Alexa Power Users

I have been staying at my son's house over the past couple of days and am experiencing what it is like to live with some young Alexa power users. My oldest son has to be in Amsterdam for 2 weeks. I used to have to travel like that and hated it when I had to travel over a weekend. When he mentioned the trip, I told him to take his wife. She could only manage one week and I knew my wife and I could handle watching their 3 children with the oldest being 8 and the youngest 2 and a half.

My son's house is only 20 minutes away and so it is not too much of a stretch to go home daily and check our mail or pick up packages before porch pirates find them. As soon as my youngest grandson wakes up from his morning nap, we will head home for a few errands. My wife will need her car as a way to get home once my daughter-in-law arrives.

Hanging out with my grandkids has helped me realized I am a mere novice when it comes to Alexa. We have a single device that sits between our kitchen and family room. Most of the time it acts as a rotating picture frame. We get to see photos from previous vacations and those of our grandkids growing up. When my oldest grandson comes over, he can carry on lengthy conversations with the device. If you have that kid always asking questions, just put him or her in front of an Alexa or Google home unit and let the questions fly. It is entertaining to watch.

My oldest son has quite a few Alexa devices strategically placed around the house. There is one in each of the bedrooms as well as various other rooms in the house. One contrast with my house is I have clocks everywhere while my son does not. That is because when anyone needs to know what time it is, they just ask Alexa. I heard my grandson talking this morning and he just asked the time to know if he could get up or not. He could and so he had Alexa reading him a story while he slowly gathered the strength to get out of bed.

When it comes time to go to bed, each of the children has a favorite bedtime track they listen to while they fall asleep. My youngest grandson who is 2 and a half listens to guitar music, my 6-year-old granddaughter likes Taylor Swift, and my oldest grandson listens to the music from the Harry Potter films.

Alexa does so much more than play music and tells time. My son has quite a few lights connected to smart outlets that can be turned on or off with voice commands. Any time someone needs a timer for important things like baking cookies or ending 30-minute reading session, you just ask Alexa to set a timer. It doesn't matter if she has one going already as multiple timers can run simultaneously. If you get stumped on a homework question, there's even an answer for that.

It has been very educational to see all the uses of Alexa and what smart devices can do. While some things are definitely easier, others become quite confusing. I'm not sure what lights are controlled by a switch and which ones are on smart outlets. When the bedroom light came on unexpectedly I quickly figured out I could just say, "Alexa, turn off the bedroom light," to turn it off. I suppose if I had set everything up, there would be much less of a learning curve.

I'm not sure I will purchase too many more Alexa devices but I could definitely buy off on the fact they are more useful than I have given them credit. I could probably expand to having a device in my office and one in my wife's. Then we could use them as intercoms to talk with each other. I could also see the benefit of adding one to our bedroom and maybe a few of the guest ones. The only drawback would be listening to my grandson carrying on a lengthy conversation in an empty room when he comes to visit.

Watching Old Movies

Recently I have found myself watching older movies and realize that younger generations may not understand them or be able to relate. Think about how many movies from the 1980's could be shortened to only 5 minutes with the introduction of mobile phones as a lot of the problems would immediately disappear. They have become so ubiquitous that the younger generations don't even know what a landline is anymore. My grand kids are not familiar with them at all as I discovered this weekend.

When I watch a movie depicting historical events such as World War II, I don't expect to see computers or modern technology. In fact, back then Jeeps represented the pinnacle of technological advancement. Now we see a movie from just a few years ago and things are familiar enough that nothing seems out of place. Then someone uses an old feature phone, which is one that makes calls and might have texting capabilities but is not a smartphone nor does it have a camera. It goes to show how much technology has advanced in a few short years.

While a number of modern conveniences are missing from these movies, there are a number of older technologies that people don't know how to use any more. I recently watched "Back to the Future" and Marty McFly tears a page out of the phone book. Does the rising generation even know what phone books are? He also checks the date by looking at a newspaper. I haven't seen one of those in a very long time. At least I know what they are, and quite frankly, miss them. The one scene showing how things have evolved is when Marty tries to twist a bottle cap off a soda bottle and his dad has to show him how to use a bottle opener.

I wonder how a 16-year old from 2025 would have to adjust to 1955? Would he or she immediately pull out a smartphone and try to get a signal? Would heating up food become a problem because microwave ovens didn't exist? Would everyone from 1955 laugh at the time traveler when he or she buckles a seat belt or puts on a helmet? These would all make comedic elements in a new movie. My only request is not to remake "Back to the Future" and come up with a slightly more original story.

 

 

Why Did Spotify Do That?

I used to ride my bike outside as often as I could. Now I have turned into a warm-weather cyclist. The weather has turned cooler so I prefer to ride on my trainer inside instead of out in the cold even though I have the clothing for it. Unfortunately riding inside is insanely boring and so I pass the time listening to music. Normally I listen to songs on Spotify but I am thinking about finding a new streaming service because of problems that recently surfaced.

I have painstakingly gone through and created a list of my 150 or so favorite songs to listen to while exercising. Recently I started hearing the same song played over and over. At one point the same song played 3 times in a row. That prompted me to go through my playlist and remove duplicates of the same song. Once I confirmed only one version of the song exists in my playlist, things went well for awhile.

Since Friday I have noticed another problem with my Spotify playlist. It has started playing "recommended" songs. I don't know what changed and can only assume Spotify did this. The problem is I don't like a lot of the songs that streaming music services recommend based on the songs on my list. While I like most Blink-182 songs, I don't like them all and have purposely left them off my playlist for a reason. I also don't like a lot of songs by All American Rejects but keep getting them recommended because they are similar to Blink-182.

Today during my indoor workout I got angry hearing "recommended" songs instead of the ones I chose for my playlist. I almost stopped listening to music altogether. Instead I just skipped the songs not on the list. The downside to that is I get to listen to more ads as I use the free service and don't pay for Premium Spotify. Basically the ad-to-song ratio went from 1:1 to an abysmal 4:1 which means I had to listen to 4 ads for every song. Secretly I think Spotify is trying to get me to start paying a monthly fee.

After my workout I immediately headed to my desktop computer and did a bit of research. I went into my settings and turned off the "Autoplay similar content" setting. My hope is that Spotify will now only play songs explicitly added to my workout playlist. If not, I will move on and give Amazon Music a try. After all I pay for Amazon Prime so I don't have to sign up for another streaming service. 

Bandwidth Explained

Lately I have doing a lot of studying about ham radio in my spare time. I get a monthly magazine from the American Radio Relay League or ARRL called QST and there are a lot of concepts I don't understand as I read articles. Rather than continuing to read and glossing over the complex subjects, I am trying to understand them more. This has me thinking about bandwidth and what it actually means.

We use bandwidth in our casual conversations with phrases like, "I don't have the bandwidth to work on that right now." That generally means that you are doing so much you don't have room in your schedule to do anything else or that the task consumes more time than you have free. We also talk about bandwidth for WiFi and how much data we can stream to our devices like smartphones, TV's, and computers. Here is a quick history lesson of what that all means and why it relates to ham radio.

When we first discovered that we could send messages over the air without having to use wires or connections, we found that we needed a carrier frequency for the message. At first, we sent messages using Morse code which uses short (dot) and long (dash) pulses of energy to convey a message. To do so, you might use 14.025 MHz as your carrier frequency with the bandwidth of your message only being a hundred Hz wide. What that means is that if someone else tries to send a message at a frequency too close to 14.025 MHz, say at 14.0251, the messages might interfere with each other. To fix this you would spread the carrier frequencies further apart. Perhaps you might use 14.026 MHz instead.

Now not everyone knows Morse code and so we learned how to encode voice messages in those same radio frequencies. We started with amplitude modulation or AM and later developed frequency modulation or FM. Anyone who has spent much time with a radio knows FM has higher quality sound than AM and so most of our music listening stations are on FM. The FCC has limited AM radio stations to a total bandwidth of 10 kHz. That means if you still use a carrier frequency of 14.025 MHz, your signal will fall in the 14.020 and 14.030 MHz range as AM splits the signal equally on either side of the carrier frequency (5 kHz below and 5 kHz above). In contrast FM signals are 200 kHz or almost 20 times wider than AM signals. It is no wonder that FM signals are higher quality than AM as you can fit more information in that space. It also means that FM radio stations have to space out their carrier signals much further than AM stations. By contrast, FM ham radio signals are only 16 kHz wide as they only need to transmit voice and not music.

Now lets tie this all together with how we think of bandwidth of our Internet links at home. When signing up for home Internet service, vendors like to use terms like 10 mega-bits per second (Mbps) or 1 gigabit per second (Gbps). With 10 Mbps it means you will be able to download 10 million bits every second. 1 Gbps is much better as it is 100 times more data in the same second at 1 billion bits every second. Now remember that there are 8 bits for every byte or character in a file so if you have a 10 mega-byte file, it won't take a single second to download it at 10 Mbps, the fastest you can download it would be in 8 seconds but even that is not true. Networks use parity and error correction bits to ensure you get the data correctly. While you are paying for 10 Mbps speeds, you are really only seeing about half that because of how the network works.

So how do kHz and Mbps relate? There is a bit of math that would make this post really long and confusing, not to mention boring. Suffice it to say that when you are talking about radio signals, you generally use kHz and when you talk about data, you use Mbps or Gbps. It all translates down to how wide the radio (in the case of WiFi) or network (in the case of wired connections) signal is needed to provide the information you are trying to receive.

Christmas Shopping Early

Yesterday my wife sent me an e-mail from a Jewelry designer that is retiring. All of her inventory is on sale for extremely low prices so she can clear it out. Today I checked out the website and wondered what I could get my wife. She told me Jewelry would make a great stocking stuffer and so I browsed trying to find something that would be perfect for her.

I found a quite a few rings that don't cost too much and look amazing. The only problem is that I don't know my wife's ring size. I know, that probably makes me a horrible husband but it really has been a long time since I bought my wife a ring of any kind. We have also been married for almost 35 years so I shouldn't be expected to remember her size when I got her engagement ring. Besides, she has had it resized several times and I'm not stupid enough to ask if it is larger or smaller than when I originally purchased it.

I continued to scroll through the site and found some necklaces, earrings, and bracelets that would be nice. Nothing really jumped out though. Then I found one item that I know my wife will love. It is kind of like seeing a bunch shirts that are all the same color and then finding one that is different and also happens to be in my wife's favorite color. I probably shouldn't say that I ordered it as she might read this post but I did find that perfect stocking stuffer.

Have I finished my Christmas shopping? No as I am not even close. I did get one gift though and now I can relax a little. Not completely but a little. 

Keeping Loyalty Status

Last week I received an e-mail from a major hotel chain letting me know I had 5 more nights I need to stay to keep my current loyalty level. I know I will be traveling later this month and will achieve 2 of those nights. The question is if I should book a 3-night stay somewhere and make a long weekend of it with my wife?

When I flew every week to go to the Bay Area for work, if I found myself falling short of a certain level, I would book evening flights to someplace cheap. Usually I would take stock of travel for the rest of the year sometime in October. If I didn't have the required segments reserved to keep my status on Alaska Airlines, I would start booking evening round-trip flights to someplace really cheap. Usually that meant I would fly to Orange County or Los Angeles from San Francisco. Most of the time I would be in those cities for a total of 30 minutes before boarding a new plane and going back to San Francisco. I remember only paying $100 for the round trip and always had a first class seat because of my status.

Once I achieved that airline status, it came with some pretty important perks. The most important perk is that I could upgrade to first class a week before the flight. I also got something like 100,000 miles to use for future travel. That more than covered the $300 or so to achieve the status I wanted. It worked out well.

I mentioned that I need 3 more nights at a specific hotel chain to my wife and she asked me where we planned to go this weekend. I told her we could go stay someplace local that has a pool and invite the grand kids to join us. She thought that to be a boring idea and suggested we catch a flight to Hawaii and have an extravagant weekend.  That idea has merit and so I did a quick search. Last-minute plane tickets to Honolulu are about $1300 for the two of us and the hotel will run us about $900. So for $2200 I can keep my loyalty status and have a really epic weekend. Or . . . I could spend $330 over the next 2 months staying at a lackluster hotel close to home.

While the epic weekend sound like a lot of fun, I would much rather use that money for an epic vacation with a bit more prep time. I got an e-mail this morning from a Cruise ship company and we can do a 7-day cruise to Alaska with an Ocean-view room for $2200. Of course the other option is to let my status drop one level and not pay a dime. Decisions, decisions.