View from the Mountain

The Epson ET-3760, No More Inkjet Cartridges for Me

My deep dive into technology stretches back nearly thirty-nine years to August of 1982, when I got an Apple II+ computer and an Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer. I am guessing the computer, printer and some software cost something over $3,000 US. That same $3,000 translates into about $8,400 in purchasing power today.

Printing and computing technology has gotten less costly instead of increasing expensive. Both technologies have also gotten much more capable. Today’s inkjet printer can print faster with much higher quality results than the Epson MX-80 of 1982. I had to have an Orange Micro Grappler + parallel interface card just to take advantage of the printer on the Apple II. Even so, some of the early word processing software required inserting control characters to get the printer to print bold or italics characters. On my first Apple II+ I installed a Videx keyboard enhancer just to be able to see upper and lower case letters on the monochrome monitor that I had.

The idea that one printer without a specialized card would work across a bunch of computers was as foreign an idea as having a printer that can scan and copy items plus print perfectly acceptable photos.

We are eons ahead of where we were in 1982, in computer technology, and but we have come even further in cross-platform printing abilities in the seventeen years since I wrote this article about the work required to print from my 2004 Linux computer. I bought my first All In One printer in 2006. At the time it was even a challenge getting it to print from my Macs. The HP AIO Photosmart C6180 never died on me, but I did replace it with a smaller Cannon TS9100 AIO printer a couple of years ago. I was having challenges using the C6180 on some computers.

This year just as I was getting ready to purchase my third set of ink for the Cannon it dawned on me that if I made that order for $40 of ink, I would be very close to paying as much for ink supplies as I had paid for the printer. While the only other complaint I had about the TS9100 was its flimsy paper tray, I decided that I would get off the inkjet-cartridge-addiction train. As Joanna Stern says in her WSJ article, The Best Printers for the Home—Say Goodbye to Ink Cartridges, “The only time an old-school, cheap cartridge inkjet makes sense is if you need to print a page here and there. Say, a return label once a month.” While I don’t print a whole lot and I  have a Dymo label printer, I print enough to think that 18 months of ink supplies should not cost more than my inkjet printer.

When it came to choosing a printer, I went with an Ethernet equipped Epson ET-3760. It was under $299 tax included, delivered to my doorstep by Costco. Filling the ink tanks was mess-free because of the special ink bottles. Like both of my previous AIOs, the printer manufacturer photo software is worthless. However, I use Lightroom so I am more picky than most people.

In order to get fully functionality (scanning and printing) with my main Mac OS and Windows 10 machines, I downloaded the software but there were no hitches or glitches. I have both M1 and I5 based based Macs running everything from Mac OS X High Sierra 10.13.6 to macOS Big Sur 11.2.3. For some reason the printer just worked from my 2010 iMac running High Sierra. We have three Windows machines running Windows 10. The oldest would be six years old. We also have a repurposed I5 Lenovo desktop from 2015 that runs Ubuntu Linux. In the surprise of surprises the Linux machine printed to the new Epson without me doing anything but selecting the Epson when I went to print. My wife and I both use Chromebooks for our evening browsing. My wife’s Lenovo Chromebook and my Asus Flip C434 both have had no problems printing to the new printer. On top of that my Google Pixel 2XL smartphone prints to it as does my new iPad Pro.

I have more operating systems and architectures printing without any problems to the Epson ET-3760 than I have ever had. I am actually amazed at how easy it was for the Epson to join our challenging group of hardware. Printing has never been this easy in my complex world of computers.

The scanning software also works well. I have printed a few 4X6 photos and the quality is fine though it is maybe not quite as easy to switch paper sizes as it was on the Canon.

This is a long way from the days when we used to flip dip switches on cards to get printers to work and sometimes even make custom cables. I still have a dedicated scanner and a black and white laser printer so I might not push the Epson ET-3760 as hard as someone who has no other printers, but I will try to report back on how long the original ink supply lasts. I will use it quite a bit for color printing since I have found it hard to get my color HP LaserJet CP1025nw to print using some of my computers.

Even ten years ago I doubt that I could have imagined that for $670 before taxes I could have both a very capable computer, my ASUS Chromebook Flip C433 2 in 1 Laptop, 14” Touchscreen FHD NanoEdge Display, Intel Core m3-8100Y Processor, 8GB RAM, 64GB eMMC Storage ($390 -June Prime Day Special before taxes) and a terrific multi-funtional Epson ET-3760 inkjet printer with Ethernet ($280 before taxes).

Success Working from Home

I have been working from home for most of my adult life.  Lots of people joke about how you can goof off while working from home. Fortunately, I have worked in enough offices to know that the biggest goof-offs usually show up at the office every day and leave without ever accomplishing anything. 

Being successful is not defined by your work environment, it is in your hands.

Even before the coronavirus, there were plenty of benefits that might accrue to you if you work from home. However, many of them are closely intertwined with having the right office, good equipment, and the temperament to work from a home office.

For over ten years, we had a cattle farm and while I had a home office for a couple of weeks out of the year during tax season, most of my time was spent on a tractor.  In 1981, we dispersed our cattle, and I got my first home office job.  It is good that I waited until then because it was nearly impossible to do the job without a computer and Apple II+s like I bought were just starting to land on desktops. That job only lasted six months but it led to my first go-to-the-office-every-day job, selling Apple computers and managing the salespeople in five distinct offices.

After two years of that, I landed at Apple and my career of being in the office occasionally while mostly working from home began in earnest. In the next twenty years, I rapidly moved up to the corporate ladder and eventually became director of federal sales. Even then I was rarely in the office more than half the workdays of a month.  I actually credit my home office as one of the reasons that I managed to last nearly twenty years at Apple. Sometimes having some geographic separation from upper management is a good thing.

Technology evolving from email on a mainframe to email on your phone and every other imaginable device has made working from home much easier over the years. Here is a list of what has helped me be successful.

1. Having a dedicated, private physical space has been an unwavering success factor for me. You cannot do great work until you are in a space where you can concentrate.
2. Developing the technical skills to support yourself in your company's specific environment is really important.  You are not going to thrive if you are always calling someone for help.
3. Using the right equipment to match your needs and the requirements of your company is essential.
4. Creating a routine that matches the needs of your company can actually help you do better than office-bound personnel.
5. Communicating frequently and often with others in and outside your company is a lifeline to sanity and success.

At times the right equipment can be daunting.  When I started managing an Apple higher education team in 1993, my office had three phone lines, one for talking, one for a data connection and another for someone calling in when I was on the other line. Creating a network in the early days was no picnic and there was no cloud for storage or collaboration.

Today, Slack, one phone line, and a reasonable Internet connection handle my communications needs. It would be even better if I had a fiber connection with symmetric up and down speed for better video conferencing.

I have found that having multiple computers is a benefit. Because I can get pulled in different directions, I like just being able to swing my chair around to another task. My desks have two Macs, one Windows 10 machine, and one Linux box.  I have my own NAS, three printers, and a scanner. I did my own Ethernet cabling when we built this addition where my new office is but most people might be fine with wireless. My office uses wired Ethernet. I wouldn't have it any other way. My own personal computer is a Google Pixelbook which almost never comes to my office. Keeping personal and work computers separate also helps. 

I keep slightly offset hours compared to our CEO. That means when he is at lunch, I can work on materials that need to be finished with a joint effort later in the day.

Being successful in a home office does not require putting on a suit every day, but it does demand sticking to what needs to be done, using the right tools, and approaching the job with the right mindset.  I have been very successful with shorts and a t-shirt for many years.  I don't miss the ties or the modems of the early years.

 

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.

Another in a long line of home offices

I have been lucky to work in home offices most of my professional career.  The office was also the dining room on our Tay Creek farm.  In Halifax it was a small, designed-for-an-office space just off the main entrance. My wife claimed it was a great place to see the back of my head.

Our Columbia home had another tiny office just off the entrance.  When we moved to Roanoke in 1989, I got to use a huge space in our newly finished basement.  I takes three pictures to get a good view of it, picture 1, picture 2, and picture 3. It might seem overly large but for over a decade I ran Apple sales teams from there including the last few years when I was director of federal sales and had a national sales team.  I did everything from generate bids for colleges to house equipment that had no other home.

The Apple office made a great place for kids to play some of the first networked games. It also served as a second home for many projects from the Roanoke Valley Governor's School. There were always students borrowing the demo color laser printer that Apple was afraid to ship around and consequently dropped from the product line.  The Roanoke office was where I first got on the Internet.  We went from modems of varying speeds to line of sight antennae to DSL and finally to a cable modem.  I spent a lot of time on the modem dialing into Apple's IBM mainframe and downloading sales reports.

In 2006 after I had left Apple and was president of sales at WebMail.us, we had a water leak that meant the office got a remodeling and I had to start over.  I wrote this post, The Saturday afternoon technologist, electronic hair, just as I was starting up once again.  Sometimes it is good to start over because you get to clean up the cables which have a tendency to become like a ball of snakes after a decade or so.

The fact is that starting over is easier and easier. I have written about the instant economy that allows businesses to get what they need to start up in hours instead of months.  It is also very easy for a home office to get everything that it needs.  Sometimes all it takes is an afternoon trip to Best Buy or Staples.

Eleven years ago when I wrote about setting up my home office on the Crystal Coast in the post, The not so reluctant home system engineer, I had worked through a number of challenges getting things running smoothly.  Things have gotten a lot easier when it comes to networking and printers.  Because I have a son with even greater geek tendencies than me, I now have a NAS (Network Attached Store) with multiple terabytes of storage.  After thirty-five years in the technology world, I also have a pretty good idea of what works well.  With that in mind I had Cat 5 Ethernet run from my old office to my new office. 

I was a little surprised when our electrician did not know how to install the Ethernet jacks since I had seen our system engineers at Apple do it plenty of times.  I ordered from Amazon the needed punch down tool and punch down block with the right jacks and did it myself.  This being my first time at putting ends on Ethernet cables, I wondered if it would all work.  I hauled a laser printer upstairs to the new office and connected it to the wall jack. Then I ran an Ethernet cable from my current Ethernet switch to the new wall jack in my old office.  I sat down at my Mac and printed a document to the printer upstairs in the new office.  It worked.  Now I can gradually move things from the old office to the new one and never lose connectivity.  I am very happy that laser printers are a lot lighter than they used to be back in the eighties.

It is amazing how much technology has changed. My first blog post on View from the Mountain was almost thirteen years ago and I was wrestling with my first Windows/Linux machine.  My desktop has changed a lot since then. Windows occupies a much great part of it but I still have some vintage Macs chugging along in addition to my Windows computers and now Linux runs on my Mac instead of my Windows computer. My photo work is now all done on Windows but I think iMac from 2010 which got rescued by a repair will have a place in the new office for a while.

Some things do not change. I am still using an IKEA table as a first desk as I build my new office just like I did back in 2006. This is the first post written from my nice new office. It is a great spot to write.

The Other Choice on the Desktop

 

Dave's Desktop- Linux in the Center

Most folks use computers for basic things that we have come to accept as part of modern life. Email, browsing and shopping on the web and even Facebook have become part of everyday life for many people.

The computer is a good way to pick up information about any of the passions in your life. If pictures are big part of your life, the computer can make it easier to share your love of photography.

Many of these things can now be handled by a smartphone and/or a tablet.  Sometimes it can be easier on one of those devices or they can turn out to be a pain.  While I have a better solution now, I can remember some painful moments typing passwords on smartphones.

Still there are many of us who find we are more productive on certain tasks using traditional computers.  I am one of those people who can keep more than one computer busy.  That is my desktop pictured at the top of the post.

Computers are even more important for those of us who make our living from them.  They are the tools of our trade and good tools as any craftsman will tell you can make all the difference in the world.

I write for a living and build websites to promote my books and articles.  I also have a great passion for photography and maps.  The ability to accurately place my photos on a map with a computer using GIS information is important to me.  It is just impossible to build a good website without a computer, and computers make it much easier to manage photos.  With writing often comes the need to illustrate. I no longer even know how to do a quality job of putting together a book or article which includes photos without using a computer.

As a writer, my computer becomes a special place that I visit to think and create.  I am troubled by both Windows 8 and Macintosh OS X Lion.  While they are the latest and greatest operating systems from the two largest mainstream OS vendors, I think they often get in your way and make us less productive than previous operating systems.

It is annoyning enough to have my smartphone beeping at me when someone in one of my social networks does something.  I don't need my computer also doing that.

I don’t want to dig into the details because operating systems are like religion and politics to many folks in technology.  I have received enough complaints and been called more nasty names than I care to remember for recent articles detailing the failings of both Microsoft and Apple.

I would like to point out what I am doing to make my life on the computers that I use more productive.  It is a solution that has come a long way. It is perhaps one that will bring shudders to some folks, but it something to keep in mind the next time you have to throw away a perfectly good computer just because either Apple or Microsoft has left you behind.

The solution for me is Linux.  I am admittedly more technical than most computer users, and I have been using Linux as a hobby for a little over eight years.  It has never been my main operating system, but that might be changing.

There are a couple of reasons for that.  One is that eight years ago getting a computer to run Linux was a huge technical challenge.  It took me nearly a month to get Linux and Windows running on the same machine.  I even had to buy a new hard drive controller to make it work.  Those days are long gone.

Today’s Linux may well be easier to install than any other operating system.  My recent experience with a brand new Apple Mac Mini is a cautionary tale for anyone who thinks picking an Apple product solves all of your problems.  While Windows 8 machines have been easier to bring up to speed, I am still left with the annoyances of Windows 8. It is just too complex and busy. 

On top of Linux being easier to install, now you can use virtualization to avoid just about every hardware headache in the book.  Virtualization which lets you runs different operating systems in software emulation is a trend that is sweeping the world of large corporations.

Fortunately we consumers can also take advantage of it. For $50 I bought VMware’s Fusion product for the Mac.  I got Linux installed on my new Mac Mini before Apple even got my new computer completely updated with the latest software.

I am using Xubuntu Linux.  It is has a simple interface and comes with a set of applications that I am comfortable using.  I am using AbiWord for documents, gThumb for pictures, Gnumeric for spreadsheets, and Thunderbird for email.  I have both Firefox and Chrome installed as browers.

My desktop looks intimidating, but it is really not that scary.  The left screen is an I5 Windows 8 Lenovo computer.  I use it mostly for photo storage and manipulation.  I have settled on Adobe’s Lightroom as my photo editing product.  I also have photos in Picasa on Windows and iPhoto on my iMac. My email is also available via Postbox on the Windows 8 machine and Mail on my Apple machine.  Since I use IMAP based mail clients, I can really look at my mail from any machine including my Nexus 7 table or my LG Spectrum smartphone.

The middle screen in my desktop usually has Linux running on it with six different workspaces.  It is very easy for me to move from one task to another.  The screen on the right usually has straight Mac stuff running on it.  I do my scanning from the Mac.  My current favorite graphics tools is Pixelmator which only runs on the Mac.   I use a couple of web tools that are cross platform but I also use Rapidweaver and my favorite FTP client, Fetch, is also Mac only. The laptop is my trusty Windows 7 Lenovo machine. It is one of my favorite tools.

I move files between the platforms with Dropbox if I want to move it to or from the Linux world.  For the Mac and Windows sides, I often use Google drive.  There are times when I cannot wait for Google Drive to update and I will switch to one of my USB thumb drives for moving files.

The virtualization client, VMware Fusion, asks me what to do when I plug in a device to one of the USB ports.  I can connect to the Mac or Linux sides of the computer.  So far all of the printing and other tasks that I have tried with Linux have worked without any challenges.  That is a huge improvement from eight years ago, but Linux has been a reliable partner for the last three or four years. This last time I didn't even have to install a printer drive.  It just saw what the Mac had installed.

I will be reporting on my progress over the next few months, but I am already more content on my desktop than I have been in months.  With the battle I had with my iLemon and the challenge of getting my Mac Mini up to speed, I am ready for some peace on the desktop. 

While I am functional on Windows 8, there is always something annoying me.  The famous Charms and I have some challenges on my Lenovo tower that does not have a touch screen.  My Lenovo Yoga with a touch screen is more usable, but I still do not find the sense of peace that I do in using Linux.

Instead of the computers trying to control me which I often feel on Mac OS X Lion or Windows 8, I am now back in control.  That is the way it should be.

I also plan to install Linux directly on an old Windows laptop. It will be interesting experiment.  Given it had Vista and only 2 GBs of ram, this could be a real transformation.  I encourage anyone who is tired of the operating system roller coaster to give Linux a try. You can usually download a live CD and try it without making any changes to your computer. It is similar to playing around with virtual machines. For some strange reason the virtual machine software costs $100 more for Windows than it does for the Mac.

With the death of my iMac, my desktop has gone from this setup to my current Linux focus.  I think it is going to stay like that for a while.

I Still Don't Want to be Hit with Your Modem

This article was originally written the day after Christmas in 2010. The thoughts are still relevant. I did a little editing to make sure the links still work.

Just before Christmas of 2010, I got an email of a Dilbert cartoon.

The cartoon pokes fun at a character with thirty years of experience. Unfortunately his experience is in the tech industry where the half life of technology is measured in months not years.

This scenario likely still fits the computer industry where I spent over twenty years.

It also fits a lot of people these days who got their toes wet in technology over the years but seem to be afraid of jumping in and really getting wet.

Unfortunately folks selling us technology are more a part of the problem than a solution.   New technologies and untested changes get thrown over the wall by tech folks more often than I can count.  Sometimes the changes are more about form factor than what the technology can actually do.

Often we as consumers are just a huge beta test for half-baked ideas.
We have moved quickly to a world where the cloud is now where much of the innovation is really taking place.  Web based applications have been a growth area for ages and I have long wondered how long operating systems will really matter.

My life which has included selling farm equipment, cattle, computers, email services, lambda class networking, photographs, articles, and FTTH has been a cram course in technology. Those diverse careers have exposed me to many new technologies before they hit most of the world.

Fortunately I have made the technology work for me instead of letting it hold me prisoner.

When we started farming in Canada, we had to use a party line for our telephone system. I can still remember brow beating the phone company into getting our first private line.

Our family first computer, an Apple II+, in 1982 was a gamble that paid off.  In 1988 it just took a lot of money and some patience to get our first car mounted cell phone. Not too many years after that my children gave me my first domain, Sobotta.org. With it came my own email to manage.

By the year 2000, I was creating simple websites on our internal web at Apple to foster communication with my sales team which spanned the continent.
In the fall of 2004 I started blogging about my experiences in putting Linux on a computer.   By 2006, I was the vice president of sales and marketing for a cloud-based email services company.  My job was to help convince people that their email was safer in the cloud than it was on a server locked in their back office.

In March of 2010, I got my first true smartphone, a Droid. It took about thirty seconds to log into my Gmail accounts and get my contacts into my phone.  It is hard to compare that to the battles I went through to sync my old Nokia phone's contacts to my Mac. I finally got it to work but it took a lot more time than it did on my Droid.

Along the way, there have been digital cameras, both video and still. Now my 2010 Nikon 3100 and my latest Pansonic Lumix camera both do video and still shots.  It is hard to even compare them to that huge first Sonny video camera that I won in a sales contest while working for Apple (not to mention my 2018 Google Pixel 2XL smartphone)

While all this has been happening, there have been ad hoc home networks and other more elaborate set-ups.  I have helped friends and family with computers and technology over the years.  I am pleased that my latest gift to my youngest daughter was a wireless router which she managed to set up on her own.

I have moved much of my important stuff to the web or the cloud as lots of folks prefer to call it these days.  Given the challenges of keeping track of an ever changing lineup of a computers, the web looks like a good place to archive things (In 2019, my standard computer recommendation is a Chromebook where everything lives in the cloud- we gave one to our ten-year old grand daughter for Christmas).

In 2012, I gave a few seminars on the importance of storing your digital photographs someplace besides your computer.  I think more people should pay attention to getting things in the cloud.  It is far better than a shoe box or letting them clog up your smartphone.

I have become something of an agnostic when it comes to computers and operating systems. I don't worship at the altar of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or even Linus Torvalds.  I just use the computers to solve the problems that I run into in my daily world.  I am proud that being cross platform gives me the skills to solve almost any computer problem on any platform.

With all this history of technology and working my way through it, I feel pretty confident that it might be a while before I have to whack a young whipper-snipper with a modem or some other outdated piece of technology, but I have been surprised by the younger generation before and I suspect it won't be the last time. I do listen to the younger generation, my son convinced me to start using Amazon Web Services and give up on WordPress. It was a challenge but now my CrystalCoast.me site is there and I understand Amazon's containers.

In my journey through all this technological change, I have learned listening works a whole lot better that shouting.  At the same time I have figured out how to differentiate between the people who know everything, and the ones who know something valuable and are willing help me while at the same time possibly benefiting from some of my thoughts.

I ran into enough brick walls at Apple to last me for a lifetime. I would far rather work with people than battle them any day. I happy to still be writing and working on the web where much of this new technology actually hits the road.

Today if you run into me walking on the beach, I can easily show you my latest website or pictures of my granddaughter on my smartphone.  All that digital information is there along with a lot of other stuff that I can suck down from the cloud. I will also likely know the exact location where I met you.

It has been a long road since I started using that first computer, but I fully expect that that there will be lots more surprises before the journey is over.  I'm looking forward to them.

Speaking of surprises, finding snow on our dock the day after Christmas was something of a Boxing Day treat.