Category: Technology

Simple Stuff

Old Fartism, Technology

Earlier on, I discussed technology and how it’s turned “nice to have” into “unless you have it, the thing won’t work”, such as the episode where Samsung fridges bricked because of a crappy “update”.

[brief 250,000-word rant deleted]

Now we’re always talking about appliances like fridges that last for yonks without breaking down, but I am reminded of one old stalwart that I used for (rough guess) about ten years before I got talked into something more “advanced” (to my everlasting regret).

Well, it wasn’t a fairy tale.

Take a bow, the venerable HP500 Deskjet:

I have no idea how many thousands of pages I printed using this old dot-matrix warhorse — remember, back then we couldn’t send any document of size through Teh Emailz, so we had to print stuff out and mail it (or hand-carry it) to the intended recipient’s office.

My memory is hazy after all these years — was it 2001 when I finally stopped using it?  I know it was post Y2K, because I was assured that it would not be affected by Teh Y2K Disaster!!! and carried on relying on it until the panic passed).  But honestly, I could probably count the number of printer jams on the fingers of two hands, no more.

Yeah, the quality wasn’t up to much.  But let’s face it:  how many times do you actually need photographic quality on your printer’s output anyway?  (In my case, it would be “hardly ever”.)

I’m telling you, right now I would be perfectly content with that HP500, even though it has no BlooToof™ connection and I’d have to plug it into my laptop every time I wanted to print something… which would be about twice a month, tops.

Of course, it would need a different cable connector because there’s no room for a 36-pin plug on the Lenovo, but I’m sure some geek could slap one together for me in about half an hour.  And I’m not sure that HP (or anyone else) even makes the ink cartridges anymore, either.

Whenever I think about the HP500, by the way, I’m reminded of this example of simple, rugged utility:

1969 VW Beetle

I’d probably be quite contented with this old thing too, even though like the HP500 it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of Cursed Modernity™ either.  OMG!!!  No electric windows, no automatic transmission, no ECM, no power steering, no anti-lock brakes, no remote disabling, no spy system (ADR), no “lane assist” and no “parking camera” (okay, I wouldn’t mind the last one too much, but it would be a simple aftermarket addition).

What it does come with:  simple and inexpensive maintenance, low fuel consumption and a full-size spare tire.

Translate the above into printer-speak:  hardly any maintenance, low ink usage, plentiful and cheap cartridge supply and an as-needed cable plug.  VW Beetle, meet HP500 Deskjet printer.

Go on, mock me I dare you.

Upgrades

Technology

Via Insty, this little gem:

Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update
bricks Samsung smart fridges

Affected fridges “suddenly lost power and stopped functioning immediately after” trying to issue a firmware update through SmartThings, Samsung’s smart home platform, per Star News Korea. The SmartThings app then showed the devices as offline. Some users said that their fridge’s internal display was stuck showing the message “Checking SmartThings app during update.”

There are numerous reports on Samsung’s Korean community forum detailing the problem. Some users claim that they have owned their affected fridge for just a year or less.

“[T]he refrigeration and refrigeration functions themselves did not work normally, so all the food in the refrigerator had to be disposed of,” one user wrote.

Of course, Samsung says that this only affected Korea — like it could never happen anywhere else.  Uh huh.

Here’s where all this technology — in appliances, cars, whatever — cocks things up.  What has happened is that “must-have” has been largely replaced by “nice to have”, and in the nature of the human condition, a lot of “nice to have” things have become “must-have”.  Let’s use fridges as an example.

Must have:  maintain a constant temperature that cools or freezes foods.  This is the sine qua non of any refrigerator.

Nice to have:  a means whereby one may control the temperature (initially, by a manual dial inside / outside the refrigerator), and by extension, a means of notifying the customer when the fridge stops working — e.g. the little light inside doesn’t turn on when the door is opened.

So when the above “nice to have” slowly transforms away from the manual / visual of the fridge itself into “you can now check your fridge’s condition on your phone” (to give but one example), all sorts of failure points are introduced into the process.  And that’s the simplest one I can think of;  but of course it doesn’t stop there, does it?

Anyway, I can see that at some point you will no longer be able to get a simple fridge like the one your Mom had in her kitchen.  Oh no:  you’ll only be able to get one that tells you the time, sets variable temperatures inside the fridge by drawer, tells you when the icemaker level drops below a certain point, and so on and so on.  All very nice to know, but nowhere close to being “must-have”.  (It will also cost three times the amount that a basic fridge used to, and will yield five times the profit to the manufacturer, which is your answer right there.)

And when the upgrades come along (why?), and the whole thing falls over, you’ll be left in the same predicament as the hapless Korean restaurateurs.

I can dream, can’t I?

Keeping Up With The Times

Surveillance Society, Technology

I have often been accused of being an old fuddy-duddy, very set in my ways and against the concept of “change”.

Mostly, I would plead guilty to such charges — and proudly, at that.

However, I am very open to change in one circumstance, that being on the issue of this godless system known as “flocking” — you know, those seemingly-ubiquitous cameras installed to spy on people’s cars and movements thereof.  I proudly created this little picture, in fact (and feel free to copy or pass on, as the mood inspires):

I purposely used the word “grex” (Latin word for flock) because as a generic collective term for sheep, it doesn’t refer to any company or individual.  Also, I’m a cultural snob (likewise by self-admission) and have an abiding fondness for classical allusions.

Anyway.

So great is my hostility to these fucking things that I may once even have suggested a DIY method for their de-installation:

Of course, as any fule kno, this was merely a tongue-in-cheek suggestion because counter-surveillance (cameras spying on cameras — does it ever end?) makes such an action foolish, even though as a curmudgeonly man of the elder demographic, using something as old-fashioned as a shotgun to take down something so horrible and offensively-modern would give me great pleasure.

But no, we should move with the times, methinks, especially when contemplating the “delenda” part of the above suggestion.  So how about something like a “loitering munition“?  (I love that particular euphemism, by the way.)

Now, this is also a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, because it’s easy to see that objects like this are waaayyyy overkill — there’s no need for a loiter function, for example, and given the typical fragility of a small camera device, there’s no need for any munitions, per se.  Even a kamikaze drone (as used by the military) would be overkill, for the same reasons — and in both cases, too spendy for Mr. Average Citizen to use.

So looking at the matter from a clinical perspective, there’s no need for such things.

But blessed as we are by living in the U.S. of A., there are always other options, such as this one, at only $40 per pop (so to speak):


(link in pic)

I would imagine that an accidental collision between a flocking camera and a drone controlled by a fumbling amateur first-time user might indeed compromise the camera’s operation somewhat.

If you see what I mean.

Progress:  not always a Bad Thing, no?

Keeping It To Yourself

Technology

Via Insty, I see this interesting report:

Nine PBS in St. Louis had a rolling annual contract with Open Source Storage (OSS), a cloud storage provider, but when the station went to renew the deal earlier this year, OSS didn’t respond.

On the day the contract expired, Nine PBS suddenly lost access to its data without any warning. That’s when staff there realized that OSS’s website was inactive and the state of Colorado listed the company as delinquent.

The station lost access to 50 terabytes of archival materials, which included all of its footage of historical events that have taken place in St. Louis.

Nine PBS sued OSS but paused the lawsuit after it was contacted by a managing partner of a group that had acquired OSS’s assets and revealed that the station’s archive was being held at the Iron Mountain Data Center in Colorado.

After the managing partner stopped replying, Nine PBS contacted Iron Mountain, which initially suggested that it would return the data, until it reversed course and refused to do so because OSS owned “the physical services housing the data.”

….translated, that means, “Unless you pay us jillions of razzbuckniks, we’re going to keep all that lovely data”.

Of course, I think that the amoral assholes who bought Iron Mountain (LOL) and are holding Nine PBS hostage should be impaled on stakes, but that’s neither here nor there.

More interesting is the followup from Driscoll which points out that on the same page there is this article about a 16TB storage unit (cost:  about $3 grand), and that with three (okay four) of those, Nine CBS could just have stored all the data themselves.  I’m willing to bet that the $12 thousand outlay is considerably less than their lawyers’ bill.

Idiots.

But we can learn from idiots, can’t we?

Lesson learned:  Forego the fucking Cloud, and keep your personal data to yourself.  Storage is cheap, your data is irreplaceable.

Which reminds me:  I need to back up my hard drive.  Tonight’s the night, baby.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD, Technology

From Steven Miller:

“Data centers being built isn’t the problem, the data in those data centers is.”

It has always been my major concern about this whole business.  It started way back, when I found out that Google was suppressing search results for my old Nation Of Rifleman website.  Even keying in whole sentences or blocks of text from a specific post didn’t bring up the post, or even the website itself.

So now I’m supposed to trust artificial “intellgence”, when I have no idea what the search criteria are, or what sources were accessed to produce those “intelligent” results?

I don’t fucking think so, Simon.

Flock Off

Surveillance Society, Technology

And then we have this little collection of reindeer games:

A quiet battle is happening across the US right between towns working to adopt Flock Safety systems and those trying to ban them entirely. From major cities like Los Angeles canceling its Flock contract to towns wrapping Flock AI cams in plastic bags because Flock won’t take them down, it’s a wild time for surveillance and questions about government accountability.

But what happens when you start seeing Flock’s now-recognizable solar panels and AI cameras going up in your neighborhood? What happens when they start to recognize your car or even individual people?

I don’t want to say what I really feel, at this point, because I may get into trouble.  Still, being who I am, I can’t help thinking of this kind of solution:

Then, purely in the spirit of scientific inquiry, I’m wondering if this might work:

Curious, that’s me.  But if you’re going to test the stuff, you may want to get some soon before it mysteriously starts to vanish off the shelves at Home Depot, or from Amazon’s warehouses.