Hawking WIFI Antenna

I recently purchased a Hawking Antenna. It was really cheap because it rattled. That was because the antenna mount was slightly broken and it was easily fixed with some glue.

Anyway the antenna is actually an ordinary antenna with a metal reflector. I will give the measurements shortly. Basically you can easily make it yourself. If you carefully pull the top end off you can then see how it works. Hopefully I will be able to do some comparison tests too.

The metal shield/Reflector is about 1.25 inches from the center of the antenna.  In my tests this antenna combined with an EDUP USB wireless card detected twice as many wireless networks in our area compared to the built in wireless adapter in my notebook computer.

EDUP USB wireless adapter drivers

I recently purchased one of these tiny EDUP wireless adapters on EBay.  First of all they advertise them as 'high power' but they are really not 'high power' if you were expecting 500 MW or 1000 MW like the real  high power USB adapters can put out.  If you really want high power add 500, 1000, or even 2000 MW to your search in EBay.  On the other hand the external antenna may double your range compared to the antenna that is built into most laptops.

Anyway I lost the driver disk and could not find it. I Googled it but no one seemed to know where to find the driver!  When you plug it in the computer says something about a RTL 8188 driver and that is the secret.  Just go to www.Realtek.com and search for the 8188SU driver.

Here is a link but you may have to cut and paste it into your browser:
http://www.realtek.com/search/default.aspx?keyword=rtl8188su

Better Business Bureau to the rescue

First of all let me warn you.  You have 30 days to get Verizon Internet working or you are stuck with a $160 disconnect fee even if it does not work.  DO NOT give them another chance - it will cost you $160!  Secondly even if you do call, write and mail everything back to them they will not disconnect you and will keep sending you bills and threaten to destroy your credit if you do not keep paying.

I blogged before about my Verizon problems but here is a quick recap.

I ordered their $50 Internet and phone deal via the Internet.  After a week or two I called and they said the order was lost and they would do it over the phone but I could not get the Internet deal.  I called back another time and was told that I could get the Internet deal so I changed my order.

Well after a few days of terribly slow connection speeds I called up tech support.  The person was very helpful thought a bit hard to understand.  They quickly determined that I had a connection problem.  After about an hour of troubleshooting we removed the Y adapter and the Internet seemed to work. 

The next day the Internet was not working again.  After restarting the box several times over several days, and trying several different telephone jacks I called them again.  This time I was told they could not tell if I had a problem but a 24 hour monitor was possible if I wanted to spend 1/2 an hour on the phone to set it up.  the first problem is that it takes 1/2 an hour to get to a real person.  You have to enter your data over an over again and when you get to a live person they will ask for that information once again.  I did not have the time so I told them to do the 24 hour monitor and hung up.  Of course they did not do it.

The next time I called I was very fed up and the guy begged me to give it one more try.  By this time I had received and paid two bills one for $75 and one for $85.  The tech support guy promised that they would have a guy at my house on Tuesday so I gave in to allowing them just one more try to get it working.  My wife stayed home Tuesday, but no one came.  On Wednesday they called wanting to know where we were.  When I got home the Internet was working, but it only lasted a few hours. 

The next day I got another $75 bill.  I wrote a letter demanding that they disconnect me and stop sending me bills.  I called up demanding that they disconnect me but the lady refused to do it.  After about 1/2 an hour I just started yelling "Disconnect me" over and over into the phone.  I boxed up their Internet modem and mailed it back to them.  It did not work, they still would not disconnect me!

So then I contacted the Better Business Bureau.  They contacted Verizon and a lady from Verizon called me to say they were disconnecting me and refunding me all of my money!  Yea for the BBB!  This whole process took about 4 months.  I still have no Internet but I might try the cable company next.

Ode to AVG

AVG was my favorite anti virus program for years.  I converted a place where I worked to using it after it found as many as 2 virus' on a computer that was running the number one anti virus program.  But its time has come and gone.

The problems started when you could no longer down load AVG free to a memory stick and take it with you to Africa or other places where there is no Internet access.  But now they have even topped that mistake.  After not being able to install it on numerous computers, that had working Internet, I discovered the source of the new problem.  Like so many other applications you now need almost 1 gig of memory to install AVG!  That is total insanity!  This picture below is proof of the problem;

Note how the memory usage jumps from under 250 megs to 619 megs when you try to install AVG. If you do not have enough memory, after what seems like an eternity, it will time out and fail to install. Sorry to say it but its 'good bye' to AVG.

Outlook error 550/Administrative prohibition fix.

MS Outlook sometimes comes up with a error 550, Administrative prohibition, or 0x800CCC69 error message.  It has to do with proper authentication.  The solution is to authenticate before sending your emails. Just check the box as seen in the picture below.

Believe it or not you can actually send email without logging into the server first. That is a bad idea, so this box says that you must log into the server first.

Update on my predictions for this century

Back around 2000 I made several predictions as to what will happen in this century.

http://sites.google.com/site/bobdavis321/my predictions

Basically I said that we will eliminate tires and wires.  Wires because everything will become wireless, even our electricity.  Recently I talked with someone working on a device that will run off your septic gasses and produce the electricity needed to power your house.  There are some farms that use the cow sewage to power their farms already.

Wires may also need to go away because of the danger of solar flares combined with our planets weaker magnetic fields.  This might lead the a melt down of our entire power grid.  Fiber optics would be immune.  Many are recommending that you stock 30 to 60 days of food just in case this happens and our food chain is shut down for a month or two, maybe even longer.

Tires will go away because cars will fly.  I am still working on that one, but the theory is that magnetic fields can warp gravitational fields.  My experiments have launched a 5 inch round aluminum washer over 30 feet into the air.  The g-force would kill a rider as can be seen in some of my video's.  But I have a theory of a more controlled method of launching a 'saucer'.  More to come on that.

WordPress - Clean up your Database!

I was working on our WordPress database looking for an error in one of the posts.  While using a PHP based SQL editor I discovered that every post had about 6 or more copies of itself.  They were all the previous revisions of that post.  Then I realized that records of revisions is why our SQL database is so big!

So then I looked for a way to clean up that huge database.  I came across a plug-in called 'WP-Cleanup' and it worked great!  It easily reduced the database size from 19.4 megs down to only 3.4 Megs!  I would highly recommend WP_Cleanup for anyone using WordPress.  It should be run once a month not once a year.

Now I am looking for a way to get rid of all of the unused pictures, there must be thousands of them!

My computer is slowing to a crawl once again

My computer is slowing down to a crawl once again and it is because Windows update is running every five minutes.  Or maybe I should title this 'Microsoft is trying to kill Windows XP' and how to fight back.  The first thing to do is to turn off auto updates and free up about 400 to 500 MEGS of memory.  What, are these people so crazy as to think that a monthly update requires 1/2 a gig of memory almost all of the time????

First to an alternate control delete to see if windows update is the problem. In the picture above it and its associated service host are taking 400 megs of memory.  Then do a start run services.msc and turn off automatic updates.

Camping at Allegany State Park

We just got back from camping at Allegany State Park.  The blue roof on the main building was just underlayment for a slate roof.


I spotted a beautiful lady on the covered bridge.  Actually I tried to take a picture of both of us using the cameras timer but I could not get there fast enough.....

We got up early and took several pictures as the sun was just rising. 

The deer sometimes like to hang out in the middle of the road.

This is two fawns hanging out in the road.

Here is a fawn along the side of the road.

Sunset, with a canoe paddling along the center right side.

A deer stops to look at me.

Can you spot the deer in this picture?  There are four of them.  They can really blend in at times.

The stone tower.  Its really not very tall.

The view from the top of the stone tower.

Our little cabin for the weekend.

The Dude

I have come across a new tool for computer / network repair called 'the dude'.  I just used it to figure out why a server was not available to everybody.  When I clicked on the server under 'the dude' it noted that there was no DNS name for the server!  So I went to the server and changed some of its DNS settings, then restarted it, and then it worked fine.  This was after about 4 hours of fighting with the server because just 2 computers could not log into it.  One of those computers was mine!  It worked fine the way it was for everyone else?

2000 Volt Washer Launcher/Can Crusher

My old 8 capacitor power supply is back in action!  This time it has 10 capacitors, and delivers 2000 volts at 1600 amps from 1,600 uF of capacitors in a series/parallel combination.  The old 5 watt resistor was replaced with a 50 watt resistor!  It still smoked when it was powered on, likely from the grease from my fingers.

The video is already up on YouTube.  It is at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i87EuYIQO9c

I tried crushing three soda cans at once, a free launch that went way out of site, and upset the neighbors, you can hear them saying "What was that?" and then I crushed one soda can.  Not included in the video is another free launch where I lost the washer.  It was found later over 100 feet away on the far side of the house.

This is the schematic diagram.  There is an error, the capacitors are only 4700 uF!  The 'fire' resistor is 1K, and the meter resistor is 2.5 meg ohms, that value varies with the meter that is used.  There is also a 10 amp fuse on the power coming in, it is built into the power jack.  The coil is a flat coil of 14 gauge enameled wire covered in a lot of glue.

Lots of famous dead people

According to the latest onslaught of spam/virus there are a lot of famous dead people.  The things these people will do to get you to open up a virus these days in amazing.  There is no low they will not stoop to!

HP 1502 LCD Repair.

Someone asked me to fix a HP1502 LCD Monitor for them. When it was plugged in the power would only flash on for a second. After opening it up I could see that all the capacitors in the power supply were blown. There were two black 1000 uF at 16 volt capacitors that I removed before this picture was taken. There were 6 purple 470 uF at 16 volt capacitors that also needed replacement. However even after all of that was done, it did not fix it the monitor until I removed the fried zener diode that is located just below the burnt spot on the power supply board near the connector between the two boards. You can use a 12.6 volt zener to replace it but it works without any zener diode. The zener diode was most likely used as a surge suppressor and since the capacitors were not working that allowed non stop surges above the zener's rated voltage until the zener finally fried.

Viewsonic VG175 Revisited again.

One of the Viewsonic VG-175's LCD's that I had repaired years ago came back again for another repair. I suppose the only permanent repair would be to replace all of the capacitors but that is not an easy thing to do. This time it looked like a loss of horizontal sync and the culprit was C55 a 47 uF capacitor at 25 volts, or at least that is what I used to replace it. It is the light blue capacitor standing straight up near the middle of the picture of the circuit board.

Note that C19 was previously replaced it causes the picture to turn into dashes all over the screen. It is the dark blue capacitor kind of laying down near the center of the picture.

The Google search algorithm changes again

Google has done it again, twice in one year, they have revised their search algorithm. In May 2010 they did something to try to make their search results more current and 'up to date'. The end results from what that did was to raise spam web sites to the top and flush long standing real companies web sites down the toilet. That change got the nick name "May Day". The latest revision took place around the middle of August 2010 and it raises the real companies back up from the junk heap by returning many results for any company that you look for. Just check out the results for one web site as seen in the picture below.

Prophecy given over me on August 7, 2010

I was at Sword and the Spirit church in Buffalo NY, for a special prophetic conference, a prophet named Leon was speaking.  After the message he gave this word over me.

The Bible says that there was angels ascending and descending.  When the pastor said that tonight about angels, revelation of heaven coming to earth, God said that you are going to be a revelation bearer.  God said that He put a scribe anointing upon you and I put a teaching anointing within you.  God said that I am going to bring you to a place of fulfillment in this season of your life.  And God said that I am lighting your fire even with a new passion says the Lord.  And God said that I have got new pathways and new doorways I am going to begin to open for you.  God said you will be one that will be able to do as God is infusing and He is empowering you.  Amen. 

Those messengers of heaven, I can see revelation coming to you brother its like eyes are open and ears are open God says you are going to begin to hear new sounds of heaven and new revelation of heaven.  God is going to give you, you are one that needs that order 1,2,3,4 and God says I am going to give it you just that way.  Except He is going to move the three behind the four, God says I am going to do that because I am going to put you in a place where you always have to trust Me says the Lord, where your faith will always have to be activated says the Lord.

God says that Son I am going to fulfill the desires and the cries of your heart says the Lord.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization Help. It is not rocket science, just think of why you search and what you search for on the Internet. Here are some keys I have discovered to getting recognized by the search engines.

1. Good Content. Write it yourself and have something there that is relevant and worth saying. Make sure your site has keywords included in the page titles, and bold the keywords in the text. One of the best subjects is problems you are having with a service or program. What did you do when you had the problem? YOU Googled it!

2. Good Links. Submit your articles to and get linked to by other sites like HackedGadgets, Wired, and others depending upon your content.

3. Get real Traffic. Add the ability to Tweet, FaceBook etc. your site and put some links on their sites yourself. Post real comments on related blogs with a link to you or your web site.  A great add on to do this is 'add to any'.

4. Submit your site to the search engines. Do this regularly.

5. Include and mark up your Pictures. Make sure all of your pictures have alt tags, a short description under the picture, etc.  The picture shows how to do this in WordPress.

6. Install the Alexa toolbar and visit your site on a regular basis.

Bitdefender 2010 Problems

There are several Bitdefender 2010 and Microsoft Outlook problems

In early 2010 we switched from using Kaspersky Anti-Virus because it was hanging up computers for ever even with a clean install of Windows. After some research and some 30 day trial runs we decided on Bitdefender. However Bitdefender and Microsoft Outlook do not get along very well. There are three problems that we have noted so far;

1. Timeouts while sending and receiving email. The solution is to set the timeout in Outlook to 4 minutes or more for each mail account.

2. Messages stuck in the ‘outbox’. Use ‘alt’ ‘control’ and ‘delete’ to make sure there is not another copy of outlook running. The solution is to restart outlook, open the message and send it again. Also you can also turn off Bitdefender anti-spam and this might cure the problem.

3. Lost messages. Some messages disappear after they are received never to be seen again. So far this has been proven false every time someone made the claim.  Usually they had stopped receiving email all together.

Don't forget to change the time when Bitdefender scans for virus’s to only once a week.

If your computer only has 1 gig of Ram, even if just running Windows XP, upgrade it to 2 gigs. Once we installed Bitdefender the computers consistently went over 1 gig of memory. In fact my system likes to sometimes go over 2 gigs! That is when running IE8, FireFox, Outlook, Publisher, Word, and AIM. BTW - IE8 is a huge memory hog, I have seen it use 750 megs of Ram!

Something else we are looking at is a problem with FireFox not starting. I do not yet know if this is a Bitdefender problem. The solution is to use ‘alt’ ‘control’ and ‘delete’ to see how many copies of FireFox are running, (Sort the list alphabetically) then shut them all down. Then restart FireFox, so far this has worked every time.

Verizon Problems

Well after all the $30 a month straight talk cell phone problems I tried to get service from Verizon.  I thought a land line would be nice and for $50 they promised to include unlimited calling and high speed Internet.  So far my bills have been $75 and $89 and the Internet speed is .03 Mb/s, slower than dial up!

I printed out the screens, and waited.  After a week or two I called and they said the order was lost so they started another order.  But I was told the $50 deal was no longer available.

Note this is not my phone number!  Anyway I called again and twisted their arm to give me the deal they promised in the first place.  But they would not include the wireless router like they promised in the picture above.

Anyways after several more hours on the phone I finally got connected.  The speed was really slow so after some more hours on the phone we discovered that their splitter was the problem.  However the higher speed did not even last a day!

Pictures of the Randolph NY tornado damage

Here are some pictures of the Randolph NY tornado damage.  The worst tree damage was on the hill above the town.

 There was lots of damage around the cemetery.

Here is a house on the hill above the town.

There was lots of other damage in town, roofs damaged and a porch missing.  We also saw where the car dealership lost most of its siding and roof.  My camera's memory was full so I could not take any more pictures!

Tax the skinny to feed the fat

Well its happened, San Francisco California has banned non-diet soda from vending machines!  Its enough that they tax the poor to feed the rich, now the efforts to tax the skinny to feed the fat have taken another step forward.

Think about this stupidity, who drinks non-diet soda?  Skinny people.  Who drinks diet soda and who eats diet food?  Fat people do.  So they want to eliminate non-diet food and drinks.  Basically you will HAVE to eat diet food and drink diet drinks!  These 'foods' are full of toxins and chemicals designed to make you fat!

When will these politicians wake up and get a sense of reality?  Do they exist only in a dream world that is totally controlled by chemical companies?  First they remove natural drugs and replace them with toxic chemicals and now they are doing the same thing to our foods, all in the name of more money for big drug companies!

Here is a link:
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/07/27/san-francisco-bans-sodas-from-vending-machines.aspx

Some claim that the rich pay all of the taxes, if that is so then lets drop ALL taxes on people who are making less than $50,000 since 'they do not pay any taxes'.  The notion promoted by the IRS and others that 95% of the taxes are from the top 5% income bracket is full of BULL.  Here is clear proof taken from the same IRS web site.  Note that about 1/3 of taxes are from Social Security.  How much SS taxes do the top 5% pay?  OOPS! 

Just in case you missed that, the cap on the Social Security tax was about $100,000 the last time I checked.  That means that income over that amount is NOT TAXED!  So then we can conclude that 1/3 of the taxes are paid by people who are making less than $100,000!!!!

Allegany State Park Storms

This weekend we were at Allegany State Park during the storms.  I stopped at the south side of the lake and took pictures of the storm to the North.  That storm included a tornado that hit Randolph NY.

When we tried to leave the road to the Main Building was closed with trees across it as well as the road to the North to Salamanca.  We stopped and talked to a policeman who was using an Axe to try to clear one of the roads.

Here is a link to the news article on the storms.

http://www.wivb.com/dpp/news/southern_tier/Communities-clean-up-after-tornadoes

Note the swirling pattern in one of the clouds.

Whats this with the blue roof on the main building?  It looked a lot better when it was brown.

Tesla Coil Gossary

Tesla Coil Glossary by Bob Davis

Tesla Coil – A collection of coils and wire designed to make great big sparks
• Spark Gap Tesla Coil – a Tesla coil that uses a spark gap to switch the power just like Tesla did.
• VTTC – Vacuum tube Tesla Coil – One that uses vacuum tube(s) as the switching device.
• SSTC – Solid State Tesla Coil – An oxymoron as these things were never designed to do that.
• IGBT – Another type of SSTC but usually a little more successful at working without self destruction.

Transformer - device used to convert the main power source to something that will produce big sparks.
• NST - Neon Sign Transformer - Normally used to light the beer signs in bar windows but also used to make big sparks.
• OBIT - Oil Burner Ignition Transformer - Normally used to start a fire in an oil fed furnace but can also produce big sparks.
• MOT - Microwave Oven Transformer - Normally used to cook your food but it can also cook you.
These normally do not produce long enough of a spark but they can be wired in series or used with a voltage doubler.

Capacitor – Device used to store a charge then release it to produce bigger sparks.
• Paper capacitor – Aluminum foil and paper arranged to make a capacitor.
• Door Knob Capacitor – Big capacitor that is shaped like a door knob, usually these can take a lot of volts.
• Home made capacitor – Old beer bottles or whatever used to make a home made capacitor.
• MMC – Many, Many Capacitors - arranged in series or series/parallel to make one big capacitor.

Spark gap – Favorite part – makes sparks what else? Sometimes self-destructs.
• Fixed Spark Gap – Two things that sparks fly in between – sometimes intentionally.
• Multiple Spark Gap – Several spark gaps arranged in series, usually air cooled too.
• RSG - Rotary Spark Gap – Motor driven rotating spark gap, runs cooler as power is only on for a ‘short’ time.

Coil – Sometimes just a pile of wire but it should be neatly wound in circles to look good.
• Primary coil – Flat or angled coil of large wire that creates the primary magnetic field.
• Secondary coil – Long coil of fine wire used to pick up the magnetic field from the primary, many, many turns but it looks neat of wound properly.
• Choke – A type of coil usually wound around a ferrite core and it is used to stop RF noise.

Top Load – Anything from an aluminum plate to a large torroid used to store the high voltage until it arcs over and makes big sparks.

My big Tesla Coil revisited

Recently I dug out my big Tesla Coil and decided to update it and make it better.  Some changes I hope to try are a bigger top load, try two capacitors in parallel and make an angled primary coil.

First of all here is the current schematic.  I realized that I had never made a schematic for it.

Here are some pictures of the guts. First we have the Neon Sign Transformer or NST.  It delivers 12KV at 30 ma.

Next we have the spark gap.  It consists of 5 pieces of 1/2 inch copper pipes spaced about 1/8 inch apart inside of a 4 inch PVC pipe with a fan blowing air down them to cool them and to quench the sparks.

Then we have a front view of all of the guts.  The safety gap is the closest item, the transformer connects across it.  Then on the right and left are the choke coils.  Between them is the .06 uF 30KV capacitor and in the back is the spark gap assembly.  Above that you see the primary coil made from #10 electrical wire.

Now for a picture of everything at once.  The secondary coil is wound on a piece of 4 inch PVC about 28 inches long.  The top load is some flexible 3 inch drier vent pipe glued to an aluminum pie plate.

The video is uploaded to YouTube.  The sparks are about 15 inches long.  It used to do nearly 2 foot sparks.  I am not sure why the sparks are smaller.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rwQZdZYdss