Tralfaz

Author: geoffand

  • The downsides of leaving Facebook

    The downsides of leaving Facebook

    As I mentioned on Friday, I am taking a break from Facebook. I did a little bit of this in mid 2015, and one of the hard lessons learned was how pervasive Facebook is across the web for the SSO (single sign on) convenience. Sigh.

    At that time, I was astounded at how many places that Facebook had wormed their way into for validation and authentication. My Strava, Spotify, and others were all tied to my identity on Facebook.

    Fortunately, at that time I bit the bullet and did much of the extrication from reliance on the Facebook identity and authentication, so this break isn't quite as bad.

    Then this morning, I sat down to do some light (or heavy blogging), and fired up the Pandora app on my iphone to listen to some soothing classical.

    You guessed it, the app, even though I am signed in by email/password, was insistent that I "fix" my facebook connection. Finally, after the third try, it realized that indeed I do not have a valid facebook account right now.

    Jesus christ monkeyballs, that was a raft of stupidity.

    I am sure that as time goes on, I will find more shenanigans to work through.

    One thing is sure though, this pervasiveness is leaning me towards fully deleting my Facebook profile.

  • The final rest for Tate

    The final rest for Tate

    The bad day happened. No, not the actual decision and act to send Tate across the rainbow bridge because his seizures were escalating, and he was beginning to suffer the consequences. That was not a good day, but at least we could comfort ourselves knowing that we did the best we could for him.

    No, the call came from the vet, Tate’s remains were ready for us. Wow, a ton of bricks. Fortunately, I didn’t personally pick them up, or I would have lost it big time. No, Barbara already had a planned visit to the vet for some therapy for Garrett, so she got the short straw by default.

    Tate is back with us, where he belongs. And I am sitting here, tears streaming down my face as I remember how much he was a part of our house, and regardless of his faults, he was a wonderful, happy, boisterous, lovable scamp.

    Sure I don’t have to watch my paper napkin, lest he snatch it and eat it, or we can leave bread on the counter without it being snatched. But those were small concessions.

    Just last week, we were at his favorite place Edenvale park, walking Garrett, and one of the “regulars” asked where Tate was. We were stoic, and explained. I handled that well. So why does having his cremains returned to us emotionally devastate me?

    I can’t answer that, but it does. From the cedar box (arguably the best cremains return we have had), to the ceramic tile they made with his pawprint. I sit here, a wreck, acknowledging that he is well and truly gone, taken from us far too young, but also knowing that we made the right decision.

    Adulting is too hard this weekend.

    Posted also on Greytbros

  • Taking a break

    Taking a break

    I am going to step back from the great time suck that is Facebook. Sadly, it it taking too much of my time, and is too addicting. Being on my phone, my ipad, and on the browsers, it is just too damn available, and irresistible.

    I will be sad that I am going to miss some epic meme’s and other fun stuff, and I will also miss the hilarity of some of the communities I am a part of. Yet, I still feel the need to take a hiatus.

    Staring down another election cycle, the clown car of the GOP candidates, the coming ugliness that I can see in the Democrats, I can say that this is a good time to give it a rest, to improve my blood pressure and stress levels.

    I took a short (few week) break in mid 2015, and a 9 month or so break in 2009, but ultimately came back. This time, I might make the break permanent. I plan on redirecting the facebook URL to 127.0.0.1 in the hosts file, so that I can’t have even a moment of weakness and reactivate my account. I will delete it off my iphone and my ipad.

    I will miss my friends, those I know IRL, as well as those that I have only known via the magic of social media.

    I will remain active on Twitter (@ganders2112 is my handle there), and of course, you can follow/subscribe to my blog, where I will continue to post.

    Cheers, au revoir, auf weidershen, さようなら, adios

  • The dreaded red light

    The dreaded red light

    I have played guitar a long time. Like 33 + years (I hate to think how long it has been, really). While I don’t play out much (or at all) anymore, I did get to a certain level of proficiency. Sitting on the couch, noodling, or jamming in my man-cave, it sounds pretty good, if I do say so myself.

    Alas, I never had any recording gear, having not prioritized that, but I recently rectified that situation. Bought a good A/D box for my mac to be the input, and finally got my old Line 6 Pod XT out of mothballs to tweak up the tone.

    All good, got a good groove on the monitors, and then I do it.

    I hit the “record” button. Suddenly, I am self conscious, I flub even the most practiced riffs, I blow the easiest chord transitions. Shit, even some of the finger picking stuff I have played backwards and forwards so often that it takes truly no thinking at all are muffed.

    What. The. Fuck.

    Yep, the dreaded performance anxiety, that red light, watching the recording in Garageband. I sound like a newb.

    Turn a way, turn it on, and just jam, and shit, it sounds good.

    Turn back to it, listen to the count in, and I sound worse than cats on a hot tin roof.

    Sigh, I am going to have to get over this.

    Also, I need a drum machine, or something to lay down a decent backbeat.

  • Latest Binge – Poirot

    Latest Binge – Poirot

    My latest Netflix binging is the ITV adaptations of the Agatha Christie stories “Poirot”. 12 season, beginning in 1989, and concluding in 2012 (not continuously of course), set in the pre-war England, they are intriguing tales of suspense, and the sleuthing of Hercule Poirot, the Belgian investigator.

    Ok, not really binging, but I have been watching them, and just broke into the 5th season. The tales are tight, compact, and enrapturing. Always starting with a murder or some foul play, the engagement of the infamous Hercule Poirot, and the details being the key to solution.

    About 6 months ago, I purchased the collections of Poirot by Agatha Christie (on a lark, I believe it was $8 for the Kindle), and I was fascinated with how closely the stories were translated to the shows. Having watched them in the past, and then read the stories, it was amazing the translation to film.

    Additionally, one of the reasons that I enjoy watching, and have continued watching, is the cinematography is fantastic, and the attention to details are remarkable. Period dress and costumes are spot on, the automobiles, and other modes of transportation are spectacular, and quite enjoyable.

    The lead actor, David Suchet, who play Poirot, does a fabulous job, truly “wearing” the role. A fastidious Belgian, who speaks with a heavy French accent, and is marvelously alien in the setting of pre-war England.

    Photo: “David Suchet” by Phil Chambers from Hamburg, Germany – Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Commons –

  • Stepping stones towards a weather station

    Continuing on the thread of projects, my ultimate goal is to build a two station weather station that has in interior display of inside and outside temperature, and outside humidity/temperature readings, ultimately logging it to one of my websites, and then displaying it in graphical form.

    This weekend, I got a little bit closer. I learnt how to hook up an LCD display to an Arduino system, how to display formatted data, and then connected two different sensors to gather the data.

    The first test was to hook up a Sensiron humidity and temperature sensor to the arduino. Fortunately, Adafruit makes a handy breakout board for this device, and some libraries to use it. As an i2c device, it has a lot of support, and connecting it was a snap. Supply 5V, and connect the SDA/SCL and you are good to go.

    The Sensiron sensor is what we use in the chamber of our 7500 series AFM, so I know it is accurate and reliable.

    The sketch is pretty simple, you load the libraries for the SHT series, and instantiate an instance of the device, and it just works. You ask for a reading, and BAM it is there for the using.

    The second part was connecting the 2×16 character LCD display. This has a little backpack decoder, and the Arduino IDE has built in support for it. Piece of cake to get it going.

    It is of course a little trickier than the serial console, as the print/println aren’t part of the methods, but a little character counting, and voila, it was displaying the RH and Temperature every 10 seconds.

    To test this, I programmed, it, and then unplugged it, taking it into the kitchen, plugging it into a USB charger, and it worked. I am almost impressed!

    This is a pretty big hurdle, but the next hurdle is a lot taller. Ultimately, I want to have it log data to a file, then send it to a small raspberry pi system to display, and to upload to the internet.

    My next step will be to build a simple data logger, and begin to finalize the sensors I will use for the remote system. Fortunately, there is built in support for SD cards (although I will need a breakout board to connect), and I have both a DHT22 sensor for raw humidity and temperature readings, and a Bosch BMP180 breakout board for barometric pressure and temperature reading.

    Exciting, and rewarding.

    But the progress is ongoing, and my shopping cart is filling up with goodies to buy…

  • Where did all those people come from?

    Where did all those people come from?

    This morning, I had a meeting with someone who was interested in collaborating on a project. We picked a small boutique coffee shop near my office (that I selfishly could walk to) and a time that seemed to be between the morning rush, and their noontime bump.

    Fortunately, the person I was meeting got there plenty early to grab a table. Holy shit, that place was packed at 9:45. People talking, kibitzing, working on their novel, doing character development.

    The flippin’ line at the counter was 10 deep when I got there, it took 5 minutes to order, and then it took 10 more minutes for them to make my Cafe Latte.

    I mean, don’t these people have, uh jobs? Are that many people working off shift?

    What a pain in the arse.

    For the record though, Chromatic Coffee does make a fine cup, and is a bit more appealing than Starbucks.

  • Apple Mail – Revisited

    Apple Mail – Revisited

    As a long time Apple person, and a dedicated Mac user, starting with Mavericks, I had stopped using Apple’s built in mail client.

    I stopped using it for a variety of reasons, but essentially, the integration with Google mail really became, uh, shitty. Really weird, unreliable connections to the Gmail IMAP server, and finally I just gave up.

    I also subscribe to a mailing list of some really cool Mac OS-X users, and around that time there was tons of traffic about how shitty Apple mail was.

    I ended up first using Thunderbird (meh), and finally bought licenses to Postbox as it worked pretty well, and their support for Google’s mail services was quite good.

    Finally, with a recent upgrade to El Capitan (OS-X 10.11.2) the experts allowed that Apple finally un-borked their mail client. It even handles two factor authentication properly. Kudos!

    So, I am giving it a second try. And you know what? It isn’t bad. It is better than Postbox.

    Finally.

  • What I’m Reading – Lew Archer Novels

    As a voracious reader, who primarily focuses on Science Fiction, I do branch out. One genre that I enjoy is the detective thriller. This penchant can be traced to my love of the Doc Savage stories of my youth, and has jumped into some more or less serious threads of what I read. From the flippant Stephanie Plum novels (a guilty, fun pleasure) to the work by J.A. Jance, I have enjoyed many a cliff hanger stories.

    However, lately, I have become hooked on the Lew Archer novels by Ross Macdonald (pen name of Kevin Millar). Set in Southern California, and beginning shortly after the war, they stretch for 20ish years, and are lively depictions of the changes that the boom years brought to that part of California.

    The principal character, Lew Archer, is a private investigator, a lone gun, whose marriage failed, and who hung out his shingle after being an LA Cop. Unlike the friction you find between many TV private eye’s and the police, you get the impression that the local constabulary appreciate, and respect Archer.

    The stories often start with a missing person, or someone desperate for help, and the first person narrative draws you in, and holds your attention for 250 or so pages, almost always with a surprising twist at the end that keeps you guessing.

    One thing that I enjoy about these stories is that they don’t telegraph the antagonist. You often are truly surprised in the outcome, or that the obvious villain isn’t the culprit, yet, the obvious villain is rarely unbloodied at the end.

    One of the books that I just finished, The Wycherly Woman, was a classic example, where you thought you had it figured out, and then WHAM, it was a total surprise at the end. Additionally, this one was set in the San Francisco Bay Area, and having grown up there, it was a pleasant read about places I know well.

    Millar’s writing style is crisp, his vocabulary is deep, and he does a fantastic job of engaging the reader in these page turners.

    You could get wrapped up in a far worse series of novels. I have been through 10 or 11 of these, and have thoroughly enjoyed each one of them. Highly recommended.

  • More tinkering fun

    Back to the real world. I have re-immersed myself in the learning required to build a little automated, web connected weather station.

    I have been learning a lot about working with the Arduino (proto boards built around the Atmel ATMega 328 microcontroller), and have added some goodies around connecting sensors, working first with a 1 wire humidity and temperature sensor, and soon to come some more sophisticated modules that will be more flexible.

    However, while it is possible to do almost all of the work I want with the arduino based system, ultimately, I am going to want to drive a little display for review here in the house, and to log it to one of my internet servers, so I can be a geek and see the readings at home wherever I happen to be.

    This weekend, I dove into the Raspberry Pi, as that is a suitable central control, data logging station, and a vehicle to push the readings to the internet. However, it was a wee bit more complicated to get working than the Arduino. (more…)