Category: Tech

Weekend Project

I mentioned in a post a few days ago (so… like… 100 posts back… I post waaaaaaay to much) that I am going to set up a new office space in one of the kids’ rooms. I am going to put together a new desk and a work-from-home workstation to use with my work-issued laptop. I was also thinking of putting a personal machine in there just for schnitzengiggles. I figured it would be a windows box and I could put some games on it or something. Mostly it would just be used for youtube, but who knows.

Today I had a crazy idea.

If I am going to have a desktop machine that isn’t a Mac (I am 100% a Mac user outside of work)… why not a duel boot with a version of Linux? Debian or Ubuntu? Something like that?

That could be fun, right? Get a little swagger for my Computer Science degree going? Yeah… we’ll have to look into that more once everything is setup and running.

Vivaldi for iOS, At Last!

Finally! After ages of using Vivaldi as my browser of choice on my laptop, there is an iOS version of Vivaldi that I can use on my iPhone! I just installed it and synced it and now all the stuff I save off on my MacBook Pro should be available on my iPhone. Now I just have to put it onto my iPad. Thanks for the memories, Google Chrome for iOS but your day appears to have come to an end at last!

Happy MacOS Sonoma Release Day

Today is the release day for the new MacOS! Sonoma should be available, but it hasn’t shown up in my Mac App Store yet.

I have to say that there isn’t a whole lot here that I am excited about, apart from the normal “newer is better (and hopefully faster and more efficient, but who really knows)” vibe. I might look into widgets. I don’t really use them on my iPhone and barely acknowledge they exist on my iPad. Maybe I’ll see what’s out there for hockey and baseball and notepads and weather and news headlines and blogging stuff and random things like that.

I don’t use Safari so even though some of the updates are interesting, I am never going to see them. Oh well. That’s the downside of using third party browsers, I guess.

Whatever, Happy MacOS Sonoma Day, Apple fanboys and fangirls. Enjoy the day (assuming the download actually becomes available in your neck of the woods)!

Ironic yet unrelated note, I was prompted to take an OS update in Windows on my work machine today. What a small world, huh?

ADDENDUM: I guess the Mac App Store was just waiting for me to start complaining on the blog because the OS Update download became available to me just a few minutes after initially I published this post. Thanks, universe!

Wish My iPhone Luck

The lightning connection on my iPhone 14 Pro Max isn’t working. It’s been spotty for a couple of months, but over the last couple of weeks it’s failed completely. I plug a lightning cable into it and nothing happens. Zilch. Nada. Fun that something goes wrong right about the same time I decide to make it my go-to point and shoot camera again. As eight year old Bellana (my 22 year old step daughter) used to say, aw fiddlesticks.

I made a genius bar appointment for this afternoon to have it looked at. I had something similar happen with a headphone jack on an older model iPhone once before. In that instance they were not able to fix it and they gave me a new phone. I hope it doesn’t come to that today. I don’t want a new phone. I don’t want to have to go through the restore process. I did force an iCloud backup today, just to be on the safe side, but I hope I don’t have to use it.

Fitting that this is happening two days before Apple is expected to announce the new iPhone. Will it be called the iPhone 15? Probably but who knows. I am not planning to upgrade this year. I will probably do it next year, but I’m going to give it a miss for now. Part of the reason I hope I don’t have to replace my phone today is because it would suck to get a brand new 14 two days before the 15 is announced. That would be almost like adding insult to injury.

My genius bar appointment is in one hour and 35 minutes. Wish my poor, sick little iPhone 14 Pro Max luck. Poor, sick little monkey.

ADDENDUM: The iPhone lives! It was just some schmutz jammed into the port. The genius bar dude cleaned it out and now it works fine. Life is good!

The Scroll Wheel is Dead, Long Live the Scroll Wheel

I take a mouse with me when I work in the office. It’s not the same mouse I use when I work at home, it’s actually the mouse that came with the last desktop computer I was issued at work back in… 1862? Something like that? 2016 maybe?

I was using the scroll wheel to scroll through an email and it just stopped working. I closed the browser and reopened it, thinking it was a software issue. Nope, it still didn’t work. I rebooted my laptop (issued to me in 2021, I think) because I thought it might be a hardware thing outside of the mouse itself. Nope.

The scroll wheel is dead.

I went to Amazon and ordered a cheap-o wireless mouse to replace it. I found a few of various levels of cheapness, then took one of the cheaper ones so that I could spend a little more for overnight delivery to make sure I had it as soon as possible.

Long live the scroll wheel.

On an unrelated note, there have been no stomach issues today. Kick ass. It’s not even 4:00pm yet and I am already close to hitting my water goal, close to having all of my vitamins in, and sort of close to hitting my protein goal. After yesterday’s dietary B.S., things are looking really good today. Killer.

Okay, less than 1.75 hours left in the work day. I have to somehow get through the rest of the day without having a scroll wheel. How did we do it in the old days? How did we even survive without scroll wheels?

Long Day

Today is my first day back at work after a four day weekend. I’ve been punched in for about eight hours and 11 minutes but if feels like 2523972 hours and 237923603 minutes.

One bad thing happened at work today. I was prompted to reboot to take a Windows update. I had no idea (because I didn’t check before I rebooted) that the update in question was a full update to Windows 11. Ah, hell.

After a few less than perfect days in a row in terms of gastric bypass side effects and the like, I have now had two very good days. Well, yesterday was good and today has been good so far. I am really tired though. I only got four hours of sleep ahead of my sunrise jaunt yesterday. Last night I got six hours but I never put on my CPAP mask so maybe it wasn’t the most productive six hours. I am trying to remember why I didn’t put it on when I went to sleep last night and I can’t recall. I know there was a reason at the time, but what was it?

Did I mention I mailed off two rolls of film yesterday? I was hoping to maybe get an email saying the lab had received them today, but I didn’t really expect to. Maybe tomorrow? One roll was loaded into Dad’s camera on either Christmas day or Christmas eve, so there will be a few Christmas shots. There was also some snow in the back yard stuff, and then the first day of Bellana’s graduation weekend. The other roll was my first roll of Kodak Portra 800. Really my first use of a professional level film. I get shivers just thinking of that, and know that everything I took will likely suck because I am clueless. That roll has mostly graduation weekend stuff, and a few pics from yesterday’s stop at Plum Island.

We are going to see Harry this weekend. I expect a lot of Doctor Who discussions. Maybe I will make him watch an episode of the original show, just for laughs. Maybe I’ll Google something like “best forth doctor episodes” and see if there’s something we can watch out of sequence.

I just did exactly that and found that Douglas Adams of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy fame wrote three episodes of Doctor who in 1979. Only two aired as the third was derailed by a labor strike. I think we might have to investigate this further.

Okay, the work day is coming to a close. Time to start packing up. I hope you all had a good Wednesday, and I hope it didn’t feel like it was 941760497 hours long.

Cross Post with Bluesky

I just posted this on Bluesky… not that anyone is really using Bluesky at this point. The user base is small to begin with (invites only) and the staff has been seriously screwing up the content moderation end and making some majorly boneheaded, racist, and sexist moves. It’s really taking the fun out of things.

Doctor Who, the original series. Season two, episode nine. This is the last episode in the second ever dalek story arc, and it’s the first time I have heard a dalek say the word, “exterminate.”

Life is pretty much complete now.

@robj1971.bsky.social

https://staging.bsky.app/profile/robj1971.bsky.social/post/3k35ppagc4j2e

Nazi Hunting on Threads

So Meta/facebook/Instagram just launched a new Twitter clone called Threads. I created an account and then immediately regretted it. I don’t want to do anything to support Meta and it’s subsidiaries anymore. I still use Instagram but it’s a terrible place. I still use Facebook, barely. I just go there for the bariatric surgery support groups. That’s about it. If I see pictures of my niece and nephews I’ll check them out, but other than that I’ve moved on.

Why then did I open a Threads account? One part curiosity, one part being that it just takes your existing instagram account and rolls it into the new service. Mostly because I am still pretty much the same social media whore who started blogging on MySpace all those years ago.

I’ve only posted on Threads once and it’s basically just my Bluesky user name. Thumbing my nose and all that. I may have found a use to justify the account though.

There is a topic getting a ton of attention on Bluesky today where people are reporting extreme right (call them what they are, nazi) accounts for spewing hate speech only to have the content moderation allow the hate speech to stay… because Meta is as nazi as the rest of them.

My purpose for having a Threads account therefore is to find examples of hate speech and report them so that everyone can see that hate speech is acceptable to the Meta folks and maybe that will bring about some sort of public backlash. Doubtful, but it’s worth a shot.

Fucking nazis.

Gear Acquisition Syndrome, Again

Figures. I finally cave in to recording my guitar direct through some sort of amplifier simulation and almost immediately a pedal company releases a new line of amplifier simulation pedals. TC Electronics is the culprit. I doubt that these new pedals are going to be in the same league as the one Strymon makes, or Universal Audio’s line, but the TC stuff will be a whole lot less expensive, I can pretty much guarantee that.

I am not going to buy one of these… yet… I am going to think about buying one often. Very often. Even if I did pony up the cash, I would never like it as much as my actual Deluxe Reverb. You know, the actual amp this thing simulates? Yeah, real is always going to be better. It’s just that the sim is less likely to wake up your sleeping wife when you play through it at 5:00am.

That Makes Two

The only thing more shocking to me than starting a running program thingie is that two days after the first “event” I went outside and did a second. Really… the first one is staggeringly unlikely for me. The second… literally unthinkable.

The app I have been using keeps some stats but I haven’t nerded out on them yet. Now that I have two data points for comparison, you can guarantee I’ll be pouring over whatever is there soon enough. Up until now the only thing I’ve checked out was the super groovy GPS map that shows my route. Given that my route is just around the circle we live on, it isn’t anything terribly interesting. More of an oval than a circle. I think it’s super cool though.

Today’s drill was identical to two days ago. Walk for three minutes, run for one minute. Repeat six times. I haven’t looked into round three yet, but I did notice that it’s supposed to last longer. The first two were 25 minutes (that math doesn’t add up… think they are lying to me?). The next one says 33. We’ll see how it goes on Saturday.