Cav's Place

Let me start with the good and say that I did get a new UPS. It’s a slightly different model, namely Mustek PowerMust 848 LCD, and for once the cables go in properly. The special cables the previous models came with never connected quite right and the slightest touch could have them loose, but this model no longer comes with its own cables, instead being made so you can plug regular power cables into it and, as I said, they actually go in properly. But there’s a button on the back that seems to be meant to reset a circuit breaker after the voltage gets above 250V, which confuses me because, despite it being listed as capable of operating at up to 290V, that breaker would indicate that this particular UPS would switch to battery mode in such a situation instead of staying in AVR mode, which would make it unusable in my situation, since I frequently get over 250V at night. However, likely because of the higher power usage during summer, with all the air conditioning equipment, that didn’t happen yet, the most being a frustrating 249.5V, so I still don’t know whether I’ll even be able to use it…
But the issues don’t stop there. Together with the new UPS I also bought Risen because it just fit into the order. The UPS was 252 RON and I happened to spot this special offer for Risen at 99 RON, which would make it some 30% less than other stores from here currently sell it for, putting the total at 351 RON and therefore just above the 350 RON threshold below which 20 RON would have been added for shipping. At least I can now finally say I did something to support Piranha Bytes, but it sure was a bad choice otherwise. For one, because I had forgotten that my DVD drive started having serious issues with certain types of DVDs, namely those that legally purchased software comes on, some two years ago, and then because I only found out afterwards that it uses Tagès and I said I’ll never support anyone selling games that use such copy-protection methods. As a result, I accidentally bought something I said I never will and can’t do anything with it anyway because I now see that my DVD drive really needs to be replaced as well because it wouldn’t read the disk under any circumstances. When I first noticed the issues I had to reboot the computer with the DVD in question in the drive around three times before it’d start reading it, after which it’ll keep working for as long as the computer would stay on and that disk would stay in the drive, but now it completely refuses to work and seems to have also started having issues with other types of disks, which so far worked perfectly.

Moving on, there was a big storm yesterday. It actually started raining nicely Friday night and was still dripping a bit when I woke up on Saturday, but then it got heavier and all of a sudden, 40 minutes before the start of qualifying for the race, this wall of water came down, alongside a barrage of lightning. There was hardly a second or two between the flashes and the thunder was loud enough to shake the building. It was over very quickly, only some moderate rain remaining, but it was enough to mess up this part of the city and my Internet access was obviously down as well, which meant I couldn’t watch the qualifying.
After some time I started resetting my switch and taking the cable in and out every so often, because that is sometimes needed after they restore access, so I was checking… Until the plug just broke and left me staring at the contacts spilled on my desk and wondering what could I do. Eventually I just left a note in the bathroom for dad and, several hours later, he told me he called them about it and they they said they still had a lot of work to do to fix the damage caused by the storm, but if they’ll somehow finish in time they’ll be around to replace the plug as well, though otherwise I’d likely need to wait until Monday.
Obviously they didn’t fix it in time, so dad left me his mobile Internet thing, assuring me that it’s fast enough for anything. I obviously didn’t believe it and was proven correct when the bandwidth settled down to around 40 kbps after probably about one minute at a maximum of around 1 Mbps. As that was only enough to allow me to follow the live timing and text commentary, I didn’t see a single live image from this race weekend.
Still, some good did come of it because dad went and bought some plugs and even one of those special tools made just for these, even though I’m quite sure that with a bit of effort you can do without it, so now at least we have some more if this will ever happen again or we’ll ever need to replace some wiring. And they would have charged for replacing it too, especially since they didn’t even install it in the first place, this cable being here since before they became my ISP, so it probably wasn’t that bad of a deal, though I still say getting that tool was unnecessary.
He actually came back with the things just as the race was starting, so I had to bump into him to get them and then rushed to put on the plug… Only to see it still wouldn’t work. So he called them and they said they still hadn’t fixed the damage, which resulted in what I said above regarding the race. They were only done about an hour and a half after the race ended, at which point I could see that I had done a reasonable job after all, though the contacts are visibly not quite aligned properly on the wires. If this will cause problems in the future I don’t know, but at least now I know how to do it and the next time I hope I won’t be in such a rush anymore… But noticing that it wasn’t done properly was enough to make me curl in a ball yet again, once again trying to at least cry and failing even that.

Finally, after the recent attack on WordPress, I’ve been noticing steady attempts to hack this blog. It’s probably just one of many, as the bots look all over for sites that use WordPress and try to exploit vulnerabilities, but it was quite worrying nevertheless. In fact some of the attempts are still ongoing, one particular bot trying to log on every 30 minutes, as it’s been doing for the past few days, though originally the attempts were one hour and seven minutes apart.
I won’t give details about what I have in my logs because I don’t want to attract more attention. They’re quite irrelevant anyway, seeing as the IPs are almost certainly fake, as is any other information that can be gathered. So I’ll just tell you that there seem to be multiple ways in which this is attempted, so some security hardening is certainly in order. Make sure you have the latest version of WordPress and that your host has the latest version of phpMyAdmin and any related software, use strong passwords, don’t log on under standard names and try to have some more tricks up your sleeve as well for the moments when somebody seems to have an eye on you. I know I have noticeably improved the security of this blog because of this, so at the moment I can say that all’s well that ends well.

Though I hope this won’t be an issue, if something weird does happen with this site, you now know why. Also, if you’ll notice any suspicious changes that I somehow won’t, please let me know. Thanks.