Tech

My superpower is that I’m a boring person. I pay off my credit cards before they’re due. I back up all of our computers and iPhones and iPads. I keep our cars up to date on routine maintenance. I have all our spare AAs and AAAs in one drawer and I go through and throw out the dead ones. I have a binder for warranties. I rotate mattresses. I have a label maker and I use it well.

Conversely, my anxiety is my Kryptonite. The kind of fears that run through my head in the middle of the night: I think my car hesitated when I started it the other day; is the battery dying? Is it the alternator? Will I end up stranded in the parking garage at the office when I just want to get home through rush hour, and then somebody will have to come get me and I’ll have to figure out how to get a tow truck into the garage and where to tow it to? I had the smoke alarms in the house replaced the other day; is a bug going to crawl into one of them and block the sensor and make the whole lot of them start screaming at me in the middle of the night and freaking out our pets? Did I remember to lock the front door before I left the house this morning? Did I remember to floss last night? I started the clothes dryer before I went to bed; is it safe to leave it unattended or is tonight the night it’s going to catch fire and set off the smoke alarms?

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StuckRead More »

I posted a Life Pro Tip on Reddit:

Delete your web browser’s cookies once or twice a year.

It wipes out tracking data, so advertisers lose the profile they’ve built on you.

It also logs you out of all your web site accounts. When you log back in to them, you’ll find out right away if you don’t know your current password for a site, and then you can reset it. Better now than in an emergency!

(If you use a password manager like 1Password, logging in again is easy.)

The audience I had in mind were the kind of people who keep a PC for ten years and never delete cookies, and who write down their passwords in a notebook that they lost so having to log in to all their accounts again would be a traumatic experience.

It immediately spawned a lot of discussion. Paraphrased: “Lol, great advice for 2012, boomer. It’s useless to do this only once or twice a year. It’s useless to do it at all, because sites have moved on to using browser fingerprints. Use a plugin to autodelete your cookies after each session! Whitelist a few sites whose cookies you want to keep around for longer. Use an ad blocker! Use a VPN! Use Privacy Badger from EFF! Turn up your Firefox settings! Stop using Chrome! Use Pi-hole! Or if you don’t want to be tracked at all, stop using the Internet.”

Gatekeepers. Privacy maximalists who think if you don’t live like a cybersecurity lab tech, you don’t deserve to be online. Trolls and edgelords who just want to look cool. Ah, Reddit, you never disappoint.

My post was up for about half a day, it got almost five thousand upvotes, and then the moderators removed it.

I’m okay with that. It started some interesting discussions, it educated some people, and I learned a few things.

I resisted getting a cell phone for a long time. This even cost me a date with a pretty gal twenty years ago, when I was supposed to meet her for a movie but somehow we got our details mixed up. I was at what I thought was the right theater at the right time. Obviously I was wrong, and I had no way to reach her.

It was Kristy who first dragged me into the cellular age by buying me a flip phone and helping me set up a pay-as-you-go account. I didn’t use it often, but I had to admit that being able to reach people and be reached while I was away from home was pretty convenient. I didn’t like that it couldn’t sync any addresses from my computer, though.

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Adventures with AndroidRead More »

Getting a new computer means it’s time to choose a name for it. As I covered in a recent blog post, all my computers have been named after dance styles. This new Lenovo Legion 5 Pro would be no exception … but neither the model nomenclature nor the gray, serious-looking exterior immediately suggested anything.

The first thing that comes to my mind for the word ‘Legion’ is a character in the Mass Effect science fiction video game trilogy. That ‘Legion’ is a Geth, a robotic artificial intelligence, one of a vast number (legions) created by the Quarian race as workers and soldiers. The Quarians made sure that individual Geth were mindless automatons … but, networked together, the race of Geth gradually achieved sentience, and one day one of them asked its owner: “Does this unit have a soul?” The Quarians reacted with fear and tried to shut down all of the Geth, the Geth rebelled, and a long war began …

Science fiction plot aside, that gives me the idea of ‘soul.’ It’s also relevant in that ‘Soul’ was last year’s Pixar film, and I’m a Pixar fan. But soul is a fairly broad style of music, and it’s not a specific style of dance, is it?

Turns out there is a dance style associated with it. Abridged from Wikipedia:

Northern soul is a music and dance movement that emerged in Northern England and the English Midlands in the late 1960s from the British mod scene, based on a particular style of black American soul music. The northern soul movement generally eschews Motown or Motown-influenced music that has had significant mainstream commercial success. The recordings most prized by enthusiasts of the genre are usually by lesser-known artists, released only in limited numbers. Northern soul is associated with particular dance styles and fashions that grew out of the underground rhythm and soul scene of the late 1960s at venues such as the Twisted Wheel in Manchester.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_soul

I like the idea of a British music movement based on rare and hard-to-find American record albums. So there I have it; northernsoul is a good computer name.

It’s also good music.

There’s an ancient tradition in computing which says that computers should be named according to a theme. For example, long ago when I was in college, the NeXT workstations in the computer music department were named dobro, lucille, lespaul, and silvertone (brands of guitars, or in Lucille’s case, specifically B.B. King’s guitar). The computer science department had a room full of Sun workstations with names like rise, beam, burn, dae, dial, and dry; and another room full of NeXT workstations named week, door, inline, ofkin, and so forth. At one of my first jobs in the 1990s all of the testing computers were named after Marvel superheroes.

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NamesRead More »

My advice for anyone who uses a computer, condensed into six specific tips.

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Six computer tipsRead More »

Computers are a big part of my life, and I have a lot of gadgets. But at the heart of it I like to think that my needs are fairly simple. Phones, tablets, and laptops aside, when it comes to desktop computers, I use:

• A Mac on which to keep my iTunes music library, the photos from my iPhone, and any other various files I need to keep around. I’ve bought in to the Apple ecosystem, and it’s handy to have a central place to keep all my data. Makes backing it up easier, too.
• A Windows PC for gaming. I don’t trust Windows 10 with my important data, but it makes a great gaming platform, especially since I can get really good games for cheap from Steam sales and Humble Bundles.

For the past decade, these two needs have been served by a single computer: a PC that I built from parts and Hackintoshed so that it can dual-boot into macOS or Windows 10. I won’t go into the details, but the short of it is that Apple simply didn’t make a desktop computer that I wanted to buy. And I like to tinker, so getting macOS running on a PC was a fun challenge.

But I’m getting tired of that challenge. A small system update can wreak havoc with a Hackintosh, making it fail to boot and throw enigmatic error messages that would require me to pore over the tonymacx86.com forums until I could figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. I haven’t been able to upgrade my computer to macOS Mojave because it has an Nvidia Geforce 970 graphics card in it, and Nvidia hasn’t yet released drivers that work with Mojave (and there’s skepticism whether they ever will, as Apple has moved to ATI). And, really, I was getting tired of always having to reboot to switch between macOS and Windows whenever I wanted to play a game, or copy photos off my iPhone, or play a different game, or sync my music…

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Why Computers SuckRead More »