Neither shaken nor stirred. Again.

Every morning I make my coffee and then pick up my iPad to check my emails, social media, and any news alerts for things that happened overnight, something I’ve done that for a very long time. This morning I saw an alert for a news story: “Why phones woke thousands before 5.9 magnitude earthquake”. My first thought was, “what earthquake?” It happened at 4:51am, while I was asleep, and was centred near the King Country town of Taumarunui, some 170km (around 106 US miles) south of Kirikiriroa-Hamilton. I never felt a thing, and I also didn’t get any alert, of course, since I’m an iPhone user.

Actually, not only have I never been awakened by an earthquake (so far…), and I’ve only ever felt two earthquakes (so far…). The first was on July 19, 2004, when we were living in Paeroa, and the second (and stronger) one was on February 21, 2007 when we were living on Auckland’s North Shore, something and I mentioned both in a post about the 2007 earthquake (it’s quite handy that I’ve been blogging for nearly 20 years).

Having said all that, there have been times when I’ve felt a gentle rumble and wondered if it was a heavy truck nearby, or maybe Rūaumoko was stomping about underground. More often than not, it would’ve been a truck—or not (very mild ones, mostly too mild for humans to feel, happen all the time in New Zealand).

Earth Sciences NZ seismologist Sam Taylor-Offord told 1News that aftershocks will continue for months, and he also explained something I’d wondered about: Why folks on the east and west sides of the North Island may not feel earthquakes on the opposite side as strongly, or even at all. According to the linked article, he said:

"There's kind of this shadow between running right down the middle of the Taupō volcanic zone, where the Earth is sort of softer, hotter, and seismic waves get worn down really quickly."

The thing that started my journey into finding out more about this morning’s earthquake was the phone alerts some people got, and I think the tech behind is interesting (of course…). It’s likely to improve and become more accurate over time, and, if it does, it’ll inevitably come to iPhones, too. This tech won’t mean people will necessarily feel the earthquakes they’re alerted to, but it could give folks a brief warning before a potentially bigger one reaches them wherever they are. Maybe?

Once I got to social media late this morning, I read the stories of people who felt the earthquake. While it’s not even remotely unusual for others to have felt an earthquake I didn’t, this time my first thought was actually about how I couldn’t even imagine being awake at 4:51am on a Saturday morning. That’s definitely about me.

This morning, and not for the first time, the morning news alerts on my iPad told me about something that happened while I was asleep, and so, I was, also as usual, oblivious to it all. But the Internet brought me up to speed on the story, and this blog helped me precisely remember specific details about some of my own history with earthquakes. To me, this is a good example of technology making my life better. Others may not feel that, of course. C’est la vie.

Ask Arthur 2025, Part 1: Popping bubbles?

This is the first of two posts answering questions in the truncated 2025 “Ask Arthur” series. This year, I forgot to promote the series, and so, there will be only two posts. But… at least there are two posts? Yeah, that’s it.

Most years' first question is usually from my pal Roger Green, and that’s true this year, too. In fact, he asked the final question for the final post, too. Roger’s question is in two parts. First, he asked:

Are we going to have an AI bubble? You may have seen this graphic where Nvidia is in this loop with the companies they are selling chips to; it looks unsustainable to me because things don't always get bigger and bigger.

Short answer: Yes, it’s a bubble, and it will eventually burst. Okay, that’s that, then! Just kidding: It’s obviously more complicated than that.

Nearly everything in the tech world is built with hype as much as actual products or services, and it’s been that way for decades. Also, there’s no such thing as a market that can’t crash, and so, it’s entirely possible it will happen to AI (speaking in general terms).

There are many tech and investment commentators who have their own reasons for warning of a bubble for the AI industry, and they’re quite persuasive, however, I’ve never found the “tech bros” particularly—what’s the right word? Let’s say persuasive, served with a side dish of scepticism in incredulousness sauce. Most of the tech bros are showmen, and it’s in their insterests to, shall we say, oversell what they’re offerening. That’s true in a lot of industries, of course.

While I haven’t seen the specific graphic Roger was referring to, I think his scepticism is exactly right, and for me, it comes down to one thing: Where’s the income? We keep hearing how the market capitalisation of Nvidia is reaching ever higher unprecedented levels, and that it’s because of all the cards they’re selling to AI companies. AI companies may offer paid accounts to users, and other companies are trying to force their customers/users into using AI, companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google (Chrome in particular, but also for search), among others. So: Where’s all the profits? Not one financial commentator has reported how the tech companies are making massive profits from all their expenditures on AI. At the same time, there’s noticeable reistance from consumers who resent having AI forced on them, particularly when there are still no regulations or saftey measures.

At the same time, there are places where AI could change everything, like medical research, for example, because of its ability to evaluate, say, medicines much faster than humans ever could. However, without safeguards or regulations, we’ll see more “AI slop” foisted on us, and deep fakes used to destroy people or promoote propaganda. Ordinary people are increasingly worried about all that—and they couldn’t possibly care less about corporate profits or the salesmanship of the tech bros.

Add it all up, and there are plenty of reasons to think the AI bubble could burst, and also reasons to think is definitely will.

In the second part of Roger’s question, he asks:

AI is an incredible energy suck; is it worth it, or will this end up hurting consumers?

It’s already hurting consumers. Part of the reason that electricity proces are so high in the USA is the skyrockeing demand for electricity from AI data centres—though the situation would be dramatically better if the current US regime hadn’t made the idiotic move to ban new renewable energy projects, particularly because it’s far cheaper and faster to build clean, renewable generation than to build fossil fuel power plants. This represents an existential threat to the AI industry, particularly as consumer anger grows at having to pay high power bills because of AI data centres.

Also, the data centres often have high demands for water at a time in which climate change is making droughts more frequent. If all that wasn’t enough, the centres usually offer little employment in areas where they’re located—not counting the short-term construction jobs, of course.

Maybe the tech bros should use AI to solve some of the problems they’re creating. If they don’t pay attention to the needs of ordinary people and ignore ordinary people’s suspicion of, and resistance to, AI generally, they may end up popping their own bubble.

Thanks to Roger for today’s question! The next installment will be on Wednesday, December 31.

All posts in this series are tagged “AAA-25”. All previous posts from every “Ask Arthur” series are tagged, appropriately enough, ”Ask Arthur”.

Previously in the 2025 series:

”Doing the annual inquisition AAAgain?” – The first post in this year’s series.

Time for my old man Life Hack

I have an old man Life Hack to share: This weekend, I figured out an easy way to re-set the clock on my oven without knowing how to reset the clock.

Whenever the power is off for any reason, as it was last week during the air conditioning installation, the oven clock starts flashing when power is restored, and it stops flashing when I turn the oven on. That much I knew all along, but I had no idea how to set the clock.

The builder left all the manuals in a kitchen drawer, but I moved it and the others “somewhere safe, so I can find it again”, and then promptly forgot where that was. I later made up a notebook in which I write down where I put a thing, and since I did that I haven’t lost anything.

The main problem is that the oven is actually a wall oven, not one designed to be mounted under the kitchen benchtop, as the builder did, directly under the hob (cooktop), as is common. The only way for me to see the temperature I’m setting, or to see several of the controls, is to sit on the floor—and that’s never a great idea the farther one gets from 50. Doing that just to set the clock I don’t even need was never going to happen.

So: I had an oven that hasn’t been displaying the correct time pretty much since I moved in. Until this weekend.

I knew that when power comes back on, it resets to Noon (it’s a 24-hour clock). Mid-afternoon on Friday, I suddenly realised (because I never cared about that clock…) that if I simply turned off the power to the oven at Noon, then turned the power back on, the clock would show the correct time.

Unfortunately, I didn’t remember that at Noon on Saturday, but did at 12:30, anyway, to make sure I was right, and, of course, I was. So at precisely noon on Sunday (relying on my watch, which gets its time from a time server), I switched off the power to the oven at noon, then a couple seconds later I turned it back on. Next, I turned the oven on, then back off, and the oven was FINALLY set to the correct time.

Yes, I could’ve launched yet another search party to find that “somewhere safe” where the manual is, as I’ve done a few times, or (more likely) I could’ve looked it up online, but that wouldn’t help me get back up off the floor after swearing at the difficulty in changing a damn clock I don’t actually use, anyway.

Maybe someday I’ll redo the kitchen, though I’m more likely to move somewhere with a wall oven that’s actually on the wall, and, until/unless that happens, I’m even more likely to continue silently cursing the stupidity of putting a wall oven under a kitchen bench (and also that so many functions are indicated by cryptic pictographs, but that’s a different gripe entirely).

Still, I finally figured out a workaround to reset the clock on my oven when I had no idea how to do it “properly”—and I have a hunch that my way is much easier and faster than the “proper” way. It only took me precisely five years and ten months to achieve this enlightenment, but an achievement is an achievement.

Adaptation me

If there’s one word to describe what I’ve been going through since Nigel died nearly six years ago, it’s this: Adaptation. I’ve had to learn or re-learn how to do everything Nigel did for us, and I also had to relearn how to be a me, not half of a we. I’ve about all of that over the past few years, and it’s certainly an ongoing process. Recently, however, I realised there are some specific examples showing how all this has progressed, how I’m adapting to my reality.

The image at right is a screenshot of a Facebook “Memory” from 2021 (which I also mentioned here on the blog). It’s about how I regained ownership of the Internet domain Nigel got for our email, but that I accidentally lost in June 2021. It was the biggest personal setback I’d had since Nigel died, and it was hugely painful. Getting the domain back, and the email accounts up and running again, mattered so very much to me.

All of which resurfaced recently when the company that hosts the email service contacted me to say they were retiring the server I was using, and I’d need to upgrade. At the time, it was too much for me to deal with (something that has recurred frequently since Nigel’s death). More recently, I got notice that it was time to renew my service, and I was going to do that the first chance I got, but they rang me first.

I renewed my account for three years, partly because there are always discounts for making longer commitments for their services, and because that meant I wouldn’t have to deal with it for three years. I renewed and gave them the go ahead to migrate all my email to the new server. That was all finished within a couple hours.

When they were done, they sent me the settings for the new server, and I updated my settings on my desktop Mac, and also on my iPad and iPhone. However, the emails for that account haven’t worked on either my tablet or phone since 2021 when I lost the former service. Now, however, the address works on all my devices. Nigel made sure they all worked, then they didn’t because he wasn’t there too look after our tech, and now it works again.

This week, I bought a new stick vac. The one I had been using was a Dyson that Nigel bought at least ten years ago from a retailer, paying roughly half price (from memory, it was an an old model—V2?—and the retailer was getting rid of old models). It was really useful at the last house because it had stairs and the stick vac was much easier to use to vacuum them than the canister vacuum was.

After I moved here, the powerhead attachment for the canister vacuum broke in a spot that wasn’t repairable. So, I had to use the non-motorised floor attachment, or the Dyson, which is what I was using—right up until it wouldn’t hold a charge anymore. Dyson does sell replacement batteries, though they don’t make it easy to find the vacuum's model number, which is vital because different models use different batteries.

I realized that if I bought a replacement battery, I’d have to replace it again—IF they still stock the batteries by then (like I said, it’s an old model). So, I started looking into getting a different machine, specifically a Ryobi because they use the same 18v batteries my power tools use, meaning I’d have plenty of batteries to use, and the company is highly unlikely to make any changes to the shape and functioning of their batteries, given the hundreds of devices that use them.

To evaluate which model was best, I again turned to the evaluations published by Consumer NZ, and found that a model that was was well-rated, especially for pet hair, and it was also somewhat less expensive than the couple models rated somewhat higher. All of which wasn’t enough to motivate me to finally buy the vac until this week.

As soon as I got home with the new machine (photo at left), I did a quick vacuum and it works really well, even along the edges without changing tools—in fact, it did edges better than any other motorised floor attachment I’ve ever used (for at least the past 15 years or so). It did a really good job cleaning, picking up an impressive—and somewhat concerning—amount of stuff the volume of stuff was probably because I haven't had a working powerhead for a couple months or so). Reviews I read said the machine's loud, but it’s not any worse than the Dyson was and is MUCH quieter than the old canister vac is. However, it’s heavy, another thing reviews mentioned. However, I use dumbbells for arm strength training, so at least vacuuming will get a chore done, too, so winning! Actually, my only real complaint is that it’s too easy to bump the power switch and turn it off—though at least it has an actual power switch: The Dyson only ran if I squeezed the trigger (there was no trigger lock), and my had would get very tired by the end of a vacuuming session.

What these two stories have in common is that they’re about things Nigel used to take care of for us, but that had failed, leaving me to find my own way forward. And, I did. The email server story included one of my lowest points since Nigel died, but then things got better and now are good as ever (and, I’ve also upgraded all my devices to better/faster/stronger models since Nigel died). The vacuum story was more complex because I had to work out what I thought was the best option, not essentially updating an existing thing.

There’s probably some sort of metaphor in all this, but my overall journey hasn’t been even as linear as these stories, and often not as successful. Life isn’t always neat and tidy, or it isn’t for me, anyway. But sometimes I manage to find my way through challenges like these, even as I still wish I didn’t have to. And maybe that’s the best summation of surviving grief. I really am adapting to my reality.

Update – September 5, 2025: I forgot to mention that the machine came with two batteries and what they said was a "fast charger". In my first use of the vac, I used one of the batteries that came with it, but, as is often the case, it only had a minimal charge so I then switched to a fully-charged higher capacity battery I already had. I put the new battery on to charge, and it really was faster than the charger I already had—maybe half as long as my old charger. Then yesterday I did a little spot vacuuming with the machine and used up the battery I used during the week. It took a little longer to fully charge (because it has a higher capacity than the new one), but just a little longer. The "quick charger" is a welcome addition to my tool arsenal.

Finally, after joking about building arm muscle with the heavy vacuum, I suddenly realised I ought to try vacuuming with my left hand—and promptly realised that'll take time to master. The results were a bit gauche since my left hand just isn't as adroit or dextrous, but at least it's not actually sinister.

New year, old problems

This year has barely begun, and already old problems are repeating. Fortunately, none of them are my fault, but that fact doesn’t make them any less annoying. Worse, there’s very little I can do about the problems, and what I can do isn’t a good option. Complicated stuff, and barely into the year.

Yesterday, I posted my first blog post of the year, one that talked, in part, about the “Y2K Bug”. That caused a big problem for me, one that requires a bit of a back story.

There’s a Google-supplied sharing bar at the bottom at the bottom of all my blog posts, making it easy to share a post by email, to “re-blog” it to Blogger, or to share it on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. I’ve used this for a very long time to share my blog posts to Facebook, but they made some changes at some point, adding a “Send Message” button to whatever post I share, and that goes to what appears to be an AI chatbot, for some unknown reason. Even worse, the ENTIRE Facebook post is a link to that Messenger chat thing (sample at right). In other words, it makes sharing posts this way utterly pointless.

I was first alerted to the problem by a subscriber to the AmeriNZ Facebook Page. When I clicked on the link, it worked fine, but it turns out that’s because I was using the page as AmeriNZ, not as myself. I started including a direct link to my blog post in the comments, and that seemed to work well—until last night when the new problem appeared.

Last night I shared my blog post as usual, and then I left the direct link in the comments on Facebook, as usual. Later, I opened Facebook and there was a Notification from Facebook telling me they’d removed my comment because, it said, “This goes against our Community Standards on Spam.” WTF?! As always, my comment had a direct link to the same thing I was sharing to the page.

Naturally, I read what they were referring to:

We don't allow people to use misleading links or content to trick people to visit, or stay on, a website.

Examples of things that we don't allow

• Telling people that they must like a Page to access content on another site
• Using irrelevant pop-ups on websites to prevent people from leaving easily
• Disguising a link as something on our platform, such as a poll or video, to get clicks

Obviously none of that was remotely relevant to me sharing a link to my blog post in a comment. So, I clicked on “read the full policy”, and it was just as irrelevant to this situation:

We do not allow content that is designed to deceive, mislead or overwhelm users in order to artificially increase viewership. This content detracts from people's ability to engage authentically on our platforms and can threaten the security, stability and usability of our services. We also seek to prevent abusive tactics, such as spreading deceptive links to draw unsuspecting users in through misleading functionality or code, or impersonating a trusted domain.

Most (I suspect all…) comment moderation on Facebook is done by bots and algorithms, so I had a hunch I was just another victim of technology, and I was right. I clicked on “How we made this decision” and read: “Our technology found that your content doesn't follow our Community Standards,” it said. “As a result, our technology took action.” Their “technology” means no human had anything to do with it, which was obvious, of course.

As usual, there was no way to appeal their decision, and there are no actual humans to contact (apparently if I pay to become “verified”, which would give me a blue checkmark, it might be possible to reach a human). So, there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

My next step was to try to remove the message option from posts, but that doesn’t seem to be possible. After the better part of an hour clicking various settings, including on the Meta for Business part that provides no way to go back to ordinary page administration (I had to close the tab, open a new one and launch the Facebook Page again), I found nothing. Facebook is notorious for putting controls for various settings in weird and illogical places, but it could just be that they don’t permit that.

So, the only option I have is to stop using the share button and copy and paste the link directly in a post on the Facebook Page (that’s also my only option for sharing podcast episodes). I have no idea whether Facebook’s “technology” will allow me to do that, but if it doesn’t the AmeriNZ Facebook Page will be useless to me, and I may as well delete it.

Meanwhile, another problem has resurfaced with my podcast: Folks clicking links are blocked by their web browser due to a supposedly missing or expired “security certificate”. I set that up only a few weeks ago when Roger Green alerted me to the problem. In fact, I was getting it on Chrome, too, but could click a few times to get the part where I could tell Chrome to let me do what I want on the Internet. However, Safari on my iPad wouldn’t let me override it, and it prevented me from accessing the site or use any direct link to a post. When I added the security certificate, all of that stopped—for me, anyway.

The podcast site is currently hosted by Go Daddy, and I’m sick of the constant problems and how difficult it is to navigate their systems to fix them—although, if I used it a lot, like if I was a web developer or something, it might be easier; I need to do something on it maybe once or twice a year. This is an open project at the moment.

Finally, a problem that took me awhile to identify: I wasn’t able to do certain things because I have a VPN (Virtual Private Network). I originally got it last January, just before my trip to Fiji with the family, because I knew Internet access was through wifi, and there’s no way of knowing how secure such things are. The VPN I chose, like most others, allow me to include all my devices, and while I mainly wanted it for my phone and iPad, I realised it could useful for things like watching news videos that are geoblocked. It worked great in Fiji, but then we came home.

I would try to access some websites and be refused access, something that sometimes happened before the VPN, but I assumed it was just a glitch. On a whim, really, I switched off the VPN and I could access the sites. Similarly, I use an FTP program to upload my podcasts to my site, and the one I use is called Cyberduck, something I've used for years, including for work. Earlier this year, I started having trouble connecting to the server to upload my podcast files: It would be very slow to login, then to access the folders on my site so I could upload my file, and then the upload would often fail, sometimes many times. I wasn’t suspicious because there were somewhat similar problems sometimes in the past, so it didn’t surprise me that there were glitches using it—ones that Nigel fixed for me, of course. I eventually started logging in through Go Daddy’s website, because even though it was much slower using a web browser, at least it worked.

When I resumed podcasting in early December, I and ran into the same problem using Cyberduck. Then, on a hunch more than a whim, I paused my VPN, and Cyberduck worked perfectly—fast login, fast access to the folder I needed, and VERY fast upload—all exactly as it should be, and how it was before I installed the VPN.

What all of these problems have in common is that at first I didn’t realise what was wrong, for different reasons. Once I worked out what was going on, I tried solutions for Facebook and for people to access to my podcast site, only to discover find out the solutions weren’t as simple as they seemed. Of all of those, only the problem using Cyberduck was easy to fix, and it’s remained fixed.

In a year in which I had very little room in my head to try and figure out complicated technical things, especially on top of everything else that was going on, it’s not a surprise that the problems took as long to work out as they did, and also why some of them didn’t work. Still this is new year, with, I hope, some new perspectives that can lead to new solutions.

Still, this certainly is not what I wanted to wrestle with on the New Year’s Public Holidays—or any other day, actually. This is one of those times where, “it is what it is.” Onward! I hope…

Simpler blogging times

A dozen years ago, I was pleased to see that this blog reached 150,000 page views, roughly six years into its existence. This was kind of a big deal to me at the time (the graphic up top is my Facebook post from that time), even though I knew it was a pretty meaningless number. “Engagement” is a more important statistic (or “metric” in the jargon) because it includes more than just the folks (or bots and web crawlers) that happen to briefly visit a web page. Still, I did like “big numbers”.

Google explains a “pageview” and how it compares to a “unique pageview” this way:

A pageview is defined as a view of a page on your site that is being tracked by the Analytics tracking code. If a user clicks reload after reaching the page, this is counted as an additional pageview. If a user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, a second pageview is recorded as well.

A unique pageview… aggregates pageviews that are generated by the same user during the same session. A unique pageview represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times.

The huh?! factor in such descriptions is largely why I eventually stopped paying any attention to the “metrics” for any of my sites. I never fully understood what they were talking about, but, more importantly, I realised it had no relationship to what I was doing: The whole point of my blog was to write about whatever I wanted to, not what the “metrics” suggested would bring eyes to the page. All of which is also probably why this blog only ever achieved a relatively small audience.

Nowadays, old-timey blogs like mine are relics. There are many successful descendants on places like Substack, often available only by paid subscription. I won’t be doing a subscription thing like that because it would require way too much of a commitment that I’m clearly not up to at the moment—that and subscription fees are potentially taxable in two countries, so what’s the point? Actually, all of that’s arguably true for my audio-only podcast, too, except that paid subscriptions for them aren’t as common as it is for the descendants of blogs like mine.

Everything’s changed since then (including my commitment to blogging), but at this point in November 2012, achieveing 150,000 pageviews was still a big deal. Twelve years later, my old-timey blog’s current total page views (also since 2006) is 3,439,541 (at the time I wrote this). I may not care about such “metrics” like I did a dozen years ago, but I still like big numbers—especially when they become bigger numbers. That much is still the same.

Memory, realisation, and the Swedes

Facebook “Memories” can be interesting, showing us things we’ve forgotten about, good times, maybe bad times, maybe things we were even proud of. Even so, and despite appearances, I never mention the vast majority of “Memories” that Facebook serves me, and when I do share one here, it’s either to reminisce or to use it as a starting point for commentary of some sort. This post is the latter sort, but one of the “Memories” Facebook showed me today (screenshot above) was about something I don’t seem to have even mentioned here, let alone shared the photo—not at the time or since. That’s not what struck me about it, though: It made me realise something that I’d never thought of before.

The “Memory” was about something I posted on August 13, 2021, soon after I found the AOL diskette in a box in the garage. The text may not be clear, so here’s what I wrote three years ago:

Going through stuff stored in the garage means going through some boxes of my own stuff that I packed up “quite some time ago”. Didn’t know I’d find any antiques, though. Takes one to know one, I suppose. But, seriously: A *floppy disk*?! 😯 I remember when those AOL disks (then CDs) were everywhere. Also, I really am an antique. 😕

I never shared that moment here on this blog, just on Instagram, which automatically posted it to my personal Facebook (which is how it showed up today as a “Memory”). However, I never shared that photo or story here, which is similar to the “Memory” I wrote about on Sunday. In both cases, I have no idea why I didn’t share the photos here at the time.

The bigger thing for me, though, was a sudden realisation: Many people have things they feel should “go to family” when they die, and I do, too. In fact, I was recently thinking about some of the stuff from my childhood that I planned to put altogether so someone can send it to the USA after I’m gone, but then it suddenly hit me: no one will want that stuff. Sure, they might get a kick out of seeing some of it, but after that it should be disposed of—but they might feel guilty doing that.

This is exactly the dilemma that many families face: What to do when you’re willed grannie’s prized china? She loved it, but it might be hopelessly old-fashioned (and not in a good way), and if it’s not even valuable, the recipient will be left feeling they need to store something they don’t want.

There are solutions, of course. For example, before getting rid of inherited stuff, a recipient could ask other members of the family if they want it—maybe someone truly does! But I’ve come around to thinking “Swedish Death Cleaning” is more or less on the right track, though I certainly didn’t think so when I mentioned it back in January 2018. My thoughts about changed, something I talked about in November 2021:

I inherited huge piles of Nigel’s stuff, things that I now have to dispose of, one way or another. I don’t want whoever clears my estate to have to go through the same thing.

And that beings me back to the old-timey diskette. It occurred to me that many of us may have stuff that’s not old-fashioned china or some other thing we have no personal connection to, but things that are much more modern—though no less personal for us. I certainly have loads of old tech stuff that I think is cool or interesting, plus other stuff that has meaning to me—to me. I don’t want to burden others with having to deal with stuff I alone decided they might want, and I’m quite happy to make that decision for them. If I’m on my final days and still of sound mind, then people can tell me if there’s something they want. But otherwise, whatever I leave behind will be cleared after I die. If I still have that diskette by then, it’ll be included.

In the meantime, and hoping that the final clearing of my house is a very, very long time away, I’ll continue to enjoy the things I know to be useful or believe to be beautiful, as I alone define those notions, and also that I’ll continue to reduce the volume of stuff in my house, as I’ve been doing since ever I moved into this house, though I still have a long way to go. Actually, I suppose my attitude is the ultimate expression of optimism: I’m betting that my lifespan also has a long way to go. This clearing of stuff is, for me, a marathon, not a sprint, and I intend to win the race.

I doubt I’ll find any more old diskettes, though.

In these modern times

I’ve been a sceptic of the promises made about machine learning, something the media usually calls “A.I.”, for “artificial intelligence”. It’s not that I think it’ll rapidly become self-aware and decide to kill us all—that’ll come later (mostly kidding…). My scepticism is because the promises made have mostly been hype and marketing puffery with little to show for all the hot air expelled. And yet, A.I. is already everywhere, and together with algorithms of various sorts, they will increasingly dominate how we interact with companies and the world. In fact, they already do—and that’s a problem.

Back in February, one of New Zealand’s two supermarket companies, NZ-owned Foodstuffs, announced they would trial Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) as part of their store security, in an effort to reduce in-store crimes. Customers entering a store will be scanned and the system will compare the images with folk in their database. The company said that if the computer finds a match, it will require a second person to do a visual match. If the individual is still considered a match, they’ll be confronted by store security. The company talks about reducing violent and abusive behaviour—which is a very real problem—but it’s obvious it has a roll in excluding recidivist shoplifters, too.

However: FRT is not even remotely foolproof, and the systems make mistakes constantly—especially for women who are not of European descent, such as, Māori, Pacific Island, and Indian. In fact, this problems has already happened.

On Monday, 1News reported that a woman of Māori descent in Rotorua was misidentified as a thief. The woman says she provided the store security with her ID and told them she was not the person they’d trespassed. "It didn't seem to change their mind which was already made up based on what they saw," she said. The company apologised and blamed “human error”, which is another huge problem in the system: It relies on the human verifier being unbiased, something all humans struggle with to varying degrees, and many studies have indicated racial and ethnic bias is common in these sorts of situations. Put another way, no one's perfect. The woman observed, "[It's] ironic they blame human error for an AI piece of technology knowing it will have false positives and errors across the board." Exactly. Also, the incident happened on her birthday.

New Zealand’s Privacy Commissioner already had concerns about this use of FRT, so it seems probable his level of concern will be heightened. He’s definitely not alone in that. My local New World supermarket is part of the FRT trial, and I’ve never been comfortable with that fact.

Meanwhile, NZ’s other supermarket company, Australian-owned Woolworths, announced yesterday that it was rolling out body cameras to all of its stores because, the company says, it’s seen “a 75% increase in physical assaults and 148% increase in ‘serious reportable events’ in the past three years”. The cameras will be worn around the neck and only turned on if there’s an incident. Also, staff are supposed to notify customers before recording.

It’s easy to see how in a tense situation a staff member may forget to tell a customer they’re being recorded—or, the staff member may forget to turn it on at all. In a statement quoted in the linked article, the company claims, “Footage will not be released except when requested by police as part of an investigation." So… they won’t turn it over to the police unless its requested by them? What will they do with it if it isn’t requested? How long will they store the footage, and how securely will it be kept? Who will have access to it, and for what purposes? Will A.I. be used, as with Foodstuffs, to identify repeat offenders? Seems to me the Privacy Commissioner ought to be concerned about this, too.

There’s no sensible person one who isn’t concerned about the rise in abuse and even violence directed at retail workers, and we’re well aware that shoplifters are driving up costs for us all. However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t legitimate questions that need to be answered, and it also doesn’t mean companies—or governments, for that matter—can do absolutely anything they want and have no controls or restrictions just because they say it’s for “security”. We’re in a completely new arena now, and that’s all the more reason there must be extra caution.

The main problem is that just like its human creators, A.I. isn’t perfect, and its flaws are compounded when the humans in the mix are placed in situations in which their inherent biases may be reinforced by the A.I. system’s inherent flaws. There’s also no such thing as a computer system that can’t be hacked, which is another reason privacy considerations are so important.

We need to dial down the hype and pay more attention to the legitimate concerns about privacy and the potential for harm caused by mistakes—by A.I. or the humans involved in the process. Meanwhile, we do need to do more to stop crimes and violence against workers in stores, and that will likely require legislation. Indeed, the two supermarket companies’ use of technology is happening at least in part because government hasn’t provided any solutions. But charging ahead into the unknown with little oversight doesn’t seem like a great idea. What I’m really saying is, let’s get this right—while we still can.

A tale of two tales

Pretty much everyone who has used social media has seen how easy it is to inadvertently confuse people, whether we posted a photo, shared something from someone else, or maybe it was something we said, the opportunities to sow confusion seem endless. Last night, I found out it’s also possible to look a bit muddled.

I made two social media posts last night while I was watching the recorded version of a tech show that streams live on YouTube every Saturday afternoon (NZ time), something I watch in the evening because I almost never watch TV in the daytime, even on weekends, and I also watch other YouTube videos before I wathc the recording of the live stream. My first post was one I made to my personal Facebook, and the other was a photo I shared on Instagram (at the top of this post), and my Instagram posts are set to share to automatically post on Facebook, too. However, the two posts were very different in tone and focus.

My first post, directly Facebook, was about what I was watching, and how I related to the show’s content:

Tonight I was watching a discussion on the weekly live show (recorded in my time zone) show from a tech channel that made videos Nigel and I watched, often together, and as my eyes glazed over watching the video, I thought about how Nigel could both explain to me what they were on about AND educate me about what to do. I find it extremely difficult to navigate *some* of these tech issues, and while I do my best, I’m second-tier at the very, very best. To this very day, despite all my best efforts, I still struggle. And so it continues.🤷🏻‍♂️

I don’t remember what topic made me reflective, and that’s partly because they talk about a lot of subjects on the show. The bigger reason, though, is that once I start thinking about something, especially if I’m wring down my thoughts (even on Facebook), I tune out other things going on around me, especially things on TV.

The hosts of the show were most likely talking about something to do with parts for PCs, or things related to Windows, however, my computers and devices are all Apple (I even watch YouTube videos using an Apple TV attached to my television). The fact I didn’t fully grasp what they were talking about merely made me remember how well Nigel understood it all, and how much I relied on him for all things tech, something I’ve talked about many times.

Shortly after I made that Facebook post, Leo jumped up in my lap and went to sleep. He fell deeply asleep, so much so that he even snored a bit. I took the photo, and shared it to Instagram, writing:

Tonight I was watching the weekly livestream video (after the fact…) of a YouTube tech channel Nigel and I used to watch (though we never watched the streaming shows…), and I looked down. Leo was sound asleep on my lap. He’s somewhere near me always. He’s a good boy. ❤️

My Instagram post was really about Leo, and it actually didn’t matter what I was watching at the time. However, I was still feeling reflective, about an hour after my Facebook post, and that’s why I mentioned watching it. The post automatically shared to my personal Facebook, where it appeared above my first post.

There have been times in the past where I’ve decided to not share an Instagram post to Facebook, usually because I shared a different photo there. Or maybe I shared one to Facebook first. It’s more common, though, for me to share things only to Facebook—actually, I often forget about Instagram for weeks.

All of this means that it’s extremely unusual for me to have two Facebook posts that cover similar ground follow one another. I don’t have a social media “strategy”—though maybe I should—but I often try to share nice or even sweet photos on Instagram because that’s public, and I’m well aware how much of social media is worse than a clogged sewer line. Those same photos then show up on Facebook (and ones of Leo usually get more “reactions” (like Likes) than almost anything else I post there.

Like Instagram, I seldom post anything terribly serious on my personal Facebook, either, however, I’m much more likely to post something reflective on Facebook precisely because it’s not public. It never occurred to me to post the photo only to Instagram, partly because I seldom do that, but in retrospect I wish I hadn’t mentioned watching the show on the Instagram caption. In fact, I thought about editing the caption to take that reference out, but I usually only edit to correct typos, not to completely change what I’ve said.

In the end, it made me realise I need to pay a little more attention to what I’m posting, not as obsessively as “influencers” seem to do, but simply for clarity and to avoid seeming like I’m being inconsistent. In that sense, it’s a good thing that posts were even more jarring right next to each other

There’s one thing more about all this, and it’s the reason I didn’t make any changes to what I posted: Facebook is notorious for not showing FB “Friends” everything that their “Friends” post, and that means it’s probable that only a handful of my “Friends” saw even one post, and that even fewer saw, so I was quite possibly the only one who noticed the difference in tone between the two. Besides, photos of Leo are probably seen more often by my Facebook “Friends” than almost anything else I post (and yes, I'm aware that talking about the two posts could mean more people see the text of both than ever would've otherwise).

It’s easy to inadvertently confuse people when we post to social media. Last night, I found out it’s also possible to look a bit muddled, even if the only one who noticed was me.

Stamping out mail

Will there come a day when no one remembers what a postage stamp was? Unless they read history or visit a museum, maybe? That day seems to be approaching rapidly, something that the Facebook "Memory" (above) reminded me about today.

When I saw the “Memory”, I realised that I have absolutely NO idea when—or even what year—I last needed a stamp. At a guess, I’d say maybe 2019? A year or so after my 2016 Facebook post, I needed to start posting something for work every month, and, as it happened, postal rates were about to go up again, so I bought a roll of KiwiStamps (like “Forever” stamps in the USA). My job ended in March 2020—and I now have absolutely no idea where I put the rest of the roll of stamps (probably, as usual, “somewhere safe, so I can find it again”).

All of this made me curious, so I looked it up this morning and found that a stamp for a letter is now $2 (today around US$1.19 or 0.95 GBP) or one KiwiStamp. That’s for a something weighing up to 500 grams (17.64 ounces in Imperial weight) including the envelope (KiwiStamps apparently can’t be used on larger size envelopes). Also, it wasn’t easy to find the rates for letters on the NZ Post site, most of which is devoted to helping people with sending packages and other courier services).

Currently, NZ Post says that they expect to deliver a letter within New Zealand in “three working days” (which I think must exclude weekends and public holidays). In 2017, NZ Post announced that they were ending “FastPost”, a higher-priced option that aimed to get letters delivered in one business day. At the time of their announcement, NZ Post said that use of the service had declined 23 percent the previous year, and that the volume of all letters sent was declining by 60 million pieces a year.

These days, the vast majority of my business correspondence is electronic (I get two statements in the post because I’m too lazy to change them), and all my bills are paid automatically through direct debit (as I’ve mentioned before, none of my accounts have cheques for customers to use). For those very rare times I need to post something (like the ballots for local government elections), those are always FreePost (which is prepaid, similar to “Business Reply Mail” in the USA).

I’m really just a typical example of why the volume of mail in New Zealand has been declining so sharply for years. While we get mail delivered to our neighbourhood three days a week now, I’m certain it’ll drop to once a week, or maybe twice a week before it drops to one day, and then at some point it’ll stop altogether. I think that the fact that local government elections and most referenda are conducted through the post may be one of the reasons home delivery isn’t disappearing faster.

The end of home delivery is probably quite a way off yet, but in the meantime I think it’s likely that more services will start to disappear, like FastPost did. As an example, earlier this week NZ Post announced that from June 29 they’ll stop delivering packages and newspapers to rural addresses on Saturdays because the volume was too low (17 rural Saturday delivery runs will continue for another year, though).

The issues surrounding this are really about the people who don’t have access to the Internet, technical ability, and or both. Internet access can be a problem for poorer people and older people, both of who may lack the access itself, or a computer or device to access it. In some remote rural areas of the country, Internet access can be dodgy and unreliable. None of these problems will change soon, but maybe by the time home delivery ends, the problems will, too.

I was thinking today that eight years from now, I might not be able to remember the last time I had mail delivered to my house—actually, some weeks, that’s the already the case. It may well turn out that the last piece of mail delivered to my house (not counting packages or courier deliveries) will could well arrive sooner than I realise.

Change really is constant.

This post is a revised and expanded version of what I posted on my personal Facebook when I shared the “Memory”. This “Memory” is what I was referring to in my blog post earlier today.

New, not old

Today Facebook served up two different things that caught my attention. One was another “Memory” (more about that in another post), but it was a"Brand survey" (screenshot above) that made me stop for a moment. It’s probably the oddest thing I’ve ever seen Facebook offer me.

What made this so weird is that FB apart from the title, “Brand Survey”, the thing they were asking me to fill out was entirely in Dutch. Surprisingly, I don’t speak or read Dutch. Sometimes I can get a rough idea of the meaning of a word, or maybe a very short phrase, because I tried to learn German in high school (and a bit after that). This was funny enough (to me…) that I shared it to my personal, sarcastically asking:

Um, you okay Facebook? Or, did you just get confused and not realise that I live in New Zealand and not old Zeeland?

I then added a brief explainer in the comments:

Zeeland is a province of The Netherlands, and the Dutch named the country of New Zealand after the province. Aotearoa is believed to be the original or most common original Māori name that the Dutch didn’t even know about at the time. The British, who later anglicised the Dutch name, didn’t care what Māori called it.

This was simplifying the story a bit, because Dutch cartographers, as was the European custom at the time, used named the places they "discovered" with Latin versions of the name they chose, in this case, Nova Zeelandia, which in Dutch is Nieuw Zeeland (the ending “d” is pronounced more like “t”), and the current official name, New Zealand is just the anglicised version of that. It became the official name when the British started colonising the islands.

The Wikipedia article on the province of Zeeland talks about all of this, and also the fact that at the same time New Zealand was named, the country now known as Australia was named Nieuw Holland (New Holland), something I've mentioned in the past. They did that was because, as the article puts it, “the two major seafaring provinces of the Netherlands in its Golden Age were Holland and Zeeland.”

Personally, I think this country should one day be officially renamed “Aotearoa New Zealand”, though with the current surge in racism and racist attitudes, that day seems farther away now than at any point since I arrived here 28+ years ago. Actually, I don’t even think an adult conversation can be had about it right now, let alone any consideration of a change.

As far as I can remember, Facebook’s post today is the first thing they’ve shown me that wasn’t in English, so that’s—a thing, I suppose. On the other hand, the actual paid ads it shows me are often for Auckland-based real estate companies, and that’s mostly likely because I access the Internet through a VPN (“Virtual Private Network”) that’s set to say I’m connecting from Auckland. But the Netherlands doesn’t have a place called “Auckland”, so—dunno, maybe their algorithms had a computer's equivalent of a brain fart?

Mainly, being served up a “Brand Survey” in Dutch was just funny to me. I don’t know if their algorithms really did mix up New Zealand with old Zeeland, or if there was something else going on. For example, my surname appears in both Germany and The Netherlands—although, I’ve never (yet!) been served up anything in German, so, I guess it’s unlikely to be that?

As corporations decide to rely on computers exclusively, all sorts of problems are emerging. So far, most of them are more annoying or hilarious than they’re actual problems (or worse). For example, people’s posts on Facebook and Instagram being taken down in an automated process using algorithms because there are no human checkers any more. One of the problems with this, apart from having no one to appeal a deletion to, is that the algorithms cannot understand either context or nuance. As corporations push automation farther and harder, serious problems will inevitably emerge. Getting a survey in Dutch will seem so quaint and innocent by comparison.

Still, at least I got a laugh out of it, and it was all a bit of fun. For now.

The day a big change arrived

I share all sorts of anniversaries, so why not a, what? Macaversary? Three years ago this week, my new Apple Mac Mini was delivered. You can thank Facebook for reminding me, and it’s a happy memory, so why not reflect in it?

I still love my Mac Mini, though had I known the Mac Studio was coming, I’d have waited for that. Be that as it may…

Three years ago today, when I wrote about my new Mac on Facebook, I talked about buying the Mac Mini and said I’d never ordered anything directly from Apple, and that was true, and what I was thinking about at the time, probably because the whole things was my idea and I was excited about it.

However, back in 2008, Nigel bought us both iMacs, with the biggest screens available at the time. He ordered them directly from Apple, and they arrived similarly quickly. Nigel then added more memory chips to both computers, because that was back when Apple allowed that. Modern Apple Silicon Macs (like my Mac Mini) use integrated memory that’s part of the CPU, and so, can no longer be upgraded.

Getting that iMac brought about my return to the Apple ecosystem: I’d been a Mac user from its very early days right up until around the turn of the century when Macs got even more too expensive than they already were, and Nigel built me my first-ever Windows PC. However, despite using a PC professionally for the better part of a decade, I still never understood Windows the way I understood Mac.

In my blog post on the new Mac, written on February 19, the day it actually arrived, I talked in some detail, as I do, about why I bought the machine, specifically, the issues I had with my Hackintosh. However, just shy of three weeks later, I fixed that problem, which basically meant I didn’t need the Mac Mini at that moment, though I obviously didn’t know that when I ordered the new machine. If I had known, I’d probably—possibly?—have held off longer, and may well have bought the higher-spec Mac Studio instead.

However, I certainly don’t regret buying it: It’s been a great computer for me, and it’s dramatically quieter than my Hackintosh was, which is a bonus. Even so, from time to time consumerist me thinks of upgrading, but I have no need to so, and sense triumphs over desire—for now.

After the Mac Mini arrived, I said that I felt that whatever my new life would be, it was somehow centred on my office, and my Mac in particular. I later went through a particularly dark time in which that new life seemed farther away than ever, but the feeling of possibility has since returned, which I’m happy about. I can again also see more clearly what I need to do to get to that new life I caught a glimpse of only a few short years ago.

Now, I just need to make my vision reality. “Macaversary’ or not, that’s a very worthwhile thing to focus on.

Keyboard error, here and gone

Typing on a device isn’t easy for a lot of us digital immigrants: Unlike those who grew up with smart devices (phones and tablets), some of us have a bit of trouble or awkwardness using the virtual keyboards on those devices. Sometimes, the device manufacturer can make matters worse. That happened to me, until one day it was gone.

I’ve used the “New Zealand English” keyboard on my iPhone and iPad for many years now, chiefly so I can get the macrons used in most versions of written Māori (for example, in the word "Māori" the “a” has a macron). I pretty obviously like to try to type Māori words correctly, and those keyboards made that possible.

As a bonus, those same keyboards allowed all sorts of other character modifiers used in various European languages, such as, umlauts in German (like in the word “grün”, which means green in English). I have the same sort of commitment to try to to type vowels correctly in all the non-English European languages I use from time to time (in non-English European languages, it’s most likely to be for a proper name).

After some upgrade or other, I noticed that the “New Zealand English” keyboard on my iPad no longer had anything but regular letters and macrons—there were no other character modifiers. I noticed this because I was leaving a Facebook comment and needed an umlaut (for a name), only to discover they were gone.

After some fruitless research, I ended up adding a German keyboard to my iPad, which gave me umlauts again. Unfortunately, that added new problems and frustrations.

In the screenshot avive, the NZ English keyboard is at top, and the German version is below. I toggled between the keyboards by tapping the globe symbol in the bottom row (second key from the left edge). However, that was also how I accessed emojis, something I use a lot in Facebook comments, private messages, texts, etc. It turns out that it was easy to accidentally switch to German and then be faced with a different keyboard layout (apparently called QWERTZ instead of the English QWERTY, and for the same reason). Sometimes I wasn’t even aware I’d accidentally bumped the globe key, so intent was I on what I was writing. Sometimes I also got into a weird loop trying to get an emoji or back to English. I was exasperated enough that I decided to (eventually) delete the German keyboard.

Then, everything changed.

Apple released another update to the operating system for my iPad, and I—eventually—noticed that the New Zealand English keyboard once again had all the special characters that had been missing. I then deleted the German keyboard, and my switching between letters and emojis was once again a peaceful endeavour.

The not noticing thing is a repeating reality, so I don’t know if my iPhone keyboard was similarly afflicted, though I presume it was. I generally only use that keyboard for texting because it’s so small and my fingers aren’t. I also never installed the German keyboard in my phone because I rarely, if ever, needed anything beyond macrons.

The story is even more complicated on my desktop Mac, and another reason I didn’t notice the difference on the iPad.

On my Mac, I use "Australian English" as my “input source” (which is mainly about keyboard configuration, though it apparently helps with spelling/autocorrect; there is no NZ English keyboard). That keyboard has all the European characters—but no macrons. For that, I have a second keyboard—called “Māori”—that has macrons, but no European special characters. Most of the time I have the keyboard set to Māori, which is usually all I need. When I need an umlaut or whatever, I use my mouse and toggle to the Australian keyboard, then back to Māori (there's probably a keyboard shortcut to toggle between the two keyboards, but I've never looked into it; it's highly improbable I'd remember it). When I noticed the change on the iPad keyboard, I just assumed Apple was standardising keyboards between mobile devices and Macs.

At any rate, I'm glad it's once again simple to type whatever non-English character I need, and to only have to use one keyboard to do it. It'd be nice if Apple did something similar with the Mac, but toggling keyboards on my Mac isn't even nearly as annoying as it was on the iPad.

Sometimes it's the smallest things that can make the biggest difference. I just never would've expected a virtual keyboard on a tablet would prove the point.

So gone I forgot

At the end of August, New Zealand’s “Covid Tracer App” was officially dropped from Apple’s and Google’s app stores. Apps aren’t automatically deleted from devices, of course, but because they’re no longer being updated, it’ll eventually be impossible to open the App, mainly because of updates to the devices’ operating systems that will make the apps inoperable. That’s not unusual of course, but the fact the date came and went and I completely forgot about it shows how much things have changed.

I remember when it was announced that the App was being discontinued, and I probably thought I should do a blog post about it at the time. I say “probably” because everything about that slipped my mind—at some point. I remember noticing when they said they’d turned off location notifications, something that was mostly (or perhaps entirely?) related to Bluetooth tracing, a feature that allowed the system to automatically send out alerts to anyone who was in close proximity to someone who’d tested positive for Covid, something that was possible because they both had Bluetooth tracing turned on. When I read about that, I realised I’d already forgotten that was a thing at one time.

All up, there were 3,666,310 installations of the App, and 1,016,326 posters were created. The posters contained a QR code that could be scanned with the App so people could “check in” at a location. I made a poster for my house because, at the time, I was planning on having work done. Various lockdowns/restrictions scuppered those plans, which I honestly now think was for the best. Still, I was prepared at a time when it mattered.

All of this came up this past Monday when I noticed the App on my phone and realised I’d forgotten all about it. I tapped it, and the screen above was the message I got. I took a screenshot of that, and also the statistics page at right. I have NO idea when I stopped using the App, but I know that use of the App began to decline after the last Covid lockdown ended at the waning days of 2021. The requirement that businesses and other public places display the QR code posters ended on March 25, 2022, and from that point onward the App was kind of pointless—apart from the Bluetooth tracing, maybe, but by then people were already beginning to delete the App from their phones. I didn’t delete the App from my phone after March 2022 mostly in case things got bad again. Then, as usual, I forgot all about it.

The last Covid requirements ended on August 14, 2023. At the time, I said about the end of restrictions, “we’ve all moved on, and the Government is really just catching up.”
And yet, it didn’t occur to me to delete the App.
As has happened in most places, Covid has now become an ongoing, though far less deadly, public health problem. In fact, we currently have a “noticeable increase” in Covid cases across New Zealand. However, case numbers are about a third lower than around Christmas last year, and modellers don’t think a “wave” is coming—though an important caveat to that is the fact that many people aren’t even testing for Covid when they get sick, let along reporting positive results. So, how can we knew sure what’s actually going on out in the community?

I noticed in the run-up to the recent General Election how many people’s memories appeared to have been dulled by the passage of time, and that, just like sports fans after literally every match ever, they were full of certainty that the government had made the wrong calls when fighting Covid. Whatever. Those people would never believe that estimates are that tens of thousands of New Zealanders are alive who wouldn’t be if the government hadn’t acted as it did, no, these after-the-fact experts are sure none of it was really necessary—“it’s basically just a bad cold!” they declare based on their extensive medical knowledge and training. Also, the loony conspiracy theories of a year or two ago are now often talked about as not loony at all.

Against that backdrop—and, ya know, daily life—I guess it’s not even remotely a surprise that I’d forgotten all about the Covid Tracer App. However, I do remember when it was a part of my everyday life, when it was a small way the vast majority of us were trying to do our part to keep everyone safe.

Times have changed, in so very many ways. I just wish more of them were positive.

Another personal victory today

Today I had a major victory, but first a reminder: Back in July, my Ethernet switch (which is kind of like a traffic cop for my wired home computer network) failed. I had to do troubleshooting I’d never had to do before (such things were Nigel’s role). I worked out that the problem was a failed power adapter, but there was also at least one port that had failed.

Next, I mapped the ports in my network so I could tell which ones were most important. I then connected the most Important ports to my wifi router, and I could again watch streaming video.

Meanwhile, I knew Nigel had used a different unmanaged 16-port Ethernet switch, and I knew exactly where it was—and I don’t say THAT very often! However, I didn’t know where the power adapter was (that’s much more common…). I spent time, off and on, searching if could buy a replacement.

Now you’re all caught up.

Last night I decided to search for a replacement again, and I still couldn’t find anything. So, I went to the maker’s website to look at the manual for the version of the switch I had. Then, it finally sunk in: There IS no power adapter (which is why I couldn’t find one). The label over the power connection clearly said that, but I had a blind spot because I’d convinced myself the power connection wasn’t a standard AC power cord connection, even though it was.

When I first looked at the switch, I thought it used a power cord just like all my former PCs used, but Macs haven’t in years, and that’s why I didn’t really recognise the connection, and convinced myself it was a proprietary cord. I know now that this was stupid, but at the time I wasn’t really working with full information, or understanding.

I have a box I put all the cables I’ve found into, so I went to it today and found two power cords in there. I plugged at the Ethernet cables into the switch, plugged it in, switched the power on and, of course, it all worked perfectly. My entire wired network is now up and running again, and it’s because of my own efforts and sweat (literally—it was HOT in the garage today!).

Honestly, it was all far easier than I can convey, but the specifics aren’t really the point. I was faced with a challenge because of a technology failure that I had to fix on my own for the first time ever. I focused, breathed, and persisted until I succeeded. Yes, I should have realised the power cord thing immediately, but I didn’t, and I don’t care: I DID figure it out and I got there in the end. I’m proud of myself. What I’m happiest about, though, is that this sort of success is becoming more common. I really am slowly finding my way forward, and I think that’s worth celebrating.

When the arc appears

Every once in a while, we may be confronted with an awareness of how the arc of change in our lives shifted us in new directions. Yesterday, I faced exactly that when Facebook served up a “Memory” (image above. When I shared it on Facebook, I said:

This is so interesting to me: Back then, I brought an actual camera with me to take photos, though it was digital, of course (Nigel and I were early adopters and had been using them for MANY years by then). Nowadays, I exclusively use my phone—and have for at least six or seven years (with very rare exceptions, chiefly for digitising old photos). This is one of a handful of areas where I can actually map out my own shift in the use of technology.

In that Memory, I was talking about some trips I’d made around Auckland that month, and I took photos that I shared on this blog (a list of the posts I think I was talking about in 2009 is at the bottom of this post). In those days, I used a digital camera because I didn’t yet have a smart phone (the iPhone was released on 29 June 2007, a little more than two years earlier). We had several different cameras over the years, and as far as I can remember, the first time I ever took one somewhere to take a photo was around 2000 or 2001—though that probably wasn’t the first time I ever took a digital photo. So much time has passed, though, that I simply can’t remember for sure, and, anyway, most of us aren’t paying attention to the shifts in our own personal technology.

I remember feeling very uncomfortable taking photos in public back in those days, partly because some of the cameras had the sound of a shutter that couldn’t be turned off, as it can now with smartphones. A bigger issue for me in those early days was that the general public wasn’t as used to seeing people taking photos of anything and everything; I wasn’t, either. Facebook had only been available to the general public since May 2006, and Twitter began in March. MySpace had been around since 2003, but people shared other stuff, and was pretty much over by 2007. Instagram wouldn’t begin until 2010.

All of which means that in 2009, I was still getting used to taking random photos, and was barely even starting to share them, However, in addition to this blog, I also shared the photos I was referring to in the “Memory” on my Flickr account. The service launched in 2004, was bought by Yahoo in 2005, acquired by Verizon in 2017 when it bought Yahoo, then sold to SmugMug in 2018. The current owners announced restrictions related to space in early 2019, but by that time I was already using Instagram to share photos. Besides, I was quite busy in 2019, what with turning 60 and… everything.

In the early years of my photo taking, the quality of the photos taken with a smartphone wasn’t even nearly as good as could be taken with one of our digital cameras. Over time, I started using my phone more than camera, especially because I always had my phone with me, and I had to plan to bring a camera along. My deliberate exclusive use of my phone really took off in February 2016 when I did my ”Nature Photo A Day 2016” series of posts. It was the first time I tried to use my phone’s camera to for more serious photography, something I’ve been working on ever since—helped along by constantly improving camera technology in my phones.

When Nigel and I went to the USA in 1997 and 1999, we used a film camera. In the 1999 trip, we also used a video camera that recorded on mini-VHS cassettes. I still have those cameras. I also still have the camera I used for the photos I took in 2009, and another, better camera that Nigel bought maybe a few months later (maybe longer), he after researched to find the best possible camera we could afford. I also have an even older digital camera that we once used a lot, along with two different digital video cameras. Maybe some day I’ll do a sort of “show and tell” post about all that history.

The thing is 2009, I wasn’t even remotely aware of how I was in the midst of an evolution in how I shot photos and videos. In 1999, I was still shooting film photos and our video recorder used tape. By 2009, I’d completed the move from still film cameras to fully digital, and was also in the midst of moving there with video, too. Ten years after that, in 2019, I was not only fully digital for everything, I was also using my phone exclusively.

That Facebook “Memory” yesterday helped me be fully aware of the arc of change in my life, and how it shifted me in new technological directions. I love when that happens.

Related

”Walking the street: Along Karangahape Road” – 12 September 2009
”On Broadway (Auckland)” – 9 September 2009
”Auckland View: Birkenhead Shops” – 5 September 2009 (photo taken 4 September)

My modern mornings

Every morning, I sit down with my first cup of coffee and pick up my iPad to catch up on the news and Facebook. Then, I stop when it’s time for breakfast and morning ablutions.

Before I get up from my chair, I get ready to charge up my iPad, something I do in the morning so I can use free solar power. I charge everything except my watch using solar power; in the old days, I charged my devices overnight, something “experts” now frown on. I also update the installed Apps while it charges.

So, I next open up the App Store, and there’s usually a little red number telling me how many installed Apps have updates. It usually says 1 to 5, sometimes a bit more, and sometimes it’s zero. I refresh it, and sometimes it stays the same, and other times it doesn’t, like today: It said I had zero Apps to update, but when I refreshed, it turned out there were actually 30 (an unusually large number). I think it’s funny when there are a lot more updates than the little red number said at first—and that can often mean a major update to the iPadOS is coming.

A short time later, my Apps were up to date (for that moment…), the iPad was fully charged, and I’d also wiped the screen with a microfibre cloth—and that’s a daily task that does annoy me (see photo up top, taken in March of last year for a post I never did; the Leo hairs are a bonus).

My Apple devices can update automatically, but I like to keep a teeny, tiny bit of control over them, which is why I still do the updates manually. However, it actually started when I had an iPhone 5C that ran out of storage space every other day (not an exaggeration). I never turned on auto updates when I got new devices with adequate storage, and I realised that manual updating gives me a chance to review the Apps needing an update, and that means I notice Apps I never use. I can then either delete them or remember Apps I liked but forgot about. Sort of an unintended benefit, I guess.

It’s similar with my phone, but I often forget to to update the apps on it because I don’t update my phone every day (usually every third day, when the charge drops to around 40%). In addition to my morning ritual, I also use my iPad while I watch TV in the evening, so it generally needs daily updating. I also need to clean my phone screen less often because I don’t use it as much or as long.

All of this has been true for many, many years. In fact, the only thing that’s really changed is that I now charge my devices in the daytime using solar power. Wait, there’s one other thing that’s very different: I bought my phone and iPad for myself. In my old life, Nigel always used to buy me a new phone when I needed one (or, when he thought I did, which was often before I did), and he gave me his iPad when he moved on to something else, or decided he didn’t use it enough (that happened three times). He looked after my tech needs back then, and now I have to do it myself. I guess nothing about this is actually the same, apart from me being lazy about deleting Apps I don’t use, and also having to clean the iPad’s screen a lot.

On the other hand, my modern mornings are so familiar and routine now that I’m not even aware of how different they actually are unless I stop and think about it all, as I just did. And that, I think, is a very good thing.

AmeriNZ Podcast episode 392 is now available

AmeriNZ Podcast episode 392, “Flexible podcaster”, is now available from the podcast website. There, you can listen, download or subscribe to the podcast episode, along with any other episode.

The five most recent episodes of the podcast are listed on the sidebar on the right side of this blog.

Fixing tech problems again

Seems like I’ve been spending a lot of time fixing tech problems. It’s my least favourite thing to do, not the least because they always take time and energy to sort out. Sometimes I know what to do, and sometimes I make a lucky guess, but too many times I have to do a lot of research to figure out what to do. Still, I get there in the end—eventually. This week (so far?) I finished two such repair missions.

Last Sunday, I published ”A very weird thing”, a post about problems I was having with this blog. It’s something I was trying to figure out for the past week, and today I finally succeeded.

After nearly a week without being able to fix the problem, I posted to my personal Facebook asking for people to got to the blog and let me know what they saw. I was trying to find out if the problem was only there for some users, and if so, who they were. Because of their responses, I was able to focus my suspicion on one post that, I was pretty sure, was the last one I posted before the problem appeared.

I put that post into draft mode (“unpublished” it), refreshed the page, and sacré bleu, the sidebars reappeared! I tried editing the text, removing a graphic, and republishing, and the sidebars disappeared. Then I tried removing a link and republishing and the sidebars disappeared again. It didn’t matter which link I left out, or if I left out both, so there had to be something else wrong with it.

And then I saw it: At the very end of the HTML code for the post was one thing: “<div>” with no closing tag. I deleted it, republished the post, and the sidebars were back. That ONE thing threw the whole page into chaos. It wasn’t what I thought was causing it, but, hey, a win’s a win.

The post that caused the problem was last week’s routine announcement of my newest podcast episode. All I do when I publish one of those posts is I open the previous one and change the episode number and name and the permalink to the episode on the podcast site. The orphaned tag ended up in last week’s post because the previous week I’d added a note to the end of the post, and Blogger added the tag and closing tag. I opened that post last week, updated it as usual, and deleted the note, BUT I didn’t notice the orphaned tag.

The moral of the story is that the problem is almost certainly always in the code (joking—only just). I didn’t notice the orphaned tag because I didn’t expect to see it there, and so, and didn’t look carefully enough. I also didn’t think that post was a problem because I’ve been doing one every week without this happening. However, when folks with all sorts of systems were reporting the same thing, I decided to check the post that, it turned out, had caused the whole thing,

The best way to prevent this in the future is to have a properly formatted template to use instead of opening the previous post and updating it (which was kind of lazy, really). I normally scan teh HTML code of every post before I publish, and I need to make sure I look at even routine posts, too.

The other problem was a bit simpler: I wanted to print out some more pages for the “to do” lists in the “What’s Up?” section of my personal organisation system (and I meant to talk about that part of the system last month—oops). However, I hadn’t used my printer in awhile, and it didn’t print any black ink. I used the menus on the printer to test various things, clean nozzles, etc., and finally got the pages printed. Now, I’m all set for the rest of the year—but I’ll need to come up with some things to print from time to time to keep the machine ready to use.

What these two issues and the recent issues with my ethernet switch (still unresolved, but with the same workaround) is that they all were things I needed to fix. Nigel would’ve taken care of the ethernet switch and printer problems, which would’ve meant dealing with my blog problem would’ve been much easier for me to deal with. As it was, I’ve been feeling pretty overwhelmed by it all, and when the printer joined the Tech Problem Festival, my first reaction was, “what now?!”

Dealing with so those issues so close together was frustrating and annoying, and, sure, I feel good that I fixed two of them (and found a good workaround for the ethernet switch problem), but I’d absolutely rather not have several happening at once. We don’t get a say in such things, of course, and when issues to solve pile up seemingly all at once, it can feel like a cruel twist of fate. Random chance like that can be annoying, but when lots of good things happen in a row, do we ever think how awesome it is we got a run of good luck? Probably not.

In any case, this week I finished two repair missions. I think I’ll just celebrate the win.