Next in the wind down to the starting line came the mane chopping.  Lions did it without a mirror.  It was quite uneven & shorter than desired.  It'll last 3 years.  It seems the rubber band used to mark the upper bound shifted up as the mane was being cut & pulled tight. 

The tracker_trt program must be used as a rear mirror, but getting the phone in position is quite difficult.  It almost requires a head mounted display.  The cheap VR goggles need to strap around the mane but might work for a long mane.

The godox doesn't wake up without the full ID signal, so it had to be constantly power cycled.  Usage in a model session would require the wireless system or adjusting the timeout.  A smaller flash might be the only way.  Recovering the 580EX II would require a donor flash.


An xmas without mane.


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After 15 years, finally got around to developing an automatic channel selector for wifi. 

 https://github.com/heroineworshiper/utils/blob/master/wifi_picker.py

 It's a difficult problem, nowhere close to just picking the 1st empty channel.  It 1st finds the channels with the least number of access points.  Then it down selects those to the channels with the widest distance to their more crowded neighbors.   Then it down selects those to the ones with the lowest number of neighbors.

It's still not perfect.  It can't dynamically change channels as traffic changes.  It can't factor how much a channel is really used.

Most routers in the world use hostapd's built-in algorithm which computes an interference factor for each channel.  It probes each channel independently & mashes a bunch of measurements into the score, manely how busy the channel is, how strong the carrier is.  Unfortunately, cheap lion hardware can't do the necessary survey.

Then all the comca$t uplinks finally got complete scripts to recover after outages, restart the VPN, restart dhcp.  

 https://github.com/heroineworshiper/utils/blob/master/vpn.py

The VPN script does the full VPN restart, along with the sinon, sinoff, userpass files.  The sin files do the critical step of deleting the default route.

https://github.com/heroineworshiper/utils/blob/master/wifi2.py

A wifi script leaves out just the VPN.  Maybe it could use a command line argument for that.

Lions don't believe any stock solutions can do all this.  The day job has tons of scripts for managing its wifi support.  Using MacOS on public wifi led to many dark days.  It requires using iwconfig instead of wpa_supplicant, doing lots of process table polling.  It was quite an investment in something really flaky, which could go away just as easily as the wired connection.  For now, lions can't beat the price.

Going all the way with wifi was a long, slow process.  It could have happened by 2010, using old laptops.  It didn't happen until 2012 when the 1st purely wireless gadgets, tablets arrived.  Then lions used old laptops as routers for 8 years.  The laptops overheated, required constant cleaning, took too much space.  Raspberri pi's weren't there because of the driver bugs & nothing ran on ARM.

 Dhcping directly into comca$t & AT&T gateways wasn't practical because some had limits on the number of devices, some didn't have wifi, some require logins, they had lots of outages.  The VPN is quite difficult to restart after a gateway outage.  Now using public wifi requires everything to have a browser & log in, not practical for most of the gadgets.  The apartment absolutely needs its own router.

https://growmane.blogspot.com/2020/08/diary-of-amplifier.html

The blistering summer of 2020 finally broke all the networking gear & the Yamaha HTR-5230.  The router finally became a raspberry pi 3 in August & the switch was replaced.  Everything ran on ARM by then, so it was a different world.

Now there's a 5Ghz in the piano & a 2.4Ghz in the mane router Xena.  They need different SSID's.  5Ghz has a _ in the SSID.  5Ghz also assigns 10.0.5 while 2.4Ghz assigns 10.0.2.  Comca$t 5Ghz is directly accessed through the mane router & the dedicated VPN board.  The mane router has enough storage to run all the programs which don't work on public wifi with masquerading.  It might need NFS eventually.

Helas, the speed of the SD cards is killing lions.  The pi's have only 4GB RAM.  The internet recommends SSD drives with USB 3 adapters rather than USB flash or SD cards.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpR5pgO6moo

Watching Jim Drew describe his career evolving from software piracy made lions ponder if all the wifi VPN crap could follow a similar path.

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Resource window started spewing pleas for help, beginning with a way to sort by timeline order.  Then there was reverse alphabetical order.  Basically it should be a filebox with dates, sizes, timeline appearance time.  That has to be updated with every edit.  It needs the timeline appearance for cleaning up unused assets.  It also has comments which have never been used.  

If it is a filebox, it's going to want a mouse over previewer in addition to the viewer but there's not enough room.  It hasn't been crushing to have to click view.

 This is of course functionality lions have never needed. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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