Another cool but clear day ahead of me, and one in the past. Yesterday was nice, a bit on the cool side, but clear and not too damp. Today should be the same.
I did my main pickup, of all the stuff for resale. That took a while and I was chatting with the auctioneer. He’s a guy who is new to me, having bought the business from the guy I knew before. He sees hard times coming as the dollar is failing, because of inflation, debt, and the other countries that have built alternatives to SWIFT and are looking to avoid the dollar. In other words, pretty clued in.
We also chatted about rent houses. He takes a different approach, renting houses in the ‘hood to individuals, on a per room basis. He’s got several houses, with 2-4 rooms each, cash money every week. He collects in person, and charges a lot if you miss or are late. With weekly rent, he gets a lot of turnover… I want the opposite. One renter, for a long time, with as little involvement as I can manage. I’ll accept that I’m getting less money than I could, if I was more hands on. Not my thing though. And frankly, IDK if it would work for me, being a paleface, vs him, who looks like his renters. Even if I was in Kentucky or someplace, renting to white tweakers and transients, I wouldn’t want to work that hard for it.
There’s room for more than one way of doing business.
Came home and did some domestic bliss, worked on computer stuff, and then had family game night. The first game was not one of my favorites, but the second might become one. Called “SmartAss” it’s a trivia game, but much simpler, faster, and easier than Trivial Pursuit. The kids were able to keep up, and enjoyed playing. My wife won 2 games, I won 3. There are some chance elements that can help or hurt you, which makes for some interesting rounds. Tentatively recommended for a mixed age and experience group, or when looking for a game for adults when alcohol might be involved and nobody wants to work to hard.
Today I’ll be wrapping some things up, probably hit the Lowes for some parts, and the HEB for some groceries, and then off to the BOL for the weekend.
I’ll be taking some stuff up to add to the stacks there, and reduce some of the stacks here. It’s a difficult balance. I’m not sure I have a good strategy or feel for it yet, but I know I’m really short on some stuff (defense mainly), and I need to get a handle on that. I like having stuff close at hand, which makes the decisions about what to put there even harder. We’ll see how it goes.
In the mean time, adding to the stacks is a no brainer, no matter where they are stacked.
nick
Try “ls *.jpg | xargs rm”.
Be careful with rm.
Do any of the filenames have embedded spaces?
The shell should handle those properly, enclosing in single quotes, but the key word there is should.
We caught hints from the in-laws that my wife’s nephew is looking at AirBnB renting of single rooms in a residential area of Georgetown. My guess is that the tenants would be military based at what used to be called Fort Hood.
Like all desirable areas, AirBnB has seriously warped the housing market up and down the I-35 corridor. Everyone wants to sample what the party is like in Austin.
Games: Younger son and his girlfriend introduced us to Tichu, which is a card game (special deck) for four people. The rules take a little getting used to, but they aren’t terribly complicated. There is some strategy and – as with any card game – a fair bit of luck. It’s more complex than hearts or rummy, but you don’t need an advanced degree like you do for bridge. Good fun!
Do people still play bridge? I am in my late 60’s and recall it as something my parents did (like cribbage), and remember seeing a bridge “puzzle” in the local paper on Sunday’s, alongside a Chess set piece.
Face it Brad, you’re just not as popular as Lynn and I.
Seriously, Lynn I can understand. He has a resource that would be valuable to someone. I have nothing of value on my website, as in zilch. I think in my case it is just random attacks against IP addresses, automated, and not targeted.
The multiple attempts are GET … for some PHP or WP file. Several thousand within the space of 30 minutes. Then nothing for awhile. Then the requests start again. I am most certain the IP addresses are from outside the U.S. but I have no way to know.
I also don’t administer the server as my website is just shared space on some server. I guess what is happening to my site is serious enough for the server admins to be concerned. I don’t think the requests count against my monthly bandwidth limit but am not certain. I have never gone over the limit so probably a moot point.
Some of the really valuable targets must get slammed continuously and it is a constant battle to weed out the chaff.
When I worked at my last, as in really the last, job the organizations network was connected to the University of Tennessee network. Some really huge pipes in and out of the university. In the first few years I was there when school would start for the year our server would get attacked multiple times by returning students. The last few years that almost completely stopped. The university required software be installed and computers scanned before they were allowed to connect to the network. All the computers were monitored for nefarious activity and if found, were immediately blocked. The university did a good job in that aspect.
happening to my site is NOT serious enough for the server admins
Fixed it for me.
I’ve also heard from old Perl guys that iterating a directory structure using globbing and passing the names to the built-in unlink command in a ‘for’ loop is faster than a shell script, but I’ve never tried that approach.
Ideally the NVR would do the file management, like all the commercial stand alone NVRs do. Most you just tell them to overwrite old files and they will run forever recycling oldest into newest… There are settings in the software to move stuff to an archive, but the instructions are unclear and I haven’t taken the time to figure it out. Usually, I check the disk space every couple of weeks, delete a month of video, and that’s that. But I’ve let the thumbnails grow until they needed to be dealt with. Done now.
————
clear day, not much breeze. Sunny.
————-
@brad, the murder rates can’t be compared due to the reasons divemedic listed, namely we define it differently and they under report it by our standards. As do most countries.
FWIW, by fbi provided stats, if you take out crime from blacks, we suddenly turn into one of the safest nations on the planet. We don’t have a gun violence problem, we have a gang violence problem. We don’t have a general violence problem, we have a black violence problem. Scott Adams saying the quiet part out loud is the best advice to avoid violence here.
———–
It’ll be interesting how the numbers change when the cartels and foreign gangs begin to dominate the culture. Hope I’m watching it from far away. Kinda like Sweden’s hand grenade problem…
n
Ah, coffee in hand. and it’s 45F outside. DANG. Looks nice though.
n
Around the beginning of December, my Synology NAS started getting hits. I have internet acces through Synology so I can access it on the road. Hackers cull names from Synology and just start hammering. I set a parameter where an ip is denied after 5 attemps, but there are a lot of ip numbers. Almost all are subcontinent. I’ll probably take it off the internet, change its name then bring it back on. Right now it syncs our large biz Dropbox, so I want to keep that going, and I use Backblaze to back it up.
I’m getting about 5-10 failed attempts a day without any real effect on the NAS.
Clearly, you don’t have enough stuff. 4 family members times 2 locations times ( 1 rifle plus 1 pistol) equals minimum 16 gubs. Plus whatever you choose to carry on your person or in your vehicle. And fodder for it all, which is where standardization comes in.
I get several thousand attempts to get in my website a couple of times a day many days. Sometimes none for the day. The peaks seem to come when I post some pictures. Which leads me to believe that some of the viewers of the images have compromised machines. All the attempts that I looked at were for the top level domain of my website, not the sub-directory.
All the attempts are “get” and a file with a .php or .wp extension.
Anyway, not my problem.
re: bridge
My first semester in engineering school, I was not challenged by my coursework. So I majored in pinochle. We had games every evening in the basement of our dorm, and I recruited everyone I could so we would always have enough players.
One of my recruits was another freshman named Todd Moses, from Skokie. He claimed to be an expert bridge player, and tried to convince us all to play bridge instead. We declined, and forced him to learn pinochle instead. He was never the best player, and caused us to doubt his card sense.
A year later, I fell in with a different dorm group, and they were bridge players. They tried to teach me the game, and I realized that with my personality, I could not play bridge and graduate college. I’d have to choose one, and I chose college.
It was about that time that I discovered that Sophomore Todd Moses was the campus duuplicate bridge champion and was writing a bridge column for the school newspaper, the Daily Illini.
My parents played bridge all the time, usually with my aunt and uncle, but also with different groups. The ladies had a group, the men had a group…
The exchanges got so heated that I swore as a kid that I’d never play.
n
I remember a comment about a recent crypto wallet hack where the commenter said: “…the only question in my mind was “Node.js or PHP?”.
PHP it turned out, but also, hard to believe, the company had not removed an ex employees access & credentials …
Oh man, a blast from the past, Dos TUI. Amazing how much you can forget in 50 years of programming:
https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/the-ides-we-had-30-years-ago-and
There are links in there that I dare not click on until the days work is done. What exactly is the “deranged discussion” about for example…
Re: site attacks / hacking:
There are known PHP files (including WordPress plugins) with known vulnerabilities. WP and plugins (and themes) get updates to fix the vulns, but not every WP site owner applies the update.
So the hackers, who know which plugins are vulnerable, do a search for the vulnerable plugin files with a request to that plugin file name, as the plugin file will have a known name. They then take action depending on the results of that initial search. If they find the plugin, then they will try to access the site using that known vuln. If they find a site that hasn’t applied the update to fix the vuln, then they proceed with the attack.
The attacker is probably using a ‘headless browser’ that acts like a ‘normal’ browser. (link) There are Linux-based headless browser (Selenium, Puppeteer) that are command line or script-driven. You can set the ‘user agent’ of the headless browser so it emulates a browser like FireFox or Chrome. There is even a ‘headless’ version of Chrome.
A hacker will attack tons of sites, looking for a vulnerable site. This is all automated and script-driven. And it’s not just WordPress sites – there are attacks against any type of site.
For WP sites, like this one, applying updates and patches is a task to be done daily. I maintain about 30 different sites, some WP-based, and I have a program (InfiniteWP) that allows me to check for updates on all WP sites with one click. And apply updates with another click. So my daily routine is to do that check, and apply updates. Which is why this site (and others I manage) have not been hacked.
Once a WP site is hacked, it is difficult to ‘de-hack’. I have been working on a clients sites (he has two WP sites on a shared hosting server) that got hacked. There are hacked obfuscated files spread all over his hosting file area, including in system file areas (non-public_html folders). It appears that the hacker used some directory traversal hacks to go ‘above’ the public_html folder to place files that will re-infect after I remove the hack files. This is easily done by placing code in running processes or in tmp folders and other places.
I have spent hours looking for and removing files. I have developed some automated processes to help look for hacked files, which has helped. Some would suggest that ‘nuking’ the WP sites and starting over is an option. Maybe, although this particular hack got into system files outside of the public_html folder, so just replacing the WP site wouldn’t fix the issue.
The cause for that client’s issue? Not updating WP files (themes, plugins, core files). And not having backups didn’t help with the recovery effort.
For this place: updates are done daily. Care is taken with plugins used. Backups of the database and files is done regularly. Still, if I was to look at the access logs, there would be lots of attempts that are looking for vulnerable files.
I believe that my maintenance and protection practices on this site (and the others that I manage) have and will continue to keep this site de-hacked. But it takes effort.
Not uncommon.
The university where I got my Masters hasn’t removed my TA account from the servers. I can pull up my class materials right now.
I stopped checking whether the SSH key still grants me access, however. I’m sure it does if the home directory still exists, but my former boss is paranoid and probably leaves the account open just to see if I check it.
My password is disabled, but the authorized_keys login route is not tied to the same IMAP system.
Holy cow. I had no idea.
Would a static site generator be better? I guess comments need a db backend and code engine of some though.
Well, only if you wanted a non-commenting place.
The advantage of WP (and it has a humongous market share – you’d be surprised at the number of sites large and small that use WP) is that there is minimal geeky stuff (programming) needed to run the site. Which is why it is so popular.
The base code is pretty secure, and well-maintained by smart coders. And it is extensible, so anyone (like me) can write plugins that expand capabilities. But it is a bit of work to ensure that your plugin is securely written against possible attacks. That’s why one must be careful in which plugins (or themes, which also can be vulnerable) you use on a site.
Although even the ‘big’ plugins can have security issues, because they are so complex. The big plugins (ex: WooCommerce, which adds a ‘store’ to your WP site) are a big target for hackers, and they have had vulns that have been exploited. (The client site that I mentioned being hacked was using a ‘big-time’ plugin that had a vuln that they client hadn’t bothered to keep updated. And that was [probably] how they got hacked.)
Regular checks for updates (I do them daily) are important. Along with some other checks I have done – along with a few security-related plugins that I have written and installed here.
You could do a static site with comments. But very complex to do. And difficult to do securely. And would just duplicate the work that is available with WP.
I’ve done static sites, but am careful about making sure that the code is secure against outside attack.
We also chatted about rent houses. He takes a different approach, renting houses in the ‘hood to individuals, on a per room basis. He’s got several houses, with 2-4 rooms each, cash money every week. He collects in person, and charges a lot if you miss or are late. With weekly rent, he gets a lot of turnover… I want the opposite. One renter, for a long time, with as little involvement as I can manage. I’ll accept that I’m getting less money than I could, if I was more hands on. Not my thing though. And frankly, IDK if it would work for me, being a paleface, vs him, who looks like his renters. Even if I was in Kentucky or someplace, renting to white tweakers and transients, I wouldn’t want to work that hard for it.
Me too bro. I want long term tenants who pay their rent on time and take care of the place.
I’ve got too many things to do than clean up after nasty tenants. I mean, who in the world throws used tampons and pads behind the toilet for me to clean up ? Been there, done that. Who leaves 30+ lawn sized bags of trash in the house for me to clean up ? Been there, done that. Those lawn sized bags were moving by themselves with all of the cockroaches inside of them.
Pearls Before Swine: Not Enough
https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2023/12/28
ROTFLMAO.
“Israel-Hamas war live updates: Second American hostage in Gaza declared dead as a senior Israeli minister warns the war could expand”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/live-blog/israel-hamas-war-live-updates-hezbollah-lebanon-rcna131415
“Israeli military officials say 167 soldiers have been killed during the country’s ground invasion in Gaza, which came after 1,200 people were killed and about 240 hostages were seized after Hamas launched multipronged attacks on Israel on Oct. 7.”
At least two of my customers in Israel have been mobilized. I hope that they are ok.
BC: Research
https://www.gocomics.com/bc/2023/12/28
I’ve been married to a woman for 42 years next month and I still don’t understand her. She understands me 100% but does not believe the facts.
So no one at Sony thought releasing a PS game called “Suicide Squad” might not be the best idea?
>> I’ve been married to a woman for 42 years next month and I still don’t understand her. She understands me 100% but does not believe the facts.
Go with the “alternate facts.”
I sold my house, even though all three units were consistently rented, because it was too much bother. Note that I live in NYS, with strong legal protections for tenants and few for landlords. I got rid of some only because the power company was able to cut them off after I think six months of not paying the bills. In theory the tenants can be evicted for non-payment of rent but in practice it takes a court order and the local judges listened sympathetically to sob stories.
“’Rich Dad Poor Dad’s’ Robert Kiyosaki Predicts Collapse Of The US Financial System — ‘We’re At The End Of An Empire. All Empires Always Come To An End’”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/rich-dad-poor-dads-robert-150412275.html
“Emphasizing the importance of financial education and preparedness, “Rich Dad Poor Dad” author Robert Kiyosaki expressed concerns about the current financial system and societal structures in the U.S. in a YouTube video titled “Robert Kiyosaki Exposes The System That Keeps You Poor & The Downfall of The USA.””
I agree, we are in dangerous times. These are “the good old days”.
“Trump Is BACK on the Ballot in Colorado:
https://thelibertydaily.com/trump-is-back-ballot-colorado/
“Following an appeal filed with the Supreme Court by the Colorado GOP, Colorado’s Secretary of State has decided to allow the candidate’s name to appear on the primary ballot.”
Glad you mentioned Robert Kiyosaki. He advocates hard money AND high debt. Debt, so he doesn’t pay taxes. I agree, but don’t have the guts to have as high a debt ratio as he does.
There are lots of others like him, but they don’t talk publicly about their methods. Maybe his books are worth a look.
Having a high debt ratio would make sense if you also expect high inflation. Buy stuff you need BEFORE inflation hits, then pay it back in cheaper inflated dollars. And if you’re expecting a currency collapse, perhaps he’s figuring that the dollar would collapse and he won’t have to pay it back at ALL.
I thought that the Colorado Supreme Court stayed their own decision until January.
Glad you mentioned Robert Kiyosaki. He advocates hard money AND high debt. Debt, so he doesn’t pay taxes. I agree, but don’t have the guts to have as high a debt ratio as he does.
There are lots of others like him, but they don’t talk publicly about their methods. Maybe his books are worth a look.
He said in the interview that that paper money is toilet paper. The only good money to him is silver and gold, God’s money. He said that he owns tons of gold. Plus several gold mines.
He also said that he has $1 billion in debt and owns 16,000 homes. He also said that “Rich Dad” was a real person who passed away a while ago and owned the beach land under the Waikiki Hilton when he passed. Rich Dad’s son is his best friend and his kids are snorting the money away.
He does think that the price of silver will be $100 / ounce in two years.
I thought that the Colorado Supreme Court stayed their own decision until January.
Sounds like somebody got a phone call. BTW, the military ballots start going out next week.
When the Trumpster was removed from the ballot CNN had the story within seconds. With the Trumpster back on the ballot, CNN has yet to post anything.
Of course CNN is a very liberal left leaning platform of mostly opinions from liberal loser leaches who have never had a real job.
A few days ago we, I think it was the We here, had a bit about junk ware on new PCs. Somewhere along the way I ended up at https://www.thewindowsclub.com/how-to-remove-bloatware-from-windows.
The article needs an editor. It reads like someone pasted together parts of several other articles.
There’s a bit there about using PowerShell to remove apps. The stuff you don’t want but MS simply knows better and hides from you in add/remove programs. The directions seem pretty clear. I have not tried using them.
The last Win11 update changed a few things around. The Xbox thing has gone away, now there’s a Game Bar. Camera? It had a right-click un-install option, didn’t even say I need to reboot. There are a few more that seem useless to me.
Maps? On a desktop? It has a r-click uninstall now, too. Perhaps it’s better than using Google Maps?
Movies and TV seems to be a way to sell stuff. I already have folders for Videos and Music. And pictures. I’m not seeing the usefulness here…. it looks like a different way to display what Explorer does already.
Phone Link requires an MS login. Forget that. I’ll just tether the phone to transfer pictures. That’s simpler than turning everything’s Bluetooth on.
Sticky Notes is sort of interesting. I need to play with it. I don’t see it being better than the text file I’ve used as a scratch pad since Win98. Maybe, but I doubt it.
Plenty to tinker with here. Grin.
And I’m off.. . thin pipe for a while. Keep it under control….
n
>> He said in the interview that that paper money is toilet paper. The only good money to him is silver and gold, God’s money. He said that he owns tons of gold. Plus several gold mines.
He also said that he has $1 billion in debt and owns 16,000 homes.
He’s gonna need a small army to protect his empire when TSHTF.
Assume one billion in mortgages on those 16,000 homes.
That’s an average of about $62,000 per home.
It sounds like he’s not leveraged very much. He stands to lose a lot of equity in a societal collapse.
If he were leveraged to the hilt, I’d say he was living on the income and prepared to walk away, but if those numbers are right, he’s got a lot of skin in the game.
Of course, if you’re sitting on tons of gold, the rest is gravy. Assuming you can keep people from taking the gold.
Bingo.
In detail, a currency collapse means that the value of the dollar decreases, which is the definition of inflation. It would then be possible to buy the fiat currency with hard assets and pay off the debt. In capitalism, all assets are fungible. Kiyosaki simply has a goal to accumulate valuable assets using debt. Since inflation (the debasement of the currency) is the government’s permanent policy, this is a good strategy which can be deployed at any time. He tries to accumulate assets that are treated favorably for taxes. This is exactly what governments do for themselves. So do rich people.
In less detail, he who dies with the most toys wins.
The catch, it takes guts. Cf. Donald Trump, plus almost all of the very successful people. Hint: they didn’t save their way to wealth.
No strategy Is perfect. At age 77, he is gambling that he will die before things get sporty. He could be right. Again, it takes guts… and determination. Never get too comfortable.
BTW, note that Kiyosaki said he has a private jet, but he doesn’t use it much for personal transportation. He said that would be like owning a house and living in it instead of renting it out. Better to have it be a productive asset. The IRS is very helpful here.
If the Supreme Court takes the case and finds for Trump – the most likely outcome — the opinion will be a humiliating smackdown to keep it from happening again.
No one wants their signature on that final order for removal.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/12/the-times-viewed-photographs-of-one-womans-corpse-with-dozens-of-nails-driven-into-her-thighs-and-groin/
FJB and his shadow puppeteers want Israel to back down in the name of Mercy.
There won’t be any in this life.
Hundreds of millions, billions of U.S. tax dollars forcibly extracted from our citizens have been handed over to the islamic butchers in the Middle East. We funded Gaza, and our political class knew exactly what they were doing.
The question is whether we in the U.S. have the strength to clean the infection from our government, our legal system and our universities before it metastasizes into something larger.
@lpdbw
I spent a lot of time in high school playing Spades and Hearts. Canasta, too, with the standard two decks and up to seven at one point. Played enough bridge in college to come to the conclusion that I was not Omar Sharif.
Of course, if you’re sitting on tons of gold, the rest is gravy. Assuming you can keep people from taking the gold.
And therein lies the rub. In the Mandibles 2029 – 2047 future documentary, the federal government will seize all gold, including wedding rings. Gold teeth was unclear.
https://www.amazon.com/MANDIBLES-FAMILY-2029-47_PB-171-POCHE/dp/000756077X?tag=ttgnet-20/
Sweet, I am still the number one review !
No strategy Is perfect. At age 77, he is gambling that he will die before things get sporty. He could be right. Again, it takes guts… and determination. Never get too comfortable.
He is Japanese American. He could easily live to be 100, many people in Japan do so.
If the Supreme Court takes the case and finds for Trump – the most likely outcome — the opinion will be a humiliating smackdown to keep it from happening again.
No one wants their signature on that final order for removal.
The Michigan Supreme Court decided that Trump was on the ballot regardless. SCOTUS loves to jump in when two or more states have differing opinions.
“SCOTUS loves to jump in when two or more states have differing opinions.”
SCOTUS should just find that the Colorado Supreme Court is in violation of the U.S. Constitution and order it dissolved.
Oh, wait…
That might be going a little too far.
Just put them in a re-education camp in the Rockies: tents, razor wire, MRE’s, a blanket apiece, some non-CO2-emitting firewood, and some of those strike-on-box matches that the libs forced on us, with the dangerous strip on the box removed.
Funny you should mention matches, mine in storage got ‘gummy’ for lack of a better word. I stock both Ohio Blue Tip strike anywhere and the green tipped ‘strike on box’. Dunno why but I don’t like it.
n
I agree. Although he thinks the near term outlook is bad, maybe he thinks he can survive it. For the wealthy, there are a lot of comfortable places to ride out adversity. Just maybe he is not disclosing everything he thinks. OTOH, he is a self-admitted (I forgot his term) irritating person who is quick to anger and act. We observers might not want to take him too seriously.
Ah, matches. I am not much of a camper, and especially not a trained survivalist, but I have been on a few outdoor trips and faced cold. Instead of matches, I carried ordinary butane lighters. These are more complex than a simple match, and therefore prone to failure modes. However, they are lightweight and very water resistant. Carry a few, and it can be easy to light a fire in adverse conditions.
I also went on a couple trips in our local mountains with a friend who had been out in Alaska in winter for a few days at a time. He was dropped in by a bush plane, and picked up later at a prearranged time and place. He survived with what he could carry. Definitely not for me, but our mountains were much less of a test. They also had access by road, and we took vehicles and a camping trailer. I learned a lot from him. He started fires with Coleman fuel (this was back in the 1980s.) He didn’t mess with shavings and other labor-intensive practices, but he sure could get a hot fire going in a short time.
Later, I thought that if I were going with a vehicle, I would also carry a propane torch. These are great for all sorts of things, including starting fires. Some diesel fuel would also be great for many uses.
Yeah, I am a novice outdoorsman. Go ahead and have a good laugh.
Hey…wait for us…
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/28/politics/trump-maine-14th-amendment-ballot/index.html