When In Rome.

Jamie was giving haircuts tonight. He’s the resident barber, and a real one as well. I decided to jump in on the fun and had him shave off my mustache. 

Back when he was in barber school I let him practice his straight razor techniques on my face and he did a great job. Tonight he just grabbed the clippers and electric shaver and scraped off my grey hair.

It’s been a while since I’ve been clean shaven; I think I’ll keep the look for a while.

In Flux.

Fellow blogger Chris recently wrote about his attempts at “Moving Away from Apple…Again“. Like Chris, I haven’t liked where Apple has been headed for the past couple of years, and since the change of administration in D.C., I am becoming increasingly concerned with any sort of tech corporation, but especially one headed up by a donor (ahem, Tim Cook) to the Trump administration.

My eighth grade English teacher would have said that previous sentence was a run on sentence and then I would have been forced to diagram the sentence. Do they still diagram sentences?

Now, before folks get worked up that I’m picking on Tim Cook, I know that we now live with a government that is basically “pay for play”. I know Tim had to do what he had to do; it still doesn’t make me feel more comfortable about the situation. Plus, Apple has had some less than stellar showings lately, like defaulting Apple Intelligence to “opt out” instead of “opt in”. I don’t like things like this.

I recently wrote up some thoughts around my computing leanings in a quasi-manifesto type format.

I. Computing Platforms

  • Lowest friction is always ideal
  • Focused applications somewhat avoid ADHD fiddling
  • Linux to embrace my privacy concerns, geekiness, and existing hardware. Linux distro of choice is Debian based, and the simplest path for me right now is Linux Mint.
  • Mac for creative projects due to existing hardware and financial investment, while researching other options. At this point my video production relies on Final Cut Pro.
  • iOS for mobile because I feel it’s more secure than stock Android, and I have new hardware

II. Sharing Platforms

  • Meta is absolutely untrustworthy but unfortunately embraced by too many. I maintain an account, though my activity has been drastically reduced. Meta products like Facebook and Instagram shall always be used in a container and through a VPN. “Shallow” personal data only. Access limited to once a day. No promotion of creativity on Meta products. Bring the audience to you through more trusted channels.
  • “Deeper” personal data is mine and mine alone. No ad supported platforms allowed. Google Drive, Google Photos absolute no deal. iCloud is mostly untrustworthy and my remaining trust is declining. Anything that is in a corporate cloud will probably have an open backdoor or backend by the end of 2025.
  • Twitter is absolutely untrustworthy and is in the same bucket as “truth social”. No use.
  • WordPress and Automattic are untrustworthy. Leadership is too unstable. Need to move away from this platform.
  • Bluesky is there for some things, especially aviation and storm chasing. Monetary contributions indicate a for-profit status probably in the future
  • Mastodon is there for most things. The community is strong and I enjoy maintaining my own instance, as well as pushing blog posts to the Fediverse.
  • Instagram is part of Meta and falls into the same privacy/data mining/etc concern.
  • Pixelfed is there for most things, though friction is rather high. I’m not pleased with the iOS app at all, opting for Impressia instead. Leadership and the developer of the official Pixelfed client is moderately unstable. Not overly impressed. Just sharing this content on my blog is probably the best way to go.
  • YouTube is used for creative output, minimal scholarly consumption, and mindless consumption. It’s Google. Watch Google very, very carefully. Implement plugins to eliminate the cruft.
  • ActivityPub wherever possible. Fediverse wherever possible.
  • Need to reseach PeerTube

III. Trusted Companies

  • Apple is deemed trustworthy to a point, however, it is falling fairly fast on my trust scale. To be fair, Apple, appears to be more trustworthy than the rest of FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google)
  • OmniGroup is deemed trusted, but use friction is high and fiddly and data is proprietary locked to a platform. Plus, no Windows client for mandatory Windows 11 work computer. Web interface is lacking critical features. Out of the running.
  • Same with CulturedCode and Things. Proprietary locked.
  • Obsidian is deemed trusted, available on all platforms. Sync seems solid and mostly safe.
  • Bitwarden is deemed trusted, available on all platforms. Sync seems solid and mostly safe.
  • Not pleased with Proton’s stance around the Trump administration, looking at other options like Fastmail for email, in concert with self hosting.
  • Mullvad seems to be good on most fronts for VPN.

IV. File Storage

  • Personal data in stored locally and backed up separately on a nightly basis
  • Personal data is backed up locally
  • iCloud is for cautious use. Minimal personal data.
  • Dropbox is being weeded out of my personal ecosystem, down to a handful of bash scripts
  • Dropbox is sandboxed to one internal server in the house and one laptop
  • Google Drive is not trusted for use on any machine
  • Local NAS solutions are optimal. The WD PR4100s have been bumped up to 16GB RAM

V. Recap

  • I’m taking a “must be accessible from the terminal” approach to all of my data
  • Proprietary lock-in is avoided, including less than full functionality web interfaces for the data
  • End-to-end encryption wherever possible

These are just a few points of where my head is at with my personal computing habits. The rest of the family is mostly on Macs and iOS/iPadOS devices, and compatibility across the board is important. I have no expectations that anyone in the house will move to Linux and that’s fine. I’m comfortable enough with Apple to not fret about it at this time.

I’m Back?

The webhost we’ve used since the late 2000s was recently purchased by a Canadian company and they’ve moved all our services to a new server. I’ve been making the necessary configuration adjustments on my side, but sometimes these things to time.

Let’s hope someone can see this entry!

Stomp.

My husband and I went to “Broadway in Tucson” and saw “Stomp”. This was a Christmas gift and it was fun to re-indulge in the holiday spirit as we enjoyed dinner out and the made our way to Centennial Hall.

We were amongst the first folks to take our seats.

I found the production to be quite interesting. It was unlike anything I’ve seen before on the stage and honestly, I was prepared for it to be a bit louder than it turned out to be.

For those not familiar, “Stomp” is basically a percussion performance piece, using every day objects. The beats are intermingled with humor and movement. Overall it’s quite an enjoyable experience.

With all that’s been going on in the past couple of weeks, it was good to escape to this performance for a little while.

Terminal D.

For some reason I was expecting Philadelphia airport to be busier when we passed through on our way home yesterday.

Our flight home didn’t leave until mid afternoon, but to keep the hotel happy we checked out on time and was at the airport by 12:30 or so. I was able to get over two miles of walking in by walking Terminals A-D in their entirety.

Another fun little ditty was arriving and departing from the same gate in Denver. That kept things simple.

After seeing family as we paid our respects for my mother-in-law, it was good to have the aviation gods on our side and have an uneventful flight home.

United gets a bad rap but I very rarely have a bad experience flying the airline. It’s the only airline we fly these days; the trend was established when we lived in Chicago, since United has a sizable presence at O’Hare.

Howdy, Neighbor.

I noticed another flight passing fairly close to our flight as we made our way to Denver this afternoon.  First photo is at 1x on my iPhone 16 Pro.

Buttons.

This is the control panel of the environmental controls for our rental vehicle, a VW Tiguan. The car is not bad to drive. It has a bit of pep, is fairly comfortable to ride in and does what it’s suppose to do.

When we were looking for a new car in 2023 we looked at the Tiguan, but we found it a bit cramped for a liking and opted for the Nissan Rogue instead.

Volkswagen has decided to replace all the buttons on their environmental controls with touchpads. Everything you see in the photo is a touchpad. There are no buttons. We still haven’t figured out how to reliably adjust the temperature, so we tap and slide around until we see a number that’s relatively close to what we’re looking for. 

We had to pull over to the side of the road to figure out how to turn down the fan.

This touchpad madness is not conducive to safe driving. I don’t know if Tiguan owners adapt to sliding their fingers around on a smooth surface with absolutely no feedback without looking at the controls, but I couldn’t figure it out.

I hope something changes in the world so that we can start having buttons again. It’s bad enough that I scream at auto correct on my iPhone on a daily basis, I don’t need to crash into things on the road while trying to get a little heat.

Geek.

As I was going through my photos the other night, looking for the shot of the 765kv powerlines in Upstate New York, I stumbled across this photo. I had forgotten about it but once I saw it I remembered it.

Taken during COVID, when Earl and I were out for many drives in the Illinois countryside to the southwest of Chicago, I stood under this 345kv line. ComEd in Illinois seems to use what I call the “Cat Ears” towers, as the supports for the Earth Wire to assist with lightning control out on the prairie.

I was always a fan of the prairies to the west of busy Chicago. I found such beauty out in all that open space.

Especially if there were interesting powerlines marching across the cornfields here and there.

Empty.

We walked through Neshaminy Mall today. It’s been cold this weekend and we’ve been doing mall walks to get some steps.

When I first visited this area in the late 1990s this mall was thriving with busy anchor stores, a recent addition, and more. Today the mall seemed about 60% empty. And it wasn’t heated.

I’m happy we wore our coats.

Neighborly.

This is a 765kv power line in Upstate New York. At one time I could stand under this line with fluorescent bulbs and they’d light up in my hands. 

This line runs northward from a large switch yard in Marcy and goes to Massena. From there it continues its march in a northeasterly direction, connecting to power flowing down from Hydro-Québec. 

As an “all things connected” geek, power interconnections like this are fascinating. I spent nearly 48 years living in the northeast with this peculiar interest. I’ve studied the power grid, especially the portion of the Eastern Interconnection in the northeast.

We probably want to remain friendly with the folks that control Hydro-Québec, since that 765kv line (along with quite a few others, including a couple of 345kv circuits in Northern New York) is bringing power down from Canada into the U.S. portion of the Eastern Interconnection.

I’m just a geek, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to get cranky with your neighbors.