Amazon announced yesterday that it’s buying Eero, a company that makes mesh wireless devices that apparently work very well. I’m not excited by this; I’m exhausted. The Verge says it perfectly:
It’s exhausting thinking about how rapacious big companies are when it comes to our data. It’s exhausting to think about how difficult it is for independent companies to stay independent.
I wanted a Nest thermostat really bad too.
This is an online security checklist recently published as the result of a podcast discussion. There’s a ton of good information in there, not the least of which is 1.1.1.1: a DNS lookup service that promises not to sell your information to third parties. My switch away from Chrome is long overdue.
It’s quiet here in D.C. with the government shutdown. The train station parking lot half full, the sidewalks are empty and Union Station is eerily quiet.
I’m currently squeaking through this week with about $7 in my pocket until my next paycheck, because of the previously mentioned refrigerator purchase and an unexpected pair of vet bills for Nox, who was throwing up his food constantly around New Year’s. We got him in to the vet and they gave him an exam and a shot of anti-nausea medication which made him pee all over the vet tech and scream as if he was being declawed with a power drill. He went back in a few days later for a sonogram, which cost more than the first visit but should rule out any foreign objects in his system (there was a cat ahead of him with a Christmas ribbon clogging his small intestine, due for a costly visit to the surgeon). In the meantime, he’s eating rabbit-based food, our supposition being he’s allergic to chicken. He’s been holding it down and mostly back to his normal self. I will admit I enjoyed his sudden shift into total lap-cat mode when he wasn’t feeling well; as he recovers he’ll go back to his semi-ambivalent healthy state.
Over the weekend, I set up Lightroom to export all of my 2018 photos as JPGs and uploaded them to our Prime Photo account, something I’ve done with most of the earlier photos in our library. Having that done is good, but my next project will be upgrading our basement server to handle more files. It’s currently only limping along with 2GB of RAM, a pitifully small amount, so someday soon I’ll throw another 8GB at it, as well as swapping out one of the smaller drives with a 6TB unit to increase internal storage. Ideally, I’d replace the boot drive with an SSD unit, and if money allows I may do that as well. Honestly, when I look at it and realize it’s a 12-year-old machine and still running dependably (unlike the G5 tower it replaced) I’m amazed–especially since I bought it for $50 as a decommissioned unit from work.
This is part of a LEGO kit we got Finn for Christmas. It’s a technical set that includes a motor drive, motion sensor, and secondary motor element. We built a tracked robot that is programmable through a tablet app to move in 360˚, make sounds, shoot a shoulder-mounted projectile, move its head, and recognize sound and movement. The whole thing was accessed through the app, including the build process. She and I had a blast putting the whole thing together at the dinner table.
The New York Times yesterday published a story about how Facebook shared user data with select corporate partners, including contact lists and private messages.
Facebook gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read users’ messages, and other tech giants including Microsoft, Amazon, and Sony access to data on users’ friends, according to hundreds of internal documents obtained by the paper and interviews with dozens of “former employees of Facebook and its corporate partners.”
I looked on my phone and was surprised that I hadn’t already deleted the app (I never use it) but finally did so this afternoon.
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).
Wow, if Microsoft’s “method” of setting up a child’s account on an XBOX could suck a bag of dicks any worse. I just spent an HOUR fighting their fucking menu system to try and verify a second account just so my kid can play multiplayer Minecraft with her friend. AND IT DIDN’T FUCKING WORK. I created an account, fought with that, deleted the account, created a new account, and waited for it to “verify” the email address. and then it shit on itself like a week-old puppy. FUCK YOU, MICROSOFT. I used to repair computers and troubleshoot software for a living. This system is the biggest pile of Kafka’s steaming shit I’ve ever dealt with.
Color me interested: Flybrix makes $149 drones made from Legos, controlled with a smartphone app.
I’ve talked a little bit about being a D&D nerd back in the day; My interest was intense for a period of time in the 6th grade, and then casual for a few years after that. I was also into a sister game called Gamma World, which was basically D&D in a post-apocalyptic setting. Something about this game caught my interest a lot more than dragons and swords. Some history:
In 1982, my family moved from blue-collar New Jersey to a town in white-collar Connecticut, and I started at a new school. We were bused in from a remote cul-de-sac on the far side of town. I was pretty isolated until school started (the only other kid on our street was two years younger, and all he wanted to do was sit inside and play Mrs. Pac Man) but after a rocky couple of weeks I met up with a guy who lived less than a half-mile from my house through the woods. He introduced me to a bunch of his friends, who lived nearby, and one of the things we bonded over was a game I’d never heard of before: Dungeons and Dragons.
I didn’t understand how the game worked at first. There were dice, and rules, and they gave me a character to play, and I enjoyed using our imagination to solve problems. We played on and off again that fall, between building forts in the woods around our houses, riding bikes, and Pitfall! I enjoyed one of the best Halloweens of my life that year when my friend’s father showed us how to melt the plastic tip of a can of shaving cream to shoot the foam in ten-foot streams; we roamed in and out of epic battles with older neighborhood boys, using our knowledge of the local woods to escape and regroup.
My parents gave me the beginner’s box set of both D&D and Gamma World that Christmas, and after that I was obsessed. We played through the spring until school let out, when my friends vacationed out of town. I spent a lonely August swimming in the pool, reading books from the library, and creating Gamma World campaigns for my friends to play through when they all got back.
That fall, we started at the middle school across town. I was dumped into a new system where I knew no one, and all of my friends from 6th grade had dissolved into other classes. D&D suddenly wasn’t cool in the cutthroat atmosphere of 7th grade, and I was adrift in rough social waters.
When we moved to New York, I spent one lonely semester in 8th grade until I made it up to the High School, and found new friends. One of the things we did was play D&D and Gamma World informally here and there; I’m not going to lie, but I miss those Coke and pizza-fueled sessions with friends, because we had a great time. (I remember an epic 10-hour session during an ice storm my Junior year).
Fast forwarding, I had a little credit with Amazon last week and decided to find a game that Finn and I could play, as well as one that I’ve been dying to try for years: Fallout 4. Fallout is a series that’s been around since 1997, but Fallout 4 was released two years ago. It’s as if they took about 90% of Gamma World and made a video game out of it. You control a character who awoke from a cryogenic vault 200 years after a nuclear war, and you spend the game wandering a gigantic wasteland, killing evil humans and radiated monsters (if you can) while picking up objects along the way. You can use these objects to craft new weapons, structures, or special items. You can start settlements for people, working to keep them happy and safe. You can find special powered armor suits which help you defeat huge, powerful monsters. In short, everything that was cool about Gamma World but without your friends playing by your side.
I’m already about 20 hours into the game and I can’t put it down.
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.