You shall not enter without the right keys..

Sigh, all I wanted to do this morning was a little 3d printing. Instead I found myself dealing with a overzealous Windows bouncer and a keyboard that's suddenly started hallucinating badly. 

Wait...Garage Intelligence is directly connected to my 3D Printer?

No that's not the case. To save myself the round trip of slicing something to 3d print downstairs and then having to retrieve the special USB micro SD adapter time and time again, I've found it much easier just to save the sliced g-code file to Google Drive, then access it downstairs via G.I when ready. 

The problems occurred when I turned on the downstairs machine..

AS FOR THE PRINT ITSELF

I'm currently sketching up a little case for a VHM-314 Bluetooth module for my car. To catch you up to speed last year a phone update knocked out the streaming from my Samsung to my Mazda for whatever reason. It's since had a number of updates however none have fixed anything and so I resorted to trying something else now, namely a Bluetooth module that turned out to be an absolute bargain and very successful mini fix. You can click here to see it all put together. 

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Because the module is located in the center console now, I'm whipping up a quick case to velcro to one side to tidy it up and keep it out of harms way. Well I will, once I get Garage Intelligence to wake up again.

You shall not pass!

It's been a while since I last fired up the machine downstairs, doing a lot of testing and the like upstairs. Obviously it's been too long because it flat out refused to let me in. Not matter how many times I tried the password I couldn't get past the gatekeeper and since that's pretty much the only way in, the only way around it was the nuke it and start all over again...oh goodie. 

(Annoying after doing all this I read up in the documentation that comes with AtomOS that by default the password is just 'User' like the login and not 'user' without a capital U. While I can't be sure, I may have continually missed the U here and that's all the issue was..) 

Booo, let me in!

On a positive note I do have my Rufus built USB stick still handy. And because my Windows drive is so small, all that I'm going over with a fresh install is pretty much the old setup. 

On a negative note, that means loading in all the drivers including the wifi and GPU, software and anything else from last time all over again. What joy on a Sunday morning!

Thankfully a small ISO installing itself onto a small SD really doesn't take long nowadays. Gone are the days where you could go to lunch, come back and it'd still be busy installing things. A few minutes later I had the bare bones system up and running again. Now it was just the case of putting back everything else.

Good news though - a fair bit of the previous installs were scattered about the workshop on various USB sticks and also lurking on the other drives. How thrilled was I when I unearthed my WIFI drivers first go?

Only when the WiFi was up and running and I tried to enter the password did I discover that something else had suddenly woken up on the wrong side of the bed this morning..

The number 8 might be lucky in some places but not in my workshop

I couldn't see it when entering my password in for the upstairs WiFi but it certainly showed up when I used Notepad to see what I was typing. All of a sudden when I typed an H, it came out as H8. Every single time. My keyboard suddenly had it's H8 (H-Eight) on and no amount of unplugging and shaking the thing to get stuff out of it was helping. I turned to Google and it basically told me it might be cooked. 

Going with it's first tip I tried another spare keyboard that wasn't doing much and wouldn't you know it? Worked just fine. H is H, 8 is 8 and never shall the two ever meet with a single keystroke. 

Sadly this means my first ever gaming keyboard has now moved from the garage to the bin. No more Fallout 3, Civ IV or typing away to work out why Ollama and AnythingLLM are no longer talking to each other. Still it had a good (hard) life!

Today's adventure isn't all bad news

If anything it's help me make the decision that while the first SSD is the operating system as it's always been, the 2nd SSD will be for hosting a couple of LM programs but also include a folder of software I might need again if the first issue keeps happening (always have backups kids!) The third HDD will be for models and anything else that's going to take up a large amount of space in the project. 

Right, now that's sorted - back to the printing!