The summer of 2013 is nearly over. Unlike last year, I haven't really been productive this year. Last year, I set goals for myself. One of those goals was to spend as much time with my kids, and spend them without using gadgets or TV.
I wanted to be able to interact with my kids directly, without using electronic devices. This was one of the reasons why I bought board and card games for Christmas 2011. My goal was to interact more often, face to face, with my kids.
Last year, I realized that the best time to be able to spend time with the kids was during summer, since school was out and they could sleep late. One of my goals last summer was to play board and card games with them as often as possible. I was able to do that. My other goals were hit and miss. Some were partially successful while others were not.
This year, I haven't been as productive because of the heat. I've spent almost all of my time during the summer in my airconditioned bedroom where the kids are camped out as well. They sleep here also to share the airconditioning in order to cut down on our electric bill. This is the coolest place in the house where my family can watch TV and the kids could read or play.
As the summer has gone along, I've spent less and less time in the 3rd floor of our house, which is the location of a lot of the pending work I'm supposed to do. It's just so hot to stay up there for long periods of time. Essentially, the summer heat has limited my family to just one room in the 2nd floor.
I'm looking forward to the start of the school year and the coming rainy season. I'm expecting cooler temperatures that should allow me to work longer around the house. Summer 2013 has been a wash. I hope next summer will be better.
Showing posts with label Home. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Home. Show all posts
Avacus, My Automatic Voltage Regulator (AVR) of Choice
The Automatic Voltage Regulators or AVRs that I use for my high-value personal electronic entertainment appliances are comparably highly priced and heavy. My reason for choosing Avacus AVRs is because of their simple good looks, slim design, their single 110v and multiple 220v outlets, and their quality which is evidenced by their heavy weight.
Jensen JMR-280 AM/FM Desktop Radio with Antique Style Wood Finish
We dropped by HMR a few weeks ago to see if there were any new and interesting items. We found a brand new analog desktop radio with a faux wood finish that had an old style look but was still a modern product.
It really looked good and only cost around $17. It was made by Jensen and used 220V. Since it was cheap, good looking, and didn't need a transformer, we decided to buy it.
It really looked good and only cost around $17. It was made by Jensen and used 220V. Since it was cheap, good looking, and didn't need a transformer, we decided to buy it.
Linksys WRT54G v7 Piece of Crap Router
I sometimes wonder why, of all the WRT54G router models my family could have gotten as our home broadband router, we ended up with the only version that used an Atheros chipset that is unsupported by any alternative firmware - DD-WRT, OpenWRT, Tomato, etc., instead of the more common Broadcom chipset which is widely supported. Not only does it limit the possibilities we could eventually perform with the router, it also limits its resale value.
This WRT54G version 7 model is a piece of crap which Linksys should never have produced. It seems Linksys has learned its lesson, and has since brought out later models only with the Broadcom chipset.
Problem with WRT54G v7 Router and Broadband Connection
We've been having issues with our router and/or shared broadband connection here at home for the past few days. My first thought was that P2P downloading from two machines on our home network were eating up bandwidth and causing the browsing slowdown or connection failures on other machines. A symptom of this would be the inability to connect to the web admin interface of the router. In the past few days, many of us in my family who depend on web access to do our work, were frustrated and had a very difficult time in completing our jobs.
Since my wife urgently needed unhindered, continuous, and stable web access, I had to block all TCP/UDP ports above the list of well-known ports which are between 0 and 1023. That includes most ephemereal ports. I blocked TCP/UDP ports 1025 to 65535 on our Linksys WRT54G v7 wireless router which still had the default firmware of 7.00.0. This allowed most of us who relied on the web to be able to continue with our work uninterrupted.
The problem was that my brother, who pays for our Internet connection, owned one of the machines that was doing the downloading. I could not block ports 1025 to 65535 permanently. Another reason why I felt that blocking the ports permanently was not a good solution, was that, at some point in the future, I was also going to be doing some P2P downloading.
Since my wife urgently needed unhindered, continuous, and stable web access, I had to block all TCP/UDP ports above the list of well-known ports which are between 0 and 1023. That includes most ephemereal ports. I blocked TCP/UDP ports 1025 to 65535 on our Linksys WRT54G v7 wireless router which still had the default firmware of 7.00.0. This allowed most of us who relied on the web to be able to continue with our work uninterrupted.
The problem was that my brother, who pays for our Internet connection, owned one of the machines that was doing the downloading. I could not block ports 1025 to 65535 permanently. Another reason why I felt that blocking the ports permanently was not a good solution, was that, at some point in the future, I was also going to be doing some P2P downloading.