watch. From there it was just a short way to my house at the top, so I kept pushing and accepted I was going to be gulping air when I finished. And then when I finished I spent about 30 seconds gulping air, then another 90 seconds breathing progressively more slowly to let my heart rate work its way down again. After a two minute rest my pulse was back to around 120.
I checked my previous times and found I didn't actually set a PB yesterday after all. I missed it by four seconds. Oh well. Today my new ceiling fan for the front porch is supposed to arrive. I already have a back box in place suitable for a fan so it will just be a question of taking down the light and putting up the fan. That will help keep air moving there and hopefully make it a little less attractive to the local insect population. My wife and I also decided to do a little extra work in the guest bedroom. The original plan was to kick that piece of work out a little but we figured since we've got everything else pulled apart we might as well do the extra. It will mean we can get another socket replaced with a new one on new wiring a little sooner. My wife is planning on using a desk in that room as a semi-permanent home for her laptop, and would feel better if the socket has nice shiny new wiring rather than nasty old wiring. At present the socket is connected to a bit of a botch where a few older sockets in two bedrooms are connected to a piece of wire that is plugged in to the attic. It was originally on a huge nasty circuit but I took that apart and plugging it in was the only sensible option I had at the time. Most of the original huge nasty circuit is now either in my scrap copper bucket or already taken to the metal recycling plant but a few scraps remain. If I get this piece of work done I can disconnect a little more of it and maybe even physically remove a chunk of it along the way. That would be nice. Even when the old cable isn't live it's good to know it's physically removed.
The extra work in the guest bedroom is done. Dresser moved, baseboard removed, lath and plaster behind it removed, new wire run under the adjacent room and down the wall cavity below to get to the breaker panel, and a new socket is installed. It's got all sorts of cool new features, like a grounding pin and a piece of nice new wire to power it. Then I cleaned up and put everything back. Aside from the nice new socket it looks exactly like it did before. I've also got a piece of cable threaded to where the next socket will go, with a wire nut over the black wire. That means I can wire the next socket in my own time but can still put the first piece of baseboard back - the last thing I want to do is have to pull stuff apart again to thread the cable to the next power socket. Maybe tomorrow I can cut more drywall strips to replace the lath and plaster at the bottom of the wall, disconnect the sockets currently in the room and run new wire to reconnect them onto their shiny new circuit. It means we gain a socket, transfer nasty two old sockets from a nasty botch onto a nice new circuit and replace them with nice new sockets, and I can do away with a nasty hack that has sockets powered from a piece of cable plugged in to an attic socket. It will be good to have that entire lot taken out. Onward, always onward.
Not a hugely productive day today. I didn't sleep very well and the traffic noise today was particularly bad, so it took me a couple of goes to assemble the ceiling fan for the porch. At least now it's done, but it's sitting on the dining table waiting to be hung. In the meantime I have exposed cable with wire nuts sticking out of my porch ceiling. I did get a good run in during the morning though. I wasn't sure just what I wanted to do at first but decided on sprint repeats. After 8 miles of them it was getting harder and harder. A couple of times I stopped the sprint stage because my legs just couldn't keep up any more. But that was what I wanted, to push well past my lactate threshold until my legs basically couldn't go any more, then walk to clear out the lactates and sprint again. They seem to be making a difference - my tracker software said for a time I was light on anaerobic activities and now it doesn't, and I find they get progressively easier each time I do them. My overall running speeds seem to be slowly improving along the way, although sometimes I still find it takes me a while to fully warm up. This evening I spent some time with our local heating and cooling guy, asking him a bunch of questions about options we might have to get rid of the window units and use something other than oil as an option for heating and hot water. He gave me quite a lot of insights in exchange for some beers, which seemed to work well for both of us. Hopefully tomorrow will be a more productive day. I'm eager to get the fan hung and out of the way, and eager to get the guest bedroom put back to something more or less normal.
More electrical work today. A sluggish morning because I had another bad night's sleep but then slowly perked up in the afternoon. We needed to go to town and might have accidentally stopped by our favorite brewpub on the way home. I kept the beer intake down because I wanted to finish some electrical work before bed, and didn't want to do that if I'd had a lot of beer. Anyway now I've got a nice run of sockets in the guest bedroom all on their own circuit, including replacing two nasty old sockets on nasty old wiring with new sockets on new wiring, adding a new socket to provide extra options, transferring another socket from the generic circuit for random upstairs stuff to the circuit for that bedroom, and recoving a nice coil of older but grounded 12ga cable that I can use elsewhere if I need it. There's another piece of wire left coiled up in the attic with red tape on the end. The only way I can remove that is by removing another socket so I can disconnect it, but that's fiddly to get at right now so I just left the cable taped so I know the end is live. As long as I remember not to suck on the end of the cable it will be OK until I can remove it. I took another look at the instructions for the fan and found it's easier to finish than I thought. In the past I've hung fans without the downrod and I'm using the downrod for this one, but reading the instructions through the lens of not using the downrod. For some reason this fan comes with stupidly long wires - I know I can cut them to length but it's as if it's designed with the option of connecting it to next door's electrical supply as a viable option. It also has a safety wire designed to catch it in case it falls (apparently a requirement in Canadaland) but the supplied wire is about eight feet long. Again it can be shortened as required but I wonder why they provide quite so much, especially given most manufacturers cut all sorts of corners to save themselves a couple of cents per fan.
Another smattering of electrical work. The porch ceiling fan is now hung and working nicely. I also took the chance to pull the piano out and replace a nasty old socket behind it. The socket is dead - I cut the wiring to it months ago - but I wanted to put a new socket in before blowing insulation into the space behind it. It's still not live because the socket is powered by a cable that isn't currently connected to anything but that piece of work is done and I can connect it any time. And of course now there are a few more scraps of old nasty cable in my scrap copper pile. I'm going to need to transfer it from its current bucket into a contractor bag soon, it's piled pretty high in there. I think I'm probably going to wait until all the scrap metal is removed from the house before taking it to the recycling plant to cash it in. Depending on what has any value I can also take the big pile of old cast iron pipework I've cut out while I'm at it.
First tme in the woods for a few weeks. Took a day off breaking the house and went hiking instead. All in about 7.5 miles, and much sweat soaked into my T-shirt. The walk to the top of the ridge was fun, the walk to the vista and back to the ridge was fun but the descent felt like a bit of a slog.
Prognostications: Depp will probably never get his money. Heard will go bankrupt and end up on some porn site for cash. The only winners are the lawyers. And how lame to you have to be as a jury person or the jury foreman to fail to fill in the amount of damages on the verdict form... THIS ^^^ is why letting a jury determine your fate should scare the snot out of you.
Depp gave the impression that he wasn't interested in the money, and I think he'd even go as far as to offer Heard to not chase it up if she doesn't chase up the 2 million she won for... I guess jury compromise reasons. That Ben Chew et all seem to be some kind of lawyers to win a defamation case like this, although I guess their best witness was Amber Heard. That initial fakeout with the failure to fill out the compensation lines was something else. How does the form even get to the judge without those being filled out?