Month: January 2023

Technician Tuesday: To Learn a Skill, Solve a Problem.

Don’t be afraid to try something. The easiest way I have found to learn something is to try and find a problem that you need to solve.

Mark KR6ZY, interviewed by Jeremy KF7IJZ, in the Ham Radio Workbench podcast, episode 19 “Listener Projects”, dated March 14 2017. Quote is from about 1 hour 53 minutes into the podcast.

I was going to write something else today. Then I heard this podcast the other night. I agree with Mark and Jeremy. If I want to learn a skill, the best way to motivate myself is to use the skill to fix a problem which is bothering me.

Mindset Monday: Use the Physical World as a Model for Your Expectations and Habits.

I usually leave the house with a coat, and a bag to hold my wallet, cellphone, and writing pad. If it’s a nice day, I might take along a digital camera in case I see something I want to photograph. I’ll also take a magazine or book if I might have some free time.

If I’m going to an exercise class I’ll take a bag with my gear for that class. A laptop and associated power cord and mouse in a backpack come along also, if I think I’ll need them.

I don’t take each of those things with me each time I leave the house.

When I install new programs on a personal computer, there’s often an option to add that program to the startup programs. Rarely are those programs a stand-alone executable: there will be background processes and programs they will start up in turn, just like I don’t take a laptop without taking a power cord and a separate bag or backpack to hold the laptop and power cord.

A personal computer with a ton of programs that start up with the computer takes a long time to start up. Similarly, if every time I leave the house I take everything I might possibly need, ever, it will take me a long time to leave the house.

When people ask me for help with their computers or other technology, rarely do they try to compare it to what they already know and do. Technology is a magical thing that they “don’t understand” and wish it would “just work.”

It’s not magic. It’s like any other tool.

Technician Tuesday: Two surprises in old technology

Recently I mentioned to some younger friends that certain types of art reminds me of computer screensavers. My friends mentioned they had never really seen the point of screensavers. They were surprised when I told them the purpose is in the name: “screensaver.” Older computer and television monitors would permanently burn an image into the screen if that image was constantly on the screen. A screensaver would vary what was shown on the screen so it would save the screen.

I was surprised to recently read that FM, meaning frequency modulated. radio was much easier with vacuum tubes. The comment I read was FM radio could be set up with far fewer vacuum tubes than it currently takes with modern solid-state technology.

Mindset Monday: Do You Actually Believe in What You Are Doing?

A company makes an item, or multiple items, and their finances look great. The finances fall apart. People dig into the books and find the company had stopped focusing on making money from making the items they were supposedly in business to sell.

Instead, the company had started making money from fancy footwork in their finances.

Fancy Financial Footwork in digital currency miners

The first place I heard about this recently was in Nathaniel Whitmore’s podcast The Breakdown with NLW. It’s a CoinDesk podcast, the specific episode is “Where Bitcoin Mining goes from here” from January 8 2023. In that episode Whitmore refers to the January 1 2023 CoinDesk article “What Will It Take for Bitcoin Mining Companies to Survive in 2023?” by George Kaloudis.

Before going on, I know bitcoin and crypto currency are controversial topics for many people.

The principle still applies. If a company makes money not from selling the things they claim to be making for a profit, but instead from playing financial games, something is deeply wrong. Kaloudis attributes bitcoin miners sitting on bitcoin and playing financial games to make money to two conditions: the price of the good supposedly being produced is increasing, and the cost of capital is low.

Fancy Financial Footwork in GE, which used to make physical things

I suppose General Electric’s financial arm had similar excuses in the 2000’s, but what excuse did GE’s top management have?

The second podcast I’m going to link is Jim Grant’s Grant’s Current Yield podcast. The episode is “Destruction of Value” from January 19 2023. Grant and his co-hosts interviewed William D. Cohan about his book Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon.

General Electric (more precisely the General Electric which existed for most of its history and made many types of machines and physical goods) and Bitcoin are about as far apart as anything technical I can think of. Grant’s Interest Rate Observer and CoinDesk are probably as far apart as any two nonfiction publications I can think of.

Yet, the conversations were similar. Cohan had found that General Electric was more focused on GE Finance than the other parts of GE which made things. It was easier to make money from money than to make money from jet engines and whatever else GE made.

Large amounts of GE’s profits were coming from their finance arm. They financed an astounding amount in commercial paper markets. At one point, before things started crashing in 2007, they were one of the largest issuers of commercial paper.

This has nothing to do with the physical goods GE was once known for making. At the time of the Grant’s Current Yield episode, Cohan said GE is still breaking down into two or three smaller subsidiaries.

Why I am writing about this.

I use this blog to write about people using technology. There’s technology I use, and some of that I write about. I write about people who talk to me about using technology. I’ve written about people who ask me for recommendations on which technology I think they should use.

The theme I keep coming back to is the user of technology being honest with themselves. What do they want to do? Why do they want to do that? How are they planning on doing that? What results have they gotten in the past? What results are they hoping to get in future? And what results are they actually getting in the present?

It’s when people are not honest with themselves that I see the biggest problems with their use of technology. And it’s when people are not honest with themselves or others that I see the biggest problems in their lives in general.

Making money from moving money around is fundamentally different from making things and selling those things. As Cohan mentioned in the Grant’s Current Yield episode, making money from money is regulated in very different ways from making money from making things. A company which does one while saying they do the other is being dishonest at some level. And it will cause problems.

Technician Tuesday: Velcro cable ties

I would not have thought Velcro cable ties would make such a huge change to my life, but they have. I have years of accumulated cables for various electronics, past and present.

No matter where those cables are, they usually look messy. I bought some Velcro cable ties. I am very surprised at how much they help control the tangling and clutter.

I’m also surprised at how meditative and pleasant it’s been to go through a pile of cables, separate, straighten, and tie everything up in neat bundles. It’s been great.

Mindset Monday: The Cloud and TANSTAAFL

The word “cloud” has long existed in the English language. “The cloud” took on a technological meaning several years ago.

The concept of “the cloud” was originally met with skepticism. It seemed unlikely that companies would throw away the investments they’d made in servers and the infrastructure to support servers and would entrust their data to servers that they didn’t have physical access to and which were run and maintained by people who weren’t their employees.

The skeptics were wrong. Even though “the cloud” means a computer owned by someone who isn’t you, once all the cyberpunk and world of tomorrow imagery is stripped away, “the cloud” became so popular it’s a multi-billion dollar business for multiple companies.

And yet, problems remain.

Today I read the article “Basecamp details ‘obscene’ $3.2 million bill that caused it to quit the cloud” by Simon Sharwood in The Register (article dated 2023 Jan 16). That article led me to “The world was promised ‘cloud magic’. So much for that fairy tale” also by Simon Sharwood (article dated 2022 Nov 2), “VC’s paper claims cost of cloud is twice as much as running on-premises. Let’s have a look at that” by Tim Anderson (article dated 2021 Jun 02), and “AWS Free Tier, where’s your spending limit? ‘I thought I deleted everything but I have been charged $200′” also by Tim Anderson (article dated 2021 May 28), all in The Register.

If it wasn’t obvious from the titles, the common theme of these four articles is “the cloud” can be expensive.

Why am I writing about this in a Mindset post?

I believe one of the eternal human temptations is for each of us to believe we are uniquely special. Sure, there are rules which almost all of us agree apply to almost all of us, almost all of the time. But there is the temptation to then say under our breaths “but not to me.”

TANSTAAFL means There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

The illusory promise of “the cloud” was the cost of hiring people who understood servers and server infrastructure, and the cost of buying, installing, using, and maintaining servers and their supporting infrastructure, could be farmed out to a different company and it would be cheaper and simpler. Even though there would be additional layers of cost and overhead because it was someone else’s employees and physical installation which was being used, that would still be better and cheaper.

I’ll even admit for many companies it was better and cheaper. For many companies, it’s still better and cheaper for right now.

There (still) Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. The servers cost money and so does the electricity, air conditioning, security, internet connections, employees to monitor and maintain the servers, and everything else which comes with having a data center.

Eventually someone has to pay that price. It’s very unlikely the cloud companies are running their businesses as charities or non-profits. And that means the cost comes back to the customers.

Technician Tuesday: Technicians Are Necessary.

I have been in many conversations where a lot of ideas and concepts were thrown around, but discussion of whether it would actually work was limited. If I pointed out times something had already been tried, and failed, and it sounded a lot like the ideas being discussed, people got uncomfortable. Sometimes the discomfort was sadness or anger that I was raining on their parade, or being too nitpicky. I preferred that to the times when the answer was “You don’t understand, I’m taking the thirty thousand foot view, so I’m not really getting into details right now.

Because of that, I created the category “Technician Tuesday” when I started this blog. Ideas are great, but how are they being implemented? How am I using technology around me? How do someone else’s ideas interact with the rest of the world.

Today, I listened to a recording of a discussion between Dr. Temple Grandin and Dr. Jordan Peterson. It was all about the importance of practical hands-on knowledge and experimentation. Applications of ideas are the true test of those ideas. A lot of that knowledge and experimentation is being lost.

The discussion was very interesting and very troubling. I’ll be buying a copy of Dr. Grandin’s most recent book.

Mindset Monday: Practice Makes Perfect, or At Least Better. Part 2 of 2.

This is a follow-up of last week’s post.

Here are some of the places I’ve seen recommendations to intentionally copy other people’s work to better my own practice:

  • A book on the modern atelier movement, where the author wrote a significant part of a four-year curriculum was devoted to drawings that are copies of works of the old masters. This helped the artist learn how previous artists had solved problems in their paintings.
  • A book on handwriting, which mentioned copy books. Those were books where people would write down famous quotes, their favorite quotes, and other quotes, and carry it with them. It helped them with handwriting practice. It also helped them to always have a handy reference of what had been written before.
  • If I look online, I can find several arrangements and analyses of famous classical music pieces, most of them centuries old.

In each case, the recommendation is to get better by copying particularly skillful examples of what came before.

I’ve even read comments that art has to be grounded in what came before, or it runs the risk of having no reference or meaning to the viewer today.

If I’m buying something I want to use, and I want it to make my life easier, ease of use and ease of learning how to use it matter. And for that, the designer probably needs to have spent some time analyzing and copying already existing works.

Technician Tuesday: Some last flashlight links, and then I’m done with this topic for a while.

While I was looking up flashlights and flashlight standards earlier (here and here), I found a couple of sites which have more information about flashlights and ratings.

Both seem to focus on the 2009 version of the flashlight standard. I found both to be interesting. The first is Flashlight Wiki.

And there is also LED Resource.

I have a relative who swears the new LED flashlights which use sets of AAA batteries last for a shorter amount of time than older flashlights with incandescent bulbs and C or D batteries. I haven’t done any testing on that. And I don’t know of anyone else who has done testing on this. If I find someone who did, I’ll post about it.

Mindset Monday: Practice Makes Perfect, or At Least Better. Part 1 of 2.

Earlier last week I opened a computer program I hadn’t used in a while. Even though it was a program I’d used frequently in the past, it took me a few minutes to get my bearings. I had to look through menus and find where the menu options and commands I wanted to use were located.

Fortunately, I was working by myself and had the time to rediscover where everything was located. Every program has a logic to how the menus are organized and how actions are named. I had time to remind myself of how all that worked.

But what if I had been asked to demonstrate this program for someone else. What if I had been asked to teach someone else how to use this program?

I definitely would need some time to practice.

It is not unusual to practice a skill.

It is not unusual for myself or anyone else, even though I know many people who expect themselves and everyone else they work with to load into personal memory the use of a program as quickly as that program loads into computer memory.

I believe this is a relatively new attitude. I recently read a book about couture sewing, which is very high-end and expensive sewing, usually done by hand. And the recommendation in that book was to practice on a piece of scrap fabric before working on the actual garment. It’s quite common for crochet and knit patterns to recommend swatching to practice the pattern with the yarn being used.

It’s not unusual in many areas of life for practice to be recommended, or even mandated. For high profile jobs in technology, classes and books will often recommend practicing before performing in front of crowds or clients. It is usually people who use technology only in passing who expect that no practice and no reminders are needed.