Just need to vent...

Thank you guys for mentioning the traps. You all are 100% correct and for certain situations they are effective.
For home use they aren't effective

Should You Use Japanese Beetle Traps? Here’s What Experts Say (bhg.com)
“However, [the traps] can be a problem if you’re living in a residential area surrounded by neighbors with gardens and yards,” Smith says. “Studies show that Japanese beetle traps can lure these insects that are as far away as five miles. So, with the use of Japanese beetle traps, you might be bringing more of these pests into your backyard.”

This is what I experienced in our area. I have a mini orchard, garden, multiple berry plants in a somewhat residential setting and the traps pull in beetles to our yard from all neighboring areas - not desirable. We are one of the few people who don't have a lawn/chemical company service their yard and a natural lawn coupled with an organic garden, mini orchard and berry plantings make our yard a haven for pollinators , songbirds etc - and unfortunately Japanese beetles. I don't want to lure any more of these undesirable critters into our yards ecosystem with the traps. Even birds despise the Japanese Beetles and won't feed on them

 

I knew you didn't want the traps near the plants to protect.

 

You need to pay attention to what is up and downwind with the pheromone traps.

I put a carefully-timed dose of grub killer in the lawn about 7 years ago, followed by a few years of earthworm transplantation. I released a couple thousand european nightcrawlers into the soil to sort of take over the activity the grubs had been doing, but with better compatibility.

That worked great. No beetles, excellent soil health since.

Unfortunately the pest that hit us worst was the emerald ash borer. I've spent about $4k cleaning up after them since we got this house.

 

Killing the grubs while still in the soil is a great solution and one we use- but have a different method.

I am committed to organic measures as much as possible. Unfortunately grub killers kill much more that grubs. It sounds as if you already knew this by adding earthworms to replace the collateral carnage after using the grub killers.

I use beneficial nematodes to attack the Japanese beetle grubs

Nematodes for Grubs – When and How to Apply - LawnsBesty
Heterorhabditis bacteriophora (Hb) nematodes are the most effective against Japanese beetles, European chafers, and other grubs found in lawns. These cruiser nematodes burrow deep down in the soil as they hunt for pests. They also easily get into the body of the pest thus known for faster elimination of grubs.

Amazon.com : Bug Sales 50 Million Live Beneficial Nematodes - HB (Heterohabditis bacteriophora) : Patio, Lawn & Garden

In our area the humid southeast Japanese beetles thrive and have many other host yards than ours - because of our natural lawn, natural flower landscaping, organic garden, fruit tress etc our yard is a natural attractant and food source for these undesirable pests. When Japanese beetles find a food source, they don't keep it to themselves they send out scents/pheromones to let all their buddies know dinner is served.

 

We used the BTG stuff. It costs more, but it's just a protein derived from bacterium. No industrial pesticides or anything. Doesn't kill much more than grubs.

The downside of it is that you need to be a calendar ninja to apply it at exactly the right moment for your bugs in your soil. It will only work during a very tight window per year. I managed to nail it and have not had any need to repeat those measures.

It's harder to find than all the pesticide-based ones- those all say "season-long" because that's the selling point- you can use most any time.

 

Understand what you are saying about time sensitive - nematodes work best in early spring or sept - oct here. Any time other than those you are probably wasting your time with an application of them.

 

Circling back on this:
Check on the availability of a re-manned battery for your XP box.

I use deaf-mute XP boxes in the telecom biz and recently unearthed 2 c-2005 ish Dells in as-new condition - and I have discovered that batteries are still widely available for these boxes.

I'm tinkering with FT8/Winlink (Digital HF radio) for 2 scenarios:
Cheap > Portable. ( < $200 from the antenna to the keyboard) a goal nearly reached as a thought expirement.
Portable > Cheap. (more like $500-1000 owing to Lifepo4 and solar and a more ruggedized and less fiddly setup)

A free or nearly free Dell with a re-manned battery might not get you through a prolonged power outage but it might last long enough for you to get a genny started.

 

This isn't a political vent, but ...
Re; post #1768 & visiting missionaries (leaving this A.M.) after 40yrs living in war torn african countries .... they mention their observation that USA is imagined as the land of shangrila. From the abject poverty & religious fighting viewpoint - it's somewhat true. From USA prospective though .....
it's getting old - hearing our nation's power players drone on about;
end of democracy
end of democracy
end of democracy
we're really that ignorantly/frail?
.

 

Biden accused of refusing to get a test. Reality is he said in interview he doesn’t need a test he is tested every day by what he has to do. Didn’t refuse the way it is spun.
Biden camp accused of providing questions for him to answer to the woman who said positive things about him. Implying they train him for the answers ahead of time and the interview is “rigged.” Reality is they have done this for years, and they are suggesting questions to the interviewer who may use them or not use them. She accepted some and didn’t accept some. The campaign said they won’t suggest questions anymore.
Then there is the other one who gets away with everything in interviews, debates, and more. Still can’t answer why he did not protect our Capitol, his first obligation. He can’t answer the real reason. He can’t answer the real reason why he tried to have votes changed in Georgia on his command. This is exactly how democracy can end, especially with newly granted power from the Supreme Court.

 

... and the missionaries' most unusual items on the cuisine ... crickets, milk you have to scrape the flies aside, crocodile, camel.
May I never vent about restaurant fish being too dry, ever again.
.

 

These are old versions, right? What prevents you from continuing to use them on the old machine you bought them for?

I can see where they would lock you out fair & square for trying to use newer app versions, and it could be argued that there's a shady middle case where you're trying to use the old versions on a new computer or new OS, but as long as you keep them on the original windows xp/7 machine you ought to be fine forever.

 

iirc - some software looking for potential piracy & flags if you merely change any of the main components like processor, memory, main board ... maybe evev video.

 

Well, it sounds like all that changed was the operating system. From 32-bit windows to some flavor of windows 10, which of course includes all that nasty telemetry and icky things that enable Adobe to remotely shut down apps.

But I suppose that a firewall fix is appropriate- again, if this were still operating on the original windows xp or 7 OS that was in place during the original licensing, that would also be air-gapped from the internet by now, and not suffering any of these problems.

 

It gets weird when you want to freeze some of your software in time while actively updating other bits to the latest and greatest. You should expect some struggle, methinks.

...not saying it isn't worth trying.

 

I find GIMP works very nicely for Photoshoppy things, and Inkscape rather nicely for Illustratory things.

While there are lots of good options for viewing PDFs, I'm less sure what a person would go use as a direct Acrobat replacement for manipulating the things.

I don't do a whole lot of GUI manipulation of PDFs, really. When there's some manipulation that I want to do, often it can be expressed well as a script (like, move these pages around into the right imposition order to print and fold as a booklet) and I'll just do that with some lines of jshell driving the Apache PDFBox library. The library seems to work pretty well.

 

I agree that GIMP is a good option as free is good.

JeffD