Tag: Geeky Stuff

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I must be getting old

I’ve been going through my computer and deleting stuff, for a variety of reasons.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to probably do a complete rebuild of the system. In preparation for this I’ve been evaluating several factors. One of those is how much software on my machine is actually useful to me today.

There was a time when all the applications on my computer had a function and were used often. Those days are past. So I’ve been purging applications and their associated data from my system.

So far so good.

Then I got to thinking about the fact that Apple’s new silicon runs much more efficiently than their previous Intel based computers. It’s likely that Apple will discontinue OS support for Intel systems within the next few years. That’s not Apple being bad guys, it’s just a matter of consolidating their programming & hardware resources.

Apple did this once before, when they transitioned from PowerPC chips to Intel. I’ve been to this rodeo before.

The question this raised is since I’m going to have to do a complete rebuild anyway should I take the opportunity to move to Apple silicon at the same time?

By complete rebuild, I mean a fresh start of the Operating System. The plan calls for reloading only those applications that actually serve my needs today. I’m going to clean out all the saved passwords from the various password keychains. (Those stored in the cloud and those stored locally on my devices.) It means the deletion of all the weird assed websites and caches, and deletion of all the bullshit accounts that every fucking website wants you to create these days. Then starting over.

The goal is to get as close to being a user that’s never had a computer as possible.

It’s a hell of a task. There’s lots of planning and preserving user ids that I still need, while shedding all the crap that’s built up over time. The worst offenders in this regard are the job search sites. They never have a login site that says plainly who the hell they are. This complicates immensely figuring out what to delete and what to save.

Since I’m going to all this trouble in the first place, does it make sense to make the leap to Apple silicon now and then plan to have a computer that is “Future Proof” for at least the next 7 – 10 years?

I like my current computer. I’m one of the few people who liked the much maligned TouchBar. This preference adds a time element to my decision. It just so happens that the last MacBook Pro that has the TouchBar and has the new M1 chip is also available in the size and configuration that I like. That being said, it probably won’t be available next year.

The advantages to a newer machine are better battery life, (almost double my current machine’s). The processing power in Apple Silicon is approximately double. The newer machine supports WiFi 6, which my current machine does not. The newer machine can give me 2 TB of Solid State hard drive space. The current machine didn’t have that option.

The disadvantages are that I lose 2 Thunderbolt ports. I’ll also lose (at least temporarily) the ability to run VMWare Fusion and therefore Windows on my Mac. Yes, I could use Parallels, but I started thinking about how often I actually use Windows these days. (Not once in the past 3 months.)

The loss of ports concerned me. Then I really thought about it, and realized that I rarely have need of 4 Thunderbolt ports. I think the maximum I’ve ever used is 3 of the four ports and that was maybe once.

I’ve got a Thunderbolt dock from CalDigit. It provides all the ports I need if I really need a bunch of accessories connected to the computer. There’s a CD/DVD drive connected to that dock right now that hasn’t been used in almost a year. My monitor uses Thunderbolt directly so even if the dock were to stop working, I’d just plug the computer into the monitor. The monitor even charges my computer when connected directly.

I’ve got several dongles that plug into my current computer but even then, it’s a very rare occasion that I’ve needed more than 2 at any one time. The dongle that gets the most use is an Ethernet port that lets me connect to a network if for some reason WiFi isn’t available.

What Microsoft applications I use, run natively on Apple Silicon. So there wouldn’t be any of the messy Rosetta application conversion that imposes a performance hit. There are a few applications that would use Rosetta but those are used infrequently enough that they represent a negligible impact.

Basically, moving to a new Apple system at this point would have little negative impact on me. All my accessories for the current machine will work the same on a new machine. All the work I’ve done to prepare for a system rebuild will work just as well if I transition, or keep my current machine.

Apple will credit me $400 if I trade in my current machine for a new one. Apple Credit will give me zero interest for a year and 3% cash back to boot. It’s not a huge savings but it’s better than a kick in the pants.

I’ve convinced myself… I ordered the new machine. It should be here in a couple of weeks…

All of above is what went into the decision.

What makes me feel old is that I’m looking at this new machine as possibly a computer that I’ll use until I’m dead. I feel old too because I’m not that interested in the hassle of maintaining or updating a bunch of applications anymore.

I first noticed this phenomena on my phone, I’ve gotten my phone’s application count down to one and a half pages. There are more applications on the phone that will probably be deleted because the benefit they provide isn’t worth the annoyance of finding them, or dealing with making sure the latest version is on the device.

That philosophy spread to my computer, and iPad too. I’m down to 81 applications on my computer. That includes those that Apple provides for free. The number is about the same on my iPad and iPhone. When the new computer arrives, I’m betting that the number will drop to 70 or so, maybe 10 of which I’ll use daily.

My Apple Watch is nearing the end of its usable battery life and rather than drooling over the rumors of the new Apple Watches, I’m thinking about a plain simple (not flashy) watch. My Rolex is still my favorite but I think I’m going to have to lock it in a safe so that I’m not mugged at gunpoint over it.

I’ve been looking at automatic watches in the 300 to 500 dollar range. Oddly, that’s the same price range as a new Apple Watch. If I go the plain watch route, I won’t have to worry about recharging or the $10 per month cellular fee added to my bill every month.

Don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of the Apple Watch features. But if I’m out camping or hiking for more than a day, power becomes an issue. I can turn my phone off to conserve power and have some privacy, but I kinda like to have a watch when I’m out in the wild. I don’t want to have to carry all the paraphernalia required to charge the darn thing. An automatic winding watch will die 2 days after I do. Rather than die after me wearing it for a day.

Sure, I can carry a solar panel, I’ve got one. I can carry a battery pack, I’ve got one of those too. They both fit in my backpack and work really well. But suppose I don’t want the added weight? Traveling by air with them is a pain in the butt. TSA always seems to have a problem with them. “What’s that? Why do you have it? Why do you need it?” You’d think the TSA agents would have seen stuff like this before, alas, apparently not. I keep waiting for TSA to ask me where my papers are.

I suppose that’s making me feel like I’m old too. I’m eschewing the “Trendy, Modern,” stuff for the old tried and true. As I’m getting older, I have less patience or indeed concern about making sure all the little bits of high technology in my life are working.

If something isn’t working, it might not be that important. The importance seems to be directly related to how long it took me to notice something was amiss.

The funny thing is that I don’t stress over a lot of these things when I notice them like I used to. Now it’s kind of, “huh that’s dead. Do I need it right now? Nope, okay I’ll look at it later when I have nothing better to do,” and move on with my day.

That’s the way my Grandfathers looked at their world. If something wasn’t immediately useful, they’d move on. When I was younger I couldn’t figure them out. They’d chide me about my leap to technology. They both thought I was nuts for using ATMs. I kept wondering, how could they not be annoyed that the TV wasn’t working? How come they’d be so calm if a power drill broke and just pick up a hand cranked one?

I thought they were just old and dumb. But now I’m seeing their wisdom, perhaps because I’m acting just like they did.

They’d realized that you only need one coffeecup, one plate, one glass, one spoon, fork, or knife. Especially if you washed ’em when you were finished using them. They’d managed to see what was convenience, and what was necessity. In that realization, they became particular about what they wanted. That led them to frugality, not because they didn’t have money, but because they wanted to un-complicate and un-clutter their lives.

At the time they died, the world was becoming more connected, more complicated, and busier. I’d enjoy taking with either of them about the world today. I’m sure they’d be simultaneously appalled and amused.

They’d both be holding their sides laughing at me tossing useless crap out of my life. They wouldn’t get the computer purging, but they’d be smiling as they watched me picking up bits of dead or broken technology and tossing it into the bin.

They’d probably get a big laugh out of saying, “Welcome to being old and dumb.”

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Another article filled with the beauty of English…

I stumbled across a new site.

The main site home page is at brownstone.org

While perusing the site and reading I ran across this article from Jan 29th 2022.

It Was All There in the EUA. Why Couldn’t They See it?

The beginning of the article is interesting as it discusses the EUAs for the COVID vaccines. As I read the article, I thought, “Yep, this is a lot like the way I felt…”

Hey, it’s nice to see I wasn’t the only one reading the data and questioning the apparent disconnect between the published material and the endless news cycle.

Where the article really grabbed me was in the section titled.

From Orality to Literacy…And Back Again

The author, Thomas Harrington presents some interesting takes on society and its evolution.

As with any such article, I don’t have to agree with him, but he made me think. I also learned a couple of new words that I honestly don’t recall ever seeing before. For that alone, I am grateful I took the time to read the piece.

It’s been a very long time since I felt I had to have a “real” dictionary at hand.

It’s an even rarer event when I am unable to make a reasonable guess at the meaning of the words used from context within the sentence, or from a words roots.

I found myself smiling as I opened my dictionary and looked up the definitions. Upon reading the meanings I once again found myself marveling at our language and how often there is a single word that conveys an exact meaning, which otherwise might require a paragraph.

Others who take the time to read Harrington’s article may read it and think, “WWDucat is an idiot.” So be it. But at least I’m man enough to admit it and learn new things.

I suspect that when the words I looked up are encountered they’ll be obvious.

There is no shame in pulling out your Webster’s! If you’re like me, you’ll get lost in the beauty of words and language for more than a few minutes.

Have a great day.

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Well I tried…

Last night there was a lunar eclipse. This one was a super long one, only happening once in 1000 years.

In honor of the duration and rarity of the event I stayed up past my bedtime and walked out onto the deck to do what we often don’t do enough of.

I looked up.

The first time I went out, the sky was clear, with just a bit of haze and I could see the beginning of the eclipse.

Unfortunately my phone couldn’t. But this is what the beginning of the eclipse looked like and I thought I was going to be golden for the whole event.

I’d already heard from some friends “Down Below” (Yeah I live on a mountain and am elitist about it, So what!) that they were experiencing fog and cloudy conditions so they couldn’t see anything.

I smugly went back inside to warm up, secure in the knowledge that I’d be able to see the whole show. (Ahem! Mother Nature why do you hate me?)

I went back out about 30 minutes later to this.

What we have here is clear proof that A) Mother Nature hates me, and B) She has a cruel sense of humor.

If you’ll notice, this is a band of clouds, a single strip, the skies are relatively clear on either side.

The rest of the eclipse was more of the same from my vantage point. A strip of clouds that was moving in just the right direction to look like a curtain pulled across this celestial event.

Like I said Mother Nature hates my sorry ass.

There was a thinning of the clouds, and I could see the shadow covering part of the moon, the camera was even able to catch it, but much of the rest of the event was hidden.

From this picture, you can see that Mother Nature is also a bit of a tease.

That being said, I tried my best. I’m sure that Mother Nature is having a good laugh with friends this morning.

“Oh, Poseidon you should have seen the look on this one guys face when I painted over the moon with clouds! I haven’t seen a look that sad in millennia. Not since that poor tourist spent his life savings to visit Atlantis only to arrive just as it sunk. Hahahahahaha!“

Yes indeed the gods are capricious.

I hope you have a good day and pleasant weekend. I’m going to take a mid-day siesta and hope that there’s not an earthquake! (Poseidon, Hephaestus, I’m looking at you guys! No angry earth movements or accidents at the forge today please.)

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Well, here we are in August

The Summer is coming to a close, the children are supposed to be going back to school. (That rite of passage may again be disrupted due to COVID.)

I’ve got a couple of projects to get done before the Winter, those projects are on hold because of the living room and flooring mess.

There’s no reason to paint the stairs if there’re going to be workmen dragging all manner of tools and things up the stairs.

I can lay in supplies for the projects in the mean time. So at least that will be, in some small way, productive.

The flooring is the last piece of the puzzle regarding the living room, then we’ll have to have the fire suppression system inspected and re-pressurized. The jury is still out on the question of the furniture being replaced. At this point it’s likely that the couch and chair will be, but the rest of the wood furniture may have survived.

As we head back into another heat wave, I’m glad that the ceiling is at least back so that the air conditioning won’t be running quite as hard. My “Martian” special worked but was inefficient as far as insulation went. We’re now fully two months into having this disruption in our lives. Although, there are others who’ve been waiting 4 to 6 months.

Between supply shortages and construction repair crews busy schedules there are a lot of people waiting in line for remodels and repairs.

At the moment, I have a pile of trashed building materials on my front lawn and can’t really even do much in the way of yard work. There’s supposed to be a crew member coming up to pick up the trash and the ladders, I expect he’ll be by when the work is complete. It makes more sense to make only one trip instead of several so I’m not really all that worried about it.

This Summer has been a season of things breaking. My faithful 12 year old monitor gave up the ghost a week ago. While I didn’t want to spend money I’m glad I bought a new monitor. Amazon on the other hand said this monitor had more ports than it actually does. Their description was mostly correct except for this one small detail. Nonetheless, the thunderbolt port was there as indicated, and provided me with a method to connect to the computer.

Amazon’s description said there was a Thunderbolt, DV, and HDMI, port. There was only Thunderbolt and HDMI. I think the copy writer on the Amazon site may have grabbed the wrong specifications. Frankly, it’s probably too much of a pain in the ass to return the monitor and call them on their mistake. Going to the Samsung site told me I had the correct model number and that this unit did not contain the DV port. So word to the wise, cross check Amazon’s description and specifications against the actual manufacturer’s before you click that convenient “BUY” button.

In this case it’s not a big deal, but If I’d specifically needed the DV port it would have been.

The panel itself is very nice and crisp. It’s even convenient to watch movies or TV on.

The new router is working like a champ although there have been some situations where firmware updates on it have caused glitches throughout the WiFi devices connected to it. Nothing particularly difficult to resolve, but as is always the case with computer equipment these glitches show up at the most inconvenient times. I’m enjoying the speeds the router provides. I don’t much notice the difference between WiFi and hardline connections. With the previous router, there was a noticeable difference and if I had to do anything intense, like downloading an OS or watching movies I always connected to the hardline. Now I’ve actually moved devices over to WiFi and been able to decommission some of the network switches.

When I reassemble the living room, I’ll be considering connecting everything WiFi and getting rid of cables that aren’t strictly necessary.

Lately, I’ve noticed that I’m not actually watching what little of the news I used to catch. I’ve even stopped reading the news online. It’s all gotten too crazy for me.

Masks, not masks. Vaccine, not vaccine. Mandated Vaccinations No Mandates. Members of Congress saying that they want to create a two class America over vaccination status.

It’s one thing if the media says stuff like that, you pretty much ignored it because they’re the media, BUT when members of Congress start saying stuff like this, it’s head snapping!

When our government starts asking for vaccination proof, we will be uncomfortably close to NAZI or Communist forms of government. Are we at the point that our Republic is already dead? Are we just scrabbling around in the carcass of what was once a great country? Where does that leave what used to be “Average Americans”?

It’s stuff like those questions that makes reading or watching the News an increasingly unpleasant experience. I’m down to looking at the insanity about once a week unless something really catches my attention. At least I’m not completely uninformed but I can’t be any more informed than once a week.

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Time for the Geeky

For years, (at least 10) I’ve been using Apple TimeCapsules for my router and basic backup needs. The main TimeCapsule which has been in continuous operation for 5 – 6 years was finally starting to show its age.

Don’t get me wrong, it still works but it was starting to drop WiFi connections at odd moments and for no apparent reason. I started digging around and found that the maximum number of WiFi connections a TimeCapsule could handle was 40. What wasn’t completely clear was did the TimeCapsule have enough horsepower to handle 40 wireless and some unknown number of wired clients or was it 40 total?

I did a quick count of the number of devices talking to the TimeCapsule on average. Try 30 devices talking on WiFi normally. (The joys of a smart home!) If all the possible devices that wanted internet access Wired & Wireless were online we were talking 50 total.

Hmmm. A few quick experiments later and I found that low usage WiFi devices were being knocked off the net being replaced by higher demand devices. Things like Xbox, Apple TV, and DVD players would replace things like the thermostat, or the weather station display unit.

These low demand devices would generally come back after the high demand items got turned off, but sometimes they’d have to be reset to reconnect to the network.

I don’t know if it was processing, sheer number of clients, or just plain old tired, what was obvious was two things. 1) The number of clients was only going to increase, & 2) I really needed new router.

I looked at Eero’s, Orbi’s, and Netgear. The problem I had with each of these was that you had to have an account with Google, Amazon, or Netgear and I didn’t really like that idea. I wanted a router that did it’s job and wasn’t phoning home to tell wherever home was, about my porn habits, or anything else I was doing or shopping for. So an account being necessary to use a router I purchased, was out of the question.

Maybe I’m paranoid, maybe I’m not.

After some searching I found the Amplifi Alien.

I did some more research and found that you don’t have to have an account to use it. It’s a mesh router. Meaning it has the ability to seamlessly broadcast to other routers or to a satellite Alien (repeater).

The unit supports WiFi 6 so my phone and more recent devices are happy, it supports standard 2.4 and 5 GHz, with unification of everything under one SSID (Network Name). My Apple TimeCapsules always had a problem with that, and I had to maintain two different network names to provide for the 2.4 GHz only devices.

The router doesn’t have a dedicated backhaul wireless channel, but it does have the ability to use a hardline to handle the backhaul communications.

This is a pricey router, but no more than a 3 TB TimeCapsule was.

The unit is configured from an app on your phone.

I had it up and running in about 10 minutes. 5 Minutes was spent trying to figure out a way to put this machine out where it can be seen instead of hiding in my wiring closet. It’s beautiful.

Wow! This thing is FAST!

Suddenly, all my devices are connected and stable. Since Apple has gotten out of the Router Business I knew I was going to have to replace my router with something non-Apple eventually. I hadn’t planned on doing it right now.

That being said, I’m pleased as punch with this machine. I’m getting full fiber optic speeds out of my ISP. My WiFi coverage is much better than it was. I’ve got zero dead zones in the house or garage, and the signal extends well into the street as well as covering my entire yard.

SUPER! No more weird pauses in music or podcasts while I’m working in the yard.

I’ve also got up to 120 WiFi clients and because of the mesh technology I’ve got the ability to actually have more than 120 by adding another Alien at the other end of the house. The mesh tech, sends clients to whichever router is closer, so presumably with many of the client devices staying in one location I could have 1/2 on one router and 1/2 on the other.

Right now, I’ve only got the one router and it covers my needs very well. But it’s nice to have some expansion room, thinking longer term.

Devices are only going to get smarter. Speakers, lights, TVs, locks, alarm systems, garage door openers, and on & on. Even my HAM radio has the ability to use the internet over WiFi.

I was surprised to discover that there were so many machines in my home that were chatting away. I knew they were there, I’d obviously connected them to the network but I’d never really started counting them until recently.

In my immediate future, I suspect there is going to be a smart ceiling fan, a smart garage door opener, some video surveillance cameras, and maybe even a smart door lock.

I could actually see moving everything to WiFi. I’m not sure I will, but I like the concept of not having to run actual cable if/when I move to a new house.

Thus far… A week into owning this puppy, I’m giving it a big thumbs up. It seems to like the Synology RAID. Now to see how it reacts to multiple network drives…