One of the best explanations of IP addressing, I’ll just link to it from here.

http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.php/topic/24043-wake-on-wan-warning-long/

I just upgraded my Macbook Air to OS X Yosemite.  But never mind about that; I realise that I’ve started building a bird’s nest of wires.

Recently I’ve become enamoured of a couple of things.  The first is saving money and especially that money which ‘leaks’ from my family budget through slow, grumbling month-on-month charges like electricity.  I measured my large 4U server with dual-core, dual-Opteron motherboard and it was chomping 183W every hour of every day.  As it was a £10 purchase off eBay the motherboard was a good buy but at my local electricity supplier’s rates that was costing me approximately £17 per month.  Too much!

So I started a drive to move services such as my web server and gaming software off it onto something lower powered.

I fell in love with small form factor PCs such as the Raspberry Pi and Beaglebone Black.  They are truly astonishing and I have a wonderful collection of them on my wall, festooned with power cables and wires which keep them fed.  Take for example the Raspberry Pi – it draws just 250 milliamps when under light workload.  The Beaglebone Black (of which I am highly impressed) draws just over 300.  In terms of power usage that is much better than the large server hardware underneath them.  Of course they are less capable machines and do less – however for what they do that does not matter.  If you think of computers in terms of four main measures of CPU, memory, storage and network then not all computers need everything big.  Something like my little Raspberry Pi for example, let’s call him “hugo”, only need to monitor signals from the variety of devices I’ve scattered around my house and environment to measure things such as light levels.  Hugo then passes things off to another small computer – let’s call her “jess” – who then determines if house lights should be switched off or on.

Much more satisfying than having a great clunking computer doing all this is a little farm of smaller devices which share out the work.  Each can be specialised to do their job well, an added advantage is that they can be turned off independently and worked on without affecting what the others are doing.

I love my micro-PCs!

I just typed my password into a google search.

That was accidental; I run a multitude of different operating systems across a number of different hardware and virtual platforms.  Some of the places I’m required to enter passwords save them securely for me (for example, my corporate VPN client), others I use a password manager in the browser.  But sometimes I still have to enter them manually.

I like my bank – it uses _parts_ of my password so I never inadvertently type it anywhere.  However this entering of my password in Google happened because of a couple of things: being eternally vigilante throughout the day does not equate to having to enter a password multiple times, and screen blanking versus screen locking.  In the case in question one of my laptops went blank screen to powersave, I then started typing my unlock password (which is mandated changed every 90 days) and pressed enter, only to find that the screen had blanked but not locked.  Of course I can alter this so that when it blanks it also locks, but my point is that constantly entering passwords is counterproductive and some sort of presence (RFID? geo-fencing?) is more applicable than the simple you-have-not-touched-the-keyboard time out, and is probably better for security control.

And don’t get me on to the mis-handled SSO tokens, constant re-entry of passwords throughout the day as I use corporate internal websites!

Want to block ambulance-chasing lawyers?  Friends you don’t like anymore?  Random strangers?

Normally blocking incoming callers on the Android platform is easy: register their number as a contact, then select ‘block this caller’ from their contact entry.  However calls where caller-id is withheld or not known don’t have the equivalent under Android unless you use an app, and those apps would normally ask to have access to all your contacts and their details – surely a privacy warning!

I was randomly set upon by some law firms who wished me to claim personal injury for a no-fault accident in my car.  The fact that I was stationary at the time and received no injury didn’t deter them, so I looked for another way of doing this.  Google is your friend, of course and somewhere on the internet this little gem appeared.  Almost all the calls have dropped to zero now, along with blocking them on my home telephone line using a powerful wifi router from AVM, and by migrating my phone line physically to a VOIP system which allows greater control (- and that was done before the calls started, for cost reasons).

The easy answer is to create a entry in your Google userid contacts, the same one which you sign in on your telephone, with a list of phone numbers in text such as ‘Unknown’, ‘(Unknown)’, or ‘Private number’.  The reason for doing it off the phone is that the phone person app, which edits your contacts, does not allow text numbers, only numeric numbers.  This may vary of course by hardware – but the offline editing works for them all.  Now when your Google id is synced to your phone it will have a new entry with those numbers, and you can then edit them and select to block the caller.  Simples!

The core purpose of physical shopping has turned into entertainment.

With the growth of the online store, I can now click and press to receive my goods delivered to my front door.  Gone is the need to walk in the world to gather essentials for myself and family, gone is the worry of finding the thing I want amongst a poor selection on shelves, gone is the hunting in different shops to find something suitable, gone is the lugging home large parcels of stuff.

Now women take this differently to men – and boy don’t we know it!  Whilst I cannot fully participate in the experience they receive from gazing at clothes I do appreciate that my young daughter likes to spend a lot of time in her browser doing just that – is there a generational shift happening here?  However the call is strong even for her and mother and daughter still walk the clothes boutiques getting pleasure from the “gathering fruits and berries” exercise.

Where is the pleasure?  Maslow would have us believe that if we answer the lower calls of essentials, then the higher calls of self-actualisation come into play – so shopping become entertainment rather than food-gathering, drinking coffee becomes socialisation, and online shops become what?  Our grain silos?  Certainly the shopping centres that I see growing are combinations of eating, entertainment, climate control and relaxing – not hard pavements and boring flat shop fronts trudged past by shoppers ‘looking’ for items.

We are the people, and we want entertainment.

I’m looking to install a suspended ceiling into my 90-year old house.  I could get a contractor in to do it but in a long tradition of learning other skills want to try it myself.  More recently I’ve been doing less ‘heavy’ DIY recognising that laying concrete or building brick wall may be best left for those with younger muscles, or more talent than me.  But suspended ceilings seem relatively easy and more importantly relatively quick to erect.  Plus there is a puzzle to solve.

With the advent of the internet group memory is starting to change, along with spacial memory through things such as static maps and the like.  I’m sure that there is any number of studies of the Google effect or how most kids homework seems to exist of searching the internet and printing pictures.  But what about things we learned as skills and became as specialised in our jobs as individual craftsmen?  What is happening to things such as problem solving, or doing things which no-one has yet done?

Take my ceiling-line-leveling challenge.  I have to draw a line around a room which is absolutely horizontal and attach the edge trim for the suspended ceiling.  I realise that the ‘professional’ way to solve this is to obtain a “self-leveling construction laser” which is a device that shoots out light from a rotating head based on a floating platform which seeks dead level.  Now I just have one room and the cost of these is approaching one month’s salary, or to hire even for one day it is £100 – almost as much as all my other materials.  Should I abandon my attempts to do-it-myself and just call a contractor who can amortize the cost of purchasing one of these over many jobs, or should I search the internet for cheaper ways to do it?  Having searched the Internet I actually can’t find any way other than measuring from the floor or using lasers.

Which brings me back to group memory and learned skills.  I actually do have a way which is almost zero cost, but the Egyptian pyramid builders thought of it first.  They had the task of getting the base of their structures dead flat so that the enormous weight of stone above would look good from a distance – no cheating the Pharaoh.  It is believed that they used the idea of filling small channels with water – which over a large distance self-levels – then marking the height and building from there.  I want to use the same idea.

I’m not going to fill my kitchen with water like a bathtub but use a thin transparent tube.  One end will be held at the right height up the wall, and water on the other end will self-level to the same height.  Exactly the same height.  Cost?  One thin tube and the kitchen tap.  The Internet didn’t (and maybe still doesn’t) carry this simple idea in a retrievable form because the group memory links aren’t there.  The internet and present search engines don’t have the advantage of our electrical/chemical wetwear brains where memories are reconstructed as they are recalled, nor does context or ‘usefulness’ play a very large part.  Most successful searches require the user to construct what they need in the same language as expressed by the writer, rather than the rather more messily architecture on which our memories are stored.  Does this mean we need new skills, just like Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End, of people who’s role is to construct searches rather than providing answers?  Good questioners, so to speak.