I don't have much to report for today, as I was again spell bound by the computers..... My Mint project was all encompassing until I did something wrong and corrupted the boot record on the hard drive....
I had put the software on there the first time as a test, and I got everything working just like I wanted it as a test...... but it was in a small partition..... So I blew that all away and reformated the hard drive to put it on for real this time....
And I worked a long time and just about had it when I added one more program, that corrupted the whole deal............
So tonight I started over from the blank hard drive...... But, Hey I'm really experienced at solving these little problems as they come up.....
In the process of all of this, I had a trojan attack the start up of my browser on the windows machine.... I use Chrome by Google, but a little internet research availed that this trojan can attack IE or Firefox or Chrome, it doesn't care.... Its called incredibar, and mystart.... Nasty business....
What it does is embed itself into your browser and come up as your startup search engine when you start up the browser... You have to close these tabs to get to your real page, and your old home page is just gone... The incredibar will add a search bar across your browser to search the internet for things you want... Of course, the signon when you click on one of the adds credits mystart as the referring web page.... and they get paid if you buy anything, or even for the clicks like google....
I managed to get this out of my lookup page on chrome by clicking, the wrench, settings, startup, open a specific page. At the end of that line is a set pages that is clickable and if you hover over the mystart, an X appears that will delete it. But some research on the internet says that I need an additional malware product to identify all of the instances on my hard drive and eliminate it... Most of the security packages like Norton and AVG haven't programmed their systems to stop it yet...
If it jumped on my computer, its only a matter of time and it will be headed your way too. I guess it piggy backs on downloads that you might be doing, and since that was primarily my whole day, I managed to increase my exposure a lot......
Google Mystart, and or Incredibar...
Retired Rod
I have Spy Bot running as I am writing this!!
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Saturday, August 11, 2012
Broken irrigation fixed and Mint...
The service professional called at 7:30 this morning and said he would be here in a half an hour....... Well he did come, but it was after 8:30... It is farther down here to the end of the city than he estimated in the 8 AM morning traffic...
But that gave me enough time to get into some pants and move the truck from the driveway where the offending broken pipes were buried.. I spent some time looking for the other valve boxes that were long since grown over with grass.
I found some of them, but the service guy said not to worry, because he has an electronic tool that sniffs out the magnetic valve solenoids, kind of like a metal detector would find a metal piece underground...
The beauty of having these guy that fix this stuff every day come look at the otherwise un-revealing hole in the ground, is that he reached in and wiggled the valve body and said it wasn't connected to anything... So with his shovel he carefully dug around the pipe off to the side of the valve pipe and unearthed the entire problem...
A piece of 1 inch PVC had given way at the elbow... Where it was glued. Or supposed to have been glued.... The purple cleaner hadn't stained the bottom of the joint, meaning that it was never cleaned correctly... So the cement had never adhered to the plastic pipe.... Eventually it was going to blow apart!! It took about 4 years...
Seems that these joints begin to leak, and then build a pocket around the pipe as the water washes away the soil that is holding the pipe together. And when the pressure is strong enough, they blow with a big bang and water everywhere...
It took a while to cut new parts and re glue and seal all the existing pipes.. He replaced everything back to a threaded joint in the valve, where he used new teflon tape... Once the ground was filled back in, all I had to do was wait for 3 hours before turning on the pressure....
Oh, and I have a bill for about an hours work and parts.... $113 and change... Not too bad since my hands never were dirty....
And later this afternoon I have been running each zone of the system checking out the watering patterns and stuff...
The rest of the day has been back on the computer where I learned a valuable lesson about making bootable DVDs.... Microsoft Windows7 will burn an ISO file to a DVD and you can read it and test it and all will look fine......!!!! BUT IT WON'T BOOT UP YOUR COMPUTER!!!!
I could find no reference to this on the internet wiki files..... But after trying everything I could think of, it slowly dawned on me that you have to have an ISO image burner program to burn these.... I knew this from my old days of copying other unmentionable media..... Dah...
So once I downloaded Imageburn, and made a dvd disk with it, we had a bingo as I was able to boot from the DVD drive on both the windows laptop and the linux desktop...
I am trying out another version of linux called Mint.
But it is beyond the nature of this blog, to explain. Other than it is a competing distribution of linux from different folks...... Supposed to be easier, but of course time will have to prove that one....
Anyway I can now happily spray all that expensive water on the parched grass around my home here in KC... Wouldn't it just be easier to rock the whole thing like we did in Mesa??? But that's not socially acceptable here in the mid west.....
Retired Rod
But that gave me enough time to get into some pants and move the truck from the driveway where the offending broken pipes were buried.. I spent some time looking for the other valve boxes that were long since grown over with grass.
I found some of them, but the service guy said not to worry, because he has an electronic tool that sniffs out the magnetic valve solenoids, kind of like a metal detector would find a metal piece underground...
The beauty of having these guy that fix this stuff every day come look at the otherwise un-revealing hole in the ground, is that he reached in and wiggled the valve body and said it wasn't connected to anything... So with his shovel he carefully dug around the pipe off to the side of the valve pipe and unearthed the entire problem...
A piece of 1 inch PVC had given way at the elbow... Where it was glued. Or supposed to have been glued.... The purple cleaner hadn't stained the bottom of the joint, meaning that it was never cleaned correctly... So the cement had never adhered to the plastic pipe.... Eventually it was going to blow apart!! It took about 4 years...
Seems that these joints begin to leak, and then build a pocket around the pipe as the water washes away the soil that is holding the pipe together. And when the pressure is strong enough, they blow with a big bang and water everywhere...
It took a while to cut new parts and re glue and seal all the existing pipes.. He replaced everything back to a threaded joint in the valve, where he used new teflon tape... Once the ground was filled back in, all I had to do was wait for 3 hours before turning on the pressure....
Oh, and I have a bill for about an hours work and parts.... $113 and change... Not too bad since my hands never were dirty....
And later this afternoon I have been running each zone of the system checking out the watering patterns and stuff...
The rest of the day has been back on the computer where I learned a valuable lesson about making bootable DVDs.... Microsoft Windows7 will burn an ISO file to a DVD and you can read it and test it and all will look fine......!!!! BUT IT WON'T BOOT UP YOUR COMPUTER!!!!
I could find no reference to this on the internet wiki files..... But after trying everything I could think of, it slowly dawned on me that you have to have an ISO image burner program to burn these.... I knew this from my old days of copying other unmentionable media..... Dah...
So once I downloaded Imageburn, and made a dvd disk with it, we had a bingo as I was able to boot from the DVD drive on both the windows laptop and the linux desktop...
I am trying out another version of linux called Mint.
But it is beyond the nature of this blog, to explain. Other than it is a competing distribution of linux from different folks...... Supposed to be easier, but of course time will have to prove that one....
Anyway I can now happily spray all that expensive water on the parched grass around my home here in KC... Wouldn't it just be easier to rock the whole thing like we did in Mesa??? But that's not socially acceptable here in the mid west.....
Retired Rod
Friday, August 10, 2012
Car wash and fixing the broken laptop..
Not many folks found the actual post for yesterday since it was before the Precious Moments pictures so I will repost it again tonight..... Since all I did today was work on these same issues with the computers again.
Yesterday....
Lets look back at today and see what we did..... Uh, well I went over to the car wash and drove the oldest car thru the line..... It hadn't been washed for a couple of months and it needed a good dusting and cleaning...
We left the Toyota out in Mesa, because there was only two of us and we drove the motorhome back to KC. Loyce drove the truck.. Most of these vehicles have some age on them now, as the truck is 6 models back now and the one I washed today is 8 models back of new.. But we don't have a lot of miles on most of them, but I still dream....
But back to reality, I needed to continue on my computer project. I have been recovering the pictures that were lost from my hard drive crash. Almost everything is stored on other devices, but its hit or miss what is on where...
I have been copying them all onto the newest laptop from a thumb drive, but that proved rather slow as the drive is only 4 gig. So it was off to the computer parts supply store this afternoon looking for, well, parts!
I purchased a new hard drive for the laptop that crashed... It was 500Gb and that was what I found.. The 5400 Rpm was cheaper than the 7200 and I'm slow too, but the old one that crashed was 4400 from looking at the label on it. So it was an upgrade...
Also I purchased a 500 Gb usb portable drive. It was $70 and made by Samsung... You just plug it in, and it has the drivers and stuff right on its disk... or perhaps in a memory chip, but the computers loved it instantly mapping it as the next available drive in the sequence... F: on one machine and G: on the other, but who cares as long as it works!
I had flopped the broken laptop upside down and extracted the old hard drive out of its bottom before I left, to make sure I didn't get one that wouldn't do the job... (should have done that with that fan switch the other night.)
Then I bought a big stack of DVDs for $15. I think there were 25 in the package. But they were Phillips brand, so that seemed OK.
Back here at the house I was merrily making Emergency Recovery DVDs on the newest laptop, while I was installing the new hard drive into the broken one. At one point I was making recovery disks and using the recovery disks that I made two years ago to reinstall the programs on the older computer...
The portable hard drive transferred files between machines seamlessly, but it takes a bunch of time to go thru the process... It read 102 on our weather station, so I wasn't wanting to be outside anyway...
When you do finish your recovery of the older machine, it is returned to the state that it was in when you took it out of its box brand new... Full of the bloat ware that came with it, and without any of the software you normally use.. It takes quite a bit of time to go out on the internet and find the programs that you normally use and then install each of them..
I used internet explorer just once to download Google Chrome, and with that and a signon, my bookmarks and tabs were instantly restored... To my knowledge chrome is the only browser that does it that way...
So I am using the older machine to write this tonight and I am happy to be doing so, because the keyboard is much more familiar to me. And I am all blabber fingers with less errors...
Still it will take a long time to get the rest of the programs downloaded and installed that were on the old hard drive. Perhaps I won't need to do all of them, but it will dawn on me that I don't have Skype when I try and call someone, so that will be when it gets installed... And so forth as I try to use the old,,new,, computer..
And after I had washed the car this morning, it began to rain about supper time, so I had to run and put it in the garage.. It's black, and the rain spots it all up, so I will need to wipe it down now... But it looked really nice for several hours.....!
Retired Rod
Yesterday....
Lets look back at today and see what we did..... Uh, well I went over to the car wash and drove the oldest car thru the line..... It hadn't been washed for a couple of months and it needed a good dusting and cleaning...
We left the Toyota out in Mesa, because there was only two of us and we drove the motorhome back to KC. Loyce drove the truck.. Most of these vehicles have some age on them now, as the truck is 6 models back now and the one I washed today is 8 models back of new.. But we don't have a lot of miles on most of them, but I still dream....
But back to reality, I needed to continue on my computer project. I have been recovering the pictures that were lost from my hard drive crash. Almost everything is stored on other devices, but its hit or miss what is on where...
I have been copying them all onto the newest laptop from a thumb drive, but that proved rather slow as the drive is only 4 gig. So it was off to the computer parts supply store this afternoon looking for, well, parts!
I purchased a new hard drive for the laptop that crashed... It was 500Gb and that was what I found.. The 5400 Rpm was cheaper than the 7200 and I'm slow too, but the old one that crashed was 4400 from looking at the label on it. So it was an upgrade...
Also I purchased a 500 Gb usb portable drive. It was $70 and made by Samsung... You just plug it in, and it has the drivers and stuff right on its disk... or perhaps in a memory chip, but the computers loved it instantly mapping it as the next available drive in the sequence... F: on one machine and G: on the other, but who cares as long as it works!
I had flopped the broken laptop upside down and extracted the old hard drive out of its bottom before I left, to make sure I didn't get one that wouldn't do the job... (should have done that with that fan switch the other night.)
Then I bought a big stack of DVDs for $15. I think there were 25 in the package. But they were Phillips brand, so that seemed OK.
Back here at the house I was merrily making Emergency Recovery DVDs on the newest laptop, while I was installing the new hard drive into the broken one. At one point I was making recovery disks and using the recovery disks that I made two years ago to reinstall the programs on the older computer...
The portable hard drive transferred files between machines seamlessly, but it takes a bunch of time to go thru the process... It read 102 on our weather station, so I wasn't wanting to be outside anyway...
When you do finish your recovery of the older machine, it is returned to the state that it was in when you took it out of its box brand new... Full of the bloat ware that came with it, and without any of the software you normally use.. It takes quite a bit of time to go out on the internet and find the programs that you normally use and then install each of them..
I used internet explorer just once to download Google Chrome, and with that and a signon, my bookmarks and tabs were instantly restored... To my knowledge chrome is the only browser that does it that way...
So I am using the older machine to write this tonight and I am happy to be doing so, because the keyboard is much more familiar to me. And I am all blabber fingers with less errors...
Still it will take a long time to get the rest of the programs downloaded and installed that were on the old hard drive. Perhaps I won't need to do all of them, but it will dawn on me that I don't have Skype when I try and call someone, so that will be when it gets installed... And so forth as I try to use the old,,new,, computer..
And after I had washed the car this morning, it began to rain about supper time, so I had to run and put it in the garage.. It's black, and the rain spots it all up, so I will need to wipe it down now... But it looked really nice for several hours.....!
Retired Rod
Thursday, August 9, 2012
Precious Moments Pictures...
I already wrote a blog for today, but in working on all the pictures that needed restored, I ran across our stop in Carthage, Mo, where the Precious Moments factory is located.... It was back in August of 2007, and I wasn't using blogger then but some other program.
I did put these in a blog at that time, but think they are just as pretty yet today... Enjoy.. Click on the first picture and it should take you to the album in Picasa.
This little chapel is down in the basement and is for the children that have departed our life too young, and for their parents that have suffered thru their loss... It brings tears to your eyes just to stand there.
I purchased this little statue and it is in our cabinet on display yet today....
Loyce stood next to this figure so you could see how big is really is...
Precious Moments is a neat if not touching stop on your RV journey....
Retired Rod
I did put these in a blog at that time, but think they are just as pretty yet today... Enjoy.. Click on the first picture and it should take you to the album in Picasa.
This little chapel is down in the basement and is for the children that have departed our life too young, and for their parents that have suffered thru their loss... It brings tears to your eyes just to stand there.
I purchased this little statue and it is in our cabinet on display yet today....
Loyce stood next to this figure so you could see how big is really is...
Precious Moments is a neat if not touching stop on your RV journey....
Retired Rod
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