Amuyu

As happens a lot in my household, the Mrs. and I were watching a cooking show last night. We are currently subscribed to YouTube TV. This particular show was about sous vide cooking. It wasn’t particularly good except for the portion on the poached eggs. We are definitely going to do that, and I’ll post about our experience here. However, we hadn’t talked about sous vide in forever. I haven’t looked up any recipes in forever. We don’t cook sous vide very often so there’s very little chance that we are going to be looking at web sites. But, after this show, we did get excited about those eggs. We also discussed which one of the machines the show was going to pick as the winner.

Then, this morning, I go to check on an Amazon order. And guess what is under my "suggestions"? Yup sous vide machines. The order of those suggestions? THE SAME ORDER WE GUESSED. Not the order the show talked about. The VERY SAME ORDER we guessed.

Screw you Amazon and your f’ing Alexa.

I’m going to find a way to get the things we use Alexa for without the spying.

After leaving Georgia Tech, my first "real world" job was working for a now defunct company called Pacific Access Computers. They specialized in a couple of things: reselling Sun gear and selling their own SBUS card for Datakit. I was hired as an SE for the South East. My work at GaTech had already given my great amounts of skill in managing and configuring Sun servers and workstations. However, as is the wont of most tech companies, I had to get certified to be able to "officially work" on these systems. Back in those days, pre-commercial internet, this meant traveling to the Bay Area so I could attend the Milpitas based training. Back then, getting tech books and tech gear was not as simple as today. Naturally there was no Amazon or New Egg yet. But there was Kepler’s Book Store and Fry’s.

My "training" involved going to Milpitas many times over the first few months of my new SEhood. Every time I flew there, I ritualistically did a pilgrimage to Fry’s. I’d spend many happy hours each time just perusing through the shelves of stuff. Don’t recall buying all that much – mostly because I didn’t have the disposable income back then – but I do recall really enjoying it very much. Many years later, the opened up a retail store here in Atlanta. Then they opened up another one. I was sooo happy and went there many times, but something was gone. It had all the stuff, but the prices where meh. The staff was most definitely meh. I clearly remember several instances of staff either being ignorant about their area of "expertise" or being overtly malicious in pushing unnecessary stuff. They did this to me, despite me clearly letting them know that I was not your average joe when it comes to tech stuff. They did this to several other patrons who clearly were just looking for a little bit of good advise (which I surreptitiously offered after they disengaged from the sales puke that had almost convinced them to buy 2x or 3x what they needed).

Over time, I also noticed that the traffic in the store was much much lighter. Their return policies became onerous. Their supply of stuff very dated. And just a general sense of malaise about the whole place. The closest MicroCenter is further than the closest Fry’s. I got to MicroCenter now. While the stuff is not as abundant – their policies and offerings are more than fair and good enough.

It’s sad. I miss the old Fry’s. And it came as no surprise today that I read this article.

Thanks for the memories. Hope you fix yourself.

Well, the decade is almost over. I know, not technically, but the 10’s are done for and the 20’s start tomorrow. It’s really hard to believe that not so long ago, we were going to start the new millennium. In many ways, it feels like Y2K was just yesterday. In many other ways, so much has happened. The world is different. We have the most politically divisive administration happening right now. Our borders are tightening and disappearing at the same time (i.e. the wall and the multinational). The Internet is not new, and is in fact a core service – not too different from power.

I’m not going to go political and will likely ruminate on the other changes later. For this one, I’m going to focus on the internet and maybe some predictions:

A dozen years or so ago, when I first started this blog, self hosting was not unheard of, but also not very common. Today, it’s in a similar place, but for different reasons. There’s a ton of services that offer blogging platforms for next to nothing. However, they seem to be ephemeral. Many people are also choosing to use one of the various social networks as their blogging platform. I’m not a fan of those for a number of reasons, but the biggest is the pernicious nature of their monetization. Others have written extensively on that, so I’ll skip the diatribe about being the product. For me, at least, self hosting is eminently more doable and practical now. The cost of storage is essentially zero. Back when this got started, gigs cost real money. Now, TBs are around $15/TB. That means a gig is 1.5 CENTS. A gig of writing will take a lifetime. What’s more amazing is the transfer cost has reached essentially zero as well. I have full symmetric gigabit internet coming into my home via a fiber link. The speed of my blog is nearly instantaneous. Even if I post images, they are automatically optimized by WordPress. If you click on one of them, it’s expanded and even at full resolution sending a 3-4MB image is fractions of a second. That’s nuts.

This same "freeness" of storage and bandwidth has led to an expansion of gizmos and services that are internet connected. I run a moderately complex home network. It includes several automations (lights, garage, doors, alarms, etc.) as well as several voice assistants (Alexa, Siri, etc.). Add up all the gizmos and gadgets and my home now, on average, has about 120+ things with IP addresses on them. That’s nuts. And it’s only going to get crazier. I have a few upgrades planned over the next few weeks that will help me manage that better (switches with better VLAN support, faster storage, etc.). I’ll write about those as I go through them, but in the end, I suspect I’ll be ready for a cambrian explosion of internet things. And I’ll have to worry about security – even more. The fact that I have this bandwidth and all these gizmos means that my attack surface has exploded. The fact that I have to create an enterprise level network to manage it is crazy. The fact that I have to do it with some serious skills and that it’s not been figured out as a simple appliance is crazy. Maybe there’s a business idea in there somewhere.

Anyways. It’s nuts. The last decade has changed many things and the home network is one of them. It’s not what I started to write about, but I’m glad I put it down. Let’s see how I/we adapt to this over the next decade.

One day at my daughters karate class I noticed one of the other dads writing on his notepad. He had small handwriting like I do and his pen was … different. It was a fountain pen but a cheap one. So I got to talking to him. He pointed me to the brand. Platinum Preppy. They are about $9 each. Dirt cheap. You can also get refill cartridges that make this an extra super good value…

But it’s the start of a rabbit hole.

The first test for these was flying. Fountain pens have a reputation for not flying very well. This is largely deserved unless you take some precautions. Not knowing much about this, I did a quick look on the YouTubes and found this video. That was super helpful, but several hours of GouletPens videos, I was hooked. It took a while for me to internalize the content and then decided to step it up a little bit by upgrading with one of these Plaisir. For $13 or so you get a nicer looking pen. I couldn’t find them with the Extra Fine nib, but the nib from the Preppy and the Plaisir are interchangeable.

But … it still looks cheap.

So further down the rabbit hole I went. Spending more time with the Goulet video channel, I ran into one that talked about good traveling fountain pens. They ranged in price from about $50 to crazy money pens. Two of them stuck out. This upgraded Platinum and this TWSBI. The Platinum is about $100 and the TWSBI is about $65 before shipment and all that. I opted for the TWSBI because it looked cooler and it was refillable rather than a cartridge one. I liked the extra capacity of the refillable and the fact that it would let me try out different inks. And, I liked the idea of giving Goulet some money for all those videos

Turns out that that was another rabbit hole. Inks come in "wetter" and "less wet" varieties. Who would have known? The wetter ones flow faster – which is probably a good thing if you like to write with nibs larger than EF. The dryer ones are thicker and will produce thinner lines – which also don’t bleed through the paper as much. Speaking of paper, that’ll be another post where I get into the notebook rabbit hole. The first ink that I tried was a Waterman Black ink. Not knowing better, and having heard that brand before, it seemed like a good idea. It was only after I did that, that I discovered that it’s well known for being a particularly wet ink. Some more googling, and I found that the Pelikan 4001 varietal should work better. And it did.

But I wasn’t done.

Filling a piston filler, like my TWSBI, apparently has some magic involved. I couldn’t get a full reservoir. I tried several methods. I took the pen apart and cleaned it. Took it apart again and lubricated and cleaned it (turns out that’s important). Tried several variations of the refill and I could only get 1/3 of the reservoir filled. But … TWSBI makes a special gizmo that makes it stupid easy. Another $20 or so later and I finally got a full fill of the reservoir.

The line I produce with this TWSBI is not as EF as the Platinum. I suspect part of it is the pen and part of it is the ink. However, it’s pretty good and … it does write very very nicely.

But I haven’t flown with it yet. That test comes in a couple of weeks. I’ll make sure to bring some extra tissues in case I get a blow out, but theoretically the vacuum fills should not have that problem.

More on that later.

I’m in the middle of taking a MacBook Pro I have that’s been sitting idle and setting it up as my kid’s computer. First thing I had to do was to wipe it clean. Then a reload (High Sierra was loaded on it). As part of the setup, I stupidly turned on FileVault.

I then went to upgrade to Catalina and I have to wait HOURS while the drive is encrypted. That’s ridiculous. It’s a brand new install with nothing on the encrypted drive but the basic OS install.

However, I did find a neat little trick and figured I would share:

sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0

That disables the low priority mode for a bunch of services like Time Machine and FileVault. The progress bar is still showing hours, but it’s significantly faster. In the few minutes I’ve had it on, the progress bar has moved from ~20% to ~50%!

Great tip for future reference.

Oh, and this does not persist across boots. Not sure I want it on all the time, but in case I do, there is a mechanism to do that via Launch Daemons. I’ll experiment with that on this MBP when I’m running Catalina. I fear that it will not work there because of the new sandboxing of the OS. More on that later.

The lovely Mrs. and I did something for the first time. We left the kids at home alone without a babysitter. This feels like a major life milestone, specially for since I’ve had little ones in my life for 26 years.

We went for sushi at our favorite place, Sushi Nami. As usual, it did not disappoint. William, the head chef, did us a solid by bringing out some rather unique things, including the pictured lobster. He was very happy to see that nothing went to waste and we (I) ate the legs and the inside of the lobster. If you haven’t done that, you are missing out. Eat it like you would a crab. The meat is rather sparse, but what you do get is absolutely delicious.

And sorry for the neon. That’s the Mrs’ idea of cool now days.