Observations that no one else cares about

SWOL…. swol battery.

I’ve been with out my 2016 MBP for about 48 hours now, I had to take it in for repair on Saturday for a swollen main battery in the chassis. The repair is a mail out repair, and since I have perfectly good computer sitting next to my Mac, I thought no big deal I’ll just use the Win10 machine for a while. I’m fluent in Windows and use Windows primarily for my day job but going back to Windows at home after 12 years of Mac at home has me noticing lots of little things.

First you don’t realize how attached to iMessage you are until you don’t have it on your main computer, having to look at your phone for a conversation rather then it being just another chat app is remarkable when you no longer have it after having it for so many years. Yes WhatsApp, GChat (until it’s sun setted next year), and Skype all provide a desktop client…. But none work quite as seamlessly between devices or the OS as iMessage does.

On my Mac I have a little automation script set up to monitor my “~\Downloads” folder and it moves files based upon file type… PDF to a folder on my OneDrive, JPG to a dedicated folder away from the desktop for memes from social media, and larger media files (over 2MB) to a network share attached to a 12TB DAS. The file automation has been built into MacOS for as long as I’ve used it (since 2007) and it’s been one of those things that has always just made life a little bit easier. Windows does not have a built-in equivalent; you can download the equivalent service but there is no native equivalent baked into the OS. Which really gets to the larger issue of there is no Windows equivalent of Automator for taking care of bunches of little tasks that we all do during our day and never thing twice about. Also, for the record yes, I still download media… I’m internet ancient, and sometimes I like to miserly with my bandwidth. I still act like I have a 56k connection when I’m paying for gigabit on one line and unlimited data on my cell phone.

Finally, I don’t think I would have noticed this if I hadn’t been working on a presentation for a conference. There is no recent documents in the “Start Menu” like there was in Windows 7/8/8.1 I literally just noticed this yesterday. In MacOS it’s still up in the apple menu where it’s been for almost 20 years. It’s not a big deal, 99% of the time I open recent files via the app I’m using them in anyway. Sometimes it’s things like the recent documents that are force of habit that you don’t notice until it’s in your face.

It’s not all weird on Windows, the Office365 experience is markedly better then on MacOS IMO (and vastly superior to iOS). Which should surprise no one as Office has always been a flagship for Windows capabilities. I didn’t appreciate how good it was until working on my conference slide deck and writing this post (which I’m writing a draft of in Word, because I like my software to work against me actively). Little things like word definitions and thesaurus suggestions when I click on words is nice, and the kind of thing I would expect from a modern fully featured office suite on a modern platform.

Most of the mechanical differences I’ve observed between Windows and MacOS are more directly related to the hardware I’m running each OS on…. The Mac is using new NVME SSD and USB 3.1 across the board, while the Windows machine is using a mix of older NAND SSD and spinning disk. The Windows machine still runs fine from a CPU perspective for web browsing and office work so no real difference in the experience. The biggest differentiator has to be the monitors! The LG 5k is a great monitor that I don’t appreciate enough… I’m really missing it using 2 Samsung 1080p monitors right now… they are getting the job done, but damn I need to do something about this monitor situation on my Windows machine.

So those are my differences I found it a bit odd and thought I would document them here since you know I’m writing on here so much…. Why doesn’t a sarcasm font exist yet?

On Ecosystems and Workflow

I could be best described as a “systems guy” I design and build systems to interact and work with other systems. Most of the times the systems are pre-built and I have to just do the interconnecting, other times it’s much more complicated. At home I’ve carried over this philosophy for the most part, I’m so deep into the Apple ecosystem it’s not even funny. You know what stuff truly just works though, so if it works for me then I’m good with it. I have philosophical reasons for not being all in on Google and Microsoft is firmly in the services side outside of Surface and Xbox.

I still maintain presences in Google and Microsoft domains, if you had to ask me which one was primary I would say Microsoft as I actually pay for their services. I have Google because it’s basically a utility for the internet at this point in North America.

With all that being written, I have made some decidedly interesting choices over the years in terms of where to put my ecosystem dollars. On the digital media front I’m iTunes almost 100% except for books, I’m all in on Amazon Kindle for books. In home audio I’ve gone a decidedly “Switzerland” route mainly because there was no Apple entry till late last year, and when it comes to audio I don’t want an assistant I want good sounding music. So SONOS is my platform of choice for the home audio side of things. And honestly their stuff works quite nicely across all mediums and and it sounds really good. Once you buy one, you won’t be able to stop.

So the one place where I’ve looked and haven’t really made a commitment is home automation. Part of it is out of lack of wanting yet more devices on my WiFi, but at the same time the overall ecosystems are becoming robust enough to warrant consideration. When you look at the major ecosystems out in the wild there are three that stand out… Apple HomeKit, Google Weave, and Nest. Nest already has a beach head in my home with a thermostat and a couple of smoke detectors, which other then helping the thermostat figure out when I’m home aren’t much worth the price of admission. Looking at the history I tend to go with ecosystems where there is a solid marriage between hardware and software.

Ecosystems are great until you don’t have any body supporting you or the company discontinues it. At least with hardware there is a chance that your stuff gets sucked up by someone else, but eventually everything dies.

Continued on backup strategies at home

This is what my weekends have come to now that football is almost over and the Cardinals are on the off season….

OK so here is the scenario, on December 22nd 2017 I was curious about some network traffic that had been reported on my router as coming from my laptop. I couldn’t find anything or remember installing anything that would have caused the traffic so I was a touch concerned. I installed a application called “little snitch” or something to that effect and my Mac summarily refused to boot.

Well shit…

Some googling later I found that I could disable the KEXT file (Mac equivalent to a driver) and I would be good to go. I was less then thrilled with this revelation as I was getting ready to take a road trip to visit family. OK I’ll just restore to the last good backup this morning from Time Machine, it will take a hour tops.

I kicked off the Time Machine recovery from the rescue console, finished packing and did some other stuff. When I came back to collect my laptop it said “16 hours remaining”. Needless to say I didn’t hang around, I took off and let the Mac do it’s thing. I long ago figured out that I could survive a couple of days on a iPad and hijack my mom’s Mac if I really needed a laptop.

I come home a few days later, my Mac is restored and waiting for me to log in. I log in, everything is where it’s supposed to be the most dramatic thing I have to do is sign into Office365 for home and school again. Up until this point I had been running Time Machine strictly off a network share on my home server I keep in a closet. So yeah… that’s great for seamless backups but it’s not what I would describe as “quick”. I ended up partitioning the external disk I use on my Mac and have a partition dedicated to Time Machine, that took care of the speed and backup problem.

This also pretty much asserted once again that between Office365 and iCloud my personal files were safe and I could get to them. This also once again proved that I really didn’t need to be paying for offsite backup as the most I would have to do is download Office and VMWare again and I would be back in business.

Then I had a thought….

Crypto viruses are a thing…. would a crypto virus also lock down my cloud information. I’m sure someone out there has already researched this and has a answer, and a quick googling says yes a crypto virus will also crypto your connected cloud services. So this brought me back to well I guess I need a segregated offsite backup… I don’t need to do the whole system as I can restore that easy enough, but I do need to have a portioned setup for personal files. Crashplan fills that niche quite nicely….

So there you have it…. backup strategies circa 2018 for one random dude who is already missing football.

That awkward moment…

It’s a bit awkward when your a I.T. professional and you realize that you no longer need a PC at home.

It started out innocently enough… I bought a Mac in 2007 and a new one in 2011 and my bank account quietly wept both times.

I upgraded to Windows 8 in the fall of last year. Why? Well why not I’m a I.T. professional I need to be versed on all forms of the dominant operating systems in the land in their native forms (GUI for Windows, CLI or LINUX, and a unholy combination of the two for Mac OS). I then did the requiste app upgrades that come with any upgrade to windows… I lost the ability to get into work… The Citrix client for Windows 8 is to advanced for the Citrix presentation server that my work uses, and I can’t downgrade versions because Citrix is dumb.

That’s not a issue I can Citrix into work on my Mac.

I find that I have less time to play games and few games that come out really intrest me, I stop buying $60 games. I start buying games that are on sale which means they are a few months old and increasingly have a Mac version by that point… This matters little since the only game I’m really interested in playing is Batman Arkham City on my Xbox

I install a hybrid drive on my Mac… and things (well some things) launch so so so fast (sub 1 second for Chrome I shit you not) (from cold boot to password screen for disk encryption is 7 seconds)

I get pissed off when I go to look for the calculator on my Windows 8 box… years of muscle memory and a certain f*’d up logic out the proverbial window.

The temperature hits 90 about 3 weeks ago, it hits 95 in my office (I haven’t turned on my AC yet (personal thing global warming be damned I don’t turn on the AC before April 15)) I turn off my main PC to keep from so much heat being kicked out. That was 3 weeks ago I haven’t turned my pc on since then. It took me a week to even notice that I hadn’t turned it on.

The change was so subtle I didn’t even notice it till I had been fully consumed. Not to say there isn’t a place for the PC in my world (“Skyrim” is still PC only) the environment for the level of work that I do has reached parity to a point that the platform matters not.

The bigger point here is I have finally shed the ingrained need for a “Full Desktop” PC and have finally come to a point where I laptop is everything I need a main computer. This notion is already on a dead man walking path though… The tablet in the living room will see to that in short order.

This leaves the following thought the future of a the high powered all powerful time and space bending machine as a thing of the past. In the next couple of years the home computer will be nothing more then a server for the mobile devices that need local content caching, the rest of it lives on the internet through a always on society.

Even the top end of the market where I used to live will no longer need high powered machines for gaming the processing power for the high definition polygons will live on a server in a datacenter that scales massively for the latest AAA title where the gamers of tomorrow pay for a license fee and then time of use for processing power (think amazon cloud only games instead of big data) the only limitation being the available bandwidth on the local internet connection.

“Anubis” is the last of the big gaming rigs… I quietly weep at this thought.

I can’t see in between, but I can see when the sun goes down and the lights go out.

In the last 5 days I have been to more sporting events then I care to shake a stick at…. Sunday Cardinals – Giants game, follow on Tuesday/Wednesday with playoff Baseball with the Diamondbacks -Brewers.

I’m not gonna lie it’s been kinda awesome.

The part that was more awesome then winning two out of three of those games though is this little thought.

At Sunday’s Cardinals game, the crowd was in Cardinal Red (and Black) and while yes it was only the Giants they are a old rival from the days back in the NFC East. And lets face it there are a fair number of New York transplants and people who while seemingly normal love the Giants. After the Cowboys game two years ago and the Raiders game last year I had come to the opinion that Arizona sports fans would not measure up to these two “storied” franchises. What I forgot about the Cowboys and the Raiders is that they have endured allot of losing in their time, not Cardinal levels of futility, but bad stretches and to a lesser extent the Giants have had the same issues in the past and I’m sure they will in the future that is just how these things work. While it’s easy to love a team when they are winning and going to the playoffs it takes a real fan to stick with them when the chips are down. And after 5-11 last and off to a 1-3 start this year the Cards are defiantly in the “chips” are down category. Things are looking up, but not that up, they are looking up though. So what did I see on Sunday that inspired me to write this…. well I saw a “Red Sea” that stayed with their team the whole time, I saw parents and kids in supporting the Cards even if the dad (not Cody) was supporting the Giants just a little bit more. And it made me realize, that while Arizona is a transient state and everyone is from somewhere else on home game Sundays we are all from Arizona at a Cardinals games. Except for Raiders fans… those people are just mean.

Now while football is religion baseball is a lifestyle.

The last time I went to a playoff baseball game it was in 2001 and the Diamondbacks may or may not have won the championship that year. It was a bought championship and honestly no one in tow cared we just wanted the championship. Flash forward ten years and the only guy left on the field from the 2001 team is the third base coach and in the playoff hunt we are once again. I don’t remember alot from the 2001 playoffs but I don’t remember the Diamondbacks ragging on the Yankees as much as the Diamondbacks were ragging on the Brewers the last night. My favorite parts were the the “Will it sink or Float” and the sinking wedge of Cheese in the pool with the announcer coming on over the PA system and going something to the effect of “And the cheese sinks just like the brewers tonight” which I thought was very cool, the home team antagonizing the other team which for me as a Arizona sports fan is kinda of cool. Also the Diamondbacks Legends race where the D’Backs mascot came out and beat up on the “german sausages” to clear a path for the legends was kinda cool.

Outside of the Suns Arizona has never really had this much pride in it’s pro-sports teams. And well honestly the Suns are just pissing away what ever good will they had left, and I’m more then happy to see the Cardinals and the Diamondbacks move in for the local pride factor even if most of the support comes from people who already have a another team.

Hell there is even room for those stick wielding Canadians that are in town and are trying like hell to stay here.

Evolution of a Workspace

So I was cleaning my office yesterday… and by cleaning I mean I took out three garbage cans of stuff and I still have more to go. In the process of cleaning I ran across some photos from Kingman and entire stack of photos from my time at NAU. One of those photos was of my desk at NAU and since I often use my desk for various picture testing moments I thought it would be neat to examine the evolution of my home workspace since that is where I tend to spend alot of time.

So first off is the NAU desk circa June 1999.

Fun things to notice in this photo… flat bed scanner, Zip drive in the tower, and of course the 19 inch monitor of doom. This evolved pretty quickly, as I remember it the scanner was put on top next to the printer sometime that summer and shortly after the new year I purchased my first laptop. The first laptop was never photographed neither was the desk in the apartment I had my senior year at NAU.

I had pretty much maintained this type of setup for the previous four years… monitors and CPU’s changed but other then that everything else stayed the same.

So next up is the office my house in Kingman, this photo is circa spring 2004.

This photo is intersting… it’s from right before I completely changed my workspace at home. You will of course notice that there is a video game up so you can probally guess what i was primarily doing at this point. What you don’t see are the three computers on the floor (1 windows box and 2 linux boxes running whatever I was running at the time) attached to the KVM. There is a laptop around at this point but it’s off to the left if it’s anywhere.

Shortly after this picture was taken I ended up with a large corner desk that I broke out the linux boxes to one side and the windows box to the middle then put various network devices and what not towards the other end. That worked out pretty well but I never really utilized the space liked I had hoped I would. That would feed into design decisons later. Also the corner desk was ultimatley left with the house when I moved.

Next is the most compact and probally efficent workspace I’ve ever had and this circa late July through October 2005.

Ah Mesa, so incase you haven’t been reading the blog for 10 years or your last name doesn’t start with the letter “K” this was when I was living with Curtis and Kristina. For the first time things really start to come together in terms of workspace and making things work together. And once again you will notice that I have a game up on both screens. And this type of setup would continue to serve me well for for the next couple of years. Other things to notice; no printer the iPaq is up and out of the way and the iPod is down low where I can get to it very easily. What I can’t figure out in this picture is why does the laptop of a PCMCIA wireless card when I know that the laptop had a built in wireless card? I’m sure there’s a good reason…

So flash forward six months I am no long restrained to one desk and have version one of the home office.

Not much change in terms of technology. The laptop would go on the left side of the table and there is another table directly behind me that keeps various other computers and networking gear. Which it turns out is really nice when you need to work on a computer that is not yours.

From this point the work space remains pretty stable… in the summer of 2007 the first MAC makes an appearnce.

This marks the transition to the laptop as the primary computer. Slowly over the course of the next year or so I transitioned off of the desktop and onto the MAC for most all of my day to day computing that wasn’t gaming. The montior on the left was also shared between the MAC and the PC for times when I needed a dual screen it stayed primarily attached to the PC. This also marks the first time that workspace decsions are being made for ergonomic reasons versus gaming reasons. Of course I say that and this is the first picture without a ergonomic keyboard or game on the screen…..

Which brings us to today….

The PC is the same as the last picture, the MAC and iPad are new. Other changes, the MAC now has a dedicated secondary screen that is physically and logically located above the primary screen. The iPad is off to the side for illustration purposes I really don’t have a good place for it yet. Right now the main purpose of the ipad is couch surfing and email.

This setup is really nice when I get my vmware on and decide I want a couple of machines going when I’m working on a project and insist on seeing the desktop of more then one VM.

So that’s the evolution of my workspace in the last 12 years but you know some people just never move past a half built toliet.

Problems that are nice to have….

So my mind has been stuck in a I.T. kind of world for the last couple of months or so, which is really sad considering what I do for a living (I work in I.T. for those of you coming in off the Google random link boat). I’ve been kicking around the idea of doing so upgrades at home to the old infrastructure, the last time I really overhauled the the desktop/laptop setup was 2007 which resulted in one shiny Santa Rosa MacBookPro and a hastily built Core2Duo desktop. Both computers have served me well for the last couple of years. As always though at about the three years mark I start to bump up to the upper limits of their capabilities… And when I say bump into the upper limits of their capabilities I’m really talking about games. I know shocker…

Ok so lets talk about the gaming situation first. I have a Xbox which may or may not red ring of death on me at any given time (for the sake of argument lets assume that my xbox is stable) In the grand pantheon of my gaming I tend to go with first person type games (Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, Half Life, Battlefield, etc) on the PC I will play them on the xbox but if given the choice 9 times out of 10 I will buy them on the PC (the one time being Call of Duty:Modern Warfare2 and I gotta admit I kind of regret that decision). I always play real time strategy games on the PC (Sins of a solar empire) (I have others but I barely play them so they don’t count). So what games to I tend to play on xbox, more of the long form RPG games and platformer type games. Games that could do well on a PC but I choose to play them on my xbox because if I didn’t I would use my for 2 hours a week on Friday nights (outside of football season) for sci-fi and lets be honest all of those shows are on the internet anyway.

OK with the game front my desktop has a solid year left in it (it’s never to early to start thinking about the next major overhaul) so lets focus on the laptop side of the house. I use as Mac as my primary laptop and I have been beyond pleased with it, I consider the Mac my primary computer for all things that involve web publishing (this blog), photos, music etc…. you know all of the stereotypical Mac type things. I do occasionally play games on my Mac but I tend to choose the desktop PC for two reasons. First it’s a desktop so it has a full sized keyboard for my fat sausage like fingers, second at the end of the day it’s a laptop. I will game on a laptop, but lets be honest given the choice almost everyone is going to go with the bigger screen and keyboard every time. I larger issue with my Mac is I’ve taken it as far as I can in terms of memory and storage. Which shouldn’t be a problem, if I weren’t using VMware for some personal projects that clearly come in the category of “because I can”. I could setup vmware on my desktop too, but that’s just not good for a PC primarily used for gaming.

I know I have a rough life.

So really what I’m looking for is the new Mac book pro’s to see what they have for memory and video cards and take it from there. My guess is they won’t have less then 8GB since that’s where the current models are at and start the transition to a laptop centric life (i.e. the current desktop is the last of it’s kind in my life). The eventual plan is to have a non gaming based “server-esque” computer that could be used as a secondary computer if the need arises, but it’s primary function would be to serve as a media server and test system.

Honestly I’m already about 60% of the way there already… what do you think about the name “Starkiller” for the next mac book? (just for some reference, here is the inspiration for the current mac book pro’s name “Aluminum Falcon“)

New Neighbors….

New neighbors moved in last weekend… I noticed a couple of new wireless networks in my neck of the woods… I’m tending to think the new neighbors like “Top Gear”

Phoenix….

And I’m not talking about the city here.

So one of the things about the “modern” internet is it’s insistence on moving to more of a “cloud” based set up. I’m about to go on a old man (at 31) rant here that will basically be “Get off my lawn you damn kids” If you don’t feel like reading the comments of a lone person as they go into what they think is a structured argument against the cloud stop reading…. otherwise you have be warned and you are not allowed to complain.

Ok so while I appreciate this whole cloud thing, I also fully understand that the data that is up there because someone (most likely) me put it up there. Now in some cases the cloud isn’t so bad… pictures for instance photography has gone almost completely digital and pretty much anyone can do really nice pictures with nothing more then a mid-range SLR and some editing software. Hell with the CCD setups in some of these cell phones who needs a point and shoot.

Other things while not practical make sense… off site backup for insistence I recently signed up for carbonite for my MAC since you know it has those photos of my grandmother that mean alot to me and if anything happened to them pissed would not begin to describe my general attitude. So a few photos is no big deal…. My home folder on my MAC is ~115GB between documents, photos, music, videos, and virtual machines. If you take away the virtual machines and about 30GB of various applications and temp data you are left with ~82GB of either my purchased or generated content. It took the better part of a week and half to upload all of this information. While that part I don’t have a issue with it would have been just as easy to make a copy of my data on a portable hard drive and mail it to my parents and say “Put this in the gun safe and hope I never have to ask you for it” But I don’t because when it comes right down to it I’m lazy and if I can have a daemon run in the background and upload stuff to the internet I’m going to do that rather then wander down to FedEx and hope my parents don’t lose a portable hard drive.

Lord knows they can barely keep track of a super Nintendo left out in plain sight 10 years go.

And then there are the parts that I really should be doing on the cloud but insist on doing them on a application on my computer because that is where I’ve always done them. Of course by this I mean email. Now while I do appreciate the advances that Google has brought to email and that I can hook up to a Google email service either through pop3 or imap accessing email on a client sucks! No I don’t want to use a browser window that gives me easy on line access to everything in my every growing mail box… I want to use Outlook damit because it’s what I use at work and it does what I need it to do well! I want to read my email and reply with either a Ctrl-R or a Ctrl-shift-R and send with a Ctrl-enter I don’t want to use what ever new thing that Google has come up with I want to use the same keyboard commands I’ve been using since 1995… you know when the only way to get a pretty gui interface was to buy a MAC!

Basically I want to do my email through a text only client on a telnet/ssh session using pine.

End of Line.

One more time….

This is the third attempt at writing something this morning… the first one got derailed by a shiny object… the second got derailed by a Google search on how to mount and extract apk files from a Android img file.

Anywhoo it’s December which means it’s almost chilly, it also means that it’s been 10 years since I started writing in what would become this blog. It’s kind of interesting to me on multiple levels on how this whole thing evolved. It started with a version of Front Page or MS Word that I would upload to Geo-cities. From there it evolved into a blogger address (which really marked the first part of normal web routine to move completely to the internet) and the blogger address evolved into this after I became unhappy with how Google was ignoring blog-spot.

I haven’t logged into blog-spot in forever I wonder if it’s any better?

/NewFireFoxTab

/Login

Hmmmm mostly the same, though it does have ad-sense and Google analytic integration now so that’s kinda cool. To bad I do this as a hobby and not a living.

I miss the “old web” long form communication of blogs (for those of us who still do the personal blog thing). Almost all of the social media sites have devolved into the shiny objects websites… pretty soon it’s going to be very little social and alot of very directed advertising. At the same time thought starting to see parity between desktop web applications and mobile applications is very cool. I knew the world was changing when I loaded the WordPress App for Android and I it was basically a full feature client on a 3.7 inch screen.

So here is to another 10 years of blogging… who knows what the world will bring.

I’m sure it will be something wonderful