I am a techno-person. I love computers. I code as a hobby. I’m a far cry from being a Luddite. But there are many ways that digital technology is making us less than we used to be. Many have been widely discussed. But not this one. Search is making us narrower, less well-rounded, and less wise. “Search” encompasses lots of things, and some aspects of it are unobjectionable. The ability […]
I’ve come up on the year anniversary of having the photovoltaic system installed, so I downloaded my PG&E usage information (which is available on an hourly time-step) for the last year, and did some quick Python/Pandas analysis. Here’s a chart showing our average hourly use over that time period. It shows both the effect of the solar panels (the negative numbers during the middle of the day, when the PV […]
A rhetorical question but, as you’ll see after a short techno-rant, one that opens a door into a basic truth about the world. For an older guy, I’m pretty tech savvy — early internet adopter (Usenet, anyone?), longtime Linux user (and reformed distro jumper), Python/machine learning dabbler. So the fact that the Windows operating system is still, after how many years now (well Windows 95 was a big thing, remember, […]
We bought Suzie a new computer last weekend, which meant that the one she was using (which was running painfully slowly under Windows XP, for reasons I could never figure out, notwithstanding a lot of effort and, in the end, a complete new install) was now available to me to more or less do with as I wished. What I wished was to see if it would run any better […]
My laptop died during my trip to the ACWA conference in San Diego in early December. It wouldn’t boot up, and the hard drive icon didn’t light up, suggesting that the hard drive was dead. So the day before yesterday, while I was in Best Buy to get my son a graphics card for our main computer (which didn’t end up working), I bought an inexpensive replacement hard drive in […]