Dogs pee in the house. It’s an inevitability, despite their willingness to please their human masters. Bladders are small, and days are long. Ergo, dogs pee in the house.
A myriad of devices exist which attempt to deal with this problem. And indeed, the pee can be extracted, but residual proteins remain. And these proteins stink! So, a myriad of products exist which attempt to neutralize them. And…none of them work.
So I was left with a choice: kill the dog and burn the carpet, or live with the smell. Neither seemed ideal. But then I remembered the final invoice I received from our last apartment. In it, a specific deduction was itemized from our deposit: an ozone treatment for the dog smell. Faye had a tendency to pee in the second bedroom.
At the time, I considered this bizarre procedure to be limited to a specialized commercial application, and therefore necessitating expensive equipment. But they say smell is the sense most strongly linked to memory, and when walking down the hallway one day, the stench wafted into my nose and my hippocampus short-circuited.
A quick search through Amazon revealed many affordable products. So, as I normally do, I made a selection based on recommendations and ordered the Enerzen ozone generator.
Excitedly, I unboxed it as soon as it arrived. I concluded that the best place to test it would be the bathroom, since if anything went wrong, the room already had ventilation. I set it for a modest 20 minutes, plugged it in, then immediately ran away as its insides glowed purple. An overreaction, perhaps. But I’ve seen enough post-apocalyptic movies to not be disconcerted at the color (even if it’s oxidation, not radiation).
I returned an hour later, figuring it had been enough time to dissipate. I figured wrong. In fact, it was 2 days before the ozone smell was finally gone. But, the bathroom no longer held that mild mildewy essence.
Unfortunately for Liz, it triggered memories of her numerous hospital visits and she became nauseous. Turns out that they use these to sterilize surgery rooms.
But despite that, it was a preferable alternative to dog pee. I started treating the carpet, cleverly devising a method to trap the ozone under a storage bin so as to avoid flooding the house in painful free radicals:
But as it turns out, an ozone generator can’t keep generating ozone with oxygen (ah hindsight). So the viable output of this method was insufficient to deodorize anything. So now, I’m running it for short bursts in problem areas, which is difficult because I can’t evacuate the house, and too much will kill the houseplants.
So it remains to be seen if this tool is effective, since I have yet to run a proper test. Hopefully the multitude of supporting anecdotes out there will foreshadow my own success. And if not, I can always kill the dog and burn the carpet.
Cars have come a long way in terms of providing information to the operator, but I still have an older car, and this diagnostic feedback is generally limited to: “Something’s wrong with your oil pressure” and “Something’s generally wrong”. And aside from inciting panic, this information has done little to help, other than causing me to schedule a future appointment with a mechanic which, in one notable case, was way too late (I had no oil in my car for some reason, the oil light didn’t come on–just the engine light, and I drove the car for a week this way–resulting in fused cylinders).
So it’s no surprise that I’ve long had my eye out for an OBDII reader. Eventually I began to look in earnest, and decided upon this cute little tool:
I chose this model for a couple reasons: mostly because it was the only model that supported Bluetooth for iOS (I didn’t want to mess around with switching between WiFi), and its software was being actively maintained. Specifically, one can run the diagnostic on any outstanding error codes, see an explanation, and receive a list of historically-successful repairs for the given code–not a bad deal for $99 (no subscription required).
Of minor concern is that the device apparently lacked any form of signal authentication. But upon further research, I found that it got around this by restricting sync time to one minute after car start, and thereafter limited connections to one device. Given the range of Bluetooth, I found this to be reasonable.
And after doing some playing around, I found a live data dashboard. This customizable screen outputs selected data to my phone’s screen in real-time, which is more cool than anything, since I doubt it will actively help me discover a problem when it happens. Still, cool.
Note that I did not take this screenshot while driving
Nerdy tech aside, I’m hoping that this time, when something goes wrong, I’ll at least be able to determine the immediate severity and avoid having to replace another engine.
About this time last year, I wrote about the frequency at which I received failed login attempts to my mail server. Since then, I’ve upgraded my border firewall, but they still get through–a consequence of needing an exposed port. So far, the IPs still get blacklisted:
This story begins with a remote-controlled centipede.
And how many stories have that preface?
Yet it’s true. My mother’s boyfriend (Roger) is a big kid at heart. And to me, that’s very relatable. I too seek excuses to wander the Nerf isle, chuckling merrily at the myriad of mischievous machinations–made by malicious Man. How I long to fork over the $150 for the battery-powered chain-fed fully automatic Nerf LMG. And I totally would, were I to have a son instead of a daughter.
But Roger’s sense of humor provides the excuse, and I find myself buying him the toys that I secretly want for myself. And he in turn does the same to me. And so, I found myself with a really cool remote-controlled centipede.
[End preface 1]
I collect electrical cords. Sure, proprietary monitor ports have given way to VGA, then to DVI, then to HDMI; but what of those old and still-functioning peripherals? They might be re-purposed one day, and then where will I find one of those old cables? So I keep them all, in a cardboard box, in which they’ve amalgamated into some form of insulated copper Gordian Knot, but I know that the moment I throw one out, I’ll need it. And despite Liz’s protestations to what she considers “hoarding”, the box remains.
[End preface 2]
The centipede has an internal battery which cannot be swapped. I find that unusual for a toy. And equally unusual is that the toy did not come with a charging cable, given the clearly-labeled charging port on the centipede’s ventral service. It was a situation of little importance given the far more demanding obligations at hand, but it irritated me. And so, I dove into the box, looking for a cable–any cable–which might fit the connecting port on the centipede’s underbelly.
And found a cord I did, much to my surprise. Yet, the cord’s other end was USB, which made me really wonder what it’s original purpose was. No matter, what I needed then was an adapter.
But then I considered–how many different charging cables terminated in USB? To answer, I dug through the box some more. I found (before I grew weary of knots): USB micro, USB mini, and the unknown and aforementioned centipede charger. I considered: wouldn’t it be nice if I could plug them all into something akin to a charging station?
And then I found the old USB hub, which was powered. Huzzah! I plugged the hub into an outlet, then the various cables into the hub (including the centipede-charger). And sure enough, the centipede indicated successful charging via glowing eyes. And now, I can plug additional devices into the hub to charge alongside the centipede.
So what started as a very insignificant dilemma turned into a more expansive solution. I now have a charging station on the tech shelf for any modern electronic which might need a battery charge.
I sit here, typing on an HP Pavilion…running Ubuntu Linux! That’s very exciting for me, although I’ve come to understand that the accomplishment isn’t so nearly as grandiose as I had predicted. Still, it’s a happy accomplishment.
This computer was a necessary replacement. Liz’s VAIO–her college computer–had died a quiet and dignified death through inevitable hardware failure. Afterwards, she used my iMac G4–my college computer. Eventually, that too died. For obvious reasons we needed a computer, and since I was unable to justify the cost of a new mac (my own preference), and since Liz hated macs, we decided upon the HP laptop (since our apartment had a certain lack of space for a permanent desktop setup, as the computer room had been converted into a nursery). Still, we opted for something with higher-end hardware, thus the HP (dv-3186cl)–an i5 quad-core 2.27 GHz with 4 gigs of RAM. It was, and still is, a respectable computing system.
This machine served us well for years, but eventually it too succumbed to the ravages of time. The hard drive had started to wear out, the OS (Windows 7), had become increasingly bloated (the inevitable fate of evolving OSes), the battery (which we had replaced multiple times) died, and the WiFi card ceased to function.
Upon this last failure, I lost my patience and bought a MacBook Pro. It had been years since I enjoyed Apple’s OS, and I was elated at the homecoming. Liz limped along with the HP, until one day it refused to cooperate at all. And as she needed it for work, she immediately replaced it (with a newer iteration of HP’s Pavilion series). I, being ever-loath to discard technology, retired the broken machine to the mothyard (the basement), with the vague plan of replacing its defective hardware parts one day, and installing Linux.
Then I received some Amazon gift cards and decided that was the necessary excuse to begin. I hooked it up (it had no battery) and pressed the power button. And it promptly informed me that the WiFi card was inoperable. I disregarded the warning, and was then informed that the drive was likely to experience imminent failure. I ignored this message too (all the data had been backed up anyway), and continued.
Rather, I tried to continue, but was then informed that the drive failed to mount. Again, no biggie. This was just a test to see if the hardware would function at all. Perhaps the drive was fine, but the OS had become corrupted. So I began my search for a Linux distro.
My first hands-on experience with Linux was openSUSE, years ago when I had managed to install it on an old beige G3 powermac. At the time, I had it configured to be a simple Apache web server, and it had performed its duties as a platform for my first-ever blog: intellectualnexus.net. I’m happy to see that the domain lies unregistered currently. Apparently no one else has since thought to use the name. I ultimately agreed to discard that derelict machine once the kid arrived, and I had been without a web server since (until I bought my Synology).
Then my sister bought me a Raspberry Pi. The Pi came with its fork of Debian, NOOBS. That was my second experience using Linux. The Pi has lived an off-and-on existence, primary simply to serve an omni-present web page (currently a Google calendar).
In both of these examples, my familiarity with Linux had been minimal, and my hand-on experiences to be lacking in confidence. But Linux had changed since my earliest experiences, and the Internet was confident that contemporary distros were rivals in usability to the other major OS players. In fact, I had even stumbled across Dell’s product listings that included machines with Ubuntu pre-installations. I hadn’t much cared for SUSE at the time, and with Debian appearing rather minimalist, I took Dell’s endorsement of Ubuntu and searched for a package.
It didn’t take long to find. It turned out that Ubuntu has very comprehensive guides for downloading and installing. They even provided a step-by-step guide for my exact scenario: downloading the installation iso onto a USB flash drive with a Mac. With this amount of helpful documentation, Ubuntu made a good option. I picked up a USB stick on the way home from work the next day.
That night, I followed the instructions to the letter, and quickly ended up with a usable USB install drive. I plugged it into the HP and booted up, and after ignoring the error message regarding the WiFi and failing HD, entered into the install prompts. This, too, was straightforward, and after the installation completed, I rebooted, hoping to see Ubuntu’s happy welcome screen.
It certainly is pretty
But instead I was met with a new error, and this time the HD was completely inaccessible. So despite my misgivings that the drive was okay and Windows was to blame, the hardware was indeed at fault. I bought a 1TB HD off Amazon and waited the two days for shipping. The old drive, now undoubtedly defunct, was removed and relegated to the mothyard’s stack of inoperable/obsolete hard drives.
What am I going to do with an 80GB PATA?
The drive installed easily enough and I re-ran the installation (once again ignoring the WiFi error (vowing to discover how to turn that message off in the BIOS later)). The install completed much quicker this time. Apparently a functioning hard drive was the key factor. I also paid more attention to what the installation was doing, and was pleasantly surprised to see that it was automatically deciding upon the appropriate drivers for the detected hardware and removing those that weren’t relevant. In short order, upon reboot, I was greeted with the happy welcome screen which for which I had eagerly awaited.
Elegant in its simplicity
I signed in and began poking around. The default installation included the basic applications necessary to navigate a file system and the Internet. I triggered a mass application update to get the most recent versions, then poked around in the package center (or whatever they call it). There were similarities between Synology’s Linux fork and Apple’s OS (a freeBSD fork), so it’s been relatively straightforward to figure out. Ultimately, I had just planned to use the HP as a web browser (courtesy of Firefox) and a coding platform (now using Notepadqq). And it’s fulfilled these expectations.
So purdy
It’s also exceeded them. The OS is incredibly efficient, and has proven to be the fastest system I have used to date. And after discovering that a sticker had melted onto the internal WiFi card, and removing said sticker fixed it, I’ve decided to order a battery and have a completely restored workstation. I don’t know if it’ll turn out to be my primary machine, but it’ll certainly fill a niche where more technical tasks are involved. So far, Ubuntu has excelled beyond my every expectation. I offer my personal endorsement.
