Category: Technology Page 1 of 9

John S., my Raleigh buddy and fellow, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, non-traditional PhD student partner bought an amazing computer to do some of the heavy lifting required for his research that involves lots of image segmentation and classification with AI. He has only had the thing for a little over a year and his backslash key broke. I had that problem with my, two-computers-ago work laptop and it was a wildly big hassle to get it fixed. Shortly after getting my one-computer-ago work laptop, Christian gifted me a mechanical laptop that I can hardly live without anymore. It works so well that I now travel with a similar, but shorter mechanical keyboard to avoid using the laptop keyboard. I highly recommend that approach, but it quickly wrecks you for lesser keyboards.

We are in the process of setting up and office for Lorena. We ordered the printer from Walmart (cheaper than the same model at Ebay and Amazon) and it arrived today–on a Sunday nonetheless, right after we returned from after-church lunch in town. The most amazing part it that it was ready to print out of the box over wireless without anything other than connecting to the network. I installed the Linux (Xubuntu 24.04) drivers that I downloaded from the internet in about five minutes and then the scanner was up and running. I am very pleased with our new monochrome laser printing, color scanning, wireless Brother HL-L2465DW printer. I hope this is the last printer I ever have to buy.

Christian helped me pick out a new printer/scanner today. I found a Brother wireless monochrome laser printer/color scanner with Linux drivers on Walmart for $4 less than the cheapest thing on eBay. It comes with a 700 pages toner which means there is some very good chance we will never have to buy another one.

With our new plan for Lorena to start taking over a bunch of the financial management stuff, we have decided to set her up with her own office/desk/computer in the bedroom. To that end, I got the little i3 Windows laptop running that I use for those few things I cannot do on Linux (do Windows builds of the GRIME2 Open Source software package and update the firmware on our Garmin watches). Hopefully I will be able to get our file server and a Linux computer running so we can implement the plan. With our Starlink setup I am still pretty sad with the upload speeds, but very happy overall with the service.

We are getting close to having a somewhat cluttered but operational house.

Our Starlink internet is now installed. We are getting 15-20 megabits upload speeds, but an amazing 350-400 megabits. We hate to be paying half again what we paid for fiber-to-the-house in Texas and about four times what we paid in Mexico for the same speeds, but we are thankful we had any option at all and also thankful not to be using Comcast or Xfinity.

Lorena and I drove to the Gum Spring Dollar General on the way home from the train station to pick up our new Star Link antenna. A guy is coming to the house tomorrow to put it up on the roof, run the wire into the house, and set up the modem. I really need good broadband to do my job well because there are such large amounts of data involved. Star Link is kind of a bare minimum, but I think it will be fine. We have heard lots of good reviews from people we trust that it works great.

We got Christian a Garmin GPS smart watch for his birthday. It is about the exact opposite of the watch I probably would have guessed that he would pick, but after looking at it, I am amazed that he (again) made the perfect pick. I actually might get one of those the next time around. My Garmin Instinct is almost five years old now and going strong so I am not sure how soon that will be. I am excited to see how much he uses it. It pretty much changed the way I think about smart watches. I used it mainly as a GPS to track my exercise walks, but now I depend on the phone and message notifications that cause it to vibrate.

I figured out a little bit of a medium term project to do now that I am done with college. I have wanted to build my self-hosted, open source video surveillance system for our house for a long time. It is somewhat of a tedious project, but lots of people have done it and I think it will be fun and useful. I bought four IP (WiFi) cameras and a NUC i5 computer to use as a server. If/when I get it going, I hope to install the first system in our house here in Texas, then build up another system to with a few more cameras for our house in San Pedro. I will try to document it here with the specs of the hardware I use and the software I use.

Christian recommended I get a new, better keyboard a long time ago. I used one he had at his apartment in Tempe every time I was there, but for some reason, never thought it would be a good idea to get one. Well, a couple of weeks, I broke down and had him buy me one for $70 after having spent the last couple of decades using keyboards that cost in the range of $20. The keyboard he picked out for me arrived today and there is truly a world of difference for the better. The keys have a profoundly better action and the whole thing just seems more solid. The keys are back lit, it sits at the right angle. I like it a lot. Additionally, it came just in time for me to work on my journal article.