‘Merica. Watching a 🚀 launch on a iPad on my lap with payloads from 🇮🇩 🇮🇱 🇺🇸 .
Thinking about gratitude for small things:
Thankful for all the people who I bump into during my day, but don’t know, who share a friendly smile and greeting. They’re tiny little gifts in my day.
For the first time in my adult life its February and I still haven’t made a vacation plan for the year and don’t even feel inclined to come up with one. I typically have an idea by the time we finish our last vacation. I have no idea why.
A New Independent Coffee Shop Opened
I found out a new indie coffee shop opened a couple miles from my house. The cappuccino is good, the decor is pleasant and there is great variety of seating choices from leather chairs to community tables to 4 seat table tops. As a plus they are using beans roasted in town by a small indie roaster. I feel all trendy this morning.
I am not winning today: followed my normal morning routine, shuffled into the kitchen, put coffee in the pot, turned it on, enjoyed the aroma of brewing coffee. Went to grab the cup from the machine to drink it and… I forgot to put a cup in. So yeah. 💤
A reminder why I refuse to have their devices in my home. Note how customers are not even part of the discussion. The US is so in need of customer privacy laws.
Amazon and Google ask for non-stop data from smart home devices
As someone who is disturbed by my country’s issues being painted as extremes for political gain I found a lot to like in this NYT piece.
it can be hard to rally the people behind a message of pragmatism, compromise and limits
It’s amazing the shipwrecks Paul Allen’s team is able to find. This one amazingly intact and upright. Look at that tractor just sitting there!
This is an usually destructive hack of a small provider. Still it is a good reminder of why it is important to have offline backups of critical files and info.
assailant who wiped out almost two decades’ worth of data and backups in a matter of hours
My Micro Monday is @diplomaticdiva. She’s a delightful person and posts great photos of London that reveal a keen eye for light.
Making the final repair from the electrical storm: wiring up a replacement transformer for our sprinkler system.
N.B. I love my Hako soldering station.
It’s in the low 30F here so miso suru and sake feels great.
I love the snark of the CARROT app and it’s my go-to for weather on my Watch. They’ve set a new bar for useful complications.
Today just gets better (not) and better (not). Now at the urgent care clinic with the 14 year old due to a bad earache. At least we can still laugh at things.
The casualty list grows:
❌ One managed 8 port Gigabit switch
❌ One un-managed 8 port Gigabit switch
❌ The Ethernet port on one 4K AppleTV
After making repairs I decided to relax with a little guitar playing. So fittingly the attached happened… 🎸 📷 Thunder & Lightning
Thunder and lightning very very frightening… ⛈ A tale of woe wrought by nature
A storm woke us up last night and shortly after a very loud thunder clap & flash. I couldn’t go back to sleep so I got up early feeling rather groggy only to discover a rather odd 90% of our devices were offline but the router was on the Internet. Took me a long time to figure out what caused the strange collection of outages. A gigabit switch failed which knocked out WiFi for a lot of devices (because the WiFi extender backhauled over Ethernet through the switch) and also of course all of the devices, like AppleTVs, on that switch were offline.
I managed to get most things back online by plugging a few key Ethernet cables directly into the router in our wiring box. While finishing that up there was a loud flash, click and poof. The power strip in the wiring box shorted out one of the outlets and tripped our whole-house surge protector in the process. I was even more awake, and more irritated. Thankfully the now blackened power strip was the only casualty and not the devices plugged into it - otherwise we’d be without any Internet waiting for a new modem from AT&T.
Even with juggling Ethernet cables I still can’t get part of the house’s wired devices back online and I can find no cause for that. I’ll have to make a run first thing this morning for a new Gigabit switch and surge protector strip. Hopefully that will bring everything back online but if not I’ll have some trouble trying to track down the remaining issue.
Frustrating but nothing serious from a life perspective so grateful for that.
I have to admit I got quite a chuckle out of the juxtaposition of Jean’s note on the envelope and the cover of the magazine she sent me. @macgenie
Feeling unusually productive this morning. I already
✅ Debugged issues in my code caused by changes in Circuit Python 3.1.2 (on a CPx board)
✅ Helped someone with custom SNMP setup on a Raspberry Pi
✅ Prototyped REST code to fetch WX data from three new services
I’ve been using ProtonMail for over a year, having moved from Google. This blog post, by ProtonMail so a bit of PR to be sure, contains some of the key reasons I made the switch.
Waffles…….
😂
I press my thumb down on an app to delete it, causing all the other apps tremble with fear, and in this moment I am as great and terrible as a vengeful god of the ancient world, my cruelty both capricious and final.
Pondering this 🤔 : a lot of us use tagemoji. Is there a way to automatically generate a list of the tag emojis I’ve used that will bring up all the posts containing them? I’m also mulling over the idea of tagemoji vs categories. Is it better to use categories? WDYT?
If you work with JSON files and use iOS the new Jayson app is a blessing. Just saying…
Our 10 year old son had his first Micro:bit programming class tonight. It’s self-paced and he flew through the first few weeks of projects already. He loved it so much he is almost bouncing off the walls tonight. I hope he keeps enjoying it so much.
This sky….. it was gone in a moment. 📷 ⛅️
