Entries tagged with tech

Entry tags:

brain trust: streaming TV

I've been thinking about updating my streaming. You can help. :-)

Apple TV (forthcoming) and Roku are both attractive and are clearly competitors. Both offer voice input, and "hey Siri, find $movie_title" would be way, way easier than using a remote control or phone to type a search, perhaps multiple times (once per channel/app). How well it works, and whether Siri will make it hard to find free alternatives to things in the Apple store, are open questions. I do not care one whit about playing games on my TV.

I have a first-edition Roku ("Roku 1", except it was just "Roku" then) and its user interface is pretty good, though I haven't gotten software updates for a year or two now (no longer supported) so I don't know what the modern UI looks like. One thing that I find annoying on my Roku is that you can only rewind or fast-forward in "steps" that are about 10-15 seconds apart, and when you jump it pauses to contemplate its navel before resuming (at which point you find out if you hit the spot you meant). So advancing to the end of the opening credits or backing up to hear that dialogue again is tedious and should be seamless. I much prefer the conventional rewind/fast-forward of my DVD and TiVo, where you see sped-up video as it goes by.

I mentioned TiVo, which streams. But TiVo's UI for streaming is really bad for people with less-than-stellar vision and measly little 42" TVs. If I can't read the titles from my chair, it's not very useful.

I also have a (new) Chromecast, an inexpensive experiment to see if that would do the job. I like it in principle, and you can't beat either the price or the footprint, but I've run into two issues. One is that it needs my phone's WiFi to be on and that sucks battery. That's probably livable because I keep a spare battery charged. The other is that Chromecast is only as good as the phone apps that drive it, and I really, really need a better Netflix app and haven't been able to find it.

The Netflix Android app is all about the eye candy. When viewing either my queue or search results, it shows me the cover art for each title -- but not the names in plain old text. Consider cover art, three to the row, scaled for a phone. I can't see that, and the app doesn't support zoom. I've found no setting to toggle between cover art and a text list. I've searched the app store for "Netflix" hoping to find third-party apps, but no luck so far. (By the way, the Crackle app has the same problem.)

Also, rewinding or fast-forwarding by moving a YouTube-style pointer really, really stinks. Netflix, where are the rewind/fast-forward buttons?

I'm mentioning Netflix a lot because that's really the only thing I stream from now. Roku has hundreds of channels but you have to interact with them individually, so I never do -- a unified search, on the other hand, would provide an entry to that. Since I'm already paying for Netflix I'm otherwise only interested in the free ones; I had thought that included Hulu but the phone app suggests that it's all paid now.

Dear readers who are technologically way ahead of me, any input?

Entry tags:

pittsburgh,
tech

reverse image search

Last night Dani and I went out for dinner, as we always do after Shabbat, and chose a restaurant in Monroeville (part of the mall complex but not in the main building). We had a nice dinner and, upon leaving, found the front door locked and other people standing around. The employee at the door told us that we were on lockdown because there was a shooter in the mall. Somebody asked if we were permitted to leave and she said "I can't stop you". After conferring briefly we decided to leave, as did some of the others there. (Our car was nearby and not in the direction of the mall.) By the time I went to sleep last night they hadn't yet found the guy, so I'd say that was a reasonable call.

But that's not the main point of this post. Several news articles (here's one) report that they identified the suspect by matching store surveillance video with pictures on social media. This future contender for the Darwin award had actually posted a picture of himself on Instagram four hours earlier, wearing the same distinctive clothing he wore in the mall later, but most such searches would presumably be harder.

Image search (by keyword) is not new, of course, and more recently Google offers reverse image search (upload an image and find ones like it). I don't know how well the latter works (haven't tested it). Searching "social media" for pictures matching surveillance footage is a large task unless Google has already indexed it for you. Either way, I wonder if they are also using geo-coding information when that's embedded in photos or posts to narrow the search. (Or law-enforcement organizations might have a big, private database that includes web scrapes and lots more; they wouldn't be the first government agency to do that.)

So this all got me wondering: are local police using Google to find suspects? What kind of success rate do they get doing that?

Entry tags:

Skype is customer-hostile now?

I have a personal Skype account, which I use very rarely via my personal tablet. That's all fine, or was the last time I checked, anyway.

I also need Skype for work, so to prevent mingling I created a work account (6+ months ago), using my work email address for the account name. I log in to Skype using that email address and password on a (work) tablet all the time. That's all fine.

It would be convenient for me to also have a Skype client on my work laptop, so I went to download one. Along the way I tried to sign into the Skype web site, using that email address. Whereupon it told me that my account name can't be an email address and I need to either give it a proper account name or sign in with my Microsoft account. I've no idea what they think the former is nor do I have one of the latter so far as I can tell. There's a "forgot user name?" link, but it leads to a login page for a Microsoft account. After making a few failed guesses about all of this I found my way to their support page.

Their help pages are useless for this particular situation (no I didn't forget my password). They don't publish any email addresses for support, of course, but there was a link for "support request page". Great, I thought -- so I clicked on it. And it demanded that I log in.

Earth to Skype: If you require login for people to get support, you aren't providing support for identity/password issues! Sheesh.

I verified that I can still log in on the tablet, then went back to their web site for one more try at "forgot account name". At which point it told me I've tried too many times and come back tomorrow.

By the way, neither help@skype.com nor support@skype.com is a valid address. I'm not even going to bother with postmaster or webmaster; most customer-facing sites I've tried to contact send those into a black hole, never mind that at least the former is supposed to always be defined.

Grumble. It was to be expected that Microsoft would be bad for Skype in the end, but this particular set of failures puzzles me.

By the way, I tried downloading the Windows client anyway just to see if I could log in there with my email address -- break the tie vote between the tablet (yes) and the web site (no). But it wants to make Bing my default search engine (no obvious way to turn that off) in every browser on my machine, so, um, no thanks. It has a checkbox (on by default but can be unchecked) to change my home page (again, in all browsers), but there's nothing about disabling the Bing thing. I'm willing to give IE over to Microsoft (and/or corporate IT) to violate however they like, but I draw the line at inviting tampering with the browsers I actually rely on.

Skype: this is not the way to build customer engagement. Maybe I'm better off just using my cell phone.

Entry tags:

tech

feature request

My phone knows where I am because of GPS.

It knows where I've been because surely it logs stuff like that. And yeah that's creepy, but still.

It spontaneously offers me information I haven't yet asked for, often correctly. Last week, for example, I had to travel for business, and starting a day or so before my flight it gave me weather information for my destination alongside my local weather. (I don't know whether it scraped that information out of email or got it from the airline app.)

So... could my phone please alert me, as I'm leaving for work, about traffic problems on my usual route? Please? It knows, after all; were I to check the navigator I'd see the problem. And it knows where I am, and that I follow that particular route every (week)day. It knows I am not in the habit of checking for traffic alerts. (It probably doesn't know that that's because I'm not at my best in the morning, but give it time.) So a little just-in-time information here would be great.

Google, can you take care of that? Thanks.

Entry tags:

making things easy = making things hard

The first time I traveled for work with my employer I saw that I could register frequent-flyer account numbers with them and they would do the right thing there. I didn't yet have a frequent-flyer account on the carrier we usually use, but I figured I could come back and add that later.

I downloaded the airline's app, used the confirmation number for the flight as an entry point, and created an account with them. The app did all the right things for that trip.

I recently booked another trip and noticed that I hadn't yet entered the frequent-flyer account number in my travel profile (and so the app couldn't find it for me). Ok, I figured -- I'll just ask the app for my account number so I can add it to the profile. (Meanwhile, I had to use an actual phone to talk to an actual human being to connect this flight to my account.)

Nope, no way to get the account number in the app -- I'm signed in, but I apparently don't need to know the account number so they're not going to trouble me with a line in "settings" or some such.

I searched my email and found the "welcome to (us)" notice, but it didn't contain the account number either.

So I went to the web site, at which point I had to log in. After failing with my standard password algorithm I went down the "forgot password" path, which is when I discovered that my algorithm wouldn't work with them (see rant below), hence the failed login. So I reset my password with their insecure rules, logged in on the web site, and therein found my account number, which I then added to my corporate travel profile. I suspect I'll need this password at most one more time (if the app challenges me for it because it changed, which it hasn't yet).

All of this could have been averted if either the app or the welcome email had a way to find the account number. Sheesh.

In theory, now, everything should be wired up: next time I need to book corporate travel on this airline the flights will automatically show up in the app and I'll never need to directly interact with the airline. That wiring makes things easy, but it was way harder than it should have been to get the information in order to effect that wiring.

Rant: In these modern times, why in the world does anybody have password rules that do not permit any low-order ASCII character? No punctuation except periods and underscores? What is this nonsense?

Entry tags:

Braille + Hebrew?

Dear LJ Brain Trust,

A member of our minyan has a degenerative vision problem and can no longer use even a very-large-print prayer book. (She was absent for a while and returned this week with a guide dog.) She realized that she didn't know as many of the prayers by heart as she thought she did, so I'm spending some time with her to teach her by ear and we'll scare up some recordings for her, but memorization isn't really the ideal solution. Sure, people can and do memorize the core, common prayers, but it's hard to memorize everything, and sometimes there are seasonal changes, so you really want to be able to read the prayer book.

I once saw somebody who used a Braille prayer book, but at the time I didn't ask him how that worked and he's since passed away. Braille is, as I understand it, a letter-by-letter notation system with an extra layer (called "condensed", I've heard) where common words have their own symbols instead of being spelled out. (Like American Sign Language, except I have the impression that the balance between spelled-out and condensed is different. I may be wrong about that.) But -- all of that kind of assumes a particular alphabet, right? So how would Hebrew be rendered in Braille -- do they transliterate it and then Braille-encode that, or does the reader have to learn a different Braille language to match the different alphabet, or what?

I'd like to be able to help her get a prayer book she can read. I don't think she's ready to learn a second Braille language (she's still working on the first).

And a related question: she has an iPad; are there Braille peripherals for that like (I understand) there are for desktop computers? Is "digital copy of the book + iPad + peripheral" a practical alternative to the massive paper tome? (She would use technology on Shabbat for that purpose.)

Entry tags:

tech

Android 4.2.2 -> 4.3: any gotchas?

My T-Mobile Galaxy 4S has, for a few weeks, been intermittently telling me that it has a software update ready but I need to take it over WiFi. (The first one came at Pennsic, I think.) This morning I got the notification while I was actually home and could connect to WiFi, so I said "yeah, sure".

Note to self: if the phone wants to use WiFi that's probably because it's a large download. That idea you had that it could do its work while you were feeding the cats and checking email? Um, no. It wasn't clear what would happen if I left before it was finished, so I let it have its half-hour.

It was only at the end that I found out what it was (though I guessed from the file size): OS update. I got a popup with words to the effect that some settings might change and I should back up my data, and would I like to install now or postpone? Yeah, that has an obvious answer.

Note to T-Mobile/Samsung/Google: you could improve the user experience there by, in that message, providing a link to a description of the differences between the current and new versions. Just sayin'. They didn't, so I found a report of this upgrade on this phone on my own. It sounds safe. I can't help noticing that that article is dated November 2013 and I'm only receiving this now. The article is silent about settings changing.

I'm also not clear (and this is not the upgrade's fault) on what data I might need to back up. Anybody know? I use my phone to take pictures which are automatically backed up already. I don't think I do any other content creation, aside from text messages I've sent I guess. Do I need to worry about application settings, like Gmail configuration, browser bookmarks, and stuff like that?

Entry tags:

tech

two dimensions out of three

It's funny to see (well, hear) my phone's navigator app react to parking garages. "Do X... oh ok you're going north so do Y... oh you're going west so do Z... oh you're going south do A... oh you're going east do X which I'll pretend I haven't said before..." -- iterate until you reach the exit. It doesn't respond to elevation, only latitude/longitude.

I can think of three possible reasons for this, and I wonder which it is (or if it's something else I haven't thought of):

1. The GPS in the phone doesn't detect altitude.

2. The map data (Google's, in this case) doesn't record elevation. It does you no good to know that the GPS is at a certain elevation if the app can't tell that that's 200 feet above the road, after all.

3. The GPS and map data are available, but the app isn't programmed to take it into account. How often does this really come up, after all?

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HD DVR with FiOS?

I learned a lesson about customer service in the 21st century this week. If you call a place like, say, Verizon to complain about misleading sales practices, they make some token offer like a few months of a movie channel (that you better remember to cancel later). And you'll wait on hold for a long time to get there. If, on the other hand, you tweet about it, you get a helpful response leading to something more significant within minutes. Nice to know.

So I now have HD signal coming in (yay), which my TV understands just fine but I'd like to be able to record in HD too. I currently have an ancient TiVo -- version 1, I think before they had version numbers. Obviously that doesn't speak HD, nor can it act as a tuner (I have to set the channel on the FiOS box). New TiVo boxes are pricy and then you have to add the lifetime subscription fee (up to $500 now!) because that's "lifetime of the box", not "your lifetime" so your old one doesn't transfer. This all suggests that I should be looking for a used TiVo that's newer than mine but older than the current offerings, one that already has a lifetime subscription that the seller can transfer.

It looks like the TiVo Premiere HD DVR was their first HD box and is a few years old at this point (sample offer on eBay, TiVoPedia page). I'm a little confused about FiOS integration; this takes "cable in" but I've read that FiOS or cable + HD + DVR means you need a "cable card" (rented from your service provider). How does that work? And is it user-installable? Or are cards "new" and older DVRs use the cable box?

I'd like to be able to record, in HD, and be able to program (time and channel) the DVR directly (not set the channel on a different device). I don't need to be able to record two different shows at once, or record one and watch another, or anything fancy like that. I don't need a huge hard drive. I want to keep costs down but want something that works pretty much out of the box, not "get a spare PC and...". I prefer to minimize ongoing fees (subscriptions) in favor of up-front purchases.

Please guide me, oh LJ brain trust. Most of you are way ahead of me on TV tech.

Entry tags:

link roundup

Two items seen in rapid succession today:

Here's why you're not hiring the best and brightest: (Jeff Atwood) talks about making telecommuting work so that you really can hire the best employees, as opposed to the best employees willing to live in a particular location. I once applied for a telecommuting position at a company that seems to get it as far as that's concerned, and a lot of the stuff they do is reflected in this article.
What do programmers care about? (20-minute video): Joel Spolsky (Stack Exchange, Fog Creek) talks to recruiters about how to recruit programmers. If you've read Joel On Software you already know a lot of what he has to say here, but I still found it interesting to watch.

Can you help? Somebody asked a question recently on Writers about guidelines and heuristics for when to use screen shots in technical documentation. The question isn't looking for opinions or what you, personally, do but, rather, formal guidelines along the lines of what GNOME does for its documentation. So far it's only attracting opinion answers. I, too, have opinions and practices that I follow, but I can't source them either and I'd like to see the question get a good answer.

Speaking of Writers, I wrote a little something about writing good API reference documentation (like Javadoc), based on advice I've given informally over and over again -- finally wrote some of it down in a public place. Feedback welcome.

I recently saw an article with interesting-seeming observations and analysis of Modern Orthodox Judaism. I'm not all that tuned into the MO community and can't evaluate its credibility from inside, but I found it an interesting read. If any of y'all would care to tell me where on the spectrum from "yup" to "WTF?!" this is from your perspective, I'd be interested.

Finally, a little something for those who use the text editor vim (which I gather is related to vi?):

Entry tags:

humor,
tech

Doc Brown to the white courtesy phone, please

As part of a system upgrade at my shell provider, I'm now using Alpine to read mail instead of Pine. Pine showed me plain old dates/times in the list of messages, but Alpine tries to be clever and I haven't yet figured out how to turn it off. So instead of a date it'll say "Yesterday", or "Monday", etc. Very annoying, but it did produce a laugh:

I was unprepared for Alpine's treatment of the message I just got from somebody more than halfway around the world: "Tomorrow". Yes, tomorrow's mail today! Sadly, tomorrow's mail, so far, has not reported usable lottery numbers.

Entry tags:

car,
tech

oh, right...

When I returned to my car tonight with groceries (on the way home from work), my car didn't respond to the key fob. No light -- presumably a dead fob battery, with no warning signs beforehand. (I've never had this happen before.) As I was calling Dani to ask him to bring the spare from home, it suddenly dawned on me that I didn't need to. Oh yes, that's what that projecting metal piece is for -- it's not just an ignition key! Right...

I spent way longer owning cars with plain old keys than owning ones with fobs, but I guess the memories of How Things Used To Be fade quickly. Except when talking to young'uns about how we did things in "our day", of course. :-)

I wonder if replacing the battery in one of these fobs is relatively painless. (It appears I can't do it myself, or, at least, there's no obvious way to open the case.) I know that if you lose one of these a replacement costs something like $150 (!), but I hope repair is cheaper. If it's not, I won't bother -- if the second one also dies while I still own the car I'll just use it the old-fashioned way.

What do Prius owners do, I wonder?

Entry tags:

tech

close only counts in horseshoes

Recently while driving somewhere unfamiliar I made a wrong turn and wasn't sure how to recover. My new phone's search widget has a voice-input option, so on a whim I pulled the phone out and said "navigate to (location)", and it did the right thing: it correctly understood my speech, launched the navigator app, queued up my destination... and did not put the navigator app in "talk to me" mode.

So close, and yet so far. So I had to find a place to pull over so I could fiddle with the phone.

On the other hand, this is still way better than paper maps. :-)

Entry tags:

tech

huh... (tech)

1. Google+ won't load on my Android tablet using the default browser. (Also fails in Firefox.) I don't know how to tell them...

2. (What I was actually going to say there:) Apparently the keyboard for my ASUS tablet drains battery way faster than the tablet itself. Not what I expected! If any leeching is happening I thought the keyboard would draw from the tablet, and if there's no leeching, I expected the keyboard to be the less-demanding device. Now I wonder what's really going on. (The two weigh about the same, and I assume battery is a significant part of the weight.)

Entry tags:

random bits

In the last two weeks we lost both

merle_ and

pedropadrao. I will miss them both. :-(

And there's no good transition from that to, well, miscellany, so this paragraph will have to serve.

I suppose, technically, if you're not sure if a TV show has jumped the shark, then it hasn't. But, that said, I doubt I'll be back for the next season of "Once Upon a Time", a show that got off to a good start in season one, carried it through part of season two, and then started going farther and farther afield of its original context. In addition to links to "the enchanted forest", the land of fairy tales, they mixed in an Arthurian knight (short-lived), Captain Hook, I think a couple other odd ones, and now, in the season finale, it's clear that Never-Never Land is going to be a major factor. If they were doing the work to tell a Gaiman-style story about all these realms being intertwined or some such I'd be on board for that, but it sure feels like they're just making things up as they go along now. Oh well.

Links:

Full moon silhouettes, a really gorgeous video of the full moon rising over the Mount Victoria Lookout in Wellington, NZ. (Link from Dani.)

Best court sanctions... ever! from osewalrus. As Ose says, best use of the term "Red Shirt" in a legal decision. And you thought court decisions had to be dull...

This is great (given that such idiots exist, which is not great). Bill Walsh was riding his bike and happened to be running a helmet-cam when a cab made an illegal U-turn across the bike lane, after being warned that it was illegal, and promptly got pulled over by an oncoming police officer. The video is short and cuts out before we get to see the expression on the cabbie's face, alas.

Feast of the ravens, a photo with an interesting story behind it. What do you expect to find when a large group of ravens congregates? Not this. From shewhomust.

siderea posted an excerpt from (and link to) an essay about libraries, mandatory internet use, and the very poor that is well worth a read. As more and more stuff moves to "online only", whom are we leaving out in the cold? The ones who can least cope, it seems.

I hadn't realized that 3D printing was advanced enough to make medical implants... a year and a half ago. Ok, this was an airpipe splint, but are plastic organs in our future?

Sad cat diary, a video in the general style of Henri (but not just one cat), from Talvin over at DW.

Entry tags:

cats,
fluff,
games,
lj,
tech,
tv

random bits

We went to

alaricmacconnal's and Elsbeth's yesterday for a New Year's Day party, which meant more gaming. I had fun playing more Dixit (

blackpaladin, which expansions were in there?), and Dani played Constantinopolis, a resource-management game that sounded similar to Puerto Rico but is twice as long (or thereabouts). I haven't played it yet.

2013 was getting off to a great start but then I had to go back to work. Powerball, you have failed me. :-) (Ok, I've never actually bought my own lottery ticket, but when a group is forming at work I always buy in because I'd sure feel stupid if I didn't and half the company won buckets of money and left.)

Resolution? 1280x1024, but maybe I'll get a new monitor this year. (I think it was merle_ who inspired that idea.) Though I'd rather keep the aspect ratio I have now (i.e. I'm not so thrilled with the widescreen monitors that are all the rage these days).

Orlando is currently chasing his tail. I thought that was a dog thing. (He's got one white pixel on the end of it, but I don't think it's that in particular that he's chasing.) More generally, he and Giovanni seem to be settling in, though I still can't pick either up for more than a few seconds and I had only 50% success on last week's vet visit. Giovanni has gained a pound in the last month, so I guess Orlando isn't being as pushy about the food dishes as I thought.

Netflix only gives you about a week's notice when something is going to disappear from their streaming service. Last week I noticed that Farscape, which had been languishing there for a while, was slated to disappear, so I watched the first eight episodes to decide if I want to queue up DVDs. It looked to me like interesting characters and underwhelming plots, but I'm mindful that some good shows (like B5) took a while to settle in. To those who've seen it: does it get better?

Apparently I can't post comments on LJ tonight, so some of you will probably get some belated comments when that changes. Let's see if I can post an entry.

Entry tags:

tablet

I'm typing this from my new Android tablet -- an ASUS Transformer with keyboard dock. It's quite spiffy! (And a well-timed gift, as I was still cogitating over my dead iBook.)

It works well as a tablet -- nice display, the apps work the way I expect, and it didn't take too long to figure out some of the interface quirks (which may be real or may be signs that I've used an iPad). The on-screen keyboard is "fat"; I don't know how else to describe it, but it works (and, not surprisingly, with better accuracy than my phone). The hardware keyboard is of course smaller than a conventional one, so currently I'm making lots of typos but I'm touch-typing. The keys are closer together than I'm used to and it feels like I'm hitting them harder than I'm used to, particularly the keys toward the edges (that are less likely to be struck "straight on"). I'm still faster with the hardware keyboard than the on-screen one, though, and it doesn't take up half the screen. So, bottom line, when I want to do extensive typing I can slip it into the dock, and otherwise its a nice 10" tablet.

Please feel free to tell me about all your favorite Android apps. I have an Android phone so I know a few, but tablets and phones are different.

Good news: somebody has ported emacs to Android and it's in the store (free). Bad news: it seg-faults for me on start. It's a known problem but the suggested work-around didn't for me. I've contacted the author.

The dock provides a USB port and there's a file-browser app. This is very promising.

How in the world do I get the Google+ web site to let me use the regular, not mobile, site? I know there's an app but I don't like it; the web site is just fine with the real-estate available on a tablet. But when I try to use it it forces me into the mobile version, which isn't as good. (Not as bad as the app, but not as good as it could be.)

The previous paragraph might describe a specific symptom of a more-general problem. General solutions also welcome. :-) (Stack Exchange, by way of contrast, uses the mobile site on my phone but the regular one on the tablet, so it's not as simple as checking for mobile devices.)

There are two browsers pre-installed, "browser" and Chrome. I wonder why. I wonder what "browser" is.

LJ oddity: I'm typing this using the (regular) web site, not an app, and when typing this text is a smaller variable-width font. When focus is elsewhere (like when I typed the tags), it changes to a larger fixed-width font (Courier, I assume). I want that all the time! (This is the HTML editor, not the rich-text one.)

I'm not very good at finger-based cursor placement yet. I wonder what typos Ive introduced while editing. :-)

More to come as I use it more, I'm sure.

Entry tags:

tech

it would be easier if it could just read my mind

The trip home from Pennsic involved detours at both ends, so I decided to turn on the GPS app on my phone (Android, Navigator, came pre-loaded) for a running commentary. (Good thing, too; the obvious path out of Cooper's Lake wasn't.) This experience reminded me of some things I really want a GPS to do for me. It's possible that it already does some of these; I'm an infrequent GPS user and was fiddling with it at the side of a rural road.

I want to constrain a route without spelling it out: "Go home from here, taking Route 422 rather than staying on 19 and, in Pittsburgh, detouring through downtown instead of via Liberty Bridge". I can, of course, just do that and let it recalculate, as I did, but I would like it to take that information into account in case there's a better way to execute that plan.

I want it to learn from its recalculations. In an ideal world I would be able to turn it on in "observer" mode while I drive, and then later tell it to navigate as close to my usual habits as possible. My GPS should be able to learn that I don't like the eastbound 376 entrance in Squirrel Hill, or the West End Bridge, or Carson Street during rush hours.

I want to be able to tell it take current conditions into account. My phone knows that it's currently pouring rain or dark; I should be able to tell it "prefer local roads over highways during heavy rain" or "try not to take Business 22 at night" or even "check conditions up ahead and advise me on when to take a rest stop" (for longer trips).

That's just until the self-driving cars are ready, of course.

Entry tags:

"7 things" #2

More from that parlor game: Comment to this post and I will pick seven things I would like you to talk about. They might make sense or be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

unique_name_123 gave me: computer, spirituality, laurel, rules, games, travel, artichoke.

( Read more... )

Entry tags:

but those were useful features!

A very helpful (yes, really!) technician at Verizon diagnosed our network problems as a flaky router, so he sent us a new one and we swapped it in today. The old router had two features that I found useful: I could name devices on the network, and the "my network" list showed me everything that had connected since the last router restart, not just the currently-connected devices. These, particularly in combination, were useful for monitoring my network. (Why yes, since I can be punished for anything done from my IP address even if I didn't do or authorize it, and since no security that is still usable is perfect, I do care.)

The new router lacks both of these features; it shows currently-connected devices by MAC address (and IP address), but short of my maintaining the name-MAC mappings externally, that's of limited utility. And it doesn't tell me if a neighbor found his way onto my network while I wasn't watching. Now my neighbors seem like decent folks, and in a different legal environment I'd rather be the sort of person who shares my spare bandwidth with anybody who needs it, but that's not the point.

Oh well. I guess I am now relying more strongly on decent neighbors and passwords, as I haven't found anything like router logs that tell me this stuff.

I know that some of my readers are pretty security-conscious. How do you handle this?