Category Archives: GeekWorld

GeekWorld

It’s Free!

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Imbolc                                                                Hare Moon

I wanted, for some reason, to establish a dropbox type relationship between this computer and the netbook which I take with me when I travel.  This means being able to access files on this computer from a distance.  This seems like a good thing to me, though just why I can’t exactly say.

Anyhow I discovered Bittorrent has a program called Sync that will do just this.  It establishes a P2P relationship between one computer or device and another for this purpose.  P2P = peer to peer, that is, both devices are equal to each other.  Dropbox and sugarsync and google drive and microsoft skydrive offer a similar service except you have to upload your files to their cloud.  Now a cloud is only a series of large hard-drives bunkered somewhere, fed lots of electricity and cooled by refrigerants.

In practical terms that means you give your data to someone else to store, then when you want it, you dial into their cloud and retrieve it.  The catch?  It’s free.  And, as I read somewhere recently, when a computer service is free, you’re the product.  That means they can access my data, mine it for advertising relevant facts and then sell me to hundreds if not thousands of others.  Also, the government can, with a warrant, crack the cloud and peak inside.

With a P2P setup all the data remains on your computers, for which the government needs a warrant and all others need the password.  In Sync’s case the password is a 32 character secret that establishes the bond between two computers.  32 characters make cracking the code technically very difficult.  Probably not worth it for my vacation pictures.

So.  I download sync.  And nothing happened.  Hmmm.  After a lot of hmming, I investigated various help forums.  Ah.  That could be an issue.  The two computers have to sync up timewise.  I fixed that since the netbook was still on mountain time from my last trip to Colorado.  Nope.

After a lot of head thumping, I tried a favorite ploy.  I turned off both computers and started them up again.  Ah.  Syncing at last.  Tomorrow I’ll learn if it does what I think it does.

This took most of the morning.

GeekWorld
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Imbolc                                                             Valentine Moon

Fixed a minor tech glitch yesterday with the aid of a friendly resident of the Indian subcontinent.  Our Roku went down.  “It is because the remote is not pairing with the Roku, Charlie.  Don’t worry, I’m here now to help you fix it.”  Not kidding about the dialogue.  Good service.  Fix worked.

GeekWorld, Health

Data

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Imbolc                                                                    Valentine Moon

Gadgets. Yes. I like them. My latest is my birthday present, a Basis watch.  The basis keeps track of my steps (not so many in these winter days), calories burned (not so accurately for reasons I’ll make clear) and, most interestingly my sleep.  basis-sleep-tracking-web

Not quite sure how the sleep sensors work, but each time I nap or sleep at night the Basis records my sleep with several different variables:  time in deep sleep, light sleep, REM sleep.  It also records turns and turnovers and what it calls, interruptions.  At 67 you can imagine what my interruptions are.  These are done up in a neat graph that wouldn’t copy, but the overall data stream for last night is below.* (above is from their website)

But that’s not all. Overtime the Basis learns your patterns and gives you a sleep score based on Basis-Bandlength of sleep and all those other data points.  It also measures, helpfully, heart rate during the day, in particular resting heart rate which is a good measure of fitness.

I initially thought it would record my heart rate during exercise and give me feedback about my workouts, but it doesn’t do that.  I wanted to be able to upload my exercise data to the computer and save it, track my progress over time.

Though I’ve always exercised with a heart rate monitor (or at least I’ve done it so long I don’t recall when I started), the technology I had was only good for in the moment ft7_blulila_topleft_340x395_0readings.  That was good, but I wanted better data.  When I found the Basis wouldn’t do what I wanted (I was not the only one who made this mistake as the forum on the Basis website demonstrated), I went to Polartech.

They make a great, inexpensive watch and chest band (transmits heart rate to the watch) which, when coupled with a data synch plate, transfers a great deal of relevant data from the watch to the Polartech personal trainer website.  BTW:  I have the FT7 which the link displays and explains, but I got it for $73, not $119.00.

This means I don’t wear my Basis during exercise.  It didn’t do much helpful then anyhow. That means its calories burned per day reading is not accurate because it doesn’t reflect my workouts.  Still, it’s sleep monitoring and throughout the day heart monitoring give it a place, too.  Oh, and it tells time and the date, too.

Now I can monitor my sleep accurately, my resting heart rate and the intensity of my workouts.  With the workouts I see calories burned, maximum, minimum and average heart rate, training load (call it intensity), time in various training zones and I get graphs over time plus a calendar/diary that records each workout in a calendar format.  I like it.

*91%

Sleep Score

19 times

Toss & Turn

1 time

Interruptions

REM 25%

1 hr 48 min

Light 54%

3 hr 56 min

Deep 21%

1 hr 33 min

Aging, GeekWorld, Third Phase

39 Billion Miles + On This Older Body

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Imbolc                                                             Valentine Moon

Realized the other day that our age in years is actually shorthand for an odometer of sorts. This odometer measures our lifespan in miles, miles around the sun.  585,000,000 miles or so a trip.  At 67 that comes to 39,195,000,000 miles on this old body.

Looked at that way the 32,000 miles we have on our Rav4 doesn’t amount to much, does it?  That’s roughly 1,600,000 miles–a day.  Or, we may as well keep going, I have the calculator warmed up, 66,700 miles an hour.  Better speed than I get out of my Rav4, too. But, what the heck, lets do a minute: 1,100.  And, for a complete picture.  A second: 18 miles.  Each second.

That means, when I count off 6 seconds for my first infusion of Master Han’s 2013 pu’er, I’ve traveled 108 miles while I waited.  That’s a different perspective on how long it takes to make a cup of tea.

All of this is a convoluted way of saying that my 67th birthday is only 12 days away.  It has me thinking about that annual pilgrimage waypoint we all celebrate as our birthday.  It’s really a cairn stuck beside the imaginary line we travel as our home planet rockets its way around the nearest star.  It is a reminder of the cyclical, rather than the linear nature of time. Yes, we count the trips, but in fact each trip is the same as the last one. (sort of.  astronomical realities may vary.)

 

 

GeekWorld, Great Work, MOOCS, Politics, Science, Weather +Climate, Writing

Back on Tailte, Peering Into the Climate Future

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Winter                                                        Seed Catalog Moon

After a frustrating morning with a balky computer, I got into Robert Klein’s work on Missing.  He’s good.  Careful, detailed.  I’ve only rejected one of his edits so far and that one I understood what he did, but chose my construction over his.  I didn’t get far, but I’ll keep at it.

I wrote a private post earlier about my anxiety as I approached this stage.  It’s still there, but the anxiety decreased as I worked.  I hope that continues to be the case.

As I mentioned on Great Wheel, my computer is running a climate model with its unused processing power.  This is part of an Oxford Study to determine the results in a particular model if it is run many times with slight variations.  These slight variation can be very significant (think butterfly flapping wings), but without running these complex models over and over, tweaking them in slightly different ways each time, it’s impossible to know for sure what a particular adjustment will do.

Climate and weather modeling are big users of super computer resources and the work on my computer is part of a massively parallel processing strategy to, in effect, mimic super computers without having to buy them.  The concept is simple.  Each home computer has many times the computing power necessary for almost, if not all, the tasks it performs and, in addition to that, most of them sit idle most of the time.  By downloading parts of larger task onto many, many home computers use can be made of both the idle and under-utilized processing power.  The first one of these projects was SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestial Intelligence, and I was part of that one, too.

They are resource intensive, however, so some of my computer frustrations might have come from it modeling global climate in the background.  I’m 95% with the task the Oxford folks assigned to me (well, my trusty Gateway is 95% done) and it may be a while before I take on another one.  This run takes approximately 350 hours of processing time.

I can and do shut it off at times.

 

GeekWorld

Adrift Somewhere in Colorado

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Winter                                                               Seed Catalog Moon

Expensive mistakes.  My phone, adrift somewhere in Colorado, not answering calls has moved beyond my reach.  Of course, Verizon was happy to replace it, demanding only a blood price and a new 2 year contract.  This phone contract business is great if you’re the phone company, for everyone else (most of us) not so much.

They did have a four propeller, camera equipped drone though, controllable from the phone. Would be fun.  But, I think for me, it would be a like a Christmas present of days gone by.  Used a lot for a while, then not at all.  Shaun Chenoweth, our Verizon salesperson, said realtors use them to show roofs and farmers use them to manage their land.  Both uses make sense to me.  Could help us find lost dogs but we have homebound canines at this point.  Still.

A smart phone is a great companion, especially once you have some reading material on it. That’s a generational attitude, I know.  All others have music.  Check e-mail.  Send texts. Take photographs.  Keep up with my Instapaper reading.  Keep notes.  Look up saved information in my Evernote account.  Even read a book if I want to.  Find the weather now and the forecasts.  Get warned about heavy weather.  A lot of work for one handheld gadget.  But wait.  There’s more.  You know, Internet, voice activated search, the flashlight, that chess platform, the calendar.  And on and on.

So, the phone is dead; long live the new phone.

GeekWorld, Great Work, Politics, Tea

This and That

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Winter                                                              Seed Catalog Moon

Started another MOOC, see more on Great Wheel.  It’s gonna be work.  Note, Great Wheel is still undergoing development.  It won’t roll out officially until February 1st, but there are several posts up already.

Found some white tea I liked that is unavailable on the market.  So, I wrote the guy, who grows in his tea in Kurtistown, HI.  On Oahu.  He wrote back and offered to sell it to me wholesale.  Good deal.  Still expensive but it’s the best white tea I’ve had so far.  A low bar I’ll admit.

(not Maui Wowee.  Bob Jacobson’s white tea.)

The NYT has redesigned its webpage and I like the new look.  Cleaner.  But.  The types pretty small for these presbyopic eyes.

I see there that the Republicans plan to claim poverty as an issue, to make them look more compassionate and inclusive.  Wonder if they know they actually have to reduce it?

GeekWorld, Great Wheel

Weekend Stuff

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Winter                                                  Seed Catalog Moon

A money meeting this morning, then a long overdue call for repairs to my gas heater here in the study. The thermostat connection has long ago died and I have a hot or cold phenomenon in these bitterly cold days.  I heat it up to dispel the cold, but then have to turn the heater off because it goes past the comfort point.  Then, with the heat off, the cold seeps back in.  Soon I’ll have an even temp while I work.

I’m also working on a design for ancientrailsgreatwheel.com, one that will enhance and integrate with the theme.  This may take a while but I have until Imbolc to get it ready. Should be plenty of time.

Gonna do something unusual later today.  Visit a bricks and mortar store.  I want to get a new video card for my Gateway so I can utilize two screens, but finding out what I actually need has gotten the better of me.  I’m going to ask a live human being.  If the tariff isn’t too high, I’ll buy the video card there in return for the help.  If it’s double the online price, well…

 

 

Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Third Phase

Happy New Year

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Winter                                                               New (Seed Catalog) Moon

Years have come and gone, slipping off into the neurons, their impressions there more and less faint, our only confidence that other years, other days have happened.  We tend to peg our memories by the year Kennedy was shot, or when we landed on the moon, or when Nixon resigned.  The year the Twins won the World Series.  The year Sorsha brought in a woodchuck.  That honeymoon through Europe, following spring north.  The year mom died.

(time is cyclical)

What I mean to say here is that our lives, the years of lives, are re-experienced episodically and briefly.  They have to be.  What would it serve us if our memories were perfect records which required an equivalent amount of time to remember as they did to experience?

But this brings up then the fatal flaw of memory.  It’s not really a memory as in a mental snapshot of an event accurately recorded and recalled when needed. No, memories tend to cluster around emotions, emotions that highlight certain aspects of an event and downplay or suppress others.

What is memory for?  I mean from an evolutionary perspective.  It allows us to recall dangers.  Don’t walk in the bush at night because a predator might get you.  Opportunities. When the snows leave and the air warms, let’s head to that particular valley because the game is plentiful there and we can dig roots.  Others. That’s my mom and dad.  There’s my brother and sister.  Over on the other side of the fire is a person you want to stay away from.

Memories, interestingly, are always in the present, that’s the only time they can be experienced, so the past is only ever real in the present.  And it is present in shards of defective recollections.

Here’s something I’ve not been able to figure out.  Time, at least as we commonly use the term, seems to run in a linear fashion, time’s arrow some folks call it.  It moves, in this understanding, only forward.  Hence the new year and all its possibility and potential. Time has not been there yet, so it’s an open field of action.  We have not  yet committed any acts in 2014.

Yet.  The markers that we use for time, the day and the year in particular, are borne of cyclical time.  The day comes from a revolution of the earth, a repetitive motion that moves neither forward nor backwards.  The year marks a revolution of the earth’s around the sun.  The end of a year and the start of a new year finds us speeding back toward the spots we encountered last year, the Zodiac, for instance.

Yes, it’s true that these times are neither constant nor exactly repeated since the our solar system itself is dynamic and our planet wobbles, but this does not bother the essential point here, that we use for what we insist on calling linear time, cyclical measurements.

In other words it would make just as much sense to say, Happy New Year.  That is, yes, it’s a New Year and that’s the end of it.  The last trip is finished and the next one begun, but there’s no real reason to count them.  We’ve not gotten further along than we did last year, in fact, right now we’re back where we started.

This is just to say that 2014 and January 1st are conventions.  This may not be important at all, but I think the whole linear notion of time makes an afterlife seem significant when it’s not.  I think the whole linear notion of time forces us to imagine an arrow not only to time, but to history, and in so doing seek cause and effect where there is none.  I think the whole linear notion of time makes aging seem like an end when really it’s only part of an ongoing process.

So, what I’ll say is Happy New Year.  Again.

GeekWorld

Cilia Scene

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Samhain                                                          Winter Moon

from Wired. Com

Ralph Grimm, Jimboomba Queensland, Australia.

Subject: Paramecium, showing contractile vacuole and ciliary motion. Paramecium lives in fresh water. The excess water it takes in via osmosis is collected into two contractile vacuoles, one at each end, which swell and expel water through an opening in the cell membrane. The sweeping motion of the hair-like cilia helps the single-celled organism move.
Technique: Differential interference contrast
Magnification: 350x-1000x

Credit: Ralph Grimm / Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition®