Terry Poulin

Musings of an aging nerd

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Having transitioned from “Gahh, no space!” to compact, so far the new desk is working out fairly well. If nothing else, it’s certainly nice to feel like I’ve got some desk space.

Because of the change up, I’ve been thinking of migrating Nerine’s charging point from my headboard to my desk, since it’s usually bedtime when I put my tablet on charge and that’s really the only time, I use my phone at home. My headboard’s been the charging station for ages, both due to convenience and the lack of desk space.

Actually, working off that metric and the dual desktop/laptop setup where usually my tablet is guarding my left flank anyway, I’m starting to think of my desk setup as the “Gateway station” where starships go in transient. Plus, the grey slab with technology sprouting out of it rather reminds me more of the space station in Aliens than any of the pocket-sized classes of Star Destroyer.

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Evidence that Windows NT is in fact, the most annoying operating system when it comes to USB, or that me, USB, and Microsoft just don’t mix well += 1.

So, for the day I’ve been rather perturbed that about every ten minutes or so, Rimuru makes the USB enumeration sounds.

Running Device Manager in “Devices by connection” mode allows me to obtain a decent tree view of USB things. Fucking with cables like a mad man allows using the process of elimination to determine what the actual fuck device or port causes this.

Interesting to me, after process of elimination across all ports on my motherboard’s Intel controller and the twin ports on my ASMedia controller, I’ve figured out something interesting about my new Anker hub.

When connected to the ASMedia (directly or extension) the onboard network port shows up as Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed). Likewise, if you insert a memory card into either card slot, no driver letter appears, and it starts making USB enumeration sounds like a mother fucker. Looks like two ports on an NS1081 USB flash card controller judging by the device manager but doesn’t work. Connect something to the Gigabit port and it does not even light up past the hubs power up cycle. This is true even if nothing is connected to the hub’s USB ports, so that it’s a straight shot to the controller’s C port and as minimal a downstream power draw as physically possible (i.e., only the hub’s power LED, network port or sd port).

By contrast, connect the hub to my motherboard’s front USB-C port and instead of Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed) that entry becomes a typical AIX based USB Ethernet port. Didn’t try the card slots when connected to the Intel controller, but I imagine they would work in that configuration.

So, this boils down to when connected to the Intel controller the hub works just fine and when connected to the ASMedia controller, the bridge chips on the hub don’t work.

Also, by contrast if I swap in one of the HooToo USB-C hubs that are so ubiquitous on Amazon, it just works fine regardless of which USB controller it is connected to.

Yeah. Pretty much by down, I don’t really care which vendor is the problem child here. Fuck’em all.

BASB Categories of Intention and my digital brain

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A while back, I came across Tiago Forte and his Building a Second Brain concept by way of a YouTuber channel that I follow. Watching a related playlist, Pick Your Digital Notes App: Step-by-Step Walkthrough also generated some interesting food for thought.

For the most part, I tend to apply a huge grain of salt or a tune out and keep walking relationship towards productivity, task, and time management systems. In my case, I was both interested in a little more detail in favor of deciding which side of my crap sifter that lands on and the rather lenghly list of notes apps referenced being cataloged by style.

In context, my long-term use of Evernote as my digital brain can be classified as the Librarian architype that Tiago mentions. I was quite amused, actually, how Evernote and that mentality went together in his playlist 😄.

But there’s another concept of BASB stuff I’ve seen that’s kind of curious to me at the higher level. Here’s an excerpt from one of my notes:

Categories of intention

  1. Tasks
    1. Actionable priorities separate from other stuff.
  2. Read/Watch Later
    1. Yeah, right.
  3. Projects
    1. Goals and deadline
    2. Longer term.
  4. Areas
    1. Important to spend and time on but no specific deadline.
  5. Resources
    1. Hang on to stuff.
    2. Collect knowledge, etc.
  6. Archives
Tiago Forte suggests these as notes. I envision them as notebook stacks, or notebooks that require a sea of tags.

Periodically, I try to re-evaluate and “Clean up” how information is stored, or “Filed away”. In thinking about how my notebooks have become laid out, I realized that most of my notebooks are largely one of these architypes categorized by some greater context to narrow the scope to what I am looking for during search.

One of the reasons I came to appreciate Evernote and, in many ways, modern applications in general, is a greater focus on data rather than files. This is why for example, as I’ve grown older the structure of my data has become less like an “Anally organized tree of fine-grained stuff” and more like a flat and wide breath of collections.

Where younger me might have viewed a structure like ~/Documents/Papers/General Knowledge Domain/Refined Knowledge Domain/Some Computer Science Study.ps” to be useful, contemporary me is just pissed off by the excessive nesting. I don’t want to spend my time organizing or finding, I want to spend my time using and storing information. So, by contrast, contemporary me would simply store such a PostScript file in my “Programming” notebook, attach tags for any relevant languages, and consider creating tags for the knowledge domain if and only if it’s likely key to being able to find the information again. That is to say, if I’m trying to narrow the hundreds of notes in my Programming notebook or searching across my entire Evernote, I might create a tag. In the area where I started to collect lots of digital information, tags were already quite the fad; one in which I have a relatively negative view towards after years of [ab]using tags.

Thus, presently my notebooks are relatively flat making it easy to glance and guess where stuff goes or should be found. Tags are for useful things only. No more debating which notebook is more specific — it’s either a high-level context, or it’s not a notebook! This is why for example, my Programming stack of “XYZ Programming” and “XYZ Software” notebooks were merged into Programming and Software notebooks and all the XYZ became tags or were simply unimportant. Part of why this works really well, is that computers have come a fair way past the old ‘find where | grep pattern‘ way of searching for data, but we still think in those terms whatever our tools for finding and grepping hae become.

My notebooks like Programming, Games, Hardware, Formats & Notations, Mathematics & Science, Linguistics, Food, Photography; are all notebooks in the domain of “Resources”, in terms of the above categories of intention. Whereas notebooks like Clipped Articles and Image Scrapbook would be considered Archives and notebooks such as Travel and Financial, would-be areas. Since I store a whole lot of stuff in Evernote, it really is like a library of resources and areas of focus, as well as other intentions.

I kind of like this notion of categories of intention. I may have to give it some thought both into my next great data cleanup and the relationship between tools that I utilize.

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So far, my evil desk replacement plan has gone relatively well.

The riser that came with my new desk places the monitor too high for my tastes, and was kind of edge to edge. To compensate, I’ve replaced it with a decent monitor arm. In general: I tend to prefer my monitors lower when they’re larger / further away and high up there when they’re smaller / closer. My goal was to open room under neath for a laptop to be docked not change the monitor positioning.

On the flip side, my LG was pretty darn painless to replace its integrated stand with the arm. Using the arm also gives me better cable management and unlike the un-adjustable one my monitor came with; I could always add binder clips to it. Hehe.

Speaking of binder clips: since I had to rewire all the things, I added a pair to the back of my desk. One to the left to keep the monitor’s power brick from moving around and one to the right to retain the incoming Ethernet cable. I also fed my mouse and probably speaker data cables through it before routing accordingly.

To facilitate fast swapping between Rimuru and a laptop, I got myself a fancy USB-C hub. The USB-A hub affixed to monitor via velcro is now connected to one of its USB-A ports and my speaker is in its USB-C data port. Mouse, web camera, and Xbox adapter are in the USB-A hub on the monitor. Pretty much fetch an HDMI cable and network cable out of the closet and it’s a one cable swap to my work MBP, and a second cable for its charger. 

Because the hub’s cable can’t reach Rimuru’s 10 Gbit/s USB-C card and the 5 Gbit/s hub on the monitor was barely reaching one of Rimuru’s motherboard USB-A ports, the solution was a 10 Gbit/s USB-C extension cable running from his expansion card to the hub. That extension cable is retained by the same binder clip as the monitor’s power supply, so it won’t fall off between the narrow gap between desk and wall when swapping cables. ‘Cuz I know how that goes ;).

To facilitate this “All the things follow one cable” plan creates a bottle neck but considering that this bottle neck is a 10 Gbit/s, I don’t really mind. Most of my USB-A peripherals have limited power and data requirements. We’re talking about whether the 1080p web cam or the simple speakers draw more juice. Not trying to power a spinning hard drive and a desk lamp.

An added benefit of this novel approach is I’ve worked around an annoying problem.

Back when my first USB floppy drive went bork-bork, I had a spell where some of Rimuru’s USB-A ports seemed dead, then went back to working. In the months (~year) since then most of his ports behave in a way that makes me believe that most of the fuses are blown. As a consequence, peripherals have generally been moved to the USB-A hub on the monitor and it connected to one of the still good ports on the motherboard’s I/O panel.

Given that whatever the warranty status and pain in the assery of that might be, it’s probably a good thing my Real Focus on connectivity has been USB-C stuff, it’s probably a good thing that I bought that 10 Gbit/s expansion card for two more C ports. Considering the fuses are probably under the big ass heat sinkage and tiny as !@#$ to desoldier and replace, I’m going with definitely was a good plan to buy that expansion card.

Moving things to my one cable swap all the equipment plan kind of removes this problem. But to cope with it, I’m thinking of two more changes. Another hub on the back of the monitor that keeps the mouse/camera from sticking out the side, and a 5 Gbit/s expansion card to put some A ports where my motherboard’s PCI-E x1 slot is available. Since 10 Gbit/s requires an x4 slot, that’s already consumed by my USB-C expansion card.

Ahh, the joy of computers. Fuck them all.

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On one hand it was a little early for lunch. On the other hand, I’ve basically been physically active since I woke up at 0730’ish. So, I’m going with a notion from one of my favorite visual novels, that having expanded a lot of calories and having no good reason to wait: you naturally eat lunch, early.

Which also makes me realize that I haven’t had any coffee yet. Therefore, it’s time to make coffee while I update my journal ;).

Because I’m weird, I like pickles on the side. Because I’ll eat at least half the bag otherwise, I’m smart enough to put chips on the side too. And who needs a few bits of tomato leftover just because you were one piece of ham shy of another wrap.

Think I’ve found a pattern that works really well for me in terms of making a sandwich wrap. These are made by:

  • One slice of American cheese
    • Broken into smaller strips and lined up so that it’s smaller than half a slice deep.
    • Starting about 1 centimeter below the edge of the tortilla.
  • Three slices of salami
    • Simply, a thin layer of cold drier cold cuts.
    • These are nice sandwich sized and thin sliced, so it takes that many to fill a layer.
  • Enough leafy greens to fit between my fingers and palm.
    • I’m more inclined towards greens like arugula, spinach, chard, etc.
    • Thinly layered.
  • A swing of sauce.
    • In this case, ranch dressing.
    • Often, I’ll use horse radish sauce, or whatever salad dressing I’m in the mood for.
  • A few chunks of tomato.
    • Romas are easily chopped into chunks a bit larger than a fingernail in length and three or four tossed in the middle.
    • Adds more crunch and variety to my diet.
    • Which works because I don’t like to eat a tomato, but I do like tomato in stuff.
  • One slice of hot honey ham
    • Simply, a second layer of cold cuts to help hold it together.
  • One slice of Cheddar cheese.
    • Broken into strips and positioned similarly.
    • I like two kinds of cheese for flavor and tend to shop that way to compensate for the odds that one will become midnight snacking instead of sandwich fixings.
  • Roll the burrito sized tortilla up, press to help keep it shut, and optionally slice in half.
I’ve been following variations on this pattern for a while and like how this turns out. Putting the cheese on the outside seems to help bind it together, as the softer cheeses will melt relatively quickly. Putting the cold cuts between the cheese and the watery bits seems to keep it tidy and less likely to spew out.
For me, I find that bread often goes bad before I can work through a loaf unless I go on quite the sandwich kick. Wrapping up a tortilla on the other hand, is at least no less healthy than my taste in breads, and easily tossed in a refrigerator bin with the cold cuts and cheeses.

From a healthier prospect, I should probably have skipped one of these halves. Not sure if it’s due to this morning’s exercise or the more sating approach to filling a sandwich wrap, but I found this to be quite a lunch. In either case, Misty would have been happy to eat the other half!

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For a while now, I’ve meant to get a thing of Altoids. Both because of all the cool projects I’ve encountered over the years that would fit in one and wondering what they taste like. Not bad actually.

That said, I found it curious that the curiously strong mints can be smelled through the cellophane wrapped tin, lol.

Desk Plans

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For the first time in quite a few years, I’m planning on a different desk setup at home. Actually, for the first time in about 16 years, I’m buying a new desk as part of the plan.

The small desk that I use has been slighted modified to suit my preference for keyboard on slab over its slide out keyboard tray. But otherwise, it’s about the same desk my mom bought about 20 years ago when we got a Pentium 4. Making the migration away from keyboard trays, and frankly having held up much better, is why it replaced my desk that I bought about 16 years ago when I got my own personal computer.

Here’s what I’m envisioning:

  1. A slab style desk about 40″ wide.
  2. Monitor riser to hold the big ass monitor.
  3. Laptop docked under the riser.
  4. Speakers to either side.
  5. Some means of swapping between tower and laptop.
For the desk part of this equation, I’m looking at this gaming desk. It’s close enough in dimensions to my mom’s old desk that I don’t think Corky will notice it encourching on his beloved bedside corner unless the cupholder falls off and hits him in the snoop or I spill a drink on his head. The included riser should be just enough to handle my monitor’s stand, and I could probably go with one of those arms if that doesn’t work out.
This should allow sliding my development Latitude or my work MacBook Pro under the riser, and in theory, maybe I can get away from the annoyance of the monitor leg being under my mouse pad 😂.
Having a slab of comparable dimension should maintain the benefit of having the room to the side for my laptop / phone / whatever the crap I’m working on but put it at the same height as my desk instead of being a “Lowered” shelf the size of a PC shelf. The lack of a place to stow my PC other than on the slab means that Rimuru will probably end up on a little rolly stand of his own, or that I’ll duct tape some cardboard together to make one.
The part that I haven’t quite figured out is device swapping.
On the back of my monitor there are strips of Velcro affixing a Gigabit switch and a USB hub. On the top is my webcam and behind are my speakers jacked into one of the dual USB-C 10 GBit/s ports on Rimuru’s expansion card.
Stack has a Dell docking station that solves most problems of interfacing if it fits but won’t be able to share much. Whether I replace it with a shiny XPS or a Mac someday, my next laptop is going to have USB-C ports much as this was a design requirement when I built Rimuru! Since most of my gear is either Bluetooth (keyboard, headphones) or USB-A (mouse, webcam, USB-A hub, Xbox controller adapter) it would be relatively easy to swap from desktop to laptop as desired by using a USB-C hub because the only Bluetooth device switching around is one with multiple device pairings. The sticky one is that my speakers require a USB-C for their data connection to actually work. The only solution I’ve been able to figure on so far, is one of the few hubs readily available that has both USB-A and USB-C ports. I figure that most connections of interest can be routed to such a hub, along with display/network for the laptop. Personally, I would prefer something like the 4-port USB-A hub on my monitor but as a 4-port USB-C hub, but those are still harder to find as most vendors are C-to-A style hubs and most have short cable lengths. The alternative would be having to switch my speakers between USB-C input and Bluetooth mode, which isn’t totally convenient since they would still need Rimuru to be powered on, making USB the better deal for toggling between devices.
A tricky part of this is the cable length such a hub. That effectively means that cable swaps would require running a USB-C to C extension cable from Rimuru to the hub and swapping the hub between that extension cable and whatever Stark’s successor is. And probably hoping that the new desk or riser lets me put binder clips on the back for cable retention, to keep the cable for falling off, lol.
Well, at least that is my concept for right now.

Debugged; Noun

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When you wonder why the automation isn’t turning off Work focus after you’ve been home a while, and realize it’s using the wrong device’s location to geo-fence.

Then add another automation for the same location on another device.

Then can’t delete either of these, because your phone and tablet both still show two entries with details from the original automation entry because deleting the automation doesn’t do nadda, and your watch doesn’t show any automations.

Then you finally say screw it and delete the entire focus.

That’s debugged. o(*_*)o

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Dusting off DooM ’93 for a refreshing break, I managed to leisurely make it through most of episode 2 before my watch reminded me that I should in fact, get off my fat butt and walk around a bit.

I’m well reminded of how the map designers were often out to get the player. E2M6: Halls of the damned has a rather obtuse layout by modern norms but really good flow for a DooM map. Magic closets unleashing enemies are kind of overused, but it’s a pretty nice map.

On DoomMaps: we can see a fair look at the various curves and bends that funnel you towards monsters.

Having survived the dance of shotguns between mobs, painted the halls in plasma and exploding lost souls, and said screw it and chainsawed through hordes of Pinkies, I eventually came across a second exit door guarded by the yellow skull key. It’s been long enough since I’ve played episode 2 that I had no real recollection of this, but of course by that point in the map I was really not surprised when this turns out to be a fake exit door leading to Cacodemons, shotgun guys, lost souls, and other things making the back of my mind shout, “PLASMA, PLASMA!!!”

Confession: when the closet full of demons opened up on the way back to the real exit door, I opted to whip out the chainsaw in order to conserve my plasma cells and chaingun bullets for E2M7.

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So, I’ve finally decided to give it a shot. For a while I’ve had some interest in the various sensors Apple Watches have, and due to recent affairs, I pretty much find myself with greater need to be aware of what time it happens to be and whether or not there is a meeting on the agenda. Frankly, I’m tired of walking to the head or the snack bar and checking my phone for the time.

Combining these factors, along with the Xbox Series X continuing to be more Unicorn than not as far as budgeted upgrade paths go, I did something I rarely do: I bought myself an expensive birthday present! With my birthday coming up soon, I decided to pull the trigger and just do it. Something that’s not a unicorn always taps that earmarked piece of my savings anyway. Actually, thinking about it, if you discount that time I ended up needing a car near Christmas time, buying a Apple Watch Series 7 is probably the second or the most expensive ‘gift’ I’ve ever picked for myself 😃😄😂. In retrospect, it’s also the first time I’ve ever been to an Apple Store, and probably the first time I’ve gone to a certain nearby mall in a about a decade.

My choice between the SE and S7 is mainly about the sensors; for all other factors I’d rather save on price. Of course, in September there will probably be nice sales if Series 8 lands at the usual time frame but I’m not a Virgo or a Libra. In terms of style being the bland sort, a nice black case and a dark green leather band in 45 mm. Something that fits both my taste and will blend in whether at work or out and about. Might investigate some of the NATO nylon straps and stainless-steel bands on Amazon for variety, but so far, so happy. The leather link uses a magnet clasp that’s as easy as Velcro, and more comfortable than the regular sports and leather bands with the usual through hole buckle that I’ve worn over the years.

This makes the third watch I’ve owned since about 1999, and the second that I’ve bought for myself. Remarkably, it’s also the most expensive. Back around ’99 is when I bought the watch that I used most in my life, for a whole remarkable ten bucks at Walmart. The only other watch I’ve used since then was a really, really slick hand me down. Until about 2010, I had intermixed between watch and watch less and set it aside sometime after adapting to phones in 2010. I can say that my desire for phones likely peaked somewhere in the middle and has long since waned in favor of tablets.

On the flipside, maybe the three rings will convince me to move my lazy fat ass more often ^_^.