Uni-taskers vs. Multitaskers

Generally speaking I like having technology that's flexible enough that it works really well no matter what I need to do. Generally a multitasking device is something that I keep around a lot longer than something that I purchase for a single purpose. 

However, there's a piece of hardware that I have had for years that only does a single thing, and dos it so very well that I have continued to replace them as I've worn them out.

Yep, an Amazon Kindle. 

I bought into these things back when the second generation of them came out with the embedded keyboard that I never actually used. I managed to use that for years, eventually having the device replaced multiple times as buttons failed and cases cracked. 

I think that I'm on my fifth or sixth one, and while that might not seem like a impressive statement I read a lot and the failures are all things that are just wear on the device. To put it simply I just wore the buttons out on the ones with physical switches, and the ones that are touch based I used them so much that the batteries eventually just gave up the ghost. 

I keep coming back to them for a couple of reasons;

First - battery life.  When I'm on a reading binge I will rip through a book a day in some cases. Granted we aren't talking larger novels but a good Reacher novel will last me a day if I really tear into it. My last camping trip had me read through the first three books of a six book series without really trying too hard. Having a device that can allow me to do that without having to constantly recharge in the middle of a given book is a requirement, and that's not something that you can do on a iPad or a Laptop.

Second - weight. With a Kindle I can walk around with a entire library in my bag, where with a paper book I'm stuck with whatever I can comfortably carry in the bag. That usually works out to one or two books at most, and even a single paperback weights more than my Kindle does.

Third - the screen. This is huge, and if you haven't looked at a e-ink screen you really should. A modern LCD is basically like looking into a light, and while it's fine if you are writing something or watching a movie it's does cause eyestrain, but the e-ink display doesn't put out any light, it's basically a piece of paper that can be programmed. Some of the new ones do have backlights but that can be turned completely off if you don't want it or aren't reading in the dark. 

On a iPad or other device I can only read for a few hours at a shot, however a e-ink display can be read for a entire day without getting any headaches or other eyestrain. 

The last thing that keeps me coming back is the price, the base device usually runs around 120$ CAD, and I generally get several years out of one before the batteries give up the ghost. The ones with the physical buttons tended to fail quicker, but the touchscreen ones take care of that quite nicely. As long as i'm getting a couple of years from the device it's well worth the 120$ to keep the weight in my bag down.

Old Hardware

Last weekend I had a bit of a discussion with a younger family member who is very much into technology and all the bits a pieces that come with it - specifically he's into older "vintage" tech. However for him "vintage" is stuff that I worked on earlier in my career, or spent my childhood cutting my teeth on.

Anyhow he managed to get his hands on a 2000's era laptop computer - specifically a Centrino based device that would have been considered resonable before Intel kicked off the release of the dual and quad core CPU's that would then become the default for the next decade. The problem with this device - it wouldn't boot properly. Initially it looked like the device had a dead disk, but after digging into it a bit it looks like the problem may be that the power supply he's got to run the thing just doesn't have the juice needed to get the device up and running. 

He was disappointed because he was specifically looking forward to playing some older games on this thing. 

Now there are some really good vintage games that are definitely worth playing, some of these are things that I would consider classic masterpieces and there are others that have not aged as well. 

This is something that he's brought up before, at point point I know he was really wanting to get hands on a SNES and a copy of Earthbound to play on the "original" hardware. Now, given the cost of a "original" copy of Earthbound;

And the cost of a working "original" SENES I really have to question if playing the game on original hardware is worth it any more. 

The only thing that I can agree with is that you should probably be using a SNES controller - or a good reproduction like the ones that you get from 8bitdo and others. Even a cheap one would probably work since the original ones, while good, were not that much better built than the USB knockoffs that you can get these days from Amazon. Having something that feels the same in the hand is something that makes the experience of playing the game complete. 

And the thing is that Nintendo knows that people still play this game - it's on the SNES library on the Nintendo Switch as a game that you can play so there's no need to resort to piracy to play the game. Nintendo also convienently sells a set of SNES controllers for the Switch, and even though they aren't cheap they are still cheaper than a copy of Earthbound.

Between DosBOX, PCEM, RetroArch, and other tools that exist in the world there are really few, if any, games that you can't play on a modern computer. And, now that USB versions of most of the popular controllers in the world exist it becomes hard to suggest pursuing original hardware to play these games on. Emulation avoids all the hassles that the vintage hardware brings with it - problems with bad capacitors, problems with broken cables, and brittle plastic that breaks as soon as you look at it. 

As much as I have nostalgia for the now vintage hardware that I sued to work with I don't miss having to manually set jumpers and other configuration options to make a sound card work. 

After talking to the family member about if they should spend another 50-100$ on a laptop that should have been in a recycling bin a decade ago I suggested that if they are only looking for a way to play old games that virtualization should be the way that they approach the problem. Hopefully they will go through the process of learning that and pick some skills that can be used in other places aside from just playing games. 

Telegram may be in some trouble...

Well, this is a interesting development. 

https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-816149

TLDR. The guy who founded Telegram, a secure messaging service, has been arrested in France for not cooperating with law enforcement. He's also being charged for terrorism, narcotic supply, fraud, and money laundering. 

Telegram is one of many messaging services that claim that they don't provide details to law enforcement regarding your conversations due to the way that they are encrypted, and the platform has little to no moderation on what you can discuss there. That's likely where most of the charges are coming from, but until more information comes to light it's going to be hard to know exactly what's going on here. 

This may however be related to some legislation that is being pushed in Europe that would implement governmental control over chat services like Telegram; 

https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/29/europol-sought-unlimited-data-access-in-online-child-sexual-abuse-regulation/

The logic here is that the government, specifically law enforcement, require this level of control over messaging services to allow them to combat CSAM and other criminal activities. I suppose having the entirety of all chat services laid open would make that process simpler but that's giving law enforcement a huge pile of data to go through and I have concerns. 

Obviously the first one is who's getting access to this data and how is that being policed to make sure that nobody is doing something they shouldn't be? Since you know law enforcement never does anything that might call their integrity into question. 

3d printing is a beautiful mess.

So a couple of years ago I was kind of lusting after a 3d printer.

The idea of having a device that would let me just crank out a physical object on demand was something hugely attractive for me. What I didn't understand right out of the gate was the amount of tweaking and configuring that is required to get a good quality print out of the thing.

At various points I've had to deal with issues from worn out nozzles on the extruder, problems with the print bed needing to be replaced, issues with the extruder not feeding properly, and problems with the filament getting too much moisture in it to be able to print properly. And while these are all things that I was able to figure out it is not a really simple plug it in and print type of situation.

And yes, I know about the newer stuff from Bambu labs that claims to be able to make things easier but I don't think they where even a option when I got the printer I'm using now, and even if they were they are a lot more money than what I wound up getting. 

In either case it's been interesting re-learning how to use CAD software and transitioning from using it for 2d stuff into using it to build a 3d model that's actually printable. The last time that I had spent any real time working on a CAD program was using a cheap one called KeyCad that was put out by Softchoice back in like 1996 or so. Needless to say the state of CAD software now is completely different compared to the tools that existed back at that time. 

The most useful thing about the 3d printer however is the ability to just crank out brackets and mounting hardware for things that I have sitting around the house. Cable management clips, brackets, and holders for things that were never intended to be mounted in any way are all things that I have cranked out of this thing. As these things become more and more popular I can see them replacing simple plastic parts that you might have to purchase from other places, but right now it's more a novelty for me. In the future this may change as the learning curve flattens out and the technology becomes more accessible. In the meantime, I suppose printing off flexi-rexi can provide me some entertainment. 

Unifi Networking - Longer term thoughts.

For the past several years I've been running Ubiquiti's network gear for the router/firewall and wireless access points that provide connectivity in my home. And after several years of working with it here it's getting to be time to look into moving to something new and I'm of a mixed mind of sticking with Unifi for the entire stack.

The wireless access points work great, and I really have no complaints about them. They provide great coverage, reliable uptime, and haven't given me any real issue over time. 

Routing however, that's more of a mixed bag.

 

The main reason that I don't just run whatever the ISP provides for a router is because they don't have the flexibility that I want to play around with. If all I was doing was using the web to watch content and check email then it would be more than fine, but as soon as I need to start messing with the DNS servers and other things it suddenly starts to become limiting. 

Previously I was runing PfSense for my routing and firewall, but when that hardware gave up the ghost I picked up a USG3, and it's great about showing statistics in the Unifi Application and giving me a single point to manage everything from there are a few things that it doesn't have in the UI where you have to fall back to command line on the router to make the changes that you need. 

Thankfully most of the things that require manually poking at the router are things that don't change frequently, but it's still frustrating enough that I'm questioning sticking with Unifi routing as a platform when I need to replace the device that's currently sitting in my wiring closet. 

Going with a SFF or Micro PC running something open source wouldn't cost really any more than getting the latest version of the Unifi kit. 

The other option that i'm considering is looking into some of Mikrotik's equipment. We wound up picking up some of thier stuff for a project at work and so far no complaints. And given the pricing that I'm seeing on their stuff it seems like it's better priced in a lot of ways compared to the stuff that Ubiquiti is putting out. 

On the downside I would have to learn a new ecosystem, but on the upside I can get a fancy red router. 

And again, things are coming full circle.

So, I'm old enough that I remember a time before being able to stream almost anything that you wanted to watch on demand. Either you waited for things to show up on the television, or you would wind up heading down to a local video store to pick out a video for the evening. 

When I was around it wasn't even blockbuster that you would go to - there were piles and piles of independent video stores that were scattered around. In my neck of the woods there were at least five that I can remember off hand each with a slightly different selection. 

Over time they dwindled and were bought out and amalgamated into larger chains but in the end streaming, specifically Netflix, basically killed off the whole rental experience. 

That's something of a shame since going to the video store and browsing for something to watch was always kind of fun. You could go in there looking for something specific, but if it wasn't there you might have to pivot and find something else, and depending on who was with you you could wind up having a polite discussion about what you are going to watch on a given night. 

Despite that the convenience of streaming eventually killed the local video store, but the main reason why that happened was simply availability - having everything in one place so that you didn't have to go hunting for a video, or worry about it being out of stock was a huge thing. I remember times where I would go to get a movie and be unable to see it because they just ran out of copies. 

Since Netflix was the standard and everything was on there getting a Netflix account was basically a no-brainer. Now however we have more and more streaming services popping up and the content is splitting up between different services. Like Star Wars? Pay out for Disney+, like Star Trek, go get yourself Netflix, like something from HBO, or Paramount? Well there's two more in there and we still are not counting for things that are service exclusive like Fallout, Altered Carbon, or others. 

Even if you are paying for a service that still doesn't mean you that you don't get bombarded with adds.

The current situation with the streaming services reminds me more of the situation with cable subscriptions back in the 80's when you had to pay to get the channels and then had to sit through the adds even through you where paying.  And frankly that having to pay hand over fist was what made things like Netflix attractive, and if they are going to continue to adopt the things that made cable frustrating I don't know how much longer I'm going to be willing to put up with it. 

macOS window management kind of sucks a bit

So a couple of weeks in with the macBook, and most things are just working for what I need them to do. A big thing that I’ve gotten used to on the Windows side of things that macOS just doesn’t do is how it handles window management. 

In Windows if you drag a window to the left or right it’s possible to snap it so that it covers the left of right half of the screen, there’s other options but that makes putting things in a place where they can be easily accessed really quick. It’s great for when you are wiring something but need some reference material on the side to be digging through. 

macOS just ignores it like it’s 1999. 

I’ve seen some notes on 3rd party applications that apparently address this, but I’m not super keen in tossing in lots of 3rd party tools if I can avoid it. 

Apparently this is something that Apple’s got stuff in place for in the macOS 15 beta, but again, daily driver system, not too interested in running beta software on my daily driver.

Thoughts on the Cybertruck

It's been a hot minet sine the Cybertruck started hitting the streets and after seeing the thing in real life and seeing how some of the reviews and panning out I have some thoughts. 

First off, the looks. 

Now there are a lot of different designs for vehicles, and not all appeal to me. The Cybertruck is definitely something that does not really appeal to me. From my viewpoint the design of a vehicle should follow it's function, and the Cybertruck in my mind allows the design to dictate the function of the truck. 

The way that the sides of the truck angle down towards the tailgate eliminates using any of the truck bed campers that I'm familiar with, and depending on how fat those come up I might start to worry about them interfering with using a 5th wheel on the thing. 

The other big thing that I think would be a issue for me are the sight lines and visibility when driving the truck. Having those wings going down the side of the vehicle can't be great for visibility when trying to back the thing up. And yes, I'm sure they have cameras covering all that space but I prefer not to have to be reliant on a camera to be able to see where I'm going when maneuvering a truck.

The biggest complaint that I have however is that the thing just looks cheap. 

I didn't really want to draw a conclusion until I saw one in real life since it's hard to tell from a photograph what something really looks like when you are standing in front of it. Recently however I had a chance to get a look at a couple of these things on a recent trip and having had a chance to see one in person I have to say that they don't look at impressive in real life as they do in the photos. 

IT's probably not helped by the body panels looking like most of them are glued on. It's probably due to the way that the thing is all sharp edges and thin lines, but to me it makes it looks like most of the body panels are just glued on to the front and sides of the thing. 

Secondly, function.

I'm sure that everybody has seen photos of people wiht Cybertrucks doing "truck stuff" that ammounts to tossing a couple of bags of dirt into the back with a case of water from Costco. That's not truck stuff, that's just vehicle stuff that you can do with anything with a trunk.

And while there are lots of videos with people taking Cybertrucks off road and having them get stuck and breaking down there are as many videos of that happening with normal trucks so a lot of that was stuff that I was willing to just write off as people playing with a new toy and not really understanding how to use a 4x4 off road. 

Then a guy on youtube who goes under the handle of Whislingdiesel got his hands on one. 

Normally I don't really watch his stuff, but the few videos that I've seen had him taking trucks and just absolutely beating the living hell out of them. When I saw that he got hands on one of these trucks I figured that it would be interesting to see how long the thing survived. And what was interesting is that the took both a Ford F150 and the Cybertuck and did the same thing with each one to see how they hold up. 

Now obviously a EV Truck will just murder a conventional one in straight line accelleration and torque, but what kind of shocked the living hell out of me was what happened when they tried to pull the F150 off of a situation where it got stuck and they wind up ripping the entire bumper off of the back of the Cybertruck.

And it's not just that the bolts that hold the tow hitch on sheared off and broke, this looks like it tore the end off of the frame that the truck and I don't see how you can fix that without replacing the entire body of the truck. 

Now, I'm pretty sure that pulling something with a truck is pretty basic "truck stuff", I use my truck to tow trailers, and to pull sumps and such out of the ground all without any problem. 

There's a lot of stuff done in that video that would normally never happen, but hooking up one truck to another to pull it out of a place where it's gotten stuck is not something that I would have thought would result in the entire bumper and it's casting getting torn off the back of the truck. 

The air-ride problems, the tonneau cover, even the doors coming apart when slammed, those are all things that I can't see happening during the normal course of using a vehicle, but the problems with the bumper - that's something that would be a concern. They point it out in the video - what happens if you have a trailer with a heavy load on it and that happens to hit a pothole while you are towing it? 

I have other concerns with the steering being drive by wire and so much being tied into that central screen, but that's common on all of the Tesla vehicles. 

Personally what I want is just a EV powertrain in the same type of truck that I have now. I don't need a huge screen to control the functions on my vehicle. The controls work, the layout works, hell I don't even need the thing to look any different. Just give me a electric version and I'm going to be pretty happy with that. 

The enshitification of hardware in the real world.

Ok. This post is going to be a bit of a rant. 

Read the link below. I'll wait.

 

https://www.theverge.com/24206847/logitech-ceo-hanneke-faber-mouse-keyboard-gaming-decoder-podcast-interview

So if you read the entire thing there's a mention in the interview of a "Forever Mouse", a mouse that you would never have to purchase again, but that would carry with it a ongoing subscription that you would have to continue to pay for software updates.

I mean we are talking about a god dammed mouse. 

These stupid things should just work. They shouldn't be something that requires an ongoing subscription for them to keep working. It's something that I pay once for, use until it breaks, and provided that it lasts long enough I would go and pick up a new one once the old one dies. 

I can't see any point where I'd be willing to have a subscription that I'm paying for a mouse, even if it was going to cover all warranty issues or other problems that came up. I mean how long can you pay for the subscription before you have spent more than the replacement cost of the mouse in the first place?

There are places where subscriptions make sense, but in my mind most hardware should be a one-time purchase. To be completely honest we have seen this happening with printers over the years. 

I've been working with computers for a very long time at this point, and printers have been something that I've had to be fighting with for my entire time working with computers - both personally and professionally. Back in the day printers were generally well built and there were models that you would pick up and run for potentially a decade or more unless there was some compelling reason to upgrade. 

I ran a HP Deskjet 830c for way longer than I can remember. At some point the thing threw a belt or something and stopped working. At the time I wasn't really printing any more and it wound up getting sent out for recycling and I was without a printer for several years. When I needed one again I ran down to the local retailer and picked up one for cheap and the thing lasted about a year before it started jamming up. This repeated for a couple of years, and eventually being a bit sick of it I picked up a laser printer that stuck around until the drum died, and it was then replaced with another HP printer that I absolutely hated.

Right now there's a Lexmark unit sitting at my house that works well that I picked up on clearance. 

The thing that I noticed each time that I was picking up a new printer was that the quality of the devices was continually decreasing each time that I had to get a new device, and the price of the toner or ink was going up, and up, and up every time that I looked at a new device. If you think about it this does make sense from the stance of the company making the printer - it's not about the printer, it's about selling you the ink for the printer. 

HP now offers a Instant Ink program where you are basically paying a monthly cost for ink based on how much you are printing. This type of thing has been around for large companies for a long time - especially when dealing with higher volumes of printing but it's starting to push down to the consumer level, and the quality of the printers has basically fallen off the face of a cliff in response since the printer only has to last long enough to sell ink and then be disposed of. 

And now it's spreading to mice. 

Sure they are talking about doing this with a "really nice" mouse right now, but you can't tell me that they won't eventually build the things to basically be disposable enough that you can't get away from having a subscription because the device is a piece of crap. 

Frankly, if Logitech does this it's probably going to be the trigger to keep me from ever using another one of their products in the future. 

Battery life and chargers.

So after having the MacBook Pro in hand for a week the one thing that I really have noticed is that the battery life on the darn thing is impressive.

On my windows devices, regardless of if I'm actually working with the device, the batteries on the laptops wind up running down and becoming dead within a few days. Generally if I don't have the laptop sitting hooked up to a charger for more than a weekend it's going to be a complete dead brick by the time that I go to make use of the dammed thing again. 

Due to this I've simply gotten used to hauling around the power brick for whatever laptop I've been using in my bag almost anywhere that I go. It's not been a huge issue in the last couple of years since the laptops that I have been working with have switched over to USB-C for power since the laptop charger would handle the laptop, battery pack, and anything else that might take power from a USB-C connection. I still need either adapters for Apple's lightning, Micro USB, and a couple of oddball things, but I always have a way to put power to the laptop.

The MacBook Pro however has been running all week and I don't think that I've seen the thing under 50% battery all week and I haven't been being super conscientious about making sure that it's connected to power. Granted It's not being run as a daily driver all day long, but it's still a new toy so there's a bunch of things that I would normally have done on my desktop have been being picked up on the laptop instead. 

Since I was worried about the battery life I have picked up a compact travel charger that I can use to keep the batteries on all my devices topped up. These new GAN based chargers are about half the size of the one that shipped with either of my laptops, so they take a lot less space in the bag. They are just as heavy as the larger ones though - and with multiple ports I can charge up the Laptop and the Phone at the same time if push comes to shove.

The specific one that I've grabbed is this one;

I've had some good results with Ugreen's stuff over the last couple of years for cables, and this seems pretty well reviewed.