Tag: tech (Page 2 of 7)

On Venmo and Privacy

August 1, 2018 / DB

I’ve been using the Venmo payment service for a few years. Mostly I use it to pay my sister-in-law, who is a personal chef, for the meals she makes for us weekly.

When I first signed up for the service, I thought it was strange that I could see a timeline of all the transactions of my friends who also used it. And there was a global timeline, where I could follow anyone who used the service. I turned that shit off quick, making sure my transactions were listed as private.

Below is a fascinating article about what can be done with data that is not marked as private on Venmo. A couple of the examples – the drug dealer, the philandering adults – are kind of funny. More concerning is the one of the woman who made hundreds of purchases for unhealthy foods and the implications of her insurance company finding them and using them against her.

As with any other social media platform or free web service, you always have to consider who can see the data you’re sharing and what the company that controls the service can do with your information. Select those privacy options carefully.

Venmo: how the payment app exposes our private lives

Cooking With Gas

July 12, 2018 / DB

Our house is now filled with the sweet, fragrant glory of wireless internet. Comcast finally showed up yesterday to get everything hooked up. Just in time for the second half of the rather glorious England-Croatia match we had cable TV and internet. Those two-plus weeks without them seemed a lot longer. Only 33 days from initial request until completion of installation.

Less than 24 hours into our Xfinity lives, we’re pleased with it so far. Then again, we would be happy with just about any connection at this point. Our internet is way faster than at the old house. We are paying for the speed boost, so it better be. It was pretty cool to watch stuff that used to download over the course of several minutes shoot down the pipe in a matter of seconds. I haven’t tried streaming any video yet, but I imagine that’s going to be better than our old experience, too.

I also figured I would have to set up several wireless access points through the house to make sure we had a strong signal throughout. I bought one, and a Raspberry Pi to control it, so I could at least get started as soon as we had service. But I was pleasantly surprised at how the Xfinity router gets a strong signal throughout the house. Looks like I’ll have to unload the WAP on someone else and find another project to use the Raspberry Pi for.

I spent yesterday afternoon getting everything in the house connected. It’s nice to be able to control our thermostat from my phone again. I need to get our Nest cam installed so I can monitor the outside of our house. I’m debating whether to dive into the world of other home automation devices as well. Right now a lot of them seem to have a higher cool factor than actual functional value, but while S gets to spend hours looking at furniture online, I can research smart light bulbs, DIY home security systems, etc.

Anyway, it’s good to be back in the world of the real internet, where I’m not burning through my phone’s battery to get a weak connection that won’t load anything that contains graphics in less than three minutes. Now I just have to keep the mowing crew and the construction guys next door from destroying our cable, which is currently sitting on the grass until another Comcast contractor comes out to bury it eventually.

Friday Notes

July 6, 2018 / DB

Time for an end-of-the-week update, as it has been an interesting few days.

I’ll share the good first: we actually have some movement in getting our house connected to the internet and world of cable television! Thursday morning L came and found me and asked, “Who is that creepy guy in the backyard?” I looked out and, sure enough, there was a creepy guy pushing one of those bicycle-wheel measuring things across our backyard.(fn) I went outside, greeted him, and asked what he was measuring. He was difficult to understand, but I gathered he was there to run a cable line.

“Great, we’ve been waiting on you!” I said. I asked how long after he was done it would take to get the house hooked up. His response, as best as I could make it out, was that as soon as he was done, he would call it in as completed and connecting the house should happen pretty soon after that. Of course he, or someone else, was supposed to have done his job three weeks ago, so I took his “pretty soon” with a big ol’ grain of salt.

I went back inside and the girls and I watched him and his partner run the line from the street to the power line behind our house. I thought it was very interesting the cable service is above ground. That’s what you get for moving into an old neighborhood, I guess.

Anyway, progress and there is a line about 100 feet from our house now. If we can just get it extended from there to our house, and then someone inside the house to get us hooked up, we’ll finally be cooking with the gas of the sweet, sweet internet.

Now for the not-so-good news: the deal to sell our home here fell apart this week. Although I think this site is pretty locked down in terms of privacy, I still don’t want to reveal too much yet since the house is officially back on the market. For now I’ll just share that we had a major disagreement regarding the results of the inspection – our realtor and we believe the inspector made an inappropriate observation in his report that caused the potential buyers to make an unreasonable request – so we gave them an F-you response and they walked away.

So, starting over. We have painters going in today and are doing some other repairs we wanted to hold off on to use as a bargaining tool. Between those improvements and the fact that our neighbors’ house has now closed at higher than their asking price, we’re hopeful that we can get a better selling price the second time around. We’ll see; we’re a little disillusioned and cynical after round one. And we’re bummed we missed two weeks of potential showings dealing with those dickwads.

What else has been going on?

We’ve arranged to have our lawn mowed. This was hard for me to do. I’ve taken care of our yard for 15 years. We don’t always have the nicest yard on the block, but I kind of liked the 30–40 minutes it took to knock out the old yard. But we agreed that even if I got a riding mower, the new lawn would just require too much of a time investment to take care of. Luckily we had some friends who suggested some guys who ended up being affordable, so they’re going to start taking care of it next week.

Thursday, on the lawn guys’ suggestion, I bought a tripod sprinkler. Yes, our yard is so big I have to use implements often found on football or baseball fields. Naturally it rained for three hours the day I bought it.

We’ve also been making daily purchases from hardware stores. We’ve literally made at least on purchase from Lowe’s, Menard’s, Home Depot, or a local hardware store every day the past week. And we keep ordering stuff from Home Depot online that, for some reason, causes our credit card company to freak out. I have to text a confirmation to the card company that, yes, the purchase was legit, and then call Home Depot and have them crank my order through again. That’s happened two nights in a row. But when I dropped four times as much on the card for a deposit for some house repairs it went straight through. I guess my card company has something against Home Depot.

The other big thing right now is just getting used to where things are and how they operate. Fifteen years of turning right to get a utensil for the stove is hard to forget when the utensils are now on the left. The thing that has really thrown us is having the door to our basement beverage fridge open on the opposite side. Every single time S or I go down to grab a beer, we grab the left side of the handle instead of the right. I imagine we’ll start getting this stuff figured out sometime in the next 2–17 weeks.

IPad Test

June 24, 2018 / DB

Since Comcast can’t get their shit together and get us cable/internet, this is a test post to see if I can post from the iPad when using my iPhone’s hotspot. Cuz I gots to crank out the content, fools.

Back In The Day

December 7, 2016 / DB

It seems like every day there is another piece of evidence that the Internet is a terrible place, and that far too many humans are loathsome people.

And then there are things like this, which reaffirm my faith that the Internet is ultimately a good thing.

I discovered it just after last Christmas, so I’ve been sitting on it for a while year. I’m glad I’m finally able to share Greg Maletic’s look back at the 1977 Sears Wish Book!

"You might not recognize what this is. This is Amazon, printed out.

The Sears Wish Book, 1977

I just wish he had shown what was always my favorite clothing section: the NFL sweatshirts and letter jackets for kids. Those were dope as hell.

Speaking of dope…

Jacked

September 8, 2016 / DB

Apple product launch announcements aren’t the must-watch events they once were for me. I’ve scaled back my purchasing of new electronic toys to a much slower pace.[1] No more new Mac to replace a perfectly good one every 12–18 months. I keep my phones well past the two years I’m obligated to keep them without having to pay to upgrade.

Mostly this is because the pace of technology has changed, at least for now. Those big leaps in design, function, and software we saw in the ‘00s has slowed way down. There just isn’t as huge of a difference in a 2016 Mac and your 2011 Mac as there was between that ’11 Mac and an ’07 one. Plus, as we spend more-and-more time on the web, as long as you have a modern browser and a decent Internet connection, you can do about everything you need to do just fine.

I did pay attention to most of yesterday’s Apple event, though. It’s been over a year since the rumors started circulating that Apple wanted to eliminate the 3.5mm headphone jack from the iPhone. Sure enough, they did it, moving folks who buy the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus to using either a lightning cable or Bluetooth to connect their headphones.

The gnashing of teeth had been around almost as long as the rumors of the elimination of the 3.5mm connection. Once that change became reality, the complaints just got louder.

In general, I don’t care about the change. Philosophically, I’m down with the move. We do need to move toward easier, more accurate wireless connections with greater range for our mobile devices. Bluetooth kind of sucks, but nothing has forced either that protocol, or any competing one, to improve enough to make most people want to use it.[2] Maybe this is the first step in making that happen.

However, Apple’s language in promoting this switch was pretty much garbage. “Courage” was the word Apple Senior VP Phil Schiller used when explaining why Apple decided to scrap the legacy connector. Which is straight up bullshit. If you strip out that horrible choice of word and go with the rest of Apple’s argument, I can get onboard with them. They are constantly struggling to squeeze more-and-more technology into their phone case. Yanking out a single-use connector that will allow them to include a better camera, more battery, or the next technological advance is a reasonable argument. The transition might be difficult, but I can understand that reasoning.

But saying it’s “courageous”? You lost me there.

The other thing I thought of while watching the presentation was how long the 3.5mm plug has been around. I’ve owned a few pairs of headphones with ¼” ends over the years. But the overwhelming majority of audio cables I’ve used in my life have been the venerable 3.5mm one. My first transistor radio used a single earphone that connected with a 3.5mm plug. I connected tape recorders to other devices with a 3.5mm cord.[3] Walkmen and Diskmen. Vehicles had 3.5mm AUX inputs to connect portable devices. Computers sent their audio out via a 3.5mm jack. And, obviously, every Apple device I’ve owned so far has exported sound via a 3.5mm connecting point.

The standard has traveled from the analog to the digital age without missing a beat, which is pretty remarkable. Odds are the cables you used to connect your VCR to your TV in 1985, or your computer to your printer in 1995, no longer work on modern devices. But the dozens of audio cords with 3.5mm connectors on each end that are knotted on my shelf of random tech gear still have hundreds of uses in them.

I’m pleased that we’re taking another step toward getting rid of cables. But that 3.5mm standard has served me well, and will continue to a little while longer.

Somewhat balanced by my purchasing of photography gear. ↩
Not to mention driving manufacturers to make better wireless headphones, speakers, etc. ↩
I remember hooking up a tape recorder to our TV via the headphone jack to record the Miami Vice theme in mono before the soundtrack hit record stores. ↩

Farewell to VHS

July 27, 2016 / DB

So after this month, no more VCRs will be produced. Wait, they were still making VCRs? I guess there are probably some folks out there with shelves full of movies – purchased or taped from TV, professional and personal – who were never interested in buying them all again in a digital format, or didn’t want to invest the time and effort to convert them to digital.

I know I still have some tapes stored in a cabinet in our basement. Some of those tapes hold great sentimental value, even if I haven’t watched them in 20 years or more. There is a single tape that holds the 1988 NCAA national championship game on it. After the game is a couple hours of post-game coverage from CBS, CNN, and local stations in Kansas City. And after that, I have random coverage of the parade to honor the newly crowned Kansas Jayhawks, speculation of whether Larry Brown would leave KU for UCLA, and other local sportscasts from that week. I think that tape is just about full. It would be fun to watch one more time.

But the video I’d most like to watch is one my buddy John N. and I made our junior year of high school. For our creative writing class we wrote and filmed a parody of the movie Colors, a dark, gritty look at the LA gang scene that starred Sean Penn and Robert Duvall. We loved that movie because it was probably one of the first mainstream feature films that embraced hip-hop culture. I’m not sure how well the movie has held up, but I bet I could listen to the soundtrack today and still love it.[1]

Anyway, we decided to make a suburban version of Colors, which we cleverly called Colours. Our version followed the major plot lines of the original, just dropped into our sleepy, Kansas City suburb. Instead of slinging rock, the drug of choice in our film was cherry Pez. We included a drive-by shooting and battles between the cops and gang members, only we used water guns rather than real weapons. There’s a dramatic scene in the real movie where, in the midst of a gun battle, the guns of a cop and gang member simultaneously jam as they aim at each other. They struggle to clear their weapons and reload so they can get the first shot off. We stole that scene too, but in our version the combatants ran out of water and had to dip their “water-type Uzis” in buckets to reload.

We filmed the whole thing in one afternoon following school. When one key “actor” failed to show, we sent a crew up to school to recruit someone who would shoot baskets for a few minutes then get blasted in a drive-by. So a sophomore none of us really knew had a bit part in this grand cinematic effort. We had parts of scenes get wiped out when our camera person forgot that her family’s video camera would back up 5 seconds each time she stopped filming.[2] But it ended up being pretty much what we wanted: funny and fun to do.

Looking back, I wonder how we didn’t get invitations for immediate entrance into the USC film school.

My favorite memory of Colours, though, came from our teacher. She had not seen the original movie, and in order to fairly grade our project, she thought she should. So she went to the theater with several viewings of our flick fresh in her mind. She told us later that people were staring at her in the theater because she was laughing out loud at appropriate times. She couldn’t help but think of our comedic take of certain scenes nor contain her laughter.

I believe we got A-’s.

I may need to find that tape and make sure it gets digitized before it’s too late.

I checked, it’s not on Spotify. I could only cobble together about half of the tracks from checking each artist. I bet I have it on cassette, though. ↩
WTF?!?! ↩

Of Birth Dates And Birth Orders

July 25, 2016 / DB

It’s a weird day in our house. Today is M’s 12th birthday, but she’s not here to celebrate. We dropped her off for her first-ever week at a summer camp yesterday. So our phones, or rather her phone, will not ring with calls from relatives looking to talk to her and wish her a happy birthday. There’s no special dinner planned for tonight, or cake for dessert. Kid birthdays are supposed to be big, all-encompassing days all about them but today our house is quiet. I guess this is a preview of life when the girls aren’t here anymore. Strange! We’ll celebrate when she gets home.

There was a hint in that first paragraph about M’s big gift: she got her first cell phone last Monday. An iPhone SE. We debated when and whether to get her a phone for a long time. We talked to friends and weighed their different perspectives on when you should hook your kid up. We settled on 12 and passing a safe baby sitting course as the requirements. She got certified last month. And she’s 12 today. We decided since she was going to be gone on her birthday, we’d go ahead and order it a little early. Plus we could change our data plan right as our Verizon billing month turned over.

We did make her sign a contract that lays down several rules and expectations. I’ve done my best to lock it down to keep her from getting herself into trouble. But all the parental controls in the world can’t get stop a kid who wants to misbehave. Fortunately M tends to follow rules and default to good behavior. Hopefully our trust will be rewarded.

One problem about giving her the phone early is that it’s arrival coincided with the hottest week of the year. None of us wanted to leave the house very often, and we all ended up spending too much time in front of screens of various sorts. I don’t know that I set the best baseline for her in that first week. But I also figured she gets the chance to go overboard at first, and then we’ll dial things back. I did get annoyed with the hourly request that she be allowed to download a new app. I gave her a few days to load her phone up, but by the weekend I told her just one new app per day. And thankfully when Pokeman Go asked for a parental email to open an account, it kept erroring off. So we’ve avoided that for the time being.

Twelve still seems a little early to me for a full-time phone. We have other friends who bought cheap phones for their kids and only hand them over when their daughters are babysitting or their kids are off to a practice/game/event without their parents. There’s a lot of appeal to that plan. But I also like the idea of her always having her phone and being comfortable using it if/when an emergency situation arises.

I guess it’s just a sign of the times.

She’s at a CYO camp about 90 minutes away through this Friday. She went for a night with her class in 4th grade[1] but this is her first time going off to summer camp. We waited this long because S went to summer camp when she was 12,[2] but a lot of M’s friends are at their 4th or 5th summer camp. Which ended up being kind of a bummer because a lot of them moved to a different camp this year. Still, she’s in a cabin with at least three of her classmates (one was supposed to be there but hadn’t arrived when we left). And she’s going to meet girls that she’ll play sports against for the next three years and many who she will end up going to high school with.

The great thing about the camp is it is about 15 minutes away from our lake house. So we went down to the lake early yesterday, took a few laps in the boat, visited some friends, and then popped down the road to drop her off. We had to walk, oh, two-thirds of a mile or so to get to her cabin. Up a couple steep hills. When the heat index was between 105 and 110. We were all sweating like beasts when we finally got to her cabin. After we were done, the rest of us went back to the lake to swim for another hour or so.

As for the birth order thing, M getting her phone wasn’t the only family event las week. I took L to the eye doctor on Thursday and after an exam, she got fitted for glasses. They should be in any day. She picked out Nike frames which, if you know L, are perfect. The optician liked that L had on a Nike shirt and new green Nike running shoes. She didn’t notice her adidas shorts I guess.

I hated when I got glasses. I remember people laughing at me the day I walked into my fourth grade class with glasses for the first time. And then there were all the jokes that came along with glasses back in the day. I guess my Bob Griese frames weren’t very cool.

But it seems like kids now like glasses, and you can get some pretty cool frames. So I think she was actually a little excited about getting them. Plus she’ll be happy not to have headaches at the end of the day anymore.

As for C…

I dropped her off at cross country practice last Thursday. On Thursdays the team does a light workout and then gets into a pool and does some exercises in there to cool down and rest the joints. As she hopped out of the car, we heard another parent saying, “Pool is closed, leave your swimsuit in the car.” Later found out there was a toddler poop incident that closed it down.

But that was just the beginning.

When she got home she ran into the house and said, “Dad! There was a naked man at cross country practice!”

Wait, what?

“He was on drugs and the police came to arrest him. Coach is going to send an email!”

Whoa.

I asked if she saw him and she said no. Or at least not until the cops showed up and took him out in cuffs with some shorts on.

I had a kickball meeting that night and the first thing one of the other parents said when I arrived was, “Did you hear about the naked guy at cross country?”

So the story trickled out that a dude smoked some synthetic marijuana that had been laced with acid in the 100-degree heat and then decided to nude up in the middle of a public park. He never offered any threat to the kids, so most of the parents laughed about it later. But because kids were present, apparently he gets his name put on the sex offender registry.

The coaches handled it great. After being warned what was going on, they hustled the kids away. I think most of the kids didn’t see any nudity, although they did see the cops come and take him away. The coaches, who knew that the older kids would pick up on what was going on and spread the word, closed practice with a teaching moment. The gist of it was that you shouldn’t do drugs because you’ll end up naked in the park and get arrested. Which is a pretty good lesson all around, when you think about it.

Classic middle kid, though. In the same week one sister gets a phone and another gets glasses, she has cross country practice ruined by a naked stoner.

Terrific marketing! ↩
The same camp, coincidentally. And her dad – M’s grandfather – went there too. ↩

Musical Interlude

February 11, 2016 / DB

Some words about music.

I’m wrapping up my first week of a rather grand experiment: avoiding iTunes/Apple Music and using Spotify in their place. I cancelled my subscription to the now defunct Rdio streaming service and went all-in with Apple Music as soon as it went live back in June. While Apple Music wasn’t perfect, I liked how it was the only service that could combine all the music I’ve downloaded over the past decade, plus stream new music, and then give me access to all those songs across all my devices. At least in theory.

As time has passed, though, I’ve grown more and more frustrated with Apple Music. My biggest issues are how songs that I’ve downloaded onto my computer often show up in different forms on my i-devices because Apple Music gets confused by the metadata attached to the original file. For example, instead of hearing the version of “Animal” from Def Leppard’s Hysteria that I grew up on, my iPad will play some terrible live version. This doesn’t happen with a ton of music, but enough to be annoying.

The bigger issue is how Apple Music syncs data across devices. Ever since I began using iTunes in 2004, my default playlist is one called “Newest Latest” that includes everything I’ve added to my iTunes library in the past 40 days. That way I was always sure to be listening to and evaluating the most recent music I had downloaded. Since flipping the switch on the iTunes Music Library feature, though, the software keeps making duplicates of that playlist. Right now iTunes tells me I have seven different versions of that playlist, with four different combinations of tracks in them. Every few weeks I’ll go delete all the extras instances, but they just reappear shortly after. I’ve also had a hard time adding songs to playlists on my iPad or iPhone then seeing them show up back in iTunes on my Mac.

It’s also frustrating that Apple Music does not play nice with last.fm, the service I’ve used to track my listening data since 2005. That’s why I had to stop sharing my monthly listening stats: music up in the iTunes Music Library cloud will not get counted in the last.fm stats.

And I hate that it is so hard to find the latest releases on Fridays when new albums get released.

I’m not really sure what the final trigger was, but last week I decided to go ahead and give Spotify a shot. So far, I’m digging it. I like that it seems pretty seamless across devices. I like that last.fm is built in. I enjoy seeing what my friends who are Spotify users are listening to. The music recommendations seem a little more true to my tastes than what Apple Music offered. And while it’s still a bit of a chore to find new releases on Fridays, especially compared to how Rdio listed them, it is still easier than Apple Music makes it.

Making the switch also gave me a chance to simplify my music catalog. The thousands of songs I’ve ripped, downloaded, and purchased over the past decade are still sitting in my iTunes library when I want to access them. But rather than importing everything to Spotify, I spent a few hours working through my catalog and only loading the songs I consider vital into my new Spotify library. Instead of thousands of songs, I’m dealing with a few hundred now, but with the ability to stream anything else at a moment’s notice. That’s also made it a little easier to focus on the newest music.

Sure, I could have done a lot of that in iTunes by just deleting much of the cruft from my library there, but then I’m still left with all of my other complaints about the service.

Odds are Apple will fix some of the issues with it’s music service and software, and if it ever reaches the point where it is more usable than Spotify, it’s easy to switch back. For now, though, I’m sticking with Spotify. If you’re on it, look me up.

In other music news, I’ve been a huge fan of music critic Steven Hyden’s writing for many years. I first found him when he worked for the AV Club. He moved from there to Grantland. Now, like many Grantland refugees, he’s a bit of a free agent. While our musical tastes don’t completely overlap – his is necessarily broader than mine – I’ve generally found the bands, albums, and songs he gets most excited about are pretty similar to mine. And he’s written some wonderful, long-form profiles of some of my favorite acts as well.

His first post-Grantland project is a podcast called Celebration Rock.[1] So far he’s had some good interviews, but the most interesting episode is #4, on which he and fellow critic Ian Cohen run through their ten favorite rock albums of the ’10s up to now. Perfect gym listening material!

That episode kicked off a nice Twitter thread where listeners share their favorite 10 albums of the decade. It’s a fun thread to read through. It reminded me of a few albums I haven’t listened to for some time, has me interested in a few I’ve never listened to, and provided confirmation that a few of my favorite albums are loved by many others.

Perfect excuse to share my list, right? It was tougher to put this together than I expected. There are some great albums that others mentioned, but which I just don’t listen to much any more. If it’s going to be on my list, it needs to be something I go back to often. And a few albums I wanted to include were from just before the decade began. Still, I came up with 10. In order:

1) The War On Drugs – Lost In the Dream
2) Okkervil River – The Silver Gymnasium
3) Frightened Rabbit – Pedestrian Verse[2]
4) Ryan Adams – Ryan Adams[3]
5) Japandroids – Celebration Rock
6) Spoon – They Want My Soul
7) Dum Dum Girls – Only In Dreams
8) Arcade Fire – Suburbs
9) Angel Olsen – Burn Your Fire For No Witness
10) School of Seven Bells – Ghostory

Named for the most excellent 2012 Japandroids album. ↩
New FR album this year! ↩
New Ryan Adams album (or two, or three…) this year! ↩

A Periodic Site Housekeeping Update

August 25, 2015 / DB

Perhaps you’ve noticed, if you’ve dipped into the site’s archives in recent weeks, but I’ve been working on another clean-up project around here. I wrapped it all up this morning.

A couple years back I stopped putting pictures of the girls on the site. Well, at least ones where you can clearly identify them. The idea being I wanted to reduce the chances for people to connect their names with a picture online. That could be just for their friends who were Googling them and ran across some silly baby picture as much as for anyone who might try to use that information for something truly dangerous.

(At the same time, I scrubbed the site of full names of all my readers and friends. Since then I’ve tried to use either first name, last initial, or just last name when referring to someone that is not in my immediate family.)

Well the latest project was to get rid of the girls’, and my wife’s, names completely. Again, this is just to protect their identities a little. I don’t want people able to search for their names, come across this site, and then read some story about one of them having a blowout when they were a baby, or throwing a fit when they were two, or other anecdotes that could be used to embarrass them. The likelihood that would ever happen is very small, but I wanted to reduce it to as close to zero as possible. I figure they’re getting old enough that they will have plenty of chances to shame themselves online on their own. They don’t need any help from pops.

Same thing for my wife. I doubt anyone would take the time to search this deep, connect this quasi-anonymous personal blog to her, and then use it to somehow harm her professional life. But again, I want to try to make those chances even smaller.

So, from now on, first initials only for my family. My regular readers know who everyone is. And any random passersby won’t miss any great context by not having full names.

And with that done – which involved manually searching through each post and then Finding/Replacing – maybe I can get back to a regular posting schedule finally.