Geek

Today has been one of the most productive Mondays I’ve had at work in years. I don’t know if it’s because of the hike, and subsequently clearing of my head this past weekend, or if it’s because of the dream I had last night. The reasoning doesn’t matter. All I know is that this morning I made a list of the things I wanted to accomplish at work and I’ve been checking these items off one by one and it has given me a strong feeling of accomplishment.

Sometimes just having a checklist on a piece of paper that one can modify with a pen is the way to go.

I’ve mentioned before that I keep track of what I need to do via a loose interpretation of the “Getting Things Done” methodology. Everything goes in a bucket, I review the bucket, and then I figure out what I need to do with the things I’ve put in the bucket. It’s as simple as that. There are hundreds of applications out there that are suppose to make this all move in a very easy way by providing an infinite number of ways to slice and dice the information so you can figure out what you’re suppose to do. Many of these applications are quite nice but I get into “fiddly” mode instead of “productive” mode when I use them. So I just have my little text file with a list of everything I want to accomplish someday, and I review it, pick a few things to work on, and go from there. I do have some coding magic so that I can jump onto any of my computers and type the word “inspire” at a command prompt, and it’ll pick some things on the list that don’t have due dates associated with them. Coupling “inspire” with my regular review of my text file helps keep me productive and organized. Plus, it’s free.

Free is good.

Speaking of free… I’ve been working on cleaning up some audio lately and I was beyond stunned when I saw how much Adobe is charging for their sound editing application, Adobe Audition. I remember buying this application for the radio stations back in the late 1990s when it was called “Cool Edit” and it was a very cool application for its time, and more importantly, it was affordable. These days Adobe doesn’t allow you to buy their software, one can only rent it via a subscription model. I considered subscribing for Adobe Audition for a hot moment, until I learned that it was nearly $35 PER MONTH if I didn’t buy a year’s worth of entitlement at a time.

The heck with that.

This whole notion of renting software from a software company rubs me the wrong way, and that’s probably because I’m an old school geek that remembers the delight I felt when someone bought my shareware cash register program back in the late 1980s. I would never think of renting that software to a business. They bought it, they owned it, and if they asked I’d give them the code so they could do what they wanted with it.

So, no Adobe Audition for me.

There are plenty of fully paid or open source sound editors out there. Audacity comes to mind and it runs on just about anything. I’ll just stick with that.

This is a bit of a geek thing, but Keenan is spot on with their latest blog entry, “RSS Readers Make Me Want To Jump Into A Vat Of Acid“. Go follow the link.

I really didn’t enjoy “Wonder Woman 1984” back when it came out a few years ago. I thought it was all over the place. The best part was the Lynda Carter cameo in the post credits scene.

However, I stumbled upon this fan made intro based on the ’70s series but for the movie and it is awesome! Enjoy!

For some reason that I absolutely can not figure out, Reeder 5 on my iPad Pro stopped showing the content of articles coming to me via RSS. Everything works fine on my iPhone and my Mac, but the iPad version just shows me the title of an entry and no content at all.

This is not the way I want to consume data.

So, I moved away from Reeder 5 on my iPad Pro and introduced NetNewsWire to the mix.

The only reason I liked Reeder 5 was the Bionic Reading, the special font that is suppose to keep the distracted mind from wandering, but other than that I wasn’t particularly attached to the application.

I like NetNewsWire thus far, especially since it’s an Open Source application. I’ll be swapping out the app on my iPhone and Mac this weekend.

My RSS feeds are aggregated by a self-hosted instance of FreshRSS. Installation, administration, and maintenance is pretty straightforward, and my control freak side really enjoys not relying on a 3rd party service that usually costs money.

With the new year I’m giving using my iPad Pro as a primary computing device another go. I’m not using my iPad Pro exclusively, but I am using it as a “sidecar” during my workday. While work has me trying to do things on a Windows 10 all day long, I can swivel to my iPad Pro to take care of personal tasks that pop up during the day, play music, etc.

So far the experience has been acceptable.

One of the frustrating things about my iPad Pro is that it’s still running a glorified version of iOS, which was originally designed for the iPhone, and it seems stuck in that paradigm. I’m really hopeful that Apple will change direction on this soon, as the iPad Pro line feels very overpowered for what’s generally asked of it to do.

Another thing that slightly bothers me about my iPad Pro is not Apple’s fault at all. The YouTube app on iPadOS doesn’t allow me to use plugins to hide comments and their idiotic “shorts”, something I always do in all web browsers on all platforms when I’m in YouTube land. I detest shorts and with the rapid degradation of society, comments in general are really not worth my time. It takes a little more brain power to ignore these things when using the YouTube app. My solution is to just not watch videos from YouTube on my iPad Pro.

That’s probably better for my mental health all the way around.

So, this is typewriter mode on IA Writer on my iPad Pro. The editor is clean and simple and best enjoyed with some breezy, easy music in noise cancelling headphones while one is composing their latest missive.

Is that the correct word, missive?

I like idea of a digital typewriter, especially when paired with a mechanical keyboard reminiscent of the 1980s IBM Model M keyboard or something equally poundy.

The only issue with my Velocifire mechanical keyboard is the spacebar has a certain rattle that I don’t enjoy. I need to figure that out. Or, I need to buy a new keyboard, something that would not please my husband. He doesn’t understand these things.

I’m typing away and acting like this is going to be a blog entry. It’s more exciting than “Hello, World”. And it’s much more exciting than typing out the script for an American test of the Emergency Alert System. I can do that by memory, you know, because 30 years ago it was my voice that recorded that for the group of radio stations I worked at. My claim to fame.

I really miss dot matrix printers, especially in the retail world. When we purchased our new vehicle last weekend, the finance manager processed all the paper work using pre-printed forms fed through a dot matrix printer designed for that sort of thing. It was earlier technology magic that has no need for replacement; it does what it needs to do it and it does it well.

Restaurants still use dot matrix printers as well because the thermal printed tickets would be rendered useless by the heat of your typical kitchen. When you place your order at the counter of a fast food restaurant, to hear it print out on a printer in the kitchen is music to my ears.

Can you imagine if retail establishments still had to use dot matrix printers today? No longer would CVS receipts be measured in feet with useless marketing messages. Kohl’s cashiers couldn’t write on the receipts with their fingernails. We wouldn’t be bombarded with surveys and coupons and the like.

It’s worth the screech of the dot matrix printhead and the challenge of threading a roll of receipt paper between the ribbon cartridge and the platen.

It’s a rainy Saturday morning so of course I am settled in on the couch to watch an episode of “Shazam!”, the first half of the “The Shazam/Isis Hour” from 1975. I never missed an episode when I was a youngster.

Today’s episode was from season two, episode two, and probably the first episode featuring John Davey as Captain Marvel. Jackson Bostwick played Captain Marvel in season one and in the first episode of season two, but was released from the production when he didn’t come in for filming. It was later revealed he was dealing with an injury from a stunt the day before, as he did all his own stunts as Captain Marvel.

I always preferred John Davey in role, probably because of his strong jaw and handsome good looks. Plus, he had a fairly heavy beard (even though he was clean shaven) and even at age 7 I found that quite handsome.

The episode “Debbie” included a moral review tag at the end of the show, like all episodes of “Shazam” and “The Secrets Of Isis”. In “Debbie” we learn that sometimes our parents exert their authority as an expression of their love. The moral tags were definitely a strong contributor to my moral foundation.

I’ve mentioned before that as part of my focused interest in “all things connected”, I find power lines to be absolutely fascinating. Like many things modern, the steel “unipole” designs we see being erected in the 21st century don’t interest me as much as the high voltage installations from the early 20th century.

I believe these 115kv pylons date to the early 20th century, probably before 1925. Larger than newer counterparts, this particular design can only be found in the former Niagara-Mohawk Power Corporation region of New York State, specifically in the area around the eastern shore of Lake Ontario and the northern suburbs of Syracuse.