Category Archives: Computers and technology
That was fun!
The blog threw a virtual rod.
I tried logging on Thursday morning per the normal routine and get errors.
I get an email: “However, I checked and noticed that there is no A record in the domain”.
I didn’t even know I needed one.
I found out that my domain name is hosted by one server provider and my blog is hosted by another.
I just tried – 5/3/25 17:20, and got in to post this.
We’ve grown over the years. I have a lot of stuff on line with the server – pictures and text. I am forced to go with a more expensive plan for hosting.
But here we are.
A.I.
Okay, let’s start with an established fact: I’m OLD. Seventy-four. I’ve watched technologies progress over seven decades. I’ve seen paths predicted that has failed to develop (yet). Flying cars, anyone?
When I graduated high school (and dinosaurs roamed the earth) adding machines and calculators were electromechanical devices requiring either mechanical cranking or access to a wall socket for power. They were out there, expensive.
We sat in classrooms and learned the progression through the world of mathematics – adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, fractions, decimals, all before we got through elementary school. Then came algebra and geometry and trig and calculus.
Somewhere in the early 1970’s the handheld pocket calculator showed up and became cheap enough for personal use. This knowledge quickly became a trope in the classroom: “But teacher, why do I need to learn how to add four-digit numbers. I have a calculator.”
And the teacher (back then you couldn’t BE a teacher unless you could add and subtract) would smile wanly and reply, “Little Johnny, what if your batteries die?”
Indeed. I moved from slide rule to scientific calculator, although I kept a slide rule in my desk at work. I used it on occasion just to wow the youngsters.
Everybody at my level in the company had a computer and every computer had MS Office which meant that I had access to MS Excel. If one had some small amount of numeracy (like ‘literacy’ except for numbers) and a few pointers, one could use Excel to perform calculations.
Of course there were caveats: You had to know what you had, what you wanted to have, and some idea of what correct answers might look like. An idiot with a spreadsheet is still an idiot. Give that idiot access to MS PowerPoint and you can move him into management.
Now we have “artificial intelligence”. Ask a question, get an answer, NOW. Somebody (or some THING) has done the legwork for you.
“But teacher, how come I gotta memorize this stuff about history. All I gotta do is ask Alexa or Siri.”
And everybody on that big hump of the intelligence bell curve will be asking the question, supported by management and leadership who are right there beside them on the curve, and they’ll get the same old answers, approved by those before them. No more Edisons or Teslas or Wrights or von Brauns. “Alexa says…”
Lawn care
It’s a quarter to four here right now. Temperature is ninety-four degrees with a heat index of 104. Yard needs cutting. The cutter, me, is a seventy-four year old fat man who has better sense, so I’m not out there pushing a mower myself.
If rain hasn’t kept me from cutting him loose, I let Javier do it for me. This is Javier.
Javier is a Mammotion Luba 5000. Why “Javier”? Because many of the lawncare professionals I see are of Hispanic descent.
Javier is mostly programmed by me to operate within the boundaries of my lawn. That meant that I had to walk around the periphery of my lawn, controlling Javier with an app on my iPhone, ‘teaching’ him the boundaries. Other models of robotic mowers depend on a buried boundary wire. Not Javier. I also had to walk him around no-go areas such as trees and flower beds.
After he’s shown the area, I go to the app and tell him to get after it. In the back yard, he’s on his own. He scuttles around in a pattern determined by programming, including cutting height, pattern overlap between passes, direction of cut, and a few other parameters. When his batter gets low, he goes back to his home charging station to recharge, the after charging, he picks up where he left off. When he’s finished, I get a text message.
In the front yard he does the same, with the addition of me sitting in the garage watching lest somebody on the street gets the thought of “duuude, I need me one-a these!”
He’s a conversation starter in this case. I’ve had several people stop in to talk about him, sidewalk strollers and street traffic from “Look, Mommy! It’s a cute little robot!” to “I been driving by and seein’ that thing. Can you tell me about it?”
And he’s a whole lot cooler than me out there pushing a mower.
Without Comment
Forty Years of Mac!
If you read Today in History on this blog you will note that forty years ago today Apple ran an ad during the SuperBowl announcing the roll-out of the Macintosh computer.
I didn’t buy mine until a year later and it cost a fortune at a time when I was working as an industrial electrician. I’d had computers before. I bought a Timex-Sinclair 1000 when they came on the market for less than a hundred bucks, plugged it into a portable black and white TV for a monitor and introduced myself to computing, which, in that day, meant programming in BASIC. I did a lot of that. Added a cassette recorder so I could save and reload programs I’d written as well as run programs I’d paid for.
Next step up was… Well, I WANTED an electric typewriter, one that would allow me to back up and correct errors from my poor typing, so I went to a local office equipment store.
Which also happened to be an Apple dealer.
The salesdude did indeed show me a Japanese electric typewriter which met my requirements, but “While you’re here, let me show you word processing like you’ve never seen it before.
There on the table was a 128k (total RAM) Mac with an external floppy drive, giving you TWO 400K 3.5” floppies, AND an Apple ImageWriter 9-pin dot matrix printer.
I sat down, got shown a couple of things about a mouse and icons and in two minutes I was in the middle of a word processing program that was intuitive, and not only that, but what I did on the screen at 72 dots per inch went straight to the printer with a couple of clicks and printed out exactly what was on the screen.
I bought one. And an external disk drive. And an ImageWriter printer. And never regretted it. I later opened that ‘do not open’ box and upgraded from 128K to 512K RAM using the instructions from Doctor Dobbs’ Journal. (Remember THAT?)
You gotta know that at that point in the rest of the world’s computing, opening up a program on a DOS or CPM (remember that?) machine was a series of keystrokes that, if you missed one, got you “SYNTAX ERROR” and nothing, or if successful, got you to your program where if you wanted italics or boldface you had to resort to such niceties as “dot-commands”. You didn’t see your work on screen, not did your fruitless attempts at indent and justification on screen translate to what your printer did.
About that printer: Pick one. There were dozens out there. Choose a port -serial or parallel. Install a driver, a lower to mid-level geek event. Fonts and typefaces resided in your printer. Deal with it.
Apple bypassed them all. First plug and play hardware in wide distribution. No more esoteric command line interface.
Apple fought an uphill battle with the Mac, but they’re still around, and much of the howl and uproar about “nobody will take graphic user interfaces and mouse input seriously” is history.
And it’s been forty years. I’m doing this blog on a MacBook Pro. When I go to work, I’m in a Windows world, but there’s the mouse and there’s the graphic user interface, and we KNOW who opened the floodgates.
PS: I was fluent in DOS. I and a couple of buddies briefly had a business assembling and selling “IBM clones” and I carried around some floppies at work, often taking the time to load programs on unattended computers. You can do fun stuff with “AUTOEXEC.BAT”.
Food for Thought – 10 January 2021
Working–
–“From Home” version.
I told people I’d start worrying when the company **I** work for starts sending people home and cancelling projects.
I’m working from home. Thanks to VPN, I have access to all the applications I need to do the administrative portion of my job, and, heaven forbid, that included the platform by which we complete a sloppy huge portion of OSHA-mandated annual safety training.
In a rare display of sentience (or it might’ve been akin to the muscle jerks of a freshly dead frog) the safety department dumped the entire year’s mandatory computer-based training out all at once instead of dribbling a few topics out with each new quarter. Accordingly I am good on that shit very important training for the year.
I’m able to track the financials on my projects. I have email and phone connectivity. I’m fully functional, although Sweetie’s bearing a portion of the charm I usually reserve for my co-workers.
Skill Set
Once upon a time, in order to survive and excel at a given discipline one, needed some certain levels of technical knowledge. In my field, if one understood things like ampacities of conductors and Ohm’s Law and how to waltz around a power triangle, and a few other things, one was on firm ground.
No more. I’m a “project manager” and the success in that field of endeavor is NOT just making sure the expenditures stay below budget, it’s navigating the vague, slithery pathways of SAP, the program the Germans sold us to get even with us not letting them keep France.
Hardly a week goes by without a change. I came back to work after a week off, applied a required update, found that the sub-programs I needed had disappeared. In a fit of “misery loves company” that same sup-program disappeared from EVERYBODY’S computer, so I wasn’t alone.
During one of the updates, ‘they’ changed its name so that the link we previously used was no longer functional. Four hours later one of my (more ambitious) co-workers found what they’d renamed it, so I updated the link and now I’m back to tiptoeing through the halls of beancounterdom.
THAT’S more important than actually getting motors to spin.
And I -DO- consider myself more than passably adept around computers.
Food for Thought – 17 March 2019
Prusa!
I’m having a lot of fun playing with the 3D printing thing.
Let me tell you something. You can get in on this ‘hobby’ for a a couple of hundred bucks. There are literally scores of printers sold out of China in the $150-300 range. I own a couple of varieties of Ender 3. That’s part of the game – these machines are open source, most of the hardware is fairly standard off-the-shelf, and that’s all it takes, like the case of the ‘Ender’, several manufacturers provide essentially the same kit for the same price.
All it takes is tweaking. And tinkering. And troubleshooting. Forget ‘tech support’ from the factory. If you buy one of these things, you’re going to live on Youtube videos and online forums for support when you have issues.
And if you’re buying these Chinese machines, you WILL have issues. I’ve banged my head over several different ones, sometimes due to incomplete or incomprehensible instructions, sometimes due to missing or broken parts, sometimes because the design changed faster than the instruction book.
And then I bit the bullet and bought a Prusa.
That’s a game-changer. Yeah, okay, I can buy three or four Chinese machines, some with BIGGER working volumes. Some of them will go together from the box in a couple of hours.
The Prusa I3 Mk3 is a kit. Took me seven hours to assemble. The thing comes with an assembly manual. Big deal, right? They ALL do. The difference? This thing is detailed, very instructive, and printed in REAL English, not Chenglish. And if you want MORE information on each step of construction, their website has detailed pictures of each step, along with comments by people who’ve assembled the kits themselves.
So, okay… The kit’s together. You plug it in, turn it on, and IT CHECKS YOUR WORK! Does a self-check. then it takes you through a very well-explained and coached (prompts show up on the unit’s display) bed-leveling and adjustment of the printhead height.
And then it prints. Well. I’ve had it for two weeks. I’ve done prints that lasted over multiple days – it’s a slow process – and NEVER had a failure. I can’t say that about other printers I own. This one’s GOOD.
Here’s an example:
And another:
If you want to PRINT instead of tweak and tune, the Prusa’s definitely worth the expense.
Fiddly Bits
I’ve always loved fiddly technologies. Fortunately, I chose a career that lets me do it that for a lving.
On the home side, though, I have a few: Shooting – handloading the ammunition thereof, right up to casting bullets. Molten metals are always fun.
Communications – I’m a licensed amateur radio operator, have been since the mid 1970’s. I was an early adopter of digital communications, going on line with a computer in 1985, running a dial-up computer BBS for a while.
And 3D printing. Very fiddly. Not as bad as when I first started in it, though it’s gotten a lot better in the five years since I assembled my first printer fram eout of laser-cut plywood , adding hardware and finally getting to the point where I could print some things.
Today I have a couple of printers. One of them did this last night:
That was printed on a Creality Ender 3. It’ looks like this:
Comes in a mostly assembled form. Took me an hour to get it together, another twenty minutes to get he bed leveled (one of MANY fiddly bits) and after that, I was running the first print. It’s cheap – a couple of hundred bucks, but then you need raw materials – filament, that runs from fifteen bucks a kilo, on up.
For those of slightly less inclination to get all technical, here’s a step back from the precipice, the Flashforge Finder.
Its looks belie its friendliness. By making it simple, they give you fewer choices, but they do make it easy. From opening the box to first print is half an hour. Your computer is needed, but the set-up is easy, it’ll do wi-fi for that, and the included software is easy to use.
Call me a pusher.
Technology toys
I have a deep interest in technological hobbies. I’m a dabbler in 3D printing for some years. I own a laser cutter, I have desktop full of amateur radio gear, that sort of thing.
Then I saw an article about a different 3D printing technology. The ones I owned are FDM – Fused Deposition Modeling. Think of a computer controlled glue gun, where the ‘glue’ is a plastic. It works, but even the best results show the tiny layers and lines where the plastic is extruded from a nozzle four-tenths of a millimeter in diameter and laid down in specific patterns.
There is another way. (There are several, actually, but I bought into this one) It’s DLP – Digital Light Processing. It’s pretty gee-whiz stuff.
You start out with a resin that goes from liquid to solid in the presence of ultra-violet light. Hanging on this idea, all we have to do is control what the light touches and when it touches it. This makes for a pretty simple printer.
We get a UV light source. that’s easy – LED’s cover every bit of the light spectrum.
We get a display that can show a cross-section of a single layer of a model. Many of you don’t know it, but there are a lot of high-resolution LCD displays out there. They work by turning on and off individual pixels. We can see this because most displays have a backlight stuck behind them. The DLP printer doesn’t ahve that backlight, it has an array of UV LEDs. If we can turn on the pixels of the display, turning them from transparent to opaque, then we can control what light gets to the resin.
The resin goes in a tub with a transparent bottom, sitting atop the LCD display which is in turn sitting atop the UV light array.
Now we can lower a plate into the pool of resin, bringing it to just above the transparent floor of the resin tub. How close? Try a tenth of a millimeter or less.
Then we send a signal to the LCD to turn off and on certain pixels and turn the light on. The resin in the tub hardens and sticks to the plate. The lgihts turn off, the plate moves up a tenth of a millimeter, and the pricess is repeated until each of several dozen to several hundred slices is hardened, each time letting the build plate move just a little higher, until the print is complete.
With the printing complete, the model is washed clean of uncured resin (Karo syrup thickness) and it is then subjected to a bit more UV light for final cure. The sun works well for this, as do artificial devices that are common because a trend in ladies’ nail polish is this new UV-cured material.
Advantage? Detail. Like 600 dots per inch detail. If you can put it on a computer screen in black and white, it can print. The layers are distinguishable with the naked eye only under magnification. They come out of the printer with great surfaces that the FDM machines just won’t do yet.
Example? Here’s one:
You can click the picture and get the full-sized one and zoom in on it. If you zoom into optimum size you can just see the light reflecting off the tiny layers this model is built of.
Disadvantages:
Slow. That two by two inch cube started printing when I went to bed last night and printed for over four hours.
It’s messy. Like I said, coming out of the machine, the model is coated with a layer of undeveloped resin the consistency of pancake syrup. I washed it off with isopropyl alcohol before finishing the UV treatment, and in the process of getting the print plate off the machine, one tends to get drips of the somewhat toxic (wear gloves, keep uncured resin off skin, out of eyes, etc.) resin all over. Paper towels cleans that up, but it’s still a mess.
Resin’s pricey: Depending on who sells it, anywhere from forty to eighty dollars for half a liter – just over a pint. It does come in colors and various formulations, some harder, some more flexible, and if you want to pay, there are high-temperature and other formulations, so you can do a model here and turn it into the mold for jewelry or dental work or whatever.
So it’s something to play with. The model in the picture? Looked like something I could try that would push the capabilities a bit further than I could attempt with one of my old FDM machines. there’s no way one of them could have turned those corners that sharply.
What can I do with it? Make things. I may make a soap dish or something.
Playing around…
I’ve always liked sticking my fingers into technology.
In high school, I started flying, and I had a strong interest in energetic chemistry. Had my own plane for a while, a Baby Lakes.
My chosen career, after the Army, was electrical power and controls.
I bought my first computer in 1982 – a Timex-Sinclair 1000. My second computer, in 1985, was that happy little toaster, the original Macintosh, in which I did that ‘hardware hacker’ thing, bumping up the 128k RAM to 512k.
I and a couple of buddies made some good money making and selling ‘IBM clones’ in 1988-89.
I’ve dabbled in 3-D printing. I have a few of ’em.
And now I’ve started playing with lasers. Bought a laser cutter. Here’s the result of my first day of playing around:
That’s lasered into a bit of quarter-inch birch plywood. I can see where such a thing might be of some monetary benefit. Changing dates, adding names, etc., is pretty easy.
Or I could just do art for my own use. I hope John Cox forgives me for this one:
I cut that one on a ceramic tile that cost me twenty-two cents at Lowes, which left me with the image in white, but incised into the surface of the tile. I filled the black parts in with a Sharpie. Ain’t selling those unless I work a deal with John Cox, who drew the original.