For better or worse, I have my niche in the family.
An old colleague of mine once said, regarding task assignments around the office, “Be careful what you touch — it might stick.”
So between, oh, 1991-1994, I did PC tech support for my employer. In the years following — say to about 2001, I was a manager of local office IT, so I still got involved (far more than I ever wanted, at times) with hands-on PC work: cracking cases, upgrading hardware, installing OSs and other software, dealing with networking and server stuff — nothing with a certificate or degree or classwork, just doing stuff and asking dumb questions and learning how to look information up.
Yeah, baby. That’s what I’m talking about.
After that, my career moved off into application development and support and project management, so my employers suggested that if I needed something done with my work computer — I let their IT people do it. Fine by me!
Fast Forward a quarter-century, in an era when PC technology and networking hardware are light years beyond what they were way back when … and I am still the local tech support here in our home, with my Mom, and with my Mother-in-Law. Need a software upgrade? Time to replace that old computer? Printer’s making funny noises? Mobile phone acting up? Trying to get Windows to stop doing that annoying thing? I am, apparently, your man.
Which, I guess, is fine — my brother-in-law is a critical care pulmonologist and researcher, and he still gets medical questions from the family (and very few of those have to do with the lungs). So I understand the mutuality dynamic.
Still, it’s kind of weird to me, less that I get asked, but that I still can do these things and have never made anything blow up or burst into flames or lose all its data. (Having a belt-and-suspenders approach to data security is part of it Knowing how to look up and read technical info is another.)
Case in point — a few weeks back I got a notification from NetGear that my Nighthawk cable modem / router was reaching end of support. When I looked it up, it was, wow, that old?
In the meantime, my wife was complaining about how crappy the network connectivity upstairs in her office was.
And in researching into things, I discovered that Xfinity actually had a wider pipeline to us now than our current cable modem could handle.
Which sent me into a wave of research and articles and what’s (not quite any more) state of the art for these things. And I pretty quickly determined that (a) I wanted to get a mesh WiFi system in, and so (b) I had to break out the cable modem / wireless router functionality from being in the same box.
Last weekend, I installed a new mesh system, using TP-Link Deco BE10000 equipment. I ran it as a test WiFi network for a week to make sure the coverage and throughput was good.
Ooooh. Shiny.
Today, I turned off the WiFi on the old router (which is still functioning as a cable modem) and reset the SSI and password on the TP-Link to match what we had had before (one difference being that the 2.4 and 5.8 used to have different SSIs). I then spent about an hour rebooting the home equipment that didn’t automagically connect to the new setup.
And it was all a success. Huzzah!
Next step will be getting a replacement router — one that Xfinity will recognize, and that will take advantage of our current bandwidth. That’ll be another weekend install, probably also rejiggering how it all fits in the corner cabinet where the network and A/V boxen reside. But once that’s in place, we’ll be fairly up to date with all this stuff and I can stop thinking about it for a few years.
I’m not going through all this to brag (believe me, I am still in the asking-stupid-questions of friends about a lot of this newer stuff). It’s just interesting to me that something that has seen so many technical advances (the whole “microcomputer” biz) over my professional lifetime still operates on basic principles I can recognize and use. I have no problem throwing money at problems that I don’t think I can handle, but it’s kind of gratifying that there are enough things I don’t need to hire a technician for that I don’t have to feel overwhelmed by the March of Progress.
I am sure I will (in all too few years) be the guy calling his grandson complaining about how there’s this light blinking on the black box doohickey — no, the one with the picture of a spider on the front — well, it looks like a spider to me — well, it’s been blinking red, and I think our Internet is slower, but the Netflix / WB / Xfinity guy on the phone said I’d have to pay to have someone come out, and if you have some free time this weekend, could you …? Yeah, that guy.
Until then? Well, good to know I still have it. Well, most of it.
In which I wax lyrical over a kitchen appliance, which turns out to be pretty special.
When I was growing up, I was jealous of the toasters other people had. Because when the toast was done, they went SPROING and flew the toast up practically into the air. Or actually into the air, if you were on TV.
I thought this was sooooo cool.
(It’s such a popular gag that you can find at leastthreeother scenes from I Love Lucy using it.)
Our toaster, however, didn’t do that fun thing. It went “Click,” and the toast slowly, slowly rose. How boring.
Over the years, I came to value our family toaster for its clean, classy look (and, at the same time, stopped actually wanting to use my toaster as a projectile weapon). And at some point in my life, after I was on my own, I bought one.
Which wasn’t easy, because it was, y’know, vintage in some fashion. They didn’t make them any more. So I ended up buying one on (if I recall correctly) eBay. And, when it arrived, mirabile dictu, it actually worked.
And Margie got used to my peculiar toaster, and it looked pretty on the counter, and that was the end of the story.
Except … it wasn’t. Because it’s not just any toaster, it turns out. It’s a Sunbeam Radiant Control Toaster, first invented in 1949, and according to this article, it’s the Bestest Toaster Ever.
Advertisement from 1952
Or, heck, watch this video, that talks about not just how it’s the Bestest Toaster Ever, but how all the really cool stuff works:
Sunbeam Radiant Control Toaster T-20C, on our clearly crowded kitchen counter.
I believe my parents had a T-35, which had the yellow Sunbeam logo on the front, and the darkness dial on the side, but no etching. It was made 1958-1967, which would line up neatly with being a wedding present.
A T-35 like I grew up with (photo via automaticbeyondbelief.org)
Sunbeam stopped making these beauties in the late 1980s, as they were simply more complex and expensive to manufacture than those ones that were so popular on TV.
And, unlike normal toasters, mine isn’t scary, either. Unless you start poking a knife into it WHICH YOU SHOULD NEVER DO OR YOU WILL DIE.
All of this was a lot of time to write about a toaster, even if it’s the Bestest Toaster Ever (or even “Automatic Beyond Belief!”). But it is pretty spiffy, and evocative of my childhood (and adulthood), so … perfect for today.
Being without a mobile phone for a week-plus sucks
So every year or so I see an eyerolling article on “I lived for a week without Google” or “I got rid of my Gameboy” or “I turned off my mobile phone and here’s how my life changed.”
Having been without a mobile phone for 9 days, I can tell you … it sucked.
(And, since I have a blog, I can kvetch about it at length. Feel free to ignore it.)
* * *
On Sunday the 9th, I found my phone — a Pixel 1 — was dead. Press a button, get a battery-and-lightning-bolt icon for a few moments. Plug it in, get the logo full-time, but no sign of charging.
Dammit.
Not my Pixel, but you get the idea
It took me a few days to go through all the diagnostics I could on my own. As it seemed to be a power problem, a lot of the recommendations for diagnosis and/or correction had to do with letting things fully discharge, letting things fully recharge (leave it on the charger for some hours), trying something, and, if that fails, try a full (dis)charge again.
By Tuesday, I had tried what I could, had scoured the Google for things to try, and starting to run into real problems with having a dead phone. So Tuesday night, I took it down to the local UBreakIFix where I had gotten a new battery installed back in May (which had been wonderful). The guy there assured me he could take a look at it that evening and have some answers.
Fast forward a couple of days, and multiple calls to the shop to get a status (which was mostly prefaced with “Oh, I was just working on it, I need to do this one more thing”). By Thursday evening, they had given up hope and said the only thing left was a motherboard problem.
Now … I’ve had this phone some years (a 1st Gen Pixel, as I noted, which was introed in 2016, which is like forever ago in phone years). So I wasn’t completely outraged that it had given up the ghost with some mysterious ailment. And I’d done some research in the meantime, and decided I wanted to continue on with a Pixel 4.
The one I (eventually) got was black, not orange
(Yes, I’ve read about the problems with the Pixel 4, most of which have to do with battery life. I’ve also read some post-release review saying, hey, y’know, if you’re not running movies and playing chip-burning games 24×7, the battery life is actually perfectly reasonable. Which, since I’m not in that heavy use category, sounded good to me.)
So Thursday evening we picked up my brick, and went over to the Verizon store. We get good discounts through Margie’s employer (who has been working with Verizon so long the company agreement number is a preposterously low value compared to where they are now).
I wanted a Pixel 4XL. And I wanted the 128Gb version.
Oooh, sorry, we are all out of 128s in the 4 and the 4XL. But we can order it and have it shipped to you.
I have been without a mobile for five days, with various dire results. Okay, fine.
Okay, that will be 3-5 business days.
Dammit.
Or, for $13, you can get it delivered at home tomorrow night by 8pm.
Sold.
Until the next day, when we hadn’t gotten any shipping info on the phone (just a receipt for the bill). And, when I contacted Verizon, I was told the order went in too late on Thursday evening, so it would be another business day.
Monday, by 8pm.
Dammit.
I did get them to reverse the damned $13, so that was … mildly less infuriating.
Monday rolls around. FedEx notes it will be delivered by 8pm, but has no more details. Oh, wait, maybe I can get more details, but I have to create a FedEx account which …
… gets validated by a code texted to my mobile. Which I don’t have.
Margie has to take Mom off to the doctor on Monday morning, but, hey, phone is due that night, right?
Well, apparently FedEx believes that “by 8pm” also includes “or eight hours earlier than that,” as we get notification that they tried, really-truly they did, at 11:59 am, but nobody was there.
Dammit.
So I can either accept delivery “by 8pm” on Tuesday (someone stay home and don’t even dare go to the bathroom, by gad!), or go by the FedEx facility after 6:15pm, but no later than 7pm when they close.
Well, it’s been a long day for me, and a longer one for Margie, but we tromp to FedEx because, dammit, I want my phone.
We’re delayed a few minutes in dealing with the fact that the email FedEx sent us with the address of the facility, when the address is clicked, points to (in retrospect) the geographical center of the city it belongs to (complete with turn-by-turn directions), rather than, as Google kept trying to tell us, a facility over near the airport.
Fortunately, we listened to Google, otherwise there would have been violence.
As there almost was when we showed up at 6:30pm at the FedEx facility, and were told by the guy behind the counter that, oh, sorry, that truck isn’t back yet.
Don’t peeve off my wife on customer service matters. She gets frightening.
The guy behind the counter quickly scrambled off into the warehouse and, lo and behold!, the truck was there, it just hadn’t checked in yet. He returned with.
My Phone.
Which I got up and running over the course of the rest of the evening, despite some really annoying aspects to Googles two-factor-authentication which almost kept me from doing the restore because it really, truly, certainly wanted me to confirm my identity logging into the phone by sending a text … to the phone … which it wouldn’t accept … because I wasn’t logged in.
The one advantage to the delays in getting the phone was that it meant the accessories (case, etc.) had plenty of time to arrive.
Anyway, I have my phone and, aside from weirdness on the company security side of things (which took up waaaaay too much of my time today), it is so nice to have my mobile back.
And, yes, this is a classic #FirstWorldProblem, but personally aggravating, regardless.
* * *
So, what were the problems of being without mobile phone?
Here were a few I noted:
All the security mavins recommend two-factor authentication for good security. I.e., not just a userid/password combo, but some physical thing you have that proves you are you, and not just some guy who stole a userid/password combo.
Most of these involved either some fancy code generator like Google Authenticator, or else, more simply, “We’re going to text you with a code, so plug the code into this screen to prove you are you.”
That’s all really awesome. Until the device that does all of that — the one you’ve installed an Authenticator on, or the one that has your pre-entered mobile number as the thing to text to — is kaput. Then all that happens is that you can’t get to the Authenticator, and you can’t receive texts …
… and various services who want to prove you are really you, can’t. So they declare you an electronic non-person.
This happened with some of my office application needs (where we use Okta authentication), but I also got picked up in a random check on reality by Twitter. Some applications allow for alternatives (“text you? call you? email you?”), but Twitter just have that one phone number it wants to text you at.
You can change that phone number, of course, but they need to text you to confirm it …
So that’s why I wasn’t on Twitter.
It’s also why I went radio silent on texting. Which is the main way I chat in passing with my Mom, but is also how some folk tried to reach me over those nine days.
Oh, yeah, no casual (or possibly life-saving) phone calls when not near a land line.
No Google Maps when driving places. No Audible books while driving places, either. The latter is annoying. The former is … weirdly 1980ish, and surprisingly disconcerting. Not just “I don’t know how to get there, how do I do it,” but even, “Well, I remember how to get there, but WTF is the traffic like and should I go this way or that?”
Okay, and, yes, a part of it was not being able to just look up stuff on the Internet, or check the news on the Internet, or take a photograph, or pull out data at will from my calendar or my contacts or my secure notes. This was annoying, but also made for weird times when it was, like, “Okay I am bored standing here waiting for the coffee to brew and what do I do aside from staring at the coffee as it brews?”Which is all the more awkward when there are five other people on the elevator, or huddled around the coffee machine, and all of them are on their phones.
None of this turned turned out to be horrible. No tales of being stuck in the wilderness or attacked by zombies without my mobile. No never-to-be-seen-again photos of my baby’s first steps lost because I didn’t have my mobile working.
But it was annoying, and cropped up as a further annoyance on an ongoing random basis. Way too many moments of, “Oh, let me grab my phone and–” cut short. Way too many “Oh, if we can’t text you a code for us to use to validate your authenticity, we are going to close your account and destroy your life” moments (or what felt like them).
Again, yes, I know, First World Problem.
It was illuminating the degree to which we (I, at least) are dependent on mobile phone access, without serious preparation to work around the inconveniences (e.g., when vacationing somewhere with extortionate roaming charges). There are probably some profound lessons there about reliance on technology, and how our tools shape us as much as we use them, and perhaps even a nostalgic call out to a simpler time.
I don’t know about that. I just know that being without a mobile phone for nine days really sucked.
I love the smell of Massive, Innovative IT Projects in the morning.
The F-35’s promise — to be the single be-all and end-all of every combat mission that any service (of any nation) might want to fly — has always been terribly seductive, as has throwing every high-tech idea under the sun at the plane, from fully integrated data and networking systems, to the plane being able to tell ground-based logistics what sort of repairs and parts it needs.
But they look so cool!
But as anyone who has done any sort of large, innovative project, esp. one prone to scope creep (and where such creep profits the party doing the work), such efforts tend to be extremely expensive, as the F-35 has clearly demonstrated. It also has tended to create a complicated jet where a flaw over here can have unexpected consequences over there — and, as a fully networked combat system, something that may be vulnerable to cyber-attack.
Fortunately, we’re not building this to go against any enemies that can do cyber-attacks, are we?
Most worryingly, a report in October from the US government’s General Accountability Office found the Department of Defense had failed to protect the software used to control the F-35’s weapons systems. Testers could take control of weapons with “relatively simple tools and techniques.”
To give you an idea of how the interconnected nature of the F-35’s computer systems is a massive vulnerability in of itself: separate subsystems, such as the Active Electronically Scanned Array radar, Distributed Aperture System, and the Communications, Navigation, and Identification Avionics System, all share data. Thus, the GAO’s auditors warned, just compromising one of these components could bring down the others.
“A successful attack on one of the systems the weapon depends on can potentially limit the weapon’s effectiveness, prevent it from achieving its mission, or even cause physical damage and loss of life,” said the GAO team.
Of course, certainly the contractor and the government have been diligent about finding and plugging any security issues.
“As in previous years, cybersecurity testing shows that many previously confirmed F-35 vulnerabilities have not been fixed, meaning that enemy hackers could potentially shut down the ALIS network, steal secret data from the network and onboard computers, and perhaps prevent the F-35 from flying or from accomplishing its missions,” Grazier wrote.
As for penetration testing of the ALIS system, Uncle Sam dropped the ball, the independent watchdog suggested. Rather than unleash a DoD red team of hackers on the code, the US government paid F-35 manufacturer Lockheed Martin to do it, and just accepted the results. Such hands-off regulation didn’t work out so great for Boeing and America’s aviator regulator, the FAA.
Well, at the very least, I’m sure the Pentagon has no officers who feel their careers are caught up inextricably in the F-35’s success and would therefore push the plane forward before it’s ready for combat, and certainly they wouldn’t be already moving forward with retiring existing successful combat aircraft before the F-35 has demonstrated it can do the job, right?
I don’t think I’ve ever seen or read SF that thought about this particular issue.
NASA had a bit of egg on its face recently when it had to cancel a two-woman space walk because, well, they only had one space suit in their mutual size.
But the reality is actually more complex — and even less complimentary to NASA and the general state of the nation’s space planning. The existing wardrobe of space suit pieces is over 40 years old, designed for the space shuttle program. NASA doesn’t have the budget to make new ones, and, as importantly, doesn’t know what sort of space suits to make as US space priorities seem to change every 4-8 years.
You even can even create your own little Bach-esque tune by entering in four notes and then watching the AI generate the accompaniment based on Bach’s extensive corpus of music.
Roboticists keep saying that robots are there for jobs that are dull, dirty, or dangerous. The best robots are busy doing at least two out of three of those things at once, and the disassembly and recycling of thousands of M26 rockets (about 700,000 bomblets) seems like it would definitely qualify as dull, and mostly likely also qualify as dangerous several times over.
Here’s to the brave Sandia Labs-programmed robots at the Multiple Launch Rocket System Recycle Facility at the Anniston Munitions Center in Alabama — may they never unionize.
The US Army sometimes finds itself with bases that don’t have easy or reliable access to an electrical infrastructure. The alternative is diesel generators and the like, but those require an expensive and vulnerable logistical pathway for bringing in additional fuel.
So some Pentagon boffin has come up with the idea of building portable nuclear power plants to generate electricity. Such plants could be trucked or even flown in, and provide a steady, no-fuel-needed power supply to bases in the middle of the Iraqi desert, in Afghanistan, etc.
Sounds like a great, even futuristic idea, right? Until you start to think about what a beautiful target such plants would make — either to steal enriched uranium from, or simply to blow up and contaminate the entire area. And given that these things would be being sent into, by definition, war zones … well, it suddenly stops sounding like such a great idea.
Which concerns don’t seem to be slowing down the US Army from going out and seeking quotes …
In addition to passing older electronics on to new users, the Lower East Side Ecology Center also repurposes some of the rarer finds for a museum-like collection of over 2,000 vintage items. These include beepers, Royal typewriters, personal computers, CRT monitors, news cameras, vintage Macs, slots machines, and countless more items, all preserved in order to display the development of technology over the last eight decades.
The collection also doubles as a prop library, where art directors and production designers can find the perfect pieces of technology for films and shows based in the past.
This is the ground floor panel setup for the elevator for the parking structure by our nearby movie theater. It always takes me at least five seconds to figure out which flipping button to press to summon the car.
The new Android operating system — currently in open Beta, but coming soon — makes some interesting user interface changes, as well as more use of AI to try to be more helpful in how individuals actually use their phones. I’ll be curious to see how both work out.
Which sounds like a cool idea, and probably is in 99% of the cases. I can see wanting to limit the types of companies used as land marks (Burger King is obvious; Smith and Jones Legal Offices on the 14th Floor, probably not), and there’s a danger of companies going out of business. But that sounds like a refinement.
Plus, I now understand better the Maps Contributor questions about “Is this business plainly visible from the street?”
