|
|
|
bundling my trips
Monday, June 19 2017
At some point today I went down to the brownhouse with an iPad, thinking I could take care of some business while taking advantage of Midge, the new, presumably reliable WiFi router installed in the external "pod" just above the greenhouse roofline (it's the replacement for the venerable, increasingly-flaky Cockroach). But Midge wasn't showing up in my list of hotspots, and it continued not to show up even after I'd cycled power to the pod. In a situation like this, the mostly likely problem is with the power supply, a cheap Chinese box that turns 120 volt alternating current into five and twelve volts of regulated direct current. Those supplies are made with bargain-basement components, and their capacitors are notorious for bulging with built-up pressure after a year or two of service. Back in February, one of these power supplies failed catastrophically from a lightning-induced power surge in the laboratory, producing actual shrapnel (which was happily contained within its housing). But even after I'd replaced that power supply with another, Midge remained unreachable via ethernet and WiFi. This forced me to put a ladder up against the east side of the greenhouse and look at the router itself. Though it should've been on, none of its LEDs were illuminated. I removed it from the pod and took it back to the house. Further tests revealed it to be completely dead, though nothing obvious was wrong with it. None of the devices surface-mounted to its circuit board had any visible damage, and proper voltages seemed to be available from the on-board regulator ICs. Whatever had happened to it was an eerie mystery, similar to the one surrounding Otto Warmbier, the unfortunate young man whose impulsive prank in North Korea resulted first in harsh imprisonment and then, terrifyingly, an unexplained decline into a persistent vegetative condition.
The dead router was a TP-Link TL-WR1043ND running DD-WRT firmware. I don't have much brand loyalty or aversion, though my experience has generally been poor with TP-Link products. I'd hoped the open source DD-WRT firmware would overcome the anticipated crappyness of the TP-Link user interface, with the hope that the underlying hardware would be sound. Evidently my hopes had been misplaced.
Happily, I had a better router (the Asus RT-N66R, "Cricket") available to replace it with, though this required running a new wire up to the pod, since that router requires 21 volts of direct current. Once installed, it seemed to work correctly. As a bonus, it's dual-band, meaning it's possible to get solid, mostly-uncluttered 5 GHz connections).
All this running out to the greenhouse and back again meant that I passed Andrea numerous times as she did whatever she was doing at the dining room table. Without fail, she said something to me every time I went through. She was just being friendly, gracious, and appreciative for being able to stay with us. But having to say something in response started feeling like a chore, as it would've had anyone been behaving this way. I actually found myself bundling my trips through the dining room so as to minimize such interactions, which is not something one wants to be doing in one's own house. (By contrast, with Gretchen, we're so completely comfortable with one another that there's never any reason to say anything unless something definitely needs to be said.) Don't get me wrong, I like Andrea and don't mind her being here. Little things like this are really the only downside.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170619 feedback
previous | next |
