RIHAHN.COM

Month: August 2019

  • 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! 😀

  • Ten Year Plan Update…

    I got a bit of a surprise in the mail yesterday; a copy of the signed deed for my property down in southern Colorado!

    All in all, it took almost exactly a year to purchase the land — which is the end result of both ‘boonies’ and ‘bureaucracy’. 

    Huerfano County, where my property sits, has a population of about 6500 people scattered over its 1600 square miles, and half of those people are in Walsenburg — the ‘big city’ for the area… So most of the county is pretty remote.

    This makes it a bit tricky to get things done at the county-level as there aren’t a lot of people available to do things. Life is also a lot slower down there, so no one is exactly in a hurry to do anything. 🙂

    But! Now I can start on phase two: a foundation and utilities.

    I have no idea how much phase two will cost, or how long it will take… There are a lot of government things involved with permits and engineering and inspections — so I’m guessing another year.

    But as soon as there is a foundation on the property, then I can get an address for it!

    It will be such a trip to get the first piece of mail delivered to what was once an empty field of wildflowers and wildlife. Said first piece of mail will undoubtedly be some junk-mail flyer for something no one needs, but I might frame it none the less. 🙂