Month: July 2021

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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

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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.

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Narrative: I was awake very early and I’ve had this itchy spot next to my eye for a bit. Normally when I’ve gotten Basil Cell Carcinoma it’s surface is flaky like dandruff. These are itchy, but not scaly on the surface. (At least not yet.) Now that I know what to look for, they don’t get very big before I see a doc. Now that I am on Medicare I don’t have to have a referral, just make an appointment!

They are still quite small, but I have an appointment tomorrow with the skin doc. I’ve had cancer cut out of my nose and a very tiny one cut out of my ear lobe. (The Doc didn’t see that one for a whole year, I had to point it out to him.) The rest of the time they’ve frozen the lesion and I was good to go. We get a full body scan once a year.

We installed six systems in Nevada, Hours of backup power, Fortigate Firewall with VPN remote network access, Eight D-Link wireless cameras, Six VeSync outlets to turn appliances On/Off, Eight Hue Light Bulbs with Hue Hub, Home Assistant (Automation) to log the house humidity and temp.

The only anomaly at present is the camera for the front door has moved significantly from it’s original position. But luckily we can still see the entire ramp! Hopefully the systems will hold together until we return.

I saw in the news that Coffee prices are skyrocketing so we put in an order for 16 bags of our Favorite Coffee.

We got CPAP supplies yesterday from Aerocare and they shipped a mismatched mask and supplies for an older mask. We called them and now they are shipping the correct supplies and we have to send the supplies we got yesterday back to them.

If we have a power outage in Nevada this alarm will go off waking us up.

Then we can use the house network UPS to power our units overnight. (Not sure how we’d charge the batteries, solar would be a good option?)

The Air conditioning is keeping up with the extreme 115 Degree temperatures pretty well. (I’ll get worried if it doesn’t cycle in the middle of the day.) The thermostat is set to 78 degrees, i’ll put a NEST on the house next trip out so that I can manage/control the temp remotely. The short cycling from the bathroom vent is helping keep the humidity up during the heat of the day.

Laid out some Weed+Feed to knock down the Creeping Charlie that has taken over our lawn.

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Narrative: Sipped my coffee while I worked on the wiring for next Sunday’s service. I checked the audio we recorded and it all looks good. At least all 16 channels were recorded! I copied the files to my NAS and boxed up the SD card for the trip to TH’s house.

I found one movie on the NAS that was corrupted over the last few days, i’ll have to copy it again from a backup.

I put some weed+Feed on the Creeping Charlie on my lawn as a test. I looked it up online too and that’s the recommended way of dealing with them.

Put the battery chargers on two of the 48V battery banks that I tested yesterday.

Dinner was awsome, we made Bisquick Biscuits for dinner!

Checked Nevada, everything looks good. Time for bed.

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Narrative: Got up really early, like 7 AM to get ready to do an inside service today. Drove to the school at 7:30 and D.E.’s son was waiting on me. We were totally rushed for the entire service, but it went well overall. Packing went ok and we went out with J+J afterwards for some Mexican food.

Had a LONG 4 hour nap before wasting away the evening making plans for Next Sunday. I bought some cables and made some design documents before retiring for the evening.

Nevada is in good shape, the cameras and Home Automation are working very well so far. The pump house door is still closed.

I charged my 48V battery banks a couple days ago and let them rest a couple days before testing them. I connected one of the two Eaton 1500W UPS units and put a 500W load on them (10A) and the batteries are fine. The internal batteries are disconnected on these units so I connected the charging cables to top them off over night. There are two circuits that run all of the electronics in our home. The two Eaton UPS units can take over each of them from the 3KW Tripp Lite Powerverter. There are a total of four 48V 35AH battery banks in case of a long duration power failure. The Tripp Lite Powerverter has the responsibility for a short term outage. Once it’s depleted I can bring up the Eaten units an charge the batteries with a tiny generator.

Nevada has two UPS units, the house UPS is 840WH of battery and the garage UPS has 200 WH of battery with a 2.5 hour limited run time to protect the batteries.

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Narrative: We had a huge victory today.

The garbage can is no longer on the curb at my dad’s house. Someone came to the rescue and hauled the trash can to the side of the garage for us today.

The pump house door has also stayed closed, we still do not know why it was open every time when we returned to my dad’s house.

Spent most of the day preparing for tomorrow’s service. At the end of the day it looks like an outside service on the inside. Generated and distributed the drawings to the team for the first inside service in a year!

8AM tomorrow, the show goes on!