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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