Two Philosophies

09:04 Tuesday, 22 May 2018
Words: 865

Hopefully this will be a quick post, because I have errands to run and stuff to do...

The other day Jason Kottke tweeted a link to this post at Stratechery called, "Tech's Two Philosophies." Read the post, it's not very long, though it can provoke a great deal of thought and discussion.

Assuming you didn't read the post, briefly, author Ben Thompson points out the difference between Apple and Microsoft, and Google and Facebook. Apple and Microsoft are platform makers, whose products are intended to empower individuals to do things for themselves. Google and Facebook are aggregators whose products are intended to do things for you. I think that's interesting.

A bit of backstory is necessary, going back to the early visions of what computing would mean for humanity. Steve Jobs' "bicycles for the mind," is an apt and lovely metaphor, and one that I think still has some value, although we have mostly failed to live up to that vision. Douglas Englebart foresaw the information explosion, and saw computers as one way humans could learn to cope with it. Englebart was also somewhat more sophisticated in his anticipation of what it might mean, as he foresaw a co-evolution of man and machine. This is a smart take on the idea that we make our tools, and, in turn, our tools make us. We can go back to using stones to grind grains, and the story goes on from there. Exercise for the reader.

What is sad, and depressing, and frustrating, and infuriating is that we have completely failed to realize either Jobs' or Englebarts' vision. Bill Gates' vision was largely realized, a computer on every desk, running Microsoft software. Yay. Go Bill. A lot to be said for having modest goals.

What I immediately thought about Thompson's assertion that Google and Facebook want to do things for you, to give you back more of your time, was that of course they do. So you can spend that time on Facebook or Google!

And Google, and to a greater extent, Facebook, are the source of much of the information overload we are experiencing. Now, I'm reluctant to rely on the idea of information overload, because it's not so much that we're overloaded with information, it's that there is so much information that is utterly irrelevant to us, and, more troubling, so much that is just misinformation. Ideally, the information processing ability of computers should have helped us make tools to manage this surfeit of data, and to an extent they have, but corporations have taken computers' information processing capability and used it to attract attention.

Google and Facebook are not information or data aggregators, they are attention aggregators. They use information of all kinds, good, bad, titillating, prurient, provocative, entertaining, amusing, demagogic, idealistic, whatever message you're receptive to, they have it and they surface it to you, place it before your eyeballs, so they can show you an ad and charge a corporation for renting your eyeballs!

And one of the bitter ironies of all this is that it's done through the screens made by the platform makers, Apple and Microsoft. It's like Apple built a bicycle for the mind, but it only travels to one destination - social media!

Now, there's a solution to this, but it's largely unattainable. We can learn a form of discipline and eschew the attention-whoring aggregators. That would require discipline and the insight to realize that social media is a trap, an insight that is deliberately kept obscured by the aggregators, and one in which we have been trained since birth to be blind to. Since childhood, we've been taught (educated) that the world is perceived as images through screens, first by television then by the internet. We are not predisposed to regard this skeptically. We'll deny global warming, but we won't deny our tweeps!

All of which is why I'm pessimistic about this civilization's future. I suspect (didn't say "hope") that humanity will survive the coming calamity; but in much reduced circumstances. Whether that's good or bad, perhaps history will judge, whenever we get around to recording and examining history after the collapse.

But we have large, powerful entities today, chiefly corporations, that have very short time horizons and cannot act in any form of "selfless" way; and who cannot perceive a threat to their self-interest beyond the next quarterly report. Perhaps some do, but it's not clear that Facebook or Google can, locked as they are in a hyper-competitive struggle to monetize your attention. And there are numerous other corporate entities leveraging this captive audience for their own purposes, which likely have little to do with our best interests.

And because they're so good at what they do, because ceaseless, relentless competition compels them to get better and better, the likelihood that there will be large social movement away from the aggregators is vanishingly small. The odds are all against us.

We're trapped.

So there's your cheery thought for the day. It's nothing new. I've been ranting into the void about it now for a very long time, to no discernible effect. I'm just getting my dibs in on "I told you so!" early.

Noise Jammer

05:49 Monday, 22 May 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 72.63°F Pressure: 1009hPa Humidity: 92% Wind: 0mph
Words: 595

Like many people in Nocatee, Florida, we have a golf cart. Nocatee requires that all golf carts be electric. Cool.

But electric carts require charging, which requires either an onboard charger, or a separate device in your garage. We bought our cart used, and it came with a charger, a big, heavy linear, transformer based box.

They seldom fail, but ours was used and developed a glitch. The cart is Mitzi's project, so she took it into a service provider to get it checked out. A cord was bad and something else was wrong, and they quoted her a price that seemed outrageous. She'd done some homework before she brought it in, trying to figure out if it was the charger or the cart's onboard computer, a little controller that manages the charger so it doesn't overcharge the batteries. So she knew there were new chargers she could buy that were more efficient and cost less than the price she was quoted.

So she essentially donated the old charger to the service company and ordered a new one from that online store with all the trucks.

It's significantly smaller and lighter the old one, so I knew it had a switching-type power supply. We plugged it into the cart and it worked as advertised.

We went to an event on Saturday about 6 miles from the house. A twelve-mile round trip is going to mean a significant recharge upon return. Came home, plugged it in and carried on as usual.

I went out back to "play with radios." I wasn't hearing the usual traffic I heard on 20 meters, so I switched over to the medium wave AM band and whoa! The "noise floor," the amount of static present on the band, was enormous. A local station would come through, but something was clearly putting out a lot of rf racket and I had a pretty good idea what it was.

I put the Panasonic RF-2200 away and grabbed a little handheld radio and tuned it to an empty frequency, noise was still present, went into the garage and went over to the golf cart charger and unplugged it from the cart. Noise went away.

Oy!

These things are only Class A FCC Part 15 certified, which is to say, they aren't designed to not emit radio frequency interference. The paperwork even tells you so, and suggests that if it causes problems for your neighbors, you'll have to correct it at your expense. I don't think our neighbors listen to much AM radio, so I doubt we'll get many complaints.

But I like listening to radios, so now I have to figure out how to quiet this thing down. When it's in idle mode, it checks on the charge status every 15 minutes or so and adds a bit of charge if necessary. So it's fairly quiet most of the time. I'm only going to hear a problem when it gets back from a trip to the river or the grocery store.

It looks like I'm going to have to get a filter, the kind the marijuana growers use for their grow lamps. And maybe wrap the DC line through a large ferrite.

I'm going to play with it a bit, using a software defined radio dongle, and a nanoSA (nano spectrum analyzer), to try and get an idea what parts of the spectrum are most affected, and to see how much difference the remedies make.

I worry, though, about if or when a bunch of my neighbors get these cheap chargers.

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The Usual Discontents

08:31 Wednesday, 22 May 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 75.6°F Pressure: 1012hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 857

You can't get a CSV file of your Apple Card transactions from within Apple Wallet. You must go to the online web site where you can't look at your transactions (That's what Wallet is for?), but you can pay your bill. And you can also download pdfs of your prior months' statements.

Which made me finally pay for a year's worth of PDF Expert. I had a couple of utilities that purportedly could extract tables from pdfs and convert them into Excel spreadsheets, but both failed and have been subsequently deleted.

PDF Expert can do it, but of course, the spreadsheet is ugly as sin, and you have to spend several minutes making it not painful to look at. (I should look into whether there is a kind of saved style I could apply to the whole sheet in one fell swoop. I have a feeling I'll be doing this again.)

You can download a csv file of all your transactions from Amazon. It takes a little time, basically you submit a request and wait for it to be fulfilled. Matter of minutes in my experience.

You get several files, each in its own folder. The one I wanted was Retail.Order.History.1.csv. That isn't a simple matter of applying a style, there are columns of data that aren't useful that must be deleted, useful columns that must be moved to more sensible locations. And then you get to figure out how to group order numbers together, because each item record of a transaction is a row, although you may have ordered several items in a single order. Oddly, the orders aren't grouped together. They mostly are, but you'll find outliers in nearly every order with more than three items. They're usually one or two rows down, inexplicably separated from the rest of the order.

That's important because it's the order total that was charged to the Apple Card, and the number that appears in the order confirmation email you receive from Amazon. That figure never appears in the csv file.

I've been subjecting myself to all of this because I'm having a charge disputed by Goldman Sachs and I want to be absolutely certain that I was in fact correct that the charge that appeared on my card wasn't associated with any order that I made.

So far, I'm fairly certain that I'm correct. I can't find an order confirmation email anywhere near the date of the transaction reported on the card for that amount. There is no order among the record of my orders at the Amazon web site that correlates to that amount. And I downloaded the record of transactions, just to be thorough.

Well... Hold the phone.

(Actually, I just got off the phone.)

Just now, in the middle of writing this post and out of curiosity, I went to the folder of folders of transactions to see if one of those might have been strictly orders, which would have been more helpful. Alas, not the case.

But, there was a Digital Items folder, and so I opened that just to see what it contained. I thought it would be my Kindle book orders, and I haven't bought one recently. There are four .csv files in that Digital Items folder, and a README. The previous folders each contained one .csv file. The only .csv file that contains anything meaningful to me (a human) is Digital Items.csv, the second to the last one in the folder listing, just before the README (which I didn't read).

Sure enough, the first record in the Digital Items.csv is my Amazon Prime renewal, for the amount in question.

Oy!

I seem to recall that I usually received an email from Amazon that Prime would be renewing at such and such a date. All of my Amazon mail went to a single mailbox, and there is no email announcing the upcoming renewal, no email confirmation of renewal, nothing to tell me that they'd charged my card to renew my Prime membership.

So when I got the alert from Apple Card, there was no correspondence from Amazon, no record of a transaction that I could find that explained that charge, and I thought my card must have been skimmed at the movies.

Well...bummer.

"New shit has come to light, man."

So I called Goldman Sachs, didn't have to fuss too much with the automated "assistant" and was able to reach a human being (in a noisy call center) fairly quickly, and withdrew the dispute.

Very frustrating, because I changed my card number too. I still have a couple of recurring charges that have to be updated.

In any event, it also prompted me to change my mailbox setup. I've created separate mailboxes for Amazon Order Confirmation, Amazon Shipping Confirmation and Amazon Delivery Confirmation, and an Amazon Other mailbox.

(All of which suggests I do far too much business with Amazon.)

And now I'm adding Prime renewal to the Calendar, so hopefully this won't happen again.

Yeah, I kinda feel like a dumbass; but I also think Amazon let me down here.

The beat goes on...

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A Place For My Stuff

13:07 Wednesday, 22 May 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 83.3°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 71% Wind: 9.22mph
Words: 964

I don't travel often anymore. Certainly not as much as during my working life. Back then, I'd accumulate enough miles to get upgrades. These days, I only wish to fly to maintain relationships with family.

After hearing about the clear air turbulence experienced by Singapore Airlines, I'm even more reluctant to fly.

In any event, I'm flying to DC in a week to spend a long weekend with Mitzi's daughter and son-in-law and her oldest grandson. Last month I flew to Albany to spend a long weekend with my 90-year-old Mom, so my experience with flying is still fresh.

For a weekend trip, I normally pack a carry-on and a camera bag. I use the camera bag to hold, yes, a camera and a lens or two; but also to hold my phone, sunglasses, wallet and keys after I arrive at the airport and get ready to proceed through security.

I have two small bags I normally use. The one I like more is a tan canvas Domke, but it has the least amount of room. I have a green, nylon Lowepro that has a nice, big front pocket and a slim back pocket that will hold my iPad mini perfectly. The front pocket is large enough for my phone, wallet and keys, while my sunglasses will fit on top of the camera and lenses in the main part of the bag.

It's never been quite ideal. I don't like the strap on the Lowepro, it's fixed and I can't swap it. Both bags have the large lid that wraps over the top and down the front to a velcro and clip fastener. They're a bit fussy to get things in and out of quickly. The Domke is better, but again, smaller.

I've made it work with each of them, but it's never been ideal.

So among the hours I wasted watching YouTube videos about EDC kits, I watched a number of videos on travel bags, specifically, slings. Just search on EDC sling bags, hundreds of videos to choose from. I bought a tomtoc Compact EDC Sling (4L) and it arrived yesterday, so I've had a chance to play around with it. (There's a 15% off coupon on my listing, which makes this a pretty good deal)

Construction, fit and finish all outstanding. The strap is long enough to fit my girth. The appeal with a sling is that it slides around onto your back when you're walking, but when it slides around in front it's horizontal, so accessing the contents isn't a hassle.

I put my OMDS OM-5 with the 20mm/f1.7 pancake mounted in it. I can get the iPad mini in there as well, but it has to go into the front part of the main compartment (which is divided into two pockets), and it's a tight fit. Playing around with the E-P7 with the 12-32mm/f3.5-5.6 mounted, and my Olympus Stylus 1s, they both fit along with the iPad. The E-P7 and Stylus 1s are each several ounces lighter than the OM-5.

I considered my options and I'm going to put the Stylus 1s in the sling, vertically, grip facing up. The bag is deep enough to accommodate that, and it makes putting the iPad mini in it much simpler. I like carrying the Stylus 1s on flights because it has a 28-300mm/f2.8 (constant) zoom, which can make for some interesting out the window shots.

There's still plenty of room for my phone, wallet, a small Anker power pank, some USB cords, my Airpods, a micro-fiber cloth, lens pen, sunglasses, keys, tic-tacs, protein bar, pen and maybe a flashlight. (I bought the black one with the black interior. Probably unwise. They make different colors, some with yellow interiors that are easier to look into and identify your stuff. Hence, flashlight.)

So after checking in at the TSA line, everything from my pockets goes into the sling bag and I just toss that onto the belt and carry on through screening. No messing around with the big flappy cover on the camera bags, hoping something doesn't fall out. (Like it did on the trip to Albany last time. Spotted my phone on the floor next to the conveyor after screening.)

Like the camera bags, the sling bag won't take up much space under the seat in front of me, so I can still move my feet around. We've got a (too) brief layover in Atlanta, but we're landing early in the morning, so hopefully we won't have to wait for a gate. The bigger question will be which way we land and how far we have to taxi to the gate. I've been on flights where it's taken 15-20 minutes just to taxi to a gate! I wouldn't have booked the flight this way, but Mitzi made the arrangements and she's using a companion fare.

I don't know how comfortable it'd be to carry all that for an afternoon out sightseeing, but I wouldn't necessarily pack all that stuff either. Certainly not the iPad mini or the power bank.

I'll probably put the OM-5 in my carry-on, wrapped in a t-shirt with a couple of lenses for use in DC. Both cameras use the same battery, and I can charge the OM-5 in camera (micro-USB, alas). That'll give me a larger sensor with some brighter primes for interiors at the Smithsonian (If photography is permitted, I don't even know anymore.), and a faster AF for shots of her grandson. But the Stylus 1s will be a good "walking around" camera if I take the dog out or walk up to the mini-mart, as I often do when we're there.

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Closing the Ring

17:47 Wednesday, 22 May 2024

Current Wx: Temp: 84.25°F Pressure: 1011hPa Humidity: 69% Wind: 8.05mph
Words: 89

I've been walking in the late afternoon to ensure that I close my move ring. (Current goal: 840 cal.) I don't press in the afternoon, because it's warmer and I just need to close the ring, not work up a sweat.

So this afternoon I brought along the Stylus 1s, just to get familiar with it again. Turned out to be a fairly prolific walk, as far as pics go. I liked this one though.

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Busy

07:01 Friday, 22 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 40.23°F Pressure: 1029hPa Humidity: 88% Wind: 2.53mph
Words: 463

Been a busy week. Heavy on the HVAC. The "conventional wisdom" is that I shouldn't run the air-to-water heat pump in reverse to cool the floors because of condensation. Everyone thinks a fan coil would be better, because it's built to handle condensation. But it's something that's blowing air, which means it's something to clean and you can't sit near it.

I've got two contractors that are going to try to put together quotes for a solution that doesn't involve a fan coil. The key is going to be the dehumidifier, and managing the dew point. I think that the worst risk is opening the sliding glass doors on a hot humid day when we've been actively cooling and having a bunch of moist air come in. Might get some condensation on the floor by the door, which would be a potential slip hazard. Maybe. Warm air rises. How quickly does it rise when it enters through the door?

In an effort to talk me out of it, one contractor was posing the scenario of having the windows open during the summer. I said that if the windows are open, it's nice out and we're not cooling the floor.

We have three months out of the year when we're, potentially, actively cooling; and a few days here and there that are outliers, like the other day when it was over 90*F here. In May. A week or so after it snowed. But with the thermal mass of an ICF house, we're not going to be cooling during those brief spikes of hot weather. The house just won't get that hot.

When it's more consistently hot, we're keeping the doors and windows closed, we'll cool the floor and manage the dew point.

People love their ducts and their blowing air. We'll have some of that of course, with the ERV and the dehumidifier. But those aren't the kind of high-velocity, high volume airflows that an air handler puts out.

It'd be a no-brainer in the southwest where the air is normally dry.

One contractor I called, who came highly recommended, told me air-to-water heat pumps don''t work in winter. He said he'd installed three and he replaced all of them with boilers. I asked him who the manufacturer was and he couldn't tell me. That told me all I needed to know. He said if I wasn't putting a propane boiler, he wasn't interested.

Well, neither was I.

It's troubling when everyone says you're making a mistake. But there's just not a lot of experience with hydronic cooling in an ICF home. Everybody is going on their experience with stick-framed houses with no thermal mass.

Anyway, we'll see what happens. Maybe I'll change my mind.

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