Your Library Card and the Libby App

I have not had a library card for decades. I love to read but have purchased books instead of just borrowing them. This weekend my wife convinced me to go get a library card so I can use the Libby app on my Amazon kindle. The first thing that surprised me is that my local library is open on Saturdays.

To get my library card I just had show my local driver's license and confirm it had my correct address. I also filled out a short form and then the librarian gave me a choice of 4 colors for my card. I picked my favorite color and left the library. I went home and downloaded the Libby app from the Kindle store. It is also available for other Android and iOS devices. Once installed it asked me questions about my library card. I had to give the name of the county library I belonged to and then give my 15-digit card number. It quickly found my information and I could immediately start checking out electronic versions of books available to me. The current catalog has over 200 thousand titles.

I am currently reading a sailing memoir from someone that sailed around the world and so I didn't want to immediately reserve anything. I will wait until I finish my current book. I did look through a number of titles though. There are quite a few sailing magazines I can check out in addition to more books on the subject. I also did a cursory search of mountain-climbing titles. Spread amongst the non-fiction are quite a few novels, should I wish to escape from reality. I am excited to pick out my next read when my current one is finished.

I am not someone that has a lot of different apps loaded onto my phone or tablet. For me to actually download an app, there better be a good reason. If you like reading, I highly recommend Libby and should have gotten my library card a long time ago.  

Recording Guitar Music on my Computer

My youngest son's daughters are used to me playing the guitar when I go visit them in Ohio. It is a nightly ritual for me to sit on the end of a bed and play while the girls fall asleep. If I am allowed to play long enough, they fall asleep before I am done. The girls love it and so they asked me to record the guitar so they can listen to me playing even though I am in Utah.

It is a lot of work to set up the recording equipment and so I put it off until my oldest granddaughter asked me two days in a row. The second day, my son forwarded a video of an impassioned plea to record the music. How could I turn her down? On Saturday evening I pulled out my wife's old Mac laptop and connected it to my audio converter. Then I plugged in my acoustic-electric guitar and got ready to record.

The Mac comes with GarageBand which is great for recording audio onto your computer. I have a high-end microphone that I use to record audio for my YouTube videos but my guitar also plugs right in. I thought I could just start playing. I clicked on the GarageBand application only to have it crash repeatedly. The simplest solution is to reinstall the application so I loaded up the App Store and downloaded the latest version. That worked and I could run it on the laptop.

My audio converter connects to the computer though a USB cable and the Mac isn't quite sure what to do with audio afterwards. It can pull input from the converter but also send output to it even though it doesn't have a speaker. I had to go in and tell the Mac to use the device for input but to route output through the computer's speakers. I actually had headphones plugged into the Mac and couldn't hear anything until I adjusted these settings. Then I clicked the "Monitor" checkbox in GarageBand so I could hear my own playing and what the computer recorded.

When I play for my granddaughters before bed, they don't care if I make a mistake. When I practice for myself, I just play through the song and don't worry if the music doesn't sound 100% correct. All that changes when you record music to play over and over. I want it to be perfect and so it took me about 20 attempts on the first song before I felt I did it justice. Knowing I wanted to record around 15 songs, I had to come up with a better way to finish the project. Or I had to stop being so picky.

The first thing I did was to change how I recorded my songs. Instead of stopping the recording after a mistake and starting over, I would keep the recording going and just stop long enough so I knew where to cut the mistake from the track. That sped things up somewhat. I also decided to play each song through once before even attempting to record it. That helped a lot and I cut the number of takes from 20 down to just 1 or 2. Being less picky also had something to do with that.

It normally takes me about 20 minutes to go through the 15 or so songs I have memorized. Recording them took over an hour with all the stops and starts. It also made for great guitar practice as I could really see my common mistakes and work to fix them. I highly recommend recording your music practice on a periodic basis to help you improve. It is something I will incorporate into my practice.

I sent the music off to my son on Saturday evening thanks to some help from Google Drive. He put it on my granddaughters' music player. When I called them yesterday, I could hear my music in the background. This morning my son sent me a video of my oldest granddaughter listening to some of my songs and being happy that she can now hear them whenever she wants. That makes me feel great as a musician but even better as a grandpa.

Time For a New Printer

I don't think a home printer is necessary unless you are used to having one. Over a decade ago I bought a Samsung color laser printer. It worked for a few years and then the ink started bleeding all over the pages. I thought new toner cartridges would fix the issue and they did for about 5 pages. Then the bleeding started again. We have limped along with the printer for a few years but my wife decided it needed to be replaced.

I did not do a lot of research about what to replace the old printer with. Instead I did what a lot of other people do and selected it from Costco. I really just went to the store on our monthly trip and wandered over to the electronics section to see what printers they had in stock. When I asked my wife if we should pick one up, she wouldn't let me leave the section until we had one in our cart.

At Costco there are really only 2 selections: a color laser printer from HP or a color inkjet printer from Epson. Both are great printer companies and neither is a bad choice. My son has the inkjet printer and thinks it is great. My wife suggested it based on his recommendation as well as the significant price difference. Unfortunately for my needs, the inkjet wasn't going to cut it. I often print maps on waterproof paper and the instructions that came with the paper say it only works with laser printers. If you think about it, it makes sense. Laser printers melt little plastic beads onto the paper while inkjets spray liquid ink. Waterproof paper will not accept the ink and I imagine it makes quite the mess.

I hefted the 45 pound HP LaserJet Pro MFP 3301cdw into our cart which effectively limited what other purchases we could make that day. I still ended up with a $750 bill as the printer came in at $400 before tax. We brought the new toy home and let it sit in the living room for a couple of days. Eventually I summoned the strength to move it downstairs into my basement office.

The new HP printer does more than print. It is also a scanner, fax machine, and copier. The one machine allowed me to remove my 30-year old copier from my office as well as my scanner and old Samsung printer. I have no need for a fax anymore and threw my old one away more than a decade ago. I now have a lot more table space in my office, which is a good thing.

Setting up the printer went something like this: pull the printer out of the box, plug in the power cable, plug in a network cable, set the date and time, open the printer app on any computer in the house, scan for new printers, and the printer could print. I didn't have to do anything special as it just worked. Today my wife needed to scan a document. Because the printer was set up, the scanner was too. She put the document in the sheet feeder on top and open the scan application on her laptop. Then she needed to select the "use sheet feeder" option to automatically suck the page into the scanner bed. It saved the document as a PDF file in her Pictures directory on her Mac.

The new printer installation took significantly less time than I thought it would. It works with all the computers in the house. For those that don't have network cables lying around, The printer also works on WiFi and has a touchscreen to help set that up.

Again, I don't think a home printer is necessary. But once you have had one, it is tough not to. My wife and I love the new HP and look forward to documents where the colors don't run together. 

Setting Up Christmas Gifts

It can be nice to see a large number of Christmas gifts under the tree on that anticipated morning. This year I received a number of presents that required a lot of work to set up. Back in September my youngest son got me a ski rack to install in my garage. My wife liked the gift so much, she got another set. The only problem is that I hadn't installed the first ski rack as it required power tools. This begs the question of how my wife knew she wanted more if I never bothered to install the first set.

The idea behind the ski racks is that they hold the skis in place close to the wall so that when someone walks by the skis, they don't accidentally knock them over, which has happened frequently in the past. My son gave me racks for 2 pairs of skis. My wife then got a pack for 4. I installed my son's and then discovered that we only had room on the wall for 2 more pairs of skis. Not to worry, I just installed enough of my wife's gift to hold 2 pairs of skis and it works great. Naturally I did that on the Saturday of the MLK 3-day weekend.

The next gift my wife got me, and the reason I am including it in my blog, is a set of bed-side lamps. Now what do bed-side lamps have to do with technology and computers? They are battery powered LED lamps and come with a remote to turn them on or off. Furthermore, they colored so that you can choose between any shade in the rainbow. If they had the ability to connect to my home WiFi, they would be considered IoT or Internet-of-Things devices. Fortunately they are not that complicated nor do they need to be. The only downside is that they need be attached to the wall. I attacked that project on the Monday of the MLK 3-day weekend.

Once again, I had to pull out power tools, in this case a drill, and spend some time planning out the project, executing the project, and cleaning up after the project. It left me asking if I really received a gift or if my wife creatively came up with a way to get me to do work around the house? I drilled a couple of holes in the wall for each lamp on either side of my bed and installed the lamps. The light unit is about the size of a soup can and is covered in LEDs. On the top it has a USB-C port so you can charge it. I have no idea how long it will last on a single charge but we have been using the lights all week and they work well.

I enjoy setting up certain Christmas gifts like Lego projects. Other gifts like the ones I received this year have felt like work. Furthermore they are what I consider golf-club gifts. You know, when a husband gets his wife golf clubs knowing she will never use them but he will. I admit I am using the ski racks and the bed-side lamps but feel they are more for my wife than for me. Next year I plan to ask for gifts that don't require drilling holes in my house. 

Improving Problem Solving Skills

Monday I had the day off and looked forward to spending the morning skiing with my grandkids. I arrived at Alta ski area early and eagerly awaited their arrival. When my son pulled into the parking lot, he delivered the bad news that my oldest grandson had forgotten his jacket which also contained his ski pass. I could hear my grandson crying inconsolably in the car and I felt really bad for him. Instead of giving up on the situation, I started thinking about solutions to the problem that didn't involve driving the hour back home to get the jacket and pass.

Coincidentally, yesterday I found myself facing a tough computer problem for work and I found it difficult to face it. Instead I wanted to give up and drop the issue in someone else's task list. I spent the morning skiing at Alta but I would eventually have to show up for work. I knew I would be working until 8pm so I had the freedom to ski until 11am. I thought how easy it would be to just quit my job and spend the rest of the winter as a ski bum. That would not be financially prudent and so I skied my last run and headed to my home office.

My work problem related to setting up a Digital Clean Room (DCR) in Snowflake. I'll spare you the details but it looked like the configuration details were entered correctly as I could see my team's data set as well as the other team's. When I went to connect the two, the system tried to do something and eventually spit out an error. The error indicated my team had misconfigured something and so I researched how to fix it. After about an hour of in-depth searching, I confirmed I did not have the correct permissions to fix the problem and so I created a very detailed e-mail to the team and made sure to include someone that had the power to set things right. I then followed that e-mail up with a direct e-mail to the person with proper permissions to fix the situation.

I had done the best I could and waited for my colleagues in Japan to start their day as they had the permissions necessary to get things working. Once they arrived in the office, the DCR started working correctly and the problem no longer existed. I could move forward and didn't need to quit my job.

So what happened with my grandson? My daughter works at Alta's ski school and I knew they have extra ski clothing in the event a kid shows up unprepared for the weather. I walked into the ski school, found my daughter, and quietly asked if she had a ski jacket we could borrow. She quickly found one in my grandson's size and I walked it up to my son's car. Then I escorted my son and grandson to the ticket office where we looked at getting a single day pass to replace the forgotten season's pass. It cost my son $5, which will probably come out of my grandson's souvenir budget the next time we go to Disney World but we solved the problem. We then had a wonderful morning skiing.

Everyone enjoyed the ski day and midway through it, my son remarked that he now understood why I left him in the car one ski day when his ski pants broke. He was 17 at the time and perfectly capable of coming up with a solution without my help. Instead of waiting for me to finish skiing, my son went into the resort ski shop and asked for some duct tape and didn't take "No" for an answer. Once he had the tape, he gave his pants a temporary fix and then joined me on my second run. We had a good afternoon and didn't let a broken side-zipper ruin the day.

It is not uncommon to avoid problems when we encounter them. It happened to me when I faced the DCR problem. The best thing we can do is stop and take a deep breath. Then we need to look at all possible solutions and pick the best one. Fortunately for my grandson, I possessed some knowledge he didn't have and could craft a solution that didn't involve a lengthy drive nor an expensive purchase. Asking for help is how I solved my DCR issue and also how my son solved his ski pants one. You just need to be sure to ask the right source for help. 

Updating to iOS 26.2

This morning I pulled my iPhone off the charger and saw that it wanted to update to the latest version of iOS. It is always important to keep your smartphone updated to the latest version of the operating system. This ensures you have up-to-date security fixes and helps prevent hackers from taking over your phone. Unfortunately I have been reluctant to upgrade to iOS 26 but it looks like a necessary evil if I want to keep my phone safe and so I spent part of the day doing the update.

The first problem I have is that my phone only has 64GB of storage. I've managed to fill most of it with photos and videos. I went through the photo/video library and moved a lot onto my desktop Mac where I have significantly more space. Then I had to go into my recently-deleted folder and remove everything in it to free up space on the phone. I went to install the update and removed enough so that the update process could temporarily remove a couple of apps and reinstall them at the end of the update process. That concerned me a bit but I let the update move forward.

The process of going through hundreds of photos and videos took a toll on my battery so I made sure to plug the phone in to keep the battery from getting too low. Then I just waited for the update to complete and focused on work tasks. I got back to the phone and noticed it back in working order but I'm not a fan of the new user interface (UI).

For some reason, the engineers at Apple love the new "glass" look where you can see through elements on your screen. That makes it so the time on my lock screen blended in with the background image so well, telling time is difficult. I immediately needed to fix that. While I always wear a watch, sometimes it is hidden under multiple layers of clothing while I ski. For that case, I just pull my phone out to see the time. Fixing the clock involved long pressing on the lock screen and selecting the "Customize" button on the bottom. Then I selected the time widget (that is the technical term for the part of the screen that shows the current time) where I had the option of changing the color. I tried white but it blended in too much with the screen. After playing with different colors for a bit, I noticed 2 small buttons under the colors. One said "Glass" and the other "Solid."  I switched from glass to solid and that made the time so much easier to read regardless of what color I chose.

There are a few other UI changes I will need to make. While Apple thinks they know what I will like, they are wrong and like to screw things up. Like many of the software developers I have worked with over my career, the ones at Apple suffer from hubris and think they know more than they actually do. Most the time, they leave a way for me set things the way I like. On occasion though they really screw things up which leaves me questioning my loyalty to Apple.

Going Back to School

Last year I worked with my manager and created some lofty goals for the fiscal year which ends in March. One of those goals included getting a specific certification for a product I use on a daily basis. I figured it would be a slam-dunk to take a test and pass it. Then I put off doing anything about the certification until the last quarter of the year (January through March). Now it is time to get serious about accomplishing this goal.

I have never put much stock in professional certifications for myself. Often times it is a matter of someone being able to study for a bit and then having good test-taking skills. I don't know why I felt the need to add a certification at this point in my career. Perhaps it is something new that I haven't tried before. In any event I have spent my own money to get access to a study guide for the test.

The process for my professional certification seems very familiar to when I studied to get my amateur radio or ham license. I purchased a study guide, read through it, practiced with some sample tests, and paid money to take an exam. Today I purchased the study guide for a whopping $20. While my ham license study materials came in a physical book, the professional certification guide is 100% online. That is fine for me as I plan to study during work hours and will be in front of my computer.

I did a bit of studying today and then jumped into a sample test of 60 questions. The real one will contain 100 questions but this one gave me a good sampling of what to expect. I found that my day-to-day knowledge ensured I got 60% of the questions correct. The questions that caused the most problems are the ones with multiple answers. Instead of having a single correct answer you have to select all options that answer the question. On my first run through the test, I managed a 90%. I only need a 75% to achieve my certification but there are 17 more example tests to try.

Part of the problem with learning new things is quickly becoming bored. I am always posting about how we learn by doing things. What I need to do is take the new information and try to apply it in my day-to-day work. That will cement the knowledge and help make the test that much easier to pass when I sign up for it in the next month or so. We'll see how I do. 

Pulling Music from Compact Discs (CDs)

My youngest son and his wife gave my granddaughters a music player for Christmas. It is interesting in that it comes with paper cards with QR codes on them. When you want to play specific songs, you insert the card into the music player and it will play the songs. You can buy cards for popular artists or you can make your own with music you have purchased. My son knows I have a large number of Disney CDs and asked if I could help him bring the music over to the music player. I'm not listening to the CDs so I figured I would help him out.

Now I work for Sony which owns Sony Music and pirating music is a terminable offense. I like my job and so I would not make copies of music unless it is legal to do so. With CDs you are allowed to make a limited number of copies for your personal use. Effectively you can add them to your library, which is what I am technically doing. I'm not sharing the music with a large number of friends nor am I stealing it. I purchased the CDs and simply wish to share the songs with my family.

My son lives in Ohio and I could have shipped all of the Disney CDs to him through the mail. Unfortunately that would cost money and take time. We wanted to do a quick experiment to make sure the process works and so I converted the music to MP3 files. The point of this post is to share how I did that.

Step 1 - Make sure you have a CD player connected to your computer. While every computer used to come with a CD player, none of my current generation of laptops includes one. Fortunately I have a USB CD drive and I can connect it to any computer with a USB port.

Step 2 - Convert the songs from CDDA format to MP3. It has been over a decade since I have pulled songs off a CD and turned them into MP3 files. I had to look up how to do this on my Mac. While there are a number of software programs out there I could have downloaded to help with this process, I just put the CD into the drive and it pulled up Apple's music player. I then had the option to copy the files into my computer's music library. I then had 4 options for different music formats and I selected MP3. The music program stores the files in a sub-directory under the "music" folder for my computer account. It didn't take too much work to find the MP3 files.

Step 3 - Transfer the files to my son. All of the music files appear in a folder or directory. I just had to send my son the directory for each CD I added to my library. The easiest way to do this is with the help of Google drive (drive.google.com). I created a directory there and gave my son access and then just copied the music to it. I have a gigabit Internet connection and so it only took about 20 seconds to copy an entire CD.

Step 4 - Delete all unneeded copies of the music. As I am loaning the music to my granddaughters, it wouldn't be honest to keep the music on my computer and so I deleted it from the music app. I also deleted it from Google drive after my son downloaded the files.

It is nice to see that Apple recognizes that people want to create music libraries and they have not hindered the ability to do so. While I enjoy listening to streaming music, I actually own a lot of CDs and may add a lot of my favorite songs directly to my phone and computer. Then I can get away from those pesky ads on Spotify and listen to the music I already own.