The Messengers of Yesh Web Address

Friday, October 23, 2020

That's No Signal Booster

I have a poor cell phone signal indoors, depending on location. I ordered a signal booster from Amazon. The good news is that it works. The bad news is that it doesn't do what I was hoping it would. I can get three bars where before there was a dead spot. That's awesome. What's not awesome is that those three bars don't translate into Mbps. So, if the booster is in a spot that gets 1.5Mbps, despite the three bars the data rate is still 1.5Mbps. If it's in a spot with 5Mbps, I get four bars but still only 5Mbps. It's not really a booster. It's a range extender. That's saddening. Unless I can find the perfect signal spot outside, I may send it back. The perfect spot would be 4 bars with killer Mbps. I'll need to get up on the roof and see what happens but not today.

I got a Roku device on sale. It's pretty cool. I prop my cell phone in a window and turn on the Hotspot. It works great. It doesn't buffer or stutter. One drawback is that I can't get local channels through it because Verizon routes my phone through whatever city, usually LA or NY, making it look like I live there. Locast.org has free, streaming local channels for a variety of cities, but it forces a location check. Roku doesn't have a GPS locator. It defaults to my phone and fails. My local city is Atlanta. The only way I can get local channels is to use the Location feature on the phone. However, that only works for watching something on the phone, which is not my style unless I'm not home. It doesn't tell Locast that my Roku is in the Atlanta region.

Enter the Chromecast. According to tech support at Locast, I should be able to use a Chromecast device to mirror the phone screen on a television. For the price of a Chromecast, I'm supposed to be able to get free, streaming local channels. All of them. I ordered one. We'll see if it works. I wonder if I could send it back in the same box as the signal booster, if it didn't.

There's some great news on the cell phone front. Visible, my cell phone company, is getting 5G with speeds up to 200Mbps for no extra charge. There's no firm date, but it's supposed to be very soon. I ordered the signal booster right before finding that out. I may not need the booster at all, or it may not work with 5G. However, 5G is not available here yet, and I don't know when it will be. Plus, I don't have a 5G phone. With 5G I'd be able to convert my home network to that and have whole house internet without worrying about speed bottlenecks. Hypothetically, I could be on the computer and have both televisions streaming HD shows at the same time. I'll know more soon.

Have a great weekend.

Friday, October 16, 2020

Not Today

There's no blog today. I need to go help someone. Speaking of help, cats are good helpers. While a dog's laying on the porch, a cat follows you everywhere wanting to know what you're doing. They'll help with anything as long there's a chance they can be with you.

Have a great weekend.

Friday, October 9, 2020

Switching Over Logins

While I still have a grace period on my old email account with my old ISP, I've spent over ten hours this week switching my email logins from them to a new email address. It doesn't seem possible, but I've been putting at least two or three hours a night into it, not counting the core ones I already changed previously. I kept my passwords in a 5x8 notepad that was full. Part of them were in another notepad.

How does it take so long? Each page could have up to a dozen accounts on it. I didn't switch the ones I'm never going back to. Very few sites would let me automatically change my email address. Some of them I had to do a web search to find out how to change it. Apparently, you usually have to contact customer service for those. There were captchas. I had to click confirmation links in emails that could take minutes to arrive. Some of them never arrived, and I had to do them again. Even working on other logins while waiting for the mails only saved so  much time. I had some passwords I could barely read or couldn't tell what a letter/number was. I had to try those multiple times. When you have a full notepad, spending from 1 to 3 minutes or more on a single login makes it take forever.

I learned a trick. If a web site says a password is invalid, even if the browser autofills it, that seems to mean they've deleted the account, though it's possible it's just deactivated. When I "restored" one of those passwords, I'd get a message thanking me for registering with the site. /facepalm It was a trick to get me to register. After seeing a few of those, I stopped doing that. If it's so old they can't remember me, I don't use them enough to make it worth the trouble of jumping through their hoops.

The worst offender was Google. I have an old YouTube channel from before Google bought YouTube that I wanted to delete. When I tried to log in, I was redirected to my "Google Account", which I had a separate login for with the same name. It wouldn't take my password. It turned out the YouTube password worked instead(Why?), but I had to jump through hoops because my device was unrecognized. LIE. The account was old enough that I couldn't pass the phone number challenge because I have a new number. As an alternative, I tried the Where do You Live challenge. I failed that, too. It turned out that, even though I was using my YouTube password instead of my Google Account password, they wanted they Where Do You Live answer from my Google account. Makes no sense. Once I figured that out, I couldn't tell if my where I live answer had a space in it or not. For security reasons, I didn't use my real city location. It didn't have a space. Finally, I had it all figured out! I started over. Again. They said I'd tried too many times, and wouldn't let me try again. I still haven't gotten it to work. I'm giving them 24 hours to reset it. It makes me want to cancel every Google account I have and use a different solution. I guess my migration away from them has begun. I already never log in to any site with my Google account. For security reasons, I have individual logins for everything. If you use Google to log into sites and you lose your phone, you're hosed.

As a side note on putting personal information in challenge questions, I never use real data. I don't tell them my first car or where I went to elementary school or any of that. Companies sell or share that information. I make up something unique that makes no sense. A few years back, Yahoo mail got hacked, and my challenge questions for multiple accounts were stolen along with the my passwords. Since I used fake information, the hackers couldn't use any of it to hack any of my other accounts, including my ISP account/mail account. It's an extra step, but it was a life saver when I needed it. None of the other companies I use that have been hacked has come back to haunt me either.

Have a great weekend.

Friday, October 2, 2020

Sukkot, High Rapture Watch

Rosh Hashana is the highest Rapture watch festival, but Yom Kippur and Sukkot can't be ruled out. Rosh Hashana lines up very nicely since it's the trumpet feast and is the feast of which no man knew the day or hour in Biblical times. It has an additional small list of other alignments that I won't go into now. It came and went with no Rapture this year as did Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur and Sukkot don't line up as neatly, though each day has commonalities with the Rapture. I'll skip Yom Kippur since it's over.

Sukkot(or Succot) is called the Feast of Tabernacles or the Feast of Booths in Christianity. In Judaism it's celebrated for seven days by living in a booth and has associated ritual observances. That doesn't seem very Rapturish, but one of the minor names for Sukkot is the Feast of Ingathering and was a time to celebrate the firstfruits of the wheat harvest and the ingathering of the harvest at the end of summer. The Rapture is the ingathering of the saints at the end of the church age. Since Sukkot lasts seven days, the Rapture could fall on any day, and no man would know the day or hour.

As noted in this blog, if Matthew 24:32-34 and Psalm 90:10 are consistent with each other and with other scriptures, the Tribulation will begin on or during the week of November 9, 2020. Having the Rapture this late would seem to be cutting it close, but there's still plenty of time left to get a covenant in place to confirm. Apparently, the Abraham Accords is that covenant, so maybe it's already in place and only needs to be signed by the many and then confirmed.

The Rapture doesn't have to fall on a feast day. It could be any time. However, the spring feasts are already fulfilled. The fall ones have yet to be fulfilled. If the Rapture falls on a fall feast, it would be a logical way of fulfilling one. If it's Sukkot, it would fulfill the ingathering part for sure, if not the whole feast.

So, what if the Tribulation doesn't begin this year? At the least it would mean the New Testament and the Old Testament are not consistent with each other and open the possibility of two messiahs, a suffering servant and a conquering king. It could also mean there's a translation error at play. It could also mean every gospel that mentions the prophecy of the fig tree is corrupted. I could also mean, gulp, that Christianity is false. Pagans would have a field day. The inconsistency in scripture would extend beyond the two passages mentioned above. It would go into the parables in the gospels, into the book of Revelation, etc. If the Tribulation doesn't begin this year, we would have a huge, theological mess on our hands. It's easier to believe that scripture is as consistent as it's always been and that the appearance of the Antichrist is very close at hand.

Have a great weekend.