It’s no secret that I have a lot of computers in my home. A few of them are “always on” (the server behind www.kahunaburger.com for example) and others are switched on when needed. It’s usually the computer furthest away that is needed. Yes, I get some exercise walking across the house and switching it on, but I found it more rewarding to send the computer a “magic network packet” asking it to turn on by itself.
And that’s what Wake-On-Lan is for. Once configured in your computer’s BIOS (Macs can be configured through preferences), the computer will listen on the Ethernet interface for specially crafted packets. If such a packet is seen, then the system will wake up from the sleep state and power on. A few seconds later the computer is usually up and running.
Here’s how I woke up the computer in the kitchen yesterday:
Now all of the computers in the house are configured to fall asleep after ten minutes (to conserve energy) and all of them can be woken up the same way.
“We absolutely do not want to do this, but Apple has made it completely impossible for anyone but Apple to make a profit selling contemporary ebooks on any iOS device. We cannot survive selling books at a loss and so we are forced to go out of business. We bet everything on Apple and iOS and then Apple killed us by changing the rules in the middle of the game.”
If that’s entirely true, then it’s quite sad how the 800 pound gorilla is crushing the competition …
The recent fraudulent charges on my E*Trade account made me open a 2nd checking account, which can be used in the interim should something like this happen again to me. That 2nd checking account also comes with an ATM card and it happened that my replacement ATM card (for the first account) arrived around the same time as my new ATM card. I dial the number on the first card and attempt to activate it automatically. For some reason the remote system does not detect the “55″ in the card number and always says that I entered an invalid number. It repeats the digits I entered and the “55″ turns into “5″ no matter how long I pause between the digits.
I call up E*Trade’s support hotline and here’s what happened:
E*Trade: can you please tell me the number on the card? Me: aaaa-bbbb-cccc-dddd E*Trade: can you please verify your social security number? Me: xxx-yy-zzzz E*Trade: can you please also verify your home address? Me: [home address] E*Trade: thank you! your card is now activated. is there anything else I can do for you? Me: yes, I want to activate a 2nd card. E*Trade: you have a 2nd card for the same account? Me: no, it’s a separate checking account. E*Trade: for a different individual? Me: no, it’s also under my name. same as the card we just activated. E*Trade: oh – ok. can you please tell me the number on the card? Me: aaaa-bbbb-cccc-dddd E*Trade: thank you – can you please verify your social security number? Me: ….. are you kidding me? it’s the same number i gave you 30 secs ago. E*Trade: i need you to provide the social security number otherwise i can’t activate the card. Me: [laughing out loud and trying to contain myself while i tell her my social security number again]
And, yes, I had to provide my street address as well. At least she followed the script to the point …
This kid has a sense for dramatic anniversaries. Almost exactly three years after she broke her arm under the left elbow she tops it off with a break just above the left elbow!
On Friday Candice got a call from school that Pia had hurt herself playing on the monkey bars. After some back and forth with the vice principal, they concluded that there was not too much to worry about and Pia stayed in school and went to after-care as always. In the evening after Candice had gotten her from after-care, things did not look right and they went to the emergency room. I joined them soon after and the elbow indeed looked “out of place”. They took two x-rays and when the technician saw the 2nd one he said that it was broken and most likely needed surgery. However a doctor would have to make the final call.
At 11pm I received a note that Pia would need to have surgery the next morning, because a normal cast would not keep the bones aligned correctly.
Saturday morning around 9:45am she went into the OR and about an hour later we were allowed back into the recovery area where Pia was just waking up. During the operation she received two pins to keep the bones in place. Everything was covered in a cast of plaster.
It was heart-breaking to see her going through the wake-up period where she was constantly crying and complaining about pain. The nurses assured us that this was normal and that every kid will behave that way coming out of anesthesia. After 45 mins she had calmed down a lot and we were allowed to go back to her room. When we had to leave at 1pm she was feeling much, much better and later that evening she was discharged and allowed to go home.
And if you have kids and want to see what you have to deal with when a kid wakes up after surgery, then watch this (she does not remember it and she was not in as much pain as it appears):
I found it quite interesting to read about Sony’s admission that user data and possibly credit card information was compromised between April 17 and April 19. Even more interesting that the first fraudulent charges appear around April 20 on my account. Quite the coincidence – isn’t it? Yes, we have a Playstation Network account, because we have a Playstation. And yes, we made at least one purchase from the network buying a game for Pia. And I distinctly remember that I cringed, because there was no option to say “don’t store my credit card information” …
Do you have a PSN account? Did you also get hit by fraudulent charges? Did those charges also come from the New York/Brooklyn area? If yes, please leave a comment or talk to me: tobias-at-kahunaburger.com.
My brother told me gets a text message on his phone whenever a charge above a certain amount is made to his card. He is in Europe and as far as I know, no banking/credit-card company is offering a similar service here in the US.
Here’s what I would like to see happen:
For each of my bank-accounts, debit cards and credit cards, I can tell my institution whether charges need to be approved or not.
I can set a dollar limit with charges below that limit not requiring approval.
For each new charge, the institution sends me a text message with the location of the transaction and the dollar amount. Alternatively the institution can provide an “app” that replaces the text message exchange.
If I asked for charges to be approved and I don’t respond within 1 minute, then the charge will be declined. The rationale here: If I am about to charge something, I can make sure that I have the phone next to me and can respond right away.
If I respond without one minute, then the charge will go through without problems.
If I know that I will be in an area without cell phone reception, I can “pause” the approval system for a certain amount of time.
While responding to a new charge request, I can designate the business/merchant as “safe” and future charges with the same business/merchant will be approved automatically. This decision can be reversed at any time.
Update 5/11: Yesterday the provisional refund hit my E*Trade bank account. E*Trade refunded all the money for all the transactions I had reported previously. The investigation is ongoing and it may be possible that they are going to dispute some of the charges at a later point, but I doubt it. It took a bit less than 3 weeks to get the money back – not too bad.
Update 4/26: We are officially at $3540.00 missing from my account. In case you are interested, here are all the charges over the past few days. The map below puts the charges, well, on the map. I’m not going to say that it is related to the Sony incident, but it is highly likely.
Look at the pretty map up there. That’s New York City with Brooklyn right about in the middle. See those blue markers? Each of them represents a transaction which I made between 4/20 and 4/24. The only problem is: I was here in Santa Fe.
Less than a year since the last incident, my Debit/VISA card was again compromised and used in all the locations above. This time the damage is around $2000 (so far) and I have to deal again with all the mess that comes with it. Those who know me will also know that I’m extremely careful with my card and who gets access to it. I have to assume that one of the people/businesses who received my card information is to blame for it, but the hard thing is finding who it could have been (or be). What makes it different from the last incident, this time the crooks used a real card (as opposed to online shopping). Somehow they got hold of the information that is stored on my card, put it on the magnetic strip of a blank card and then went shopping. This seems to suggest that somebody must have “copied” the information from my physical card (I need to read up more on the subject in order to be sure about this).
The hints above point at a female shopper who has a thing for shoes. There are two transactions which stand out: the one at the jeweler and the one at the small deli in Brooklyn. Something tells me that the person using my card can be found there. Visa claimed they are investigating and E*Trade also said they started an investigation – I bet they won’t find anything and just write off the $2000. I’ll keep on looking and see if I can find more hints in the transactions. I even started to check Craigslist/EBay in NYC for recent postings that could be linked to the merchandise.
Arggghh – I’ll add another post in a little while with a proposal on how to stop this mess.
PS: If anybody knows what business “HENRRY PASQUAL HER” in Brooklyn could be, please let me know …
Sometimes Adobe even surprises me (as somebody who works there). Just a few days ago we unveiled a technology which allows you to remote control Photoshop from your mobile device (smart phone or tablet). Photoshop acts as a server, which can receive commands from a mobile device. Below you see one sample implementation that turns you phone/tablet into a color mixer. I saw it demoed at a recent company meeting and it is pretty cool. You can get more info and links via betanews.
… I’m truly sorry that we stole from you this weekend. We went to your store in Albuqurque on Saturday. My daughter was cold, because your air-condition’s temperature was set too low. We borrowed a sweater while shopping for her clothes and forgot to remove the sweater before checking out. Only once we left the store we noticed that Pia was still wearing the “borrowed” sweater without having paid for it (you should have seen the look on our faces once we discovered it). In light of the $200+ purchase and the sweater’s value of $7, we decided to not come back and return it. I hope you understand! To make up for our asocial behavior, we did this and this. Thanks for your understanding and I promise it won’t happen again.
Above is what I see when I go to a specific project on http://code.google.com/. They had a lot of outages lately and, of course, always when I needed something. Does not instill confidence …
While PNM was looking over my project, CST contacted my Home Owners Association to get approval for the solar panels. The president of the association asked for a rendering that would show what a person standing on La Vida Trail (the closest road) would see. And here’s what one would see (hint: nothing):
(by the way: the big lollipop on top of the garage is the antenna for my wireless Internet connection)
After this I got the association’s approval.
Then this morning a document from PNM arrived, which states that they also approve of the plans and that we can start with the construction now. Yeah!
Supermarmite is making the news today (I stumbled on it via popurls.com). The idea is simple, but genius. Every day thousands of people will cook meals in their homes and usually have too much for the members of the family. They invite random strangers who are members of the Supermarmite web site to eat with them. They post meal details and when things will be ready on the site and others can look up what’s cooking around them and reserve a spot for a fee decided by the cook. Here’s one entry from Paris this evening:
About a week ago Damon from Consolidated Solar Technologies was here at my house. We went up on the roof and measured the area where the PV panels are supposed to be installed. His initial assessment was that there would be enough space on the main garage roof for most of the panels. I asked him to reserve some extra space around the area where the vents from the warm water heater come up, because plumbers like it when it’s easy to do the piping for a thermal solar installation.
He left with my home’s plans and promised to have an update a week later.
Yesterday afternoon he sent three sketches (made with Google Sketchup – the final ones will be made in AutoCAD) with an initial proposal for the location of the panels and the electric equipment. Everything looks good and there’s only one item we need to figure out: my wireless internet connection requires a dish-like antenna on the roof. If you zoom in on the sketch below, you can see it looking like a big, black lollipop. At its current location, the antenna will cast a shadow on some of the panels which will reduce efficiency of the system. We either need to relocate the antenna or place the panels outside of the shadow path. I prefer the later and sent my counter proposal back to them.
Once we agree on a design, the final plans will be created and then the whole lot gets submitted to PNM for approval. I was told that this step is going to take longest …
When I moved to my current home, I planned to convert it to solar energy as soon possible. It did not happen for the past few years, but now I have the funds to install a 8,424 kWh photovoltaic system and I can’t wait for it. I’ll document the process as I go along to encourage others to follow my steps.
NM is hit by a very strong sun every day. Even on days when we have record low temperatures, the sun provides an amazing amount of free energy. I want to tap into it and reduce my carbon footprint as much as possible. I looked over my electric and gas bills for the past few years and determined that my electric energy consumption should be the first one to be addressed, because it is almost constant and represents the largest amount of money every year.
I contacted a lot of different companies in Santa Fe and Albuquerque and finally settled on Consolidated Solar Tech in Albuquerque, because of their reputation and pricing. I would have loved to go with a Santa Fe company, but every single quote I got from local companies was way higher than CST’s.
CST provided a number of quotes for different types of PV panels and different system sizes (the amount of energy produced). I decided to go with the one that provides almost 100% of my yearly energy use. And because I have nothing to hide, here’s the quote from them:
Total system cost is around $33K and after tax credits, other discounts you end up at $20K. This is bundled with an 18-month, 0% interest loan from Enerbank for about $14K.
The important piece of information is on page 2 of the quote. It represents a chart that shows my average monthly usage (yellow) and compares it to the amount of energy that the PV system produces:
For 7 months out of the year my meter will run backwards and send electric energy back into the grid. This also means I’ll be getting checks from PNM for the excess energy produced. For the remainder of the year my PNM bills will be a fraction of what they used to be. Overall I will break even and not have to worry about electricity bills any longer. 8 years from now I will have recuperated the cost of the installation and that’s assuming that energy prices per kWh won’t go up, which is pretty unlikely.
I’ll keep posting updates as we go along, but I have a feeling this is something I won’t regret anytime soon.
