scott

I Almost Contributed To The Death Of My Cat

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Today I was walking down my stairs as I normally do to get coffee in the middle of the day. My cat Grogu thinks it’s a game and when I put my hand on the top of the banister he tries to paw at it. I went to lean down and pet him when he was doing that. He had other ideas. At the same moment I was leaning down he was making a full leap with the intention of jumping up to my shoulder. Since I was going down and he was going up I mostly missed him. His paws scratched my neck a bit. However he kept going since my shoulder wasn’t where he thought it was going to be. When I mean he kept going, his trajectory took him two thirds of the way down my stairs. I cannot say for certain if he landed legs up however he recovered pretty quickly. For about three or four seconds I thought he was going to fly all the way to the bottom of the stairs and hit our step cabinet. While I was still getting over the shock of the situation he was sitting on the bottom step licking his paw waiting for me to finish walking downstairs.

He likes to sit on my shoulder however I haven’t seen him try to make one leap onto it before. That got me totally offguard.

If cats have nine lives I’m going to count that as one of them.

The Story of My Mac Mini M1

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I had been waiting for Apple to come out with a new Mac Mini that I can upgrade to for a long time. I even wrote about it as far back as 2016. By then it had been two years since Apple had released anything new in the Mac Mini models. I had the 2012 model at the time. They had came out with a 2014 model however by 2016 when I wanted a new computer it was not worth spending money on a two year old computer model that is only slightly better than the one I already own. The challenge was what I owned was four years old and really needing a replacement.

It would be another two years before the mini was refreshed in 2018. At that point I was prepared to buy a new one. I may have even had an order ready to go. However on reflection the differences between what I had that was six years old in the 2018 variant wasn’t hugely different and the amount of money was not insignificant. At the time I past on an upgrade and just used a laptop as my desktop. I also purchased A significantly cheaper Intel Nuc with better specifications that I put Linux on.

Even after coming up with an alternative plan I still really wanted a Mac Mini. I just couldn’t justify the price for what it was getting me. Flash forward to fall of 2020 and I was excited to pre-order a M1 Mac Mini. I did in fact have an order placed and it was on backorder for about six weeks. After a little while though I talked myself out of getting it and continue to use my old laptop. It was not until this winter then I finally decide the time was right to make a purchase. For the money the mini was a pretty nice computer with the M one chip in it. I also had a 12 inch iPad Pro that are used around the house and out and about like a laptop. It’s not a laptop replacement however someone said the perfect quote that it’s about 90% of our computer replacement. For when I’m not at my desk having the iPad Pro is perfectly fine. For when I sit at my desk having a desktop computer works better than a laptop docked to a monitor.

After literally over four years of waiting I finally got my new mini. Was it worth the wait, I won’t say that. It is a pretty nice computer though. my 2012 mini stop being functional as my main computer about three or four years ago. I used it for a while with Debian on it. At this point it is a paper weight.

I was so slow to write this post that a funny thing happened after a few months with my Mini. I started missing a personal laptop or the freedom that being undocked from a stationary position. Even if it was rare that i did it, the flexibility was nice. I went out and got the stock 8Gig M1 MacBook Air. I was worried that the base configuration was not going to be powerful enough. I was wrong. It has been perfectly fine. After having the MacBook Air a while i can say that i do not use it away from my desk often. When i do it is worth the flexibility. I do see the iPad Pro 12” getting flexible enough that i may change that decision over time.

As great as the Mini was, after about a year I had sold it on eBay in favour of the MacBook Air. I still miss a desktop now and again but the laptop is way more flexible.

W Sisters Short on Failed At Parenting

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Walking home from school today I told the girls that we are thinking about getting a car. We like the Prius. An old work friend once called them the Ninja of cars and that name stuck to me so I told them that if we get one I want to name it snake eyes. He is of course the most famous ninja I know.

A asked who he Snake Eyes was. I gave a fake shocked face and told her he was the best Ninja from GI Joe. She said what’s GI Joe? I asked her how she didn’t know what it was? A’s reply was that I had failed as a parent. In this case she was right, but it still stung!

The Story of My Upgrade Partially Pi Powered Backup Network

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I have written a few posts on using Resilio Sync to replicate my personal data as a backup network. Currently I have several nodes running at home on various devices. I have one remote nodes running. It is on a VPS that I may write about in more detail separately. I had another remote Pi at a friends house for years. With the cost of the VPS being so cheap and easier to manage remotely I gave up on the extra node with my friend.

Instead I have 2 Pi’s running Resilio at home. In addition to a ODROID HC2 and instances on my laptop and NAS. Every device does not have all the data on it except for the NAS. Some of the shares are so big I had to shard them out. Only the NAS has all the data. However all of my data is replicated at least twice in the house. All, but my videos are replicated to the VPS.

I also started using Amazon Glacial Deep Freeze to backup (approx $1 per tb) some shares. Deep Freeze is so cheap my intention is to add bigger shares to backup. I just have not gotten around to it yet.

The Raspberry Pi’s photographed are the Pi 2’s (white cases) and Pi 3’s (Grey cases). The current generation of Pi’s I am running are two Pi 4’s. One with four gigs of RAM and the other with eight. I have a third Pi 4 with four gigs of RAM that I am playing around with alternative configurations on. I still have the second and third generation Pi’s. I use the third-generation ones periodically. Most recently one was a dedicated Pi-hole, however I recently stopped using it.

Pull disclosure, pictured is the older P2 and P3’s.

Do I Get A Merit Badge Or Something For Finishing Cryptonomicon?

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I finished reading Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon today. Funny enough until a few years ago i hadn’t know it as a body of work had exitested. When i did i was in no rush to start it since i had heard it was a rough slog to read and it was huge. I dont remember what changed recently however I finally got around to starting it in the beginning of April. I cannot recall any novel I have read being that large. I feel like I deserve some sort of cryptography merit badge by finishing it.

Now a days I read way too many reviews on books before I read the actual book. I want to be sure something is worth it for me. With Cryptonomicon I was a bit worried about the time investment since so many people gave it mixed reviews. In the end i decided to risk it. I really liked it. Once i got going i did not worry about how big it was. I also found the story to be a really good progression leading to the conclusion. Many reviews complained it was all over the place and i guess did not see the progression from the original plot points to the end. I thought it was pretty well done overall.

I also got more of a lesson in cryptography than I thought. Since I didn’t really expect any lesson at all.

My iPad Mini as a Phone?

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I have had two mobile phones at the same time for years. One is my work number. The other one is my personal one. It is been that way ever since work stopped letting me expense my own number and required you to have your number on their shared account for at least 10 years or so. In the US I had concerns about moving my personal number to my work account. What if I left and I wanted my number back? Our human resources Department was actually very cool and had said you can absolutely have your number back. Only in rare situations (not a scenario I fell into) would there be a question of not allowing it. In any event I felt more comfortable keeping my personal number separate so I had my work phone and I had my personal phone.

When I got to the UK I could have simply got only a work phone. I didn’t have any history of a number that I have been tied to. In the end I got my own personal one for the same reasons I had one in the States. I wanted one separate from Work. In the UK it is significantly cheaper to do this. My personal phone SIM costs me 13 pounds for more data and minutes than I ever remotely use. In the US that same plan would cost 75-100 dollars.

The phone I use for work has varied greatly. It is generally my second phone. That means it is never a high end one. It has been everything from vanity of Android to an iPhone SE, the original. The SE is what came standard with the contract in the UK. The screen is frankly just too small for me. I find that funny since for years that was the standard size of an iPhone screen. I had many different iPhones of that screen size and didn’t like the size however got by ok. I guess age just catches up to you. Since the phone that came with the contract was virtually useless to me I used the SIM card to experiment with different phones. When are travelled internationally a bit in the summer of 2019 I bought an Android phone and they did dual SIM cards and used the Work SIM with it. I found that the very big sized screen of the android phone I was using specially as a second device made it useful for me. I didn’t always keep in my pocket so even though was bigger than my regular iPhone 11 pro it didn’t matter. I have written about my issues with the Android phone and why I sold it in another post. With that phone gone however I was back to either using the iPhone SE or an iPhone 6 that I had from the states. Neither option had a lot of storage. 32gb on an iPhone is basically unusable in my opinion now a days. To compensate for the poor storage and small screen of the SE I splurged for a used iPhone 7+. The screen size was nice. It was better than the 6 or SE I had. It just wasn’t bigger than my iPhone 11 Pro that I used for personal use. The physical size of the 7+ was bigger than the 11 Pro. That made it an oddity. The screen was smaller yet the size was bigger. The screen was nicer and the storage was better than the other options I had. I still found no value in carrying it around and left it in my bag for when I need it.

Even before the lockdown I had thought about using a tablet as a quasi phone. It was a good idea I never really did anything about it. During the lockdown I obviously did not really leave the house very much. I ended up using my iPad Mini 4 as a sort of phone replacement. In many use cases at least around the house the iPad mini was a pretty good phone replacement. I couldn’t keep it in my pocket all the time yet it was nearby most of the time. One challenge was that the iPad mini 4 was starting to see its age in performance. Before the mini 4 was being used as a sort of phone replacement I had meant to sell it on eBay anyway. My using it and feeling its limitations compelled me to sell the mini 4 on eBay and and upgrade to an ipad mini 5.

Sometime after getting my new iPad mini I moved my work SIM card to it. I have been using the mini basically as my second phone. Even though I can’t put it in my pocket (it is a bit big for that) I can carry around and even put it in my jacket pocket of some jackets. If I am out of the house for more than a brief trip to the market I usually have my backpack or messenger bag with me that I can easily put it in. I am finding the much larger screen size to be great.

Except for WhatsApp I think I can do pretty much everything on the tablet that I do on my phone. All my work apps work perfectly well and I take advantage of the bigger screen. I can make calls using FaceTime audio, Signal or Bria for voip calls using my US number. Let’s face I do not make many regular phone calls these days. Even if I need to I can use FaceTime tethering to my iPhone for that anyway.

I may end up needing to put the work SIM card into a real phone at some point in the future. I am not really sure. I am hoping not. The iPad mini isn’t perfect. I still use my phone more in the house since it in my pocket. I also use my iPad Pro more as a sort of computer replacement around the house. When I need to run out for short periods of time or even just to sit here and dictate this blog entry using the iPad mini is just right.

Grogu & The Couch

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Grogu made a power move today and spent all morning sitting on the couch in M’s spot. Well played Grogu.

Now sure M was at work, but still power move cat…

W Sisters on The Easter Bunny

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This story is from 2021 and I don’t know why I never published it.

A tells M the other day that they (the girls) have a theory that M is the easter bunny. Apparently the girls went looking for cereal and they found on a high shelf the stash of Easter chocolates and candies that we had bought to prepare for the Easter.

The cover story will be that I ate the candy after M moves it. I am ok with that even if I don’t get to actually eat it