Category: Research

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.

Monday Mindset: Help and hindrance, standards

At one time I read product standards as a full-time job. I left that job years ago but I still look at what standards a product says they comply with, or are expected to comply with.

Simplistic description of standards.

Many standards do serve a useful purpose: they set expectations for a product. Depending on the standard and who issued the standard, those expectations might cover safety, features, performance, reliability, or other things.

Some standards are free, some cost a bit to purchase, some cost hundreds of dollars to purchase. Some are fairly straightforward to read, some are very dense. The trickiest seem straightforward when reading them, except there are certain terms which have a specific meaning in the industry or market covered by that standard, and that meaning isn’t well known to people outside that industry or market.

Standards can become a hindrance when the market expects or insists a product has to meet a certain standard. A person might have a good product idea but find themselves in an industry or market where the required standard is very expensive to buy or very expensive to comply with.

Standards are by definition reactive and a reflection of the past. Standards describe what has already been made and how it should be made going forward. I don’t know of any standard which was written about an imaginary product, in the hopes someone would read the standard and create a product to meet that expectation.

Standards are a really good way to show the limitations of language in describing the world.

Standards are initially written with an ideal something-or-other in mind. As time goes by, there are revisions which are almost organic in growth. These revisions usually come from someone trying something which didn’t work, or didn’t work as expected.

If a standard is written very precisely and explicitly, it’s easy for someone to avoid if they want to: find a way to describe their product which is different than that precise definition. Then the standard doesn’t apply. And if the definition is written more broadly, then someone who wants to avoid it can argue about the meaning of the words or the intent of the writers. And the standard still might not apply.

Any product or facility which was built or designed more than five years ago, and is being held to a standard whose initial edition was written more than five years ago, will have at least one place where the language or practices have shifted and it’s possible someone could claim the standard possibly wasn’t being met.

The best way to I found to learn a standard is to write a summary of each clause. That’s also very painful and arduous.

Why am I talking about all of this?

I don’t get to turn my brain off because somewhere a product standard got mentioned. I don’t get to turn my brain off because a product says they comply with a certain standard. And I don’t get to turn my brain off because a product doesn’t say it complies with a certain standard.

Standards can be helpful. Like any other tool, they can also be a hindrance.

Technician Tuesday: How fast do I want life to come at me?

I was originally going to write about another useful Windows program I’d found.

Then I read this latest post on Axis of Easy, by Mark Jeftovic at EasyDNS. Among other things, there’s reports of concerns from U.S. politicians about the amount of information collected from users’ smart phones by TikTok if I install their app.

If I follow the links from Axis of Easy, I go to ZeroHedge and then to a Summit News post written by Steve Watson on November 21, 2022.

I’ve had lots of friends who decide if they doubt or believe news based on whether they like the source. For me, I look at what is said first and then worry about the source later. Can TikTok collect that information if I install it on a smartphone? It’s possible. There are other smartphone apps which have been accused of gathering a lot more information than they need to, and sometimes more information than they admit to in users’ permission settings.

The same problem exists in PC programs. In 2019, there were concerns about the Zoom webconferencing app installing a web server, unasked, on users’ Macintosh PCs. Here’s a story about that from The Register on July 9, 2019, by Tim Anderson.

I don’t currently run GlassWire or WireShark or any similar program. I suppose that might be the next thing for me to do, install something like that to monitor which programs like to gossip and which don’t.

Technician Tuesday: I’ll stick with the old(er), thank you very much.

The Early Days.

I started playing with cameras over three decades ago. At that time, it was only film and 1600 speed 35 mm seemed like a revelation. Yes, it was grainy, but you could shoot indoors without a flash!

Even Then I Was a Curmudgeon.

Later came the digital cameras. I stuck with point and shoot film cameras for the first few years of digital cameras. I didn’t like the limitations of ISO 100 film (only outdoors on a sunny day and if you’re indoors you’d better have a really good flash) and early digital cameras went back to the same limitations.

Eventually I got a DSLR, which was exactly what it said: a Digital version of a Single Lens Reflex camera. It took photographs and saved them to a memory card, but it had the same SLR mechanics. There’s a mirror that lets you look through the lens from the viewfinder, until you actually take a picture. Then the apertures close, the mirror flips up, the apertures open long enough to expose the sensor (CCD in DSLRs, film in the original SLRs), the apertures close and mirror flips down, and then the apertures open and you’re back to looking through the lens via the viewfinder.

I’m Still Opinionated.

The last couple years I’ve seen advertisements for mirrorless cameras. I did some research over the weekend and found out they can use different lenses like SLRs and DSLRs, but they show the view through the lens digitally on the back display screen. In other words, if the power’s not on and the circuitry isn’t talking exactly right, there’s no good way to know exactly what the lens of a mirrorless camera is seeing.

However, they can be smaller than DSLRs.

And then there’s video. The original SLRs did not take videos at all. That was not ever their purpose. The original DSLRs did not take videos either. There are many DSLRs now which do take videos. From what I read, that required quite a bit of work for camera manufacturers to figure out. Again, the original DSLRs were Digital SLRS, and SLRs were still photographs only.

I’m Happy Where I Am. There’s Still Lots to Learn and Explore.

So, am I going to get a mirrorless camera? I don’t expect to get one, not any time in the near future. My DSLRs are working just fine for me. And they still have many depths I haven’t plumbed.

I know video cameras purpose built for video are a whole different world. Just the lenses for those cameras seems to be a while different world. Ugh. I’ll explore those worlds another day.

Technician Tuesday: Checking manufacturer’s support sites.

Entering an online business’s website is similar to walking into a brick-and-mortar store. The newest, highest margin, and hopefully most interesting stuff is where you first walk in.

And like a brick-and-mortar store, sometimes there are some unexpected treasures to be found on the back shelves. The “support” section of a manufacturer’s website is often a good place to look.

Today, I found a more extensive user manual on a camera manufacturer’s support site. And on an embroidery machine manufacturer’s support site, I found a guide for digitally cleaning a machine when it’s time to lend the machine or sell it to someone else.

Mindset Monday: You may already have more than you know

Someone told me years ago that hardware designers made software writers’ lives easy. He said that in the early days of programming, it had been a point of pride to have the cleanest, smallest, fastest code.

Because hardware designers kept increasing memory and speed, software lost the need to be small, fast, and cleanly written. That’s unfortunately led to the bloat in a lot of modern software.

Happily, it’s also led to many programs and pieces of electronic hardware having more features than I would expect. Why does an audio recorder have an built-in tuner that includes setting for six different ways to tune a six-string guitar? I have no idea, but it’s there.

Telling myself that I don’t have everything I need or I need to get something else is a way for my brain to keep me where I am. It’s a way to procrastinate. And many times it’s false. I already have all that I need.

Technician Tuesday: More on how-to guides

Last week I wrote about what a great time it is to look for how-to guides. This week I ran across some how-to guides that have been around for several years.

A while back I purchased a Uniden scanner. I have been looking through Uniden’s support documentation on their website and while very thorough, it has a lot of information for more advanced users. There’s a difference between manuals for “here’s each option and what settings and attachments you need to use for each option” and manuals for “here’s some examples of what you can do with specific options and why you might want to use that option instead of the other three which look very similar.”

(In a completely different industry with completely different customers, this difference in types of manuals is why sewing and embroidery machine manufacturers are now selling “playbooks” in addition to the user manuals that comes with their machines.)

This morning I searched for beginner instructions on how to set up my scanner and found the sites Mark’s Scanners and Scanner Master. Scanner Master is a business specifically for selling and setting up scanners. And yes, they have how-to guides for a beginner which already look more helpful than what I was finding on Uniden’s site.

Technician Tuesday: Now is a great time to look for how-to guides.

It’s a great time to find user guides. In the last five years, I’ve seen really good books published on things like sewing machine repair, and the software programs Audacity, GIMP, and Inkscape. Humble Bundle is a great site to check for bundles of how-to books, including lot of DIY electronics books about Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Beagle Bone.

A friend was trying to find YouTube videos on musical instrument repair, and I found several books published on small sites about that too.

I enjoy reading about farming, plants, and botany. For that, Chelsea Green is a very tempting site to browse through.

This is true for all types of topics I’m not even covering. A lot of the how-to topics I’m finding how-to books on now were topics I searched for ten years ago and not nearly as much was available.

I considered looking up links to include here, but that’s would defeat my point. Learning how to search for topics is a good skill to have and to keep in practice. (I heard someone recently refer to it as “library science.”) There’s a huge amount available relatively recently. It’s a great time to find how-to guides.

Mindset Monday: Always be looking.

There’s nothing I do which is new in the history of the world. There’s a lot I do which is new to me. (Or it was new to me at one time.)

There’s always new ideas on how I can do things. Sometimes I find new ideas in unexpected places. Sometimes the new idea is something I was pretty sure I knew and then I find out a much simpler easier way.

The task might be new to me, but there’s someone out who’s done this for years and has tons of experience. I should go find that person, or find something they wrote, and try to learn all I can.

Another way to put this: “I’m completely self-taught!” is often not the bragging point some people think it is.

Technician Tuesday: Finding a way to regularly backup my files.

For many years I backed up my files by creating copies on other disks or other drives. I only did this when I remembered.

This is still the method many people use.

Over ten years ago I went to a presentation by a woman who was speaking about data, electronic files, backups, and so on. She said that she had talked to multiple parents and grandparents who had lost many early pictures of their children because the pictures were on a cell phone, and nowhere else. The cell phone died, and so did the pictures.

I broke out of my own bad habits after reading comments about businesses destroyed by computer crashes. That finally made me appreciate the difference between time and money. The money to buy a replacement computer probably can be found. The time to recreate all the lost files probably cannot be found.

I did install a program which regularly backs up my computer files, some time last year.

There are multiple ways of creating file backups. Currently I’m using Macrium Reflect which creates a disk image. I can also use a program which will only back up certain files and directories I choose. Maximum PC magazine had a recent article listing various useful programs for Windows, including a backup program. I will start going through that list and seeing what I like and what I don’t.

(That decade-ago lecturer also said if you really want to save photos for posterity, print them out. Nothing digital will be as reliable. I believe that, yet that is something I haven’t yet done myself. That will be a project for late this year or early next year, to start picking which photos I want printed and looking into how to get them printed.)