Tag: Tools

Time For Me To Get To Work

I write in this blog about different aspects of technology and different ways of looking at how to use technology. I post links to other sites, about technology, which interest me.

Honestly, I could have done that in a diary and skipped the whole process of setting up a website. Using pencil and paper to record thoughts is pretty old technology. It’s definitely stood the test of time.

I started a blog, which has multiple steps, to learn more about how to set up websites in the current year. I’ve decided it’s time to remember that and get back to work.

There’s lots of sources, I think it’s more important to pick one and get started. So I’m going to try Khan Academy. I took a look at their basic courses on websites the other day. It’s under the heading “Computer Programming,” which I didn’t expect. They advocate learning JS before learning HTML and CSS. I didn’t expect that. I’ll start there, and see how it goes.

Technology Won’t Get Someone To A Goal They Haven’t Defined

I created this blog to be about how a person can make their technology work for them. Personally, I like technology, gadgets, and tools.

However, I often talk to friends who want help with some piece of technology. “I just want it to work” is a common statement. In my opinion, they are working for their technology more than it is working for them.

Some of the biggest difficulties I’ve seen people have with technology is they haven’t decided what they’re aiming for. They don’t know how their steps today will get them to a place they want to be in the future.

A Simple Example

As a very simple example, one restaurant I frequent has a loyalty program. The loyalty program requires installing an app on a smartphone. I sympathize with why the restaurant wants their customers to install an app. There’s customer profiles, direct to customer messages, tracking trend with regular customers, detailed data on what dishes are doing well. But why would I, the customer, want to download the app?

There are some rewards for the loyalty program, discounts on dishes or next visit or something-or-other. I read through the apps list of what information it tracks, and honestly it was more than I wanted to share with a restaurant app.

Data harvesting aside, each app on my smartphone and each program on my computer is a place for trouble to start. It’s a place for a conflict with other programs or with the operating system to arise. It’s something to potentially eat up my computer’s or smartphone’s processor cycles or memory space.

Is there anything so important about a restaurant loyalty app that it’s worth all that hassle? No, not for me.

The Existence of Something Does Not Obligate Me To Buy It.

Too often when my friends ask me about helping them with some piece of technology, they never stopped to wonder why they got it in the first place. Yes, there might have been an end goal of more money, less worry, more time, a task being easier to accomplish. This piece of technology was presented to them, and there doesn’t seem to have been a lot of thought about “Will this thing in front of me get me to the goals I want to achieve?”

Many times, there wasn’t a goal set at all. Someone told them it was a good idea or a recommended idea for something-or-other, and now there’s this piece of technology that they are working for.

Cutting Edge Technology, Back In The Day: Slide Rules

I’ve been busy enough the last couple of weeks I’m off my writing schedule. I try to put up one post a week with an interesting technology link.

Today, I’m writing about technology which was revolutionary and cutting edge, but is now seen as obsolete. And that is slide rules.

Slide rules are based on logarithmic scales. They turn multiplication and division into addition and subtraction.

That was the simplest slide rule scales, there were other scales on slide rules too, for different mathematical functions.

The Oughtred Society is a group devoted to slide rules. If you’re interested in slide rules, that site is a good place to start.

(Nope, I still haven’t looked up correct citation rules for online links in an online post.)

Useful Links: Rugged Radios, description of uses of GMRS v BB

I was looking for places to buy portable handheld radios the other day, and stumbled across Rugged Radios.

In addition to their product pages, they have a lot of good information on their site. Here are some useful links I’ve been reading through:

Done for You: Stitch Kitty from Wild Ginger Software

This is an interesting concept, and I hope they do well.

There are several small independent companies making and selling sewing patterns. But a sewing pattern takes more than just templates to use when cutting fabric. There are sewing instructions, sewing diagrams or photos, lists of recommended fabrics, recommended notions, instructions on assembly order, instructions on seam allowances and whether seam allowances are included on the pattern pieces, needle and thread recommendations, stitch setting recommendations, and more.

Stitch Kitty is a (new? relatively new?) program from Wild Ginger software, which helps with all of that. It’s called a “professional guide sheet generator.” I have not heard this term before, not in sewing, and not in any other craft where patterns are sold.

I haven’t bought Stitch Kitty myself and I haven’t tried it. I’ve used sewing patterns in the past, but I’ve never tried to create one myself. I think their sample sheets look nice. I read through the software description. It sounds like Wind Ginger worked very hard to think of every variation a customer creating a sewing pattern might want, but I don’t have enough experience to judge.

I’m back where I started: this is a really interesting concept. I hope they do well.

Slow Is Smooth, Smooth Is Fast

Computers and Software

I’ve had computers where I could hit six key combinations in quick succession. And then I could watch it all be executed smoothly — and correctly! — over the next twenty seconds.

I’ve also had computers where I had to watch the monitor after every single key press. I wouldn’t like the results if I got too far ahead of what the computer was doing,

Hardware devices with lots of buttons tend to fall into the second category: get too far ahead and it will take me longer than if I’d gone the device’s speed to start with. Most remotely hosted services seems to fall into this second category too. And most smart phones are in this second category.

Business Practices

Then there are other mental processes where rushing makes things slower in the end. The classic phrase “I’m writing you a long letter because I didn’t have time to write a short one” is an example of this. There are legions of corporate memos sent in haste, legal documents filed in haste, emails addressed and sent in haste, where time-consuming mistakes were made which probably could have been avoided if there had been less haste.

Hand Crafts

My last set of examples today is hands-on processes like sewing, welding, woodworking, and dozens of other hand crafts. “Measure twice, cut once” is a common statement in almost all of them for the same reasons I wrote about above. Measuring twice takes much less time than buying more fabric or wood or metal or whatever else I was using.

Why Am I Writing This?

Mostly, I write this blog for myself, but I write about the problems I see people have with technology. I write about the recurring themes I hear in what people say and in what they ask me for help with. I write this blog for everyone who says “I just want it to work.” Part of making it work, and this goes for all types of its, is knowing the speed of the technology and respecting that. Fixing something broken is almost always slower than slowing down enough to not mess up in the first place.

Useful Sites: Cyclone and Dust Collection Research, courtesy of Bill Pentz

The site: Cyclone and Dust Collection Research. The home page says it was created in 2000 and was last updated in August 2022. That’s an impressive amount of dedication.

I found this through a link from The Wood Database.

Yes, he is advocating for products that he helped design. I’m fine with that, profit is part of what makes the world go round.

Obviously, it’s about dust collection. I’ve only just started reading through the site, but I already found this bit of interesting information: it’s dangerous for a person to vent their dust collection system inside their shop. Very fine dust is what causes a lot of the physical damage and venting a dust collector system inside the shop lets particles too fine for dust filter continue to circulate in the shop. Much better is venting the dust collection system outside.

Mr. Pentz’s biography is quite interesting. At the end he says that his health has finally required him to retire and slow down. I hope his health gets better.

The Person Doing the Job Is As Important As the Job

Is It the Tool, Or Is It the User?

It’s as important to use a tool which fits the person doing the job, as it is to use a tool which fits the job.

I started this blog for a number of reasons. One of them is to get more familiar with WordPress in its current form.

And I have found I like the WordPress post editor for editing. I hate the WordPress post editor for composing. It’s not local, it’s hosted on a server somewhere, so sometimes there is a slight delay between me typing and the letters showing up on the screen. At times this is maddening.

More frustrating is trying to navigate between paragraphs using the keyboard. Sometimes the arrow keys work great in the post editor. Sometimes the arrow keys don’t work at all, even when I know there is more text to see if I could just get the screen to keep scrolling down.

I’m By Myself, So If It Works For Me, Then It Works For Me

The last couple of weeks I’ve started composing posts in a program that runs on my computer. No internet connection needed, navigation in the document is simple. Then I cut and paste it into the WordPress post editor and finish editing there.

That works much better for me.

I am sure there are writers out there who love the post editor. And that is the point of this post: sometimes who is doing the job and using the tools is as important, or even more important, than which tools are being used.

This is part of a larger theme I repeatedly see, confusing the How with the Goal and the Why. If my Goal was to learn how to use the WordPress post editor, inside and out, then using a separate program for composing would be admitting defeat. If my Goal instead is learning how to use WordPress efficiently, and it’s more efficient for me to use a separate writing program for composition, I think that’s fine.

What If It’s Not Just Me?

Writing this, I have newfound sympathy for someone supervising a group of creators. Yes, as long as each person gets their part of the job done, then how much do tools matter? But if they have to work together, they’ll need a common framework to talk to each other. If it’s expected that absences can be covered by co-workers, then common tools are essential.

Am I Looking In the Wrong Places?

For tasks such as editing photos or video or graphics, I see many tutorials on how to set up workflow. I don’t see nearly as many tutorials for how to set up workflow when it comes to writing, or to blogging. I’m not sure if I’m actually seeing a lack, or if I’m not looking in the right places.

Great Power Brings Great Responsibility

Yes, it’s trite. It’s also true.

Not having to do repetitive routine tasks by hand is one of the benefits of technology.

An obvious example is using a spreadsheet program to create and calculate spreadsheet numbers, instead of having to write everything by hand. And then not having to rewrite everything by hand because one of the starting number changed.

A less obvious example is being able to model unsolvable math problems. Back in the 1990s I was told there were heat transfer problems which engineers and mathematicians had not been able to solve with calculus. Those same problems could be solved by a computer program modeling heat transfer over thousands and millions of small volumes.

However, with great power comes great responsibility.

That same computer will do other things we ask it to do, like delete every file we have. There was an article in The Register, “Automation is great. Until it breaks and nobody gets paid.” It was published on April 14, 2023 and written by Simon Sharwood. It is part of The Register‘s ongoing “On Call” series where readers write in with stories of tech problems they’ve had to fix.

Even more enlightening than the story was the comments section. There were quite a few comments in there about former co-workers who had written something “simple” which had very not-simple repercussions.

Technology is great and saves a lot of time, but only if it’s used responsibly and wisely.

How It Fits Together, How It Moves

It’s just as important to figure out how things move together, as it is to figure out how they fit together.

It’s also a lot more difficult. When things aren’t moving correctly, it’s easy to see. My computer doesn’t boot up, my kitchen appliances don’t work, my sewing machine doesn’t sew. These are all things that happen when things don’t move together correctly.

Intended movement isn’t usually shown in user manuals or service manuals either. I suppose in some cases it might be a trade secret. In other cases it might be something difficult to document. Seeming odd or arbitrary troubleshooting in user and service manuals often seems to be focused at getting parts aligned to move the way they’re intended.

Timing in software is an entire other black art.