Is This Really Real, Or Just A Dream?

I just spent 3 hours wrapping Christmas presents.
Most of them are for my wife. Seems she's been nice this year. I must love her a lot.

The pile looks quite impressive. I'm looking at it right now. And really, it's not even december yet. Must be all that Christmas merchandise I see at the store everyday. Or maybe I'm just bored. My wife is out of town after all.
Yesterday I found her red high heels in the closet. I instantly knelt down, and sniffed and touched the artificial leather.

Right now I could really really smoke a cigarette. Outside, and yes, it is almost minus 20 outside. But a cigarette would be nice.

Good thing I don't smoke.

There's one thing I find really annoying. It's about frozen pizza. Delissio Deluxe. On the package they don't mention the weird meatballish ground beef. The kind that feels like crumbly shit in your mouth. They only mention all the awesome olives and peppers and veggies and pepperoni and cheese, but they fail to inform the costumer, me, about the disgusting meat. Fuck you, Delissio Deluxe.

I'm gonna need some nuts. Hazelnuts, to be precise. They belong auf den bunten Teller, some crazy tradition from where I come from.

I have a question: Say you have friends who are a couple. Say you don't really give each other presents for Christmas. But then say you found some awesome gift for one of them, so naturally you want to send it to them. But you didn't really see anything anywhere for their partner. Now do you have to buy something crappy for the partner just so they both get something?
Or will they automatically know we're thinking of them, too, even if they don't get a present?
I hope so.

S N O W

Now we have snow. 15 centimeters or so, probably more. It's still snowing. The sky is grey, low cloud cover. No way there's gonna be planes in weather like this.

Goodbye hotel room, goodbye red wine, cheese and olives.

Hello, frozen pizza, here I come.

Weather Warning

Fuck living up the buttfuck's asshole.

I had planned to fly away from here today, but couldn't, because of the weather. Couldn't drive to a bigger airport either, because of freezing rain. This sucks.

It's really time they invented teleporting.

Soup

By the way, you can't live off frozen pizza alone. Especially if it's overpriced. That's why I cooked myself a nice green bean soup today.

I Used Up All My Duct Tape

Praise and respect to all the Swiss army knifes on this planet. Today I used mine to cut a wooden board into small pieces (no, I do not own a hand saw).
Why did I do that?

Well, it was a necessary step towards re-building my usb-dish construction once again. I just didn't feel that a signal hovering around -90 was the best thing. Plus I had still doubts about the focal point.
I brought the whole thing back inside and re-did the whole mirror-pieces procedure again, but this time I fixed the top-bit of a paper-coffee-cup to it, basically as a ring-to-look-through in order to see the lamp's reflection in the mirror pieces. Doing this showed me that the focal point was a bit higher up and a little further out, so I had to construct something to make the arm longer. The focal point is now about 56 centimeters out, which matches my calculations about a dish like this.

So I brought home a wooden board from work (one of those I'm collecting to build a dog house) and used that to build a new base for my new receptor. I bought two cans of Puritan Beef Stew (on sale, 2 for 5), emptied one can (I'm gonna eat it later) and used it to make my new cantenna.

This is what it looks like.


Yesterday I also found another old chair outside, quite weather-worn but still sturdy. I thought it might come in handy to get the whole construction a bit higher up, so I used cable binders to attach my half-chair to it.


It looks a bit adventurous, but it's quite stable. We had rain and very windy weather all day today, and it didn't tip over.

Let's cut to the chase: Was it worth it? Did the signal strength improve?
Yes, it did.


A nice gain of about 10, as you can see the area north of -80 gets visited quite frequently. So, compared to just the usb-dongle outside by itself, which clocked in at less than -90, and considering that I have still trees and a building in the way, the result is quite ok, I think.
If anybody has any idea how to improve it even more, let me know.

I'm gonna eat that beef stew now.

I Want To Believe

For some reason I just couldn't believe that the focal point of the dish is not located where the receiver-thingy was mounted: on the end of the arm.
So I broke a tiny mirror and taped 8 pieces to the edge of the dish, then shone a light on it in a dark room, put my face to the end of the arm and tried to see the reflection of the lamp in every single piece of mirror. And would you believe it, I indeed saw the reflection of the lamp in every tiny single bit off mirror.
So I removed the usb-dongle from where it was and taped it to the end of the arm, using the plastic cover of the receiver-thingy as a base. To weather-proof it I put a clear freezer bag around it and taped it to the arm.
Still, so far I don't really see a lot improvement.

I have to think about it some more, and try more, but at the moment it's raining and very unpleasant outside, so I guess I'll do that tomorrow.

I also found out that my usb-dongle is so old, it doesn't even work with windows 7. (It turned out last night that a steady -85 connection is way better than a spiky -75 one, so I tried to hook up my new laptop. Well, I guess my old computer has the privilege of being online for now.)

As for using multiple usb cables, or shorter ones: I can't. Since I don't exactly live at the hub of civilization here, I have to work with what I got: 2 usb cables 3 meters each that get too long if I put them together, and a fucking old usb-dongle. Better than nothing though. Of course I could order things, but then I could also order and buy a brand new and stronger usb-dongle. But where's the challenge in that?

It only has to last until november, anyway. I actively and consciously choose to believe.

What Is He Doing Now? Contacting Aliens?

I had the afternoon off today, so I worked some more on that usb-dish. I found an old chair outside, half of it missing, on which I mounted the dish. I also removed the receptor-thingy, or whatever that is, from the arm on the dish (attaching the usb-dongle to it didn't get me any gain, so I figured the focal point must be somewhere else.
I searched for it using the old trial & error method: moving the usb-dongle around while keeping an eye on the signal strength.

But how do you fix something in place 33 centimeters above the arm in mid-air? You can't use any metal, and it has to be weather-proof.

Piece of cake: With bottles. I bought two bottles of water at the supermarket and drank them, then I just replaced one of the caps with my usb-dongle, cut 4 holes in the bottle's bottom, taped it with tape to prevent ripping, and attached it to the arm using cable binders.
I didn't need the bottom of the second bottle, so I cut it off, then I just stuck the bottomless bottle right on top of bottle #1, thereby shielding my precious electronic parts form wind and weather.
Then I aimed the whole thing roughly at where I think the signal is coming from, and it provides me with a steady -85. That is not great, but better than what I had before, and it is a pretty stable connection.


I did all that with my old laptop.

When I checked my new laptop, I noticed that the signal pattern had changed. Instead of a constant -90, which sucks, I suddenly saw a lot of spiking up to -75. Well, you can't watch youtube with that or even listen to online radio, but you can surf the net. And at every spike even faster than the connection of my old laptop. A bit unreliable, though. But since I can't connect the dish to my new laptop without moving my whole workspace (usb cable not long enough, 2 usb cables together cause signal-loss), I think I'm okay with that.


I guess it must be from the dish outside the door. We have some kind of nook here, walls on three sides and a balcony right above. I'm thinking the signal gets reflected by the walls or something, and then bounces back onto the backside of the dish, and from there right at my computer.

But then again it could all just be coincidence.

I don't know if this is the optimum, though. Probably not. Maybe I'll work on it some more.

Poker

Last night I played poker again with my boss and his friends. 20 dollar buy in, 10 buck re-buy. And what can I say, I won and went home 100 bucks richer than before. Yay.

Today at work I paid the price for it. Poker lasted until 3 in the morning or so, and I had to work all day today, inventory, counting stuff. Have you ever counted stuff with dead beer still in your system? Not a lot of fun.

Then again: One of the guys in fact had, you won't believe it, in his shed a totally unused spare satellite dish.
And he was so kind to give it to me - I borrowed it from him.

I tried to set it up after work today, but I think that fucking usb-dongle is just too old and weak. And really, satellite dishes like line of sight a lot.
But line of sight I can't provide.

I might try some more, but I don't have much hope.

By the way, praise to my microphone stand. It's so versatile. Last night when I came home and wanted to grab my towel after brushing my teeth I suddenly remembered the laundry, because my towel wasn't there.
Of course I couldn't throw it in the dryer in the middle of the night, so I transformed my mic stand into a great big T and hung my wet clothes (on hangers) on it.
Dry in the morning.

I like my stuff.

Cantenna

I've found this little program called Inssider 2.0 to monitor the strength of the wireless signal.
Here's what the connection has come down to:

As you can see it hovers around -90, which means: you can't have a stable connection. I know that at around -75 it is good enough to actually use it. So naturally I thought about options to gain those 15-20 dB.
I found out that you don't have to spend fuckloads of money to improve the sending or receiving power of your system. With a bit of knowledge and the right tools you can build your own antennas.
Well, I can't do anything to the source of my signal, because it is not mine. Therefore all I can do is try to enhance the receiving end by building my own new antenna. But how to connect it to my laptop?
Since I am no electronic specialist and don't own the right equipment, opening up my computer and fucking around with the built-in antenna simply is no option. Therefore I decided to get my hands on an USB external wireless dongle.

I figured if I can get a gain of 15 using the dongle, everything'd be just fine.

So I went to the store to buy one (I knew they had exactly one available), but in the end I didn't have to purchase it, because luckily one of my co-workers had one sitting around unused, and he gave it to me for free.
Yay! So went to the canned-food aisle and bought myself a can of ravioli (the only bad side of this little project, I had to eat them). Then I went home and tried out my new free USB device, an old Trendnet tew-624.

Thing is: I hooked it up to my computer and the thing didn't even pick up a signal. It is actually weaker than the antennas that are already built into my computers. Using the dongle as connecting device I had to walk outside to get the -90.
That sucked.

The whole project had instantly become useless, because even if I managed to get my 15 dB of gain, I would just end up where I was before.

But then again, I had already bought and eaten the fucking ravioli, so by god, I wouldn't not refrain from building my antenna!

So I sat down with my swiss army knife and assembled this device:


So this is a pretty directional home-made antenna. Using it I managed to get about -90 inside. So it actually worked! I thought about setting it up outside, but because of a number of reasons like cable-lenght, window-situation, outside-temperature, possibility of theft etc. I decided against it.

Instead I opted to try different antennas first, and also to enhance the performance of this thing.
I looked around in the apartment for things to use to collect microwaves, and in the bedroom I found a metal lampshade. Then I made this:


Unfortunately this device didn't work at all. So I took it apart and instead built this thing, an attempt to create a spherical reflector, some kind of two-dimensional parabolic dish, if you will (I wish I had an old satellite dish).


I used tin foil and string, but it was very hard to find the right spot for the usb stick. I couldn't find any means to create a stable construction, so that's why I abandoned this one and went to build this instead:


Well, I got a flicker out of that one, it would pop up every once in a while somewhere at -96 or something. I decided to combine it with my initial successful cantenna:


But this didn't do anything but bad to overall performance. So I disassembled everything and felt satisfied enough that I managed to build a working cantenna (and to waste a lot of aluminium foil and duct tape). No practical use in the end, but it was fun anyway.

Now, if I had an old satellite dish, I could combine it with the cantenna and aim it directly at the source of the signal, that should get me another 10 dB, I think. Maybe I'll find one somewhere.

By the way, I'm writing this on my old laptop from the other building. They've started to build the roof on the building inbetween. Our apartment is now completely cut off.

The Shield / I Am A Monkey

The source of my internet connection here is located in a different building, between 30 and 50 meters away. Inbetween is an area half grass, half trees. Well, there was an area half grass, half trees until they cut down half of the tress and dug a great big hole in the ground. Until they filled that hole with a basement. Until they started building fucking walls.

The connection became better when they removed trees. The connection remained stable when they dug a hole, it was fine when they built the foundation and the basement, and it was quite alright when they started building the walls.

Then two days ago they added another half meter to the fucking walls, thereby finishing them, thereby COMPLETELY FUCKING UP my connection.

Question: How do you seriously fuck up a wireless connection?
Answer: Build a fucking building in the way.

And now I'm sitting here with an on-and-off-fucking-mess of a connection, unreliable, laggy, slow and overall bad.
Hello? This is my door to the world!

Word is they're gonna fix this somewhen next month. Blessed are those who are believers.

Then again, who knows what it's good for. Maybe I'll go out more now.

Sidenote:
Today I was lifting up a dresser (for delivery), when the unthinkable happened. My pants, which I purchased about six months ago in London of all places, ripped apart at the seam. The ass-seam. Completely straight down from belt to balls, CRAAACKCH!

Only six months old!
I will attempt to fix them.

Winter...

...is officially here. It's white. Snow in the trees, on the cars, on the ground, in the air.