Rethinking Home Computing Part 4... and looking back at the Pandemic.

OK, OK, I'll make this the last of the "Rethinking Home Computing" posts.

I can't believe it's been 2 weeks since my last post. 

In that time, I've adjusted to moving to the NUC for my PC, and after a couple of days it settled in, the browsers calmed down and I can use it. Most of the time. It's a little flaky at times and requires a reboot still. Not great, but there's probably 30+ windows open when it happens. Problem exists between chair and keyboard.

The mini PC for the radio machine is plodding along OK. The USB interface currently used on the G90 is getting a lot of noise.

Usable I guess, but those lines. They shouldn't be there. The IC706 doesn't have that issue with the digimode-4. I suspect getting a digimode-4 will sort that out, but that's not high on my agenda. My next few weeks spendings are paying off bills, so a $100+ cable will just have to wait. 

I really haven't done much radio work in the past couple of weeks. I've poked at SSTV occasionally, and I've had a few random attempts at FT8. DX Keeper is no longer logging my contacts in real time, and reimporting the log files is creating duplicates if I don't edit it first. I need a bit of time to sort this out.

After 12 months of working from home, it's time to transition back to work. Realistically that changes my available free time. The lunch breaks, the travel time, etc., have all been "my" time where I've been able to get stuff done and still mostly have time to jump on the treadmill. 

I'm also able to multi-task. Going back to work changes that. 

In these past 12 months a lot has happened. I did a lot around the house. I got my radio license, I put up antennas. I spent too much money. I ran up power bills that challenge my ability to pay for them. I ate a lot of junk food. 

I shared my work space with a 9 year old pretending to do school work whilst I kept focussed on what I was doing. At the same time, my son struggled along at day care as we couldn't get him in to see the paedatrician or any other specialist he really needed. Now in kinder, we've finally be able to make progress, only to discover 6 month waiting lists. 

My parents have finally been able to see their grand kids again, robbed of a precious year that they had planned to use so much of coming here to see them while they still both can. This damned pandemic has been cruel, even when we have managed to get through it so damned well. 

A tough year for me, having wound up with pneumonia right at the peak of the paranoia. Long, drawn out process for anyone to realise that I was actually sick having been dismissed by paramedics and a hospital doctor alike after having alarmed an experienced ED nurse during a COVID19 test given the state I was in, having spent most of an hour in her presence as she tried to find a site doctor to assess me (which never actually happened). It took a week of waiting for a phone consult with my own GP who took the matter seriously enough to request a chest x-ray which produced alarming enough results to have the radiology department specialists contact my GP and discuss having me sent straight back to the Emergency Department... which meant going straight into the respiratory "clinic" - aka "The COVID ward". 

A couple of really rough weeks spent mostly upright in a recliner on account of not being able to lay down, sleeping minutes at a time with my O2 saturation dropping horrendously low should I dare get up and finally medications that started to work. After about 5 weeks I was good to go again. The cough lingered for months afterwards. I had to convince my sons day care that I had been cleared to return to work just to be allowed back in the building; they knew that I didn't have COVID19, and I wasn't contagious - but up until that point, when I did take him and pick him up, I had to call and have someone come outside and collect him from me.

I've never been that unwell for so long. Even when I felt better, my GP would take me off for another week then want to see me again. 

I don't profess to recall much of that period in the grand scheme; most of the time I was too exhausted from lack of restful sleep, coughing my lungs out and otherwise just being unwell. I remember the significant bits, but that's all. I do recall at one point my automated server monitoring triggered an alert to me at midnight one night, and I dragged myself off the couch, into the study and fixed it there and then. 

Moving forward, I'm thinking about the things that have to change. I'm not home to deal with the endless stream of deliveries. I can't go back to eating overpriced cafeteria food every day. 

I can't access my own VPN directly from work; there are things that stop it (that aren't intentional) so I need to work around it. I need to get into the habit of having things like the ATU-100 on, powered and tuned to whatever frequency I want to use it on before I leave in the morning should I feel so inclined to try some midday SSTV or FT8.

What things on my home network do I want to finish tidying up before I loose the time to handle them? My mail server needs replacement, but the build I want to use currently isn't working for me. It's had days spent on it without quite getting where I need it.  All of this stuff goes back into a pile of "I don't have time" so it really needs to be updated and running well enough to be left alone for a long time. A few recent changes have helped add some efficiency and nearly everything else has been updated and is otherwise well positioned. 

My reef tank is in a bit of a state. I added fluconazole to it a while ago to kill of an algae infestation that wouldn't go away. I had to remove my refugium in the process to avoid killing off all of the macroalgae. As that all started to die off, I added an additional treatment to kill the cyanobacteria that had also taken hold. 

That caused the skimmer to go mental. 

During a power outage last week I pulled the plug on the return pump - a 6000L/hr DC pump that I've had for quite some time. The tank UPS will keep it running for a while, for it's a fair power consumer on the UPS, and I prefer to keep the wavemakers powered as that keeps the oxygen levels up as the primary method of keeping the whole thing alive. The pump unfortunately never came back to life. Initially I thought it was the power supply as the light on it would vanish when the pump was connected, but using a second known working power supply yielded the same result. 

I tried a smaller DC pump that had previously worked. It ran for about 15 minutes, but it too gave up. That pump had run similar head heights before, but it decided it was done. 

My emergency backup option was to use the AC pump I use for pumping water inside. It's not a direct replacement for the existing plumbing, so I used my water change rig to do the job. 

Late last week.. the day before a new pump that I couldn't actually afford but had no choice but to buy was due to arrive, the power went out again whilst I was doing a school pick up. Also the day where my step daughter had insisted that she would come to the car rather than me waiting for her.. which added about 10 minutes longer than necessary to the pick up. 

It turns out that the pump was connected to a non-UPS powered board, so it went with the power. 

When you build tanks with sumps, one of the first things you do is engineer them so any water that syphons from the top down doesn't flood the sump. I've always been very careful about this. It's tank building 101. 

Unfortunately, my water change rig is designed especially to facilitate pulling about 5 inches of water out of whatever it's in. In this case, it meant that 5 inches out of a 4x2x2 tank syphoned down into a sump that has enough space to cope with maybe 30L of syphoned water then escaped out to the floor. Carpet no less... because the builders wouldn't change the plan unless we paid them an extra $30K to throw down $200 worth of tiles. 

I've since managed to dry the carpet - thanks in no small part to the Ryobi wet vac I've always kept should such a thing ever happen, and the fan that helped dry it off. I'm under no illusions here - that carpet..and it's underlay will need to get replaced sooner or later. The upside is that had it been tile, the water would have ran off and flooded the floating floor boards either side of that area and my study carpet so in this case, the carpet we never wanted sacrificed itself to protect the flooring we did want.

The new pump is in. If I can get 8 years out of this one, I'll be pretty impressed. A lot more power and handles the head height with ease, all in a smaller and lighter duty package (at a lot less cost). I did a water change last night of about 20%. The skimmer is still running mental. The tank really needs a 100% change done on account of the tin levels in the water. I'm not rushing at it as I really want to give the fluconazole time to kill of every last strand of algae first. If I don't, it'll be back in no time.  It would be nice to get this thing all back to normal soon. I do need some new dosing containers as one seems to be problematic and its unbalancing the dosing volumes. I'll also need to replace the shelf sitting over the sump has it's too wet for its own good on account of the skimmer causing excessive moisture. An inch thick acrylic/nylon chopping block might be the go if I can find a slab big enough.

So much more I'd like to be doing, but so little time. The XYL is about to attempt to return to working as normal as well, which will mean some nights and weekends. Hopefully a few nights with clear skies will mean time I can get out with the telescope, and the rest can be nights with the radios once the kids are in bed.