Finn is sitting next to me on the couch playing Roblox on her shiny new iPad Mini. This is a gigantic upgrade from her grotty 4-year-old Kindle Fire, which used to be my old Fire. She’s getting into playing games with her friends online, and while this is making Jen and I very nervous, we’re also not going to completely lock her social life in the basement. She had a friend over on Wednesday who has a new iPhone X—yes, you read that right—and they tried to play Roblox together. Finn’s Kindle kept crashing and needing restarts, and Jen texted me and told me she was getting frustrated.
I’ve been bumping up against the limitations of the Kindle since we set it up for her; Amazon funnels parents into a paid model for parental oversight on your kid’s device, which I was too cheap for. I disabled a lot of the functionality and made it so that she couldn’t do any in-app purchases or browse the web, and that seemed to work OK for what she was doing. But the unit is old, and slow, and the battery is weak, and it was two-year-old technology four years ago, which means there were games within Roblox that wouldn’t run properly, and that app isn’t supported very well on Android from what I can tell. And all the kids are playing Fortnite, which it won’t run at all.
Her laptop actually turned out to be harder to manage. I set up a very strict internet whitelist to start with: Baltimore County Public Schools, PBS Kids, dictionary.com, National Geographic, and about four other sites of the same quality. But because any and all of the pages BCPS serves pulls scripts and content from other domains, all of these have to be whitelisted—over, and over, and over again. I had to make a second account for her with no firewall so she could do research online, and monitor what she was looking at.
Bless her heart, our daughter doesn’t have tantrums or whine or act like a baby about shit like this, but Jen is great at staying tuned to her frequencies and knows when things feel wrong. We decided that she should be able to reach out and play with her friends online without feeling embarrassed by her gear. There are a lot of seismic social shifts happening right now, and we want to make sure we’re not holding her back, while also not pushing her too far forward.
So we had a family talk over dinner, and after setting some ground rules we all came to a decision.
Jen and I weighed the options of different devices first; any phone is out of the question, as she’s not going to have one of those for several years—I don’t care what all of the crazy alarmist parents around us say, she doesn’t need to get in touch with me during recess in the fourth grade. I considered buying a new iPhone and giving her my old one with cell service disabled (it’s a 6, and beginning to show its age, but still functional), but there are a couple of modern games that won’t play on it. I considered an iPod Touch, but I figure she’d lose that pretty quickly. I looked at all of the models of iPad and finally settled on the Mini for its size, capacity, and price. It sits comfortably in the middle of each segment, and I figure it’s got enough room to expand into a schoolwork device as she gets into middle school. It’s big enough that it’s easy to see and hard to lose. But it’s also smaller than a full-size iPad.
I had to do a little sleuthing to figure out how to set it up for her correctly; at first I logged in with my account but quickly realized I’d have to undo that after I set her up with a Family Sharing account. She’s now got a subaccount keyed to her age, and she’s not able to purchase apps without her iPad sending me a confirmation alert. It’s set up with three hours max of screen time between 7AM and 9PM, and I’ve gotten pretty granular with the other settings. (I’m hesitating with the whitelist so I’ve set it to Block Adult Content, and we’ll see how that works).
Overall, I’m impressed with how Apple has thought some of this stuff through; out of the box it has a lot of the features I wanted without having to pay extra for—that’s part of the premium price, I suppose. The real test will be how she butts up against the parental controls I’ve set up, and if we have to modify any of them. But for now, she’s over the moon, and already talking about what case she’s going to buy for it.
Apple is releasing an updated version of their Airpods for the same price–$159, or $200 with the wireless charger. I wear headphones at least two hours a day, so these are on my list of must-have tech purchases this year. I cannot describe how annoying it is to deal with a wire catching on every damn thing–my messenger bag, my pocket, my coat, whatever I’m carrying–so this will be a godsend.
Last night, while I was waiting for my work laptop to clone, I swapped the hard drive out of my late 2010 Macbook Pro into a spare late 2008 MbP I bought as a decommissioned unit from WRI. The 2010 model was suffering from a random shutdown issue, where it would simply blink itself off, and I was getting fed up with it. I’d installed a SSD drive a few years ago so the process was straightforward and easy. The recipient machine only has 4MB of RAM but that should be good enough for the basic stuff I use it for these days. When I stop to think that I bought that machine eight and a half years ago and it’s worked trouble-free for the majority of that time, I have to appreciate the quality and value of Apple gear.
This morning I was on the road by 7:30 to run errands before the storm; I was out of the grocery store by 9 with a completed grocery list. At 10 I had an appointment to meet a lady about a rear cargo cover for the CR-V, which she was selling on Craigslist. This accessory was absent when we bought our car, and I always found them handy to have (my 1982 Subaru GL had one) especially when parking in the city. In 5 minutes the deal was done (they also threw in a set of OEM lug nuts they had laying around) and as we chatted they told me they’d sold their 2005 model with 280,000 miles on the odometer. Our ‘V only has 120K so I think we’re in good shape for another couple of years.
After that were more errands; I sold a couple of lousy XBOX games at the Gamespot so that I could buy a copy of LEGO Star Wars for us, picked up a new metal snow shovel at the Lowe’s, and did some other boring crap.
When I got home we made some lunch and got down to the depressing business of packing up all of the Christmas gear. Within about an hour we had the tree uncovered and out at the curb, and after hunting down and sweeping up all the pine needles we took another hour to straighten up the house.
Then Finn and I took the chainsaw out back to see if I could get it to start. With a little new gas in the tank and the proper choke setting it fired right up and settled into a nice throaty roar. The chain didn’t move at all, which means one of several things: there isn’t enough chain lube, the chain is too tight, on backwards, or misaligned. I’ll try chain lube first and work my way through the other issues afterwards.
Update: It was the chain brake. All I had to do was reset it and the chain spun straight away. Finn and I picked up some chain lube later in the week (the reservoir was dry) and with that I should be able to start breaking down the big stumps in the yard.
So I had a long list of stuff I wanted to tackle over the Christmas break. I thought, “I’ll have seven full days to get all of this done! No problem!” And suddenly it was day 6 and I was still in my pajamas from Christmas Day and there were still boxes and piles of wrapping paper on the floor and I hadn’t done a thing.
I did get to spend a ton of quality time with Finn and Jen, and for that I am grateful. It’s rare I get to be with them all day without involving some kind of errand or job around the house, so it was really nice to devote hours to building LEGO robots or playing on the XBOX.
That having been said, I have a list of shit I need to accomplish in the next couple of weeks:
Clone the hard drive on my work laptop and upgrade it to High Sierra. I was given a second-hand Mac a few years back with a tiny 128GB drive, and one of the first things I did was replace it with an off-brand drive. It turns out that the latest flavor of OSX doesn’t like some of these drives. This means I’ve got to repeat this process for three other laptops at work. It’s important because the latest versions of Creative Cloud won’t install on Mojave, which is what three of the four machines I’m responsible for are running. I did rebuild the intern’s laptop, which is a start. I have to put together a High Sierra install thumb drive and continue this project over next weekend. Done. Needed to be Mojave, though.
Get the Accord emissions checked, and then get the rear brakes fixed. The former is easy, but the latter may wait a little while, as the Oh-Shit fund evaporated when we had to replace the refrigerator, and Nox had to go in to the vet for some expensive tests this week. Done and done.
Shoot pictures of student work on the light table. I’m giving all of their work back but I need to have some record of what they did and how it looked. Luckily the table is still assembled in the basement so it should be a pretty simple workflow to build. I did this! It didn’t take that long and I got the most important pieces shot.
Clean the Scout seat belt tensioner. It’s getting harder to pull over my shoulder these days, which means the mechanism inside is dirty and needs to be opened and serviced. I did this! It took 15 minutes and made a HUGE difference.
Continue pulling toe moulding off the kickplates and caulking the gaps. I do notice a difference in the dining room wearing socks now, but the house is still drafty.
Rewrite my syllabus. Having a class under my belt after an absence of a year, I realize there’s a lot of stuff they need to know and a lot of stuff I need to overhaul. The syllabus I inherited is probably 10 years old and besides being boring it focuses on the wrong stuff. I’m going to narrow the parameters of the assignment so that I can expand what I’m covering (grids and guides, best practices, color, presentation, craft, production, etc.) because it sounds like they’re not getting half of this in their previous classes. I’m also going to add in an earlier grading point so that they’ve got an idea of how they’re doing earlier in the process.
The true fallout from the storm has now been tallied:
- Our cable box was fried and needed to be replaced. The Verizon guy handled this for us yesterday. Thank god the TV is OK.
- Our landline phone base station is fried and needs a replacement.
- The HDMI switchbox controlling our media electronics died and has been replaced.
- Our Airport Extreme base station is unresponsive. (I went back to using the Verizon router wifi).
- An older 8-port Netgear router in the basement died and has been replaced with a noisier but robust 32-port Netgear switch I saved from the electronics dumpster at WRI. I have to look into replacing the fans on this unit.
- The RJ-45 cable running from the AppleTV to the basement router is unresponsive; I’ve got to chase this down (or run a new one).
This is probably the worst loss of electronics we’ve suffered since we moved in, and it was only from a power loss. Obviously I’ve got to harden some of our crucial electronics (the server in the basement needs a new UPS unit, for one thing).
I’ve had an iPhone 6 since early 2015, and with only a few hiccups, it’s been great. In 2018 it still does 95% of the stuff I need it to do, and seems to keep up with most of the modern apps I need to use. Unfortunately the battery was on its last legs last year, right about the time I wasn’t able to do anything about it. I was getting about a quarter of a day of light use, which was alarming.
I finally made an appointment at the Apple Store at the beginning of April to have the battery replaced, and in the meantime was using a Mophie battery pack to extend its life. Unfortunately on the Saturday before my appointment, the phone fell onto the concrete sidewalk out back and shattered the screen, so my service call now included two replacements instead of one. At the Apple Store I waited for a Genius to help me, and he told me they would have to send it out overnight for a fix instead of being able to handle it in-store. Grudgingly I obliged, and the next day I picked up my shiny phone–only to find the battery life still sucked. Unable to get back in before my Colombia trip, I stuck the Mophie case back on it and made do until I got back.
A brief note: the Mophie case is a great idea with one fatal flaw. In execution it works brilliantly: it goes on like a standard case but adds a switch on the back to send a charge to the phone when you need it. You charge it with a mini-USB connector and it charges the phone first and the battery pack second. The problem is that it’s not shock resistant, and with the added weight of another battery pack, any drop above about 3 feet will result in a broken phone.
Last Saturday I made another appointment at the Apple Store and went about my weekend. At the Dunkin Donuts on Sunday evening, as I jumped out of the Scout, my phone slipped out of my jacket pocket to the pavement…and smashed the screen again. Disgusted, I walked into the Apple Store today and explained the issue; the Genius looked up my account and admitted that they’d replaced the screen in April but not the battery. I handed over my phone and let them take it for a couple of hours to do the repair, and we went on with our day.
Upon return, the Genius showed me my phone, which had failed their validation test (the screen looked like a distorted screencap of Qbert) and they handed me a brand new phone, charging me only for the $30 battery replacement. I brought it home, restored it from a March backup, and updated the apps on board. All is well again, and it looks like that iPhone 8 will have to wait another couple of years.
My iPhone is now over three years old and the battery life has been getting progressively worse over the last six months. It’s included in Apple’s replacement program, so I made an appointment on Tuesday to go into the store and have it swapped out. In the meantime, I had it with me in the backyard as I was raking leaves on Saturday, and stupidly placed it on top of one of the bags while I adjusted my fleece. the bag toppled over and my phone hit the sidewalk with a crunch: the screen blew up into a million pieces. Amazingly, it still worked!
At the store they were backed up so I had to leave it overnight for a screen replacement, and now that I’ve got it back, it seems to be working well. The battery feels like it’s still draining quickly but it’s got more life than it did.
I’m working on plans for shooting lots of video and photos in the next three weeks: I’ve got a dinner photo shoot followed by an early morning event shoot next week. The week after that I’ve got a full-day video shoot designed as a follow-on to the NCE video I made in London two years ago, which Jen is going to come down and help me with. The week after that I’m in Colombia shooting more video for a bike-sharing project, which should be a real adventure. I’ll have a new Canon 5D Mk4 to work with, and I’m renting a DJI Osmo to shoot crowd scenes while we’re there, and I’ll be with a co-worker who speaks Spanish so that I’ve got help with the language barrier.
Apple has rolled out a battery replacement program for the iPhone 6 in reply to the recent throttling controversy. I’ve noticed my 6 getting both slower and weaker over the last year, and especially after the recent update. Looks like I’ve got a $29 battery replacement in my future this spring.
My circa 2010 MacBook Pro has been having random kernel panics that I traced back to one of the two graphics processors failing. A little internet research brought me to this site, with some helpful advice on how to disable the bad chip permanently.
Lifehacker has a good writeup on how to get Siri to pronounce names correctly. When Finn was a toddler we bought her a doll that talked and played games and responded to buttons; it used a weird pronunciation of her name that I still haven’t been able to get out of my head.