Blog reactivation

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As the subtitle above suggests, I’ve had a blog for many years. When I was working – and particularly when I had a job that required an active presence in social media – I blogged very frequently. My recent gigs required me to keep a lower profile, and coincidentally I refocussed much of my personal commentary on channels such as Facebook and Twitter. As a result, this blog languished – it was practically moribund.

But now I’ve retired, and I feel no constraints on what I might write professionally. Furthermore, I find that I’m spending longer on Facebook than seems entirely healthy, and I’m sure that some of my friends and family are getting a bit tired of my political postings. So I’ve decided to try to switch back to blogging, and limit my engagement with Facebook. We’ll see how successful I am.

Here we go….

Four Google WearOS Smart Watches

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The value and usefulness of a smart watch depends on two things: the device, and the software. A few years ago I moved out of the Apple ecosystem, so my recent smart watches have all been based on Google’s WearOS, an Android-based system. Unlike Apple’s closed world, WearOS is intended to be used by many different device manufacturers, with different ideas about what these devices should look like. This is an interesting challenge.

I presently have four WearOS devices:
(1) Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro
(2) Skagen Falster 2
(3) Diesel Fadelight
(4) Michael Kors Bradshaw

These four devices have three different control configurations and two different screen technologies. Thus although all are WearOS devices, I interact with them in quite different ways.

The Ticwatch Pro was one of the first “second generation” smartwatches for WearOS, and I understand that Google worked closely with Mobvoi on it. It’s the bulkiest of the four, and has a two layer screen (a bright, colored, hi-res display and a low-power monochrome overlay). This gives it a degree of “always on” use without the color display draining the battery. It has two buttons, but no crown (clickable rotatable button). This means that every selection of a new application, or scrolling through messages or notifications, involves swiping on the screen. This didn’t seem like a particularly big deal until I got the Skagen; since then I hardly ever use the Ticwatch. Ease of use matters.

My second WearOS device is the Skagen Falster 2. It’s a lightweight utilitarian watch married to a cheap and cheerful yellow silicone strap, which works just fine. It has a crown and two buttons, and each button can be assigned to launch a specific app. (I tend to use button 1 for Google Fit and button 2 for Weather.) I really like this watch, and only gave it up because something even better came along.

Watch number three is the Diesel Fadelight. I really can’t recommend it. Physically, it looks like a rather chunky watch module snapped into a stiff clear vinyl strap. It’s not very comfortable, and the buckle is awkward. The Fadelight has a crown, but no buttons, so there’s no way to launch an app quickly. (Launching an app takes four actions: click to turn on the screen, click again to show the apps, scroll or swipe to the app, and click or tap to launch. On the Skagen, I simply double-click the assigned button.)

And then I got the Michael Kors Bradshaw, which has become my favorite watch. Firstly, it looks and feels just right: it’s got a navy blue aluminum case and multilink band, with an optional blue silicone strap. It reminds me of my old Citizen SkyHawk, which I wore for many years. It looks and feels like a classic. For controls, we have a crown and two buttons, like the Falster 2, and I was able to set it up to work just the same in a couple of minutes. Compared to the other three, it comes with an amazing range of faces. Some are the kind of “bling” that I would never use, but others demonstrate a tasteful and creative combination of style and function.

One more point: charging. The Ticwatch Pro uses a custom charging dock, with four contact pads. The other three all seem to use the same white magnetic two-pin charger, which mates with the sensor module on the watch which is set inside two contact rings. I’m glad to see some standardization emerging here. (It’s also worth mentioning that the dual display of the Ticwatch Pro didn’t prove to be a big advantage. With “tilt to wake” turned on, all four watches have 24 hour battery life, which is good enough for me.)

Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends….

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I’ve been blogging since the last century, but I really got going in 2003. (You can read the first few posts here.) I’ve moved from Moveable Type to WordPress, shifted my hosting to various sites (including grommit, our Solaris x86 box), and most recently to a virtual machine in the AWS cloud. I’ve spun up various parallel blogs – things like clueweaver.com and speakingofclouds.com – but over the last few years my blogging has fallen away to almost nothing, leaving an insecure, poorly administered WordPress site that was probably a magnet for botnets.

So things are changing. I’ve killed several sites, including Speaking of Clouds, and I’m moving all of the blogs which I run (for myself and others) to the managed WordPress service of A2. I’ve used them for various work projects, the Cumnor Hill Books site is here, and the price is right.

Does this mean that I’m going to resume blogging? Perhaps. The decline in self-hosted blogging has been widespread, as people have moved to FaceBook or Medium to share short and long form updates, but I have a hunch that widespread skepticism about big social media platforms may translate into increased autonomy for writers. In addition, much of my blogging was always related to my work, along with the technology and travel that were inextricably involved with it. Over the last few years, my professional responsibilities have been less… bloggable. I anticipate some changes over the next few months, and it would be good to get back into the habit of writing.

So welcome back….

Update on moving in

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As we continue unpacking and getting set up, I’ve found one system that didn’t handle the move too well.
About four years ago, my storage system (for music, photos, videos, backup, VM images, and so forth) consisted of two Firewire 800 boxes: a WD Macbook Studio (2TB) and an 8TB RAID enclosure. Since my latest iMac didn’t support Firewire, I used a Thunderbolt-to-Firewire adapter. This mostly worked, although the RAID enclosure usually needed power cycling after I rebooted the iMac. Performance was decent.
When I got around to unpacking everything and setting things up on Saturday afternoon, I was met with a lot of noise from the RAID enclosure. Some of it was a failing fan, but there were other worrying undertones. And about 10 minutes after booting, the RAID system simply went away. Ouch.
Fortunately, all of the really important stuff was on the Studio. The RAID was mostly used for local backups and staging to Backblaze (my cloud backup), and I knew I could retrieve or recreate everything on it. (And I was willing to retire a few hundred gigabytes of VM images from OpenStack and CloudFoundry testing.) But I knew I would need more space than the 2TB on the Studio. After lunch, I headed over to the nearest Best Buy and picked up a new Seagate Backup Plus Hub. 8TB for around $200. Who would have thought it, eh?
So today everything has been consolidated on the Seagate, and both of the older units have been retired. I’ve reconfigured my Backblaze setup, and all of the laptops and other devices are happily backing up to the iMac again. And Firewire is history…

How would an average user handle this?

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I’ve been using an iMac as my primary home computer for the last five years. Nice system, both as a desktop and as a server for the rest of the apartment, with a string of FireWire drives hanging off the back. It came with 4GB RAM, and in 2012 I added an extra 8GB so that I could run VirtualBox VMs. However in recent months it’s started to misbehave; about 10% of the time the display won’t come back from screen saver or sleep, and I have to restart via Cmd-Ctrl-Power. So I decided to replace it with a new iMac. Nothing too extravagant: a 21.5″ Retina iMac with Core i5, 16GB RAM, 1TB Fusion disk. (I looked at the 27″ model with a discrete GPU, but I couldn’t justify the expense. I’m not really a graphics junky. More practically, the 27″ wouldn’t fit under my over-desk cupboards.) I also ordered a FireWire-to-Thunderbolt adapter, hoping that my existing storage setup would just work.
The new iMac arrived yesterday, and I had a decision: clean install, or transfer from the old system? With the previous iMac, I’d done a transfer from my Mac Mini, so I knew that there was quite a bit of cruft in there. On the other hand, my Mail, iTunes and backup (Time Machine and Backblaze) configurations are complicated, and I was inclined to let the Migration tool take care of them. So I booted up the new system, hooked them together with an Ethernet cable, and let it rip. Six hours later, it was done. I plugged in my FireWire chain, using the new adapter, and everything just worked.
Sort of.
I spent a couple of hours testing and tweaking stuff, amused to see which apps required re-authentication and which ones treated this as a reincarnation of an already-trusted system. And then I remembered that I’d forgotten one cardinal rule: I hadn’t checked for software updates. So I did… and the OS X 10.11.1 update wouldn’t work. It just hung. Perhaps it was a “first boot” issue; I’ve often noticed that things in OS X don’t work quite right after an update, and a reboot usually fixes them. So I chose restart.
Black screen. “Bong” sound. White Apple logo. Then "kernel panic" in the top left corner.
Tried again. Same result.
I contemplated the time required to do a full reinstall of OS X. I wondered about Genius Bar appointments. And then I decided to reboot in Safe Mode (holding down shift right after the “Bong”). That worked, though the system was glacially slow.
So I grabbed my rMBP (what would I have done with only one computer?) and started searching for kernel extensions that might be causing the problem. Eventually I found this piece about VirtualBox-related panics. I opened a terminal, deleted the offending files, and rebooted. The panic was gone – and, equally important, the 10.11.1 update installed correctly. Later today I’ll try a clean installation of VirtualBox to see if it’s OK. (I use a VirtualBox VM to cache all of my context for open source work, including keys and git scripts.)
Whew.
(And the Retina 4K display on the new iMac is just gorgeous.)

Oliver Twist on bandwidth…

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The obvious quote is “Please, sir, I want some more.” However perhaps more apposite is another from the same book: “Some people are nobody’s enemies but their own.” A year ago, we moved from Santa Clara to our new apartment in downtown San Jose. We’d been using an old DOCSIS 2.0 cable modem together with an Apple Airport Extreme for Internet service, and for various reasons it hadn’t been very satisfactory. When we arrived in San Jose, I decided to replace them with an all-in-one solution: a DOCSIS 3.0 modem with built-in Wi-Fi router from Netgear.
For the last 12 months we’ve put up with the consequences of this misguided attempt at simplification:

  • My company VPN keeps dropping the connection, requiring a tedious security scan while it re-establishes the session.
  • Video and audio through WebEx (our standard collaboration tool) is so unpredictable that I usually arrange for a call-back to my cellphone.
  • While watching a movie on Netflix we can expect at least a dozen shifts between different video quality levels as the streaming codecs try to compensate for bandwidth and jitter.
  • Elder Scrolls Online is… challenging.
  • Speed tests routinely showed less than 15Mb down, which is a lot less than we’re paying for. (I’d love a good long-term jitter measurement tool…)

A couple of days ago I (again!) started poking around the net looking for solutions. This time, I discovered that a number of other Netgear users had experienced similar problems, particularly with VPN access. Moreover the consensus was now pretty overwhelming: all-in-one solutions are just too inflexible. So today I replaced the C3700 with a $99 Arris SB6141 – a simple, no-frills DOCSIS 3.0 modem; no Wi-Fi, no GbE switch. (OK, it does have efficient channel bonding (8 downstream, 4 upstream), but hopefully that will be completely transparent.) After calling Comcast to provision the new modem, I dusted off the old Airport Extreme and plugged it in. And then I ran a speed test.
66Mb down, 12Mb up.
Not South Korean speeds, or Google Fiber, but a lot better than I’d been used to. And this setup should be able to handle the 150Mb upgrade that Comcast is trying to tempt me with. In the meantime, it’s going to take a few days of testing – particularly streaming video during peak hours – to see if this kind of performance is sustainable. Fingers crossed…

All the planes I've flown on

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This post was prompted by two things today. First, Tom Gill remarked on how important it was to pick the right kind of aircraft for the season (e.g. avoiding range-limited types when there are lots of delays, headwinds, etc.) and tagged me in his post. And second, I realized that my second flight today (IAH-SFO) was on a type of aircraft that I’d never flown before. And got got me thinking: what have I actually flown on?
My first flights, back in 1961, were on Aer Lingus Vickers Viscounts. Today these would be categorized as regional turboprops, along with Saab 340s and so forth. I’m not interested in those. But apart from those, what does the list look like?
Airbus A300: Yes, Air France and Eastern
Airbus A310: NO
Airbus A318: NO
Airbus A319: Yes, mostly United
Airbus A320: Yes, many airlines around the world
Airbus A321: Yes, US Airways and various European carriers
Airbus A330: Yes, various inc. Aer Lingus
Airbus A340: Yes, including Olympic and Jet (but never on the A340-500/A340-600)
Airbus A350: NO (not surprising, given how new it is)
Airbus A380: NO (but I really want to)
Avro RJ: Yes
Boeing 707: NO
Boeing 727: Yes, various, inc. Lufthansa, United
Boeing 737: Yes, all models except the 737-600 (Boeing’s equivalent to the unloved A318)
Boeing 747: Yes, 747-100, 747-200, 747-400. Never on the 747-300 or 747-800
Boeing 757: Yes, both 757-200 (more than I can count) and 757-300 (United, ex-Continental)
Boeing 767: Yes: 767-200, 767-300, and (finally) 767-400
Boeing 777: Yes: 777-200 with United, BA, and many others; 777-300 with Singapore.
Boeing 787: Yes, 787-800 (China Southern); not yet on the 787-900
Canadair CRJ: Yes, all models
Embraer RJs: Yes, most variants
McDonnell Douglas DC8: Yes, various, mostly United.
McDonnell Douglas DC9/MD8x/MD9x: Yes, various, mostly American, Eastern, Northwest, Delta
McDonnell Douglas DC10: Yes, United
McDonnell Douglas MD11: Yes, American
Vickers VC10: Yes, British Airways

When something entirely familiar changes unexpectedly

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What happened to my credit card?
I’ve been using credit (and debit) cards for around 40 years. In that time, the card has barely changed: 85.60 × 53.98 mm laminated plastic, rounded corners, with the number embossed across the middle, my name and the expiration date embossed below it, and a signature panel on the back. A few decorations have appeared – a chip on the front, a hologram, a security code on the back, even my own photo. But the basic card has remained the same. And many other cards that I own follow the same form factor, for obvious reasons.
I just got a new card (a Chase Mileage Plus Explorer), and it’s different. Radically different. It’s half the thickness, for a start. On the front my name is printed (not embossed) in slightly raised letters. On the back, my name, the card number, and the expiration date are printed below the signature stripe, using the same slightly raised style. There’s a hologram, but no chip. (Boo!)
I’m sure this is going to be more convenient in everyday use. The merchant can read the card number, my name, and the signature without turning the card over. It’s thinner: if all my cards were this thick, I could use a much slimmer wallet. (As it is, I’m worried about this one falling out of the slow.) On the other hand, I can’t see how this would work with an old-style carbon-copy credit card machine. If not, will some merchants refuse it? (I’m not the first to worry about this, see here and here, including the comments.) Does this card conform to the ISO/IEC 7810 ID-1 standard? It certainly looks thinner than 0.76 mm.
Above all, I’m surprised that something so simple struck me as such a big deal. Probably time to re-read Don Norman’s “The Psychology of Everyday Things”.