Mostly Harmless

We have ways to make you Tock

Dateline: Roseville. My car is on its last legs. Engine problems. Bite me.

It was bad enough when I whacked a curb a month ago and gave it a permanent alignment problem. Nice for the resale value, I presume, but I could live with that. Also nice is the slow leak in the A/C which requires a yearly $80 recharge, I can live with that.

Now it’s burning oil, at an alarming rate, and has killed yet another catalytic converter. So… $500 to fix one of the CCs and _maybe_ a $2,000 valve job. Or worse. Potentially better (valve guides). It’ll cost hundreds to find out, I think. My mechanic did say there may be a point when I might want to consider “walking away” from the car, since I may end up paying thousands of dollars to fix a car worth thousands of dollars.

Update: Used engines are cheap. Rebuilt, not so much. Cheap means $900 – $1600. I could get an engine with 45k miles on it for $1,500. For $900 I’d get an engine that’s due for the 90k maintenance. I’m liking the idea of having an engine with 70k fewer miles on it.

My mechanic was figuring $4,500 for a rebuilt engine. At that point you’re spending the trade-in value of the car to make it worth… the trade-in value of the car. (One place I found on the ‘net won’t rebuild those engines ‘cuz the walls are too thin, so I don’t think rebuilt is an option anyway.)

According to Kelley Blue Book the mileage difference between 45k and 115k gets you a $1,300 improvement in resale value. The mileage diff. between 0k (e.g., rebuilt engine) and 115k gets you… a $1,300 improvement in resale value. I suppose it’s topping out the “low-mileage” parameter in there somewhere. The whole car doesn’t magically become 70k miles newer, of course, but one could argue that the lower mileage engine adds a lot of life to the car (esp. considering it’s F*ing dying currently).

So, the Plan o’ Several Hours Ago was “buy a new, used car this weekend.”

The Plan o’ The Moment is “used engine + new cat + leisurely investigate getting a newer car sometime in the future.” But I’m still going to check out ye old WRXeses this weekend.

(I tweaked the site, ever so slightly. Too lazy to put in a rotator script today though.)

Also…

Roseville is getting an Apple Store. Twin Cities’ third Apple store

I wonder what CompUSA thinks about that, since they’re right across the street from Rosedale. (I’m guessing they’re probably not too broken up about it, actually, judging by the lack of traffic in the Mac section.)

wireless-bandwagon-department

The nasty gram from Comcast has compelled me to finally get an actual hardware router/firewall. Might as well get WiFi while I’m at it, I thought. Might as well get 802.11g — and judging by this thread at Slashdot I’m especially glad I didn’t give Comcast any money for their spy-router.

The nasty gram went something like this: “we see that you may be using more than one network device with your cable modem…” and “get your own router or buy one from us.” Got my own, thank you very much. At least they only really care about how many IP addresses I’m hogging. (I guess I don’t download enough pr0n to get the “you’re sucking (no pun intended) too much bandwidth” letter.)

In the olden days, 4-5 years ago, they would only let one device get a DHCP address anyway. Then one day I noticed that my laptop grabbed an address which meant I didn’t need to route through my other Mac anymore. How convenient. DHCP worked for my TiVo when I put it online too, and that was over a year ago. So now they’re clamping down on the extra addresses people are using — which they wouldn’t have been able to use in the first place if Comcast hadn’t silently(?) removed the limitation. I’d like to thank ‘em for the “free” ride though because I have a much cooler wireless setup now than what I would have gotten a year ago.

I got this 802.11g router and an AirPort Extreme card at Amazon. Ordered them Monday morning and had ‘em Wednesday morning. Wednesday night it was all about the WiFi! Woot!

Now that I have an AirPort card I realize that I could have probably avoided the cost of the router altogether by just using the neighbor’s network, but I’m not getting a very good signal *cough*cantenna*cough* and I’d have to go through the inconvenience of cracking their WEP key — the inconvenient part is that the numerous WEP cracking utilities don’t work with my wireless card. The cracking itself is fairly straightforward, from what I’ve read.

Fun with wireless security! Turns out that most of the security features can be gotten around with Not Much Effort. First, we have “hiding the SSID.” That just means the router doesn’t blatantly advertise its presence with a large neon sign that says “free bandwidth.” My neighbor didn’t get that memo so I can see his network but he can’t see mine. Unfortunately the SSID is included in every packet so anyone sniffing the network is going to know what it is. It is nice to not have a big neon sign though.

Secondly we have WEP. Wired Equivalent Privacy. Isn’t. Since it uses a static key for (a) everyone, and (b) everything, it can be busted wide open in a matter of hours without any fuss whatsoever. You can use dynamic keys with WEP but that only adds a moderate level of difficulty to the cracking, apparently. It’s kinda like putting a padlock on your tool shed — it keeps the honest people out.

Next, we’ve got MAC address control, wherein you tell your router to only let known devices connect to the network. So even if someone knows your SSID and your key they still won’t get in. The problem here is that the sniffers can determine a legitimate MAC address and spoof it by setting their wireless card to that address. Still, I’m leaving that turned on. No need to make it easy for the crackers.

Finally(?) there’s WPA. Wireless Protected Access. Is. It’s holding the fort until 802.11i is finalized and you need to buy a new wireless router because of the beefier encryption requirements. WPA fixes all the problems with WEP, or so they say. Cryptographically strong and all that rot, using Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (cool!) and Michael (MIC – message integrity check) to make your WiFi network safe for a better tomorrow. WPA gives you per-session, per-packet encryption instead of that one static key that WEP uses. The biggest potential problem is using a weak password. WPA can be run with a pre-shared key for SOHO users, or with a RADIUS server back-end for enterprise class security. The pre-shared key in WPA is much more secure than a pre-shared WEP key because of the better encryption in WPA. Having an authentication server dynamically allocating encryption keys is even better. I think that’s the best you can hope for until 802.11i comes out, short of building a Faraday cage, of course.

(I’m currently compiling a RADIUS server for my own amusement. The amusement is that I never have the right libraries for these sorts of things and I have to go schlepping around for them.)

In the meantime I’m enjoying watching all the infected PCs bounce off my firewall. Perhaps later I’ll go war-walking around the apartment building, that should be entertaining, and the next time I’m in the mall parking lot I’ll see if I get a signal from Old Chicago or Buffalo Wild Wings, they’re both supposed to have WiFi.