Author: Radar

---

Narrative: I want to buy two new NAS boxes, but I’ll have to wait on one of them for a bit. I have to conserve what little money I have left.

One of the three DNS-321 boxes has a bad hard drive.

I checked my closet and i had an identical drive with a bunch of recorded TV on it. Very early this morning i installed the drive, formatted the both of them as a RAID 1 and then ran a diagnostic test on them.

Three hours later the enclosure approved the drives for use. The next challenge is setting up a “Public” folder that the cameras can put their video on. I also have a traditional DNR that links to a China cloud, but it’s good enough to use for a VPN circuit if I block access to the Internet. My third option is to actually buy a ASUSTOR to link to the cameras.

First up though is to update all these cameras to the latest firmware and have them reach out to a known wireless network.

Don’t forget to mow the lawn, even in the dark… LOL

---

Narrative: I spent almost the whole day working on documenting our next Sunday service. It seems I’ve been elected as the most knowledgeable individual to support their service.

The first drawing is about the stage itself, they wanted something that was a little more descriptive though.

I used PP to create this slide and graphics to make it more clear.

This slide shows the wires going to the sound board.

This graphic shows the starting position of all the controls of the board.

The next thing I spent a good deal of time on was the cameras in Vegas. All the D-Link cameras are going out of support in September. I LOVE the Amcrest cameras but it was suggested that I try the “Blink” cameras.

The thing about these cameras is they are battery powered, yep battery powered for over a year. They record a segment of time after a movement in front of them. What I don’t like about them is the segment may occur a full 5 seconds after a movement is seen. (That can be a long time)

Our current cameras record 24/7 so every second of an event is recorded. The trouble with them is that they are being retired.

This is a trustworthy camera. It’s only 2Mpixel, but i don’t need to see their face since it is probably covered anyway. I’ll run these Amcrest cameras in parallel with the D-Link cameras until i am comfortable they can do the job. I am a little worried about the DNR part of the system. A DNR is a couple hundred bucks and so is a ASUSTOR.

I ordered a couple white cameras too.

I have one silver camera, the silver 2M ones are not available on Amazon anymore.

---

Narrative: I spent most of the morning drinking our wonderful coffee from Santo Domingo. Oh, and I spent a good deal of time thinking about the network in Nevada.

Home networks tend to be flat, everything touches everything else and wireless networking has access to everything! Another way of securing your home network is thinking about what things HAVE to touch to be functional. Then divide the network between those things that don’t have to talk to each other directly. Then write out what things should communicate with other things in a chart like the one above so that you can build firewall rules to protect everything.

I was looking to bring one of them to Nevada, but then I found out they were terribly OLD and unsupported since 2019. Even the newer NAS I purchased DNS-320 Share Center is also out of date and vulnerable

I just happened to have purchased a 4 disk ASUSTOR NAS for my home network a month ago.

First thing i noticed is that it is terribly fast, at least compared to my D-Link 321 boxes. It also is more like a cell phone with all the apps you can add to the device.

I searched Amazon for a product to replace all four of them and I’ve decided to get a ASUSTOR 2disk NAS for Nevada.

---

Narrative: I missed two days writing in my Blog, i was terribly busy getting ready for church. They have moved their auditorium to completely wireless and we don’t have the transmitters to reach them. So we’re tying in to the old wiring with a board we’ve brought. It turned out to be confusing on which channel was going to be in the monitors. (I hadn’t thought that through!)

I’ve spent almost all morning creating drawings for next Sunday so that I’ll have a better handle on it next time. Like the outdoor services, we’ve not done it the same way twice!

We’re wanting to add storage to our network in Nevada. The trouble with that thought is that we don’t want old cameras and our network storage to be on the same network. In fact it’s a good idea to have the computers on a different network. I can create the network from here on the firewall.

We’re wondering if we can capture some sky images, but the weather doesn’t look promising…

---

Narrative: Up Supp’n coffee. We need a scanner/printer in Vegas and there’s three decisions with that. First, where should we buy it. Amazon seems to have the cheapest price, but we’ve got to navigate the delivery date so it arrives while we are there. I prefer a hard wired network printer, but it’s also handy to have wireless. The decision on that one is that we can use the house wireless and connect the printer hard wired. The M428fdn looks like it would fit nicely.

We’re going to need storage for the scanned documents. We could use a flash/USB drive on the laptop, but that can’t be shared easily. We could use a NAS on the network, but that has wireless access to PII. We could use cloud storage, but that is limited to 5Mbits upload. Balancing security, speed and access.

---

Narrative: I am up really early and I have a little time to catch up on my blog. I’ve sent a message to a newspaper asking them why can’t the republicans in Texas let the voters decide for the districts that the Democrats who left the state? Give the vote back to the people, they are supposed to be representing their desires anyway.

I spent the morning working on getting our medications for the next trip. We had an issue where the pharmacy changed our prescription to a generic and the Doctor and the pharmacy were talking about two different drugs and they refused to refill our prescription in 6 weeks of trying. We asked for the Supervisor and she found the problem in 2 minutes.

We spent a good deal of the day discussing our next trip. I checked the two older 48V battery banks and they were down to 50 volts. (12.5/Battery) I put two 48V banks on one solar charger and the other two banks on the 2nd solar charger to keep them topped off.

I updated the three Raspberry Pi’s in Nevada and did several speed tests. The Internet performance is much better than it was when we were out there last month

---

Narrative: I didn’t get up very early this morning and I have a rendezvous this morning at 9AM with a friend to make some cables for me. I checked the lawn first thing this morning for progress on the Weed+Feed that I put out last night. There was no grains of the product left on the leaves. (It must have rained.) That’s good and bad, i wanted enough moisture to carry the product into the plan but not enough to wash the product off the leaves?

Word Press notified me that https is now enabled for my website! Cool! That will protect my passwords to the website and my blog.

The skin doc said that the lesions are nothing to worry about, he froze them without taking a biopsy.

We had church service in the evening and we called it a day.

I have moved to a weekly entry until my life gets caught up a little.

---

The COVID numbers are about as low as they’ve ever been.

---

Narrative: Sunday, church services in the morning and spent the entire evening moving my network onto the new firewall.

Monday: Built some cables to connect the new Peavy speakers and put a connection between the two firewalls for management. Looked into cost of plane tickets and rental cars.

Tuesday: Cleared church equipment out of our cars.

Wednesday: Church services in the afternoon. Added $15 to our three sponsored children for COVID related expenses. I realized today that my driving skills have gotten rusty. Need to drive more often!

Thursday:

---

Feelings: As Christians we are compelled to look after the Widows and the poor. Just how we do that in this climate when there is so much energy fighting the democracy I don’t know. We were able to help a family get electricity this year! They are very grateful!

---

Retirement: We’ve spent 10K on an air conditioner, need to make that up.

Purchases: Conservation mode, we’re more than 3 paychecks in the hole.

Repairs:

Religion: We were called to read the book Crossing the Line, i am on chapter 5.

Family News: Going day by day.

Arts:

Travel: Florida travel looks well out of reach!

Taxes: I need to finish them.

Pi News: Love em, but no time to play with them.

Media: No Instagram posts today I’ve made a couple posts to FB EcoFlow R600 Group.

Injuries: No injuries.

Accomplishments: None.

From the book “Triggers” by Marshall Goldsmith
Did I DMBT make my wife feel loved? Yes
Did I DMBT help my wife today? Yes
Did I DMBT be happy? Yes
*Did My Best To

I have moved to a weekly entry until my life gets caught up a little.

---

The COVID numbers are about as low as they’ve ever been.

---

Narrative: Sunday, spent all day running an outside church service. Taking equipment, setting it up. Tearing it down and taking it to storage.

Monday: Mowed the front lawn.

Tuesday: Mowed the side lawn.

Wednesday: Unpacked my four new inexpensive speakers.

Thursday: Updated the firmware on my cameras and DVR. (That took all morning) Mowed the back yard today and then got a double scoop of ice cream from Brusters. Constructed four more

Friday: Getting organized, laying out tasks and firming up requirements.

---

Feelings: As Christians we are compelled to look after the Widows and the poor. Just how we do that in this climate when there is so much energy fighting the democracy I don’t know. We were able to help a family get electricity this year! They are very grateful!

---

Retirement: We’ve spent 10K on an air conditioner, need to make that up.

Purchases: Conservation mode, we’re more than 3 paychecks in the hole.

Repairs:

Religion: We were called to read the book Crossing the Line, i am on chapter 5.

Family News: Going day by day.

Arts:

Travel: Florida travel looks well out of reach!

Taxes: I need to finish them.

Pi News: Love em, but no time to play with them.

Media: No Instagram posts today I’ve made a couple posts to FB EcoFlow R600 Group.

Injuries: No injuries.

Accomplishments: None.

From the book “Triggers” by Marshall Goldsmith
Did I DMBT make my wife feel loved? Yes
Did I DMBT help my wife today? Yes
Did I DMBT be happy? Yes
*Did My Best To

I have moved to a weekly entry until my life gets caught up a little.

---

The COVID numbers are about as low as they’ve ever been.

---

Narrative: Sunday, we held a Zoom service it went well. Sunday afternoon we got our mail and spent some quality time.

Monday: Created a stage setup for the team although we didn’t keep to the design, it was close.

Tuesday: Cut up 200′ lengths of wire into 50′ pieces and terminated the ends with power Pole connectors.

Wednesday: Working with the team to assign tasks for Sunday.

Thursday: Finished the speaker wires for running the Yamaha speakers. We celebrated at Chilis and had ice cream.

Friday: I went to storage and picked up the equipment for Sunday. It’s two full car loads of equipment.

Saturday: Spent the entire day with Larry playing the Yamaha speakers and measuring the results.

---

Feelings: As Christians we are compelled to look after the Widows and the poor. Just how we do that in this climate when there is so much energy fighting the democracy I don’t know. We were able to help a family get electricity this year! They are very grateful!

---

Retirement: We’ve spent 10K on an air conditioner, need to make that up.

Purchases: Conservation mode, we’re more than 3 paychecks in the hole.

Repairs:

Religion: We were called to read the book Crossing the Line, i am on chapter 5.

Family News: Going day by day.

Arts:

Travel: Florida travel looks well out of reach!

Taxes: I need to finish them.

Pi News: Love em, but no time to play with them.

Media: No Instagram posts today I’ve made a couple posts to FB EcoFlow R600 Group.

Injuries: No injuries.

Accomplishments: None.

From the book “Triggers” by Marshall Goldsmith
Did I DMBT make my wife feel loved? Yes
Did I DMBT help my wife today? Yes
Did I DMBT be happy? Yes
*Did My Best To