Geek

I’ve been excited about today’s schedule launch of the SpaceX Dragon since they announced today was going to be the day. Not only did this mark the first time astronauts would be sent to the International Space Station via equipment designed and manufactured by SpaceX, it would also be the first time American astronauts would head to the ISS via U.S. soil instead of hitching a ride with the Russians.

Not that cooperative international efforts are bad.

It’s been too long since the Space Shuttle was decommissioned in 2011 and quite frankly I was almost convinced that would be the end of the manned American space program. Luckily I was just being a cynic and through amazing technology and the efforts of thousands of people smarter than me, astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken were aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft on countdown ready to head to the ISS. Unfortunately, Mother Nature decided to get in on the act and the countdown was stopped at -16 minutes and 54 seconds due to weather.

I had cleared my schedule at work and was watching the proceedings all afternoon when two things happened: a meeting popped up on my calendar scheduled for launch time and then the weather call was made and the launch was rescheduled for Saturday.

I will be on the ground ready to watch the proceedings during Saturday’s launch. I’m giddy like a young boy with the thought of these two men going into space from American soil.

Space exploration is a major reason why we have all this amazing technology at our fingertips. It’s our quest to get to the stars that has compelled us to push forward on technological advancements. Today’s crew will be using touchscreens, I believe a first, to navigate a commercially developed and built rocket to orbit. The open source operating system Linux has played a key component both with SpaceX and with the International Space Station.

I always enjoyed the math teacher that wrote in my yearbook way back in 1982, “Reach for the stars!”.

Though many will disagree, our country needs to get its people back in space under our own power. Perhaps this is the beginning of a new era of discovery, wonder, and exploration.

I’ve always had a small fascination with power lines. More specifically, the larger transmission lines that criss-cross the country side in hundreds of multiples of kilovolts. Years ago, searching the Internet on the history of a specific design of transmission tower, I stumbled across this photo from the 1950s. It was a publicity photo for the Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation.

Through some clever deduction via Google Maps. I was able to find this location and I wrote about that experience here. On that blog entry you’ll see a photo I took approximating the vibe of the two ladies shown in the photo above. My husband snapped this photo with my iPhone back in early 2016.

I always liked this photo of me, as I feel like it conveys a certain type of energy I see within myself.

The design of the transmission towers shown in both photos seems to be confined to Upstate New York, mostly in the footprint of the former Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation. I haven’t come across that exact design in any of the other 50 states.

Since moving to Illinois in 2017 I’ve wanted to capture the same type of energy I see in my photo above but on the Illinois landscape. Today on our road trip, my husband used my iPhone to take this photo.

I kept a small amount of color in this 2020 photograph because I liked the look of the hint of green in the field. The transmission towers seen here are similar to others found throughout the United States, except they have “cat ears” on top instead of the typical smaller supports for the ground wires elsewhere in the country.

As I was standing under these lines (which I believe are carrying 345kV) I could hear them crackling where the spacers are doing their thing between the towers.

I call this new photograph, “The Power of Wonder”.

So since we’ve started watching “The Mothers-In-Law” on Amazon Prime, Youtube has somehow figured out that we’re doing so and has started suggesting obscure television shows from the 1960s. One such show is called “Karen”, a show I have never heard of until about 15 minutes before writing this blog entry.

As I watched the episode on Youtube I couldn’t help but notice a familiar face:

It took me a few moments but then I realized it’s Bonnie Franklin, best known as Ann Romano on the 1970-80s Norman Lear sitcom, “One Day At A Time”.

Another show that has been suggested is called “Good Morning World”. I started watching an episode but was distracted by a passing thunderstorm; it looks like it might be a 1960s version of “WKRP In Cincinnati”. I may take some of this long weekend to check out an episode or two.

These obscure sitcoms are kinda groovy.

Earlier this month I received word at work there would be a change in the BYOD, or “Bring Your Own Device” policy at work. Since last year I have been using a personal Mac mini for all of my work from the home office. While I work for a company that full embraces Microsoft’s business offerings, Microsoft has shifted their approach over the past couple of years and have made their products much more friendly to operating systems outside of Windows. The official approach at work has been if you’re participating in BYOD you can use the Citrix-based VDI (Virtual Desktop Instance) to get to company applications. While connected to the work VPN with my Mac Mini I could do pretty much what I needed to do without delving into VDI and I was a happy camper.

Since the Mac Mini is a desktop device, I also had a work issued Windows 10 Dell laptop, which is my official work computer. I figured I would use that for travel and I would log in with it every couple of weeks to keep it up-to-date with the latest patches from work’s desktop services.

At least that was my intention.

A couple of weeks ago I received word that I hadn’t logged in with the laptop since late March and I needed to log in to get important updates. Not a problem, I’m always happy to oblige, so I did just that. The only thing I don’t like about that Dell laptop is the screen resolution; at 1366×768 it’s a little compact for me to do what I need to do on a daily basis. I have my own 32-inch USB-C monitor and the Dell laptop has a USB-C port on it so I hooked up the whole affair and was actually delighted to see I could use the monitor at it’s fullest resolution without throwing the laptop’s fan into fits.

Since I was tardy with the updates this must have brought some attention to my account and I received another message from desktop services, this time advising I could make a choice of staying on my personal Mac Mini or I could use the company issued laptop, but not both. The company is moving to Microsoft’s WVD, or Windows Virtual Desktop, and the way the licenses are managed the company allocates either a laptop OR a WVD license per user, not both.

Staying with my Mac Mini would result in me not having a mobile solution for when I start traveling for work again, so that wouldn’t work. So, I decided to give up the Mac Mini approach to work and set up my Windows 10 laptop for full time use.

It has been a surprisingly smooth and pleasant move for me.

As a software developer and systems engineer I work in Linux all day long. I primarily work from the “command line” when doing much administrative stuff and the reason I liked the Mac Mini was because it had a Unix terminal baked right into the operating system. But over the past year or two Microsoft has done a complete 180º on their feelings around Linux and now offers “Windows Subsystem for Linux”, the ability to run Linux right inside of Windows 10.

This too has been an amazing experience for me.

My transition to the Windows 10 laptop, with Ubuntu Linux running in the “WSL” has met all of needs for work both effortlessly and easily. I am surprisingly pleased with the setup I’ve been using for the past week; today I took the opportunity of the quiet afternoon to put the finish touches on my setup and I’m ready to go after the long holiday weekend.

A while back I told my husband and family that my requirement of sticking exclusively to the Apple ecosystem had come to an end. With this proclamation we purchased a Windows 10 gaming computer from Jamie and Chris, with my intention of turning it into a flight simulator setup over the next couple of months. My husband has been enjoying playing online games with friends on it. It’s a fast machine for about a third of what we’d pay for a similarly-spec’d Mac.

I’ve also been moving back towards Linux full time with my personal computing needs. The hardest move for me was my task management system. I’ve been using OmniFocus for over 10 years and while it has served my needs well for all this time, the web version was just not powerful enough to meet my needs on the Windows 10 work computer. I solved the issue in a very simple way. Using the framework of the simple todo.txt text-file based system, I simply wrote my own automations and other task management routines that run on a nightly basis for both work and personal tasks. When I get up in the morning my day is already planned out the way I want it. When I have flight on the schedule, I can go to any computer in the world, log into my little Linux server I have running, and type “flight (date)” at the command prompt, and tasks reminding me to charge devices, update iPads, plan flights, get the weather, and pack all my gear, will appear on all of my task lists with the proper date and intervals necessary to accomplish everything I do before a flight.

I’m getting old. It’s easier for me to type a command at a prompt instead of point and clicking and moving things around on a screen.

The truth of the matter is two-fold, not only was I not able to work effectively within the closed-ecosystem of Apple based products, I’m quite frankly also getting bored with my Apple products. I’ve had an iPhone X since they came out in late 2017 and aside from some battery issues I’ve been experiencing over the past couple of days, I do not feel compelled to get the latest and greatest in any way. My MacBook Pro is a mid 2015 model, the last version before they went to those awful butterfly keyboards, and my iPad Pro works great and does everything it’s suppose to do, the exact same way every iPad I’ve had has done it for the past 10 years. The iPad Pro is a 2018 model and I don’t feel the need to update that anytime soon.

What I really want is to get back into Linux full time, but I can’t justify selling and buying things just for the sake of change. So in the meanwhile I’m running the latest version of Ubuntu Linux in a VirtualBox on my MacBook Pro and it’s running great. Canonical has done great things with Ubuntu over the years. A lot of the diehard Linux community is grumpy about Ubuntu and Canonical, some even going so far as to saying it’s not “really Linux”, because of some commercial software in the distribution. But I find Ubuntu’s implementation to be beautiful and stable and it gives me the ability to just get things done.

Because Linux gives me options, I’ve even gone so far as to install the older “Unity” desktop environment on my Ubuntu install. I simply like the way Unity works better than anything else out their in the Linux world and because Linux gives me freedom to set my computer up the way I want to, I’m going to use that freedom to do just that.

Apple hasn’t done anything wrong and I still recommend iDevices for folks that aren’t super tech-savvy and still want to maintain their own data privacy. I think Apple does that very well when compared to some other solutions out there. Microsoft is making great strides in keeping things open and giving folks choices, and Linux is awesome for those of us that want to know exactly what makes our computer tick and make it the exact way we want it to be.

My only family rule with the technology now is data can’t be confined to a specific device or ecosystem. This cooperative approach is keeping us a happy open family.

Let’s learn about this new phenomenon called “Word Processing”.

We are the point of quarantine where I just watched a 25-minute infomercial advertising a General Electric Stratoliner Cooking Range. The advertisement is dated 1950. Push button technology. What will they think of next?

So I’ve been working on building my own Alexa device, which will eventually make its way to a wall in our home. I made great progress with the SDK (Software Development Kit) today. She’s talking in over my earbuds and responding to commands through a cheap $10 USB microphone plugged into the back of this Raspberry Pi 4.

My next step is to build a custom control screen. I am loving this challenge.

Here’s a link to the guide I’m using for my development: https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/alexa-smart-screen-sdk/raspberry-pi.html

Some geek time today.

Years ago I picked up a couple of LED smart bulbs from Home Depot. As I recall, these particular bulbs were very affordable, adequate for what I had planned for them (I believe they were going in a guest bedroom), and they were branded GE. While we were using Philips Hue lights for out automation at the time (and still are today), there were notes online around the flexibility of these GE bulbs: they would be compatible with the Philips Hue hub or you could get a hub made by Wink and go with that. Home Depot had a special where they were practically giving the Wink hub away so I paid the minimal amount of cash they wanted for the hub and tried to integrate it into our smart home setup.

I was never satisfied with the Wink Hub. It became unresponsive too often and we were still moving in the Philips Hue direction. I abandoned the hub and basically forgot about it until it was recycled, along with the GE bulbs, when we moved to Chicago.

I received an email advising me my Wink Hub would no longer be functional after 5/13/20 unless I joined their subscription plan to provide continued service. The plan is $4.99 a month. There’s probably taxes too. There’s always taxes.

Looking at the calendar, the 13th of May is only a few days away. If I had invested more into the Wink Home Automation system I would be a very unhappy customer right now.

Now, in the grand scheme of things $4.99 per month doesn’t seem like a lot of money. But what doesn’t seem like a lot of money to me may seem like a lot of money to other people. Plus, I distinctly remember the Wink Hub box mentioning “No Subscription Fees!”.

It would appear that Wink has changed their mind.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, I am becoming very subscription fatigued. All of these consumption and membership and automation based subscriptions can be very taxing on the household budget. The kicker is, Wink provides a luxury, a convenience. Why pay $60 per year just to be able to turn lights on and off with my smartphone? Yes, changing colors, automating on/off times, etc. is nice, but it’s not a necessity. I can still flip a switch.

I feel bad for the folks that have gone all in on the Wink ecosystem. I’ve been reading about consumers that have built Wink into their new construction; wall switches that rely on Wink, relays that fire off sprinklers and what not, relying on Wink. Unless they pay the subscription fee, all of these devices will become INOP in just a few days.

Sorry Wink, but that’s not the way to get people to love your ecosystem.

Companies like Wink are trying to move us to a subscription dependent future. That’s not a future I want to be part of. Intrigued by these developments, I may spend some of my geek time researching open source alternatives to share on the various home automation forums I’m part of to see how folks can continue to control their devices on their terms. There’s almost always an open source solution.

Four days notice of a support paradigm shift is not the way to flip a switch.