D J Rout

In 1990, I was helping out with the production of the second Visible Ink annual effort out of RMIT. When I say 'helping', I mean that I was slowly typing out a manuscript into some God-forsaken publishing software on an Apple Macintosh. Said Macintosh had a ten inch black and white screen, pretty good graphics for 1990, microscopic icons that made less sense than an emoji-filled text message and the keyboard from Hell. I swore then by all that was then holy—the World Trade Centre in New York, the colony of Hong Kong, and apartheid—that I would never use a Macintosh again.

Flash forward thirty-two years-odd to yesterday. I had, in November last year, made the case that a Macbook would be a form of visual aid to help me live a more or less normal life, and that therefore the NDIS could pay for it. They had allocated $10220 for me to spend on visual aid equipment, and I had spent around $640 on computer repairs between November 2019 and November 2021. I hadn't spent any more because I kept getting knocked back on computer expenses, and they wouldn't go for a large screen TV, either. So, I finally convinced them of the utility of a Macbook and got a quote from JB Hi Fi on November 13^th.

Then, by the time I'd forwarded the quote on to McCallum Financial Services so they could pay JB, my plan had expired and the new plan only had $5000 to spend. (Explaining these plans and why we need them I may do some other time.)

On January 7^th this year, McCallum ring to say they'd paid the quote but the money would take a few days to reach JB. I gave it four days, and trotted down to JB on the 11^th. After a bit of finagling with quote numbers and some ID on my part, they gave me this box:

There's no doubt about it. The unboxing process on Apple products is something of a delight, and I was sitting here with such expensive (or dollar-intensive) machinery that I felt like putting on a suit and tie.

After the delight of taking the thing out of its paper wrapping, I was even delighted to find that it even smelled nice. This was in stark contrast to the smell of my actual desk which had become a bit putrid over the previous week what with spilled tea and biscuit crumbs. In honour of this new machine, I cleaned off the desk using Windex and a Chux superwipe. Meanwhile, back at the box, I unpacked the charger and charging cable.

As you can see, the charger is about the size of an actual Dodge (or Valiant) Charger, so I had to unplug the Lenovo and the CZUR camera to plug this thing in. It was, as you would probably suspect if you've been following my journal for a few years, the work of a moment to plug the thing in. When I opened the lid it gave me a nice 'tada' sort of sound, the original 'tada' from the earliest days of the Mac if memory serves. Then the screen came on:

You can see the bottom of the monitor from an actual computer there. I was Googling like a mad thing to find answers to setting up a Mac.

After that there came a few hours of absolute Hell while I set the thing up. I won't go into that too much because the pain is still present and the wounds raw and bleeding, but fuck this thing was a pain where you simply don't expect pain to be, even at my age. snaky_poet once said that the good thing about Macs is that 'things just work'. I can now appreciate what an utter torture chamber the rest of her life must be. If she thinks things 'just work' on a Mac, she must turn on the lights by cramming coal into the loungeroom generator and strangling a kitten to propitiate the impedance gods. Nothing 'just worked'. The keyboard was easier to use then the one on the 14" Macbook that I had tried at JB, but not much easier. And I had to keep squinting at the dark screen to find the mouse cursor. It was tedious to follow the pointer across the screen until it was on the correct clickable bit, which I had to do because I was using the goddamned trackpad which, incidenntally, only works if you use one finger, but I kind of managed it. By 11:15 on Saturday night I was exhausted and resolved that everything I hated about Macs hadn't changed and that I w3as going to kick some obedience into the bloody thing on Sunday morning.

As gorgeous as the Macbook's packaging was, I had eschewed the very expensive Apple mouse in favour of a Logitech Pebble.

On Sunday I arose from the procrustean bed, if I may so call it, full of vim and vigour and, after tackling that morning's Wordle, cracked the old knuckles and…had a shower and got dressed, then had a cup of tea and, fortified by the morning's routine and the sustaining powers of tea, settled down to have another go at this stupid machine.

I got my darling Kelvatari on the ol' Skype because she had one of the damn things and could probably help. She got me through most of the process. At least to the point where I could fire up Safari, a browser I had previously only used on my phone, to try and install Microsoft Office on the Macbook. This process, very easy on a computer, is yet another arse-reaming on this thing. After five attempts to download the installer, each download taking approximately forty-five minutes before mysteriously halting, I finally got a complete file. I was able to install it just in time to head over to Write Club.

I still haven't been able to get the mouse to work. It's a Bluetooth mouse, so it should work without having to plug in the wireless receiver, which is impossible anyway because there're no plugs on the thing that the USB dongle from the mouse will fit into. I've got the thing connected to the network via WiFi, which is good because there's no Ethernet plug on it, either, and so far the only thing it's found is my Kindle Fire. It kept searching for the mouse for four hours before I was finally able to make it stop. But by 2:00PM on Sunday it was time to go over to Write Club. With a Macbook.

Now—even though I haven't written anything on it—I can say I'm a real writer.

If you're reading this, it means I uploaded it successfully.

In fact, for the last ten days I've been uploading every fucking thing. I ran 79GB of pirated offsite-archived video via FTP to a certain IP address on February 15^th, which made some sort of sense when I added up the total space on my drive to be 68GB, if I allow, for some reason, another 10% or so of data to account for formatting or transmission or whatever. So it made sense that I was 80% into my 100GB per month data cap.

For the benefit of Ameicans, most Internet access plans put a limit on how much data you can move, up or down, across the wires and servers that make up our geographic chunk of the electronic frontier. In return for this curbing of our access, we get an Internet that is…well, that starts with 'I'.

Fear not, the rest of this post won't be as technical.

So, I had to get some extra data or face the horror of being shapd, ie slowed down, from 25Mb (megabits) per second to 0.256 Mb/s, a speed that would've been blood-curdlingly fast back in my dialup days, chugging away at 56K/s and taking a weekend to download a game update, or back to the 80's at 300 baud when mine own evil brother, incredibleloon, was hitting the bulletin boards and I was sending email over the LAN at Collingwood TAFE. I rang Internode and they very nicely just gave me 70GB of extra data.

Imagine my blood-curdling (again) shock when I got an email saying that I was 70% over my limit. A couple of days after that I got one saying I was at 90% of my limit. So, i had used 63GB of data in the space of five days!

I checked my usage on Internode. Weird-arse downloads I can understand. Dialers, malware, and Windows 10 updates are the problem there. But to my (blood-curdling) horror, the bulk of the usage was the uploading. I was squirting 6GB a day up to somewhere.

I rang Internode. I asked them whether, or if, they could tell me where this data was going. They replied that they couldn't tell me the IP addreess of the destination of this data because of my securiy and privacy.

I replied that that was very nice of them, but I was asking them to do it. If I've got malware or whatever doing this I want to fucking know about it so that I can stop it.

They replied that they couldn't tell me, but they could give me an hour by hour breakdwon of my usage. They did this, and I discovered that the uploads coincided with me turning on the laptop I'm writing this on now. This didn't tell me where the data was going, but it did show that it was the laptop, and therefore presumably Windows 10 (or maybe some malware), that was causing it.

They suggested that MalwareBytes or Avira were the detectors that could find malware that might be doing this. They also suggested that Dropbox, iCloud, OneDrive and Google Drive could be responsible, as these progams love to sync things across the 'net, chewing up your data, which is one reason 'the cloud' will die a natural, but lingering, death in places like Canada, Australia and anywhere you have to pay for your data like we do.

Anyway, the malware detector Avira was made by AVG (or so I incorrectly thought atthe time—see the hyperlink above), so I wanted no part of that, so I scanned both manchines using MalwareBytes. It detected 4 malwares on the Windows 7 desktiop, a machine I usually don't give a crap about because it's more a games machine than a production machine, as it were. MalwareBytes quarantined 4 things on the desktop and discovered none on the Windows 10 laptop, so I've done what I can so far.

The problem is that I have to guess, by a process of turning machines off and on andn then comparing the hour by hour uploads with the times I turn eac macine on, to see which one is doing the uploading. But it doesn't explain how to stop it. One method would be to determine precisely which machine is moving the data around by seeing the traffic on each machine, and I can't do that on my current modem router because it's too old (2015), so I ordered a new one. $89 well spent, I hope.

Further, it sees that under Windows 10 you can't monitor the traffic from teh actual machine. Now, it is more than likely that you can, but that how to do it is hidden so deeply under the layers of 'user-friendly' obfuscation that I will never find it.

I checked OneDrive and the other cloud things and nothing had changed there. I thnk I am going to turn them all off. They're no use for moving data, or for storage, and I don't need tu update shit on my phone, Kindle, someone else's laptop or whatever. Maybe that will help. In the meantime, I plough through the data in ways I can't fathom, for reasons I don't understand, from sources beyond my ken.

Welcome to 2018.

So, this story has taken a while to prepare. The images that you will hopefully see in this were stored on one OneDrive, Microsoft's answer to seeing an overcrowded marketplace and saing "Me, too!" Web services. I mean, what the fuck? Apparently it's not a form of storage, but it's always being touted as a method of ensuring your stuff is safe in case of a (local) disaster. But what is the point of that if, when I accidentally delete a file on my hard drive, OneDrive sees that and does the same thing on the web? Or the Cloud or whatever the fuck they call it?

Where's my mag tape?

Anyway, this is the story of Gliniadur, my new laptop:

Now what was that photo all about? I can't even work out what it is. It may be sideways or something but it was taken on 16^th of June and thus falls somewhere near the date of the events in this story.

First things first, though. I had to get a martini.

In my experience, which I grant you isn't great or wide in the field of cocktails, the nature of these drinks being, in Australia, defined by poor quality and great expense, the best vodka martini is made at Fuji Sushi and even if it isn't the sort of thing James Bond would wax lyrical over, at $US2 a drink the ratio between cost and quality is spellbinding. A few more spells weaved by the bar maestro over at that fine Japanese food emporium and this gaijin was ready to tackle the computer purchasing game.

But why buy another laptop anyway, I think I hear you ask with fervent curiosity. Good question. The answer was that the ol' Samsung had become difficult to type on because the letters had been wearing off the keys as fast as the little knobs on the home keys were, that the damn thing was taking eight minutes to boot—a situation, I admit, might've been solved with a machine refresh such as you've been able to do since Windows 8 but which, really, fills me with a bit of scepticism about the operating system. I mean, if you can refresh it to speed it up without losing any of your data (and that not thanks to OneDrive) how does it get to a state where it needs refreshing in the first place? Okay, that and the fact that I was up to four blue screens of death a day finally persuadd me to gegt a new machine. Fortunately, my darling Kelvatari has a card with Best Buy, so it was possible to defray or amortise the cost of a new laptop over a few payments.

I had set my heart on a Lenovo laptop because the keyboards are highly rated, but the only Lenovos we—that is to say, my darling Kelvatari and I—could find there pretty ordinary machines with not much RAM and not much drive space, unless you wanted something pried around the Apple level and I had decided to get an Apple only if the Lotto gods smiled and Kelva was importunate enough in asking me questions about how to do things on a Mac, a skill with which I have no familiarity at all. So we began the hunt based on the specs of the machine over the brand and reputation.

Hewlett-Packard used to make great printers and crap computers, and this didn't change much with their acquisition of Compaq which made great computers and no printer at all, but for some other reason they now make great computers and crap printers. This may be because of the decreased use of printers in the home computer market. Certainly I wouldn't buy another HP printer at gunpoint, and certainly not an inkjet again even hough the price of laser printers in this God-forsaken republic is insane.

And it came with all its ancillary crap.

But this HP laptop had all he grunt I now need, since I'm not a gamer anymore, and the demo model in the shop had a great keyboard. Nice feel to the keys and the home keys were well marked. And a numeric keypad which is rare but vital in these modern times.

Reassuringly, as soon as I hit the 'Power' button the HP logo came up:

I then launched into the exciting process of installing Windows 10 and configuring the way that Windows want, overlaid by the way HP wants, slightly nuanced by what I actually want. I won't go into details because it is likely to be more tedious to describe than my paradigm-shifting discourse on installing Windows 8 and the game-changing screed on the last Windows 10 creator's update that I have the photos for but haven't got around to writing yet.

And this, to some extent, is where the story starts. Or at least whee the subject line is explained. In the course of setting up the computer and logging into my Microsoft account, which still requires me to use an email address I haven't had for ten years because that's just how stupid Microsoft is, I had to give the computer a name. Dr Jerry Pournelle gave all his machines names when he was writing about them in Byte, and he may still do for all I know. I despise this practice, though, and simply refer to each of my machines as, you guessed it, 'my machine'. I may add a location to indicate which machine I'm referring to, but as to naming them…well, the manufacturers have their logos plastered upside down on the backs of the screen for laptops, so what more naming do you need?

The answer is that you need to name them for network purposes. Now, you can have names arbitrarily assigned by the network when you connect, or assigned by th manufacturer when they're made or set up before purchasing them. My , for example, my Kindle is amazon-f326cfcfc and I think another one is unknowna002dc5176ba. Kind of roll off the tongue, don't they? The original name of mine you may be able to see in the photograph, and good luck to you, as it is lost to the winds of memory for me, but I had to rename it to find it on any network I might be on. My original choice was going to be HIPSHP or something like that, but then I thought that I should stick to the Welsh motif, since Kelva and I are still trying to learn the language (and doing pretty well at it, provided every conversation we have in Wales goes no further than how much we like coffee). So I chose CYFRIFIADUR, Welsh for 'computer', which I think literally means 'account adder'. But then I thought 'No, let's be as accurate as possible.' The Welsh word for 'laptop' is GLINIADUR.

And thus a legend was born named.

It has, as you're probably aware, always been my practice to get Office Professional and this time was going to be no exception. The reason for this is not because I want to use Powerpoint, which I just don't get, or Publisher which I get even less, but because of my determination to master Access or die in the attempt. So far, Death has been holding sway over this endeavour but he can't always have it his way, right? Right. And I despised the idea of Office 365 because it means I'm buying into this Idea that I can't control my own software and have to keep paying every year to use it, and thus be subject to whatever 'improvements' they may make to the software—such as getting rid of the maps feature in Excel in Office 2007—and that if I'm online to use the software my data charges are going to be colossal. However, it was only $US50.99 which is a lot more bearable than around $US400 in these parlous times with the AUD hovering at levels that would give even a Somali pause for thought.

As you can see, it took a bit longer than 'a moment' to set up:

Or did it? What is that even a photograph of? And I doubt that even setting up Office would take eight hours, thirty minutes and thirty seconds as indicated by the timestamps on each photo.

But tha' nothing. Originally I was going to backdate this entry to June 20^th, but that would give a false impression. This damn post has taken me a month to write. Granted, I don't get much time in the daytime because Kelva's place is not set up to work in very well. Still, a month? Bloody hell.

But it's finished now.