My laptop is no longer my own. A nefarious intelligence has taken control, and there’s nothing I’ve been able to do. Linux has been no protection. Going offline has been no help. The sentience masterminding the takeover has been relentlous.<\/p>\n
So far I’ve not been stopped from working. It’s been a symbiotic relationship. I fear however an imminent shutdown, a short circuit. <\/p>\n
The intelligence I speak of is not some evil cracker from Eastern Europe. Nor some software from Redmond. It’s a horde of black ants who’ve decided to live inside my laptop. <\/p>\n
Our house has been invaded by these ants for the first time this year. The African ant is large, and rarely comes inside. The Argentine ant, until now the most common ant in our household, only enters in summer, when the drought forces them out to find water. However, a new kind of ant is now taking over the house in winter, nesting under my TV aerial, inside a CD case, and now inside my laptop.<\/p>\n
I was unaware of the full extent of the invasion until I arrived in Johannesburg. I’d flown up with my laptop on Wednesday afternoon, and on Saturday morning settled down to do some work. I’d noticed the odd ant surfacing, and realised I had a problem, but assumed it was the odd straggler. I left a glass of water next the laptop while I went away for 5 minutes. Upon my return there were hundreds, thousands of ants streaming out of the laptop towards the water. Hundreds had drowned.<\/p>\n
I grabbed the laptop, did some frantic blowing and wiping, and the problem seemed over. I’d assumed the ants were dying of thirst, and that keeping my laptop sealed for a few more days would finish off the rest. <\/p>\n
Early this morning as I was preparing to return to Cape Town, I opened my laptop case, intending to write a brief summary of the invasion. There were thousands of ants again. I’ve done some more blowing and wiping, and once again I have to assume the ants were on their last legs, in a frenzied search for food and water. We’ll see what happens when I get back to Cape Town though – the invaders seem too hardy for that.<\/p>\n
Anyone have any experience in de-infesting a laptop? <\/p>\n
UPDATE 27\/6: It seems since ants navigate by smell, a large number of strong-smelling spices can help. I’ve tried cinnamon, and it works very well in keeping the ants away (not killing them). It smells nice too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My laptop is no longer my own. A nefarious intelligence has taken control, and there’s nothing I’ve been able to do. Linux has been no protection. Going offline has been no help. The sentience masterminding the takeover has been relentlous. So far I’ve not been stopped from working. It’s been a symbiotic relationship. I fear… Continue reading My laptop has been taken over<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-water-personal","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}