I set up another account for the Travelall on Instagram last night, wrote an entirely new post, picked a completely different picture, and added completely different links to the profile. It wouldn’t let me use the account name from my first try, so I used a slightly different one. I wrote a long description for my second post and put it up with a new picture this afternoon. Checking the account later, I got an ominous notice from the app that said they noticed suspicious activity on my account that may have come from a bot, or something. So I’m fully expecting to have the fucking thing shut down a second time.
I mean, fuck’s sake, I’m not selling meth or boner pills; I’m posting pictures of a rusty truck. What the hell?
I had the opportunity to buy a piece of hardware for the office that I’ve been looking at for a long time and figured I’d write up an initial review of it here. We’re on a Microsoft tech stack at work, and most of it works well enough. However, we’ve been fighting against Sharepoint’s inexplicable habit of corrupting media files larger than 1GB, which makes any kind of file sharing useless for my team. I’ve been a Dropbox advocate for as long as I remember, and I’ve threatened to quit if they took it away from my team. But Dropbox is a cloud-based service and relies on your local hard drive for local storage; when you have ~10TB of working video files, you can’t fit that all on a laptop.
Because my team is half-remote, I need to have a central local file server with media files available for people to check in and out when they get to the office, backed up to Dropbox seamlessly. So I bought a Synology Diskstation DS1522+, which is basically a box with four hard drive sleds and an operating system. With five 8TB drives the whole bundle came to about $2,300, which is not cheap, and which is why I don’t already have one of these sitting in the basement.
Setup was easy. I’m used to pulling/swapping hard drives, so the new units went into the box pretty quickly, and after I buttoned it up I found an out-of-the-way counter to hide it on with power and a network drop. Once it booted up I followed the quick start instructions to find a web interface and stepped through account creation and basic configuration of the box. Within about 10 minutes I had it formatting the drives into a hybrid RAID configuration, allowing for 2-drive fault tolerance and netting 20TB in total storage. It was easy to set up SMB and AFP services for sharing, build out user profiles, and add a cloud services package to connect to Dropbox. From there I set it up to sync with our huge video folder overnight.
This morning I logged into the box as a network drive and all of our stuff is right where it’s supposed to be. Instead of dealing with hours-long download times via the cloud, our files now take minutes via the local network, and it’s much easier to dump folders back to the local drive instead of uploading via a web browser and bogging down a working machine for hours at a time.
Overall I’m really impressed with it so far, and I’ll be keeping an eye on it over the next year to see how well it holds up. Eventually my ancient Mac Pro towers will need to be replaced, and a simple box like this looks like a great option. I’m glad to be able to test-drive it here.
Well, that was short-lived. After setting up a second Insta account for the Travelall, and having it deactivated for “violation of community guidelines” with no further explanation, I couldn’t find a way to either contest the deactivation or restart the account. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t get back into the account at all through Instagram’s backend, and it didn’t recognize my cellphone number as a valid cellphone number (?). This could be because I don’t share my cell number with Facebook, which owns Instagram. Maybe the robots decided I wasn’t me, even though they probably know more about me than I do. So I deleted the whole thing, and I’m going to try to build it again.
What is still unclear to me is why it was deactivated in the first place; neither of the images I shared there had appeared in my main feed, and the text in the description was new. Did someone flag my account? Did the robots decide I was a clone of myself? Have I pushed humanity one step closer to the Singularity? We will never know.
I fucked around with Instagram the other day to add another account to my profile (or profile to my account?) for the Travelall, figuring I’d build up some followers there and see if I could funnel traffic to the YouTube channel. I’m experimenting with how all this stuff works based on things I’ve learned at work, and if I can keep making $20/mo. on T-shirts, I can at least pay for my hosting bills. I made the account and posted two pictures, both shots of the truck I don’t think I’ve shared on my regular channel before.
Anyway, I got a notice this evening that the new profile was deactivated. What? But I could reactivate it by logging an appeal. So I followed their steps: I entered their CAPTCHA code correctly. They asked for my email address, and they sent me a code; then they wanted my phone number—and the system broke. It didn’t recognize/didn’t like my cell number for some reason. The help pages are less than helpful and basically just point back to the app and tell you to verify through that, so I’ll wait until tomorrow to see if I can get it to work then. In the meantime, I changed my Meta/Instagram password, figuring someone may have tried to brute-force into my account for some reason; hopefully that doesn’t break their system further.
File this under my paranoia is increasingly justified: New cars are increasingly spying on us and reporting our driving habits to insurance companies. Some of the carmakers don’t want you to disable this reporting feature, and make it difficult to shut off. This article details how to shut off the reporting for most modern makes; apparently Honda is of medium difficulty, but this is something I intend to take care of this weekend.
I called the dealer. He talked to some people at Honda and called me back. If I wanted to shut off the data sharing, I’d have to download Honda’s HondaLink app, which came with its own 14 pages of unreadable terms and conditions.
That was my only choice, he said. He also said I was the first person to ask him how to do so. I reluctantly downloaded the app, but couldn’t figure out how to shut it off from there. Finally, a day after downloading the app, I was able to shut off the data sharing in my car (confusingly, I had to do so in the car and not on the app, but only once I downloaded the app). It only took me a month.
I paid for the product, yet I have become the product.
Super. Apparently AT&T left all of their customer phone numbers, calling and text records, and location data out on a cloud server somewhere, and “criminals” downloaded it. The timespan is from May—October 2022. Guess whose network is AT&T? I submit: the true criminals are the fuckheads at AT&T who continually leave this shit out on cloud servers for anyone to stumble across and download.
Countdown to useless, lawyer-enriching class action lawsuit: 10, 9, 8…
Longtime readers are bored of me talking about the Fallout game series, but I’ve dipped my toes back in after binging the web series on Amazon, which was, remarkably, pretty good. While not sharing quite the expansive feeling the game series did, I thought the character development and careful attention to detail was done exceptionally well, and they nailed the tone of Fallout 4 really well. They’ve already committed to a sequel in the series, which is nice to hear.
I’d already been replaying Fallout 4 for a month or so, having grown tired of the repetitive nature of Starfield, and had grown tired of replaying the same levels in that over again. In a rare moment of clarity I figured I’d check to see if Fallout: New Vegas was available through Game Pass, for which I am paying, and I was surprised to see it was. Loading it up for the first time, it’s really clear that it was released in 2010: the graphics are pretty blocky, the lighting is junk, and it’s easy to see the limitations of the original platform. That being said, it took me about an hour to adjust to that regression, and now I’m enjoying the game. The base mechanics for the later games are there, so it’s a lot like making the jump from Fallout to Starfield, but backwards—the fundamental controls are present minus all the stuff they added later. Apparently this is the best of the whole series, according to the interwebs, so I’m in for a treat.
Apparently Starfield is supposed to get some sort of expansion pack later this year, which would be nice; I’d like to go back to that and do something different, having completed all but the last main quest. And I chortled to read that No Man’s Sky is getting another in a series of updates, which will make a supremely repetitive and boring game…a little less repetitive and boring? I’m shocked anyone is still playing that game.
WordPress did one of its automatic updates earlier this week, and the 10+ year old template I was using for the Scout blog decided it didn’t want to cooperate anymore. Which is strange, because it’s basically a fork of the template I use here at IK (uh-oh….). I chose it because it was the simplest, most basic theme I could find at the time. I didn’t want an overdesigned, overcomplicated theme built for e-commerce or stuffed with features I didn’t need; I just wanted something lightweight and easily customizable that I could adapt to my own needs quickly. It had its quirks but it was fast and useful and it served me well up until the point it stopped functioning. So I looked around for new themes and tried a bunch on and finally found a couple of theme frameworks that function well enough, but everything these days is, well, overcomplicated. Trying to move some basic page elements around took a bunch of exploration and some surgery, and I still haven’t found an easy way to add my old banner image to the top in a way I like.
Waiting for Hazel to investigate a bush this morning, I noticed something on the ground nearby that set off an alarm bell, and I picked it up: a thin Tile location sensor laying in the grass. It’s pretty slick: very slim, just small enough to fit in a wallet. We’ve had some issues with the father-in-law’s wallet and keys going missing, and this looks like a better option than an AirTag, which aren’t made for slipping into a wallet. They don’t sell the model I found anymore, but I’m gonna jump on Amazon and set him up with a few so that we can keep tabs on his stuff.
On a related note, I broke down and installed a Ring doorbell on the front of the house last week, partially because we’ll be vacationing soon but also to just have another eyeball on the front door. As much as I hate the idea of the surveillance state and Ring’s ethical bankruptcy when it comes to sharing data, there are no good alternatives (the cheap Wyze camera I trialled last year worked fine but then it was revealed they were leaking footage, so it’s been sitting in a box since then) and we’ve had good luck with the Ring on the front of Bob’s house.
I’ve spent a fair bit of time cleaning up my long-neglected YouTube “channel”, which until recently has just been a CDN for videos I’m embedding elsewhere. I’ve made the realization that I need to add a lot more context around anything I post there, meaning each video needs some kind of voiceover, title card, and description so that they stand alone a bit better. I posted the latest Travelall update yesterday and within six hours I had sixty views—which is peanuts, really—but you’ve got to start somewhere, I suppose. As I’ve done work on WRI’s channels I’ve picked up some tips and advice on how to raise visibility, so I’m putting those into place to see how things go. Strangely the Hudson video has 11K views which look to be completely organic based on the stats I’m seeing. I guess Hudsons are more popular than IH.
The New Yorker ran an issue on AI this month, and one of the articles inside is by a programmer who has been wrestling with what ChatGPT means for his career and balancing the old paradigm of figuring out a problem for yourself through code vs. figuring out how to speak to AI to help develop that code faster. He talks about the steep learning curve he faced when starting out, and how persistence and determination help push through the hardest parts of learning that new language; how rewarding it is to sit back and think through a problem, then be able to write the code properly to solve it. It’s like painting or cooking or any one of a number of difficult skills that take time to master: there’s a particular satisfaction that comes with finishing that artwork or serving that food where everyone appreciates the craft. The successful completion of the struggle is what keeps us going. But now a bot seems to be able to do the same coding work without effort, in minutes.
Bodies of knowledge and skills that have traditionally taken lifetimes to master are being swallowed at a gulp. Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it.
The author is rightfully worried that his career will disappear if all we have to do is type a question into a box and have the box write the code for us. But he comes to realize that this new technology speeds up the drudgery of writing the code, and we’re still using our brains to solve problems; the box is helping by speeding up the process—and in that process, we’re learning a new kind of language: the translation. We have to learn the language the box needs to complete our requests properly. And you have to know how to think about programming, and understand what proper output is, to know how to ask the right questions.
I spent a lot of time in the late 90’s learning a couple of different languages through books; the first was a language called Lingo used by an application called Macromedia Director. I started using it after learning the basics in a continuing ed course at MICA and got good enough that my boss at the time (who was smart enough to know that the Web was the future, even if he was a lousy boss) hired me out to make an animated screensaver for a government agency. I read the Lingo book and learned enough to build a primitive randomizer to play different clips so that the screensaver showed something different each time it looped. When I was finished and my code worked, I was quietly stunned. A new world had opened up, the one my Dad had been telling me about (and which I resisted until college, when it became clear that this was the future) and I saw my place in it for the first time.
With that experience, I got my first web design gig. I learned some Perl first, and then PHP as I got further into producing my own sites. I was never completely fluent in either language—I couldn’t sit down and write a web application from scratch—but I could read and understand what things were doing, and I knew enough to fix things that were broken and add logic to change the behavior of the apps we worked on. And most importantly, I could talk to the programmers who could build things, which is a skill all on its own. I was very good at translating the concept to the people making the code.
Had I been a smarter man I would have focused solely on learning and mastering PHP, and I might have pursued a different career path. But my skills were more suited to UI/UX and I made a good living in that specialty for years until I burned out. Around that time I began to notice that the shop I worked for was leaning more heavily on templatized solutions: instead of estimating 80-100 hours for someone like me to generate two concepts, mood boards, and the designs to flesh out all of those requirements, they were finding templates they could modify to suit their needs and banking that extra billing as profit. What had once been a bespoke craft I’d trained myself to do was becoming commoditized, and I was lucky to get out when I did.
I don’t think AI is going to be able to take over art direction or brand creation anytime soon, and ChatGPT certainly can’t walk into a room and convince ten skeptical personalities to approve a concept or mediate a discussion; I’m thankful I’m not walking into programming or web design fresh out of school. And I’m extremely glad I’m not a writer by trade.
I sat down with my ChatGPT account last night and asked it to produce a couple different examples of PHP code to do simple tasks: create a form field to capture several inputs and write them to a text document; build a randomizer to display a different image on a page at reload, and write an AppleScript to resize an image. It wrote simple code that did exactly what I asked and worked flawlessly. I can see how asking it to build something with more functionality would be challenging, and require some iteration to learn how the AI needs to be asked, but it’s frightening how fast and easy the bot did its job. I’m going to practice my translation and see if I can make it do bigger better things.