Geek

I have gotten in the habit of watching something on my iPad while I watch my teeth. I do this because it takes a few minutes to watch something and the result is that I end up brushing my teeth for a longer period of time, which is good for oral hygiene.

While Apple wants us to do all of our media consumption on our iPad, iPhone or Apple TV (with a smattering of Apple Watch thrown in), the truth of the matter is that I want us to have the tech right now that lets us consume media wherever we can consume it. For example, I want to be able to watch a video or catch up on my work schedule or whatever while I’m brushing my teeth. Corning Glass is on the right track with the concept of a “connected bathroom”; the processing power lives in your tablet but glass surfaces, mirrors, etc., all with embedded displays, can display the data.

This is wicked cool to me.

If you look closely at the graphics on the mirror in the photo above, you’ll see there is calendar information, weather, a thermostat control for the bathroom and controls to run the shower. Apparently there’s also a remote control for a Smart coffeemaker. 

With the Internet of Things explosion of the past couple of years, we have all of this today. Nest thermostats allow us to control the room temperature remotely. Calendars on a myriad of devices. I’m not sure about electronic temperature control for showers but I’m sure there are smart energy use devices out there that have this functionality and the same goes for controlling your coffee pot remotely. The problem is that all of this technology is disorganized. Everyone (Apple, Amazon, Google, Nest, etc.) are building ecosystems that sort of talk to each other but there’s a lot of friction in building an intermediary to get everything to talk to each other.

This is not going to help this technology go mainstream.

I want all of my technology to talk to each other, seamlessly without bickering as to who’s ecosystem I’m using, and I want data displayed on touch-enabled glass services. I’ve been telling Earl that as we ready for the move to Chicago, I want our new home to be as high tech as possible. Finding an ecosystem for our tech investment should not be a laborious process. If the new home already has a Nest, I want various modes of input, whether it be Siri or a touchscreen or Amazon’s Alexa, to be able to talk to that Nest. This habit of putting things in silos is crazy. It’s like buying a new washing machine and realizing that the water outlet on the wall is incompatible with the hoses that feed the washer. We wouldn’t put up with that.

Why do we put up with all of these differing standards when it comes to equipping our home with the latest in automation technology?

Now, to go find that touchscreen mirror for the bathroom.

So on November 22, 1986, I wrote a check to Ames Department Store for $9.30. There’s a reason that I know this. Earl and I moved into our current home in December 2003. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that today I would come across my cancelled checks from when I was in college in 1986?

There’s a lot I could tell you about the computer printed data, or “franking”, on the back of the pictured check. Some of the data shown would never pass the privacy concern tests of today.

After watching the movie “Wonder Woman” last night, I felt like watching a few clips from the 1970s television series with Lynda Carter. I’ve always gotten a kick out of the way Wonder Woman takes care of this woman trying to booby-trap a car.

I keep saying that someday I’m going to attend WWDC, or the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. This is a yearly event where developers for Apple’s various platforms get together and Apple shares with the developers as to why Apple has the greatest platform in the world to develop for. They have workshops, product announcements, platform upgrade announcements and sneak peeks and basically a great opportunity for software developers from all over the world to get together and geek out on Apple products together.

Yesterday Apple kicked off WWDC 2017 with their annual Special Event, in which they took the opportunity to announce a few new products and their planned upgrades to their operating systems (macOS for the Macintosh, iOS for iPhone and iPad, etc.)

As much as I wretch about Apple and their Quality Control practices of late, after exploring other options that are out there I’m still fully committed to the Apple line of products for a myriad of reasons. When compared to other platforms, I find that Apple’s approach to computing works best for my needs. The fit and finish of their devices meet my expectations (long gone are my days of using cheap, plastic technology that breaks down in less than a year). And, probably most importantly, Apple is not funded by ad revenue that is gleaned from my data. In the wide scope of things I don’t really care if Search Company X cares if brush my teeth with Colgate or Crest but I absolutely, positively despise advertising, especially ads embedded in software I’m trying to use. Forget about web pages that have dancing ads or autoplaying videos about Athlete’s Foot or whatever. I am always willing to pay that little bit extra to keep the ads out of my computing experience.

Apple’s experience is the best way to accomplish that task.

I totally get that there is a wide array of folks out there that absolutely despise Apple and everything that they stand for. I’ve heard everything from “they force you to upgrade every year” (they don’t, in fact, Apple’s MacBook Pro line usually lasts longer than anything belched out by one of the PC Notebook companies), “I shouldn’t have to pay for a grounded spaceship in the middle of Northern California” (honestly, I hope the new Apple Campus becomes a beacon of how environmentally friendly a company, and any person, should be these days) and “Pffff, who cares, Android has been doing that forever” (which I think is wonderful. I’ve used Android before, it feels like a second rate, kitchen-sink operating system to me that could fall apart at any given moment, but if it works for you, use it. I’m not going to evangelize why you shouldn’t use Android, that’s your business).

The Special Event yesterday has a bunch of announcements that pretty much followed the script predicted by the rumors that have been floating about. iPhone and iPads will get iOS 11. Macs will get macOS High Sierra, which sounds like it’s going to follow the same precedent that Mac OS X Leopard followed years ago when they added refinements and tweaks to Leopard to give us Snow Leopard. Getting totally geeky, macOS will get a new filesystem that will immensely speed up file operations on the hard drive and as a person that copies a lot of video that’s a very cool thing. Apple also announced the new HomePod (not completely a fan of the name) which brings Siri to the smart speaker paradigm currently led by Amazon with the Echo and Google with Google Home. It’s pricey but apparently it has amazing sound. Siri is built in. Everyone tells me how awful Siri is and that it’s worthless but I use Siri all the time, especially to control our Philips Hue lights when Amazon Echo’s Alexa responds with “I can’t find the device you’re looking for” after every other request. Siri always knows how to turn off the lights on dining room hutch. Alexa can turn them on but forgets how to turn them off.

The two standout features that really grabbed my attention had to do with mobile and are both in iOS 11. The first one is safety oriented and is called “Do Not Disturb While Driving” mode. Basically, iOS 11 now has the ability to detect while you’re driving and will put your phone in a Do Not Disturb mode, replying automatically to messages on your behalf indicating what you’re doing. The screen will remain dark and when you get to your destination everything will unlock and you can catch up on your activity then. You can build a VIP list that allows select users to reply to the alert with “Urgent” and it will force your iPhone to display the message.

I think this is exactly what they driving American public needs in a smartphone right now and I am eager to use it.

The second update to iOS 11 that really got my attention was the vast improvements to using iOS on the iPad. Apple made great strides in making the iPad Pro more of a content generation device and less of a content consumption device. The addition of Drag and Drop to the interface, along with a more familiar Mac-like dock along the bottom is a welcomed enhancement. I have always wanted to use my iPad Pro as my primary computing device, especially when traveling, but I’ve always felt boxed in by the experience. While not perfect, iOS 11 takes a hearty step forward in making this possible, at least within my realm, and I’m eager to try it out.

The hardware upgrades announced were a welcomed addition to the event, and one that should calm folks screaming about Apple being behind the curve on processing power in their MacBook Pro line, at bat for a bit. One of the hardware announcements, the new iMac Pro coming in December, really grabbed my eye. This is an iMac designed to be a powerhouse of a machine and to be used in professional environments (photo editing, graphic design, video creation, etc). It’s pricey but the specs are out of this world. And the best part it, while it is amazing, it’s NOT a replacement for the Mac Pro, which is going to be updated in 2018.

It also comes in Space Gray with all new Space Gray accessories. It looks bad ass.

All in all, I’m a very happy and content Apple Geek. I purchased a couple of things yesterday (tell my husband to calm down as I didn’t spend a great deal of money at all) and I’m looking forward to watching some of the workshops at WWDC 2017 online in my spare time this week.

There’s been a lot of talk over the past 48 hours about Climate Change. I’ve heard also sorts of people debate as to what is happening with Climate Change on a global scale, its impact on the economy, who is responsible for Climate Change and whether the climate is even changing or not. Many believe that Climate Change is part of a cycle and that the Earth will take care of itself. Scientists believe that humans are having a definite negative impact on the climate and we may be mucking it up to the point of very dire events over this century.

Of course, Trump announced yesterday that the United States will be pulling out of the Paris Agreement, an effort initiated on our behalf by the Obama Administration in 2015, because he feels it doesn’t give the United States a fair advantage on the global stage. Sometimes being a leader isn’t a fair game.

Participation in the Paris Agreement is completely voluntary. Canceling the United States’ participation in this agreement is symbolic at best. Hopefully, Trump spent too much of his political capital with this latest distraction stunt to further erase any hopes of him being re-elected for a second term in 2020. Realistically I doubt that he’ll make it to 2018 in the Oval Office, let alone 2020. Though, admittedly I have underestimated the stupidity of the general population and I will probably continue to do so. Optimism and all that.

The Maple Ridge Wind Farm can generate power for about 140,000 homes. With 195 Vesta turbines placed over 75 square miles of land in Lewis County, the wind farm has an installed output of 321 megawatts of power. The wind farm surrounds some farm land of relatives on the paternal side of my family. It’s about 45 miles north of our home. With all the talk about renewable energy this week I went up and parked the Jeep in the Visitors’ Center parking lot, listening to the wind turn the turbine situated closest to the center.  

Admittedly, the turbines are large and definitely a part of the landscape. There’s no escaping them, so I understand why folks would be hesitant to live near these fairly recent additions to the Tug Hill Plateau. But looking at the bright side, there’s no smog, no toxins being released into the air and no threat of a nuclear meltdown.

Just the whisper of clean energy being produced by a renewable resource. Somewhere nearby, 140,000 homes were able to light up their evening because of these guys doing their thing with the wind.

And I find that to be absolutely amazing.

Let’s keep the momentum moving forward. Even if we don’t have to do it, let’s want to make our planet, our only home, the cleanest it can be. Let’s not be selfish.

Let’s give more than we take.

Earl and I have been working on cleaning out our storage areas throughout the house in preparation for our move to Chicago later this year. Earl has been leading this charge and every day he is tackling a closet or a cupboard or a long forgotten drawer. This weekend we worked together to disassemble some of my extraneous geek toys in the “server room” in the basement.

We are probably the only house on the block that had a server rack holding two servers and two file servers with plenty of storage space. The two servers were old computers that had been repurposed for server use – one of the computers was date stamped 1996. An IBM Personal Workstation, it was a Pentium II/233 running Linux. Its task was to flip relays to run the clock system collection wired throughout the house. On the wall was a much newer master clock designed specifically for that task but I liked the idea of flipping relays via a program I had written. I relented and moved the control over to the master clock and decommissioned the ancient computer.

The second server was an old point of sale terminal from an auto parts store repurposed to run Linux and provide “gateway access” to the network at the house. With today’s technology there are much better ways to get to our home network, so I decommissioned that server as well.

The two file servers provide backup capabilities for our computers when we are connected to the home network. They also hold the hundreds of hours of flight and other video I’ve taken with the GoPros. All of our music and photos are also backed up on these two file servers. This evening I went around collecting other external drives I had hooked up to various devices in the house and centralized all the storage.

We now have nearly 20 TB of file storage in the house. It’ll take a lot of downloading to fill up that space. The hard drives are divided up between two little file servers designed specifically for this purpose. One day I’d like to take all the hard drives out of their enclosures and install them in a Drobo 5N2 so that everything is completely centralized and redundant.

Earl can live with one little box sitting in the corner of our new home instead of a big server rack sitting in the basement.

My life as an IT guy is never done.

It’s a given that there’s been major leaps in technology over the past few decades. While computers have been around for my entire lifetime, it wasn’t until I was an adult that technology started coming into every aspect of our lives. I remember the excitement I had about technology when our local grocery store converted from big mechanical cash registers to relatively compact (for the time) electronic cash registers. These didn’t have scanning or anything, everything was categorized as it had been on the mechanical predecessors (Grocery, Produce, Meat, etc), but they could handle fractions, compute sales tax, weigh produce and had enough memory to store the price of a few items in their memory. Management could pull reports. And these little electronic marvels printed receipts that many folks could understand. There were no frills, a message, a list of the items and the total, amount tendered and change due. Thank you and please call again.

Here’s a sample receipt from my senior year in high school.

This receipt from Zayre lists five items, tax due and the aforementioned important points that should be listed on a receipt. Seasons Greetings from Zayre. Easy peasy. The receipt is maybe two inches long, tops. The customer can match the numbers to the numbers on the item. There’s no paper waste. Fun fact, when I was writing code for a temp job at a department store, we made it a challenge to use a little receipt paper as possible, printing the “header” of the next sale as the paper from the current sale was being ejected. We wanted to save paper and save the store money.

Now, here’s a photo grabbed from some random guy on the Internet. It captures the receipt that was spewed out of a modern CVS cash register when he purchased a pack of gum.

Why on earth does a receipt need to be nearly two feet long for the purchase of one item? Who uses all these coupons? How many times do one need to see the store logo? Why do retail establishments feel they need to hammer me over the head with countless marketing messages from one purchase? Why the waste? What happened to be eco-safe and emissions free?

Just because technology allows us to spew yards of paper at a rapid pace out of computerized cash register doesn’t mean that we have to do it. Who is this benefitting? The only positive result from this ridiculousness is the benefit to the paper company. How much of this paper is being wasted? How many trees are being cut to print out six CVS coupons for a pack of gum.

This is not the direction I thought we’d be going in the 21st century. I really believe that technology is ahead of the general IQ of the population. We are capable of doing incredible things but we are literally wasting our bandwidth on stupid stuff.

I know I sound like I’m chasing kids off my lawn but we really need to keep our use of technology reasonable and in perspective. Stop wasting paper.