RIHAHN.COM

Category: Modern Computing

  • Data Loss

    Sadly, even given the precautions I take, it appears I’ve lost all of my photos between August 28th 2004 and August 9th, 2012.

    It’s more than likely a combination of numerous moves and almost as many computer systems over the years, mixed with various online storage systems that came and went.

    For example, I had several hundred photos hosted on my “iDisk” service at mac.com starting from 2008 or so, but that went away in June of 2012 and I clearly missed the window to download everything.

    Oh well.

    These days storage is so cheap that I have a dozen copies of things in half a dozen places, so it’s harder to loose it all.

  • Behold! A cellphone that just makes phone calls!

    As I mentioned a while back, I’m giving up on my iPhone XS Max in favor of something with less demands on my time and attention. Enter the Light Phone II.

    Due to zombies and riots and other such elements of day-to-day life in 2020, it took a bit longer than anticipated for the phone to arrive, but it did.

    It’s roughly the size of eight credit cards stacked, weighs about the same, and feels really solid in the hand. It’s really small for today’s giant slab of glass phones, but for me it harkens back to those older, boxy Blackberrys that I had to carry around — with maybe a touch of StarTac thrown in there.

    Currently the phone does three things; phone calls, text messages, and has an alarm… That’s it.

    Call quality is pretty good, but the texting is merely ‘workable’. Texting isn’t something you want to do just because you want to talk with your thumbs… I’ll see if there’s some way to auto-reply with “Call me” for the 3-4 people that will have this number.

    Speaking of, the new phone has a new phone number, while the old phone will keep the old number. The iPhone will live on my desk as an interface for all of my banks and whatnot who love to send security codes as text messages or cannot conceive of someone not having a smart phone to run their app du jour…

    The iPhone is on “ting”, so if I’m not using it, it costs a mere $6 a month — $12 if I make a couple of calls and texts. The new phone is on Light Phone’s unlimited plan which is $30 a month — so even with two phones I’m still at a third of what AT&T used to charge me.

  • Unplugged, part two

    While waiting for the new phone to arrive, I’ve been training myself to not rely on the iPhone quite so much; leaving it on my desk when I go to bed, leaving it at home when I go out, etcetera. I even managed to leave it at work yesterday and didn’t notice until this morning.

    In the interest of doing something far better with my idle moments than cruising news feeds or playing the mobile game of the week, I dug out my old Kindle Voyage with the plan to do some light reading…

    The Voyage had been sitting in the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet since before I moved out of my house in Murphy Creek out east, so it had been without power for about four years… I was concerned that this might have caused some battery issues, but I’m happy to say the Voyage charged back up and after a manual firmware update is as good as new.

    Some stylish photography with my Canon G12 instead of a phone…

    The current light reading is “The Dictator’s Handbook”, which is a fascinating dissertation on the rules of rulership and why bad behavior is almost always good politics… Basically the modern version of Machiavelli’s “The Prince”.

    I’d forgotten just how easy on the eyes the Voyage is. It’s a 300dpi e-ink display, so it’s reflective like regular print versus transmissive like a monitor, and my old eyes are really appreciating the break.

  • Unplugged

    I’m making the move to ditch my thousand dollar iPhone XS Max in favor of a $250 thing called the Light Phone 2.

    The move from a “smart” phone to a “tool” phone is driven by a couple of factors:

    One — I’m not happy with how intrusive and all-consuming my phone has become. It seems like every few minutes there’s some alert, message, update, or text that requires my immediate attention. And even though I want to just deal with the interruption and then get back to what I was doing, I find that once I pick up the phone I wind up fiddling with it instead.

    Two — the level of data collection from folks like Apple and Google has started to cause an arched eyebrow, with “Contact Tracing” being the newest incarnation of them getting to know you better than you know yourself. 

    And again, if a service is free you are the product — and I’m tired of being data-cattle for big-tech.

    The biggest difference with the Light Phone 2 is that it is, quite simply, a phone — you make phone calls with it. It also does SMS and a few other handy things, but every function it offers is designed to be procedurally similar to a screwdriver; one does not pick up a screwdriver when it beeps and then play with for a half an hour.

    The Light Phone 2 also does not have a camera. This has prompted me to clean and tune my old Canon G12 camera in preparation… I’d forgotten just how good the G12 is, and it’ll be nice to get back to some real photography.

  • MacBookPro 16,1 – Update…

    It’s been a few weeks since the last entry, so I should post something for posterity…

    The new MacBook Pro laptop is amazing, and I’m with the countless reviews at this point; it’s the laptop Apple should have been making all along.

    Now, I know why they didn’t make this thing all along; 10nm process chips from Intel that have supposed to have been available for like two years now coupled with Apple’s love affair with “single wire” Thunderbolt 3 charging…

    Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) has an upper limit of like 100 watts of power it can supply, so everything in the laptop has to fit within that envelope at peak load — and Intel’s 14nm i9 9980HK consumes about half of that all by itself. Intel’s 10nm process chips would allow more headroom for GPUs both power-wise and thermally — but Intel can’t quite seem to make 10nm work… So Apple has been making due with what they have, and falling behind the tech arms race because of it.

    The new laptop is still limited by USB-C power delivery, but because of AMDs 7nm process 5000 series GPUs (like the 5500 in the laptop), and Apple deciding thin is out and making space for a workable thermal solution (and ditching that butterfly keyboard), the 16″ MacBook Pro is finally “Pro”.

  • MacBookPro 16,1 – More Laptop Shenanigans

    I have this perpetual unwritten deal with Apple… Since the earliest days, every time I’ve purchased an Apple gizmo someone at Apple takes note of this and within a few weeks they inevitably announce some new paradigm of product that renders what I just bought obsolete.

    Every. Single. Time… And this has gone on for decades now, so I know this will happen and even somewhat plan for it.

    This time around it was the MacBook Pro that I purchased about three months ago. It’s a really nice laptop, and all of the diligent research I did on it pointed to it being the latest refresh of the design, with the latest hardware and newest bells and whistles — and it would be the pinnacle for at least a couple of years.

    Ha! Tech reviewers apparently don’t know of my deal with Apple.

    So I purchased the 15.6″ MacBook Pro and started the timer… Three weeks to the day Apple announced they would be bringing out a 16″ MacBook Pro that would be twice the laptop of the one that I had just purchased.

    Damn it Apple…

    Anyway, knowing this would happen I’d made arrangements with a friend of mine who has been using a hand-me-down Mac Pro I sold him like a decade ago. If Apple released a new-hotness laptop, I would sell him the one I just got to replace his antique for $500 less than I paid for it.

    And, long story short, I picked up my new custom-made 16″ Macbook Pro last evening and handed over the old one to said friend.

    The new laptop is a 2.4 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9 with 32 GB of 2667 MHz DDR4 ram, 2TB of SSD storage, and an 8Gig AMD Radeon Pro 5500M GPU in it. 

    The biggest difference between the new laptop and the old though is Apple finally conceding that power users don’t care about how “thin and light” the machine is; they bought it for work, and that work will push the device to its limits routinely — so stop frittering about with tiny little heatsinks and fancy half-millimeter travel keyboards, and just make it beefy enough to run balls-out 24/7. 😀

  • MacBookPro 15,1 – Computer things…

    I’ve been using my MacBook Pro exclusively for about three months now, carrying it back and forth to work, using it at home, writing, building 3D models, texturing, doing art, music, and video — and other than a few issues with OSX trying too hard to help it’s been great!

    I’m still not a fan of “do everything” operating systems… An OS exists to run user software on user hardware, that’s it. Everything else tends to be sub-par bloat.

    But OSX is still better than Windows in that regard — and has less creepy user spying too.

    I have “upgraded” the laptop slightly. First was an external thunderbolt-3 PCIe enclosure for my old 1.2TB Intel 750 SSD, which is now used for “Time Machine” backups. Then I picked up a CalDigit TS3 Thunderbolt-3 dock which connects the PCIe enclosure and all of my peripherals to the laptop when I’m at home. I was also using the CalDigit to run my 34″ ultrawide monitor.

    I had been holding off on the eGPU upgrade until Apple finished the AMD NAVI drivers, which they did last week with 10.15.1 — so there is now a Powercolor “Game Center” eGPU box housing an AMD 5700XT on my desk as well. And now the ultrawide monitor is plugged into the eGPU.

    While Thunderbolt-3 is limited to basically PCIe x4, the 5700XT is still several times the performance of the Vega 20 GPU in the laptop — which makes SecondLife a bit easier to work with. 🙂

    The latest acquisition is a Wacom Cintiq Pro 13″ which replaced my decade-old Intuos4.

    I’d originally decided to just replace the Intuos4 with a new one (the old one has gotten a bit shaky on the right side of the active area…), but Wacom’s prices are kind of crazy and they still want $500 for the Intuos… The Cintiq was basically the same size, has a built-in screen, and was only $200 more —  and I’ve always wanted to try drawing directly on what I’m working on digitally… So here we are.

    I’m still getting used to the ‘directly on the screen’ thing, but so far so good. I’ve been right hand on the mouse/digitizer/pen and eyes on the monitor since the late 80’s, so there’s a bit of re-learning to do. But I’m still adaptable. 🙂

  • We interrupt this interruption with an important interruption…

    It’s probably a sign that I’m getting old, but the level of momentary interruption in today’s world is starting to wear on me…

    Phone bleeping and blooping every few minutes with some alert, message, text, or call (did you know the warrantee on my 14 month old car is about to expire unless I call this random robot who left a voicemail!? Three times today!?). Texts get real bad when election season rolls around — like right now; once an hour some millionaire career politician I’ve never heard of (or care about) is begging for money in SMS form…

    Email app popping up every 5 minutes with an alert about something. Don’t worry, it’s just another seven emails about cheap medication — three of which are bad asian translations and one is literally in Hangul… Or it’s an offer to join a webinar!!! for some app I’ve never heard of (or care about).

    The non-stop alerts from Discord / Telegram / Skype / Slack / IM-app-of-the-week because no one can settle on one thing so everyone needs a dedicated machine just to run all of the required IM apps.

    People in SL noticing I’m online and instantly IMing me to ask “What’s up?” — I dunno, you tell me. You’re the one who IM’d me out of the blue… And if I managed to bolt before they can finish typing, SL will happily forward that random ping to my email…

    People at work just walking into the office and starting to talk at me — even though I have headphones on and a deep look of concentration because this code wont write itself. And once I’ve told them, again, to turn it off and back on again for the third time this week it takes a half an hour to get back into the groove… Too bad someone else will walk in and start taking in the next 29 minutes…

    And the intrusive behavior-targeted tracker-based social-engineered pervasive advertising in EVERYTHING… Ugh.

    I need a vacation from always-on, fully-dynamic, mesh-connected, interactive-groupware I think… Time to go be a hermit in a cave. 🙂

  • New phone too!

    My iPhone SE that I picked up back in mid-2016 had been having battery issues for a couple of months, so after getting moved into the new MacBook Pro, I decided I should just go all the way and replace the phone as well.

    Enter the iPhone XS Max, which is probably the most aptly named phone ever made as “excess” fits it rather well.

    So far it’s been rather nice, if a bit large; it’s definitely a 2-hander of a telephone. I especially liked how it was able to just set itself up by setting it next to the old phone — that’s a neat trick (thank you bluetooth).

    The facial recognition is a bit creepy, but I’m guessing I will get used to it. It’s been fun to try and fool it by making faces at the phone. 🙂

  • MacBookPro 15,1 – New laptop!

    In my ongoing downsizing efforts I picked up the new laptop I’ve been spent the better part of a year saving up for; a 2019 model of the 15″ Macbook Pro!

    I’m mostly agnostic when it comes to the PC / Mac wars, and have used pretty much everything as a daily driver since my ZX-81 back in the early 80’s (For example, my old SGI Indy is sitting on a shelf right over there…) — so going from a Win10 gaming rig to an OSX laptop isn’t that big of a deal for me.

    Yeah — Apple hardware can be somewhat spendy, but that tends to balance out over time as the hardware is so good. I mean, sure, I could have purchased any number of high-end Windows-based laptops for what this cost, but after test driving several… They just weren’t as good.

    I’m also a bit old-fashioned and Unix-based operating systems are more my style; so the fact that OSX is basically BSD with a candy-coated interface is a selling point for me.

    Anyway, this particular laptop is the 15-inch with an 8-core i9 CPU,16 gigs of ram, 1TB of M.2 storage, and the Vega 20 video card. And somehow that all fits in a box about the thickness of about 20 sheets of paper…

    It’s chewed up absolutely everything I’ve thrown at it so far without a problem.

    I’m still getting ‘moved in’ — which entails remembering lots of complex passwords, dozens of text messages from web sites to authorize the new cookie for security, and finding equivalent software. But so far so good!

    Even the 1.2TB Intel 750-series PCIe SSD from my win10 system, shifted into an external thunderbolt 3 case for use with the laptop, ‘just worked’.

    So, that’s the update — and my first post from the new laptop! 😀

  • End of year bonus!

    My company does end-of-year profit sharing, so the check before Christmas is usually bit bigger than the rest.

    Well, the last two years have been pretty slow as our marketing department has been somewhat asleep at the wheel for years now (we’re working on fixing this), so I wasn’t really expecting anything this year… But I got a small bonus anyway. 🙂

    It definitely helps with my ten year plan.

    I still need to invoice for all of the artwork I’ve done as well, being as I’m doing that on the side under my own company. It’s not much as I’m giving my CFO a pretty massive discount, but right now I’ll take anything I can get; houses aren’t cheap…

    Other than that, I’ve spent the week attempting to re-re-write the 20 year old time tracking software we’ve been using here at work since 2003. 

    It’s open-source PHP code running on a Unix LAMP stack and was written in 1998 by Peter D. Kovacs in PHP 3 and using MySQL 3.22. The application was taken over by Dominic J. Gamble at Advancen in 2002 and moved to PHP 4 and MySQL 4… 

    Unix doesn’t stand still for very long — so I re-wrote large parts of it in 2014 to bring it up to speed for Ubuntu 14 which was using PHP 5 and MySQL 5.6.

    Well Ubuntu 14 is about to fall off of the support list, and PHP 5 is EOL on December 31st. Ubuntu 18 is the new LTS (long-term service) and it uses PHP 7.2 and MySQL 8 — both of which are incredibly different from the older versions… I can’t even use the same password hash algorithm between MySQL 5.6 and 8.

    Basically our time tracker will need a complete re-write to work with the new services, which is probably more effort than 20 year old cobbleware warrants.

    So now I get to convince the powers that be that they need to use something else.

    The complication with this of course is that there is 15 years of familiarity with this application, and that makes change really scary.