Geek
The Data Behind The Screens.
Read this. You can also download it here (right-click and save on those underlined words) and read it in a better PDF browser than apparently what I have on my blog.
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Holey.
I don’t know what the technology is behind these menu boards at the local McDonald’s, but the holes in the display thing has been going on since we moved to Tucson nearly four years ago.
It’s so weird.
Old School.
I am writing this blog entry on the newest addition to my geek space. Today’s addition is a brand new Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB RAM.
This little computer is amazing.
In the background of the window I’m using to write this entry, I have an instance of Firefox showing my local weather radar. I have access to all my files through Dropbox and the household NAS (Network Attached Storage) unit. I can get to my Macs. I can get to my other Linux machines.
All using a computer the size of a deck of a cards.
The software I’m using, as pictured in the screen shot above, is called WordGrinder. It’s an old school word processor; the type of which was found back in my young geek days when I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 1980s. I opt to use a font that mimics the font on my old 12-inch CRT monitor from back in the day. WordGrinder is free and is perfect for those looking for an old school word processing experience. Better yet, it is the perfect way to force focus while writing, as there’s no other distractions going on. I’m using an application dedicated for writing and it throws my geeky brain chemistry into warp speed.
Little things like this is why I love technology.
Crowdstrike.
In case you haven’t heard, we are experiencing what some have termed as “the worst global Internet outage in history”. It’s because of Crowdstrike, a security company used by many, many companies. They sent out a security patch to systems running Microsoft Windows yesterday, and that patch had issues. Computers that applied this patch then crash and can’t be restarted without removing said patch. The kicker is, getting the computer to a state where the patch can be removed is tricky, especially if the computer is not locally accessible by someone that knows how to do this sort of thing.
And because of this, airports and airlines and DMVs and banks and hospitals and telecoms and all sorts of businesses that run Microsoft Windows and use Crowdstrike to keep their systems secure and hurting bad today.
Apple devices (Macs, iPhones, iPads, etc) and Linux computers are not locally affected by this outage, but systems they access could be affected. Microsoft based computers on their own (not managed by Crowdstrike) are also not affected. I’m 99% sure your gaming computer is fine.
We have been dealing with Crowdstrike all day at work today and it looks like the fun and frivolity is going to continue into the weekend. Luckily, the applications my team at work supports all run on Linux based servers, outside of two legacy applications we inherited from another group during a recent re-organization at work.
I’m surprised a patch from a prominent security company made it into the wild with such a defect. Usually these things are caught well before they’re released to the public. As of this writing, Crowdstrike’s stock price is down over 11%. I’m a little surprised by that; I thought it’d be much more.
Mechanics.
This blog is approaching 23 years old. Having started out as HTML pages built from scratch, then moved to Movable Type, and then moved again to WordPress, I think it’s been living on the same WordPress platform for 18 years or so.
WordPress has changed a lot over the nearly two decades I’ve been using it.
I’m not completely satisfied with my WordPress experience. There’s a lot of elements that just get in my way. But it does offer a fairly “low friction” experience when compared to some other workflows. I just want an editor where I can easily post media, write a bunch of words, and basically hit “Print”. WordPress still affords me that opportunity, albeit a bit slower than it did in the past. There’s a lot of cruft in the platform.
I’ve been tinkering with the idea of moving something a little less resource intensive, but moving 22+ years of blog posts to a new platform is an extremely daunting task. A good chunk of my life is documented in this blog thingee, missing photos notwithstanding, and I don’t want to lose the words I have written over the years. I also don’t want to lose the comments of others. Even though blogs are not really a “thing” anymore, I do get comments once in a while and they make me smile.
So while I tinker with the idea of moving the whole shebang to another platform, I probably will end up just changing the appearance and tweaking under the hood to make things run a little better and a little faster.
If you see me swinging around wallpapers and chandeliers in here, you know when the dust settles I’ve done everything I can to keep the history alive.
Watch.
As you can tell by the posts here on this ancient bloggy thing, I’ve been making a lot of videos lately. I enjoy sharing these videos with folks via YouTube and then subsequently posting these videos through the various social media outlets. I’m not in it to make money; it’s an art endeavor.
Apparently the YouTube algorithm, which makes or breaks influencers on a daily basis, doesn’t like my cavalier, “I’m not going to shock you with my thumbnail” approach. Either that or folks just don’t care for videos of a 55 year old man climbing mountains and popping in and out of frames like Paul Lynde on “Bewitched”. Though, I tend to think of my witchcraft presentations to be more along the lines of Maurice Evans on the series.
I’m having fun and that’s first and foremost on my priority list. I’d really like to make other people smile or at least forget about their worries for some moments with my “art”. If you know someone that’d be interested, feel free to share.
Portal.
As I get older, I’ve been finding it harder to focus on tasks. I’ve never been one for “deep focus” if the activity is not on my checklist of intense interests. Unfortunately, work tends to not be on that list.
In the past I have listened to music to try to eliminate distractions around me. This generally works, but over the past few years I’ve noticed that anything with lyrics in the music tends to be a distraction as well. I blame this on listening intently to the words, a habit learned since becoming a pilot, where I’m always listening to my call sign from Air Traffic Control.
There’s a part of me that wonders if this increased struggle with maintaining focus at work has something to do with my couple of rounds of COVID since 2020. I know most of the world believes COVID was a hit ‘n run sort of thing, where we got vaccinated, and if we feel recovered from it we were just as we were before we contracted it. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I know that I’ve never been able to shake off a certain amount of brain fog since my experiences of having COVID.
I have found that listening to soundscapes like thunderstorms or even brown noise has done wonders for my focus at work. Luckily, I’m in a position that lets me enjoy such a thing. I alternate between my Apple AirPod Pros and my Bose noise canceling over-the-ear headphones.
Today I discovered an app, via the Apple Store Story page, called Portal (link to the Apple App store). A beautifully designed app, not only is it a joy to use, but it provides gorgeous imagery to go along with the amazing soundscapes. Here I am enjoying the sights and sounds of a waterfall in Iceland.
At $49.99/year (or $250 for a lifetime) it’s a bit on the pricey side. I just started the seven day free trial today. So far in the past hour I’ve knocked out more work than I’ve knocked it in the previous three.
Peace of mind and feeling grounded through better focus might be worth that price of admission.
Recall.
While I was out on the Great Plains chasing storms, I apparently missed Microsoft’s announcement of their latest ventures. While I don’t have a lot of Microsoft in my life, outside of work where it’s mandatory, I still like to keep tabs on what’s going on with the company. And of course, since it’s 2024 and everyone has discovered that cryptocurrency isn’t what it was cracked up to be, Microsoft is joining the chorus of screamers going all in on “A.I.”. They’re doing this with their new line of PCs, called Microsoft Copilot+PC, and a new feature to Windows 11 called “Microsoft Recall”.
First of all, I don’t really need to meet the marketing genius that came up with the term “Copilot+PC”. Talk about unsexy and clunky. But whatever, it’s Microsoft, not Apple coming out with this new line of computers so my expectations are lower.
But let’s talk about Microsoft Recall. As I understand it, Microsoft Recall is a nifty new feature in Windows 11 that will take a screenshot of whatever you’re doing every three seconds and throw it into a database on your device and keep it there for three months. Looking at the news? Captured. Look at photos of your last vacation? Snapped. Look at porn? Gotcha. Look at your bank statement? Grabbed. It’s all there in the new Microsoft Recall database that lives on your computer so that Copilot, Microsoft’s version of “A.I.”, can go back and tell you where you stored your photo since you can’t remember where you stored it.
First of all, if you don’t know where you’re storing things on your computer, and secondly, if the existing Microsoft search can’t find it, perhaps you need to reexamine your computer use methods. A good chunk of the people I know using Microsoft products tend to just throw everything on the desktop anyway, so if it’s not there it’s probably not important.
Can we talk about what a privacy nightmare Microsoft Recall can pan out to be? Yes, the database is stored locally on your computer and for all intents and purposes, your data on your computer should be encrypted. Windows 11 offers this right out of the gate. But imagine if someone grabbed your P@ssw0rd! Not only do they now have access to the here and now, they also have access to screen shots grabbed every three seconds for the past three months.
What the heck.
Now, not to be too shiny in my tin-foil hat, but Microsoft isn’t exactly know for their strong privacy practices. Microsoft is rapidly introducing ads of all persuasions into their products, and how long will it be before the magic “A.I.” takes a gander at those every-three-seconds-for-the-past-three-months screenshots and determines what’s your likes, dislikes, etc. are and starts fashioning ads after those tastes? I keep thinking back to an old podcast featuring a prominent tech guru of the time (we’ll call her Gina Patrani), where the speaker was touting the wonders of the just released Gmail. “I don’t mind a few ads based on keywords from my email if it let’s me have this fantastic new email service for free.”
What that little approach turned Google, heck the entire tech sector, into today is a whole ‘nuther ball of chaos we’ll discuss when I’ve had a few drinks at breakfast.
There is no way that Microsoft is going to let that gold mine of three months of data just sit on your computer and not get mined for the revenue generation potential it promises. Corporations don’t work that way and with every corporation shimmying and needling every scrap of user data possible to turn it into a revenue stream, anyone with any sort of understanding on how the world works will agree with me.
I can’t imagine how this new feature, one that you must opt out of because it’s on by default, will be received by lawyers and doctors and bankers and stock brokers and the like. As mentioned earlier, my workplace has an unnatural love for all things Microsoft, but I can’t imagine a screenshot every three seconds and stored for every three months would be received well when it comes to the company’s proprietary secrets. Though, admittedly, I bet the folks that monitor employee productivity will find it a hoot and a half; it’s one less thing they have to install to monitor the my computer.
I’ve been using computers for a very long time. I’ve been writing software for a very long time. I’ve been online in some fashion for nearly 40 years. In the interest of your personal technological safety, run, do not walk as far away from these new PCs as possible. Breathe as much life out of your existing equipment, switch to something else (Linux, Apple, etc), or hope with the rest of the world that this idiocy does not see the light of day.
And as a quick side note, no government, and especially no government in the U.S., is going to step in to stop these sort of advancements from happening. There’s way too much lobbying and other ways for elected officials to benefit from these sorts of “A.I.” ventures.
I have been clamoring for years for our technology to be moving forward again. Trust me, this ain’t it.
Her.
OpenAI, the company that brought ChatGPT to the masses, had a big spring event yesterday. It was their opportunity to show the latest technology the company is bringing to the masses. It didn’t have the polish of an Apple presentation but I still found it to be an interesting thing to watch.
In yesterday’s presentation, OpenAI introduced us to their latest advancements in ChatGPT. It has been dubbed “ChatGPT-4o”. While the “o” looks like the zero on a 1970 Sharp Microcompet calculator, it’s actually pronounced “o”. The “o” stands for Omni.
The presenters went on to share all the new things these LLMs, or Large Language Models, can do. This involves being able to interact with users via video and speech, as well as the default voice sounding a lot like Scarlett Johansson in the movie “Her”.
And that’s not where the similarities to Samantha in “Her” end. There were also many demos where two AIs were talking to each other, singing with each other, and exhibiting other activities that has normally been relegated to the likes of Sci-Fi movies.
I have complained for the past decade that it seems like technology advances have been iterative. Apple’s Vision Pro headset, revealed earlier this year, had promise of technology that would take us to the next step, but from what I’m seeing in various tech circles, it hasn’t really taken off.
We all know that some fear “Artificial Intelligence” taking over the world. These AIs, even in their latest incarnations, are still very much Large Language Models, being quite clever in the presentation of human derived knowledge, logic, and thought processes. But hearing them interact with one another immediately made me realize that the phrase, “I’ll have my people talk to your people”, is going to become much more commonplace.
Those humans that work in call centers might have a reason to be concerned about the longevity of their careers. If any space is going to be invaded by this technology, this is going to be it.
