I woke up tonight wondering what’s going on…. My face underneath my right eye is very sore like I got whacked with a hammer. My eye lid has a scratch on the edge that is bothersome. Widespread general pain and I am sitting on an enlarged prostate that feels like I have to go #2. I am rather tired more than I am rested and energetic.
Hurricane IAN is making its way across Florida, mom has not seen anything significant. Her power doesn’t seem to have been affected either.
We did our 90 day visit with the doc first thing this morning.
Mom called on the Echo and we talked for a bit.
Many moons ago I needed a wireless travel router that I could use as a bridge across the room between two disparate networks. The tiny TP-Link TL-WR702N was a very capable 802.11B router.
When I was in South America we needed Internet access and the China USB modems from Guatemala carried malware. I had a TL-WR902AC which you could plug one of these USB modems into and it would provide Wireless Internet. More importantly since I was sharing the Internet I could throttle the users so that my allocation was not used up in a single day.
Move forward a couple years when the TL-WR802AC was getting hard to find I bought a GL.iNet 802.11G “Mango”. When we were deployed to Belize I bought 10 of them to enable the entire team to VPN past the hotel network. I also was able to VPN into my home network in Atlanta with ease.
Move forward two more years I needed a dual band router since the 2Ghz band was terribly overcrowded. Meet the GL.iNet “Slate”, it was a little bigger, but had 5Ghz band and external antennas for a farther reach. When I stood up the network in Pahrump i wanted a little cheaper version so meet the GL.iNet “Creta”. Inside it was almost the same as the “Slate”, but without external antennas.
All these routers are very capable on IPV4, but severely lacked IPV6 functionality. The latest router in the family here at the homestead is the GL.iNet Beryl.
And GL.iNet Opal they are much heavier and draws almost twice the power of the “Slate” or “Creta” routers with a USB-C power connector. (I can’t blame them for using a cell phone connector for a travel router, but 3 Amps is a lot of current for a 5V power supply.) The wires are heavy and pretty short, which is not very conducive to being portable. I have the same problem with the Raspberry Pi Model 4…
Combining the experience gained with the snap IDC LED connectors I found last year. Add that to the inexpensive DC-DC inverters that can supply 3Amps into a USB-C connector, I can power this router using upwards of 12V across very long wires. If the voltage drop is an issue, there are inexpensive Wall Warts that can supply 14V to 24V to compensate for the voltage drop.
I have a few networked devices that don’t like being turn off and they really don’t like the power to them fail. I have multiple UPS units that supply power to these devices, but occasionally I need to do maintenance on the UPS. In those cases, I’ve had to turn everything off to change the power source. One solution that I came up with is a 110V relay that switches the power fast enough the device doesn’t notice.
The coil is attached to the redundant wire such that when it is powered the relay switches to it to support the equipment/load. That way the “Normal” connection can be removed from power without losing power to the critical devices.
I should mention that there are some irregularities.
1. The case shown can be opened which can expose dangerous voltages.
2. The design will falter if the alternate power cannot support the load.
(The relay will chatter, switching rapidly between the two sources.)
3. The design is not intended for switching inductive loads under power.
(Especially if the two sources are out of phase with each other.)
Of course someone came out with one that is actually cheaper than making one. LOL
We got up waay after 8 so I was too late to join the guys on the Waterway Net this morning. It was only 41 degrees this morning and there’s a frost warning for tomorrow. We checked our grocery list and it was too late in the morning to get groceries before lunch. We needed a break, so we headed to Outback for lunch. The bill kind of surprised us, it was only 55 dollars. We ate at the bar with Armani and had a good time.
We drove to Wally World for groceries, it wasn’t a very heavy bill. The Progresso Soup section was terribly diminished. We also could not find our favorite Pace salsa either, they had Picante but not salsa.
When we got home, we discussed our way ahead with her brain health. We have to start documenting her symptoms, she’ll never remember all the details when she sees the doctor next. Which by the way, the doctor doesn’t come in until Monday and we have an appointment with a Social Worker which is getting in the way of seeing an actual doctor.
The picture of my arm last year was clear.
The larger spot is a little bigger than a pencil eraser. It’s still a little scary!
I’ll make an appointment with the skin doctor tomorrow, I had an appointment last week, but I also have shingles.
Got up around 8AM and checked in with the HAM radio guys on the Waterway Net. I spent a few minutes gathering information on our financial support of the Philippine children.
I also updated our three Daytimers, by inserting and moving 3 months.
They are absolutely necessary in our current environment. One Daytimer is the current 6 months, 3 months past/3 months future. One Daytimer is the past 6 months and one Daytimer is last year. I also use this blog to keep track of when we’ve accomplished things that we may not have written down in the Daytimer.
Dinner is a frozen turkey breast. It will take 3 hours *1PM before it is done, we’ll start the vegetables and potatoes around noon. Alexa is awfully easy to setup alarms like these.
Todd is probably going to get snow today, it’s only 41 degrees this morning and only getting up to 61 later today.
Made an eye appointment for next Monday, I have a crease in my vision at 5 o’clock just outside my primary vision in my right eye.
Made a huge dent in the loose paperwork on the kitchen table. The entire left side of the kitchen table is for transitioning paperwork and staging stuff.
My back is starting to bother me, need to take a break and lay down somewhere. I took about a half hour nap in the lounge chair, and I felt a little better.
Slept maybe two hours last night. I found out that the grocery list was not made, and we have to toss food that we could have eaten. She’s really worried about the doctor’s appointment on Wednesday and that’s taken a toll on us. We had disagreements all day yesterday.
Checked in with the HAM guys this morning on the HF radio while I update this blog. She also brought me a cup of coffee to sip on.
I worked on the tub of wires for the parking lot speakers, it looks like they are all still there. I separated them into cloth bags and the rest I put back into the tub. The wires are so heavy they broke through the bottom of the tub they were in.
Our 20Yr old, sponsored youth in the Philippines had a child of her own in May. I remember seeing a letter a while ago from her apologizing for something. The letter she wrote in May was sent directly to us from CF Philippines yesterday which I found to be convenient. The tone of the conversation was they thought we’d drop her support because she got pregnant. I know for a fact the CF will drop her if she gets married, that happened to Rochelle. We wrote a letter and forwarded that letter to CF Philippines directly. They are going to work with the community to determine what’s appropriate going forward and get back with us.
We found out in the evening that the doctor’s appointment was cancelled by Emory and that we were supposed to call for a Social Worker appointment earlier today. Oops! We’ll have to wait until Wednesday.
Woke up around 6 this morning when the alarm went off from Sunday service wake-up. Checked in with the HAM radio guys while sipping my coffee.
Applying for the Gwinnett Homestead exemption on our home. The taxes are outrageous at $3,400.00 all the documents have to be in one PDF. I had to print them and then rescan them to upload to the county website.
Just found out that we’re cooking chicken in the cold oven and it’s 11AM. 20 minutes to heat the oven, another 30 minutes to cook the chicken. We should be able to eat by 1:00 PM if we forfeit our nap. I set an alarm on Alexa for 10AM so that we catch this earlier. We really should discuss the next day at 7:15 when her alarm goes off. We decided to cook the beef stew meat since it expired today.
Dinner was really good, but we’re still not on the same page today.
We’re keeping the troubles of yesterday and throwing them into conversations today. Emory Brain health appointment is this week, I think she’s a little apprehensive about talking to the doctor. We’ve NOT done anything that he’s asked us to do as far as medications.
Mowed the back yard, we have a lawn service for the front.
We saw an American roach on the wall in the den today. We tore up the room cleaning out any crumbs of food and we laid down a glue trap behind the chairs. I may have to clean out the Den closet if they are nesting in there.