Life, Kids, Technology & that move to another continent
scott “Never ignore coincidence. Unless, of course, you’re busy. In which case, always ignore coincidence.” Crazy that a Doctor Who quote is semi-appropriate for describing how I feel about something at work.
Of course during the same issue I kept thinking and said out loud at least once “if Woody had only gone to the police, none of this would have every happened. I guess that I am just well rounded in my pop culture quotes.
I feel like I have been careful not to impose our opinions on the girls. I was generally pleased then when on their own they started liking Star Wars. I believe I wrote about how I introduced it to them previously.
Like many things we want to expose the girls to we got a book or two about it. They enjoy it so much that I got the entire series as Little Golden books. That segued into watching the movies with them. The girls have now seen all of the movies in the original trilogy at least once. They have also seen the force awakens several times.
Watching the movies was a good segway into the girls requesting for Star Wars stuff. A more than T however T has an Ewok pillow and a few other things. A has numerous Star Wars themed accessories and things. I find it extremely cute. I also love that I can share something that I enjoyed as a child with them. Of course who am I kidding I enjoy it now as well.
Star Wars is of course very mainstream and it was surprisingly easy to introduce them to it. There’s lots of children themed ways to have them engaged in Star Wars such as the books I bought. Other things I have wanted to introduce the girls to have been more elusive to me on how to introduce them.
Doctor Who has been something I’ve enjoyed since I was around 10 or 11 years old. I may have been exposed Star Wars much earlier science fiction franchises have played an important part in my history. Lets not forget partly how we named both girls. T story is here.
Even before I started buying any Star Wars books T had a plush TARDIS. Both girls have lunch boxes however not sure if he’ll ever use them. I still maintain they had to have them. . I’ve also gotten the girls action figures. I can’t remember exactly when I bought them however they’ve had them since probably before A could walk. Both girls know of the action figures and they can even identify who is who. I have one doctor, and Amy, and Rory. I am not a purist so it’s a 10th Doctor. since I like him better than the 11th. I wanted the Amy for A. I haven’t found a T one even though I know it exists. Beyond being able to identify them and never really played with them.
Something changed in the past few weeks however. I’m not really sure what however they started taking significantly more of an interest. We were playing with the dollhouse and the girls had several action figures. It was an assortment of wonder woman, Superman, Batman, Belle from beauty and the beast, Ame Pond, Rory and the doctor. I thought it was pretty hysterical the dialogue they had interacting. After that both girls started talking about thr doctor and the companions and asking questions.
Previously I bought a sonic screwdriver that I keep near my desk. Every once in a while and the girls complain that they’re scared about some imaginary thing in their room I take it out and make it light up telling them getting rid of all the bad guys. Both girls love to play with it and make it light up and make noise. After their interest in the action figures the girls started wanting to play with the sonic screwdriver more. I decided to buy another one so I had two of them and give them to the girls. T got my 11th doctor screwdriver and I bought A the 12th Doctor one.
I’ve had to confiscate them so they don’t take them to bed at night and make noise. I also had to prevent them from going to school however A claims she took it to school one day anyway. For right now that’s unconfirmed.
I’m still not sure if the girls are old enough to watch any episode. They do ask questions and I am showing them pictures. I also have shown them some small clips on YouTube.
We are planning a trip to Disney World. M showed the girls a video about it. One of the things that we’re doing with them when where there is a treat to go to Cinderella’s Castle one of the breakfasts. I forget which one. The video showed that one part of the meal everyone has or can bring magic wands, swords or other stuff. We saw kids with an assortment of things. At first the girls asked if they could bring their light sabers. Now they’re asking to bring their sonic screwdrivers.
Overall I’m just enjoying being in the share things I like my two adorable little people. They continue to live up to the statement I always say that they are my entertainment budget. They always seem to entertain me.
Fantastic concert and conveniently located venue. Great night
The kids were at Day care by my office today so I brought them over to work for lunch. It was the first time I did that. T decided she could write a better puppet module so she got right to work!
Back in February when my family went on vacation I spent a lot of time playing around with Docker. I converted several applications I was running on raspberry pi’s to run in Docker containers on my Synology Diskstation.
The challenge I gave myself was could I set up the containers to run on the NAS (The Diskstation) while at the same time being able to run them on my Mac mini as a backup in case there was any problems. That meant I needed to figure out how to replicate the configuration information between the devices.
I solve that challenge by setting up a new Resilio Sync folder for all of my Docker config’s. In most cases there was little to no reconfiguration needed to have those config files work on the NAS or the Mac mini. It wasn’t a super elegant solution since it did require human intervention however switching between systems was not something I intended to do often.
I did run into problems getting Plex to run as a container. I was having performance issues in general running Plex on my NAS. My solution was to setup Plex on my Mac mini as a native app. At some point I want to go back and figure out how to get Plex working in a container. Even when I do that I will still need to build a new machine to host it on. The Diskstation just doesn’t have the power to run Plex and my sync application at the same time anymore. Even with the 4gig I upgraded the disk station to a year or so ago is now not enough.. For now I can continue to use Plex on my Mac. Longer-term I have bought components to build myself a Linux application server to host all of my containers so I can make my disk station just host files.
In March I blogged about my “almost disposable email“. I still have improvements to make when dealing with external sites and services. Overall that model works pretty well.
When thinking about my personal email, my dilemma changes a bit. Unlike most people who use the Internet send and receive email for personal use I have changed my address multiple times over the years. Friends and family of mine have commented about the fact that I change probably too often. In reality it’s only once every 3 or 4 years. That apparently is to much for most people. Of course some the people commenting may still be using AOL addresses from the 90s.
In 2014 I blogged about My sudden allergic reaction to all things Google. In that post I wrote about migrating from Google hosted mail to a hosting provider in Switzerland. The Swiss-based provider I selected offers much greater privacy protection vs a US-based company. For what I was looking for the price difference was nominal. By moving to a Swiss-based provider wasn’t a magic bullet. All my data on my website and email stored on their servers is still not encrypted at rest. In other words I am still exposed just less likely to get snooped on by a government. Even that statement has caveat. Let’s say I am better off than before. I still have much to do.
With my mail being hosted in Switzerland I have relatively good level of privacy protection. That means if someone wants to get a hold of my mail they would need some sort of court order. The fact that there is a request should be disclosed to me. That is unlike US hosting providers that would not need to inform me if they were asked to spy on me. To go a step further and make it impossible for anyone to get my email on the mail server I would need to encrypted my email at rest with the hosting provider having no knowledge of the encryption keys. The reality is this is important however not my threat model. I’m more concerned about personal details being intercepted via an unsecured network.
To address both of these problems I have been investigating two different secure email providers. Protonmail & Tutanota. Both in theory provide the same service. They allow you to encrypt email and send it. They also encrypt email at rest on their systems and have no knowledge of how to decrypt. Email sent between two people on let’s say proton mail has the email encrypted completely. If however I am on protonmail and I send an email to someone not using that system messages secure however there is a caveat. What really happens is an email is sent to the recipient telling them that there is a secured message waiting for them and it provides a link to that message. I can send along a password hint if I want as well. The recipient can then click on the link and read and respond to the email. It secure however not super user-friendly to what most people are use to. I experienced similar systems when I briefly worked at a health benefits organization that had to comply with HIPPA rules in the US.
My threat model concerns sending and receiving of secured information via email. I do realize that the use case is not required for most emails i send. In most cases what I’m sending can go “in the clear”. Having the ability to encrypt as needed is the big value to me.
Having stored mail encrypted at rest with the provider having no knowledge of the decrypt keys also makes me feel more comfortable when I am not hosting the data. ProtonMail & Tutanota both offer this fundamental security feature. The challenge with both providers that neither currently have a way to import or export email. I am a person who has most if not all of my mail going back to 1996. For years I was proud to have that stash of mail. I also have gone back to really old messages for information. In today’s world however having that much personal data sitting on a typical mail server is too big of a potential risk and a major liability.
I no longer keep that archive of mail on a live mail server. Instead it is encrypted on a personal computer in a database. At least I still have it. To use ProtonMail or Tutanota would mean I would no longer have correspondence that goes into the system. That limitation is given me a little bit of pause. Since I started playing around with the system late last year proton mail has announced they will be launching a secured IMAP option. I am assuming that will enable me to offload mail from their system. That would make their solution much more viable for me.
As I continue to play around with both systems I have been favoring ProtonMail over Tutanota. I’ve not yet jumped into using one for my personal mail however I am leaning towards protonmail. One of the hesitations I have is that protonmail is not cheap. It costs about half of a full hosting package I have per year. Tutanota is as cheap as one dollar a month per user. Protonmail is around five dollars per month for what I initially need it for. Protonmail also does not allow me to move my entire family using a specific email domain onto an account unless I use a much more expensive account than the five dollars per month plan. Tutanota will let me set up multiple family mailboxes for one dollar per mailbox per month. That makes Tutanota an option if I wanted to continue using the same email domain I currently use for my personal email.
The solution to this issue is for me to switch domain names i use. I have a few other ones I own i can start to use however that brings me back to how I started off this post. I don’t want to change my address, however it is a price i am willing to pay if other factors are positive.
I could make my life easy and just use Tutanota and move my family over to it also. The challenge is I like protonmail much better. The UI is nicer on both the web and iOS app. The iOS app loads faster. It has a few more nifty features versus Tutanota such as tagging. Overall I just get a better feeling about it.
Knowing myself what I likely will end up doing is change my personal email so I can use a different domain name that I have that isn’t being used for anything else and point that the proton mail. I would then leave my existing mail domain where it is and allow my other family members to continue using it.
For now I’m still waffling a bit on what to do. If your friend or family member of mine and you are reading this, you know why in a few months you might get a notice that I changed my mail address yet again. Of course if you read this far kudos to you.
This was a story that happened back in February. I am finally getting around to writing about it.
For almost as long as she could talk and sentences T has spoken about Her friend Doka. I don’t remember if I journaled about him/her before. At first Doka was just a friend that was a baby. Then she became her baby. Consistently she has been very small and resides and T ear. Since as long as T is been her mommy she’s been living into T ear.
Later on T started saying that she has 10 children. Doka was always discussed first. Recently she went from having different names for each of the kids to all of them being named Doka. Only one of them lives and her ear, the original one.
Today while looking at my photo screensaver on my laptop T commented that a baby did not have any hair. She then said that no babies have any hair. I corrected her and said some babies have a little bit of hair and that she had some when she was a baby but not much.
After telling her that she told me that Doka in her ear has no hair. She offered to show me and came over and turned her head so I can look into her ear. I moved her hair away from her ear and looked inside and put my finger right at the edge of her ear and said oh yeah I see Doka. T smiled and stepped away and then told me that when I touched Doka she giggled.
Ever since before I decided to lose it weight I was tracking my activity. Originally I used a Jawbone Up. I went through several versions of them and then I try to Fitbit for a while. I ended up going back to jawbone and then again back to Fitbit. For about a year I have been using a Fitbit Alta.
That was until last month I stopped using an activity tracker during the day. The annoying clanking of the band against my watch finally drove me to stop using an activity band altogether during the day. I did some basic research and I found that the accelerometer on my iPhone is relatively comparable four step count to a wristband activity tracker. The downside I read were you don’t always have your phone with you so the phone doesn’t always capture your total activity. For me I generally do carry the phone with me most of the time and the level of accuracy the phone would give me versus wristband was worth the trade-off.
Several weeks into this change my step count seems pretty consistent. I still use my Fitbit to track sleep however I stopped wearing it during the day. Generally pretty happy about that decision since having my watch and a wristband was always annoying. It was worth it when there was an alternative however now that I found a decent one I don’t see going back to wearing a dedicated wristband with the feature set that are currently offered.
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