My neighbor, while showing me how to fly the drone I was borrowing from him, asked me casually, “Would you like the old plasma TV I’m Freecycling?”
Curious, I followed him out to the curb of his house, where a 42 inch Panasonic plasma sat waiting for someone to pick it up. He told me the HDMI wasn’t working but that the component inputs were all functional, so I figured I’d toy with it first and then Freecycle it if I couldn’t get it working. We hauled it back up the driveway and continued the drone lesson. Later, we heaved it into his van so that he could drive it over to the house. It’s just shy of 100 pounds, so it’s almost impossible to carry by oneself. I was leaving for Paraguay the following day, and Jen wanted it out of our hallway, so she and I hauled it upstairs and onto our dresser, where it sat like the Monolith in 2001.
When I got back from the trip, I hooked an HDMI cable up to it and confirmed that it wasn’t sensing input. Then I tried my XBox with component cables, and…there was no input. I haven’t gotten any farther than that, though I need to try a camera with a component cable, or maybe our ancient DVD player which predates HDMI to confirm. But I’m pretty sure it’s a 42″, 100 lb. brick that I need help hauling back down the stairs.
We have found a house in Delaware that will be our vacation hideout for 2017. It’s up the street from 2014’s rental, and this one is actually across the street from the beach, but there’s access within a short walk and the view from the porch looks beautiful. We’re taking two weeks this year to get our full rest on, and we’re sharing the house with friends to offset the cost and make sure Finn has playmates to hit the water with.
Having been without my iPhone for three days, there were times when I felt like I was missing my right arm. What will the weather be like today? What’s the address of my doctor’s office? It was alternately liberating and annoying to be unplugged when I needed information. The idea of a simple cellphone does have its merits. The Punkt MP01 is a simple cellphone with just the basic functionality, and it looks great. Unfortunately it’s only available for 2G GSM, which means it’s unavailable for AT&T, my carrier.
In the latest continuation of the tortured Yahoo saga, some of the company has been sold off to Alibaba, the Chinese eCommerce giant. What this means for Flickr is still unclear; as mentioned before, 90% of the photos on this site are hosted there. Just in case, there’s a handy set of instructions for downloading an archive of your images.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Santa brought me a technological upgrade for Christmas this year. I’ve been using a base model Kindle Fire since last Christmas, when a rock bottom sale made the purchase a no-brainer. It’s a decent bit of gear for the money but I found it lacking in a lot of ways, especially after comparing it to the iPad it replaced. The battery life is short, which is no surprise given its size. The touchscreen is less responsive. And the interface, while functional, lacks some basic features–like a file system that lists files alphabetically. Santa took advantage of another sale this year and got me a Fire HD, with a bigger screen, faster chip, and better battery life. These small improvements have finally presented a useful replacement for the iPad; it’s faster, the battery lasts longer, and the screen is more responsive. It’s cheap enough that if it gets broken I’m not going to cry about the cost, but it’s powerful enough that it does the main things I need it for. Plus it’s got a mini SD card slot so I can add storage space when I need it.
This means my old Fire is available for Finn to use in a limited fashion; I’ve been reading up on how to lock it down for child-friendly use. Amazon has a couple of different approaches available for parents, from setting up a household account and making a user profile for your kid, to using an app called FreeTime which essentially locks the Kindle down to only what you want them to access. I haven’t figured out which one is better yet, but I’m going to get this sorted out in the next week. She’s asking to play Minecraft, because pretty much everyone else her age is already doing so, so I’m going to have to read up on that as well.
And speaking of games, I installed Steam on my work laptop over the break, mainly so that I could play Firewatch, which was available through a holiday sale. I initially tried to run it on my personal laptop but it was so choppy as to be unplayable–not surprising for a 7 year old machine. (This also raises the question of a new laptop sometime this year). I was excited about this game when I saw the previews; it’s produced by an indie game developer and funded by the company that makes several Mac apps I use on a daily basis, and it got excellent reviews when it was released. I played about an hour of it after installing, and immediately was hooked. It’s a first-person mystery exploration game, so there’s no running and shooting, and all of the information you get is through a walkie-talkie with an offscreen female voice or what you pick up along the way. I’ve played about two hours of it now and the mystery portion is just setting in. I will have to ration it out so that I don’t play through the whole thing in one sitting.
Meanwhile I started archiving photos from this year and making room for 2017. We’re running out of space on the basement server, so I bought a 4TB drive to replace the cramped media storage drive that holds our movies and music. I began reorganizing the miscellaneous files there to free up space, but it’s obvious I’ve got to rethink the whole situation, especially in light of the gigabytes of photos I’ve got from 2016.
I’ve always wanted a Nixie tube clock, because AWESOME. I never had any idea how difficult and specific the construction of nixie tubes actually was.
Another awesome graphic from XKCD: the Earth Temperature Timeline. Once again Mr. Munroe does an excellent job of putting things in perspective.
Satan’s Hairy Armpit is upon us, with temperatures in the mid 100’s, and all of our air conditioners are cranking. Jen asked me to haul them all outside and clean them out earlier in the summer, and I’m glad she did; they were all disgusting inside, full of black yuck and gunk in the bottom. I disassembled each, sprayed them with mildew killer, hosed them out, and sat them to dry in the sunlight. Now they’re keeping us cool without spraying our lungs full of tuberculosis as we sleep.
I’m considering taking out a home equity line of credit before the election, as I don’t think the new bathroom will be completed without it. We can’t seem to get any traction going in there, and now that I’m not freelancing as much as I used to, I don’t have extra cash appearing magically to throw at it. I have no idea what the markets will do if either candidate wins (but I can guess what will happen if Trump is elected) so I think it’s time to get a fixed APR locked in before everything goes in the shitter.
I’ve been batch processing all of my digital photos from the last 10 years from camera RAW format to JPG, so that I can back them up to Amazon Photo. We get the storage free through Prime, and even though I’ve got two backups of my photos (one in the basement and one in my desk at the office) I’d like to have a third somewhere else. Amazon Photo doesn’t take RAW files, so I set up a simple batch action to open, process, save, and close them into a single folder, which then gets uploaded en masse. I tried finding a script that weeded out any JPG files (why open and resave them?) to filter out everything but what I wanted, but found the documentation poor and once again bonked my head on the low ceiling of my Javascript abilities. So, I gave up and relied on the base batch processor to take care of 2014 and 2013, and being OK with the fact that it’s saving them all at a lower quality for the sake of size.
So many good things to find here: A Complete History of the Millennium Falcon, exhaustively researched and illustrated. This is my favorite spaceship design, and what taught me at an early age that careful asymmetry was an excellent design choice.
Having upgraded all of our WRI work laptops to current models, I’m phasing out our older machines. This means I’m able to buy them for a nominal fee. Last week I grabbed a 15″ MBP for Finley, who has been using a tablet at school and borrowing my laptop to do schoolwork during snow days. I spent some time flattening a spare drive and installing El Capitan (I fell prey to a somewhat common bug with all of the USB installers I’d created before I got one to work) and creating a user account for her. I’m now in the process of locking it down as tightly as possible. The parental controls in OS X are a new adventure for me, but with a little research and some experimentation, I think I can make it kid-friendly and lock out all but the G-rated sites we’ll allow her to browse.
At the same time, I’ve got to rebuild my work laptop from scratch. About a month ago I had a dumb travel accident with my coffee thermos and soaked the lower half of the case, which prompted a trip to the Apple store and an emergency rebuild. They left the hard drive but replaced the lower case, display, motherboard, and several other components. When I got the machine back it booted up into an older version of my user account, but it’s been acting funky. Playing video from the internet sometimes blows up wireless connectivity and/or crashes the browser, and the Microsoft Office suite goes up and down randomly.
I grabbed a spare drive from my stash at work and cloned the drive. Over this next weekend I’m going to do a full reinstall of the OS and build it clean from the ground up.
Meanwhile, Jen’s laptop, which is newer than mine, decided it was time to throw a tantrum and blinked off. It’s doing something I’ve never seen before: the startup sequence drops out about 2/3 of the way through and blinks to a dead gray screen. Booting into Recovery Mode, the Hardware Test, or from an external recovery drive has the same result. I’m stumped, so I pulled her drive and transplanted it into Finn’s computer until I can diagnose the hardware problem. Great!
Another repair in the works is our balky plumbing system. Last fall, when I was in Abu Dhabi, our new toilet stopped flushing. Jen had plumbers come in to diagnose it, and they replaced the toilet after snaking the lines. Soon after that, the basement flooded, and they snaked the line again. That was when we found the pipe was clogged under the magnolia tree, and we dug a very expensive trench in the yard to replace it.
After Christmas, to celebrate the birth of the Baby Jesus, the toilet clogged again.
The plumbers put a camera down in the line and diagnosed a problem with the cast iron pipe that links the second bathroom with the main waste line; when the original plumbers installed it, they didn’t add any downward angle to the last length of pipe, which runs about 2/3 of the width of the basement. This means the waste didn’t have any help moving to the main sewer line, and sat in the flat section of pipe, where it hardened and clogged. So, they replaced that entire length of iron with PVC at a proper angle on Thursday. It was expensive but if and when the upstairs bathroom ever comes into use, it’s necessary for keeping things flowing smoothly.
Friday morning, we woke to a cold house.
The boiler decided it didn’t want to stay lit, which meant we needed to call the plumbers out. Again. This time, the diagnosis is a bad spark unit, which is a module about the size of a sandwich. Unfortunately, the boiler itself dates back to Jimmy Carter’s term in office, so the part isn’t normally in stock anywhere. My plumber couldn’t source it today because his supplier is doing inventory all afternoon, so I’d have to wait until Monday. So we’re going to find a couple of space heaters, close off the outside rooms of the house, and hunker down tonight.
I made a few calls and found a different guy in town who can get the part for me by tomorrow morning; I’m going to take a $160 non-refundable chance and put it in myself (it’s three wires and two screws). If that fails, I’ll have to keep the plumbers of the world in business myself. I don’t have the money, after paying for a fancy new toilet, a trench in the front yard, two more visits to unclog the lines, and a new waste pipe, to put in a new boiler, so I really hope this works.
This is unscientific, because the Idiot forgot to set the same ISO on each camera. So we’ll call this “Round 1”. What you’re seeing is two cameras with three lenses shooting on the same focus point. These images are unedited other than bumping up the D90’s exposure to match the D7000, but I’ll fix that in the next round. The first two lenses are manual and the third is a modern AI at the same focal length.