Technology

Make your own humidifier!

In the spirit of fictitious cartoon character1I make the distinction because certain presidents-elect seem unclear on which people are real or not. Grandpa Simpson, I tied an onion to my belt and made my own humidifier by boiling a pot of water on the stove.

Some stats for reference below. This is stuff that will be interesting to no one but me, so I will include a picture of a cat at the end. If you don’t like cats, pretend it’s a dog with funny ears.

  • Starting humidity in living room: 24% (low)1
  • Time for water to boil enough to change humidity: 15 minutes, rising to 25% (OK)
  • After 30 minutes: Humidity is 28% (OK) and about 2 cm of water has boiled away
  • After 45 minutes: Humidity is 31% (OK), about half the water has boiled away
  • After 60 minutes: Humidity is 35% (OK), water is down to a few cm
  • I shut the boiling water off just over one hour in

Our ex-humidifier was cool air and used a wick/filter design. I am wondering now if warm air might be better. Things to ponder.

And now, a cat I saw on Mastodon:

Ready for a hug! Or to attack you. Who can say? Cats!

  1. This appears to be the threshold for when it slips from being OK to Low. ↩︎

Why I don’t want to do a web search to troubleshoot my camera’s issue

The Issue: Pressing the shutter button halfway down works as intended, allowing me to lock focus. But pressing the button the rest of the way results in a temporary black screen in the EVF, then it just goes back to the regular EVF view. There is no shutter click, no photo taken. Bonus: Occasionally the EVF itself just goes black on its own, though this seems more intermittent.

Possible ways to find a solution:

  1. Take the camera to a local camera store
  2. Ask friends, family or other people I know
  3. Do a web search on the internet

Issues:

  1. May require an up-front fee, likely repair cost will be disproportionate to the cost/value of the camera (that is, way more than I’m willing to pay)
  2. I don’t know anyone with enough expertise to diagnose

And let’s expand on #3:

What it comes down to is this: Web search now sucks. And yes, it’s because of Google and its push for ads, AI and other nonsense that has trained site builders to optimize (SEO!) garbage that will get pushed to the top of searches, resulting in a web that is mostly junk pages full of keywords, listicles and not much useful information. And if you use another search engine like DuckDuckGo or Bing (which is one of the engines used in aggregate by DDG) you still suffer because all those crappy pages are still going to turn up, thanks to Google’s dominance in search.

Shorter version: I expect a lot of garbage results, with no genuinely useful tips or solutions. And this ignores another thing that Google isn’t even responsible for: The tendency to find many people asking the same question, but no one ever providing an answer.

Observe: Someone posting on a public forum: “Hey guys. I have Problem X. Anyone know how to fix it?” Three days pass. Same person: “FYI, got a fix, you can go ahead and close this thread!” In which the person never offers to others what the fix was.

I mean, I’ll break down and do a search eventually, but it ain’t going to be pretty. I will, of course, provide full details here.

It’s “Technology Hates Me” Day!

At least I hope it’s a day and not, like, a week.

  1. My Canon camera took 78 photos today without issue. It then stopped taking photos, without explanation or apparent cause.
  2. While editing a few of the good photos taken today, Windows 11 hard-locked, forcing me to reboot it. This has happened several times since installing the major fall patch.
  3. TBD. There is still time before I turn in for the evening.

I have no idea what to do about the camera. For Windows 11, I am teaching it a lesson by rebooting into Linux Mint. It’s tough love, see.

Also, here is a cat having technical issues:

Monitor problem diagnosed!

Surprise twist: It wasn’t the monitor.

Last night I had my PC running in Windows 11 and per usual, left both monitors on, with the screensaver running to blank the screens. Shutting the right monitor off would result in it acting flaky for up to half an hour before it would settle down.

This morning, the right monitor was acting flaky, anyway. I described the issue, which included the power button being ignored when pressing it. Jeff said that seemed funny and it occurred to me to try plugging in the power adapter from the other monitor. The “bad” monitor immediately sprang to life.

The fix is a $23 compatible (hopefully) power adapter, which should be here in four days. In the meantime, I’ve temporarily replaced one of the monitors with my old 24″ one and the part that bugs me is not so much the size/resolution difference (though 24″ seems really small now), but rather the colour/temperature difference. I’ve made enough adjustments to the 24″ monitor that now the 27″ looks funny.

I should probably just go outside for a walk.

But at least I don’t have a dying monitor, as once feared.

Secretly I love urban planning

Maybe it’s also the secret futurist in me that hopes for a brighter, well, future.

A Dutch intersection that works for pedestrians, cyclists and motorists. At first glance it seems confusing, but look closer, then read the article below. It’s a great example of considered, thoughtful engineering–the kind we see too little of in North America. But here’s hoping we adapt the lessons from our European neighbours.

The overhead shot:

It actually makes sense. Really!

The article: A common urban intersection in the Netherlands

Why is Windows suddenly kind of slow?

I don’t know. It seems to have started in the past week and everything feels just sluggish enough to notice and, thus, be irritating.

I am typing this in Linux Mint, using Firefox, which remains snappy and responsive here in neckbeard land.

The slowness is probably some obscure bug in the major patch that came out this fall, or one of the billion processes always running in the background going wonky. You know, the kind of thing that is all but impossible to troubleshoot these days. We may be back to the days when you just reformat and start all over again.

Linux is getting closer to all I need for an operating system. Just a few more things and I can leave Windows behind after using it for the past hundred thousand years.

I just need to figure out how to play Diablo 3 in Mint. I mean, choose a good writing app. Yeah, that’s it.

The Culling: Further considerations

Maybe the cloud isn’t all that. A few years ago I got a Synology NAS and it works pretty well. All of my photos from my phone are backed up effortlessly and I can access them from mobile using Synology apps. I can easily backup my camera photos, too, if I took the time to set it up. Right now I pay for the family plan for Microsoft 365, so Jeff and I can each get 1TB of OneDrive storage and access to the Microsoft Office apps.

But Word still drives me crazy, its permissions often create problems where none should exist, and there are free alternatives, like LibreOffice and OnlyOffice. My next renewal is in April, I’m thinking I might go with the NAS and open source apps instead. I just need to be prepared to provide tech support for the inevitable friction from making the move!

Basically, I am feeling this urge to pare back everything to The Olden Days of Computing, where everything was mostly local and the internet was for cats. I’m not saying I want to go back to floppy disks, but some things were better way back when.

Vancouver transit with maximum transit

By way of Tom Scott, I came across MetroDreamin’, a site that allows people to design the transit system of their dreams anywhere in the world.

I was curious to see if anyone had done anything with Metro Vancouver, where the actual transit authority, Translink, has timidly expanded its rapid transit program over the last 38 years. And they had!

This is my favourite example, which includes tram lines and SkyTrain everywhere.

https://metrodreamin.com/view/QlhJdGRyVDViNlhPd05Kb05PNk9WR3JndDJsMXwzMg%3D%3D

Here’s an image of the map for the click-averse, but the link above is better (and doesn’t require an account).

And a close-up of the dense section around Vancouver proper:

And not forgetting the legend that details the various lines, both existing and imagined:

I love this kind of stuff. It’s too bad this remains a fantasy, because there are a ton of good ideas here, but no political will (including the financing) to make it real. Metro dreamin’ indeed.

I like Linux more than Windows*

*In some ways.

Here they are (a not exhaustive list):

  • Better font rendering. This surprised me, but fonts look fuller and sharper.
  • Faster. Everything feels snappier, especially ordinary OS things like opening/moving windows.
  • The file manager does not regularly crash. Or crash at all.
  • So much more customization for the UI.
  • The panel (taskbar) can go anywhere, like in Windows’ olden days.
  • App and OS updates are handled by a single manager, making it simpler and quicker than Windows. Also, I choose when to install them.
  • A better bunch of built-in apps.
  • A better Mastodon app (Tuba) than anything on Windows (though not quite as good as some available on Mac).
  • Desklets, applets and extensions add a ton of optional convenience features.

There are aspects that aren’t as polished as Windows, I haven’t replaced all equivalent apps yet, and gaming is still not quite there, but at this point, the downsides of running Linux (I am still using Mint) are considerably less than when I first started tinkering with it. This pleases me.

Magic stick

One of my online gaming pals got a pet carrier for his puppy so she can get out and about (she can’t go on-leash as she is not yet fully vaccinated). The carrier comes with this instruction:

It makes no other reference to the magic stick.

UPDATE, November 4, 2024: The magic stick has been identified. It is, in fact, Velcro.