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Collision Repair

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Small rant.

I have a 2007 Prius. Back in July of 2013, I got rear ended. Or rather, my wife, unborn son, and I got rear ended. Anyway, the Auto body shop that is run by the dealer I bought the car from did the work, and after the aftermarket bumper didn’t fit, they put a real Toyota bumper on the car. Anyway, fast forward 5 months, and something starts to smell in the car. I search, and pull everything out I can think of. Smell goes away for a day or two, then comes back. So, I pull more out. Finally, I open the “hidden compartment” in the trunk, and wham, the smell hits me. I remove everything in there… smell is still there. Fine, I remove the compartment itself, and find a good 1/4-1/2″ of smelly yellowish liquid. I think it’s uncured epoxy resin or something, and head back to the body shop. They mop it up, and say “let us know”. Okay, so I take it back to a car wash, and run through. Viola, more liquid, though this time it obviously is car wash soapy water.

I make an appointment, and take the car back. They give me a free rental for the day, and stick the car in their shower… they find there was a missing piece of body panel sealant below the right tail light. They patched it up real quick, and stuck the car back in the shower, with no leaks.

So, the rant is… why the heck didn’t they stick it in the shower after the initial repair?! Gar… I really hate shoddy workmanship. Would have taken a few minutes, and saved me hours of looking for a smell in my car… plus, saved them the rental car, and time. It’s like insurance insisting on the aftermarket bumper that didn’t fit right… they had to buy both (aftermarket and OEM) because they tried to cheap out to start with. Gar!

Asus RT-N16

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RT-N16 Rear (No Antennas)Years ago I moved my cable modem down to my garage to get it closer to the coax (CATV) splitter. The cable modem then had CAT5 running up to the office where my Airport Extreme (which provides routing) lives. This meant anything that wanted to be on the network had to either be in proximity to the office, or be on wireless. This kind of sucked for a DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) computer I have in the garage, and the hope of moving my electronics lab out to the shed. So, I’ve been planning to install a router in the garage next to the cable modem for almost as long as the cable modem has been down there. So, to that end, I purchased one of the most capable home routers in existence, the Asus RT-N16. Got it off eBay for about half price, but I really didn’t want to spend much since I don’t need the wireless capability (I have a very functional Airport Extreme). All I really wanted was a decent CPU speed, ram/flash size, and a GigE switch… which all basically means being able to run Tomato, DD-WRT, etc (which the RT-N16 will do. More later).

The router itself is pretty reasonably sized, not taking up much more space than a 5.25 external enclosure. On the back are the antenna jacks, 4 GigE switch ports, the WAN port (also GigE), USB2.0 (for a printer, or external HD), and DC jack. CPU, RAM, and Flash info can be found here. Basically though, short of the Asus RT-N66U, the RT-N16 is pretty darn near the top of the home router capability chart. It won’t route at gigabit speeds (seems to be around 150Mbit/sec), but I don’t have that kind of bandwidth at home anyway. Plus, the RT-N66U goes for at least twice as much new, and on eBay.

Anyway, after receiving the unit, was the most complicated and time consuming part of my experience: deciding which firmware to use. The stock Asus firmware is fine for most people but I really had 4 main requirements:

  1. IPv6 Support (Native from ISP)
  2. Built in DNS Server (for internal DNS)
  3. UPNP/NAT-PMP support
  4. Non-sucky NAT

So off the bat, DD-WRT and Tomato support built in DNS, the native firmware does not. There is an alternate to the native firmware nicknamed Merlin, but it only did some things, but not others. DD-WRT doesn’t support native IPv6, it only does 6to4 tunneling. All the firmwares do UPNP, but only Tomato does NAT-PMP. So it was looking more and more like Tomato was the answer. The biggest issue being that Tomato seems relatively dead, major code wise, with only people like Toastman doing mods. But, that’s good enough for me. I grabbed the latest Tomato from Toastman and loaded it up (which requires first loading dd-wrt, then Tomato due to some weird size or packaging issues… I’m not sure). Loading the firmware was really the only way I was going to find out if it met the last requirement. And by that, I really mean the ability for me to use things like Apple Remote Desktop from home, and have ports open appropriately. m0n0wall does not do this reliably. The biggest issue is that I had to do a lot of the configuration and testing without it being my primary router (I didn’t want to take my network down for install/testing). So, in short, I ended up moving back and forth between Tomato, DD-WRT, Merlin, and the stock Asus firmware at least half a dozen times before putting the whole thing down, forgetting, and then remembering I’d decided on Tomato at the end.

Then yesterday, I put Tomato back on the RT-N16, and configured it for IPv6, Internal DNS, DDNS, etc and installing it. All told, my network was down less than 5 minutes, and it seems to be working great. It fit very well on my garage “network” pegboard with some zip ties, and it just seems to work. I, of course, had to tell the Airport Extreme it was just a Bridge at that point, but that was quick and painless (though it does take a very long time to reboot for some reason). All functionality that I required seems to be working, including IPv6 (though for Comcast, you want to set it to DHCPv6 with Prefix delegation and leave the rest at defaults).

All and all, I’ve very happy. I will need to rearrange the pegboard soon as I can’t see the lights on the router at all, but for now, it works!

[xrr rating=5/5]

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

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catching_fire_ka_300dpiI recently saw The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and having read the books, I can say that the movie both kept very closely to the book, as well as provided a nice improvement to the first movie, which seemed very low budget. The second movie starts very shortly after the first one ended, and picks up with very little attempt to re-introduce viewers to the characters, or the plot. Viewers are obviously expected to know what is going on before starting this movie, even though about a year and a half has passed between the first movie, and the second.

For more info on what the plot is, please see my review of the first movie here. So after the first movie/book, and our main characters survive, they go on to live in nice houses back in their district. The idea being they are being rewarded by the Capital for “winning” the games. The movie basically starts at this point, just before they are about to go on their “tour” of the country talking about how great the games were, etc. And they also get to see the riots that are breaking out in the country.

Anyway, it’s hard not to just detail the whole movie. I can say, however, that the movie follows the book very well this time around, and the production quality was very good.

Anyway, recommended, and I have very little negative to say with the movie.

[xrr rating=5/5]