On moving

We've (mostly) moved to a new (to us) residence.

Getting out of the old house has been slow, but we do have a deadline, as the old house is under contract to sell at a substantial discount under what it would be worth if fixed up. Nearly everything is out. We're left with gardening tools and supplies, hand tools and a few odds and ends. The rest we'll likely leave behind because the contract allows that.

At this point I think all of our books are out. About half the artwork is out.

We're still getting things sorted in the new place, still painting here and there, still finding new places to put old things.

I'd like to carve out more time for the life-enriching things I consider important. I have ten things on my list. I'd like to touch on more than three each day.

We gave up on AT&T for DSL. We gave up on AT&T altogether, because they botched the move order for the analog land line and after spending hours trying to get someone who both cared and knew what they were doing, I gave up on them. Now we're with Cox (😐) for internet, at the lowest pricing tier. They haven't introduced hard data caps here, but since they sort of talk of having a 1TB cap, what's the point of having faster service if it's possible to hit the cap at the lowest tier of service if one were to run it flat-out for a whole month? I hope that having Cox for internet is a better experience than having them for cable TV was.

We're still a cut-cord household - we had an antenna installed and it's hard to be happier with it. All the local channels we care about come through splendidly.

We giving up AT&T we also gave up the landline number I'd had for a long time. With all the junk calls it received, this isn't that much of a loss. It does mean relying more on mobile phones and the attendant per-minute charges, but even with a pay-for-what-one-uses plan (yay Ting!), we pay less than we would with an "unlimited" plan with one of the big carriers. VoIP like Google Voice fills part of the gap.

With Cox internet, OpenWRT would panic reboot when starting WoW. I haven't yet determined why. Connecting our actual WiFi access point directly to the cable modem was fine, though.

Ekster estas varmeta

Ekster estas varmeta. Hodiaŭ estas mardo kaj mia edzino kaj la katinoj dormas.

Mi ankoraŭ estas komencanto en Esperanto.

Mi bezonas paroli kun aliaj homoj.

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Outside is warm. Today is Tuesday and my spouse and the cats are sleeping.

I am still a beginner in Esperanto.

I need to talk with other people.

OpenWRT Chaos Calmer 15.05.1

A few weeks ago I updated my Linksys WRT600N to OpenWRT Chaos Calmer 15.05.1. I wrote first about using OpenWRT on a WRT600N back in October 2015.

First I downloaded the bundle most appropriate for my model of router, then updated through the OpenWRT web interface. The only downside was that my custom-installed packages went away, so I lost my stats reporting installation. I reinstalled most of the packages I'd had installed prior to the update, but didn't recreate the stats setup.

Note to self: record the list of installed packages before the next update.

The router itself is running swimmingly. I wish I could say the same for the DSL (which I get through a reseller, so I don't have to deal directly with the ILEC's terrible customer service), which has a hiccup every few days and has to renegotiate a connection. I wish we had a choice here of something other than DSL or the cable TV company for wired Internet.

I promised to discuss the features I use most.

I have the router configured to NAT the public connection. What I use most is the realtime traffic monitor display, to show overall bandwidth usage and high traffic targets. I also have swap configured on a USB thumb drive in case of memory shortfall, as the WRT600N doesn't have much RAM.

Recognizing roots in Esperanto

In a previous post I noted that I had begun studying Esperanto. Now, several weeks into the effort, I find parts of the language easy to understand, without having to refer to word lists or mousing over the newly-presented words. I attribute this to having studied German (most, in high school and in the last year), Russian (next most, in high school and community college) and Spanish (some, years after high school). Many of the root words in Esperanto derive from Romance, Germanic or Slavic vocabulary.

Other words leave me puzzled until I learn them, then usually they click and I recognize the origin. A few I don't know the roots, but probably will eventually.

Hodiaŭ estas vendredo. La katinoj dormas. Ekster estas varma.

In search of . . .

. . . affordable housing that I can, in good conscience, purchase.

One story, three or more bedrooms, 1.5+ baths, not a slab foundation, not in an HOA, with a simple roof line, and where the property taxes won't eat us alive.

It's a challenge and my dear spouse is working hard to find one that meets our needs and is within our ability to make the down payment.

Stargate Atlantis

Last year I posted a blog entry mentioning the journey from beginning to end of Stargate SG-1 for me. I thought I might finish the remaining live-action shows by year-end.

I didn't make it.

I did finish Stargate Atlantis a few months ago, but still have the bulk of Stargate Universe to go. The last few episodes of Atlantis were pleasing, but the finale seemed rushed.

I've been watching Person of Interest and Law & Order, as those recordings on my DVR are bigger and I wanted to reclaim space.

Hodiaŭ estas dimanĉo

Hodiaŭ estas dimanĉo. Hieraŭ estis sabato. Morgaŭ estos lundo.

Lernu Esperanton! Vizitu http://www.duolingo.com.

I'm not sure when or where I first learned of Esperanto. It could have been the Stainless Steel Rat books of Harry Harrison, or the Riverworld books of Philip José Farmer. Back then the best resources were obtainable only by mail.

A few months ago I restarted it in earnest when I discovered that Duolingo, a web site devoted to free language learning tools, had a course for English speakers. I've also joined a few Facebook groups devoted to it, where I can be exposed to the language on a daily basis.

So far I've had fun.

Person of Interest

Nearly five years ago I began a journey. You might not think of watching a television show as a journey, but if a show has a compelling story, you might.

Such was with Person of Interest, created by Jonathan Nolan, noted for screenwriting on The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar, and for the short story "Memento Mori" which was turned into the movie Memento.

Person of Interest starts fairly episodic, then dives into lengthy story arcs around the Machine, a government surveillance system that has also been turned to good purpose by our protagonists.

There's really not much more to say except that it worked, despite the technical overreach typical of TV crime shows, and I recommend it.

Dirty Flashing CyanogenMod

It's not what you likely think it is.

"Dirty flashing" refers to installing an OS update, in this case an Android phone update, without wiping data first (which has attendant hassle of restoring apps and their data).

My aging Android phone is one of those officially supported by Cyanogenmod. Since I acquired it, I've been running CM11, which tracks the official "KitKat" (Google version 4.4). In the meantime, CM12 (Lollipop) and CM13 (Marshmallow) have been released. I had been resisting upgrading, because the device install instructions recommend wiping data and a brief attempt to install CM13 led to a continual crash loop.

Since then I read an official Cyanogenmod blog post inviting people to dirty flash. I decided to try again, but this time with CM12, which has an officially stable release for my phone ("snapshot"), while CM13 is still in test/development/experimental releases ("nightlies").

I followed the instructions for downloading the CM12 bundle, Google Apps, and updated the recovery manager I had installed already. I made a fresh backup of the running OS, copied that to another machine for safekeeping (also I keep a backup of the stock (factory) OS KitKat image, in case I have to run through any activation steps with my phone provider), put my phone in airplane mode, disabled XPrivacy (with its fine-grained application permission settings), and booted into recovery. Then I wiped Dalvik (the Java runtime cache) and Cache (the rest of the operating system cache) and flashed CM12 and Google Apps. And rebooted. And waited. Upwards of an hour later, my phone had finished booting and updating application caches.

And everything works, though the settings have moved around a bit and I'm still getting it set up as I like it. Still, my apps, my data, my home screen setup, all there without trouble.

I'm going to try CM's Privacy Guard feature for a while instead of XPrivacy, because it's less intrusive. XPrivacy was constantly asking for permissions and it became tiresome.

Next up, CM13 after a snapshot release is posted for my phone.

OpenWRT on a Linksys WRT600N v1.1

Note: At first blush, it does not appear that OpenWRT supports the 5GHz radio. This is fine for my application, as I have another wireless router.

I've been running OpenBSD as my firewall, but have often had performance problems on the old hardware on which I run it. While searching for an alternative, I decided to revisit possibilities for the Linksys WRT600N wireless router I've had in storage since I replaced it with something with better 5GHz and 802.11n performance. I had been running DD-WRT on it, but maintenance of that release fell by the wayside several years ago.

OpenWRT, on which DD-WRT is reported to be based, appears to have a more active development community. I discovered that version 1.1 of the WRT600N, with serial numbers starting with "MNR0", has been supported since version 14.07 of OpenWRT.

I still had a copy of the original firmware, downloaded from Linksys when they made it easy to find, so I loaded that, replacing the DD-WRT image. I set the load to switch to factory defaults.

The latest version of OpenWRT is distributed in the TRX format, so requires conversion for the stock Linksys firmware to be able to process an update, which must be in BIN format. The OpenWRT ticketing system has a case concerning this and here is a direct link to the conversion tool in base64 format. This tool is a 32-bit x86 Linux executable, so I had to install 32-bit glibc.

The resulting file installed smoothly from the Linksys firmware's update page.

A subsequent post will discuss configuration of features of interest to me.