Yeraze's Domain 3.0

I’m really enjoying audible so far. Between the one credit per month that comes with the subscription, and the 2 free Audible originals you get each month, I find myself having no problem keeping myself busy in the commute.. So i thought I would share some of what I’ve been listening to lately:

Just wrapped up another Audiobook, this time it’s "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking". It’s a 6-hour and change book written and narrated by Oliver Burkeman, who has lots of similar books.

In short, it’s a book about the trappings of the "Cult of Positive Thinking" and references lots of psychological studies that demonstrate that Positive Thinking can actually make us less happy, because things rarely turn out as happy as we can imagine. Instead, he proposes a moderate amount of negative thinking, imagining just how bad things can get, which can then make you a bit more relieved when you realize that basically never happens. Along the way he links this to the ancient teachings of the stoics, buddha, and various other religions.

It’s an interesting listen, and makes reference to Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, just like "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck".

I enjoyed the first half of it. The latter half gets a bit slow, since it’s mostly more evidence for reinforcing the first half, so it felt a bit repetitive and dry.

Every day I have about 30-45 minutes to drive to work, and another 30-45 minutes to drive home. That means an hour or more of drive time every day. I’ve had a Spotify account for a long time, but after a while the playlists got boring and stale. I tried podcasts for a bit but beyond a few episodes of Hardcore History (Thanks John for the tip!) , I couldn’t find much I liked.

Late in 2018 I setup an Audible account. Started with the usual free trial and converted after a while. So far I’ve finished the following books:

I’ve heard about Audible for years, constantly peddled via Youtube starts and other Podcasts. I never really thought it was worth it, but having used it for a few months I finally get it. It’s a delicate balance: Finding books interesting enough that you don’t go to sleep, but not so interesting that you wind up sitting in the parking lot waiting for a good place to stop, and not so complex that the few seconds of highway-hypnosis zone-out doesn’t completely trash it. (I wouldn’t recommend doing Lord of the Rings via Audible, for example).

So self-help and management books have so far been a great match (as evidenced from the list above). The new "Audible Originals" program is great too, since I only get 1 free book a month. With the Original’s program, they pick 5 or 6 items every month and you can get 2 of them for free (that’s how I got The Last Days of August and Victorian Secrets).

What’s fascinating is I find something magic happens in your brain afterwards. For example, "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" is the story of a new CEO stepping into a floundering company, and the various interactions with the C-suite team she inherits. The entire book is read by Charles Stransky. However, looking back on it I have memories of distinct voices for each character. I’m honestly not sure how it happened, but the same way you wind up with mental images and mannerisms for characters in your own imagination when you read, the exact same thing happens here.

So In short, I recommend it. It’s a great way to pass otherwise unusable time, and broaden your perspective at the same time with some good reading. If you know of any other books I should put on my wishlist, post them in the comments below!

So I’ve had the R7000N for about a month now. It’s a pretty good router, but it has some problems. Sadly, they’re the same problems I dealt with constantly on routers prior to my Airport.

The biggest one is 2.4Ghz Reliability. The 5Ghz band is rock solid. The wired ethernet is rock solid. The 2.4Ghz band comes and goes on a regular basis, for no good reason I can find. At first glance you think “Well just use the 2.4Ghz", but it’s not so simple. Ring doorbell, Kuna light, Nucleus Tablets, Echo Dot, wifi-enabled clock/weather station… All of those are 2.4Ghz only.

Apparently this is not a new problem, there are long threads on their support forums for it. I tried a few of the usual things to no avail, but eventually stumbled upon the following combination of things:

This combination seems to have fixed it. That last one was a bit disappointing (It means my router is now wide open to port scanning), but it works.

I remember running into similar problem all the time, where the 2.4Ghz would die .. I usually attributed it to overheating or traffic, as it would usually happen when I would sustain a lot of bandwidth for a while. Either BitTorrent of a particularly active torrent (hence a bunch of traffic), or streaming Netflix or Youtube for a long time.

I post this here in hopes that it helps someone else. I’m disappointed that a new $200 router in the year 2018 suffers from the same problems plaguing cheapo routers in 2005, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

For the last 10 years, almost exactly, I’ve been using an old 2nd generation AirPort Extreme wireless router. It’s been a fantastic piece of kit. I’ve never had to reboot it from getting confused, it’s worked with dozens of clients and multiple configurations as I’ve changed service providers, iPhones, added and removed network extensions, and more. But after 10 years, and moving into a modern home in South Florida where they use metal studs for the exterior surfaces, some problems have shown up.

Perhaps the biggest problem has been range. Even in our old home, being on the farthest extents of the house meant spotty coverage. In our new home, I can be only 30 or 40 feet away and have trouble getting signal. All of the pipes and metal studs cause worlds of interference. And with the new exterior items I’ve been adding to our network (wifi security cameras, ring doorbells, wifi-enabled garage door openers, etc) I’ve been forced to play games with cheap and flakey wifi extenders. It was finally, after 10 years, time for an upgrade.

After consulting with some friends and reading some reviews, I finally settled on the Netgear R7000N Nighthawk .

The following was important for me:

I’ve only had it up and running for 24 hours, but so far it’s working great. I configured it with the same SSID and password as our existing network, so all of the laptops and iPhones came through without an issue. However, I did have a few glitches to fix:

So I’ll update as time goes by. So far it’s working great. It even has some features I’m still discovering:

A few months ago I saw an ad on Facebook for something called the “Remarkable Tablet".

Looked impressive. I’ve tried various iPad note taking apps over the years, most successfully Notes Plus. Unfortunately, all of the capacitive styluses I tried had lackluster accuracy. It seems like a really obvious thing, to take notes on a digital tablet, but the iPad never quite fit the bill. App developers had some clever tricks, like how NotesPlus does it’s zoomed-in text entry bar, that works pretty well.

However, for me at least, the real “power" of physical note-taking is in the freedom of it all. I can draw stars and lightbulbs in the margins, I can put boxes around text for emphasis, I can draw a big line and arrow connecting two separate paragraphs of text when the conversations pulls a “getting back to the original topic". Sure I can usually do that on iPad apps, but it’s a weird combination of switching tools and modes each time, breaking the flow.

After 2 months of using my Remarkable tablet, all I can say is WOW. They got it right. You create a notebook, select your type of pen (gel, pencil, or fountain) and off you go. It’s as simple as that. The texture feels like real paper, it’s an e-ink display so it looks like real paper, and the response of the pen against the tablet acts like real paper.

I’ve replaced carrying my laptop to meetings and using Evernote for notes-taking, and now I just use this. It’s a fraction of the size and weight, and it’s actually faster to use. I can email the resulting notes to my Evernote Email address as PNG’s, and then Evernote takes care of the rest.

The software is still under active development, as evidenced by this great new firmware update this week that rearranged the Template system solving one of my biggest complaints with the device. And to be fair, there are still some bugs in the system:

Still, it’s quickly become one of my favorite tools and part of my standard workflow in the office.

I give this one a 4.5/5 Stars! I look forward to seeing what Remarkable does next!

For those of you watching my Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook pages you no doubt have already seem most of this.

Of the new hobbies I picked up right at the end of 2017 was Wood Working. Inspired by lots of you tubers and some ideas stuck in my head that I couldn’t find available anywhere else, I finally started collecting up some good tools and dove in. I started with some basic shop furniture and then into smaller things for inside, and then into some big pieces like the end tables and the mudroom rack.

I’m still learning a lot as I go, but I’m loving every minute of it.

Yesterday I read a short piece on PGP from ArsTechnica’s Filippo Alsorda entitled “I’m throwing in the towel on PGP". It’s a great piece on the fact that PGP is still the pinnacle of security, but it’s just failed on everything around use-case and integration. Like him, I use PostBox for email, with EnigMail. I’ve maintained a set of keys for several years, regularly expiring and recreating them, but the only signed email I ever got was an annual notice from Joker.com validating my domain.

Even doing everything half-right (I never did key-signing parties and all that), it still was mostly “security theater". The keys sat on my laptop hard drive, and I had no way to access them from my phone or tablet. Every time I wanted to expire my key or adjust the expiration to push it out another year, I had to resort to arcane gpg command lines cut-and-paste from StackOverflow. Odds are, I fubar’ed it more than once and I’m nowhere as secure as I thought.

So in short, I’m giving up on it. I’ll keep things enabled for a while, but I’m not going to bother maintaining it like I have. Instead, we have better tools these days. I’ve setup Signal for encrypted instant messaging, and setup a ProtonMail account for email.

So, if you want to reach me via an encrypted channel.. Reach out to me normally (Facebook, twitter DM, email, etc) and I’ll share the details.

It was the end of 2013 when I first published the AppleScript hack to put Hangouts Links into Calendar entries. Lots of folks have commented that they’re having problems with it, so I thought it was due for an update.

In short, I’ve quit using it. It was always flakey, even when it did work. Every time someone would update the calendar entry (add a new attendee, update the agenda, change the location) I would get a new Calendar entry and it would undo my changes. Plus, some events it just wouldn’t work with and I never could figure out why. Plus, Apple’s calendar just doesn’t seem to handle some of what Google does so I had events that didn’t synchronize properly. I regularly had events that appeared in my google calendar but not on my OS X Calendar, and vice versa (This seems to be related to complex repeats syntax).

To replace it, I started using Fantastical. They have a great 30-day trial you can try out, and then it’s $40 to buy it. I was hesitant at first to pay the $40, but then they released an update that adds:

With those 2 features, I pretty much never have to use the Google Web Calendar again! It synchronizes great (better than what I saw of Apple’s calendar), and it pulls in Apple Calendar data too. All of the data is fully editable, and they have some great hotkeys to let you setup “Calendar Sets". Plus, it integrates with OS X Notification Center and other systems for a great clean use.

So, if you’re looking for me to update my scripts, I have no plan to. If you find a way to get it to work, definitely post in the comments and share your results with others!

I had a spreadsheet collecting a long list of dates, and next to it a calendar I manually entered. I wanted to color cells on the calendar, so that the color indicated the Number of dates in a separate list that fell on that date. I wanted green if it was 1 or 2, Yellow if it was 3 or 4, and Red if it was 5.

It took me too long to figure it out, but here’s how you do it:

Create a “Conditional Formatting" with “Custom Formula", like so:

L1:L200 - The Column of dates.

A3 - The top-left cell containing the calendar (of August 2016 in this case)

This is the comparison for the 3 and 4 case, just change the <5 and >2 to whatever you need.

Hope it helps!

Next step is to get this to work for multiple columns of dates.