I have been completing a few technology upgrades around the house this year. The latest activity is replacing my aging NetGear Orbi quasi-mesh (3rd node was a low-end TP-Link WiFi hub) with something a bit more capable.
The change-over went very smoothly but produced a few ‘old man’ moments as I considered the hardware itself. Size isn’t everything, but sometimes bigger is… if not better, at least necessary.
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We haven’t had as much snow this year here at our home near Castlegar as usual. So it was no real surprise when we got a bit of a dump of the white stuff last Friday. Waking up to a marshmallow world is not entirely a bad thing.
We also finally got that ‘comfy chair’ Irene and I have been wanting to add to my office space. There is a little story behind that as well.
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I am fussy about my vision. I’ve been wearing glasses ‘full time’ since I was about 12 years old. I have weird eyes and if my glasses aren’t ‘just’ right I get headaches. Well, more headaches than usual.
The local optometrists in Castlegar, Trail, and Nelson don’t have the model of lenses (Zeiss ‘Smartlife’ progressives) that I’ve found work best for me. Measuring for these requires special equipment and training.
So I drove yesterday to Kelowna to get my eye exam and prescription and order my new lenses. That’s an eight hour round trip, and I’ll have to do it again in a couple of weeks when the glasses are ready for fitting. That probably seems a bit excessive, but…
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The news the last couple of days has reported somewhat confusingly on new Chinese AI company called ‘DeepSeek’. I found a fairly clear report on the BBC about what is going on. DeepSeek itself isn’t the really big news, but rather what its use of low-cost processing technology might mean to the industry.
And that implication has cause a massive stock selloff of Nvidia resulting in a 17% loss in stock price for the company- $600 billion dollars in value decrease for that one company in a single day (Monday, Jan 27). That’s the biggest single day dollar-value loss for any company in U.S. stock market history.
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I use an RSS reader and subscribe to a number of traditional news feeds like the BBC, Reuters, and CBC. I also have a collection of blogs and gaming related sites whose feeds I follow- but I’m focusing on the traditional news for the moment.
Lately I’ve been carefully curating which stories in my news feed I actually read, and I occasionally feel rather guilty for my choices.
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My new Mac Mini arrived earlier this week as I had hoped and has been set up in my somewhat re-organized office. I’ve had a bit of time to play with the new computer and have a few observations to make.
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I recently ordered the items necessary to replace my MacBook Pro in my office with a Mac Mini. That computer is over five years old now and portability is no longer a requirement so the change makes a certain degree of sense. My intent is to make this a good workstation for my computer-related hobbies: blogging, fiddling a bit with coding, and a possibly a few online learning activities.
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A lot of social media content is pure fakery. Accounts are created and posts generated entirely to attract eyeballs either for revenue generation, political manipulation, or simply because it is ‘entertaining’ to certain people. The algorithms amplify much of this content towards more and more extreme viewpoints because that is what keeps most of us engaged. This is true because humanity, in the larger sense, is horrible.
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I’ve been rather quiet here during December. It was a difficult month with the loss of my wife’s Mom Celina and my Sister Judy. I’d classify this as perhaps the saddest December in my life.
Irene and I had our usual quiet Christmas, short a few decorations. We did put up a tree, and I made a turkey dinner for Christmas day- but other than that it was just quiet times together for us. That’s perfectly fine and more or less normal, but both of us are struggling with emotions which casts a shadow on things.
I’m starting to think about what comes next, and that includes thinking about the upcoming year in general. I looked back through my blog and found that, as far as I can determine, I have only given ‘New Year’ predictions once since I started writing here. Back in 2007 I prognosticated about what 2008 would bring and, skimming through that post, I think my guesses were largely correct. I was even right about Google, shares of which dropped about 50% during 2008- but over the longer term I was very wrong on that one.
Predictions for 2025 might be fun: I see that Wilhelm over on The Ancient Gaming Noob has been doing this kind of thing consistently for quite a few years. I don’t have any intent to reach that level of ludicrous detail, but maybe I can make this into an annual tradition of my own. Certainly I should be able to do better than once every 17 years.
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Humanity has made a mess of the world over the last couple of centuries or so. We’ve also experienced an unprecedented amount of progress on many fronts. Halting our destruction of the environment is mandatory if we want to continue surviving on this planet, but halting all technological progress is also not the outcome I’d like to see.
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