Ring Doorbell For the Win

Looking at my last post regarding my Ring doorbell, I believe I have a love-hate relationship with the device. Today it came to my aid and kept from interrupting me while doing important work. Of course in order for that to happen, I had to have my smartphone connected to it so I could use the camera.

Lately my neighborhood has had a string of door-to-door salespeople ringing doorbells and interrupting my work. Normally it is too much of a hassle to open the Ring app on my phone and see who is at the door so I walk from my basement office up to the door only to get upset about being interrupted. Due to large bombs being exploded out in the Utah desert this week, I have been logged into my Ring app to see what others in my neighborhood are saying about the loud noises we are all hearing.

Today when I got the doorbell notification while working on something very important, I just pulled up my phone and quickly spied my front porch. When I saw 2 people I didn't recognize nor expected, I continued working. About 10 minutes later I finished my task and checked the door to see if they left something. Sure enough they left a brochure about something I am not interested in learning more about.

My Ring doorbell doesn't always work the way I want it to. Sometimes I have to go through and extensive login process just to get access to the camera and that can be frustrating. Fortunately today the stars aligned and it kept me working when I didn't need to get up. Today I like the device. 

Time for a New Exercise-Focused Smartwatch

I have loved my Suunto 9 Baro watch and use many of the features on it almost daily. Towards the end of ski season, I noticed the barometer in the watch stopped working. I would ski multiple runs but the device couldn't keep track of them. Instead I would have to look at my GPS path and count how many times I rode the chairlift. Then I started training for a trip my wife and I plan to take this fall: the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim hike. The amount of vertical feet I hike is a very important metric and so I decided to get a new watch.

I am a fan of Apple products as I have an iPhone and am typing this on a Mac computer. However I am not a fan of their smartwatches for one simple reason: short battery life. I need something I can use for multiple days without having to worry about charging my watch. With that in mind, I started researching a replacement watch.

When it comes to exercise-focused smartwatches there are 4 major brands: Suunto, Garmin, Fitbit, and Coros. I have not had much experience with Coros and so I wondered if I should take a chance and try one out. They seem to provide a lot of features at a low price point. After reading a number of reviews and comparing features, I decided to pass. I also passed on a Fitbit as my experience with the brand is not positive.

I am a sailor and when it comes to the most accurate GPS devices for sailing, Garmin wins every time. One of the people I ski with has a Garmin smartwatch and so I could compare notes. My wife also has a Garmin watch but unfortunately it does not have a built-in GPS and is very cumbersome to use. Ultimately I would have been willing to give a Garmin watch consideration except for one thing: I am invested in the Suunto ecosystem and wanted to continue using the same app on my smartphone.

Another factor that played into my decision is price. As an Eagle Scout, I get a 35% discount on Suunto watches and a 25% discount on Garmin. For those interested in how to get such a discount, comment and I will be sure to get back to you on details. Just make sure you have your certificate proving the accomplishment.

After weeks of looking, I narrowed my watch choice down to the Suunto 9 Peak Pro, the Race S, or the Vertical. I liked the 9 Peak Pro because is the follow-on to the watch I already have and I assumed it would be similar enough I wouldn't have to learn how to use it. I liked the battery life but it is a couple years old and is probably due for a refresh soon. I liked the battery life on the Vertical and all of the features specific to mountain climbing and hiking uphill on skis. Unfortunately it is also a few years old and the most expensive of the 3. Ultimately I decided on the Race S. It does not have the greatest battery life but is the newest and has some fixes that I wanted. The heart-rate monitor on my 9 Baro is very inaccurate and will double count heartbeats. This makes my fitness level rank with the worst of couch potatoes. The Race S has fixed that. It also had the best price of the 3.

I received the watch a week or so ago and my wife saved it for me to give as a gift for Father's Day. The first thing I noticed is how much smaller the new watch is vs. my old one. I used to have trouble wearing dress shirts because the size of the watch. The new one is very nice and will fit under the sleeves of my shirts. The second thing is how much more accurate the heart-rate monitor is. I went for a run and didn't spend the whole time with a heart rate of 212 beats per minute, which is well above my maximum.

Unfortunately I have only had a couple of days to test the watch but so far I really like it. Ski season is over so I won't be able to test that functionality for 4 or 5 months but I prefer the Suunto features over the Garmin so I am sure I won't be disappointed. While the Garmin does track alpine skiing, the Suunto has separate ski touring and alpine skiing settings and it is helpful to have both. If the watch doesn't live up to my expectations, I'll be sure to provide an update here.  

A Low-Tech Gift with High-Tech Uses

June is the birthday month of my oldest grandchild and so I need to think of an appropriate gift to get him. This morning my son reached out to me and suggested I get the same thing my wife's father got him when my son turned this age: a genuine Swiss-army knife. Thinking about the gift, I think it is a great gift for someone of my grandson's age and so I immediately ordered it from Amazon.

Now a pocket knife is controversial gift for a young boy. Some might say it is too young for such a dangerous weapon. My youngest son was slightly older when we decided to core apples while camping and he seriously cut the palm of his hand and required stitches. With the knowledge of that event now, I might have taken the time to do a bit more teaching on the proper use of knives and my son might not have required a late-night doctor's visit.

Looking at the picture of the knife on my computer, I doubt the knife blade will ever get used that much. I have a lot of adult friends that carry knives daily because of all the other tools they contain. The one I have chosen has both Philips and flat-head screwdriver blades. I am always using mine to remove covers off electronic equipment to replace batteries or scrape corroded connectors. Carrying a multi-purpose knife has its benefits. I'm sure it will get used.

One important thing I will have to stress to my grandson is not to ever bring it to school. While that is something I could do when I was his age, we are all a little paranoid when children bring weapons to school. Rather than have to deal with severe consequences it is best if he leaves the useful tool at home.  

Reconditioning Rechargeable Batteries

A year or so ago, I purchased a cordless vacuum to use on my sailboat. There are a lot of brine flies out on the Great Salt Lake and they love to infiltrate the cabin of my boat where they die within a few hours. I used to just sweep them up but having a vacuum is much easier. The only problem is that rechargeable batteries don't last forever. Over the Memorial Day weekend we went to the boat only to discover the vacuum lasted about a minute or two before dying.

Sometimes the rechargeable batteries still have a charge and it is the charge controller that thinks it is dead. I brought the vacuum down to my office so I could play with it throughout the day. The first thing I discovered is that I could plug the charging cord into the vacuum and it would immediately tell me I had most of a charge. I quickly unplugged the vacuum and would use it for a minute before it died. I continued doing this 3 or 4 more times until the charge only lasted a second or two. Then I let the vacuum charge for several hours.

I hoped by running the battery down to truly nothing would reset the charge controller and I could get more than a minute or two of use. Just to get an accurate reading I started a stopwatch as I turned on the vacuum and began cleaning my office carpet. One minute and six seconds later, the vacuum shut off with a dead battery.

I looked up the user manual on the Internet and quickly scanned the entire book. I didn't find any help about how to replace the internal battery. About the only hope I came across is that it told me to take the device apart and remove the battery before throwing it away. The good news there is that I should be able to easily take the unit apart and remove the battery. Unfortunately the battery is soldered into the printed circuit board and is not meant to be replaced.

Fortunately I have been able to put the vacuum back together and now have to decide how much effort I want to put into fixing it. It would not be difficult to cut the wires from the battery and solder in a new one. Then again, for the price I paid for the thing, it might be easier to buy a new vacuum. Naturally it would be a different one. One with better batteries.

Technology in the Desert

I helped keep runners safe at the Salt Flats Endurance Run held earlier this month. It is something I do every year as it combines off-road driving with ham radio. For some reason crazy people enjoy running out in the desert and a select group of people go out and help make sure they stay safe. Interestingly enough, I think the volunteers outnumber the runners two or three to one. I should try and figure that out next year.

Normally my wife and I drive out to Aid Station 6 and set up camp for the day. We bring lots of drinks and food to help fuel the runners. Once we are done, we drive back the way we came over a very rough road that requires high-clearance vehicles. The runners continue on a trail that we can't follow as per Bureau of Land Management (BLM) rules. It takes us about 45 minutes to make the drive to Aid Station 5, which also happens to be Aid Station 7. There we wait for all the runners to safely make it in. This year we didn't have to.

In the past we have waited as our vehicles might be needed to get as close to the runners as possible before having to continue on foot. This year the radio crew at Aid Station 5/7 had a new toy: a drone. Instead of driving out a mile or two and hiking to look for lost runners, they could send a drone equipped with a camera as well as night vision. That allowed us to leave at a reasonable hour of 9pm and get home by 1am. Previous years has had us sticking around until midnight or later. That makes for a long day.

This year we hung around for a few minutes and then made the lengthy drive back to the start/finish line. We dropped off all of our extra food and some of the remnants of the runners' drop bags that we brought out to our aid station. While checking out with the race officials, we could hear on the radio the happenings at Aid 5/7 and the status of the last runner, slowly making his way to them. We knew he would take time as he barely made it to our aid station before the mandatory cutoff time. They sent the drone to locate him and did so as the marvelous piece of technology reached its maximum range before needing to return or risk running out of battery. On that news, my wife and I jumped into our Jeep Wrangler and drove home. It felt downright luxurious being home by 1am.

Using AI Appropriately

I had the pleasure of helping develop the PlayStation 5 video-game console when I worked in Research and Development at Sony Interactive Entertainment. One of the advantages of the hardware is that the file system is fast enough so it is not necessary to keep multiple copies of digital assets. What does that mean? When you create a virtual world, it is made up of a number of digital assets such as trees, rocks, buildings, or any number of other things we find in the real world. Most of the time, those assets are used over and over again. For the sake of an example, a forest is made up of a lot of trees. There may be only 5 different tree models created for a game and then they are reused many times to give the illusion of a forest. With the PS4, game designers would copy those 5 trees hundreds of times. That isn't necessary on a PS5 as you can have just the 5 tree types and point back to each one on the file system any time you need it. Assuming each tree requires 4KB of memory (an arbitrary value pulled out of thin air) and you have 1000 of each tree in a game, the PS4 would require 4MB for each tree used while the PS5 only needs 4KB. Theoretically PS5 games should be significantly smaller than for other game consoles. This becomes very helpful for games like Red Dead Redemption 2 that required 2 Blu-ray disks for the game. For physical game disks, it saves a bit of money and for digital downloads, they don't take as long to put on your system.

So what does that have to do with using AI appropriately? It boils down to why game developers only make 5 tree models. Most gamers don't slow down and look at every tree in a forest to see if it is different than all the others. So why take the time to create more than 5? If you can throw the problem at a generative AI program, you can let it create hundreds of different trees. This provides a level of uniqueness currently missing in a lot of games. This totally eliminates the benefit of the PS5 over other gaming consoles as its games once again become bloated. The reality is that while the PS5 doesn't require duplication of digital assets doesn't mean game studios are using the feature. You will still find copies of digital assets spread throughout quite a few games. Why not make the games more unique?

I have been thinking about this issue for the past couple of days and came up with another area where the use of AI should be applied. I walked through my kitchen this morning to get myself some breakfast. My floor is a high-quality laminate with a simulated pine surface. While pine is great looking, it is a very soft wood and makes horrible flooring that is easily scratched and dented. Using a high-quality laminate allows it to be almost indestructible yet look beautiful. The downside to a laminate is that there are only about 5 patterns on the boards. They repeat quite often and if you look closely you notice a lot of the boards are the same. The laminate floor company could use AI to create 100 different patterns instead of just 5. This would create a much more unique floor.

Yes these two solutions for generative AI don't seem to be high priority. After all if they were, companies would spend the effort to make their products more unique. The beauty of using AI is that products can become more unique and special without humans having to spend more time making it happen. You will still need those humans to fine-tune what is generated but their time can be spent being creative and not doing repetitive and mundane tasks.

 

Sextortion Should Be A Capital Offense

Recently someone came to me and asked for help after being a victim of sextortion. What is sextortion? Simply put, it is when someone coerces you into sending naked pictures of yourself and then tries to get you to pay money to keep from sending those pictures to your friends and family. Often times a bad actor will pose as a teenage girl and offer to exchange nude pictures with teenage boys. About the best advice I can give is just don't do it. That is often easier said than done though.

The unfortunate thing and why I think it should be a capital offense is that a large number of teenage boys have ended up committing suicide over sextortion schemes. Parents involved in these tragedies from different states have lobbied their legislatures to make the crime a felony, which it is as of today in Utah. Personally I don't think it is enough of a deterrent. Due to all of the lives that have been lost, I think we should be able to up the punishment so that a criminal that has caused a suicide should suffer the same punishment, death.

Now I know I am a bit harsh and many will point out that death-row inmates cost more than someone doing life in prison. I understand that. I also know that others will be upset at me for being so willing to take the life of another person. I only wish the criminals extorting money from teenage boys worried as much about the effects of their actions.

Unfortunately the reality is that with the ubiquity of the Internet, most bad actors dabbling in sextortion don't reside in the United States. When I wrote about this same subject half a decade ago, the e-mail started in Panama. I know there are other documented cases with criminals in various African countries. That means bad actors have some level of protection from prosecution in the United States.

So what can we do about sextortion? The first thing you can do is report it to the authorities. This includes local police and the FBI. The FBI's website where you can file a complaint is www.ic3.gov. You can also go to StopNCII.org to see about removing those images so they don't continue to propagate. Be forewarned that they have a 90% success rate. That is nowhere near the 100% we all hope for. Finally be prepared for all your friends and family to receive those embarrassing pictures. About the best you can do is respond with an apology when someone tells you they have been on the receiving end of those images.

To finish the story I started this post with, I advised the person not to pay the extortion fee. Once someone realizes you will pay, it only opens you up to more sextortion attempts later. A day later a number of friends and family received those compromising images. Everyone that received them reached out to the victim, showed support, and expressed concern. Nobody judged. We all have things in our lives we would like to keep private and don't want shared with the world which is why I never answer my phone in the bathroom. Friends and family understand that and won't rake you over the coals for a mistake you have made. 

Using Napkin.AI to Streamline Presentations

There is a lot of focus on artificial intelligence (AI) in the media right now. Some of it is good and some of it is bad. Yesterday I had a colleague ask me how I use AI in my job right now. I had to confess that I know lots of areas where it can be used, such as summarizing lengthy articles or generating complex code, but that I don't feel the need to use it. Then I thought back to when I created my last presentation. That is a classic example of where anyone can use AI to help.

I sit through a lot of presentations and hate it when someone creates overly-wordy slides. It makes for a very uninteresting presentation and is often called "Death by Powerpoint." When I find myself putting a bunch of text on a slide, I take a step back and try to figure out how to replace all the words with a simple picture. Sometimes that can be rather difficult and so I told my colleague that AI is a great way to streamline a presentation. We have an internal engine at Sony that we are encouraged to use. That keeps our confidential text from falling into the wrong hands.

My colleague asked if I had ever used napkin.ai, which is a website specifically designed to take presentation text and turn it into a picture. I immediately logged in and gave it a shot. I didn't have to create a new user or anything as I just logged in using my Google account. Then I copied some text from a personal document I had open and it generated several images for me to select. It worked amazingly well.

Should you find yourself trying to create a presentation and have a slide filled with text, I highly suggest you give napkin.ai a test. It may just help things become more easier to understand. Of course be sure not to input confidential or sensitive information as there is no guarantee it will remain so. 

Volunteering My Time

Today there are a select group of runners preparing to run 100 miles on the Salt Flats of Utah tomorrow. They will wake up early and try to complete the run in 36 hours. Some will hurry through the course while most will suffer. I have the luxury of driving my Jeep Wrangler on very rough roads out to the 40-mile aid station where I will provide water and food for the runners. I will also use ham radio to send their times to race control so family and friends know where they are on the course.

This is something I have done for the past decade or so and appreciate the chance to help out. One thing about ham radio which is also known as amateur radio is that you cannot be paid for it. That is the very definition of amateur. This is one of two ultra marathons that I help with every year and they are always an adventure.

One year helping with this race, I pulled into aid station 5 and heard air escaping from my right-rear tire. I continued to drive to my final destination, aid station 6 as the tire still had plenty of air. When we had a lull in the activity, my buddy pulled out his battery-powered impact wrench and we changed the tire like a NASCAR pit crew. The spare had never been used and needed a bit of air but Jeepers always carry air compressors and we easily filled the tire.

Another year we had someone get off course and find themselves in quicksand as the sun sank below the horizon. Fortunately the recording of runners at Aid Station 6 allowed the race organizers to know the last known location and the Utah Department of Public Safety helicopter quickly located the runner. The helicopter hovered above the quicksand and they were able to pull the person to safety. I will confess that the pilot may have gotten too close to the ground and almost got stuck himself.

There are countless more stories to tell but the message I want to share is that volunteering is important. There are lots of people that can use your help and so do your community a favor and look for opportunities to help out. You won't be rewarded monetarily but you will be compensated in many other ways.

Updating My iPhone Software

Apple sent me a request on Friday asking me to update the operating system on my iPhone. It said before doing the update I would need to make more room on the device as I didn't have enough free space. That surprised me as I had over 10 GB available. Fortunately it brought up a utility to help me remove large files from the phone.

I take a lot of pictures and movies with my phone that I use on my YouTube channel. That requires me to copy the files from my phone to my desktop computer. I don't need the copy on my phone and so I spent some time making sure I had copies on my computer before deleting them from my phone. I did keep several photos on my phone as sometimes I like to show some of my pictures to friends and family. There is a balance though as keeping too many pictures makes them difficult to find and deleting to many means I can't share some of my adventures.

I went through my phone and freed up quite a bit of space. Apple's utility then showed me my largest text message attachments. My daughter-in-law often sends me large videos of my grandchildren being cute. I made sure I had copies and then deleted the ones on my phone. That freed up even more space to the point I felt I could install the operating system update.

I made sure to plug my phone into a stable power source and started the update. It ran smoothly and half an hour later, I had a phone with the latest operating system. My hope is that Apple doesn't continue to make more large updates. If they do, then I may need to upgrade my phone simply to have more memory so I don't have to worry about these updates in the future.

My Mac Not Recognizing my Password

Earlier this week I tried to log into my personal desktop computer, which is a Mac Mini from a few years ago. The machine is connected to the Internet but impossible to reach from outside my office, thanks to how I have set it up. As the only way to get on the computer is by being in my physical office in my house, I have a relatively easy password that I always remember. For simplicity's sake, let's assume that the password is "password" even though it is something different.

I went to log in and the computer didn't recognize my password. I thought I may have mistyped it so I tried again only to be denied access to my computer. I tried again making sure the caps-lock key didn't get inadvertently pressed. That didn't work either. I started to panic thinking that someone had hacked into my system. Then other equally problematic scenarios started running through my head. Fortunately I knew I didn't have to worry about my computer locking me out if I tried too many times. I took a deep breath and started applying my troubleshooting skills to the problem.

I looked carefully at the password field and started typing my password and it showed me the usual dots for each character. I typed "pass" but only saw 3 dots instead of the 4 I expected. I cleared the field and tried again watching the same result. For some reason, the first character I typed was not recognized and so I tried typing the first character twice. I entered "ppassword" and my computer let me in. I felt a huge wave of relief.

Eventually I stopped using my computer and the next time I came back to it, I had to enter my password to unlock it again. Fortunately the problem with the first character not being recognized did not happen. I counted the dots on the screen and they matched each key click I entered. I have not had the problem since that one time.

Should you find yourself trying to log into a Mac unsuccessfully, I suggest counting the dots and making sure all the characters are being recognized. If not, do what I did and double up on the first one. It may save you an anxious moment or two like I had.

Making Soap and Processing Data

My youngest son works at a liquid soap manufacturing facility in Cambridge, Ohio. Sunday evening I talked with him for our regular weekly call and asked about a project for which he is spending a lot of time. He mentioned that most soap factories mix all of the ingredients in large vats and then fill individual containers. He went on to say that his facility is more advanced in that it mixes the ingredients in the piping, does the appropriate cooking, mixes more ingredients, and eventually fills the individual containers. This is a much more streamlined approach where the only bottleneck is at the end.

I listened intently as I had no idea that making soap mirrored some of the data processes I work on at Sony. We have some data pipelines where all of the data is stored together and then cleaned in batches. Other pipelines clean the data as it comes into the system and quickly stores it in the tables that get used for analytics. The advantage of the second method is the data is always up-to-date. With batch processing you have to wait until the batch is processed before you can analyze the data. That may occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly frequency.

I explained the similarities to my son and he further elaborated that in the factory they have real-time monitoring of the systems. This includes flow rates and temperature values for different parts of the process. He asked if we have the same types of monitoring for the data and I responded that we do.

While my son is a Mechanical Engineer and I am an Electrical Engineer, the same ideas can be used in both disciplines with correspondingly similar pros and cons. This reminded me of a class I once took on "Thinking Outside the Box." The course mentioned that you may get ideas for solutions to problems you are working on by simply looking at other seemingly unrelated fields. I can't agree more.

Whiners vs. Problem Solvers

Recently I read a post on LinkedIn that seems to be going viral about the high cost of dice for board games due to the tariffs imposed on goods from China. The post talks about how the company has looked to source dice from other parts of the world but can't find any companies outside of China. As a result, they will have to pass on the added costs to their customers so that a $40 board game will now cost $60. I apologize for not having more details but the post bothered me because it sounded more like whining than someone looking for a solution. I don't like listening to whiners.

I immediately started engineering solutions for the problem and thought about what I would do in the same situation. As someone with a 3D printer, my immediate thought involved a minor investment in high-quality printers capable of churning out all the necessary dice required to meet with game demands. While my current printer might not be up to the challenge, there are a number of models that are and it struck me as very unimaginative to whine about not being able to manufacture dice. 3D printing is what a lot of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) players do when they want to create their own multi-sided dice. Couldn't that work for a board game company?

Then I thought about other possible solutions. Ultimately there is nothing like physically rolling high-quality dice while playing a game. Perhaps until a dice manufacturer can be found the company could provide a smartphone application that simulates the roll of the dice. There are a number of existing apps already and so it wouldn't be that difficult to replace physical dice. While most of us think of standard 6-sided dice, D&D players require many different sided dice and resort to these types of apps when physical dice aren't available.

I'm sure there are even more possible solutions that this board-game manufacturer could employ. Yes these tariffs are going to be painful. But I see the pain as short-term as we shift some of our manufacturing back to the United States after spending the past several decades shipping it out. Fortunately my experience has taught me that growth only comes through trials and in the end it is worth it.

Old Photographs Don't Lie

I spent about 10 minutes this afternoon looking through old photographs and they scared me. I ran across old pictures of girlfriends, people I hung out with, and me skiing in my youth. While I don't claim to have the best memory, I remember being a much better skier than those pictures would indicate. I also confess thinking that my old girlfriends looked significantly better in my memory than those pictures would indicate. Perhaps my wife is just that much better looking.

The other thing I remember wrongly is the quality of film photographs. I have been using a digital camera for so long and they have continued to evolve from rather poor results to now when they are significantly better than the film photographs I remember. Now one important thing to remember is that not all cameras are created equal. That is true for film cameras as much as it is for digital ones. I'm sure I used a lot of those crummy disposable cameras as they easily fit in a pocket and could be pulled out to take very blurry pictures. Then you didn't know what you got until you spent money developing the film. With a digital camera, if you don't like the photograph, you can delete it and try again. While I have some poor film photographs, I also have some really nice ones taken with a top-of-the-line Nikon from that time. While they look amazing, I still prefer my high-end digital camera.

In going through my old photographs, one of the first thing to note is that I used to have hair. I found a great picture from my teenage years and I look much better with hair. I wish I still had it. Unfortunately my genes conspired against me and I'll have to be satisfied with being bald. It is a good thing I got married before I lost my hair.

I have also decided to hide all of my old ski pictures from my kids. I ski much better now than I did back then. Part of it could be that I ski over 100 days every season now and I was lucky to get 20 back then. The important thing is that if my kids see those old photographs I will be ridiculed and made fun of the rest of my life. I should probably burn those pictures.

Mobile Phones for Children

Yesterday my 5-year-old granddaughter got a smartwatch with a phone built into it. She can only use it to communicate with a very small number of people. Naturally my wife and I are on that list and we have each received no less than 5 phone calls in the past 12 hours. While some might be bothered by so many calls, my wife and I love it as we enjoy speaking with any of our grand kids.

My son got the watch for his daughter to help locate her while playing with friends. she is very socially active and her parents often have a hard time finding her when it is time to come home for dinner. That is the primary reason she has the device and I agree with his thinking.

My slightly older grandson also has a similar smartwatch and he behaved the same when he got it. He wore it constantly and sent me voice messages all the time. Then he discovered he needs to charge the device and it often had a dead battery. Eventually I stopped getting messages from him and he stopped wearing the device. It became an unreliable way for me to contact him. Now that his sister has a smartwatch, they have been competing with each other to contact my wife and me. My hope is that with two of them having devices, we will have a great way to contact our grand kids.

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and mobile phones became ubiquitous, I set 15 as the age for my kids before they got their first mobile phone. I wanted them to have practice using one before they started driving. That way if something happened in the car, a child could reach Mom or Dad. Now mobile phones have evolved to contain a lot more functionality including cameras, location data via GPS, and a number useful applications. It makes more sense to lower the age I originally set but still am not sure what that age should be. Fortunately I don't have any young children as my oldest is almost 30 and has kids of his own. Ultimately I don't think there is a specific age that works for everyone as I prefer to look at maturity. Not all 5-year olds are created equal and some will do well with a smartwatch while others won't. I'm interested in your thoughts so feel free to leave a comment. Others may appreciate your advice as well.

IRS Does Not Seem to be Slowed Down

It is tax time again and there seems to be some fear this year because of all the people being cut from the federal government. A lot of people are worried that Elon Musk and his seemingly gang of 20-year-old thugs is going to slow down tax returns being mailed to honest working Americans. Knowing this, I sat down last week and worked to get my extra complicated taxes filed. It took all week but I submitted them on Saturday afternoon. I then read the fine print and discovered I should expect my return within 21 days.

One of the reasons I have a complicated tax return this year is I cashed out a rather sizeable investment which I promptly reinvested in something with much better returns. The only problem is that I have to pay capital gains on the increase over the past 30-plus years. In doing so, I withheld federal taxes as if you owe more than something like $1,000 you will get hit with penalties. The state of Utah is different in that as long as you pay your taxes by April 15th, there are no penalties. My hope was that I would get enough back on my federal taxes to cover what I owe the state. I am actually getting slightly more back than I owe so I might be able to take my wife out to dinner or something. I did my taxes early enough that receiving the federal return within that 21 days would give me more than enough time to pay my state taxes.

Today I had to log into my bank account for a completely unrelated issue and noticed my balance is larger than expected. I clicked on the details and noticed that my federal tax return is sitting in my account ready to be sent to the state of Utah. It only took 5 days for me to receive my refund! This is the fastest I have ever received a tax return.

Let me return to my second sentence in this post about Elon Musk and his seemingly gang of 20-year-old thugs slowing down tax returns. I think this is one myth that doesn't fly with me. Granted my experience is one in 300-plus million Americans and your experience may vary. However I'd like to believe that the mere threat of dead wood being cut from the federal government has lit a fire under IRS workers and they are working with the speed we haven't seen in decades.

Back to the University of YouTube

Once again my youngest daughter came to me with a car problem she needed help with: replacing a headlight bulb. One nice thing about modern cars is how well they do keeping dirt and debris out of the engine compartment. The downside is that it is not very intuitive on how to do simple things like replacing a headlight. Before committing to the work, I looked on YouTube at the process of replacing a headlight on her Jeep Cherokee.

The first video I found had a very encouraging sign: the video came in at 3 minutes. That indicated it would be a fairly simple job. I watched all 3 minutes of the video and learned the very important trick to get to bulb. While I would have tried to go in through the hood, it is actually easier to unscrew 3 bolts and go in through the wheel well. The guy did it in 3 minutes on the video but did some editing to remove some of the boring parts. I estimated it would take me 10 minutes. I found time in my schedule and texted my daughter when she should come over so we could work on her car.

My daughter arrived with the new bulb and we did the work in my driveway. Fortunately we had a bit of a warm spell this week and I didn't need to bundle up. We worked together and quickly had the old bulb removed. As you should never let oil from your fingers get on a new headlight bulb, I ran inside quickly to get a single disposable glove so I could handle the new bulb safely. Then we reversed the process and had the new bulb in quickly. It would have gone 30 seconds faster if I had remembered that you turn to the right to tighten. Once I figured that out, the car went back together easily.

When I added up the time it took me to research the most efficient way to change the headlight bulb and the time to actually do the work, I figured I saved myself about an hour. Yes I could have gone in through the hood and figured out how to change the bulb thanks to my skinny hands. I probably would have lost a lot of skin and learned a dozen new expletives so I'm glad I took the time to do a bit of research.

Can You Really Trust an Online Review?

I recently went on a cruise with my wife. When I got home, I had an e-mail from the company where I purchased the trip, which is not the same company as the cruise line. The e-mail asked me to provide a review.

Every time I purchase something online I seem to get a request asking me to review the product. Once I bought a winter jacket in August and a week later received an invitation to write a review. I hadn't even worn the jacket yet let alone put it to a true test of how good it is. I've had that jacket for 2 years now and could provide a much better review but nobody would be interested in it because you can't buy it any more. It has been updated and only slightly resembles what I purchased. My review today would say that the jacket is amazingly wind and waterproof, breathes well, but has lousy zippers. If I didn't have such an amazing seamstress for a wife, the jacket would be in the garbage. It is only after 2 years of use that I have come to that conclusion.

Let's go back to my cruise example. How would anyone know if my review of the cruise is accurate or not. Anyone who has taken such a trip knows that one passenger's heavenly cruise can be another's sub-standard one. I have only been on one other cruise and I found each to be amazing and a lot of fun. They occurred on different cruise lines but had similar standards for food and entertainment. I would rank both as 5-star experiences but someone with the experience of 20 or more cruises would be a better judge.

One area where I feel I am an expert is skiing and feel I can give an honest opinion of equipment or various ski areas around North America. It is actually a topic of my YouTube channel. How would you know if you can trust my opinion or not though? I have ridden up the chairlift with quite a few skiers that are on the wrong skis but swear they are the best skis in the world. Nobody has ever spent $1000 on a new pair of skis and gone on to say anything bad about them. It makes them look foolish and so they only sing praises for their equipment.

There is also the other end of the spectrum. Sometimes someone will get a bad product or have a bad experience. Perhaps they took their spouse on a wonderful cruise only to find out the spouse wants a divorce. Do you think the cruise is going to get a good review? Probably not but not because of bad service, poor food quality, or lousy entertainment. The reviewer may be going through something outside the control of the cruise line and the reviewer should not be penalized the company for it.

So how can trust an online review? Look at as many reviews as you can find. In statistical analysis we always throw away the highest and lowest scores as they can skew what is really going on. Look for those 2, 3, and 4-star reviews to see why people didn't give the maximum or minimum rankings. You will discover that the passenger booked a cheap cruise during hurricane season and spent the voyage seasick, which is not the cruise line's fault. Perhaps someone is really sensitive to color and the picture didn't quite match what they received. That doesn't ruin the quality of the product, just the aesthetics, which may not be important to you.

Remember that not everybody is qualified to provide quality online reviews. Furthermore there are reports of AI being used by companies to give large numbers of positive reviews. Be aware of that and look at a number of reviews for any products or services you are considering. Carefully selecting the right reviews will help you understand if it is right for you.

A Case for Text Messaging

I have never been a fan of using text messaging. That being said, I do recognize that it is a prevalent form of communication and use it when necessary. Today I have discovered a case where text messaging beats other forms of communication and have been using it for that.

Before continuing I should share why I hate texting. I am a fast typist and prefer to use a full-sized keyboard instead of a tiny one on my phone's screen. That is one reason my personal computer is a Mac. It seamlessly allows me to see and respond to my phone's messages on my computer. When someone sends me a message, I can use that full-sized keyboard to respond. Furthermore I don't have to take my phone out of my pocket. I agree that if you need to send a short message to someone, it is easier to send a quick text than to call them or send an e-mail. If there is going to be any back-and-forth, use the phone part of your smartphone and give them a call. Your communication will go much quicker.

Today I have been trying to schedule a meeting between two people and there has been a lot of back-and-forth. While a phone call would be nice, that is not a good solution with more than two people. One person is generally busy doing other things, like me for example, and it is tough to get everyone on the phone together. In this case, I had a young woman ask to meet with a senior manager. While I would have liked to just introduce the two and have them work out a time to meet, protocol in this situation dictates that I act as a gating person. Otherwise the senior manger would be inundated with meeting requests and never be able to get any work done. I asked the senior manager for some preferred times and got a number of options that I passed onto the young woman. Unfortunately none of the times worked for her because of other commitments and so there has been some back and forth to find a time that will work.

The nature of text messaging allows a conversation like this to take place over several hours without ripping anyone away from meetings or interrupting the current flow of the day. Now one could argue that this process could have been shortened by having access to the young woman's and the senior manager's calendar, making it easy to find a time for the two to meet. Unfortunately there are a number of scenarios where that doesn't work. One that I run into frequently is working across time zones that are far enough apart that one of the two parties will have to meet outside of regular work hours which is what happened today.

I still dislike that some people would rather send a text than talking on the phone but recognized there are reasons where text messaging is the best form of communication.

Using Google Calendar

I spend a fair amount of time working as an executive secretary for a volunteer organization. This is not something I aspired to do. Instead someone asked me to do it and I said I would. As an executive secretary I basically set appointments for people to meet with the leadership of the organization. Sometimes people ask to meet with the leaders and other times leaders ask to meet with specific people. Google's calendar, which can be found at https://calendar.google.com, does an amazing job and makes things very easy.

Before networked computers became commonplace, someone in my position had to keep paper calendars and have a lot of coordination meetings to make sure not to double-schedule someone. Now it is as simple as providing a scheduler like me with access to your calendar. Most of the leaders of the volunteer organization I associate with have e-mail addresses separate from their regular work or personal e-mail. Then they just log into Google Calendar with it and make sure to give me access to their calendar so I can set appointments for them.

The organization leadership changed significantly last week as nobody is expected to be a volunteer forever. We met as a new group on Wednesday evening and I deleted my access to the old leadership's calendars. The new leadership then shared their newly created e-mail addresses and gave me proper access. The next evening I then went through and created calendar entries for all of the regular meetings. We also had a number of requests for people to meet with the new leadership and I entered those. Fortunately I had lots of experience using Google Calendar in the past and did not have much of a learning curve.

I keep my personal calendar on my iPhone. I can access it from my Mac computer. It is great as I keep all sorts of appointment information up-to-date using both devices without having to worry about which one has the most correct information. They both do as an update on one pushes the change to the other. This would also be a great solution for the volunteer association I work with. The only downside is that everyone is required to use Apple products. Google Calendar doesn't care what phone you use. While you can access it with your phone's browser, there is also an application you can put on your phone. I just always use a web interface and it works great.

Are there problems with Google Calendar? Of course but they are minor. It has all of the features I need it for and appreciate the free price tag. If you are looking for a calendaring tool that makes it easy to share people's schedules, you might want to give it a look. It may also work for you.

Dates on Websites

Earlier this week I had a neighbor call me asking about getting his amateur or ham radio license. I explained the 3 levels of licenses and privileges associated with each. I then pointed him at some study resources as getting a license requires passing a test. Next he wanted to know where he could go to take a test. I did a quick Internet search only to find significantly outdated information. When I got my license over a decade ago, you could reliably count on a test being administered on the last Tuesday of each month at a local emergency operations center or EOC. COVID must have put an end to that and the latest information I could find seemed woefully out of date.

This underscored the importance of making sure dates on a website being updated regularly. You may have a website that advertises an event in the seemingly distant future. You send people to the site to provide information about the event as that saves you from having to say the same thing over and over. The event comes and goes but what happens to the website? If it is still up after the event, people get confused. It might be easiest to update the page letting everyone know about the success of the event. Then the site can continue to exist in digital perpetuity.

My preference for dates on websites is to store events in a database and populate the website from it. Then if there are no longer any future events, you have a message that says something along the lines of, "No events are currently planned." It is also fairly easy to add new events to the database and you don't have to worry about deleting old ones as the database logic should not show past events on an upcoming events page.

I continued searching for my neighbor and eventually found an upcoming exam session in March. That seems to be a long time away but it will be March in no time at all. That also gives him plenty of time to study.

Life Without E-Mail

Yesterday I woke up early and got ready to head to my morning workout. Before doing so I like to check both work and personal e-mail to make sure I am not missing an important meeting that got scheduled overnight. My work e-mail and calendar showed a clear morning. When I went to get my personal e-mail, I couldn't connect to the server. I didn't worry about it and headed out for some exercise.

I got home and still didn't have access to my personal e-mail. I tried to log into my e-mail service provider's website and couldn't get there either. At this point I knew they must have done something big. I wondered if it had anything to do with the wildfires in Southern California (It did not). On a whim, I logged into my company's VPN which make it looks like I am located in Southern California and managed to get to my e-mail service provider's website. There I could log a ticket with technical support and try to get help.

As a side note, it is tough to get e-mail-based technical support when you can't get your own e-mail. I had to periodically check the website to see if they had any updates. Doing so allowed me to see that they had moved my e-mail server from an old machine to a new one and propagating those changes takes time. Fortunately those changes came through much more quickly on the VPN and I could use a web client to see all of my e-mail. I really only had one important message letting me know I am involved in testing a new outdoor product. That is always exciting.

I went to sleep knowing I could access my personal e-mail from my work laptop. I hoped that everything would be working when I got up in the morning. This morning I headed down to my computer after breakfast and still didn't have access. 

I logged into my e-mail provider's website and looked at the ticket to see if they had any information. They asked for a traceroute. A traceroute is a command you can run in a command-line terminal window to see the path data travels to get from your computer to a specific server on the Internet. On Mac and Linux you just type "traceroute www.google.com" and on Windows you type "tracert www.google.com". Unfortunately my personal network at home traps that information and doesn't allow the path to be seen. This is a security protection and I needed to open the firewall to allow the data through. In desperation I pinged my e-mail server just to see if I could get to it from my home network using "ping mail.myserver.com" and something happened. I started receiving packets back. I tried checking e-mail on my computer and everything seemed to work.

Naturally I updated the ticket with my e-mail service provider and let them know I could get my e-mail now. I read through the useless messages I received overnight and felt a huge wave of relief with that problem solved. I then sent out a very important e-mail that I put off sending last night.

One would think that life without e-mail would be calming. I found it to be quite the opposite as I have become conditioned to getting useless messages throughout my day to prove I am connected. Without e-mail, small-unrelated problems became magnified into larger issues than reality. Now things are working and I feel much better even though I don't have any important messages that need my urgent attention. I wonder if I am addicted to e-mail? Probably.

Using the vi Editor

It is not every day that I have to edit large blocks of code. Usually I will put together a few lines of SQL or Python and pretty much any text editor will do. Today I put together a 450-line SQL statement and so I pulled out my favorite code editor: vi.

A common mistake with vi is how it is pronounced. Technically it should be pronounced as the two letters "V" and "I" but some try to pronounce it as a single-syllable word that rhymes with hi. Another common mistake is that it is difficult to use. It does have a pretty ugly learning curve for beginners but once you learn how to use it, it is significantly faster than most other text editors. Why? Because you never have to take your fingers off the keyboard. If you know how to touch type, you know not having to pull you hands off the keyboard to use the mouse or cursor keys can be lightning fast.

The vi editor evolved with the Unix operating system and became the de facto editor back in the 1980's. That is when I started doing technical support for Oracle running on Unix systems. My boss sat me down and made me learn both Unix and vi. The main point of confusion is getting used to being in command mode or edit mode. In command mode, all the letters of the keyboard have a specific function. The letter "h" moves the cursor to the left, "j" moves the cursor down, "h" moves it up, and "l" moves it to the right. Once you get used to that, you never have to take your hands off the letters to use the cursor arrows to move the cursor. It does take a lot of practice though.

To get into edit mode, you just hit the "a" or "i" keys. The "a" stands for append which allows you to add more characters after the cursor where "i" is for insert and adds characters before the cursor. Then to get back to command mode, you just hit the "ESC" or escape key. Once you play around with vi for a bit, your left pinky finger can find the escape key fairly quickly.

There are some other quick shortcuts that make editing code very efficient. If you want to delete the current line, just double tap the "d" key. If you want to copy the line, double tap the "y" key, which is short for yank. Then to paste either what you have deleted or yanked, use the "p" key and vi pastes the line below your cursor. If you made a mistake with what you deleted or pasted, just hit the "u" key and it will undo your last command. Hit it a couple of times and it will undo the previous couple commands.

Up until now, nothing seems that groundbreaking. The real power comes from prefacing any command with a number. If you want to move the cursor down 5 lines, just type the "5" key followed by the "j". Want to copy or yank 10 lines, just type "1" followed by "0" followed by "y" and followed by "y" again. Then when you want to paste them, just go to the line above where you want the copied lines to be inserted and type "p".

Then there is my favorite vi command: the do-it-again key which is the period or "." If you copied something and want to paste it several places in your document, just copy the line and move the cursor to the line above where you want it to go and press "p". Then move to the line above the next place you want it to go and hit the period key. If you want 5 copies of the line, hit "5" followed by "." and you will see 5 identical lines below your cursor.

Now I recognize that vi would be horrible for creating a term paper for school or any document for that matter. So I don't recommend it for a general-purpose editor. It has evolved over time though to be a very efficient code editor and that is where it excels. It is available for Windows for free and comes installed on all Mac and Linux machines. Most people know it as Vim, which is just an enhanced version of vi with color coding and a few other goodies. If you need to create code, get familiar with it and you might learn to appreciate it. Just don't be turned off by the difficult learning curve.

Getting Old Printers to Work on New Macs

The saga that has become getting my wife's new computer working is finally over. Yesterday I sat down and figured out how to get all of our printers usable on her new MacBook air. It involved countless Internet searches, none of which helped solve the problem. In fact, one post that I followed created more issues that I had to work around. For anyone who has upgraded from an Intel-based Mac to one of the new Apple silicon Macs, there is one little step that I discovered on my own should you want to use any of your existing printers.

Apple's Migration Assistant did a great job of moving all of my wife's files from her old computer to her new one. It even copied over non-approved programs like printer drivers engineered for the Intel CPUs. The problem surfaces when you try to run them but let's not jump ahead of the story.

My wife needed to print something up last Friday and could not. I did not have time to help her solve the issue at the time and finally got around to looking at it earlier this week. We have 3 printers in the house and she really only uses 2 of them. Neither of them would connect to her new computer. I looked up a number of forums and the best information I had told me to delete the files out of a printer directory. DO NOT DO THAT. I won't repeat where that directory is as that caused an issue I had to remedy, which I will explain at the end of the post.

Nowhere did I find the correct instructions and so I am posting them here. All I needed to do was install Apple's Rosetta 2 software. It allows programs created for the Intel Macs to run on the new Apple M-series CPUs. I discovered this solution when I tried to install printer-driver software. It asked if I wanted to install Rosetta. The first time I said, No. The second time, I gave it a shot. That allowed my Samsung color laser printer to work with my wife's laptop.

Most people will not have a problem with printers unless they are really old like mine. Apple has come up with an all-encompassing printing system packaged with MacOS called AirPrint. There are a huge number of printers supported already. Just not really old ones. Fortunately one of my printers that my wife never uses is on the list and is my Cannon. I connected her computer directly to the printer through a USB cable and it printed without issue.

The last printer I needed to get running is my wife's HP Deskjet 1000 - J110. Apple's Migration Assistant copied over all of the correct driver files but I mistakenly blew them away at the advice of a post I read. Once I figured out I needed to reinstall all the driver files, I looked for them directly from HP. None of the programs I tried worked. I still have the old Mac and so I located all of the files and copied them to the new computer. I used the command-line interface or terminal to do all of the copying and will spare you the details. It involved the "tar" command to create single file that had all of the driver files in their correct directories. Once I copied that single file to the new computer, I used the "tar" command again to install the files in the correct place.

At this point in the process I had to go somewhere and didn't get back to it until yesterday. I thought I had done everything correctly and tried to print something. I immediately got an error message telling me that the MacOS refused to run a program because it couldn't trust the source. I had to use the administrator password to force the computer to run the program. The same thing happened 3 or 4 more times with different programs. Finally I stopped getting error messages but the printer refused to print. At this point I did the only thing that made sense: I rebooted the computer. When the computer came back up, I tried to print a page and it worked. I can now say that my wife's new computer is as usable as the old one before it died.

Should you get a new M-series Mac computer from Apple and want it to work with your old printer, don't do anything other than install Rosetta 2. Your computer will ask if you want to install it and just say, Yes. You don't have to go look for it or do anything special. Then things should work well. If they don't, try a reboot before doing anything else. If that still doesn't work, throw away your old printer and go buy a new one.