View from the Mountain

Empowering Technology

Technology that empowers you is more than just cool stuff.  To be really successful, technology has to be affordable, easy to use, and capable of accomplishing important tasks which were previously difficult to do.

I was working for Apple Canada and living in Halifax, Nova Scotia in January 1985 when Apple introduced the LaserWriter, the first laser printer to be widely used. Ignoring the first home computers, this was the first time I was involved with the rollout of technology that had the power to fundamentally change the way we did things.

The list price was $6,995 and more important to those of us lugging it around for demonstrations, it weighed 77 pounds. Networking, called AppleTalk, which came with it reduce the per user price to something reasonable.

I was happy that my previous career was running a cattle farm where I spent much of the winter hauling around 100 lb+ bags of feed.

It is a measure of how technology accelerates that in December 2011, just about twenty-six years later, I bought a Brother HL-2270DW laser printer for $99.98.  It only weighed 15.4 pounds.

The original Apple LaserWriter printed eight pages per minute of 300 DPI text and graphics using a 12 Mhz Motorola 68000 chip.

The Brother printer that I bought in 2011 printed at 27 pages per minute at up to 2400 X 600 DPI.  It had a 200 Mhz processor.  The Brother printer came with Ethernet and wireless connectivity.  The Apple LaserWriter only had LocalTalk, a very slow but revolutionary network for 1985.

The original LaserWriters were heavy and expensive. Few of them made it into home offices in the early days. The most recent Brother Laser 2360DW that I purchased was only $85. The printing resolution is the same bit it now prints at 32 PPM and has wireless, Ethernet and USB connectivity.

Even more important to the success than the hardware of the original LaserWriters was the software that had been developed to work with them. As is still the case today, great hardware is only as good as the software that runs on it.  Pagemaker and Illustrator allowed people to create documents that had never been created on the desktop by office workers. What was a revolution in 1985 is an often-unappreciated part of today's office life.

I still remember doing a demonstration for educators in Fredericton, New Brunswick in the fall of 1985. I was about five minutes into the demonstration of a pre-release version of Adobe Illustrator.  There were twenty or so people in the room. When I glanced around the room about half already had their mouths open.  That is what happens when disruptive technology gets in front of people who are smart enough to recognize it and see the future.

The LaserWriter and desktop publishing were not the last disruptive technology that I got to witness in my technology career which will hit four decades next year.  It has been an amazing ride. I suspect there is lots more to come.

This list of technology that has changed lives is longer my short list. Here in no particular order other than how it has stuck in my mind is my list.

1. The graphical interface as epitomized by the original Macintosh was a revolution to those of us who started out with green screens and arrow keys. It was what drew me to Apple. It was revolutionary and we are still seeing its continued impact.
2. One piece of software that has had as much or more impact than a lot of fancy software that has disappeared is the spreadsheet. Lotus 123, Microsoft Mulitplan, and eventually Excel changed the way that we look at numbers. We felt like the Macintosh was a real computer when Microsoft released Multiplan for the 128K Mac. It ran on 3.5-inch floppy disks.
3. The ever-increasing size and speed of computer storage is also a revolution but it happened over time. The first 5 meg Profiles that I carried around were worth $3,500 US. I recently paid $87.99 for a SanDisk 500GB Extreme Portable SSD. 
4. The writable CD-ROM and even the DVD had huge but transitory impacts on us all.  Everything is in the cloud now.
5. Wi-Fi was a gamble at first and sometimes a pain to get working. Apple's first Airport Wi-Fi was not cheap in 1999. Wi-Fi is everywhere now, plus it is inexpensive and easy to use.
6. Even more important than WiFi is the Internet. As company, Apple, got on the Internet seriously around 1993.  The Internet is a huge part of our lives today. Just as important as the physical connection is what we can do on the Internet which has gone well beyond exchanging messages. The original iMac set a standard for making it easy to get on the Internet.
7. Digital cameras were another technology that changed lives. We used our first digital cameras, the Apple Quicktake, on a digital scavenger hunt at the Mountain Lake Lodge in Virginia around 1993.  Little did we know how big digital photography would become.  With digital photographs came iPhoto, editing photos and storing them on the web.  Even now Google photos are part of my life every day.

I could also add fiber to the home, FTTH, but I do that for a living and today far too few people are enable to take advantage of it like I do.

It would be easy to add Smartphones.  However, in a way, they are a bunch of revolutionary technologies crammed into a small form factor. I like the individual technologies better than Smartphones. Perhaps one of my favorite examples of revolutionary technologies crammed into something small, light, and inexpensive is the Chromebook.  

The summer of 2021 with tax I paid $416.33 for an ASUS Chromebook Flip C433 2 in 1 Laptop, 14" Touchscreen FHD NanoEdge Display, Intel Core m3-8100Y Processor, 8GB RAM, 64GB eMMC Storage, Backlit Keyboard, Silver. It has a built-in camera and WiFi.  It wakes instantly (faster than my MacBook Pro) and the battery never lets me down.

I once sold an Apple IIe with a 5 meg Corvus hard drive for over $19,000. That included a dot matrix printer and a daisywheel printer.  It was before the day of LaserWriter.  My $416 Chromebook easily prints to either my color HP Laser Printer, my color Epson Ink Jet or my monochrome Brother LaserWriter.  All of the printers plus the Chromebook computer did not cost $1,000.  That is empowering, transforming technology.

 

 

 

A Safe Warm Spot for a Challenging Fall

Ed, a good friend of mine who died a few years ago, used to say that if you were willing to look a little, most of the time you could find a place on the water in Carteret County where the wind wasn’t blowing. Ed grew up here and knew the area’s waters better than anyone I have ever known.

We have spent fourteen years here along Raymond’s Gut just off the White Oak River north of Swansboro. I managed to learn enough about the White Oak River from my kayaking and boating to know Ed was right. Many times, I fished a cove just off the river when the main River had whitecaps on it. Then there were times you could be in the middle of the river with hardly a ripple. Sometimes it is blowing on the river but quiet on the backside of Bear Island.

It turns out Ed’s wisdom also applies to our house. If you look a little, you can almost always find a cozy spot out of the wind. It is one of the reasons we love our home. The side of our house with the most windows faces the South. That and the protection provided by pines just across the water from us makes our home a delightful place as the air turns cooler in the fall. It also creates a great microclimate for gardening. Living on Raymond's  Gut just off the White Oak River turned out to be a lucky decision for us.

On October 18, 2020, we awoke to a temperature of forty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. That is a very cool fall morning here on the coast. I actually wore a long-sleeved tee shirt when I went to retrieve the Sunday paper. It is only the second or third time that I have done that since early spring. However, I will have to change out the shirt by noon. I still have not given up my shorts and Crocs which often remain my uniform until well into November and sometimes even December.

When I headed up to my office, I stopped by our little porch which is off of our great room. I wanted to snap a picture of the view which turns out to be the picture that I chose for the post. As I walked onto the porch, I embraced by the warmth of the sun. The temperature on the porch was likely twenty-five degrees warmer than it was on the ground level out in the breeze. I was very tempted just to sit down and soak up the warmth and enjoy the wild world that is so much a part of our home. The number of Great Egret and Great Blue Heron pictures that I have taken from the little porch would stun most people.  I took this Great Egret picture and this Great Blue Heron picture the previous Friday just before I walked inside and took this shot of a Kingfisher.

Soaking up warmth is not something we do a lot of here in the summer when the heat has found us. Fortunately, Carteret County has a lot of water and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean, because of all the water, it takes longer for summer’s heat to reach us than it does many of North Carolina’s interior counties. In early summer it is not uncommon to find areas twenty miles inland recording temperatures ten to twenty degrees warmer than us.

We do go through ten to twelve weeks of really warm weather, but most people just use that as an excuse to either jump in the surf or be out on the water in a boat or kayak. We are lucky to have a house where there is almost always a continuous breeze in the summer. When fall comes all the warm water tempers the incoming rush of cool air. Many years we have even picked tomatoes in December and once we even harvested them in January. All that warm water makes a huge difference in the cold months.

With the Covid crisis that we all face, I feel extremely blessed to live in an area where there is room to safely walk and enjoy the natural surroundings that have so enriched our lives over the years.

While we might not have gotten our green beans planted early enough this year, we still have the hope of some November or December tomatoes. While the headlines in the newspapers cause a lot of stress, where I live and the house I live in generally help to counter that stress by letting me soak up some warmth or some of nature’s beauty.

Two of the linked drone pictures, the little porch and the wild area behind the house, were taken by Justin Whitt of Light House Visuals as he was taking pictures for the listing of our home. I highly recommend Justin but you can judge for yourself by looking at our listing.

Lumix Cameras That Capture My Life

Taking pictures is a big part of my life. I have been doing it for as long as I can remember. There is a picture of me as a college student over fifty years ago with a Nikon F1 camera in my hand.

I have written several camera articles starting back in 2006 when I wrote about a Sony Pocket camera. The death of that Sony camera gave me my first experience with Panasonic cameras when I bought a Panasonic Lumix DMC ZS-1 as a replacement. Ten years later that camera is still working.

I have also used and written about Nikon and Canon's point and shoot super zoom cameras. I bought my Nikon P500 in 2012 and moved to a quicker focusing Canon SX50 in 2013. The Canon was a great camera but had to go in for repair regularly.

In 2017 I got a Panasonic Lumix Z1000 as a large sensor replacement for my aging Nikon DSLR D3100. In 2018 after three refurbished replacements to the Canon now an SX60 followed by another hardware failure, I moved to a Panasonic Lumix FZ80 for my everyday bird and beach camera. I have been a happy user for over a year. Along the way in 2016, I added a Lumix LX100 which I sometimes use as a pocket camera. Most often it gets used for inside shots especially of people. These are not particularly expensive cameras. You could buy all three of them for what it costs to buy one of Nikon's new 70-200mm zoom lens.  The FZ80 is available on Amazon for under $300.

People regularly ask me which camera is my favorite? I often reply that my favorite camera is the one I have in my hand and sometimes that means my Google Pixel 2XL smartphone.

It is no surprise that cameras have a hard time surviving my environment. I take close to 100,000 pictures for some years. The cameras get exposed to a lot of sand, salt, and weather. I regularly wear out SD cards. I am happy to report that my two newest Lumix cameras have very reliable WiFi transfer modes.

More important than the cameras that I use is what I do with the photographs after I take them. On a typical morning, I will go for a walk and take anything from a dozen to fifty photos. When I return home, I will often do a WiFi transfer to my phone of four to ten pictures. Those pictures once they get to my phone, are automatically backed up to Google photos. I often use the online Google photo editing tools to resize and correct a few photos which I will post on Facebook.

When I go upstairs to my office, I will download all photos using Lightroom. From all of the photos I have downloaded for the day, I will pick the best ones, crop, and correct them in Lightroom. They are exported to a folder that is named with the day's date. That folder is on Microsoft's cloud service, One Drive. Sometimes, I will add to that folder from the ones I have stored on Google photos. Microsoft has very good tools that quickly allow you to resize photos that I download from Google. Once a month or so I will upload my favorite photos from the month to Flickr. I also create Google Photo albums when it makes sense.

I still believe that in most cases, you will get a better photo with a real camera especially if you are after birds. However, I have taken some remarkable photos with my Google Pixel 2XL but they would have a hard time competing with an image from the  Lumix Z1000 with its 21.1 Megapixels and 1 Inch High Sensitivity Sensor.

However, the best way to take good photos is to take lots of them and learn how to work with them. Photos straight out of the camera rarely match the image that you were trying to capture. At least learn how to change the white balance on your camera. Just setting the white balance on your camera to minus 2.5 will allow you to take a picture of a bright moon in the night sky. Having a good camera with image stabilization will allow for some great bird pictures. Most of all storing your photos in the cloud will let you easily enjoy your memories.

I was (07-03-20) a member of the Amazon affiliates program but I am no longer. You can click on one of my camera links to buy the cameras from Amazon where I purchased mine. No commissions will come to me.

I was (07-03-20) a member of the Amazon affiliates program but I am no longer. You can click on one of my camera links to buy the cameras from Amazon where I purchased mine. No commissions will come to me.

I was (07-03-20) a member of the Amazon affiliates program but I am no longer. You can click on one of my camera links to buy the cameras from Amazon where I purchased mine. No commissions will come to me.

Fifteen Years of My Own Words

The Point, Emerald Isle, NC

The Point, located on the far western end of Bogue Banks in the town of Emerald Isle, has great significance to me. For over a decade it has been the local place where I feel the closest to nature. I have written about it many times and even specifically about going to the ends of the sand which is not far from where this picture was taken.  The Point is also where my love affair with the Crystal Coast began in 1969 when my uncle Austin and I had to drive down the beach in my old Bronco to reach the Point.

I do not have to look back nearly as far as 1969 to remember that I wrote my first post on Typepad in November 2004.  This is post number 1,445 on View from the Mountain.  It has been seven years since we left the Mountain, but the blog continues to be one of my favorite soapboxes.  It is something of a minor tradition that I write an anniversary post. I hold up the tenth-anniversary post and the fourteenth-anniversary post as examples.

Much like the moment of clarity that I wrote about in this post, I have come to a few conclusions about our world.

1. First, there are many people in the world whose actions either intentionally or unintentionally are hostile to the rest of us. Often we are little but roadblocks in their schemes which often have more to do about their insecurities than anything else.
2. If you are trying to do what is right for the majority of the people, you are going to run into people who will oppose you. There are people out there who care more about themselves than about anything. The concept of the greater good is foreign to them. I have seen these people, had to deal with them and felt the hurt long after they have disappeared.
3. I have also come to realize that there are people who really do not care for facts unless the "facts" happen to bolster their own opinion. It is hard to understand but they seem to love to cling to the worst stories about people. Even if the narrative has no factual basis, it lets them rationalize their dislike, distrust or divorced from reality thoughts.  They deal in lies and rumor.
4. Another fact of life is that many people have trouble admitting that they are wrong. They will try to shovel the blame over on you even when it requires unbelievable contortions.  It is never their fault mainly because they dress in Teflon and everything slides off of them.
5. It is incumbent on us in our thoughts, our writings and our actions to call out the people who are trying to destroy our world. If you are silent, you are complicit.
6. If it requires a struggle to demonstrate balance in your subject matter, maybe you need to see if you are having to manufacture the balance.  To equate the influence of evangelical right on our politics with that of the religious left is a stretch that I am not willing to make.

That is it for the fifteenth-anniversary post.  As another fall comes to a close on the Crystal Coast, we are settling into our winter routine here along Raymond's Gut and the White Oak River as we finish this adventure and look forward to the next one.

Our Quinquennial Technology Refresh

I have a long history of writing about technology in the month of December. Two of my favorite old articles are Please Don't Hit Me With Your Modem that I wrote in 2010 and Computer Battle that I wrote way back in 2004. Technology (and my opinions) have really changed since those articles got published.

I have been in the technology business for over thirty-five years which includes almost twenty years at Apple.  When you are a manager at a large technology company, you get spoiled with new technology.  However, it has been over thirteen years since I left Apple and I have figured out how to do with a lot less. Essentially I do a quinquennial, once every five years, technology fresh and am happy with it. Looking at technology that permeates our lives at least that regularly prevents a lot of problems.

We all need technology these days, and if you just wait for things to break before upgrading, sometimes recovery can get messy.  Sometimes we all need to buy something because of a death in the computer family but if I do my quinquennial refresh, that is rare.

I still know people that get a new computer every year or two but I do not feel that need any more than the need to get a new car every year. My main work computer is over seven years old but has had upgrades. Since I use five different computers most days (and that does not count my smartphone), I am not a normal computer user.  Most normal people might just have only one or two computers in their household. 

Our family technology refresh this year has included two new laptops, one for my wife and one for me.  A new wireless phone set. A new small television and a new digital camera. A few things have been improved by switching to gear that we already had or by adding new components.  I am really happy with the results.  Our computers are all working great. The pictures coming from my new camera are outstanding. Our new Panasonic DECT 6 wireless phone sets are fantastic especially the paging feature which makes life simpler since my workspace is far from the rest of the house.  We also bought a small $130 television set and added an Amazon Fire Stick for connectivity instead of connecting it to cable.  The television provides much better quality than our expensive Sony that was installed eleven years ago.

You can translate all this into something useful for yourself.  If you are buying a laptop this year and also only want to upgrade every five years like we do, expect to spend between $700 and $1,200 for a good laptop that will last five years or more. As I am writing this just before Christmas 2017, you should look for a minimum of an eight generation I5 processor, 8GBs of RAM, and a 256GB SSD (Solid State Drive). Your system should come with a touch screen and at the low end of the price range a minimum screen resolution of 1920x1080.  At the upper end, you should be getting much higher screen resolution, double the RAM and double the SSD capacity.  A system similar to these specs will last a long time.

Personally, I have had good luck with Lenovo, HP, and Dell laptops.  My wife's system was bought in the summer a few months before eight generation Intel processors were available but it is fine for her needs.  We both got both systems for less than the $1,999 price of one Mac Book Pro laptop with less impressive specs than mine. (Details in the geek section)

The one thing that might throw laptop purchasers who have been out of the market for a while is USB-C.  The hub pictured at the top of the post is one of the USB-C hubs that are common.  Some new laptops only come with USB-C ports now. My HP Envy has both USB 3 and USB-C.  With the help of my hub, one USB-C port provides Ethernet connectivity, the connection for a monitor and an SD card reader.  Expect to spend about $40 for a good USB-C hub. I consider mine more of a dock for the laptop when I am working at my desk as opposed to traveling.

My other upgrade to computers was to replace the last mechanical drive in my computer fleet with an SSD.  Since it was an older I5 Lenovo desktop with only 8GBs of RAM, I also installed Xubuntu Linux as the main operating system.  The system which was slow as molasses is now super speedy and very reliable.

While my son was visiting at Thanksgiving, he noticed that we had two wireless networks in our house. I had a wireless network with a router but it turned out that our relatively new cable modem had wireless turned on and was broadcasting DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) addresses. Without descending too far into a technology whirlpool, it was not good to have two WAPs (Wireless Access Point) competing for spectrum. I had not noticed since most of my serious computing is done in the wired portion of the network where my computers and printers are hooked up by Ethernet.  My son said he got better speeds out of the one from the cable modem so I removed mine from the network and fixed the new wireless setup so it uses OpenDNS servers which provide a little bit of filtering.

The new television we got was an inexpensive 32" Toshiba for around $130.  We bought it to replace an old-fashioned tube television in a bedroom but we are currently using it in our new family room until we can decide on (and afford) a new larger television. The picture quality is exceptional.  We are hoping to get one of nice LGs at some time in the future. I needed a new computer more than a new television. Our home entertainment equipment with the exception of the new TV is hopelessly outdated but my wife is happy with it and I hardly watch television.

The camera I got this year is a PANASONIC LUMIX FZ1000 4K Point and Shoot Camera, with 16X LEICA DC Vario-ELMARIT F2.8-4.0 Lens, 21.1 Megapixels, 1 Inch High Sensitivity Sensor. The big selling point for this camera is 20 megapixels and the 1-inch sensor.

I still use a Panasonic LUMIX DMC-LX100S 4K and my Canon SX60-HS which was repaired once again.  The SX60 is a refurbished replacement that I got when Canon could not repair my longtime favorite Canon SX50-HS. I am also still using the Nixon D3100 that I got in 2010.

We also bought a set of Panasonic KX-TGE475S Link2Cell Bluetooth Cordless Phones with Answering Machine.  We had replaced the batteries more than once on an old Pansonic set which we bought eleven years ago.  The phones were much cheaper from Amazon and the sound quality is noticeably better than our old ones.

If you are really interested in the geeky details of all the computers and how we got to do this about once every five years read the next section, but it is really written so I can remember the details the next time I have to do an upgrade.

-David

Technical Specs and How the Quinquennial Cycle Evolved

 The first priority this year was upgrading my wife's computer this summer.  She was well past the five-year mark on her laptop though she did get a Chromebook a couple of years ago and it extended the useful life of her other computer which was a 2010 I5 HP laptop with 4GBs of RAM and a 500GB mechical hard drive. While her old computer looked brand new, it had become slow and there was little that I could do to fix it without starting to replace parts.  We bought her laptop together with one for me back in February 2010.  The two laptops together cost around $1500 after rebates.  We considered Apple laptops but at the time we could not have gotten one Mac laptop for the price that we paid for the two HPs and the Mac laptops were stuck on an old processor.  You can read the full reasoning behind those purchases in this Applepeels post.

The quinquennial upgrade can be traced to a couple of years later when my HP 2010 laptop got repurposed and sent to my youngest daughter. There was nothing wrong with it but she needed a laptop and I was starting a stint as a technology writer at ReadWrite Web.  I needed new technology so I could write about operating systems and such. It was the fall of 2012 and on Black Friday that year we drove to Wilmington and I bought a Lenovo Yoga at Best Buy. It was $999 and had an I5 processor, 4GB RAM and a 64GB SSD (Solid State Drive.)  It was a little of bit of a gamble since we did not know how long my technology writing career was going to last.  The job seemed to go well so a few months later we bought a MacMini through a friend still working at Apple. That spring I also upgraded my main camera and got a Canon SX50 HS.  The technology upgrades were more than paid for by the articles that I wrote, but turning out articles was like being on a treadmill and predicting what might be of interest to an ever-changing editor was not a lot of fun.  It paid the bills but if you figured it as an hourly wage, it was scary. Fortunately, I had started my current job at WideOpen Networks the previous summer and about the time I burned out as a technology writer, the new company was coming up to speed.

I might have skipped this upgrade cycle but my main Windows desktop started dying on me this summer.  Over the course of a few months, I managed to keep it going but it finally gave up the ghost and I took it to a computer repair shop. This was the first time in over thirty-five years that I have ever taken one of my personal computers to a repair shop so you have to figure that the system was in serious trouble.  The shop finally determined that it was the motherboard but a new Lenovo motherboard was close to $400 dollars and more than I wanted to spend on an old computer.  They assured me that they could order another motherboard for $150, put it in my case with my 32GBs of RAM and I7 processor and everything would be fine.  A week later it turned out the third-party motherboard would not fit in the Lenovo case so we ended up ordering another case for about $100.  Once the case came in and the motherboard and all the parts were installed, the computer would still not turn on. With the next step being a new processor at $450, I pulled the plug on the operation and felt lucky that my repair shop billed me zero dollars since they could not fix my computer. It does not take a technology expert to know that spending close to $700 on an old computer is crazy.

At that point, I needed a new computer to do my photographs. I wanted a system with an eighth generation I7 processor, 16 GBs of RAM, and a 512GB SSD, and 3840 x 2160 screen. I managed to find a 13 inch HP Envy at Costco with those specs for $1,099.  Just to make certain that I was not making a mistake, I hauled my even-geekier son with me to Wilmington to make certain that I got the right computer for my needs. For comparison, my wife's system was a Lenovo 720 with the seventh generation I5, 8GBs of RAM, and 256 GB SSD. It cost around $800 with a touchscreen at 1920x1080 resolution.  We got our two systems, both with touch screens, fingerprint sensors, and mine with the latest I7 processor, a 512GB SSD, 2GB NVIDIA GeForce MX150 Graphics and 16 GBs of ram for $100 less than one Mac Book Pro with an older processor and only 8GBs of RAM.  Apple's laptop math continues to make no sense to me.

With a 13.3" laptop taking the place of my desktop, I wanted to make sure my ten-year-old Dell monitor was up to the task. My son took one look and said that it was losing its brightness. I took advantage of Dell's Black Friday's sale and got a new 27" Ultrasharp monitor for $395 instead of $595.  All I had to add for everything to be complete was the USB-C hub that I discussed earlier.