Tag: tech

New Stuff

So many software updates this week. I updated my MacOS and now I can run my iPhone from my MacBook. I am doing it right now. the Bruins are going to start about 10 minutes from now and I am listening to the pregame via the NHL iOS app but I am running it from my laptop. Cool. I can’t see myself doing this often… I mean, my iPhone is right next to me. I could be listening straight from the phone, easy enough. Whatever, new stuff is fun.

I am typing this on the Vivaldi browser. Vivaldi took an update this morning and the whole UI has been tweaked. Everything looks different. Does it look better? Eh. Who can say. Different but the same, I guess. It took about 20 seconds for me to get 100% used to the changes and more or less stop noticing them.

I took an update on my iPhone the other day too and now I have a dark mode that can change the app icons. Different, yes… better? Maybe. I like it. It doesn’t really amount to anything, but it’s fun. New stuff is fun.

Now if we could just get the Bruins to win an effing game. They are finally back home tonight but they are playing Dallas and The Stars are off to a good start. How about we get our shit together, eh Bruins? Tonight seems like a good night to start.

Firewall Fail

I took my laptop to the hospital today. My father is asleep so I took it out of the bag thinking I could watch the season three finale of The Umbrella Academy. I connected to the guest wifi and…

All of my streaming services are blocked by the firewall. I have an account with a free VPN service, but that appears to be blocked too. I cannot connect to it.

YouTube works though.

Audible Failure

I didn’t think that failing at the Audible app was a thing. You know Audible, right? Basically it’s Amazon’s audiobook subscription service?.

I didn’t think there would be a way to straight up fail at using the app, but you know what? That audiobook that I just downloaded is most definitely in German, not English.

Fail, indeed.

Futurama was Wrong

I was just playing a game of Space Invaders on an Atari 2600 emulator I found online. I had a pretty good game.

Then I thought of that one episode of Futurama where the aliens from planet Omicron Persei 8 invade and Fry defends the Earth armed with his bottle of Shasta and his all Rush mix tape.

So I put on the Moving Pictures album to see if listening to Rush would improve my game. While it did improve my mood and my general sense of mental well being (that album RULES), it did not improve my game. Not even a little bit.

I guess the bottle of Shasta is the missing link. Either that or Futurama was wrong, and we all now Futurama is never wrong.

iPhone 14 Users

My phone is an iPhone 14 Pro Max. I didn’t upgrade to a 15 last year. I used to always skip a generation, then there were a few years where I did not, now I am trying to get back into the every-other-iteration way of thinking. When the next iPhone is released I will probably upgrade. Not because I necessarily want to (though I absolutely do) but because my trusty ol’ two-year-old is starting to get weird on me.

Are there any other 14 users still out there? Are they experiencing weirdness too? That’s a rhetorical question. I’m not expecting a discussion here, I’m just an old man yelling at clouds, so to speak.

It’s not so much weirdness as slowness. Everything, both native and 3rd party applications, just seem to need a little more time to do what they gotta do. Launch? Crunch some data? Open a photo? Play an audio or video file? It just seems to take a little longer than it used to. In some cases it takes a few full seconds more than it used to.

I wonder… is this some planned obsolescence program kicking in? Is Apple trying to convince me to upgrade this cycle by hamstringing my system over here? It’s possible. I don’t think it’s likely- (I mean it’s a 14 not a 4, right?) but it could be.

Not that I need any arm twisting or anything. I do want a new phone and it will probably just be a few months until the 16’s hit the market. I just wonder.

Anyway, I took today’s photo a day challenge pic before I left the cellar this morning. Yeah, it’s another guitar pic. What are you gonna do about it?

327/365
327/365

Windows Updates

Windows updates are just the worst, aren’t they? Seriously!

I just got prompted to reboot to take a Windows update. Okay, I guess. I was kind of moving between tasks at that moment so it seemed like as convenient a time as any. I rebooted.

30 minutes later* and it’s finally letting me log back in! Damn, Windows updates are just the worst!

*Yeah, it was more like 2-3 minutes, maybe. Time has a way of distorting while you’re taking an OS update, doesn’t it? It’s like Covid. Thanks to Covid, the year 2019 is simultaneously yesterday and 200 years ago.

To quote the great Douglas Adams, “time is an illusion. Lunch time, doubly so.”

Testing… Testing…

I just plugged in a new keyboard at my desk in the office. Just test driving it. It is not as nice as the one it replaces, but it has a number pad and I had reached the point where I couldn’t live without one anymore.

Long live the new not-quite-as-clicky, clicky keyboard.

Empty Nesters… Again

Bellana is back in Vermont. She left last night and stayed over one of her friends’ house in order to cut down on her morning commute today. At our house she was three hours away from work, and today is a work day for her. I get it. It makes me sad to see her go, but I am also really happy we had her for a few days. Even more so as we had Harry for a few days before that, and their visits overlapped so we had them both for a day. That made me really happy. That was an extra good night.

Jen is working from the office today. I am working from home. That means I am here by my lonesome, just me and the cats. I have a podcast playing on my MacBook and it’s streaming to Home Pods scattered all over the house. I don’t have to pause the podcast if I need to get up and leave the room. Heh heh. Technology is cool. When Jen comes home I’ll shut off any streams that are anywhere other than Harry’s room/my office space.

The Great Heatwave of 2024 is going to become official today. The forecast calls for the temperature in my little city to hit 99 degrees. That will be three days over 90. Heatwave: Confirmed. It is 9:10am right now and it’s already 83 degrees. It’s going to be fun.

The forecast for the rest of the week? Rain and clouds and awful. Back to normal, I guess.

After complaining about crappy sleep for the last week or so, I finally topped six hours last night. In fact, I topped 7.5 hours. It was broken though. I fell asleep at 9:30pm. Not by choice. I just couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore and zonked out. Normally I try to eat something before I go to sleep out of fear that my stomach will get so empty over night that it will hurt. A snack at bedtime avoids that problem, but I didn’t have one last night. My last bite to eat last night was at 7:49pm. I woke up with a bit of a stomach ache at 2:30am. I had a little snack and felt better, but I couldn’t fall back to sleep until well after 3:00. Oh well. I felt really tired when I woke up today (almost an hour later than I had planned) but I feel okay now. Here’s hoping I won’t be totally exhausted today.

Okay, red head. Back to work.

Cellar Dweller

My step son is home for a few days so I cannot work from the desk in his room. I’ve been using that space for my telecommuting needs for months now. When did I move things there? I can’t remember. Was it last fall? Last August maybe? I could search the blog for it but I’m too lazy at the moment.

Not using the desk in his room means I am back at the desk in the cellar. I left it all setup for work use when I moved so the big question for this morning was would it all still work?

The answer? Yes. Yes it does. All of it. Excellent. I had to plug everything into the laptop, and plug the webcam into the USB hub, and turn the speakers on, and that was it. I am now 100% back up to speed. I’m all punched in and off to the employment races.

Technology, man. You gotta just dig it.