So I took the Tacoma to work yesterday hoping to score another load of sod to throw in the chicken area. I stopped at two Home Depot’s and a Lowes and struck out, no sod. I also stopped at a garden center I looked for sod at before. When I asked him about sod he said they did not have any and I shouldn’t expect anyplace to have sod for awhile. He said all of the rain would make cutting sod impossible. If the sod is underwater or drenched the machines used to cut it can’t do their thing. I never thought about that but it makes sense. The chickens will have to deal with the muck for now.
Speaking of rain, I read that the precipitation from Tropical Storm Emily dropped the normal amount of rain we would receive for the entire month of August in two days, fantastic. I’m glad President Trump wants to reinvigorate the coal industry since global warming is a complete farce… it should be hugely, terrifically, awesome.
I printed my first big thing on the CR-10 printer, a nice headphone stand. I am getting the hang of things, slowly.
So even though the yard was already a functional lake Mother Nature seemed to not give a fck, dumping another four plus inches of rain on the property last night. Without a doubt, this is the worst rainy season I have experienced since moving to Florida. I absolutely hate it.
The chicken area last ngiht was completely submerged, front and back. I told Cindy we need to let them out into the main yard for a couple days so they can get to some high ground. It’s no good for them to be standing in a cesspool all day long. The property is already a mess, letting the chickens roam around there for a couple days isn’t going to change much.
Yesterday I was remoted to my home server for something and noticed something odd. There were some browser windows open to some dating site. What was odder was that Chrome and Firefox were installed on the system and I was not the one that did it. In addition on the desktop were several jpg images of random people. Obviously, I had been hacked. Of course I flew into remediation mode.
When I looked at my installed programs I saw the Chrome and Firefox had been installed on July 26th so I uninstalled them, assuming they were part of whatever the hackers were using to gain access. I also installed Norton Security Suite. I had uninstalled the Vipre AV protection I had on there a month or two ago because of problems I was having. When I rebooted the server I was no longer able to get remote access, it said my password was invalid, wtf…. So I was unable to look at it further until I got home.
My initial assumption was the Norton firewall was screwing with my remote access so I figured when I got in front of the server last night I would be able to log in from the console. Nope, my password no longer worked…. They evidently changed my password as well. Luckily I had another account I could get access with which I used to change my password to something pretty unguessable.
So once I got access again I continued my investigation. I installed and ran Malware Bytes which came up clean as well as a Norton scan. I figured they likely got in via RDP so I changed the port my firewall port forwards RDP on so that door would be closed. I monitored the server during the night to verify no other access attempts were made. So far all seems well. Of course it is annoying and somewhat worrisome that someone got on the box however my home server serves a much lesser role in my home IT structure nowadays since my email has now moved to the cloud and any important files live on Dropbox. Still, I will be keeping an eye on things because you can never let hackers win.
So I finally got some successful prints off my new CR-10 printer last night. I first did a first layer adhesion test print followed by an EUC mudguard print so I could compare it to what I printed on the Finder. The print came out well although the support material seemed a little too robust and difficult to remove. I still have a lot to learn but I am getting there slowly.
Mother nature evidently has a cruel sense of humor. When we got home Sunday afternoon we were both thrilled to see pretty much all of the standing water on the property had receded into the ground after 2-3 days of no/light rain. Heck I even took the tractor into the back yard of the coop and mowed the two foot high grass that had been poking out of the water. The chickens even seemed happier to have full access to their area without having to wear flippers.
Well out of nowhere, a tropical storm developed Sunday night and blew through our area in the last 36 hours dumping tons of rain, putting me back at square one. It frustrates the hell out of me. I can not wait for the return of winter. During that time I will need to do something to significantly raise the ground level in certain areas around the house with the chicken yard being first priority.
Despite the near constant rain I tried to be somewhat productive and changed the oil on the Ioniq. It was probably not needed yet but since we were going on a road trip I wanted to get it done. The rain forced the work to be done inside the garage which required some extra care to avoid getting oil on the floor. The procedure went smoothly. Getting access to the oil drain plug and filter is a little weird as they are hidden behind two access panels of a weird felt-like cover over the entire bottom of the front end of the car. Of course I shot video of the work since I found no other Ioniq oil change videos, a possible niche market.
It was ironic that my new large format 3D printer that I have been waiting for over a month to be delivered finally showed up yesterday. I wasted little time in setting it up. The first thing I noticed was it is far less polished of a set up than my FlashForge Finder. The controls are pretty sparse, the bells and whistles are far fewer but this printer is not about that, it’s about printing big shit.
So instead of doing the smart thing and trying a small print first, I went right into trying to print something big, a console tray for my Tacoma. I got the print started ok but when I got up this morning the one corner had lifted off the print surface so I killed the print.
Not only do I need to learn the ins and outs of the new printer, I also need to learn how to work in a new slicer software since the program I used for the Finder is proprietary. I have no doubt I will get better at it but this week is not the best one to try to do so because of everything else going on.
Speaking of everything else, I have a lot of anxiety about going on the road trip. I always have concerns about leaving the house and specifically the chickens in someone else’s care. However this time I also have a TON of things going on at work currently which makes taking a week off less than ideal. I am confident it will all work out ok in the end but I still have an unsettled feeling that I do not enjoy.
I ordered an Inmotion trolley handle to attach to my Msuper for the trip to allow Cindy a way to push the wheel more easily. I broke the built in trolley handle doing backwards maneuvers. My eventual fix will be replacing the handle and case of the Msuper but that isn’t going to happen this week for sure. This stop gap measure should get the job done short term.
