I recorded three minutes of the Nut House 5 sugar glider cage barking after a storm passed over. It is just the single cage and I believe you can hear four of them in this segment.


/images/terrys/20090427_Gliders_Barking_Nuthouse.mp3

I was washing cages the other day and noticed that my newest cage had a problem. The screw and nut that hinge the bottom of the cage door had worked themselves very loose. As a matter of fact, I could just pull out on the door and it came off.

So, if you have one of the cage types that have screw-hinge doors, be sure to check on them once in awhile and make sure they are tight against the nut. It might not even hurt to add in two small washers on the bottom to act as a low-friction plate so that the nut wont be working loose.

It is going to be freezing tonight and I am going to keep Robin outside. To prepare, I just reworked her foam nestbox a bit with the hopes of the heating pad being more effective. I have a metal radiant barrier in there and I have had the heating pad on the wall so as to warm up the space and try to avoid overheating the animal. That only works so well against the cold, so I have decided to place the pad on the metal sheeting right below where she will nest so that the heat can rise up right to her body. She can bury herself under blankets and sit right on top of the heating pad if she wants to. I did relocate the thermostat a few inches above that area so that it can turn off the system when it gets too warm. I doubt it will shut off at all tonight. The pad only draws 8 watts. If you can imagine an 8 watt incandescent light bulb; well, it would give off very little heat or light, and this pad is no different. It is warming and pretty safe for her and should do the trick.



The pad is a Zoo Med Repti Therm 6"x8" flat nichrome heating pad controlled by a Repti Temp thermostat with probe to turn it off which does the job well.

I fastened the pad and the power wire using metal hvac tape. Since I have the thermostat controller to protect from overheating, I might get the 8x12 version next time if it fits just to give an extra umph to the warming.

You can watch Robin on her webcam , and I am monitoring the box temperature with a wireless probe. I havent been able to figure out how to get it to display on the video feed yet.

Today I moved Robin and her cage back outside. The weather has been really nice so I figured that it is time. I used some spare rotting wood to make her somewhat of a roof to provide a little more shelter from the sun and rain. The trees do the job pretty good already though. She still has her warming nestbox if it gets chilly but I imagine that she will spend most of her time up high in the pouches swinging in the breeze.

I still have her webcams working but I need to find a good way to weatherproof the electrical center while still giving it ventilation.

I had her out walking around the yard today and then watched while she dug around in the grass and grabbed something into her mouth. Turned out to be a lizard which gave her quite a smile after chomping on it.

Ice is finally on the ground this season in Dallas Texas! Because of this, schools all over have closed at noon, businesses are shutting down, chaos is abound... The number of vehicle accidents has already spiked and the death toll from this day is expected to be very high.

There are a lot of new exploits out there and one in particular is causing some havoc. It got me just last night. It is called a DNS Hijack or Changer. The trojan installs simply from you visiting a malicious web site, simple as that. I was browsing web administrator sites and blogs last night and got infected. Once infected, it changes your dns settings to a privately controlled and exploited server which intercepts all of your dns requests and proxies them and sends you to fake web sites. The malicious dns server often acts as a proxy and will exchange between you and the real website you are trying to go to and it will use that to collect your passwords and so forth and so on. Also, this system is used to give you a ton of extra popup ads. So if you get a lot of popups, you are probably infected. This is how I realized I was infected as all of my old sites suddenly had popups including sugarglider.com and my browsing became slower too as it had to wait for the proxy dns server to process. From what I have seen, odds are that most of you reading this are infected with at least some ADWare and maybe something worse like this.

What you can do?

First thing, check to see if you have the dns exploit. Open a command prompt and type ipconfig /all. Look for the DNS servers and see if they are what they should be. I didnt write mine down, but I believe the malicious ones on my system began with 238.xxx.xxx.xxx. As an Internet user, you should know what your DNS servers should be for your ISP. Odds are they will be automatic and not manually set which is good.

There are a lot of tools out there to use to search and clean your system. There are almost none that I trust. If you are surfing and get a popup ad that suggests you are infected with something, it's just an ad, it's a lie, and they WANT you to click on it to load up their cruddy trojan crud, so never ever do that.

One tool that I trust is called MalwareBytes Anti-Malware . I recommend that you download, install, update and then run this tool on your machine.

After it detects and cleans off the 200+ things that most of you are probably infected with, you need to check your DNS settings on your machine and make sure that they are what they are supposed to be. This program will remove the exploit, but it will not correct the DNS entries; that has to be done manually by you. Most of you should be set to automatic DNS via DHCP.

So after all of this, you really need to reboot and then hit F8 and select boot into safe mode WITHOUT networking and run the scan again. This may take much much longer this time, so do it at night or when you will be away. In safe mode, fewer things are running and the software can remove more exploits.

I have found that anti-virus softwares these days arent managing to be useful anymore. Mcafee, Norton, ... They all suck, seriously. It may well be worth paying the fee for the professional version of this program to have the realtime protection.

So after a few months of having no webcams online, I got them all back up and running. There are three sugar glider nestcams and then my opossum nestcam and then whatever else I am experimenting with.

http://www.sugarglider.com/webcam/

I realized that these pages were not showing up at all in search engines so I created a better landing page that they can follow. So I hope this will let more people know that I have these cameras up and running because it can be neat to watch.

As I get more experience with this and locate better cameras, I hope the quality gets better. For the geeks out there, I am running a reverse proxy server as a Vmware guest OS and am using it to map all of the internal camera servers and whatnot through a single external ip address on port 80. Each camera stream shows up as a NAME.jpg from http port 80 and then the javscript refreshes it on the page. Firewalls all over allow this where they do not normally allow video streaming.

I also have a few robotic cameras and can also map the remote control function through the reverse proxy service. I'll get one added to the public webcam list here one of these days.

The cameras I am typically using are these enclosed weatherproof bullet cams from China.



I like the glass cover on the front as it keeps curious gliders from chewing the lens which I have had a lot of in the past with other cameras. I have also had the zoo critters chew the heck out of the camera cables, so I have devised something to attempt to prevent that from now on. I have enclosed the camera itself in the end of a pvc fitting and then routed the cable through pvc pipe and fittings to the side of the cage. Then I have the cable itself wrapped in metal tape hoping that they will not find it fun to chew on. We shall see how that endures. One benefit of the pvc setup is that I can now easily adjust the camera height and position inside of the box to get the best view.

With three glider colonies and an opossum in a super large and heavy double cage, I pretty much have five large cages to clean so it can take some time.

I used this opportunity to also install square mesh flooring in the remaining two glider cages. The smaller mesh gives the animals more to rest onto so they might actually be able to open their feet while on the cage floor instead of having to grab a tiny bar for stability.

Stock cage floor grate


Modified cage floor grate


You can see the difference between the floor and the walls.


Three squeaky clean glider tower cages.



The smaller mesh is also a happy thing for the larger opossum that I keep. You can see the difference the mesh makes on the floor of her cage from the left and right sides in this photo. She goes to the 1" right side to poop and the left is where she eats and hangs out if not up high on the branches or in her nest.



If you are watching at the right times, you can actually see Robin emerge from her comfy heated nestbox to come out to the cage floor to do what she does.

/>Opossum Cage Floor Webcam
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I cleaned out the mealworms today. My process is to filter all of the worms from the frass and then dump them all into my old beetle drawer and then create a new clean drawer to move all the beetles into. So right now on webcam my beetle drawer looks super clean and empty but that will change quickly.

Just Cleaned


LIVE BEETLE DRAWER CAM


I'd like to find some better way to manage my mealworm farm. For instance, I can let the beetles hatch with the worms, they can mill around and feed and mate, but then they climb a ladder to go up into the hatchery to lay eggs. As they hatch up there, the small worms will fall through the mesh grate and into their feeding ground. The goal is to separate the hatchery from the feeding area to prevent worms from going up to the eggs so they cannot eat them.

I'll never build this but I should.

It has been awhile since I have had any of my webcams running. During the Summer I was doing my best to save energy so I disconnected anything not necessary to trend my power usage and find out how I can save money.

I have finally started hooking up webcam servers again. Robin now has two cams in her cage which is still parked out in the garage for the Winter.

If you can see the images below, it means that the cameras are on and the images are live and clickable.





Being out in the garage, there is no ethernet available for the camera servers. So I modified an old Linksys wifi/router/hub box with a hacked firmware to turn it into a wireless bridge and hub. So that gives me an easy four ports out there and I am using two for the cams.

   

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kazko
Gender: Male
Occupation:computer geek
Member since: Jan 24, 1997
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My Bio
NUTHOUSE (3) Pican 4/30/2002, died 6/02/2010 Buddy 5/01/2006 Hazel 2/01/2007, rehomed 11/28/2011 Maya 4/25/2007 Pili 4/25/2007 MISFITS (3) Big Guy 9/23/2003, died 1/29/2014 Lil Guy 9/23/2003, died 5/13/2015 Hunter 4/19/2006, died 3/23/2014 JP 8/12/2006 Shikoni 2004 Kioko 2003 Washi 2003, died 5/27/2014 SUGARSHACK (3) Chico 1/15/2006, died 9/14/2011 Cookie 10/15/2005 Kimmie 10/15/2005 Lucky 5/25/2007 Spritz 8/24/2007, died 7/06/2011 Ginger 8/24/2007, died 12/16/2012 Rock 9/09/2007, died 3/23/2013 Crystal 9/09/2007, died 11/01/2012

   

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