Tralfaz

Author: geoffand

  • More Apple goodness

    This last week, I “discovered” something that wasn’t really hidden. Somewhere in the evolution of Apple’s iCloud service, in particular the sharing of login information and passwords in the service, a really cool feature is lurking.

    On Tuesday, Barbara had a 2 hour procedure at her doctor’s office, and I waited in the lobby. So I took my iPad and logged into their Wifi so I could continue reading the NY Times. Simple, find the SSID, and enter the password for guest access, and you are online.

    Since I had a couple hours to burn, I pulled out my headphones and plugged them into my iPhone, to listen to Pandora, and I discovered that I automagically connected to the wifi. Because I logged in on my iPad, the credentials were in the system, and my phone just picked it up.

    Of course, I knew that this was possible, and likely read that it was part of the feature set, probably even experiencing it somewhere. But this was the first time that it hit me.

    Way cool.

  • Back on the Fitness Track

    A recent life change (that is the understatement of the century) is providing me with time to improve my fitness. Being a “get out and do something” kind of guy, that means walking, hiking, cycling.

    In the last week, I have done 30 miles of walking (5 days of 6 mile walks), and one 18 mile bike ride. While it is too soon to see tangible results, I definitely feel better, and the exercise give me ample time to think.

    My goals are simple. I would like to shed about 30#’s (not too difficult), get back to being able to ride 30 miles 2-3 times a week, and to be able to run the occasional 10K race.

    All achievable goals.

  • Restaurant Review – Sinaloa Cafe

    Restaurant Review – Sinaloa Cafe

    When I lived in San Jose in the past, one of my favorite places to eat was a little Morgan Hill staple, Sinaloa Cafe. Solid Mexican cuisine, fun atmosphere, and packed on Friday and Saturday nights. Sadly, their original building burned down a few months before we left San Jose for Tucson, and I lost touch.

    I heard that they rebuilt, and moved closer to downtown Morgan Hill, but hadn’t made the trek.

    Well, we moved back in 2014, and finally I got the chance to try it out.

    First, the interior is a bit cleaner than the old place (not that it was “dirty”, but it was a well visited restaurant with 40 years of history). We went on a Wednesday night and arrived at about 6:45. No wait, and we sat in the front part near the bar. The chips and salsa arrived almost immediately, and it was how I remembered it, freshly fried chips, and a tangy salsa, not chunky. Yum. Our first round was their “Cadillac” margaritas, and they were delish.

    We ordered, a Chile Verde burrito for me (wet), and the Enchiladas Especial for Barbara. I also ordered a side of guacamole to nosh on.

    Food was hot, and while I can’t speak for the enchilada’s, I can say that the pork chile verde was delightful. It was zesty, the pieces of port were succulent, and the sides (rice and beans) were a perfect complement. A fabulous meal.

    The second round of drinks was a bit more reserved, a margarita for Barbara, and I had a Pacifico, as I had to drive.

    In summary, it was much how I remembered it, the quality remains high, and we will definitely be returning to the new location. Next time I will buy a new t-shirt, as my old ones are about to fall apart.

    I see that Yelp has them rated at 2.5 stars. Definitely a bum rap.

  • Some Apple Grumbling

    After yesterday’s post, and one a few weeks back about the aging of my laptop, and how battery life seems to be on the wane, I had a bit of a love-hate thing going with my trusty MacBook Air.

    When I got it, I easily (and I mean really easily) got 12+ hours of normal use on a charge. Often a few days between needing to hook it to the charger.

    But with Yosemite, the full disk encryption seemed to take a toll. Still for the added security, I was satisfied. Then El Capitan came, and battery life turned to absolute shit. 4 hours on a charge, watching the battery percentage drop like a late 1960’s Chrysler Newport wagon’s gas gauge on the freeway was no fun.

    However, from opening the activity monitor, I noticed that there were two services that were sucking YUUUUUGE amounts of CPU cycles and battery.

    Googling them lead me to an odd culprit. If you are syncing your contacts with Google Apps accounts (and I was), that often these two services would run rampant, and soak your battery. Disabling the sync from Google Apps, and boom, I am back to a reasonable run rate.

    2 hours of use, writing blogs, and the like, and I am still at 93%. Not bad for a laptop nearing 3 years old.

    Not sure if this is an apple problem, or a google problem, but at least I got my battery life back.

  • Why I Love my Mac

    Why I Love my Mac

    Anyone who has known me in real life, and via my vehicles on the web know that I am an Apple computer fan. And passionate for my beliefs.

    There are many reasons why, but top of the list is that stuff just works. Case in point, our old Epson 4490 Flatbed scanner. We bought it probably 6 or more years ago, when we needed to digitize some photographs. It was well rated for that, and it had/has good Mac support. I don’t recall it being too expensive at the time (I suppose I could look up the order on Amazon, but I am feeling lazy, so sue me,) and it served its immediate purpose well. We imported a ton of old photos, and the bundled software did a great job of fixing the glitches.

    But since that initial use, it has been relegated to a dusty shelf, brought out when needed to digitize a form or file. No big deal. I just kept a copy of their scanner software on my laptop, and it was a snap to get a clean import.

    Last summer, I did a radical wipe and recreation of my Macbook Pro, ostensibly to create a formal Fusion drive (750G spinning disk, plus a 240G SSD), and in the process started from scratch. Thus no Epson scanner SW installed. In the interim, I just grabbed the Wife’s MBP to grab a scan.

    Today though, her laptop wasn’t available, and I needed to get a scan.

    Great, I was going to spend a half hour finding the software and drivers for this well aged, long discontinued, scanner. Groan.

    Or did I?

    I plugged it in, fired up the built in Preview program, and low and behold, it recognized the scanner, and I was able to grab an image. Freakin’ awesome. No download, no installation, no reboot, no messing with COM ports.

    It. Just. Worked.

    In the windows world (old days) you needed drivers, installation, and often some magic incantation uttered over the install CD to get a scanner to work. You needed to delve into things like TWAIN, and the like.

    And, God help you if you upgraded to a new service pack or bought a new computer, as you would spend tons of time hunting on the interwebs to get it right again.

    Or not, and give up, buying a new scanner.

    Yep, I love my Mac, even this 6 year old MBP still rocking it.

  • Aggressing sales – Vistaprint

    Sales, marketing, what do these words bring to mind? It depends on your proximity, and susceptibility, but to many they bring about as much loathing as the dreaded “lawyer”.

    However dreadful the concept of sales and marketing are to the common person, it is clear that they core concepts work.

    While this is hardly a “fun” introduction, it is an important framing device for the tale that is about to follow.

    A life change is causing a bit of a course correction, and realignment. As part of this, and a coming networking opportunity, I needed some simple namecards (business cards). The natural choice is Vistaprint, as I have no custom logo or designs, and merely wanted to get my contact information down. (more…)

  • Digital Scatter – Contacts

    Digital Scatter – Contacts

    A recent life change is forcing me to become more organized, and to remove chaos from some areas.

    One key area is my digital address book(s). Over the years, with my haphazard adoption of new technologies and platforms, it was inevitable that my growing list of contacts split among several services, would fester and be a moldering mess.

    There are definite epochs in my contacts. The first significant epoch being when I got a gmail account in 2004. There, Google began collecting my interactions and creating “contacts”. This sort of happened organically, to support the gmail client.

    Since I did little filling in of details, the vast majority of these contacts are little more than name and email addresses. Good for mailing, but not much else.

    Add to this my personal domain (that you are reading this on silly), another gmail (google apps) account, and another set of contacts, equally chaotic, and thin on details.

    Then in 2008 I joined the Smartphone revolution buying an original iPhone, and that became my go to device for managing contacts. This sync’d with the Mac “Contacts” application, so I had them on my desktop and on my phone. This is where I kept a bit more complete contacts, adding addresses and other information.

    Somewhere along the line, Apple got smart, and allowed you to collect the various contacts from gmail and other services into the Contact application (and moved their repository to the iCloud service). This is helpful, and provides a central location to look at and manage contacts, and (hopefully) clean up the clutter.

    Alas, 2 years, 3 or more repositories, and truly no rhyme or reason to my filing has caught up to me.

    Today, I spent several hours first cleaning up my gmail contacts, and then organizing my icloud contacts. Now, I have a sane contact database (and quite a few more people I know than I would have thought).

    The next challenge: My browser bookmarks. Shudder.

  • A month with Digital Ocean Hosting

    At the beginning of the year, there was a monstrous downtime at my host that was the final straw. I has a VPS there for a little over 2 years, and while at first it was rock solid and awesome, it had become less reliable through the summer of 2015. There were several down times, that were resolved with a reboot, or restarting the Apache server, or the mysql server.

    Not too big of a deal.

    Then the week between Christmas and New Years, the wheels came off at A Small Orange hosting. The VPS service there was by and large down.

    When it came back up, I was out of there lickety split.

    My destination: Digital Ocean

    Instead of a well provisioned VPS, where the configuration is pretty robust, fully provisioned with a firewall, WHM and CPanel built in, you get a very basic server, called a “droplet”. You can select the OS, and even do a lot of one click installs. LAMP, LEMP, WordPress, and many more options are preconfigured out of the box.

    I spun up two droplets, one a preconfigured WordPress installation (my main tralfaz blog), and then a blank droplet which I used the excellent serverpilot to create three simple wordpress blogs. Smooth process.

    One other benefit of Digital Ocean is their YUUUUUUUUGE collection of simple, granular articles to help people who are not super technical to get a clean, secure installation.

    Even if you are not a geek, you can get:

    • A clean ubuntu installation
    • Setup SSH with secure key authentication
    • Remove root SSH login (for safety)
    • Configure a UFW firewall with only the ports needed open
    • Install and harden a mysql installation
    • and much much more…

    For as little as $5 per month per droplet, you are good to go.

    Oh, did I mention that they have wicked fast data servers in many geographical regions?

    So far, 100% uptime for 30 days.

  • PSA: Telephone Directory Waste

    PSA: Telephone Directory Waste

    Who still uses their Yellow Pages local directory? Really, when was the last time you actually looked up a phone number or a service in there? Be honest.

    Or, are you like 99.3% of the population who just hits google on their smartphone, and off you go? Or checks out Yelp for reviews. For the last 10 years or so, we would get our new directory in the early spring, recycle the old one, and put it on a shelf, never to be opened.

    Lather, rise, repeat.

    How wasteful.

    Now though, you can opt out of receiving directories. The website YellowPagesOptOut will let you select which directories you want (probably none), and suddenly, this anachronism of the 19th century will be banished from your home.

    On, and you can do your part to reduce the 1,400,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

    Seems like a no brainer to me.

  • The downside of not playing out

    The downside of not playing out

    As I continue on my journey to record and capture some of the music in my head, I have come to a realization. Alas, my preponderance of playing solo, and without others, I lack something of the ability to “fit“. This will take some ‘splaining…

    When listening to an orchestra, you hear the whole piece together, where all parts fit. From the woodwinds, to the strings, to the percussion, all the musicians have their own part to play. Isolate one instrument, and you might not recognize the piece. But as you add the individual parts back in, you begin to see the thread.

    I have long known that writing for an orchestra is an art, and requires more than just musicality, but the ability to spatially separate the instruments, and to visualize (audibleize?) how they will sound together. It is why the greats (Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and on and on) wrote music hundreds of years ago that still captivate and enthrall us today.

    But this is much the same with modern music as well. Think of the simple power trio. Cream was Eric Clapton on guitars, Ginger Baker on drums, and Jack Bruce on bass/vocals. The three of them played together perfectly, complementing, and intertwining their masterful musicianship. Each was borderline virtuosic, but balanced each other out, and the net result was kick ass music.

    My problem is that I have almost never played with a complete group like that. Sure, I have jammed with a bunch of fellow axe slingers, belting out some simple Dylan or Zeppelin riffs, trading licks and lead lines. Heck, even some original stuff was shared.

    But, playing with a solid timekeeper? Not much, except very early on in my journey with an old Heathkit metronome.

    Back to recording

    It is clear to me that this lack of practicing with a beatmaster is a problem. Laying down a track, and listening to it is getting better (getting around the “blinking red light syndrome”) as I am sounding more how I know I can. But due to my lousy practice regimen, I slow down and speed up during riffs, and as I map it against the measure markers on Garageband, I can see my imperfections.

    The first step in solving a problem is recognizing that you have a problem. Or so they say.

    Two things are amply clear.

    1. I need to practice more. A lot more. With more structure. I need to work on matching notes to a beat timing, and to become more aware of that.
    2. I need a simple drum machine, or other aid. Yes, I can do the click of a metronome, but something with the ability to accent the start of a measure, or to alert me to the sections of something I am playing is an aid I need.

    Fortunately, these are both simple things to address. Well, except for the blood sweat and tears of practicing.

    While I have been playing for over 30 years, and at one time was practicing 4-5 hours a day, my diligence has waned, and when I pick up the guitar, my instinct is to play things I know well, and have riffed to for a long time.

    I definitely need to expand in to uncomfortable territory to break out of ruts. I need to work on building a composition one track at a time, and to learn to better use the tools at hand.

    One last thing: I am clearly not ready to share my work, but I will admit that I am progressing. One day, I will post a song.