Geek

So last week I updated my new Dell XPS 13 to the latest version of Ubuntu Linux. I stick to the LTS, or Long Term Support, editions of Ubuntu Linux because they’re suppose to be more stable than the more frequent releases that come out twice a year. After updating to the latest LTS release my laptop was unusable. It wouldn’t boot up, I couldn’t log in and everything on my laptop was lost.

Sigh. The joys of a Linux laptop.

This evening I spent time rebuilding my laptop from scratch and I finally have it to where I want it to be. I’m back on the LTS release from 2014. Things are stable, the desktop is pretty to me and I feel like I have it in a usable state. I’m not going to endeavor to upgrade again. I’ll stick to the stability of what I have now.

This will keep me as a happy camper.

I am traveling for work for the next couple of days and this will be the first time I’m bringing my Linux laptop along as my primary personal laptop. I’m looking forward to the experience.

As a software developer and as an old-timer when it comes to personal computing in general (I’ve been online since 1985), I’m a big proponent of open data accessibility. This comes as a surprise to some of my fellow geeks because I’ve been an Apple user for the past decade or so and Apple is notorious for their “walled garden” approach to a user’s data. Obviously I’ve made some compromises along the way.

A few years ago Google Drive and its “office” products, Docs, Sheets and Slides started making a splash in the productivity world. Accessible from just about any web browser, these applications gave users the ability to create and edit their office documentation on just about any computer that had an Internet connection and a web browser. Aside from the data mining plumbing behind the software, I found this to be a fantastic approach as user’s could use the computer of their choice using the software of their choice (within reasonable bounds). As users moved away from Microsoft Office to the simpler and less expensive Google Drive, Microsoft responded with Office 365, a subscription service which includes web access through any reasonably modern web browser. To gain traction with their iOffice suite, Apple had a big announcement of their online offerings of Pages, Numbers, Keynote etc.

Amongst the data I store in the cloud, I have a spreadsheet that tracks every commercial flight I take. Every time I sit down on a Delta flight or whatever, I add a row to this ongoing speadsheet. I track the date, time, flight number, aircraft type, seat number, flight attendants first names and random notes about the flight. The only purpose for doing this is to track how many flights I have taken, what kind of airplanes I’ve flown on and to just jot down some memories. I have typically tracked this information in Apple’s Numbers app, either on my iPhone or my iPad. I used iCloud to sync the data between devices.

I tried to access the spreadsheet from my Linux laptop. Apparently, the latest version of Firefox or Google Chrome running on Ubuntu Linux is not good enough for Apple’s standards.

I am not comfortable storing my data in a cloud that requires a certain application, a specific combination of hardware and software or a helping of voodoo to get my data back out. I believe that data stored in “the Cloud” should be able to be pulled off the Cloud using whatever hardware and software has the means to accomplish such a task. I don’t believe that users should be locked into the offerings from a specific hardware manufacturer or software development company. While this control from a company allows them to provide a specific experience for the end user, it also takes away too much control from the user and places it in the hands of the company.

This makes me very uncomfortable.

So I moved my commercial flights spreadsheet out of Apple’s Numbers and stored it in my Dropbox in Excel format. I can now access it from any computer and use a wide selection of tools to get my data. And for a sanity check, I confirmed that I am able to use Microsoft’s Office online products successfully from my Linux computer. In the past Microsoft has immensely disliked Linux, though that is changing.

Set your data free. Don’t keep it in a cage that you can visit under specific circumstances. The computing world is about freedom. Embrace that freedom.

Occasionally I will have some sort of dream that hearkens back to the 1970s and 1980s when I was absolutely fascinated by the computerized systems appearing in the retail environments. Last night I dreamed about such a system in a grocery store. Musing about the dream this evening, I ran across this video online describing how cutting-edge technology would soon enable a cashier to pull funds from your bank account and automatically transfer it to the store’s account. My, how far we’ve come in 40 years.

This video is quite short but I found it to be very fascinating. How I loved the days of “legacy computing”. In case you’re wondering, the cash registers in questions are NCR 255s. Quite expensive at the time, I can vividly remember these at a local IGA Market near my grandmother’s house. When I worked at Hills in 1990, I briefly used these before they were removed and new IBM cash registers were put in their place.

As I type this, Microsoft is having some sort of big event somewhere in the United States. I’m seeing quite a few posts about it on Twitter. Mentions of Microsoft’s Hololens being used on the International Space Station, discussions of the integration of Linux into the Windows platform and partnerships between Microsoft and Linux company, Canonical and being discussed. As a person who has not owned a Windows machine in almost a decade, I’m finding this all quite interesting. Are we finally getting to the age where information is freely exchanged between computer systems, regardless of who’s hardware and software you are using? I certainly hope so.

I recently purchased a new laptop. It arrived just before our trip to Florida last week and I wisely decided not to bring it along because I didn’t want to fiddle with my new toy while I could be dancing in the streets with Mickey and Minnie and spending time with my family. So it wasn’t until this week that I’ve gone full-tilt with the new laptop and I have to say that I am loving it. A lot.

Here’s the kicker: my new laptop is made by Dell. It is not an Apple device.

That’s right, I decided to purchase a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop. It runs Ubuntu Linux and it was designed to do so, so it has pretty much been a plug ‘n play experience for me. While I’m re-acclimating to living outside of Apple’s wall garden I’m finding that there are some really cool things out in the technological world. Apps that interact with one another. Digital assistants that are a little more intuitive than Siri. Predictive behavior instead of adaptive behavior.

Now, don’t think that I’ve become all anti-Apple, because I haven’t. I still maintain that Apple makes beautiful products that do amazing things and they have definitely pushed technology forward, especially up until a few years ago.

But I don’t know that they’re still pushing the envelope like they used to. Oh, I know that the iPhone 7 is rumored to not have a headphone jack, so you’ll either need an adapter or use a wireless headset with your iDevice, but I don’t find that change to be as revolutionary as getting rid of floppy disks or anything like that.

In today’s world of touch enabled everything, I really like the fact that I am able to touch the screen on my new laptop if I so desire and have the screen respond. I can scroll. I can touch buttons, I can do all of that. It wasn’t a necessity but it’s a nicety that I really enjoy and find that I miss when I use my MacBook Pro (which I still have). Apple refuses to put touchscreens on their laptops because they want you to buy another device, an iPad or an iPad Pro. The thing about that is that you’re then locked into apps instead of having an actual computer at your disposal. I honestly think that Microsoft’s “Windows on everything” and Canonical’s similar approach are both more forward thinking than having users buy, carry and use multiple devices.

In an ideal world, I want my smartphone (whether it be an iPhone or whatever) to be my computer. Set it next to a keyboard and monitor and it works like a regular computer. I want the ability to “fling” things from my smartphone up onto a wall display at a meeting. The accumulated time I have spent futzing with LED Projectors and matching settings and the like with my computer has been maddening. I want to flick, talk and go.

Having a touchscreen on my laptop is definitely a step in that direction.

Dell also makes a Windows 10 version of this awesome XPS 13 laptop. I really like the build quality. I really like the “infinity display” where the screen goes to nearly the edge of the bezel, though I don’t really care for the relocation of the webcam down into the lower part of the screen (because the screen goes all the way to the top edge). The XPS 13 is light, powerful and comes with enough ports and doo-dads to make it quite versatile. I’ve been a Linux guy since the mid 1990s and though I’ve been using Apple products for the past 10 years, I can’t help but be impressed by how far Linux has come along with the desktop experience.

After Apple’s mediocre announcement of the iPhone SE and something else that escapes me at the moment, I knew that looking outside of Apple’s “walled garden” to other ecosystems and manufacturers might lead me to more innovation, larger technological leaps forward. At the very least, having my data free so that’s not tied to Apple devices has opened my eyes up a bit.

I might get to flick a presentation up on a big glass display sooner than I thought.

I’ve decided that I’m going to embrace my inner geek this weekend and enjoy myself with many things technological. I have already installed a new file server on our network. The file server of choice is a WD MyCloud Mirror. To get completely in the weeds, this is a RAID-1 setup, so all of our data stored in the file server is mirrored to a second hard drive. This helps keep our data extra secure.

After I’m done copying all of the relevant files to the new file server, I’m going to consolidate the various hard drives we have installed elsewhere on the home network and make them all available through this new file server.

There’s quite a few changes I need to make to the network to get it in top notch condition again, but I won’t bore you with the details of changing routers, reconfiguring the wifi hotspot and the like.

By the end of the weekend everything should be tuned for speed and backed up in a brilliant manner.

And I will be one happy geek.

I’ve had this lingering memory of a lawyer-based television show set in the future. I remembered watching it once or twice and that one of the witnesses on the stand is asked the name of the current President of the United States. The answer? “Oprah Winfrey”. My other memory of the show was that while it took place in the future, it didn’t take place far in the future, maybe a decade or two.

Yesterday during a lull at work I execute some cleverly worded Google searches and found the show in question: “Century City”.

“Century City” was a mid-season replacement for CBS in 2004. Only nine episodes were made; I believe the original run was for eight episodes. From what I’ve found online, this short series is available on Hulu. I’ve been watching it on YouTube. This morning I was watched the pilot episode. The main cast is comprised of all familiar faces, before watching it this morning I hadn’t remembered the Viola Davis was on the show. She’s pretty much playing a tamed down version of Annalise Keating (“How To Get Away With Murder”) without the flash-forwards and intensity of being involved in several murders.

I digress.

The show is set in the year 2030. The pilot contained several current day topics including the ethics of cloning, plastic surgery and the use of steroids. Court proceedings can take place via hologram. The plot of the pilot was good but it didn’t blow me away. I look forward to watching the rest of the series as time permits.

The one thing that fascinated me about the show is how the writers and production staff saw the future. Since the show was produced in 2004, before smartphones and tablets became mainstream devices, their view of the future is a little more desktop computer based than I expected it to be. The desktop computers look futuristic with their translucent displays and tiny bases supporting them. The storylines seem to indicate that Microsoft continues its monopoly and grew in ways from what we’ve seen in real life (apparently in a later episode it is mentioned that Microsoft put the first colony on the Moon.) Everyone is tied to their desktop, no one is walking around with a tablet, heck, no one is even walking around with a Star Trek Tricorder.

Other advancements in this Century City future are quite interesting: pitless cherries, seedless grapes, high speed bullet trains in Los Angeles (much like the Hyperloop that Elon Musk is working on), holograms everywhere and PowerPoint presentations via 3D displays. This stuff was quite nifty.

One thing that I enjoyed was the tackling of the philosophical challenges of their future: the ethics behind cloning, the purposeful manipulation of DNA to create designer babies and Mick Jagger still performing at a Boston concert at 87 years old, thanks to age defying steroids and plastic surgery (he’s not on the show, a “boy band” of 70 year old men mentions his name when defending their genetic manipulation).

And most interestingly, the idea that Oprah Winfrey became President at age 76.

The future wasn’t all rosy in “Century City” but I think it was believable in 2004. It’s a shame this show didn’t do better. It’s a nice cross between a legal procedural and science fiction. I look forward to watching the handful episodes of the show.

And maybe I’ll write Oprah’s name in come November.

I went for my first bike ride of the year yesterday. The weather was rainy, the temperature was in the mid 50s and I hadn’t really planned on going for a ride until the last minute, but I felt determined and energized so I decided to go.

The rode for a little under 45 minutes, clocking in almost 8 miles in that time. It was not my fastest ride by any stretch of the imagination, but it was one of my earliest rides in any given year and despite being soaking wet when I got home, I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

We live in what is roughly the geographic center of New York State. Many years ago this “hub” location was chosen by the New York State Power Authority to bring many of the high voltage wires strung across the Empire State together. A couple of miles up the road from us is a big switching station, with guards and helicopters zooming in and out and large sets of power lines going off in all directions to the various corners of the state, neighboring states and Canada and the like. One set of wires headed to Niagara Falls passes about a third of a mile behind the house. Several times a year I watch helicopter pilots navigate along the wires as others on board do inspections of the towers, the wires and the surrounding landing. A couple of times I’ve seen guys in impressive safety suits walking on the wires.

Riding up the wires yesterday I couldn’t help but notice the loudness of the “sizzle” I could hear coming from the wires. The spacers within the lines held the lines in place or the insulators that mount the lines to the tower were making a very audible “sizzling” sound, undoubtedly from the rain and the moisture in the air.

If you look really closely in the picture above, you’ll notice a neighbor’s play area in their backyard directly under the far right leg of the circuit crossing their land. I wondered about the safety of this, as well as the sizzling sound, so I spoke with a friend of mine who used to work up at the Power Authority.

The sizzling sound is not uncommon but is harmless. There have been a lot of studies of the effects of the electric fields generated by these types of lines but none of them specifically attributed any adverse health effects to the electric fields themselves. There may be a link between the creosote used in the wooden poles and health effects. I found this to be quite interesting. Another point of interest was that these two sets of wires that pass through our neighborhood are not the highest voltage of the wires in the area, that honor belonged to the wires that had due north to the Canadian border and Hydro Québec.

I’m tempted to take some fluorescent lights out to the field again like I did a few years ago to see if I can get to light up in my hand. I find electricity to be so fascinating, even when it’s making a sizzling sound.

Whenever I need to feel inspired at work, I watch one of the “A Day In The Future” videos from Microsoft on YouTube. We are just on the edge of the technology shown in this video, and I’m excited to see it coming to fruition. This is the type of working environment that I see myself working in someday, helping create the types of tools seen in this video. 

I would love to see Microsoft bring all of this tech to us in the near future.  I think they are making progress in that direction, and I’m really hoping they succeed. It’s technology like this that will help us all live together in a better way on the planet.