Owen’s Ignorant Guide to CD Ripping

ASCII: The big problem seems to be enforcing text/titles that aren’t bolixed-up with weird unicode or worse — i.e. that use only ASCII character codes. The admirable free freac CD ripper is almost perfect with a few quirks, but when I uncheck “Use Unicode filenames” it still manages to sneak in many foreign and weirder characters, seemingly from a wacko Windows code page of yore, but who knows. ... This, of course, confuses the heck out of the admirable free VLC MP3 player, at least after I create a playlist out-of the filenames with my primitive would-be ASCII tools. Which isn’t helped by VLC’s utter refusal to countenance “double-quoted” filenames, one of the typical ways around such annoyances, not without its own conniptions. ... So I had to gimmick the primitive would-be ASCII tools to rename the files to harmless real ASCII before inclusion into the playlist. ... And that’s all I know and, as I am fond of reminding my attentive public, so much more....

... This all on the sad occasion of buying my last Yamaha 5-cd changer. Note: (1.) the non-Yamaha units don’t work: can’t play some CDs, more so as the weary weeks or minutes pass; and (2.) the available Yamaha unit at amazon has risen alarmingly in price over the last year. So even I don’t need a weatherman, and I must rip my beautiful CDs to wretched audiophile-despised MP3s, the result already being far superior to the beloved CD changers....

“Bad” CDs

More than once, when a CD won’t play or in today’s case, rip, I’ve taken the thing out and could see nasty gunk on it! Usually on the outside circumference, i.e. the last track, I don’t know why, probably where I previously handled it. But I could clean it off with hand lotion, my fingers, and Kleenex — note that CDs aren’t like the previous inferior LP medium, and don’t keel over and die ’cause you touch them with your fingers. So I put a little dab of hand cleaner on the CD’s non-label side (where the music is) — I seem to be using Vaseline “total moisture” with Aloe; whatever — and then I rub the bad gunk with my finger + the good gunk until the bad gunk goes away, and wipe off the residue with the Kleenx. ... I mean, don’t do it when covered with chicken fat, presumably a previous fault, but if it looks reasonably cleaned-off in a bright light, that’s probably good-enough. ... And then the CD will play/rip perfectly!

30 Gigs full

So at last my precious 312 ~classical CDs produced around 29,357,421,589 bytes of beautiful MP3 data at the Freac “Standard, Fast” setting which as I have noted would no doubt make the audiophile’s head spin like that poor girl in The Exorcist. Around 94 megabytes per CD, or say 100 meg for government work. ... Not exactly chicken feed, but a test with naked “.WAV” files was 610 meg....

Distortion

But now I can listen to all my CDs, and some of them are wanting. The ones apparently made from ancient reel-to-reel tapes of historic organs, for instance; one of them had alarming tape noise, a kind of distortion I think they call it “head noise” where the tape physically binds on the head, and had so much of this I exiled it from the tribe! ... But even acceptable noise levels are still surprisingly high, particularly in my system where I compress everything so I can listen to the stuff at a more-or-less civilized level. And it occurred to me this is probably one of the reasons the unwashed audiophile masses thought the CD versions of their beloved LPs were defective: because the LP, like my snarling dogs fuzz box, masked noise, what with the typical LP clicks, pops, and frequently ridiculously-loud surface noise — which on the beautiful transparent CD version are totally absent, so the original analog tape noise and distortion are much more apparent....

Random?

We all of course want our selections to play randomly, at least I do, and we all suspect the player isn’t really doing it right, and so do I, or VLC’s random button. So I wrote randj so every playlist starts randomized as good as a cranky programmer could get it....

— the programmer-aesthete
Sun 5/25/14

The End of Ethernet

I abandoned the ethernet at 3/23/24 in the afternoon. Presumably some usux™ upf--k had finally bolixed it beyond hope, and I was too weak to continue the struggle.

For years I’ve had these pitiful software monitors that’d poll all my machines every few seconds and see how they were doing, and it came to pass they were doing poorly — I could see them pause — for seconds, for minutes, forever — and at some point in the dark cold amazing global warming Florida afternoon I realized — dummy! — it’d probably work better without the ethernet, since I was limping along with many ethernetless wireless machines already. So I unplugged the enet cables and performed some minor software trickery and, behold!, I can work on files on one machine from another in a completely different room — which wasn’t possible that morning.

So at last it’s over. My ethernet adventures mostly started in Florida 10 years ago or so, much of the sorrow and pity outlined below, and I was very proud of outwitting usux™ and rigging my peer-to-peer network so it worked. NOTE that much of the information below is still necessary for making a peer-to-peer network work — what usux™ hates like hobbitses — so I will leave this debris for the innocent striver, who must remember to ignore everything about ethernet switches, but pay attention to configuring PCs so they wan’t require a usux™ profe$$ional to use files on different machines. ... And vaya con Dios....

Obiter Dictum

Like Cool Hand Luke, usux™’s ethernet problem is a failure to communicate. ... Like when a few years ago they made all new machines turn-off the wireless when I plugged in an ethernet cable. I returned more than one such to amazon, and I hope the vendors appreciated the usux™ omerta policy — but then again, there’s probably some usux™ slush fund to cover that kind of thing, so long as the vendor never tells the user why the wifi won’t work. And probably paid-for with our tax dollars, in the furtherance of right, justice, and monopoly.

And no doubt Mr. Biznessman is perfectly happy with the wireless-only regime, since it’s much cheaper than stringing stupid cables around, and there was no way to avoid the kindly always-beneficent usux™ upf--ks anyway — I certainly couldn’t.

... & as I wander ’round my palatial Florida estate, I keep coming across ethernet connections and unplugging them: this morning, my pitiful Macintosh laptop, and the brave but tired windows XP machine — neither of whose ethernets have worked so well for many a moon. ... And last night I discovered my almost-derelict music laptop connected to the enet which I don’t think has had the slightest significance for years, as I play my baroque & George Wright organ music + heart-rending renaissance a capella....

And I suppose I should note that usux™ probably didn’t just deepsix the charming network cable standard with a kill switch ... well actually it seems fairly likely, but in any case they could’ve easily just incompetently optimized the wireless network a little ways too far and never noticed the ethernet machines jumping off the cliffs.

... But then I brought my precious DellXP machine back to my peer-to-peer network! ... I actually plugged in one of those tiny wireless USB thingeys, and it clawed its way up to usux™ and, presumably receiving robotic approval there, instructed me to insert the CD what came with the wireless thingey — one of these 3“ CDs, and of course the antique DellXP machine’s got a CD drive, usually occupied by the OED dictionary DVD which doesn’t work anywhere else on earth, although I still prefer the tiny type dead-tree version I got in a corner, along with cheater glasses — and the XP cd drive whirled, cryptic messages appeared, and at last there was a proprietary program down on the taskbar which I clicked-at and ”enabled“ the wifi ”radio“. And now my pitiful network monitor shows the DellXP in all its glory. ... Well actually the poor DellXP falls-over after a few hours, so I suppose it won’t be one of the tight-knit core of my ridiculous herd — but who’s perfect? And I can still usually edit other machine’s files from the DellXP which is still occasionally useful — as much as anything I do is useful....

Slower

And, yes, the beautiful seamless cableless network is slower than my cranky broken ethernet in various obvious and less-obvious ways. ... On large file copies, what I rarely do anyway, & @ loading such files to edit, which is a major amusement. But now I know if I wait a little while, so far they’ve come-up; definitely not the case before. ... And no doubt for a life-long subscription fee and your firstborn, usux™’d be happy to make it go as fast as my tired broken ethernet used to.

Clarity

And I suppose, to clarify (!?) things, I should note that my two major desktop PCs — the super-serious work-related-once-upon-a-time one, and the innocent playful music & art gadget in the music room — these were both of the antique flavor (the older might’ve been 2011, although the runes are faded), and they could run wireless and ethernet — because presumably usux™ would’ve gotten serious legal action if they clobbered Mr. Biznessman’s herds back in those ancient days. Until some time a few weeks ago, when they clobbered them anyway, along with my pitiful foreign legion outposts....

The Usux™ Ethernet Jihad....

So my ignorant guide below is even more ignorant, since usux™ destroyed ethernet connectivity @ early 2022 I’d guess — of course the entire operation is completely secret and nothing was announced or ever will be, just like that 1984 Orwell book — we’ve always used only wireless, and ethernet never worked better than wireless. ... Never, you blithering antique fool....

3/21/23. And actually after months of blissful folly, I’ve concluded that leaving my herd of laptops ethernetted/unwirelessed is cool, since it stops the endless upf--ks which of course will expose me to the horrors of nasty virii/usux™ totally-not-restraint-of-trade planned obsolescence — and I can always unplug the enet and upf--k windows when/if I want. ... Sadly, this won’t work for my lovable desktop machines where I actually pretend to work a lot, but que será será....

The Sadness of Usux™

Tue 4/11/23. Googling for “ethernet turns off wireless” got me a wonderful usux™ website which at least recognized the problem — but, sadly, the supplied regedit hack didn’t seem to do anything. I’m assuming usux™ has intentionally killed the ethernet, to make sure that their totally non-profit every-15-minutes upf--ks couldn’t be suppressed, but then again I’d guess it’s 50/50 it’s just incompetent mediocrity. ... Anyway, the stages of usux™ destruction:

• Not denial, but omerta. ... Nothing is admitted. They just do it, and you can suck it.
• Googling provides candidates for salvation.
• In the fullness of time, one of these will actually work. Or not.

In my disappearing network agony, googling worked soon after the ridiculous destruction, but of course usux™ may get around to fixing that any minute now. And google fixes never worked....

Owen’s Ignorant Guide to Your Broken Home Ethernet

(2014?) You have a home ethernet, at least I do, because the *(&^*^) wireless doesn’t work, as I learn over and over again in sorrow and hysterical anger. ... Please understand: the part where I talk to the world wide web and the starry internet through my beautiful Belkin or whatever wireless router — that works fine. It’s the “file sharing” which is totally broken....

Power Cycle?

Although I should note that my Belkin appreciates an occasional reset, which you accomplish with a cut-off toothpick or something in a little hole in the back. I used to do this every morning when I was trying to use it for file sharing, and then I neglected the ritual after my ethernet wiring triumphs. And one day after a month or so the wireless printer refused to print and the internet was slow until, after a shameful time in the wilderness, I remembered to reset the poor confused Belkin, and all was cured. Then the LOL suggested I should put it on a timer, so it turns-off for a bit every night around 3 am, and now the starry internet is ever so much more sprightly....

However. ... The part where I talk to my herd of harmless cowering PCs and even a Mac, and look at their files, and stuff like that, on the wireless? ... That’s never cured, and only works when it feels like it, and even then it’s at least twice as slow as the beautiful ethernet that worked so well in the North and which I abandoned by necessity here in the Sunny South, devolving to the wireless only. ... And so I hired a “wire guy” to come and ethernet up our place; and so he did, and some of it worked: three of 5 circuits were gershtunk. ... Because I was stupid — actually I blame it entirely on my beloved and her impetuous ways — but anyway I didn’t have my cable tester gadget unpacked yet and that was stupid, exactly what I warn stridently against below.

Wire guy versus giant cables strung around the house

By “wire guy” I mean any supposedly-professional installation, instead of stringing ethernet cables around the house. I’ve done it both ways now as Judy Collins so memorably warbled, and the ethernet cable sprawl is immensely easier. Uglier to be sure, but easier. Of course you probably would test your professional installation before paying the guy; I’m comparing the two approaches including the difficulty of fixing the professional installation which is inevitably higher, i.e. unscrewing the wall plate and doing horribly-complicated ethernetty things, versus replacing a cable. (Then again, in 2016 powerline ethernet actually worked — twice!)

So the following is just a mish-mosh of stuff I think I know and/or learned in the last few minutes about this annoying topic...

Switches/Routers

All these ethernet “cat5” “RJ45” cables are plugged into computers or, more likely, switches, which can be had for $10 at amazon these days. The switches have blinky lights on the front whose purpose I was always a little vague about, since they typically all blink together without any distinction made between one circuit or another. Actually I lie; frantic activity usually blinks two of the lights more frantically. But it also turns-out they are actually a useful diagnostic tool! Because they won’t light if your incompetent ethernet installer didn’t connect all the wires right and you never bothered to test before paying him. ... And some have special talents....

They Wear Out

And incidentally, these lovable little plastic switches do wear out after a few years. I mean I can feel they’re toasty, and they definitely fail, cunningly waiting for the most inconvenient possible moment. And if your ethernet, Heaven forfend, is anything like mine, you’ll have to execute cunning strategies to figger-out which one is flaking. The last time, I deployed a female-female ethernet plastic adapter to connect a crate directly, avoiding the switch; which proved the switch was unhappy, even ’though its little lights flickered as always....

The Numeric Ethernet & Abandoned Hope

THIS IS ALL TOTALLY INVALIDATED SINCE USUX™ KILLED THE ETHERNET, AND YOU SHOULDN’T USE NUMERIC ADDRESSES ON YOUR LOVELY WORKS-ALL-THE-TIME WIRELESS NETWORK U IGNORANT FOOL.

Note that for your home ethernet to work, you must use numeric addressing. ... Or at least for mine to work; you could conceivably know more than me — gasp! — and know how to fashion a DHCP server ’n’ all. That is, I tell my crates that the interface for the ethernet card — usually the “unknown network” in a strangely appropriate memorial — well actually it’s “unidentified” but same difference — should use “fixed” ipv4 addresses, and then assign it one, with a “mask”. The beautiful Lenovo desktop I’m typing this on has a numeric address of 10.1.1.29, and a catchily-named “subnet mask” of 255.255.255.0. ... These of course can be checked with the glorious “ipconfig” command-line magic....

And incidentally, if this and the material so far makes your head ache and arouses a nameless dread, I’m afraid you are doomed to wireless; you are without hope and must live in whatever network hell has been assigned to you by capricious fate and awful destiny i.e. Microsoft.

(The Mac is Different)

... And make that your Windows ethernet; on my pitiful home imbroglio, at least with Apple’s latest OS-of-the-week, names worked better at least for a while — that is, to see my two Macs on the ethernet from Windows machines, I was better-off using their names instead of the numbers I relentlessly provided them. I’ve seen apparently-knowledgeable Mac writers endorsing the sacred utility of numeric fixed addressing, but that was probably 37 OSs ago. And of course after a few months or years, the Macs seem to work better with numbers again...

... Anyway, I’m pretty sure the numbers force Usux™ at least to use the ethernet instead of the wireless, since my superficial tests indicate it’s definitely faster that way, which was my original impetus to finally get this stuff going after a remote graphic file editing incident was infuriatingly tedious during particularly wireless-hostile barometric pressure or afrit traffic or something. But the numbers also provide a more-reliable address for your desired adorato, the names of which Usux™ just tends to forgive and forget, as per moon-phase and the Iron Rules of Mediocrity.

The numeric connection isn’t necessarily prompter than the wireless; just much more reliable — so far, once I abused Usux™ sufficiently and it was whimpering in the corner, not one has refused to connect, a common outcome with wireless file/drive access. Indeed, a failing shared by both wireless and ethernet networks; I developed a little menagerie of batch files to support numeric addresses before there was wireless, because Usux™ kept mislaying the named units on the ethernet/switched network. ... But there can be a typical 30-second or so Microsoft delay when I access a numbered crate, which is slower than the 15’’ it might take for a named wireless destination to show-up — or fail with fumbling excuses about how it “can’t find network path”. This delay is probably largely about what kind of cache the local machine maintains, of named and/or numeric addresses. On my Lenovo desktop for instance, the numeric addresses always come up instantly; my noticeably-defective HP crate is more comfortable with the Microsoft standard of arbitrary annoying delay. ... You pays your money and get a totally random result....

Delay Death: looping ethernet monitor

Thu 2/19/15. I’ve reduced the ethernet connection delay to unnoticeability by running a “loopnetview.bat” monitor constantly which rouses all my wandering crates every six seconds or however often it takes, which seems to get Usux™’s attention. And I must report that even in the all-new all-dancing Windows 8.1, the stupid Usux™ Windows still copies very slowly with a named presumably-wireless address i.e. “\\lenovo\n\something”, and much faster with numbers like “\\10.1.1.29\n\something”. It’s just the way Usux™ rolls. ... But be sure to see the Wireless Dawn, below....

Sun 10/15/17. In my wondrous new Florida paradise, with hardly an XP to be seen, I’m not even sure the monitor is still needed — but you will remove it from my hard drives clutched in my cold dead hands. ... I find it comforting, anyway; and the stupid thing probably still won’t work without it. But I suspect it was mostly good at remindingUsux™ of the crates’ names, and I’m so far in numeracy that hardly matters. Except in new wild-eyed new-era wireless adventures.

RJ45 Ethernet Fixtures

There are at least two kinds of little RJ45 ethernet female fixtures that can go in a wall panel: one of them has a “push down” block where you stick the wires so carefully carefully so they’re each in the exact right place. The other flavor is actually just a female-female RJ45 “coupler” with one end that snaps into the plate, and you would plug a manufactured ethernet cable into the other. These are scoffed at by pro installers, but make far more sense for you, me, and probably the pro installer, since the manufacturer has incredibly intelligent robots that put the wires in the right places with infallible certainty and competence. Of course you would test them beforehand. And of course the manufactured cables cost more....

That is, if you’re going to go through the trouble of “fishing” wires through the walls and all that, using a manufactured cable so you don’t also have to do the rigorous push-down discipline at least seems preferable. Note that manufactured cables come with an annoying “shroud” (as shown ) and without (cheaper); the shroud is there so the plastic clip that locks the plug into its socket doesn’t snap off when you look at it wrong, which it infalliably will, without a shroud, usually within 2 or three minutes, although if you were fishing them through the wall it’d only happen when you got one end done after unspeakable toil and trouble....

As noted above, now that I have experience with the professional way, I think stringing ethernet cables around the house is more fun....

A Magic Potion

DeoxIT D100L “tweak” magic contact oil in a needle-nose bottle. A problem with using manufactured cables instead of heroically and incompetently rolling your own is it’s one more connection, inside the wall, to go bad. I buy the ridiculously-expensive DeoxIT product and use it lavishly on every electrical connection I expect to work twice. And it may even help!

Test You Idiot He Said to Himself

Test the ethernet connection!! My skilled professional installer used the push-down style RJ45 fixture, because he was a pro. And didn’t test it because I don’t know why; just incompetent like me I suppose. ... I’ve had one of these ethernet testers with LEDs for years — Amazon has one for $6 or something — and I was finally driven to actually use it and I could see that one or more of the 8 signals don’t light-up. The “pro” technical term for that is “broken”....

And as noted before, those seemingly useless lights on the switch won’t light unless the ethernet cable, if connected to a computer or another switch, is OK. And also, sadly, the ethernet tester OK itself does not mean the circuit will work; it’s a minimal requirement. ... The final test is always the Microsoft half-hour test; i.e. try to map a local drive to an ethernet computer, and if microsoft is peeved, it’ll hang-up and then fail after half an hour....

Tiny screwdriver time

A small flat-blade screwdriver. I had bought some of these push-down fixtures from monoprice.com, and it turns-out every one is like a snowflake, no two brands alike and mine weren’t like the ones the installer used, but close enough to see where I had to insert the screwdriver to press down the clip thing so the fixture’d pop-out from the plastic wall plate which I had unscrewed from the wall. Of course if the installer was a complete idiot, the attached cables will be very short and the whole project’ll fail and you can move on to the infinitely-preferable stringing-cables-around-the-house path. Our installer wasn’t that dumb; apparently just bad attitude....

So then I used the little screwdriver to pry-up the push-down clamp thingey on the offending connectors — there are two of these push-down connectors of course on every ethernet cable, on each end, and in the first assault I guessed the right end apparently, based on my vague memories of which he did last and hence least carefully — and bothered the tiny wires very very gently while watching the lights on the tester. Slowly slowly no hurry. And got it to work. Liberally DeoxITing it. Even if you don’t get all lights on the tester to work, if any turn-on as you wiggle the wires, that’s good because it probably means the actual cable’s OK — that the installer didn’t manage to terminally-abuse it snaking through the ceiling and walls — and you can try sticking one of these ridiculous fixtures on just like a pro which so far means it has a 50% chance of working....

On a second circuit, I successfully wiggled the wires on both ends! (Or thought I did). And got to appreciate the work of my professional installer; the cable was all twisted wrong and obviously in a hurry. It’s terrible, like seeing into his brain via shoddy workmanship.

... But maybe not such a great idea

But when I got all through weeks later, only one of the circuits I so treated continued to work; one failed and a third, wise in failure, I could’ve probably wiggled to maybe-functional, but it was apparently flaky and I arduously replaced both jacks....

Glorious Conclusion

And there you have it! All I know and so much more! ... Of course then you have to convince your Usux™ piece of indescribably-repulsive excrement to actually implement the numeric address peer-to-peer network it doesn’t want to. ... Although I have a helpful hint there: try and make sure you actually gave the computer you’re testing a numeric address, like I forgot to check for about an hour and a half. And for that matter, don’t mistake one of your cloud of computers for another, like I also managed to do....

Work, Home, and Public

Getting to see your stuff on the ethernet is a whole different can of microsoft. At the least you gotta tell Usux™ your public network is totally open and free to any comers! Here’s my Windows 7 recipe:

1. Control panel. In the search field I type “ip ad” and it infallibly finds me “Network and Sharing Center” “View network connections”. That’s where you’d go to change the numeric address Heaven help you.
2. But instead you treacherously click “Network and Sharing Center”. Then on the left “Change advanced sharing settings”.
3. Which gets to a screen with two drop-down lists for “Home or Work” or “Public”.
4. I click “Public” and then proceed to throw open the doors of networky! The top three items are set to the “sharing” liberal setting; and the bottom two to the less restrictive setting.

Why Public? This is the setting microsoft uses for when you idiotically connect to the public wifi in those internet cafes! It’s supposedly safe and restrictive and of course we’ll believe anything. Why does Usux™ force you to use this setting for your ethernetted crates? ... Couldn’t have anything to do with their deep whelming desire to get Mr. Businessman, a well-known ethernetting type, buying expensive servers from Microsoft? ... Oh No!, that would be so venal, how could I?!?!

I do hope you have a “Windows 7 Firewall Control” installed? And for that matter I try to remember to unshare my drives when I’m out and about (privileged “net share c /DELETE” & etc.). ... But then it’s Microsoft, the secret and sneaky. For instance you probably can’t see your ethernetted drives and files anyway; see my dangerous and almost certainly useless advice. ... And actually, once I found where the “public” settings hide, it’s not so hard to change ’em back and forth....

My Towering Triumph

I am now an Ethernet Master. ... Others may speak, and whine, but I know. ... Or any rate, I put one of the monoprice press-on cat5 ethernet jacks on the installer’s cable, after cutting his off — and the tester approved, and even microsoft! ... It is done. ... And the installer’s RJ45 jack wasn’t unique; the colors were apparently standard, and referenced on the monoprice jack, which has two rows of colors one of which matched the installer’s — both units had colors and numbers. The actual order of the numbers was different, the two fixtures weren’t identical; but the correspondence of the colors to the numbers and, hence, the cable wires, did line-up, so I could replace just the installer’s jack at one end, and not at the panel, which he presumably wired-up in the morning. ... Really it wasn’t so bad, as the poor fellow says in Slaughter House 5. ... Assuming the installer has left adequate cable to pull the thing out, and my installer did — no doubt familiar with his work — and the process of getting the wires in, while not easy-peasey, wasn’t like delicate soldering or something.

... Ooops ...

And then bleak despair. My cheapo Trendnet router would blink slowly on the installer’s shoddy circuit, to tell me, in its speechless way, “something wrong’s master; the wires are restless”. ... I would not listen, or see of course, and marked it “broken” with scornful question marks and then replacement — until the stupid circuit repeatedly failed. And the cable tested AOK with the tester. ... So I went and replaced the RJ45 jack on the other end of the cable, at the central panel, and now it is perfect and will fail no more forever; until it does and I weep. ... Then again, as a test, I strung a regular decent manufactured cable as a replacement — two of ’em, with a coupler! — which worked perfectly of course. Generally affirming my string-the-cables-around-the-house preference; because when it fails, I’d just string another cable, and put my RJ45 tools away to gather dust. ... The point is, on installations of any size it’s expensive to use manufactured cables, and ugly and un-businesslike; but for a home install, who cares. ... And anyway, I have my doubts about how businesslike the continued addiction to guys with RJ45 tools really is....

& The Triumph of Numeracy

... To resume my gloatathon, I have a pitiful batch file “Loopnetview.bat” which I run every 5 seconds at least on my HP desktop in a pitiful attempt to keep in touch with the rest of the herd, and until the advent of my ethernetted numeracy, it never saw all of them once; not ever in the “net view”, but even in my cruder more-likely test, only after manual intervention — the manual intervention being a batch file which cycles the wireless off and then on, and then tries to copy a file to the feckless unit; this would raise the afflicted about 90% of the time. ... Since converting over to the ethernetted numeric way, Loopnetview sees everyone every time. ... On some machines — notably my beloved HP desktop what I got moments before that lunatic CEO announced they were getting out of the PC biz — the first run, and occasional subsequent attempts, take the Usux™ official senseless delay to see some of the swarm — which is another reason I’ll run it on those machines — but once it gets going, amazingly all the pullulating crates stay connected! ... It’s astonishing! ... Of course at the same time, I changed the arcane ’n’ antique “workgroup” on all the machines from a miscellany of WORKGROUP and OEMWORKGROUP to the chauvinistic OWENLABS, so comparisons are totally bogus....

The numeric approach might also work with the wireless, except for the minor detail that the numeric addresses on the wireless are unknown to my machines, given out as they are via DHCP from the wireless router at PC power-on. They could be discovered probably by some tedious trickery, but the algorithm would always devolve to somehow getting hold of a machine through its name, which ability is not reliably supported by Usux™ networks. ... Anyhow, I’ve come to see that, obviously, networks everywhere, even Usux™, actually run by the numbers, like most computery stuff, and these silly names are just window-dressing so-to-speak, supplied to the microsoft victims customers through shoddy database junk that has been minimally updated since Windows 3.1. ... In grown-up systems, extortionate IT officials no doubt handle their own stinking DHCP servers, where everything is safely hidden from our prying eyes. ... Speaking of which, the ancient hidden relic \windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts might be a way of associating numeric addresses with decent honest windows names, and the fact that Microsoft hides it with such awful invisibility, at least in Windows 7, is certainly an argument in favor of that suspicion. But I vaguely remember it was a favorite target of the earliest naked hacking savages, so perhaps we’d best let it be and in any case it’s so hard to get to I may have to....

The Long Nightmare ...

... is over? ... I wanted to note this auspicious occasion: a day has passed, and my home network still works. ... And later of course it’s worked for months....

The Installer’s Sins

And after a settling-down period and other intervening adventures, I realized that perhaps I have been too hard on the incompetent didn’t-bother-to-test “pro” installer (whose RJ45 fixtures I saw at Home Depot; but they didn’t sell testers!). ... While his work still doesn’t arouse warm “positive job recommendation” feelings, who can say otherwise? ... Certainly not me; and he did crawl into the attic, drop the wires into the walls, and cut-out and mount the boxes, all of which activities I still dread, and would doubtless accomplish with varying degrees of amusing and glaring incompetence. ... So he arguably did the harder part, now that I’ve mastered the monoprice.com “no tools” RJ45 fixtures; and he wasn’t expensive....

How Fast the Wireless: A Rag Confesses

And then in “Chronic Router Model 420” p 21 MaximumPC 5/14 in answer to a complaining reader the magazine blows the gaffe about wireless router testing: they admit they connected a PC to a router’s ethernet port, and then tested wireless download speeds from that PC’s hard drive. They’re actually testing the wireless speed, you understand; another PC has a wireless-only connection to the router, which connection speed they test. The letter-writer had very sensibly pointed-out that there were no internet connections in creation that came anywhere near the ridiculous speeds they quoted for the wireless. ... I had always vaguely wondered about that, but of course like most of us concluded long ago they were just lying about everything, like politicians, and what’s the difference. ... That MaximumPC would print/answer such a letter suggests that particular scam is becoming so well-known there’s little percentage in maintaining the usual wall of silence....

The racket of the 2nd part

Which brings us to the second part of the scam, still under high-def omerta: they barely mention which PC they use to test these invariably new new new wireless standards. Because my laptops and yours and practically everybody’s won’t connect at those high speeds. They refer so briefly to “a laptop with a dual-band Intel AC 7260 Wi-Fi card 15 feet from the router” no name no brand, although I assume the manufacturers happily supply them with the latest such for the usual puffery. That’s the racket of the second part — the wonderful magical high speeds can only materialize if you have the very latest PC with the right super “wireless card” along with the beautiful astonishing super-fast router. ... Which may be translated to the vernacular as “no such speeds exist in the real world”. ... The idea is to sell one of these things — always pricey of course — to a sucker and if he notices the scam, well they got his money once at least. Many of the fan boys will invest utterly in the deception anyway, and believe they are getting super speeds without any evidence since they only use it for the internet and as scam part one makes clear, that doesn’t go anywhere near that fast.

We of course are one of the suckers and bought one of the super routers, but we never got as far as noticing how slow it actually was, because it never connected at all — it was so super sophisticated and flexible and all. At least we got to return it indignantly to Amazon. ... The Belkin we then bought at Walmart connected right up, at least to the starry internet....

And the scammy MaximumPC didn’t even go into how they got their anonymous laptop to connect to the wireless for their tests; they almost certainly used fixed numeric addresses somehow; since the names don’t work.

The Wondrous TP-LINK TL-PA4010KIT Powerline Ethernet

Finally, to show how everything I know is wrong, apparently you don’t have to wire-up those ethernets no more! Instead, you can buy one of these kits for ~$40 @ amazon. Some bullet points:

• You must plug them into a wall power outlet, or an extension cord, but NOT a “power strip”. Almost all of those have “surge suppression” circuitry to make your powerline adapter fail.

• The kit comes with two of these things, and when I just plugged them into wall sockets, it worked. I told the Amazon review it was the first real plug ’n’ play I’d encountered in years. And a lot easier than hiring the wire guy or, Heaven forfend, doing it myself....

• Then I wanted another. So I bought another kit which, it turns-out, gives me two more nodes I can use for wandering laptops or whatever, through the magic of the invisibly-labeled “pair” button. The general scheme is you press the pair button on unit A, the power LED flashes, and then you do the same on unit B. You do that with the original pair, and then do it again with either one of those, and a new friend. And so on....

• The connection turned-out to be a little cranky, but mostly in an anomalous way with some antique XP machines, and is presumably partly the magic and mystery of Usux™....

And I assume these things are actually slower than the top-notch ethernets which I never seem to have, and probably adding additional nodes slows them down even further. So if you’re planning on 4K video editing, you will be sad. ... I am happy happy happy, and feel gratifyingly-justified in my childlike faith in gadgets....

The Wireless Dawn

10/17. At last in the wandering years, wireless file transfer, so completely gershtunk in my golden age, has functioned adequately. On the occasion of my iPad2 (bought-@ 5/11) becoming utterly obsolete — its ability to transfer my pitiful little text notes to real i.e. windows computers through dropbox failed at last beyond recall — I switched to a somewhat bulkier but nevertheless fairly-tiny Win7 machine with a real keyboard — i.e. as opposed to the infuriating touch ithings — which, if it was to function in its new role, had to be wireless — and so it was! Shazam! ... I had already built-in to my numerous intricate batch procedures the ability to go wireless, presumably when I tried these pitiful experiments in the past, but now, it worked! ... The world is sunshiny and bright....

Note, however, that I still run my “wake-up” batch files, that rouse-up all the other machines, at least every 30’’, on every PC — it’s just that my ipad replacement now does it wirelessly, and all the other machines are instructed that they must do the ipad replacement that way also and, amazingly, it all works. And random accidents indicate my ipad replacement still works better with the loop running....

The wireless is still noticeably slower than the ethernet but, what with the evolution of the wireless hardware ’n’ software, not so much that it hurts much. The ghastly 50’’ connection delays have not reappeared. At least so far. ... And so the ethernet lies down with the wireless at last, and all is calm.

11/11/17. And then sadly my beautiful wireless windows 7 asus ux31a machine went ka-blooie, when the computer, presumably stressed at such functionality beyond the ken of Usux™, crashed quite resoundingly and, sadly, permanently....

— the unutterably-amateur ethernet installer
11/17

NOTES

1. A typical batch file to map a network computer’s C: drive to the local drive G: might be called RemoteNo7.bat and contain “net use /PERSISTENT:NO G: 10.1.1.37\c” — but mine of course are immensely more elaborate and subtle....

2. A switch is the more likely endpoint of an ethernet cable because otherwise you’d have an ethernet of only two computers — there is no built-in thing for “daisy-chaining” ethernet devices one after the other. Also, the connection would have to use somewhere in its length a special “crossover” cable, because most computers are too stupid to do what switches do, which is automatically adjust for direction. And I see here at amazon there’s an innovative “crossover adapter” for a mere $7, so you can skip the cable. But it won’t work without the crossover; or, preferably, switches....

While I’m at it, I should mention that people sometimes think their ethernet should connect to the world wide web, by plugging-in a central switch to the cable modem which often provides ethernet jacks for this purpose. They probably think this because that’s the way it worked at beloved alma mater Moneybag$ U. which had hot and cold running ethernet + innernet. ... Indeed, we set-up our central panel next to the cable modem/router thingey to make this an easy option, although I blame my beloved leader — I’ve found I just want to connect my crates together without the web, using the ubiquitous built-in laptop wireless for that purpose, or a $10 usb wireless adaptor. The wireless actually works well that way, presumably because that’s why the multitudes get the things, + the cable modem service is generally slow-enough so it gains no advantage from using the ethernet, and finally I delude myself that I protect my innocents from the wicked web, although any half-way decent malware coming in from the dark shadows probably would think nothing of hopping across the local ethernet....

3. And then @ 4/15/14 a beloved laptop I had until then shared only via the wireless ’cause I didn’t want to trail cable all over the living room wouldn’t show up on my precious ethernet, when I plugged it in so I could copy something bigger than 37 bytes. Refused won’t talk deathly silence. And it was all the ridiculous “public” settings, and once properly/stupidly corrected, it lit-up like a charm....

4. Occasionally the timer seems to somehow fail to reset the Belkin — Halloween 2014 for instance — and while Microsoft pitifully tries to make a living flogging tablets and presumably cares less and less about those file thingeys I naturally suspected the end of civilization and the wireless file system, and went so far as to redeploy a wireless laserjet printer to a decent numeric ethernet connection which it happened to support. But then it all melted in the mist after I poked that stupid reset button again and I just don’t know anymore. The moral still is “doesn’t work” but still it worked much better after I poked the stupid reset, and abused my intricate batch-file numeric support system to make wireless filing more viable so my otherwise-pointless super-laptop could be used on the couch which of course should’ve worked before the second reset.... (But these days I connect the couch through the tplink.)

On the other hand, I note that whenever I power cycle the wireless router, the internet speeds up — when it should do the exact opposite, because all the local caches presumably got dumped. ... But no; sprightly & gay it is, once it gets wacked on its electrical frontal lobes....

5. But really, the name/number thing is so obvious! ... Usux™ gets its wireless addresses from the DHCP mechanism thoughtfully built-into your wireless or something and doesn’t from my inferior ethernet — ’cause I didn’t create one. So even when I connect “manually” to a specified numeric address, Usux™’ll prefer the official DHCPed thingey whenever I use the name; actually I don’t know that Usux™ even remembers the name of a numeric-addressed machine. It used to do that with the antique “workgroup” mechanism of Windows 3 I think, but of course Novell got kilt-off and they probably haven’t bothered for years....

6. My batch files running every few seconds, raising every computer in my pitiful ethernet, are essential, as I discovered in 10/16 when an ethernet switch went dead; like an incandescent bulb. After a few non-working replacements — I got to test the ones I’d retired previously, but weren’t absolutely certain were bad — I put a new one in its place and got to watch my “loopnetview” come-up in all its tedious glory ... a ceremony I normally neglect. It took about 10 minutes before it got going adequately, and even then one machine remained obdurate and sullen until I rebooted it. ... Oh wait that was just a windows 8 crate....