The Simple Things
I can't help but be satisfied and pleased after making a TV swap this morning. It wasn't brain surgery by any means, but I still find great satisfaction in having done it and the new system being fully up and running with our antenna, Roku, and Raspberry Pi connected to it. I also took the opportunity to vacuum and clean up all the dust that had accumulated behind the TV since the last time I did a cleaning of it a few years ago.
It is, unfortunately, not a dumb TV. But I only connected it to the internet to do a system update, and then removed its access. I ended up going with another LG tv, found a solid deal for it from Target, and was able to pick it up from a store rather than risk it being shipped.
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I just want a dumb TV
Katie and I have had a flat screen TV which we bought shortly after moving to Seattle, a bit over ten years ago. I snagged it as a really good deal from Sam's Club and, overall, it has been fantastic except for one thing. For much of the past ten years, it has had an annoying issue where, randomly, it pop up on screen and say a new connection has been detected and ask if we want to switch to it. This should be a handy feature, right? Except, it's not. We aren't making a new connection. It is detecting ghost signals. Nothing is plugged into the port it believes have a new connection.
As it turns out - this is a known issue when I search the model online and no one has found a solution. So, we just have gotten used to it as a minor annoyance and inconvenience.
However, while we have come to be used to it, I am also embarrassed by it when we have friends over. Like if my car were to keep randomly backfiring while I was giving a friend a ride. They're my friends, they aren't judging me economically or in any way by the TV's annoying interstitial screen, but still... I hate it.
So, with some Christmas money burning a hole in my pocket, I have decided it's time we replace this TV.
But, now I am faced with a new growing frustration: finding a reliable & high quality dumb TV. That is, one which doesn't have its own Internet connection and report the hours I binge and threaten to show me even more ads. As it turns out, these are not prolific in the market.
It is the sad state of the world that TV companies have realized they can derive even more revenue by doing this. In my searches the only "dumb" TV I could find which fit my price range and size specs was from the "Sceptre" brand which is reviewed poorly online.
I could go to Craigslist or FB marketplace, but I fear scammers and buying a bad TV and having no recourse to recoup my money.
Ultimately, I have conceded defeat: finding a new dumb TV is a losing battle. I've accepted that we'll be getting some sort of smart TV, and that I'll simply not use its built in features and I'll leave it offline. This ensures that it can't be fed new ads or share usage data, etc.
Or does it? I fear about the next step for these devices, which would be the now nearly omnipresent Xfinity wifi. What if the manufacturer has worked out a deal that it can always reliably connect to Xfinity regardless of whether I initiate it or not? The discussions I've seen online don't seem to have anyone confirming this sort of thing happening, but it isn't a major leap to guess that it could arrive one day.
I guess we'll cross that bridge when it arrives. But this is an area, like right to repair, I wish we'd get some real champions in Congress and the Senate to push legislation which protects consumers and pushes back on the corporations.
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Q&A with Peter Barrett about Robotics
I think the first two questions are fantastic and on the nose. Peter Barrett is a Palo Alto Venture Capital investor.
TC: What was the biggest robotics story of 2022?
PB: The Great Autonomous Vehicle Capitulation. Ford and VW abandoning robotaxis are another indication that autonomous vehicles are decades from ubiquity. Autonomous vehicles may be inevitable, but they are certainly not imminent despite lots of very clever people and eye-watering amounts of capital pouring into the domain.
We have had autonomous vehicles driven by neural networks since the ’80s. I think we are about halfway there.
The good news is that in the interim, we do have a mature technology that improves traffic 30% and reduces fatalities at intersections by 90%. It is called a roundabout.
What are your biggest robotics predictions for 2023?
The biggest trend in 2023 will be the realization that robots are best used to amplify people rather than replacing them. Robots as collaborators that work for people in human environments is the best way of exploiting the unique capabilities of both.
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Nano thin layer of gold could prevent fogging on glasses and windshields
Sign me up. As a glasses wearer, one of the most infuriating things is when my glasses fog up. If it can prevent smudges, there is literally no price I won't pay.
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The history of the USB thumb drive
I remember floppy disks. I remember ZIP disks. I remember burnable CDs, as well as rewritable CD ROM disks. All were means of transferring data between machines. And all were summarily taken behind the barn and shot in 2000 with the arrival of USB thumb drives.
Who invented the thumb drive? Well, it turns out, it came from Singapore. Or, as the article goes on to delve into, did it?
From the intro:
In 2000, at a trade fair in Germany, an obscure Singapore company called Trek 2000 unveiled a solid-state memory chip encased in plastic and attached to a Universal Serial Bus (USB) connector. The gadget, roughly the size of a pack of chewing gum, held 8 megabytes of data and required no external power source, drawing power directly from a computer when connected. It was called the ThumbDrive.
...
Later that year, Trek went public on the Singapore stock exchange, and in four months—from April through July 2000—it manufactured and sold more than 100,000 ThumbDrives under its own label.
But then:
In April 1999, the Israeli company M-Systems filed a patent application titled "Architecture for a Universal Serial Bus-based PC flash disk." This was granted to Amir Ban, Dov Moran, and Oron Ogdan in November 2000. In 2000, IBM began selling M-Systems' 8-MB storage devices in the United States under the less-than-memorable name DiskOnKey. IBM has its own claim to the invention of an aspect of the device, based on a year-2000 confidential internal report written by one of its employees, Shimon Shmueli. Somewhat less credibly, inventors in Malaysia and China have also claimed to be the first to come up with the thumb drive.
I encourage you to read the full article as it is an interesting look into that era of technology and how taking original credit for something can be difficult.
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"My secret life as an 11-year-old BBS sysop"
My own interaction with BBS' was limited. Primarily I recall my dad using one that was provided by the local computer part supplier - and the only thing I really recall is that they would (cringingly) include a 'blond joke' on the BBS every day. I don't recall him actually ordering anything or doing anything on there - not to say he didn't, but that he was using it for work and I was simply uninterested in it other than the 'joke' that I could (sometimes) understand.
However, the era of the BBS remains a fascination for me. I found this retelling of someone's experiences running one as a kid very interesting and entertaining, and also I see it as something that could have been me. My usages though really came with the world wide web and the internet. I did a fair bit of usage of MUDs over Telnet.
Online time was precious back then. Since most BBSes only had one phone line, you didn't want to hog the line for too long or the sysop might boot you. And there was extra jeopardy involved. Since we were using our regular house telephone line to connect, the odds that my mom would pick up and try to dial out—thus ruining the transfer process—remained very high. But whatever the risks, the thrill of remote projection by computer sunk into me that day and never left.
So true. The era of when we had to utilize the house phone for online access, whether it be the BBS or the Internet, we lived in fear that someone would pick up the phone and cause a disconnection. I was lucky in that my home had two phone lines, one for calls, and one for business faxes & we put the modem on the fax line to minimize the risk.
Writing this, I realize I can still remember both phone numbers. My main house phone was 407-292-0911, and our fax line ended up being 407-292-0225. Memory is a funny thing, it's been over 20 years since we had that fax line. Though, I suppose, I probably continued to see it on business cards and flyers dad would have laying around the house for years afterwards.
In those days, I used the same password on every BBS I called, including my long-distance friend's BBS. As a result, he and his friends had my login credentials to every BBS, and they began logging into them as me and posting mean public messages under my name, and starting arguments with other people. When I discovered that, I was devastated. I tried to defend myself, but it was impossible. My friend and his buddies played with my name and character as if it were a puppet, making fun of me and humiliating me in front of others.
Around that same time, I had another friend named Radon, who designed my custom BBS menus (the same ones I use, albeit modified, to this day), and he regularly called The Cave and provided updates. Somehow, my long-distance friend and his crew knew about what we were doing. He called in impersonating Radon one night, uploaded an EXE file, and said something like, "Here are the new menus you wanted." I trusted him and ran the file.
It was New Year's Eve 1992, and I sat and watched as a Trojan called "Schizophrenia" wiped my hard drive, destroying everything I had built.
Just brutal. I can easily imagine this and put myself in that position. Again, so much of what was written echoes with me as a kid who came naively into an adult playground and would sometimes be met with cruelty. This is heartbreaking.
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Firefox launching on-machine translations so that you no longer have to use the cloud
It wasn't just Mozilla to be fair:
Firefox Translations was developed with The Bergamot Project Consortium, coordinated by the University of Edinburgh with partners Charles University in Prague, the University of Sheffield, University of Tartu, and Mozilla. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 825303.
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EU okays 5G equipment on planes
Within the European Union, airlines will be able to install the latest 5G technology on their aircraft, allowing passengers to use their smartphones and other connected devices just as they do on the ground.
The European Commission has adapted the legislation on mobile communications to the most modern standards. As a result, 5G coverage can also be made available on aircraft.
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Schmetz on TV
My household has two Raspberry Pis.
One, 'Klopp,' runs our home automation, spam blocking, etc. The other, 'Schmetz,' had been a little dev machine but I've since stopped using that (at least for the time being.) So it's been sitting largely idle for a while.
After acquiring a mini-HDMI to HDMI cable, Schmetz has been relocated to the TV. As I explained on Mastodon, primarily to easily enable some streaming to the TV (Twitch which cannot stream on Roku, thanks Amazon.)
It will also prove useful on days where I need to stream multiple games of soccer, etc.
Now I need to update our Harmony remote to properly handle inputs.
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Explaining how touchscreens actually work
In 2nd grade, we had a man come to my class and show off a medical computer which had a touch screen on the monitor. I was a precocious kid who grew up around technology, and I asked if the monitor worked by the heat off our fingertips and the man was very kind as he explained they did it then based off a grid of lasers across the screen.
He finished explaining it though by saying, "But, when you're older, you need to come work for me."
I was sad I never got his name or a card, that sort of encouragement has stuck with me over the decades.
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With news of Google Stadia's imminent shutdown, a game dev mourns on Reddit
He and the team had spent 4 months working on getting their game successfully ported to Stadia and were just about to finish the process. Just brutal.
[Disclosure: Out of an abundance of caution, I'll disclose I work for another game company, Wizards of the Coast. We are not in any way directly tied to this story, but given that it is in the gaming sphere, I felt it prudent to call this out.]
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Today's Amazon delivery:
- Bluetooth keyboard that I can use with my Duo 2 (and other devices, potentially, but primarily for the phone.)
- Eyeglass wipes to get rid of the smudges, dust, and dead skin which continuously collect on my eyeglasses.
- 3M anti-slip material so I can apply some small bits to my trackball which has a propensity for sliding off my laptop when I transition it from my lap to the table next to me.
I absolutely love my Duo 2, but for doing any writing beyond quick notes or social media posts, I simply find the typing experience on screen untenable. This Logitech keyboard has a trough for the devices to sit in, and it can be used to connect to up to 3 different devices thanks to the toggle.
So, the idea is that when I am at work on lunch, or out somewhere else with my daily bag, the keyboard unlocks the Duo 2 as a full computer-esque replacement.
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There are interesting and exciting opportunities for how AI/Machine Learning can help Indigenous people protect their homes
This is not anything unusual or unbelievable, but it is an interesting confluence of technology and those people who most care about protecting their corner of the environment. One example in the article:
One of the first AI-based Indigenous conservation projects, undertaken by Cornell University, was co-developed with the Coral Gardeners, from Mo’orea, French Polynesia. Founded in 2017, this Indigenous group cultivates heat-resistant super corals and transplants them onto damaged parts of the reef. Cornell provides the software to track the sounds of the many organisms making their home here and, working also with the University of Hawaii, integrates them into a recording platform, ReefOS, a network of sensors and cameras collecting visual and acoustic data 24 hours a day. The AI-mediated soundscape tells the on-site respondents whether the reefs are starting to sound like healthy and stable reef systems, or whether additional restoration efforts are needed.
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An electrical engineer explains what a semiconductor is
Reading this gave me serious flashbacks. In high school, while I was trying to figure out what I wanted to be, my dad called upon a family friend who worked for Lucent (a chip maker.) We went over to his house one evening and he began explaining what he did. I grew up with computers and I loved them, but that evening quickly showed me I was not interested in computer engineering as I ended up actually dozing off as he talked. I felt so embarassed and bad. They also gave me a tour of the local Lucent facilities on another day.
I find the technology fascinating but it just doesn't click with me. I took a computer engineering course at Georgia Tech and thank god for my friend Jay, otherwise I would have absolutely failed. The underlying logic components of gates and everything makes sense and I enjoy that, but the steps going from that to physical component is where it loses me.
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"Drone Contraband Deliveries Are Rampant at US Prisons"
This seems wholly expected, but interesting to see it confirmed. With a new head of US Prisons, I'm hoping we see reforms from top to bottom (obviously will require larger decisions and changes to the law) but will also be curious how they go about combatting this.
I wonder if we'll see the US Prison system will use falconry as their tool of choice? Or perhaps they'll begin utilizing anti-drones.
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"US regulators will certify first small nuclear reactor design"
Many of the small modular designs involve different technology from traditional reactors, such as the use of molten uranium salts as the reactor fuel. NuScale has a much more traditional design, with fuel and control rods and energy transported through boiling water. Its operator-free safety features include setting the entire reactor in a large pool of water, control rods that are inserted into the reactor by gravity in the case of a power cut, and convection-driven cooling from an external water source.
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Meta sees first ever earnings decline and suffers resulting stock dip
Far from putting the company at risk, but it signals that the company is really beginning to struggle. The next six months should be fascinating.
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200 Terabyte SSDs Coming
Micron has invented a new chip which will enable massive SSD drives for computers. That is, to be a little technical on this blog - NUTS.
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Wonderful wonderful art
Just watch. It reminds me of a wonderful tech demo years ago about the possibilities for digital publications, the idea that you could have a page of a newspaper then zoom in on an ad for a car and then that ad gives much more data, specs, graphics, etc, to zoom in and engage with.
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"It Goes by the Name 'Bedtime Procrastination' and You Can Probably Guess What It Is"
I'm in this article and I don't like it. - As the meme goes.
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