STRAVA MULTIPLE RIDE MAPPER

I love technology, things like computers, smartphone, and programming.  I also enjoy long distance running as a form of exercise.  It's wonderful when the two areas of my life converge.  Through a blog comment, I learned about the tool called Strava Multiple Ride Mapper (SMRM), http://www.jonathanokeeffe.com/strava/map.php .  It's a web form that lets you specify a range of dates to load your Strava activities and put them all on a map.  It works for most Strava activities, like running and walking, not just bicycle rides.  My first use for it was to make a word without having connecting lines between the letters.  It can be done but it's tedious.  You have to end a run after each letter.  Three-letter word would mean three separate runs.  I think the system that I have in place, whereby most of the time the letters are linked at the bottom, works fine for me.  It does save time, like if you make the letter U you can just end at the upper right corner instead of having to run back down to the bottom of the letter.  But as I said, it is too much work, from my point of view.  I also don't like to monopolize people's Strava feed.  For example, if I spell Strava with SMRM, that's six separate runs, or six entries in the Strava feed of people who follow me there.  I just don't like it.  I regularly unfollow people on Facebook who regularly post nothing but links to YouTube videos, one after another.

What SMRM is great for is to make phrases and I put it to use with my latest three runs.  The phrase is Live Laugh Love, that cheesy phrase seen all over Etsy.  I planned the words so that they are kinda strung together but not on the same baseline.  I like to work with rectangular grids but there is not enough room to spell all three words across.  It may be possible to stack them but I really like how the phrase turned out.  It's irregular, less boring, somewhat whimsical.

A few tips on using SMRM:

• You do have to grant SMRM access to your Strava account.  If you are hiding from The Man, or working for The Man on a secret mission, this is not for you.  You probably shouldn't be using Strava in the first place anyway.  Or something like that, you know what I mean.
• Have patient once you click that Load button.  It takes a while to parse through your Strava activities to find matching info.  Not only can you specify the date range, you can also select type of activity, whether to ignore Commuting entries, etc.  Give it some time.
• While the tool works on smartphones, it's best used on a desktop or laptop computer.  If you have to do it on a smartphone, put the phone in landscape mode first.

A wish-list:

• Strava recently switched to OpenStreetMap and while there are some downside to it, a welcomed change is the lack of all these local businesses clogging the map.  Google makes some money with all that info, not the open-sourced OpenStreetMap.  I wish SMRM would get away from GoogleMap too.
• There's a link called Download KVM but it doesn't work.  I love to explore all the features of a given app or tool, but clicking that link only produces the error message There was a problem generating the KML file, please try again.
• Similarly, if you try to give the author feedback, the link for that gives me the error Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension which is required by WordPress. I don't know what that means and don't want to go through the trouble of "fixing" my system just to leave a comment.

The author, Jonathan Okeeffe, actually has a few Strava tools offered.  I find SMRM useful and made a donation.  Check it out and donate if you agree it's a good tool to support.

WII FIT PLUS SEGWAY CIRCUIT

When I feel lazy in Wii Fit Plus, I merely play the Balance Games instead of doing yoga poses or strength exercises.  The nice thing with Wii Fit Plus is there are many more so-called Balance Games.  Wii Fit Plus may call them something else, but they are basically games, something more interesting than the regular exercises.  I got pretty good with all the games and was able to secure the top spot, or completed all the levels.  Until I hit Segway Circuit.  Pretty much the only control you have is lean forward to move forward and lean backward to, uh, move backward.  Well, you also turn left and right by turning the WiiMote, which you hold horizontally with two hands, the front of the WiiMote (the part where the infrared light shoots out) pointing to your left.  The goal of the game is to go around bumping into beach balloons that were inflated by moles or gophers.  There is a time limit and the last mole has rocket-propeller to travel faster.  With the Amateur Level, it took me a while to realize that the only to catch up to the Last Mole is to use a ramp to speed up.  One bump into The Boss Mole, I think, and it's game over for Mr. Mole.  Or at least that's what I vaguely recall.  I should go back to it just for fun.

For the longest time, or at least it seems so, I was stuck with the Advanced Level.  There are more beach balls to bust and that Last Mole was impossible to catch.  Through some YouTube video, I learned that once you have the puppy to follow you, pressing A sic the dog to the Balloons.  It saves you time from having to traverse the distance to bust the Balloons yourself.  Just travel a bit toward a Balloon, press A, then the dog will do its job.  Be careful not to press A too many times.  Press once to get the Balloons busted by the dog, but don't press too quickly or you will call the dog back to you.  Another button that is useful to know is the 1 key.  In the overview map on the right, pressing 1 will zoom out a little bit to show you where the Balloons are, so you don't end up wandering all over searching for them.  Lastly, don't bump into the Moles while they are above ground.  You lose points and I think it makes them run away to another hole, making it harder for you to bust the Balloons.

Even with more time at the end to chase the Last Mole, I still couldn't catch it.  Eventually, I realized that the dog can only do so much work.  It may slow the Mole so that I can bump into it, to bust its on-board balloon.  The on-board balloon is replaceable, so pop one and another one comes out.  Only after the third balloon popped that you would be done.

I am now on the Expert Level and it seems to be even more difficult.  There are buildings to go around, Balloons may be on the sidewalk or within some place that's higher than the road, thus your progress is slow.  I think the trick is to get the dog as soon as possible.  Luckily, the dog seems to be in the same spot all the time.  In the Advanced Level, it's under the tree on the left if you make the first right turn on the road.  In the Expert Level, it's between the building in town.  I will try to ignore all the Balloons and go hook up with it next time.  That may be the only way to quickly bust all the Balloons, with the dog's help, to have more time to defeat The Boss.

POWER OF ADVERTISING

 Someone recently joked that he was so bored at home that he started buying stuff through Facebook ads.  My one experience with that ain't so great.  We spend so much time in FB it makes sense that the advertisers would target us.  The thing I bought was some motion-sensing LED light.  Perhaps because many FB users also went for the same ad, it took me a few weeks to receive the item.  It was about $20, light is yellowish, and needs to be re-charged every few days.  Yes, the seller kept me updated, but it still took what seemed like a long time.  Some time later I bought two sets of 3-pack lights from Amazon, from two different vendors just to see the differences, for about $10 each light.  The Amazon stuff, as usual the case, arrived in a few days.  The Amazon lights also last for weeks before requiring a charge!  There are actually many choices with Amazon but for now I prefer the LED lights from Otinlai.  I like that they have a physical switch to go between Always-On to Off or to Night-Mode.  The other light I got from Amazon has one button to press to cycle through the three modes.  I had to read the little text on the light's body each time I want to make the changes. 

VOTE

 On Monday, I voted early.  It was relatively painless, I just walked in, had my barcode scanned, signed, made my selections, scanned both sides of the ballots, then out in maybe less than 15 minutes.  From what I heard on Facebook, the scenario was different elsewhere.  People waited on queue for hours.  I did go to the poll with a book and with my iPhone fully charged.  I've been trying to cut back on Social Media time on the iPhone but I was hoping to catch up on the many podcasts I subscribe to.  It is good to come prepared.  Wednesday I had the opportunity to go for a morning run and the message is VOTE.

I VOTED EARLY

I voted early! I suspected the weekends would be busy so I waited until Monday to do it. The rain probably discouraged some people to procrastinate. It was quick, no waiting at all. I walked straight in, some staff member shouted at someone at the door that no photography allowed at the entrance, I proceeded to the check-in desk.

I recall when I worked on Election Day some years ago, the workers were assigned these booklets that let us look up voter's Districts, based on that the staff, at the desk for the Districts, would find the voters' documents for them to sign. It was a two-step process.  We had to use a straight edge to better find the info.  One colleague had the great idea of writing certain oft-needed info on a separate piece of paper and that helped sped things along. Today, the workers had some tablet device that can scan the barcodes on the booklet I received in the mail, which I brought with me. Signed my name with a stylus and off I went with a ballot to the filling station, filled in the many bubbles needed, then finally walked over to the scanning station. The scanner doesn't do duplex so you have to scan one side then flip the ballot over and scan again. Let's hope wherever those scanned data go it's securely protected against tampering!

Vote early if you can. All the info is actually in the voter's booklet you already received in the mail. Where to go if you want to vote early, the hours the place is open (some day it opens early, others it closes late, to accommodate different people's schedule), plus the usual info related to Election Day, it's all there.  I found things via the 311 app on my iPhone but it wasn't necessary. Bring the booklet with you, open it to the page with the barcodes, save everyone's time.  I was lucky to walk right in but by the time I left, a queue was already spilling out of the building.

NO MACS SLEEP IN BROOKLYN

My desk is tiny but sometimes I want to use an external keyboard with my Mac laptop.  With an external monitor connected, I want to close the laptop lid then rest the keyboard atop it.  Alas, I soon found out that, unlike Windows, there was no system setting to tell the Mac to Do Nothing and stay awake.  Instead, as soon as the lid closes, the Mac went to sleep.  Supposedly there was some app to force the Mac to stay awake but it was no longer in development.  What I have been doing is, either keep the Mac's lid open and use the external monitor as additional real estate, or jam the lid so that it wouldn't close all the way and use the second screen as a mirror of the laptop.  I sometimes use a Bluetooth keyboard from Apple and it jams the lid perfectly.  But there must be a better way.

By mere coincidence, I recently had my Mac laptop connected to power source, as opposed to running on the built-in battery, and closed the lid while connected to a monitor.  Boom!  There it is, on the glorious second screen, my Mac screen!  The computer didn't go to sleep, it simply went from two screens to just one, which is fine.  I can now put a full-sized keyboard, or whatever keyboard I want to use, right atop the closed laptop.

It's nice to discover things on my own, but I suppose with the correct terms to search I would eventually come across the official words from Apple:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201834

SCREEN TIME GRAY BARS = SCREAM TIME

 I recently resumed using iOS Screen Time, found in Settings, to keep track of my iPhone usage.  As suspected, I spend too much time on Social Media, in particular Facebook.  Lots of other useful info, like how often the phone got picked up, what apps were launched after that.  Nice little bar graphs to show you what's going on.  What's not so nice is there are these gray bars that don't seem to match anything.  You would think the Internet has the answer to everything, but after some Googling, or maybe Bing-ing, the answer is either Miscellaneous Apps or, gasp, Background Tasks carried out by the iPhone itself.  I am not convinced of either answer but if I have to choose one it would be Miscellaneous.  If it's Background Tasks, then this is a classic case of the nerdy engineer collecting info that is useless for the average user.  Screen Time's primary use is for the user to see how much time he uses the apps.  Things that he initiated.  Background Tasks are not initiated by the users and should not be included in a graph that shows how user spends his time.  Maybe in The Matrix, the Computer Overlord may be interested in Background Tasks, but out here in our simulated world, we only care how much time we spend scrolling down our Facebook Wall.

THE LAST TIME WE...

On Facebook, many people post a lot of useless stuff.  However, someone recently posted something that I got very emotional thinking about it.  It was a quote that goes like, "One time you had fun with your friends but did not know that it would be the last time you would be together."  I am not much of a party animal but I suppose the scenario can apply to any gathering.  Maybe just a simple dinner with loved ones.  More recently, on Mac Geek Gab podcast I heard about an iOS app called Last Time.  Supposedly you make an entry in the app and it keeps a running count of whatever that you just entered.  Looking at the app some time later, you would learn that you have a certain pair of shoes for so many months, you last had dinner at some place so many weeks, and so on.  In my emotional state, I am not sure I want to install the app but I think eventually I will.

This week I learned of the sudden death of an elderly friend.  He is older than me by some twenty years.  He was a young medic during the Vietnam War while I was still a toddler.  Vietnam is a big country and we never met there but some forty years later in Brooklyn, NY we did, through a run club.  He took up long-distance running late in his life but he was good.  I am not fast to begin with but he was indeed faster than me.  I used to think that when I get to his age I would be happy to still be able to run like him.  One time he paced me at a Summer Series 5K and it was one of my best times.  I was in much pain, since on my own I usually don't run that hard, but I was very happy too.  He was a good friend and a good coach.  A very nice guy overall.

For me, his sudden death left two unfinished businesses.  I am not 100% sure, but I think he once mentioned he had this letter he found on a wounded enemy combatant.  Recall that he was a medic in the Vietnam War.  He wanted me to translate the letter, just out of curiosity.  He never got that letter to me.

The other unfinished business is that at one time I wanted to make a route-art, StravaArt if you will, for him.  Since he was in the armed force, I thought it would be appropriate to use his last name.  At the end of his name, I would add a red cross, to signify his role in the war as a medic.  Maybe I thought that I better run the idea by him first, but never got around to it, nothing ever came out of my StravaArt idea.  I may still be able to do that one of these days.  I do plan to resume running regularly so it's a good possibility.

PAIR OF EYEGLASSES FOUND IN GREENPOINT, BROOKLYN

 P2MX+48 New York

Every now and there’s some alert on Facebook or such social media of someone gone missing. Their family would try to spread the word as far and wide as possible to try locate them. This post of mine is similar in nature although not as critical.

Today (Tuesday October 20, 2020) around 6pm I happened upon a pair of eyeglasses on the sidewalk outside David’s Auto Repair in Greenpoint, at the northeast corner of the intersection between India Street and McGuinness Boulevard. (The code at the beginning of this post is used by Google Maps to locate the business). I picked up the pair of eyeglasses and asked the man who happened to be sitting near the entrance of David’s Auto Repair. It wasn’t his. I went inside David’s and left it with the receptionist. Ideally the owner of the glasses visited the business recently and eventually traced his way to the store.

Just as an experiment, I am going to post this story in my places on the Internet and maybe you can help too. Ideally the post should go to some Greenpoint, Brooklyn groups or networks.

I BELIEVE I CAN SLIDE

My good fortune with Wii Fit Balance Games is rolling along fine.  Or maybe my skill just keeps getting better and better.  With Balance Bubble games completed, my new Balance Game these days is Penguin Slide.  You control a cute critter, the penguin, that stands on an iceberg.  Fish jump out of the water onto the berg, some gliding along, some jumping.  You shift your weight left or right to slide in that direction and gobble up as many as you can.  Be careful not to slide too far to the edge, as falling into the water costs you time.  At the edge, if you quickly shift you weight back toward the center of the iceberg, your movement becomes a jump, which you definitely need to catch the 10-point hovering, red fish.

For a long time, I struggle to get into the Top Ten list.  Naturally, my son, younger and more nimble, occupied the top slot, probably a few slots in the top five as well.  Thanks to much practice and a better understanding of how the characters in the game behave, I got better and was able to get into the Top Ten list more frequently.  I discovered that when the Red Fish appears, it's best to get ready for it.  No more chasing the 2-point Green Fish or the 1-point Blue Fish.  Just stay in the center of the berg, as soon as the Red Fish emerges from the water at whichever side (left or right), hovering in midair because it has some special power, slide that way and jump.  With that technique, I got enough points to bump my son off from the #1 position.  I even got as high as 98 points!  Now I plan to keep trying until I get 100 point, or more, then I will move on to other Balance Games.

BALANCE BUBBLE PLUS COMPLETED!

The first time I tried Wii Fit Plus' Balance Bubble Plus, it was so difficult.  The idea is the same as the original Balance Bubble.  You "travel" in a bubble and direct the movement by leaning left, right, forward, and backward.  Yes, it's very useful to be able to move in all four directions.  And it's a bubble so the slightest bump and your "vehicle" busts, game over.  First time I played Balance Bubble I also thought it was difficult.  Too difficult for mere mortals!  Luckily the "harzards" moved in the same pattern so after a while I knew what to do to complete the game and completed it I did.  The Plus version introduced a rotating arm, a big one, shortly after you make a few turns.  This is where it's important to be able to go backward a step or two.  You don't want to move faster than the arm.  Every now and then I can even squeeze right in front of the arm and not have to wait for a gap to open up.  Then comes the dark tunnel, with which I had to constantly stop to observe the surrounding because your light can only see so far.  Move forward too fast and you can bump into the floats or whatever that's floating around you.  Out of the tunnel there are two small rotating arms going in opposite direction.  You need to time your movements and squeeze into the gaps.  Last hazards are the bees!  I hate them!  There are five or six of them, just cutting across the screen as you try to reach your final destination.  In a classic case of witnesses with unreliable memory, after I completed the game I watched some YouTube videos and now I cannot recall if I paused on the first two bees then zoomed past the remaining bugs, or if that's what I saw in the videos.  Whatever, I did finish the game, not easily, far from the ease the YouTube people showed.  For example, it looks like when they arrived at the dark tunnel they just went straight through without pausing like me.  Oh well, I should be glad that I at least finished it.

SWIPERS GONNA SWIPE

 I love the iPhone and smartphone technology but in some aspects my old-school way of thinking can only take me so far.  In particular I am talking about swiping with the finger(s) as a way to interact with smartphones etc.  Swiping with one finger, say as a way to look through a list, is kinda easy.  Pinching and un-pinching to zoom in and out isn't too difficult to learn.  Some maps would tell you to use two fingers to move around.  The message would be there so you can read it and act accordingly.  That's the max for me.  I understand there's a whole slew of things you can do with three fingers or maybe even four fingers.  That's too much for me.

I looked forward to using iOS 14 just for the ability to add captions to photos.  I hate it when I cannot find a particular picture I want.  Having the appropriate caption associated to each photo would be useful, but only in the recently released iOS 14 can that be done natively.  The thing is I couldn't find the place where I would enter the caption.  I know there's an Edit button, after you selected that you can do some simple manipulation of the photo, like rotating, cropping, or messing around with its color, brightness, etc.  So that's where I went to find some mythical button that says Add Caption.  Except it's not there!  I tried Googling for it but because of my choice of words all I got back was lists of features of iOS 14.  Why, some of those lists even mentioned the ability to add caption, just that they are so busy talking about the new features there's no time to show me how to actually do it.

I decided to ask a friend who upgraded a few days earlier.  Maybe my iPhone 7 is too old to support the feature.  Not so.  The feature is there, I just had to get the photo in full-screen mode then swipe up from there.  Doh!  There it is, a blank space to take Caption!  Of course, afterward I searched for How to add Caption in iOS 14 or something similar and there are many useful hits, albeit useless now.  Now that I know how to add caption, it vaguely dawned on me that I came to that screen before, where there are other info about the photo, like Location.  I probably arrived there by mistake, otherwise I would know how to get there.  Maybe it's just me, but that's not intuitive at all.  Oh well, years from now when old farts like me die off the young people (young now anyway) will all agree what a great interface it is, so natural to swipe up to see more info about whatever they are looking at.

CLAPTRAP BY TOM RICHMOND AND DESMOND DEVLIN

I love MAD magazine.  Being a bit artistic myself, I love to see the caricatures in the magazines.  I don't know why I didn't buy it more regularly.  For a while, I decided to buy it every two months, that's their publishing schedule, six issues a year instead of the usual twelve.  It gave me an excuse to wander into Barnes and Noble.  I even stated buying the compilation books, which technically are just reprints of the magazine, except for the foreword and other writings in the beginning.  But I missed so many years/issues, the regurgitated materials in the books were new to me.  I even decided to stick with MAD after the move from the East Coast to the West Coast.  New staff, new this new that, many people hated the new stuff, but I didn't mind.  But my measly support wasn't enough.  Now MAD supposedly won't even publish much new materials any more, except perhaps the cover and a few pages inside.  Enter former MAD cartoonist Tom Richmond and former MAD writer Desmond Devlin!  Together, they are putting out a new book with at least ten parodied movies, brand new, never published elsewhere.  There are a few Indiegogo tiers to consider but simply put for $25 you can a book featuring materials normally seen in a MAD magazine as if the mag is still churning out new, monthly content.  They already plan to do Volume 2, if this pattern continues it's almost like having a monthly MAD magazine with new materials.  Who knows, they may even release something every two months!!!

First, Tom and Desmond needs your help.  Support the IndieGoGo project, if you share my love for MAD magazine.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/claptrap-movie-spoofs-in-a-classic-humorous-vein?fbclid=IwAR1ToPkFdB-xN9uPeor3baZkH4Y-pX5FQQBRB9LcTsYmO0Stj95O71IuJ2k#/

NO SLEEPLESS IN MAC LAND

I finally have a modern computer monitor that can directly connect to my not-so-modern, but not that old, Mac laptop.  Typically with laptops using external monitor, I prefer to keep the lid closed.  I have this fear that a laptop is very vulnerable when it's wide open.  A push of the screen in the wrong direction can snap something and it won't function the same way any more.  When not in use, I usually keep the lid either closed all the way or at least leaning toward the closed position.  Alas, the way Mac OS X works, as soon as you closed the lid, the computer goes to sleep.  There's no built-in function like Windows where you can tell the operating system to Do Nothing.  There are utilities to disable sleeping but they don't work with laptop lids closing.  What a bummer!  Ya know, back in the day, the Mac was a superior graphical interface but in some areas Windows now has overtaken it.  Like this Sleeping issue, for instance.  My so-called workaround is to keep the Mirroring function, so that the laptop screen and the external monitor show the same thing, then close the laptop lid but jam it with my Bluetooth keyboard.  The laptop lid is in a slanted position so I don't gain any additional real estate space on my physical desktop, but at least I can see the big screen with the laptop screen sorta out of the way.

WII FIT - BALANCE BUBBLE GAME

 Part of my daily exercise regiment includes, usually, 30 minutes with Wii Fit Plus.  For those who don't know, the Nintendo Wii game console interface is more physically-involved than other systems.  It's a decent way to get some exercise while playing games.  They even go as far as having exercise programs such as Wii Fit and its sequel, with which you do actual yoga and strength training exercises.  The interaction is achieved with the help of the Wii Board, which the player would stand on.  You can weighed everyday to track your pounds.  You can also find out how balanced you are, even though your left and right sides are not identical, you do want to try to have a sense of balance of the two sides.

Sometimes the yoga and exercises get too boring.  You can unwind a bit by playing Balance Games and such.  They are basically video games but you control by shifting your body to move around.  Just like video games, with some games you can only advance so far and it seems there's no way to complete the game.  With some computer video games,  there are cheat modes that you might find to finally complete the game.  Not a good idea to always cheat, but it's just a game and if you already tried hard enough you just want to get over it.

One game I finally complete is Balance Bubble, found in the original Balance Games of Wii Fit.  Like many things in life, the first few times I didn't get very far.  I kept trying and got better, eventually completed the Basic Level.  In Advanced Level, there are bumble bees buzzing around and would bust your fragile bubble that you ride in when you cross their path.  Again, for a while I couldn't get past these pesky insects.  Luckily, once you know that the bees fly in certain pattern and that you can go backward or stay in place, then it's not too bad.  Also, in places where the wave emanates from the shore, the current isn't that strong so you don't need to overreact and end up crashing into the shore.

I am now trying to complete Balance Bubble Plus.  The route is totally different, there are rotating arms, and there's a dark tunnel that you can only see so much ahead.  You just have to move slowly and carefully avoid bumping into the round objects floating about.  Once you are out of the tunnel, there are two rotating arms, with smaller radius so that you have less room to maneuver, one set of arms after another.  And they rotate in different directions, too!  The furthest I got was past the first set of arms.  Even if I somehow get past the second set, time may be running out, too, so I'll have to try to lose little time in the easier, beginning section.  These games are supposedly to be relaxing but they are getting my blood pressure up!

LET THE MUSIC PLAY... FOR THE DISHWASHER

 I don't cook so the deal at home is I do the dish-washing etc.  We don't have a dishwashing machine so it's a tedious task that I was happy to delegate to my son when he was home from college.  Now that he's back at the dorm, it's my responsibility again.  I try to make it more tolerable by having something to listen.  I am a big fan of podcasts so that was my first choice.  However, dishwashing can get noisy and as sharp as my hearing is the clanging sometimes muffle the sounds from the podcast off my iPhone.  I would miss the punch line of a joke on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me or Ask Me Another, so that's no fun.  Next I tried my music library, but after a while it gets boring, hearing the same old songs day in day out, even though I have a lot of songs randomly played.  So I tried apps like iHeartRadio.  Strange thing is the app would just stop at some point after playing for like ten minutes.  First-world problem!

Now I am happy with YouTube playlists.  Not just any list, but 70s and 80s rock music, maybe even 60s and I can even stretch to pop music.  Yes, there are advertisements and some even demand you interact with them before the next song plays, so it's not a perfect solution.  What I like is now I finally learn the names of some of the tunes I hear regularly.  Not that the makers of those playlist always list the song names, but some kind souls usually add the names, in proper order, as a comment.  Thank you!  Two songs I now know the names for are The Breakup Song by The Greg Kihn Band and Paint It Black by The Rolling Stone.

NOT THE BRIGHTEST BULB IN THE ROOM?

Continued to slog through study session for A+ certificate, so boring since I know most of the stuff, I just don't have the piece of paper to prove it. Let me try to make some puns so I can remember more useless facts and acronyms...

Why are laptops screens never brighter than desktop computers' screens? Because for their memory laptops use Small Outline Dual Inline Memory Modules whereas desktops' memory modules are just Dual Inline Memory Modules. SO DIMM vs. just DIMM!

I did learn something fun, not sure how useful it is though.  Supposedly while some designation for memory speed are usually rounded down for better appearance, such as 66

2/3 becoming just 66, exception was made DDR2-666, as it gets artificially inflated to 667 to avoid looking like the Devil's Number.  Talk about religion of the Western World influencing everyone else.  If the people who control technology believe in Buddhism or Islam then 666 doesn't mean anything.  On the other hand, if the Chinese control these designation, everything will end in 8, as the sound for the number 8 is the same for expansion, more, increase, which the Chinese automatically pair to wealth, health, the usual good stuff.

BACK TO SCHOOL, SORTA

No respect, I get no respect.  Yup, when it comes to some jobs, having no certificate whatsoever in the computer field gets me no respect.  Recruiters nowadays probably run resumes through some filter and if there's no A+ or MCSA, or whatever the job demand, then you get filtered out.

I finally took the plunge and registered for a paid A+ online course.  It's not the first time I try to go for a cert, but this time it's online so hopefully the progress-tracking provided, the example tests etc will help.  In the past, I spent x dollars on some set of books then lost interest shortly afterward.  Maybe because work required more time, family matters, whatever.  This time, with the exam voucher already paid for, that should be incentive enough to get the darn thing done.  Plus while unemployed I do have some time.

People ofter mention so-and-so school course is so useless, such as, "When was the last time I need to use trigonometry in real life?"  Trigonometry, I have to agree on that, at least for my line of work (computer support, mostly at financial institutions) but not algebra.  Still, likewise these cert courses are so boring, going into every little details and most likely won't be used ever in real life.  It's like reading a book on how to avoid being sued if you run a business.  It makes me chuckle to think back on all the risky behaviors ex-colleagues of mine did.  Like stacking boxes so high or haphazardly so that they eventually crashed down overnight.  Or management at older jobs where the floor had gaping holes because some tiles were partially removed.  I guess if those people have certs they wouldn't do that.  Or that they don't care about safety, just rushed around getting the job done with the minimal effort and move on to the next one.  Sigh.

At least now I am at some chapter in the online course where it's a little more exciting, different types of USB connections, hard drive connectors etc.  Maybe if I think of a pun to go with a topic occasionally it won't be so boring.  Like SATAday Night Fever or ATA boy!

Have you found something really useful from an A+ cert prep course in real life?

THE RETURN OF THE AMAZON REMOTES

 Like many people, I buy from Amazon, every now and then, not weekly like some addicts.  I try to support my local businesses but sometimes the local places just don't have what I want. The pandemic doesn't help either.  Getting the stuff delivered to me is convenient, especially since there's an Amazon Locker at my nearby 7 Eleven.  Porch pirates ruin the experience and I once lost a package so now even if I have to pay extra for the Locker I still go with it.

One thing I dread about though is returning stuff to Amazon.  I haven't had the need to do so, until this week.  In my mind, that involves finding some box that would fit the items, pack the items, contacting the seller for some authorization paperwork, print or write the return address, then finally take the package to the post office, which the past few times when I went there on the weekend the queue was long.  Not at all an attractive prospect.  Recently I bought some third-party remote controls for my Wii console and they wouldn't stay synced.  I had to sync them each time the Wii is powered on.  I was glad to find out that it was a rather smooth process to return them.

I had a month to use the product before it's ineligible for return.  I heard about Kohl's store being physical pickup points for Amazon but didn't know that they process returns there as well.  7 Eleven places also handle returns, except the available choices are few, nowhere near where I live.  Kohl's is not as close but I could use a nice walk, some excuse to get out of the house once in a while.  Although the return process for Kohl's clearly mentions no need to pack up the items, I thought since I had a printer and a padded envelope from a different, recent Amazon purchase I would pack the items up.  It turned out to be unnecessary, or probably detrimental to the process in use by the person doing the returns.  She asked me to cut open the packaging and then she did her usual things.  So much for trying to re-use stuff.  I guess Amazon has their fixed process, or the person doing the work just didn't know what to do when the items are already packed.  Whatever, a day or two later I got credited for the purchase on my credit card.

I did notice a small pile of used Amazon boxes by the entrance to Kohl's.  The boxes are probably from people who picked up their stuff and then didn't want to deal with proper disposal of them at home.  If you need a box, Kohl's by Caesar's Bay should be a place to check out.

ORIGAMI ORIGIN

I love origami and had a phase during which I was very much into modular origami.  There are so many types of modular origami, as I discovered in the books I borrowed from the public library or bought from elsewhere.  I tried maybe two or three types and found sonobe modular to be the easiest to do.  Sonobe, that's all I know by name.  It's important to know the lingo so we origamists can communicate.

One day at a friend's house, as we prepared to start dinner, my friend's mother started folding these little trays.  The trays were then used to hold bones and such, stuff discarded from the food dishes.  I love origami but so far the stuff I made were just decorative and serve no useful purpose.  I sometimes joke a sonobe ball can be kept in the car dashboard for throwing at bad drivers, but such action would probably escalate quickly.  Anyway, I asked the woman to show me how to make it and was able to master it quickly.  Later on, I showed my own mother and she's been making them regularly.  I just made the ones shown below, as offer to my local Buy Nothing group.

What are they called?  There must be a name for them.  Some Japanese words, I prefer.  I don't make them regularly and usually I would have to reverse-engineer one when I forget.  If I know the name, I can look it up in YouTube.  Better yet, I plan to use Jitsi Meet's record feature to make a YouTube video, just for my own feeble memory to rely on when needed.

 

COSTCO QUEUE OR NO QUEUE

 Sometimes Life is just not logical.  I need to make a grocery run to Costco in Sunset Park, plus a visit to Bed Bath and Beyond just a few blocks away.  I got to Costco around 4 P.M. and there was a queue going around the block.  I suppose it's some kind of social distancing measure.  Wife didn't want to be spend time on the queue so we went to BB and B.  I gave up on the idea of visiting Costco that evening, since most likely when we were done with BB and B, more people would get out of work and make a stop at Costco, further lengthening the queue.  Strangely, on the way back from BB and B, we drove by Costco and lo and behold there was no more queue.  I thought maybe because the store was going to close soon, but an employee said they were still open for another three hours or so.  What gives!?  So much for logical thinking.  Or maybe the queue wasn't for social distancing, or maybe the queue was too long and Costco was afraid of losing customers and just let everyone in.  Who knows.

Inside it was somewhat comforting to see that everyone wore masks.  The store was big but there were many people too.  There's no way you can avoid being close to people.  Hopefully the masks did their job.

MEET PHILO-REN, SUPPOSEDLY

 Back in 1989 when I first started working my first job out of college, a colleague just bought a house and there was this plant in a pot in her backyard.  I think it wasn't in great shape, I vaguely recall her telling me.  She noticed I was diligent in watering the various plants in the office and offered to give the plant from her backyard to me.  Probably more likely just a snip of it, I cannot imagine her carrying the plant with its pot on public transportation.  We were working at One Penn Plaza and I think she traveled via MetroNorth commuter rail, from Little Neck area.  Took care of the plant I did, I even took some cutting home and gave out to other people who were interested.  I took a piece with me as I changed jobs over the year and still have a few at home right now, some 30+ years later.  I never knew what type of plant it was so one day Google told me it's a philodendron.  Recently, my track club sprouted a plant propagation club and I wanted to find out what type of philodendron my plant is.  I already came up with the punny name Philo-Ren.  Alas, none of the places Bing took me to told me what type of philo the plant is.  Some site mentioned pothos and a club member did too.  So, after all this time, it's not a philo, but some type of pothos.

Can actual people of the Internet help?  I really want it to be a type of philo but the color and shape just don't match anything I read.  The leaves are elongated, not heart-shaped.  Color is solid green.  This particular plant (in the photo) grows in water and is near a window, so while it has some sun, no soil nutrient so the leaves are not that large.  I moved a cutting to a pot outside and the new leaves are significantly larger.  Please let it be a philo, else I need to come up with another name to be punny with reference to pothos.

TROUBLES IN WII PARADISE

In general, I am very happy with my Wii setup, in particular Wii Fit exercise program and Wii Board.  But as my son pointed out recently, it's over 10 years old, the world has moved on to bigger and better things.  Well, maybe not better, as the Wii physical input is probably still the best.  Yes, things are breaking down, perhaps aided by fumbling fingers.  Recall that when I recently re-discovered the Wii controllers and boards, the busted batteries appeared to do some damages to the battery compartment.  That wasn't the case.  But then the family started to use the setup regularly, everyday, sometimes by three different people.  Mistakes were made and new batteries got depleted.  One controller started acting weird, going off on its own or losing connection to the main system.  Luckily, there is a market for replacement controllers and I got a pair this week.  A visit to some setup screen and the new controllers detected the mothership, we already started using them yesterday.  (They actually arrived that day Tropic Storm Isaias cut off our power, didn't do us much good to have them.)

Something else that's different with the Wii setup is how the top ten list for Wii Fit Plus behaves.  While I am still glad that the ranking carried over from Wii Fit to Wii Fit Plus, I also noticed that some list got many entries cleared out.  Can it be because the main system is running out of storage space?  So that given the additional poses and exercises that came with Plus some older ranking must be removed?  I think as long as the top few positions are still intact, I am OK with it.  Yeah, first world problems.

I CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW

Yesterday, Tropic Storm Isaias hit New York and it sure was nothing to sneer at.  Not that much rain, at least for where I was, but really high wind.  The wind just blew right along the street outside my house, along with traffic too.  I am sure a block over it was going against traffic.  Electrical power went off many times, each time just a second long, but by 3:30 P.M. it finally did enough damage wherever power was flowing from and there was no power for a while.  The occasion finally made me install the iOS app from Con Edison to report the outage.  Supposedly power wouldn't return until 3 A.M. next day.  Luckily, power did come back around 10 P.M. same evening, a few hours ahead the scary estimate.

In recent months I started using these so-called cabinet LED light-sticks and love them during the blackout.  They are very bright, have a USB port for charging so you don't need to worry about regularly buying alkaline batteries (be it AA or D etc).  They are motion-sensitive so they are great for hallways and other places that don't need constant illumination.  The first one I got only had two mode - ON with timed shut-off and OFF.  The next three I got, from a different company just to see how different they are, also has a ON-until-manually-powered-off mode.  As if to further convince me to get away from D-battery lanterns, and their ilk, one of the old lanterns the batteries busted so badly that the spring parts that help keep the batteries in place corroded right off.  I am tempted to cannibalize another flashlight, or anything else that's broken but has a similar springy thingy, to repair this one, with some Crazy Glue, but I definitely will not buy any more of them old flashlights.  LED rules!

SAY NO TO MO'

And they lived happily ever after.  Or so they thought.  Some time ago I read somewhere that gift cards make great presents.  They give the recipient the choice to get what they want and the cards themselves have no expiration.  Then Toys R' Us went out of business and I joked about getting gift cards for my nephew who was going to become a father.

Not too long ago I won a raffle for a Modell's gift card.  Just before the pandemic hit NYC, Modell's went bankrupt.  I think I already used the gift card but wasn't that sure.  This week I noticed that on the back of the card it says the card expires five (5) years from the date of issue.  So much for that idea about gift card having no expiration date.  Or maybe it's just Mo'.  Not that Mo' will be around much longer, but for now I must Say No To Mo'.  One other thing:  when I visited my local Modell's this week, they have a sign that says they only accept gift cards up to July 26 or .  It was already early August so whether or not my card had any values on it, it was no good.  I did call 800-ASK-MODELLS and only to be directed to some mailbox that's already full.  No human to help me with my card.  When I insisted, the chap at the store in Caesar's Bay supposedly looked up for me to confirm that the card had zero dollar.  I hope he's right.  Or if he didn't really look things up and just wanted me to get out of his hair, oh well, easy comes easy goes, that's how raffle prizes are sometimes.

A WEIGHTY SOLUTION TO A FIRST-WORLD PROBLEM

I still use a regular, non-digital bathroom scale to keep track of my weight.  Yes, people elsewhere may have hunger problem but some of us worry about being too heavy.  I do need to lose many pounds and a combination of rope skipping, elliptical running, and Wii Fit exercises seem to help.  The Wii Board can sense my weight but from time to time I still use the bathroom scale.  Problem is my eye-sight ain't that great and I cannot see the dial that well standing atop the scale.  I can bend down but even though my whole body is still on the scale, the action seems to affect the weight reading.  Enters the omni-present smartphone!  I now use the zoom function of the camera to get closer to the scale's face to better see my weight.  Yes, the cell phone weighs something but it's a good trade-off.  I am fine with that.

iOS TEXT REPLACEMENT

I regularly offer to my Buy Nothing group free items or stuff to borrow. I would end the post with the phrase “Pickup near the 25th Avenue station of the D train.” By now, the iPhone is smart enough to start offering the word “near” as soon as I typed “Pickup” and so on. But I can take that further with the Text Replacement function. As illustrated below, through the Settings app, I define the “word” BNpu as “Pickup near the 25th Avenue station of the D train”.

As long as your brain can remember a few “words” that you define, there are great possibilities with Text Replacement in helping you save time and be more accurate with your typing.

I already created the shorthand BNpu so it appears in the list, you would touch the plus sign in the upper right of the screen to create a new shorthand.

Note that the shorthand is not case-sensitive, I had the n in lowercase but iOS still offers me the replacement text.

WE LOVE WII FIT PLUS

In these uncertain times of sheltering in place, it is important to stay active with indoor exercises.  Years ago when I got an elliptical machine, it was used mostly as a coat rack.  I was able to run outside at least every weekend and would occasionally used the "coat rack" during the week, but it was mostly not used.  Likewise, for a while my son was using the Wii program Wii Fit Plus, with the required Wii Board, to do yoga and strength exercises.  A few months ago when I pulled the Wii Board out of cobweb, the batteries already busted but luckily a little cleaning with rubbing alcohol and cotton swaps, plus fresh batteries, all was good again.  I've been using the elliptical and Wii Fit everyday.

As great as Wii Fit is, there are only so many yoga poses, strength exercises, and balance games to interact with.  A few weeks into the new routine, I started searching for a sequel of Wii Fit.  There is one and it's called Wii Fit Plus.  Not wanting to be a compulsive buyer, I promised myself not to buy it until I finished all the moves.  Or at least between my son and me.  It's necessary to add that additional clause because I am horrible at the balance games and only play a few of them, whereas my son aced all of them.

It's been a long time since Wii Fit etc came out so there are no "new" program to buy.  Amazon offers Renewed version at some discount with a guarantee so I went with that.  For some reason, among the various offerings on Amazon there was a PAL version.  From my days of dealing with software for the Amiga platform, which was popular in Europe, I learned about NTSC and PAL, the two primary video signals used in the U.S. and Europe, plus other places.  I don't know the nitty-gritty details of the difference, just that you cannot view a video made for PAL on a TV set in the U.S., which can only handle NTSC.  I made sure the Wii Fit Plus I bought does not say PAL or spells out NTSC.  I used the Amazon Locker at my local 7 Eleven, no package for you you porch pirates!

It's been a while since I last inserted a disc into the Wii, the first time I did so with the Wii Fit Plus disc I did it wrong and the disc couldn't be read.  Flipped it over and all was well again.  I plan to go through every yoga pose, every strength exercise, with different levels of time duration, every balance games, just to make sure the disc has no bad sector or scratch.  So far the three new yoga poses and the new strength exercises work so I don't expect to return the disc.  My son is still going through the many balance games, hopefully nothing wrong there.

I suspected that the Wii has some internal memory that remembers all the players and their stats.  I am glad that that is the case.  It makes sense, but sometimes things don't necessarily make sense in real life.

WENT TO B.A.T. FOR COVID-19 TESTING

As part of return-to-campus, my son's school requires him to test for COVID-19.  I recalled seeing video footage of testing places having long queue of cars and thought that would be a safe way to get it done.  Everyone in their own cars, whoever getting tested just need to stick their head out the window to get the brush stuck up their nostril.  I also recalled seeing someone Facebook friends' post that the testing site at the Brooklyn Army Terminal (B.A.T. or just BAT) had no queue at all, you get in and out very quickly.  It's a huge place that I drive by whenever the BQE South has too much traffic and I take Second Avenue to the Belt Parkway.  Surely there's enough room for a long queue of cars.

I drove my son to BAT around 12 noon.  It was not an ideal time to be in the area.  Years ago there may be plenty of room for a long queue of cars but much has changed in the area.  There's a relatively new building erected to house a Ford service center, taking a chunk out of the parking lot.  Then there was some road construction along Second Avenue, running from 58th Street toward the entrance to the Belt Parkway, two-way traffic was controlled by a few road workers with STOP and SLOW signs.  The nearby hospital, now under NYU Langone, expanded and took a few new buildings, resulting in more traffic in the area.  The COVID-19 test site is a walk-in.  What's worst was that just north of Third Avenue it was alternate-side street cleaning between 11:30 A.M. and 1 P.M. that day. I could have just dropped off my son, he's old enough to do the test himself, but I was already in the area, I wanted to accompany him in.  Alas, with the construction and alternate-side sweeping, there was just no place to park, not even the parking meters were available.  We went to have lunch elsewhere and came back to squat in a place and waited in the car for 1 P.M. to arrive.  Supposedly, they cannot ticket a car that has a driver sitting in it, but I have no faith in the ticket agents, but I also have no choice.

At 1 P.M. or so we walked the few blocks to the test site.  There was no queue at all.  Literally in and out less than 15 minutes.  Fill out some quick form, verbally, sign some electronic pad, look up to the sky and let the lab technician stick the brush up your nostril, all done at walk-by windows.  There was even a mobile restroom that we used before heading back to the car.  Restrooms in NYC are even more difficult to come by these days.

The B.A.T. COVID-19 test site was really quick.  There were many booths to take care of clients if the queue was long.  Some bus stops right by the entrance so it's not totally unreachable by public transportation.  Depends on where you live, you may need to spend time with subway-to-bus transfer etc.  If you drive, find out the street-sweeping regulation, which days of the week, between what hours of the day, and time your arrival so you can easily get a spot.  There's no drive-in testing so be prepared to park or just to drop out your "patient".

RECURRING SLEEP-VISIONS

I heard that the German language has a word for every situation.  Supposedly, the Japanese language does too, although I heard about German more regularly.  There are some words, English or otherwise, I wish I know that would better define the following two scenarios:

DREAM.  As simple as it sounds, DREAM is a misleading word.  It may have started out as just something you "see" while sleeping, but then it became something that you wish to come true, as in Martin Luther King's I have a dream.  When I want to discuss something that I just saw while sleeping, it may be just something interesting to me, nothing dramatic that I would wish to be true.  It may not be so bad as to be labeled a nightmare.  For now, I use SLEEP-VISION, I love coining words, assuming that SLEEP-VISION is not already a word.  I think hyphens are underused also so I try to throw them out there whenever I have the chance.  Onto a SLEEP-VISION I had recently.

I was supposed to setup a bunch of computers for a training session.  Nothing unusual, just the CPUs connected to monitor, mouse, and keyboard.  Oh year, Ethernet network connection, too.  Funny thing is I had that vision before, that someone told me about the training schedule so that I would be there x days before the event to set things up.  I think I arrived late.  Maybe a few hours before the training event, or maybe a few hours late on my scheduled time.  If anything, it just means I sometimes think about work.

So what's the German word that aptly describes the situation?  Something that was seen while sleeping, that seems to continue after a period of time.  Inquiring minds want to know.

POSTERINO 3 - EASILY FORGOTTEN IMPORT FOLDER

I run an active alumni group for my high school.  Every now and then I would make a photo-grid of one particular teacher.  The grid shows photos of the teacher, in chronological order.  It's nice to see someone changed over the years but certain features would stay the same.  I use Posterino 3 on the Mac to make the grid.  The software is great for that kind of thing.  Ideally, this is how it works:

1. Set up a grid.  In the example below, it's a 4x4 grid.
2. Select the folder to import images from.
3. The photos from that folder show in the little gallery to the left of the grid.
4. Either drag individual photos into the grid, or fill the grid up alphabetically, or even randomly.

I love the idea of a template and Posterino has the feature, but documents created from my custom template wouldn't show the images available.  The only way to get the images to show, at least to me, is to carry out these steps:

1. Create new document based on the template.  The grid is there, with the editable years that need to be adjusted depending on what years' photos I have for the teacher.  The years also depend on how long the teacher stayed at my school.  Unfortunately, there are no photos to the left of the grid.  The screenshot shows some images I placed in the source folder.  They should be part of the template file, at least I think they should be, but they are not.
2. Select the source folder by selecting File/Import Images as in the picture.  I would love to avoid this step but it's the crux of the problem.  Even after I selected the source folder, nothing would show up.  Very weird, but that's why we are having this conversation.
3. Create a new document, again!  Use any existing template.  I stick to the standard ones instead of the custom one I made, just to be clear which one is which.
4. Immediately close the new, second document, without saving.
5. Boom!  Somehow the action of creating a new document forced Posterino to load the images in the source folder.  Maybe it's because I'm still using an old Mac, maybe it's a bug that is to be resolved later on.  I am fine with my workaround for now.

Before I came up with this "solution", I worked off folders named for the teacher.  Now, everything has to be in a folder called photo-grid.  As I am done with the project I would copy the folder's content to another folder named for the teacher.  It may work if I change the source folder every time but I think it's easier to see where things are with the five steps above.

DON'T STOP, SKIPPING, HOLD ONTO THE FEELING...

In this day and age, you would think the Internet has all the answers.  Or at least it should.  I had a question last night and Google didn't quite give me a straight answer.

My exercise regiment, while I am unemployed and sheltering in place (at home) includes rope-skipping, elliptical, and Wii Fit.  I never skipped when I was a kid.  It's not something boys would do, at least in Viet Nam.  But I keep seeing it used as part of a training program, especially in the Rocky movies.  I happen to have a skipping rope in the house, it takes very little space to skip, and you can do it almost anywhere.  Some time ago, I started skipping in the alley at my house, my son and I took turn using the one rope we had.  Those early days, I could barely do five or six consecutively.  I jumped too high and wore myself out quickly.  Or I would get entangled with the rope because my timing was just off.

With this current pandemic, I renewed my interest with skipping and made much improvement.  I now can do forty reps of the rope moving overhead to in front of me then gliding below me.  I think that's the standard.  I can even do backward, where the rope goes overhead behind me then comes back to the front from underneath.  At much slower speed, but still in reps of ten or so.  My current routine is 3 sets of 40 reps each, forward, then 3 more set of backward skipping, whatever rep I can manage.  I may have read a little bit about rope-skipping, but maybe only about variations, to make it less boring.  Last night, I decided to research some more, especially with regards to losing weight.  Articles after articles would discuss the work involved in terms of time duration, not reps or sets as I've been doing.  That led me to dig some more around the question of "What time duration should I do with my daily rope-skipping exercise?"  And wow it sure took a lot of digging.  At first, it seems 30 minutes is the answer, but then the instructor mentioned that in that 30 minutes one would also do push-ups and other exercises, so that's not it.  In the end, I found from some blog that for a beginner a series of 10-minute sets will do.  With short breaks, like one or two minutes.

That's what she said, supposedly.  Today, I put myself to the test.  I thought I am pretty good at it now, that I should be considered intermediate.  Was I wrong!  While I was able to do 80 reps in one minute, I was flat out tired afterward.  I tried to have one-minute break, as opposed to the usual breaks that I had before, which involved doing other things around the yard, or checking for updates on social media.  The verdict is that I can do 5 sets of 80 reps in about 10 minutes, rest included.  I sure was all sweaty and panting.  The last set I think I only got to 70 something because I was out of gas and couldn't jump high enough so the rope got me.

The moral of the story: sometimes there's no one size to fit all.  Research and get an idea what should be done, but then try it out yourself.

FIRST-TIME ACTIONS DURING THE PANDEMIC

There's a first time for everything, they say, and I certainly did a few of those first-time things during the pandemic.

• I need to have an eye test to renew my driver license.  Silly me, I looked up the local DMV (Department of Motor Vehicle) address on Google Map and just drove there.  The DMV office is on the same street block with a police precinct.  The entrance to the block had a police sawhorse with a policeman stationed.  I thought maybe it was to keep protesters away from the precinct.  Maybe it was, but the policeman told me DMV wasn't opened yet.  The next Phase, whenever that is.  Doh, I should have called first.  I ended up having my eye test done at a local pharmacy.  Quick and painless, I was asked to put on my near-sighted glasses then read one line off the chart.  That's it, $20 please.  Not free like the DMV, but I sure saved a ton of time.  If I have my choice, I would rather save the money.
• Drive-thru anything is such a necessary evil.  When I was working as a field technician, there were days when I had to rush from one visit to another.  Only in those circumstances would I consider a fast-food drive-thru.  Such a waste of gasoline, burning away and polluting the environment while the vehicles wait for their turn at the order microphone then again at the pickup/pay-up window.  Sadly, we are living in a certainly interesting time and I found myself a few times recently using the drive-thru of some Chick-fil-A's.  The entire service area was closed, no restroom, no Starbuck's, just the Chick.  Not too long ago I even used a bank drive-thru, to deposit a check.  I did use the bank's app once or twice, but in this particular case I wanted to make sure the check got deposited without any issues.
• I have my share of buying stuff online but it's almost always because the item in question isn't available in the physical store.  Or the store has so few options.  My work shoes are a few years old so I need to replace them.  Ah, but the shoe-stores are not considered Essential so they were not open the last time I tried to visit one.  They would open the following week, I believe, at which time I was no longer working.  I try not to go outside unless it's for grocery or for work.  So mail-order it was.  Luckily, I know my shoe size and there was one retail store I recall joining their mailing list to receive whatever discount I got at the time.  Free shipping for members, too.  The only thing that wasn't good is that I forgot to use the $10 discount code.  Argh, I know someone who would return some item that cost just 25 cents to buy it again at half that price, but I won't be that person.  Maybe I'll buy another pair and remember to use the code this time.

THE INTER-CONNECTED LIFE

It is a good thing I don't have any abnormal fear of COVID-19.  I am lucky so far, only lost my job and nothing else.  The week before the public library shut down until further notice, I borrowed an audiobook by the name of Lone Wolf, by Jodi Picoult.  Audibooks are normally loaned out for 21 days but because of the pandemic the library gave long extension.  For some reason, I never got around to listening to the 11-disc "book".  Probably partly because computers nowadays don't come with optical drive.  I do have a USB DVD drive but the extra step of connecting it to my laptop somehow discouraged me from start listening to the book.

With the public libraries scheduled, perhaps already, to open this week, I finally decided to start listening to it.  I thought maybe I only have another week or more of the extension.  The audiobook has at least two narrators, a male and a female.  From Disc 1, I learned that the male narrator is someone named Nick Cordero.  Or maybe I should use the word "was", because in the news recently there was a Broadway actor, young person too, just 41 years old, who just died because of complications from COVID-19.  A few searches in Google and Bing do not confirm my suspicion that it's the same person, but I do know actors, singers etc sometimes narrate audiobooks.  Maybe if I stumble upon some Nick Cordero Fan Club, if those things still exist, I can confirm it's the same person.

A major part of Lone Wolf involves a person who suffered severe injuries to the brain and had to be kept alive with breathing apparatus.  Yup, a VENTILATOR.  Years ago, I may not pay much attention when the word VENTILATOR is used, but nowadays it makes me shudder, based on what I read it's a painful process to be put on a ventilator.

Sometimes you just cannot avoid the news.  I don't try that hard to avoid it, so while I find it interesting that COVID-19 still makes its way into my life, just as I try to forget it via an audiobook, it's no big deal.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KAREN!

Poor Karen, she has no love on social media these days.  I think I'll give her a boost by using her name as the first in, hopefully, a series of video clips, that show nothing but the phrase Happy Birthday followed by a name.  People are born every hour everyday anyway, right?  Maybe even more frequent than that.  Surely someone somewhere is celebrating birthday and in need of a video.

I made the video from a GIF, or actually, from a few GIF because I did the work in PersonalPaint on an Amiga computer emulated on my MacBook Pro.  The phrase Happy Birthday, Karen! is too wide for the screen and had to be created as three separate GIF files.  Thank goodness for EZgif.com, which let me combine multiple files to create GIF.  I discovered that the trick is to name the file sequentially and the new GIF will created in that order.  In my case, the files were called 1-Happy.gif, 2-Birthday.gif, and 3-Karen.gif.  I also typed up the final frame and held it for a minute or two.

Maybe because it's the first such video, it's quite a process.  Hopefully if I do it more regularly I can get better.  I used the Bullion animated font and there are a few more to work with.  I suppose the next video will still use Karen's name, but with all the available animated fonts.  After that, what name should I use?  Maybe I'll consult the list of most popular baby names of 2019...

Check out the video at:

https://youtu.be/YnkIB7csPys

FACEBOOK ROOMS (VIDEOCONFERENCE SERVICE)

I recall not too long ago videoconferencing was still a novelty.  The technology just wasn't there.  You can do text chat fine but as soon as you turn on the video option, you can see the jerky motion, maybe eventually the chat software would crash too.  Nowadays, I regularly FaceTime with colleagues or headhunter.  Talk about a computer in your pocket.

Of course Zoom is all the rage these days, warts and all.  Being a frugal guy, I also made the jump to Jitsi Meet to see how useful it is.  Free is good, right?  No time limit, no registration whatsoever.  I even found out recently someone made a tele-health package based on Jitsi.  The sky is the limit!

Today I checked out Facebook Rooms, Facebook's answer to all this video-conferencing craze.  It's built into Facebook and Facebook is the king of social media, you cannot go wrong!  Well, in my particular case, I could use some more participation, but that's another story.  There is a limit of 8 people max per room and it wasn't an issue for me.  I had only one other participant and his window took up the center of the screen while mine sits in the lower right.  Very simple interface - the row of buttons in the screenshot is all you get.  Share Screen, See Participants, Mute Video, Mute Audio, and Hang Up.  I sure miss having a text chat window, but maybe Facebook figured many people cannot type or spell anyway, there's no need for a texting feature.  No background picture or video, either.  No background blurring as well.  Note the Gear icon in the upper right?  That's just Settings, and a bunch of keyboard commands.

I find Facebook Rooms feature-lacking.  Too simple.  What's with the eight-people limit?  I cannot see myself using it again in the future.

A WII BIT BETTER EXPERIENCE

One day a few months ago, during the height of the pandemic perhaps, I decided to better explore the Wii program Wii Fit and its companion Wii Board.  The product was bought years ago to help my young son lose weight.  The Nintendo Wii is great in that it requires physical interaction with its programs, but the Wii Fit program takes it a step further.  Instead of games disguised as exercise, Wii Fit offers training sessions in yoga, strength training, aerobic exercises, and yes, plain simple games that also requires some simple forms of physical movement.  You start out interacting via the standard Wii Remote, but then you would need to power on the Wii Board and get your weight measured, your center of balance, etc.  Excellent tool to have during a pandemic lockdown!

PSA!  If you are still sheltering in place and have a lot of free time, then search for electronic devices that use AA, AAA batteries etc.  Open up the battery compartment and see what state of decomposition the batteries are.  In my case, the Wii Board and both Wii Remotes had busted batteries.  I had to clean the contacts with rubbing alcohol, via a cotton swab, and all is well now.  I even re-visited an Apple Bluetooth keyboard (model A1314) and managed to remove a busted battery to regain use of the device.  The only battery-operated item that I couldn't save was a freebie flashlight.  No need to waste energy trying to save that.

I never like the point and click interface of the Wii.  It takes a little getting used and I guess old me never got around it.  Luckily, for Wii Fit, I discovered that after the first few initial screens, once the yoga lessons get rolling, I can do most of the interactions via the directional buttons and the A button.  Just move up, down, left, or right as needed, note which item gets highlighted, then press A.  To go from Yoga to Strength Training, use the minus or plus ( - or + ) button. The B button on the underside of the Wii Remote is for going back to the previous layer.  See what I mean, with the knowledge which button does what you shouldn't need to point at the Wii Receiver any more to interact with Wii Fit.

I NEED SPACE

Until recently, I was having problem with storage space on my MacBook Pro.  It's my newest Mac but it's many years old and the hard drive seemed not to be big enough.  I would delete photos, music files, etc to reclaim a few measly gigabyte then all of a sudden, right in front of my eyes, I would see in a Finder window that available space dropped steadily until there's nothing available.  Sure, those podcasts took up some space and I deleted them, stopped the subscription.  I also moved scanned photos to a 256-GB flash drive.  Yeah, I also deleted cached data in the Safari and Chrome browsers, that sure helped a lot.  I read somewhere that having a few gigabytes available is a dangerous thing to do.  Supposedly, just the sleep file, which is some file that holds all the info for the Mac to seemingly instantly wakes up from sleep mode, is a few gigabytes.  There was so much I can do with my own account's data.  Luckily, I decided to look at the other accounts on the same computer.  Motherlode!  I discovered that in the Downloads folder of the guest account there are some 10-gb files.  Some ISO file and some update to Xcode, the code-writing environment for Mac.  Moved those files to an external hard drive, wham, 20 GB reclaimed!  I also read up on Xcode and as nice as it is, I have no plan to become a Mac programmer, or any kind of programmer.  Yes, I'll whip up some PowerShell script to make my job easier, but nothing that would need Xcode or any integrated development environment.  The app takes up 10 GB of my little laptop, so off it went!  Now my Mac has a whopping, no sarcasm there, 30 GB of free space!  It's just an app, it's perfectly safe to delete.  I did gingerly test all my apps the days after I deleted Xcode.  From what I read, the only time you would need Xcode, outside of being a programmer, is when you download some uncompiled, i.e. not readily usable, open-source piece of software.  To run said software, there may be some script you would need to launch, whereby the script would use Xcode to make the final compiling.  Or something like that.  If you only use commercial software, or ready-to-run open-source software, there's nothing to worry about when you delete Xcode from the Applications folder. 

Not that it's insignificant, but earlier I also found 1 GB of some movie extras.  I rented the movie off iTunes and only saw the movie so that went away but the extras stayed.  I usually don't care about extras materials, especially from a movie I saw so long ago.

In order to see content of other users on the same computer, you would need to give yourself access.  It helps to be an administrator of your own computer.  And know how to grab power!

PHOTO SPLICING WITH GIMP

I have a decent collection of yearbooks for my high school.  I have two flatbed scanners, a Brother multi-function device (MFC-490CW), better in quality and a Umax Astra 1220U, which has a larger scan area but only works with an older Mac laptop and can only do 150 dots-per-inch.  The older Mac laptop is a pain to use, very slow to boot up and to use, so I mostly use the Brother device whenever someone from my alumni group would like to see a page from my yearbook collection.  For most of the books, the pages fit perfectly into the scan area.  Even if the pages don't fit, I would lose only blank space on the page, or at most the page numbers, which can be at the extreme left or extreme right of the page.  For some of the older years, however, the photos would go edge to edge and my little Brother wouldn't be able to cover everything.  The situation is especially true with the faculty section.  With just one scan, some teacher would lose half of her face or a teacher on the other edge of the age would lose a third of his face.  Time to launch GIMP, the open-source photo-editing software!

Instead of just scanning the page once, I would scan it twice, or more as needed.  The first time I would focus on, say, the left edge of the page.  In the next scan, I would make sure to include the right edge of the page.  Some of the pages not only wouldn't fit horizontally they would not fit vertically either.  It is possible that I would need to scan four times of the same page.  One good thing is the Brother scanning software automatically add a number to the file name as the scans are created, e.g. 1968 p009, 1968 p009 1, 1968 p009 2, and 1968 p009 3

To get a perfect page, I would scan the same page four times, each time making sure one corner is perfect.

At last it's time for GIMP to do its work.  Mind you, GIMP does many things, but for my need, I just need to combine slices of one picture into another.  I would open all the scans of the one page in GIMP.  Let's say I will use the picture that has the right-most side intact.  It lacks a left side, some teacher's face is incomplete there.  I need to make the picture bigger so I have somewhere to paste the missing faces.  To achieve that, I would increase the Canvas Size (Image/Canvas Size...).  I always increase based on percentage and 10 more does the job.  The default is to expand on the right side and/or the bottom side.  In this case, I want to expand the left side and the bottom side, so I moved the preview picture around.  Should I want to increase the size uniformly on all sides, I would click the Center button.

Move the preview picture around to decide the new expand area.

When I scanned the yearbook page, it created a PNG file, a standard picture format.  Once I start to edit the file in GIMP, it takes on the XCF format that is used by GIMP.  One big difference between XCF and PNG is the use of Layers.  PNG has limited support for Layers, when you copy and paste, the pasted material is temporarily on its own Layer and can be moved around.  Once you close the file, the Layer is no longer there, whatever it had is now part of the file and cannot be moved easily like before.  Our picture with the expanded canvas size is ready to take on a paste and give it its own layer.  However, the expanded area is transparent and may not properly show the pasted material.  I find it best to instantly flatten the document (Image/Flatten Image) so that the expanded area takes on the property of the document.

After the Resize button was clicked, the picture is bigger, but the new area may not show pasted content.

Flattened, the expand area is now ready to receive paste content from the other three pictures.

I learned Photoshop before I used GIMP.  While GIMP probably does most things Photoshop does, the way GIMP works is a tad different.  So I went to the picture that has my missing right side.  I would copy the entire faces of the right edge, usually a whole strip from the top of the page down to the bottom.  With Photoshop, when I paste it into the first picture, I would be able to move the pasted item right away.  With GIMP, I would have to first select xyz, then I can move it around.  Before I discovered this difference, it was such a pain to move anything around after pasting.  I don't know how I did it, I just know it was painful.  I find it somewhat helpful if I zoom in, so I can better align the pieces.

With the piece from another picture copied and pasted, I have to make sure to choose the lower button, Move the Active Layer, before I try to move the piece into place.

That's all there is to it.  Scan multiple times of the same page, each scan covering each edge.  Expand the canvas size of one document, flatten the file to fill in the new, expanded area.  Copy and paste as needed, but make sure to select what to move.  Now you just have to carefully move the segments into position so all the faces are complete.  I have yet to find a way to move a floating selection by keyboard combos so it's such a pain to move with the trackpad on my Mac laptop, but that I can live with.  I usually save in the XCF format the file that has all the pasted items.  Then I export that file to PNG and delete the other files to save space.

The final product.  Not perfect, as you can see a little gap in the upper left corner, but all teachers have their faces fully displayed.