Scott Gruby's Blog

The Great Pumpkin Pie Delivery

2025-12-01T02:35:20Z

This year for Thanksgiving, we decided to spend it with my wife's family in Santa Cruz. Our son would take the train from Davis to Santa Clara and we'd pick him up at the train station. Since we were going to be seeing him, he had a list of things for us to bring him such as his camping gear, laundry soap, a suitcase so he could use it to come home on winter break and plastic containers to store leftover food. One thing he also put on the list was Costco pumpkin pie. He doesn't have a car nor a Costco membership, so he wouldn't be able to get one himself. I suspect pies will be back (or still here) when he comes back for winter break, but he wanted pumpkin pie to bring back to school.

I spent a few days collecting things from his list and trying to figure out how we were going to get him a pie to take back to school. We drove up (I need to remind myself not to do that again even if traveling by plane on the busiest week of the year could be a nightmare, it can't be as bad as driving), I did some research and because the pie contains eggs and milk, it needs to be refrigerated. I mentioned this to my wife and she wasn't as convinced as me that it needed to be cold as lots of baked goods can be kept out and has dairy and egg.

I had considered picking up the pie at home and taking it up there, but I was leary about keeping it cold. So how was I going to get my son the pumpkin pie?

The day before Thanksgiving, my wife and I went to Costco in Santa Cruz (it was less crowded than our local Costco on a normal day which amazed me) to pick up the pie. The pies were in the refrigerated produce area, so my wife agreed that it needed to be kept cold for the whole journey and sent our son a message saying that we weren't going to get him a pie because we couldn't keep it cold and safe back to school. He sent her back a sad emoji and pleaded with her to get the pie.

We picked up one pie to take to Thanksgiving and our son was going to have to make due. When my wife put the pie in the cart, I saw that it was only $5.99, so I said to get another one and we'd figure out how to get as much of the pie back to school for him.

Our hotel room had a small refrigerator that wouldn't possibly hold an entire pie right from Costo, so we took the pies to my brother-in-law's house as we were having Thanksgiving dinner there. After Thanksgiving, we weren't going back to my brother-in-law's house, so I sent a full pie with my in-laws as we'd be seeing them the next day; we took the remainder of the pie back to our hotel and I stuffed it in the refrigerator (I took it out of the plastic and folded the tin over as there was about half left). So now the pie was at my in-laws' and still a long way from getting back to school with our son.

The day after Thanksgiving, I picked the two largest plastic storage containers we brought up and checked to see if they would fit in the hotel refrigerator; they did which was great! When we got to my in-laws', I took the full pie out of the refrigerator and sliced it up stuffing it in the two containers. With the exception of 2 pieces that my son and wife ate, I was able to fit the pie in the plastic containers! Things were looking good, but not out of the woods, yet.

On the final day of the trip when we had to get our son to the train station, my wife took a bunch of the other plastic containers and filled them with ice. We them put the containers in plastic bags and put them in the suitcase along with the pie. I'm not sure what shape the pie would end up in when the suitcase was turned sideways and then upright, but that wasn't a problem I was going to solve.

We got our son to the train station and he took the 2.5 hour trip back to Davis. When he got there, he let us know that the pie was still cold when he put it in his refrigerator a school. Mission successful!

What I've learned from Operation Pumpkin Pie:

Pumpkin pie must be kept cold (I have no idea why other pies don't).
An entire Costco sized pumpkin pie can fit in 2 large plastic containers.
We can keep a pie cold for several hours in a suitcase surrounded by ice.

Stress and Ulcerative Colitis

2025-11-06T21:16:27Z

About 24 years ago, I started having symptoms of ulcerative colitis and then was diagnosed right after I got married. I won't draw any conclusions about what caused me to develop the condition at that time. I've been keeping it under control, for the most part, primarily through medication. When I was diagnosed, there weren't that many choices; now there seem to be a bunch.

Every few years since then, I've had a colonoscopy, and my gastroenterologist has said there has been some inflammation and sent me home with cool pictures he took (maybe cool isn't the right word).

I've tried to have a pretty balanced diet, exercise regularly, and have made attempts to keep stress under control through daily meditation over the last 7 years. For the most part, I haven't had flare-ups and have been living with the disease.

Last year, after I had a regular colonoscopy, my gastroenterologist said that I was in clinical remission with no signs of active colitis. This was absolutely awesome news, and everything I have been doing must be working to keep it in check.

When I went to my primary care doctor for a checkup, he commented on the results and asked if anything had changed in my life. I thought about it and realized the biggest change in my life has been around stress. At the time of that colonoscopy, I had a job (and still have it) that is as stable as one can get in a job (more stable than the government), my wife and I have managed to raise our son that was about to graduate high school and soon finish his associate's degree, I was volunteering a lot, which filled me with joy, and financially, I had nothing to worry about. All of these things basically reduced my stress level to a very manageable level. While I have tried to manage stress throughout my life, it wasn't until last year that all the pieces finally fell into place.

It is amazing that stress can manifest itself in physical ways. I just hope that I can keep everything in check with my stress so that my colitis remains in remission.

Burning down the house (almost)

2025-07-08T12:45:43Z

The other day, my son came to me and said his monitor wouldn't turn on when plugged into the surge protector and that the "building wiring fault" light was lit. I told him to try the surge protector in another outlet and circuit and he said that it was still lit on the same circuit, but not on other circuits.

As I was working, I told him to wait until my father came over later and that they could troubleshoot it then. When my father came over, they started looking at the problem and I jumped in to help check the outlets. I opened the first outlet (with the power off, of course) and tightened the wires and re-wired the quick connects so that the wires had a better connection with the screws (I dislike the quick connect because there is a piece of metal in them under pressure that if the metal loosens, we'll end up with a problem). Unfortunately the problem persisted. I repeated this on another outlet to no avail. On the next outlet, we determined that it was the home run connecting to the panel.

We disconnected the legs going out from the outlet and had the same result. This narrowed down the problem to being between the breaker and the outlet. My dad suggested we swap the breaker with one that didn't have the problem; no luck either.

As we were looking at the panel, I happened to notice that 2 of the neutrals screwed into the bus bar were burned! The wires hadn't been properly secured (we had the house remodeled 12 years ago) which caused resistance and could have lead to a fire. I snipped off the charred bits and properly wired the neutrals.

Luckily we caught this problem as who knows how bad this could have been. Fhew.

The wrong way to do home automation

2025-05-04T19:30:18Z

A few weeks ago I read an article about how celebrities and famous people were ripping out home automation systems because they were hard to use and unreliable. I kind of laughed at the article because the systems that were likely created by "professionals" missed one of my main points about home automation and that is the system must augment, but not replace manual operations.

If someone walks into a fully automated house, they may have no idea how to turn on a light, a fan, the heat, air conditioning, etc. When I designed our home automation system, I put physical switches in the walls to control lights. Granted the early switches I bought were toggle switches that confused a babysitter once, but lights can be controlled by physically pressing the buttons. I do have a few switches in slightly inconvenient places that automation helps fix the mistakes, but worst case the buttons can still be pressed.

I would never imagine designing a system without manual control as who knows when a software update could take out the automation or there could be wireless interference taking out devices. For the most part, my system has local control (some monitoring is cloud based because I don't have a choice at the moment), but even local control doesn't always guarantee that it works. If a system relies on the cloud, there is even more reason for concern as their could be connection problems or cloud control could be down.

If and when I have to setup a new home automation system, I'll take the same approach of putting in physical buttons and use the automation to make it easier and convenient to do some things. However, one area that is more difficult to have manual control is audio since we don't own a physical tuner and have music distributed throughout the house. Luckily, this is not vital to being able to live in our house; nice to have, sure, necessary, no.

Overreliance on GPS and Mapping Software

2025-03-31T01:48:19Z

When I first learned to drive, I always relied on checking a map prior to leaving so that I knew where to go and kept a map or map book (Thomas Guide) in my car in case I got lost. When MapQuest (remember that?) came to be, I replaced checking the map with printing out the directions to my desintation. For longer trips, I went to AAA and got a TripTik travel planner which was really neat at the time.

With the discontinution of selective availablity, commercial and consumer GPS started to become useful. Prior to this time, the innaccuracies of GPS made it more of a toy for consumers. I played with a number of units prior to this change and ran some mapping software (StreetPilot) on a laptop that was a novelty that it showed my general location, but wasn't useful enough for turn by turn navigation.

When Garmin released the iQue 3600, the company I was working for at the time, purchased one for me so that we could get it working with our software. This was my first dipping my toe in the water of turn by turn navigation. Looking online, this appears to have been in the latter part of 2003. I was so impressed with the setup that I purchased one for myself and used it all the time. The only downside (and downside of PalmOS devices at that time) was that it didn't have primary flash storage (the maps did reside on a flash card) so that when the battery died, the device had to be re-synced.

I'm not sure at what point I stopped printing out MapQuest directions and looking at a map before trips, but I was thinking about this last weekend. Last weekend I was at a Scout event at a local Scout camp and before I left the camp, someone picking up their Scout said that the highway was blocked both ways on the path home. I said no problem, I'll just navigate using my phone like I always do (I do like being able to download offline maps just in case I don't have cell overage).

The path home was one that I had never taken before in the 7 years that I'd been going to this camp. However, I didn't think twice about taking the route and just followed along. I had never been in most of the areas it took me, but I never stopped to look at a map (I don't carry physical maps in my car). I made it home safely and in the amount of time it had estimated for the journey.

Should I check maps before I leave for a trip? Should I carry physical maps in my car? Am I asking for trouble relying on mapping software? These are all good questions and I guess I've resigned myself to taking precautions such as downloading offline maps, having a power source to power my phone, and having a general idea of where I go before I leave.

I'm going to have to say that mapping software and GPS have, in general, made my life easier as they generally provide good estimates for arriving (leaving me with less down time as I like arriving early and before mapping software, I would arrive way early), reduce stress of having to look at a map while driving or remembering the turns, and if I make a wrong turn, the software re-routes me without having to take my eyes off the road or stop.

Measuring Productivity

2025-03-09T00:58:55Z

I was chatting with a co-worker the other day and we were talking about working in an office. For knowledge workers going back to an office may have little value, but for managers they really have no way to measure if a person is being "productive" either at home or in the office, so the theory may be that if a worker can be seen not "goofing off", then they are productive. However, is that a good measure of productivity? How can productivity be measured?

That got me thinking about the job I perform and how productivity could be measured. For people that work with their hands, i.e. not knowledge workers, measuring productivity is pretty straightforward as their tasks are usually repetitive and can be measured as units of work per time. Think stocking shelves; a certain number of shelves can be stocked in a period of time. Same goes for construction workers; they build something in a given amount of time.

For knowledge workers, productivity is harder to measure. In my last job, management seemed to be about metrics and would regularly tell us who committed code. Even worse than that, someone I worked with at that company surmised that layoffs (there were 5 rounds during my time there) were tied to how often we committed code. For anyone that writes code, this is an absolutely awful way to judge productivity because people could commit often, deleting code can be productive, analyzing code and not committing could also be considered productive.

Is analyzing a bug productive? Sure, but how is that measured? Bugs come in all different shapes and sizes and some could take a short time to fix while others could take a long time; does that make a person working on the easier bug less productive than then one working on a harder bug? Is developing features productive? Sure, but features like bugs are not created the same. Would you say that a feature is a unit of measure per time? So you'd be half as productive if your feature took twice as long to develop? Do more lines of code mean being more productive? Absolutely not as something really complicated might be accomplished in fewer lines of code; a lot of time could be spent finding where and what lines to write.

Let's talk about not actually writing code, but writing documentation. Would you count the words written as a metric? That's pretty ridiculous. How about architecting a solution where you think about a problem for awhile? Can you measure productivity there?

Are there days that I feel "productive"? Absolutely. Can I tell you what I did to feel that way? Probably not. Solving problems could make me feel productive, but the amount of time getting to the solution I may not feel productive even though it is part of the process.

Bottom line is that I don't believe there is a good way to measure productivity for a knowledge worker. Some people may disagree with me, but I haven't seen it done well in my career.

Air Frying

2025-03-08T15:38:01Z

In our trips to the bin store, we kept encountering silicone liners for air fryers. After seeing them, I suggested to my wife that maybe we should get an air fryer to see what all the hype was about. She found one on the local "buy nothing" site and picked it up (free is a good price for trying something out).

The first thing we made was French fries (pre cut, frozen ones from Trader Joes) and they turned out pretty well. We made them a number of times then we asked ourselves, what next? We can't just have a dedicated French fry maker.

Last year and this year, my son and I are staffing a Scout training event and since he is vegetarian, he basically gets special food. Last year I was working in the kitchen, so I made tofu for him (and a few others). As the kitchen at the training has a convection oven, I thought I'd try out some recipes at home. The air fryer could mimic a convection oven (sort of), so I found some air fryer tofu recipes. The prep work was a bit time consuming, but the tofu tasted good and was enjoyed by the whole family. The problem with our little air fryer was that it could only cook about half a slab of tofu in it and we make 2 slabs of tofu for the family. This meant that cooking took awhile.

It finally dawned on me that our oven has a convection mode! We've had the oven for almost 12 years and we never used that mode. Using the convection oven to "air fry" the tofu has been easy and delightful. I put the tofu on a metal rack on a backing sheet and I can cook all the tofu in one fell swoop (I flip it over mid way through). It takes about 45 minutes to make the tofu a bit crispy.

If you haven't tried marinated tofu cooked in a convection oven, I'd definitely recommend it! We typically put it on a salad and it is one of the only meals that my son will go back for seconds.

Using Jekyll for this Blog

2025-03-02T21:07:48Z

When I transitioned my blog to a virtual server many years ago, it worked adequately with the version of Wordpress and MySQL that I used. Over the years, Wordpress and MySQL required more and more resources to run. I didn't really want to upgrade my virtual server for a hobby, so I kept tweaking the settings to ensure that the server would still run. Unfortunately the server started having more and more problems over the years from running out of memory to increased load that took the server down.

After one too many alerts of the server failing to respond, I decided to convert my blog to a static site using Jekyll. It was pretty easy to setup on my Mac and then deploy it to my server. There are a bunch of options for static blogs; Jekyll seemed like the simplest to get configured and get running.

Pros

Reduced server load
Reduced server memory usage
Faster load time on pages
Simplified maintenance
Reduced surface to attack by hackers (no MySQL, no php, etc.)

Cons

Search is a little hacky using some JavaScript I found that searches an HTML page with every entry in it!
Site has to be regenerated to deploy.
Since I have it setup on my Mac, I can't post without using my Mac.
I have to synchronize the built site to my server using rsync.
Comments can't be added except manually (unless I integrate a third party site).

Summary

I probably should have converted my site a long time ago to reduce my frustration with having to maintain it. While the blog may not look as good as it used it and lacks many features of Wordpress, I think this was a good move as I'm trying to simplify working on servers and networking.

New blog

2025-02-28T21:06:39Z

I've converted my blog to a static blog so that I no longer have to maintain the database and other things that were causing me issues.

At the moment, it isn't pretty and comments aren't here, but I'll try to bring them back.

The Road to Retirement

2025-02-23T18:33:15Z

At the height of the pandemic, I started to think a lot about retirement. When I was 12, my father started me on the path to retirement by setting up an IRA for me. While this may seem young, experts say that time is the best way to build a nest egg (unfortunately due to tax law changes, I can't establish an IRA for my son as it requires him to have income to offset his contributions). Throughout my life I've been thrifty (some may say frugal) with my finances. Combined with being hard working and frankly, quite lucky, financially I'll be ready for retirement.

Being set for retirement only leaves me with a big hole; what is retirement? I've always told myself that retirement is doing what I wanted on my own time. That vision hasn't changed. However with retirement on the horizon, I need to figure out how I'm going to fill my time. I know what I don't want to do and that is sit around all day in a recliner, read the paper and watch TV. Sure, maybe I'll do that occasionally (well, what is a newspaper?), but being stagnant isn't in my nature and studies have shown that being active mentally and physically are keys to living a long life.

Friends and family have asked what I like to do. That's a really good question; I've spent the last 17 years (almost) with my main goal being to help raise my son. So I've put what I want to do in the backseat. I've always wanted to help other people (yes, I know it is part of the Scout oath) and have done that through volunteering. I'm definitely going to spend more time volunteering. I've been a regular volunteer at Feeding San Diego and I plan on increasing time there. Also in the last 1.5 years I've changed how I work with the Scouts; I've gone from being a troop leader to helping at the district level. This has brought me a lot of joy and I feel like I'm making a difference. It's good that I've discovered happiness in that as they can always use more of my time. Is volunteering the only thing I want to do?

What will I do for myself? Yes, I could argue that volunteering fulfills me and it does. However, there must be more. That's the part of retirement that I'm still working on figuring out. I really enjoy 3D printing and my son is dead set on teaching me how to use OnShape. I also enjoyed flying a drone (gave that up years ago as I didn't find I had time) and am thinking of taking a drone class to get licensed; that may open up a business opportunity if I want to film this commercially which sounds cool. Not sure it will pan out, but another piece to occupy my time.

Any suggestions from the peanut gallery on what to do in retirement? I'm not quite there yet, but I'm not going to work until I drop (I hope).

Working From Home

2025-02-08T13:59:46Z

There has been a lot of discussion in the last few years about people working from home where it went from almost no one to most office workers working from their homes. My experience working from home differs from most people as it has been part of who I am for 25 years, way before it was what every one did.

My first time working from home was in 1998 when the company I worked for closed its offices and kept me employed for a few months until I found another job. Back then we pretty much only used email to communicate. That experience was awful as I had only lived in Portland for less than 6 months and really didn’t know anyone. I was definitely not a fan of it, but doing that was better than being unemployed.

About six months after I started my next job in Portland, I decided that I really didn’t like Portland. I was lonely and the weather was pretty bad during the fall and winter (overcast didn’t work for me). I sold my house and gave notice to the company I worked for and started preparing to move back to San Diego. I didn’t have a job lined up, but I’d figure it out. The owners of the company I worked for asked if I wanted to work remotely. That was a no brainer as I didn’t have a job.

At the time, I had an extra phone line and we used email and AOL Instant Messenger to communicate. I really enjoyed the job even though I didn’t interact much with my colleagues in person. I continued for about 3.5 years and I parted ways as I was bored and the company didn’t have work for me at the time. Working from home was never considered an issue and I was pretty effective at my job.

Over the course of the next 20+ years, I contracted and had a few jobs all being able to work from home. Video conferencing didn’t become the norm until about 7-8 years ago so we used AOL Instant Messenger, fax, telephone (dial into a conferencing system), VoIP PBX, and email to communicate. Never was there a question if I could do the job being at home; it was just what I did. The only time it came up is I had a manager tell me that I couldn’t get promoted if I wasn’t in an office and the closest office was in San Jose.

During this time that I worked from home, I got married and became a father. Looking back over that time, I can tell you that I wouldn’t trade working from home for any amount of money as it gave me the flexibility to be there for my family. I didn’t miss a school performance, school conferences and was always there if needed. I drove my son to school and picked him up a few times a week when my wife worked. In addition, the time I didn’t have to commute allowed me to spend more time with my family. This is time that you can never get back. Doing some rough numbers, if I had to commute 30 minutes each way over the last 25 years, 1 hr/day * 50 wks/years (allowing for vacation) * 5 days/week * 25 years = 6250 hours = 260 days! Even a short commute would take a lot of time off my life.

In the few times when I looked for a job, I tried to look for remote work as I didn’t know if I could actually go into an office. About 9 years ago I did get a job where I had to commute 30 minutes each way, 5 days a week. I only lasted at that job a short time with not being able to work from home one of the several reasons that I went back to contracting.

After my last company went through some rough times, I decided to look for a new job. This time, however, I didn’t exclude jobs where I had to go into an office as I’m in a different place in my life. My son has now finished high school and no longer needs me to drive him around. The job I landed requires me to be in an office 3 days a week and I go.

It is kind of interesting that I go into an office where my immediate team is not located; I’m the only person in this country! When I have calls, I always see lots of squares where everyone (with few exceptions) is in their own location. It is kind of rare to see 2 people in the same room. With teams spread out around the country and world, are we more productive with everyone in an office? I’ll certainly understand that some jobs have to be done in an office due to security/secrecy, hardware availability, etc.

As I’m not generally a social person, working from home has been pretty good to me. A major downside to working from home has always been working too much and not being able to separate work from home as my work computer is just there; it was even harder when I was a contractor and my computer was used for both work and home. Working for someone else and having a separate work computer makes it a little easier to separate the two as I close my work computer at the end of the day/week. However, I can’t help but to put in long hours especially now that my team is in a time zone that is 16-18 hours ahead of me.

Will working from home stay for most office workers? I have no idea. I can’t imagine having to go into an office 5 days a week; 3 days is hard enough as I’m far more productive at home than I am in an office full of cubes.

Another stab at fixing the Vizio SB36512-F6 Soundbar

2024-11-22T13:38:45Z

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about fixing the SB36512-F6 soundbar as sometimes we just couldn't hear anything from it. My "fix" seemed to work for awhile, but over the last few months, the problems have been worse. We would start a show using Channels or Netflix (primarily) and got no sound. Lately the volume buttons wouldn't work (through HDMI-CEC) which is also frustrating. Through a combination of powering down the TV, changing the input on the soundbar, and powering off the outlet for the devices, we were able to get sound again.

I've been so frustrated with this that I've been on the verge of purchasing another soundbar, but waiting for a Costco sale so that I can take advantage of their return policy when it performs poorly. Today I decided to do another web search to see if others encountered the same problem. Unfortunately my original post was one of the hits! On the positive side, other posts indicated that Dolby Atmos was pretty poor on these types of soundbars which gave me an idea.

In order to get Dolby Atmos on the soundbar, I plugged the Apple TV into the soundbar's HDMI port and then the TV into the soundbar's HDMI ARC port. If I was willing to forego Atmos, I had more options for connecting the soundbar. Since I like HDMI-CEC for controlling all my devices, I decided to plug the Apple TV directly into my TV and then plugged the soundbar into the TV using HDMI-ARC.

Initial tests show that the setup works as expected with HDMI-CEC working for controlling volume and the power to the devices (I use power loosely as the devices are always in some type of standby mode). Will this fix my problems? I sure hope so or it is back to the drawing board on how to deal with this frustration.

It still baffles me that getting devices that adhere to standards working together is such a crapshoot. I have no idea how the average person gets any type of technology or electronic device to work.

Lost My Wallet

2024-11-10T15:07:46Z

I’ve been carrying a wallet for something like 35 years in my back pocket. Initially, I carried my ATM card and a few dollars. When I got my driver’s license, I added that to the mix. Slowly over the years, cards just kept getting added, such as my insurance card, student ID, CPR card, credit cards, EMT card, AARP card, etc. It got to the point that my wallet was quite packed, and I looked for a slimmer wallet. I did find a wallet that reduced the bulk, and I used that one (or a replacement) for many years.

Last summer, my son got his driver’s license and at the same time bought himself a used iPhone. While I suggested he get some type of standard wallet, he was insistent on getting a MagSafe compatible wallet that he could attach to the back of his phone. For him, it worked well as he only had his 1 card and a $20 bill; he insisted that he would only use ApplePay and didn’t need to carry his ATM card.

This past summer, as I was thinking about what I had in my wallet, I took a careful inventory of what was in it.

CPR card - digital version on my phone; never needed to show it.

ATM card - I only use it to get money out of the ATM, which is deliberate and not just when I’m out and about.

Auto insurance card - digital version on my phone; proof of insurance in each car.

AARP card - digital version on my phone; have yet to use it.

Prescription benefits card - no longer in use as it is part of my health insurance.

Driver’s license - digital version not yet accepted anywhere.

Credit card - needed as not everywhere takes ApplePay.

Costco Card - digital version on phone.

EMT card - never used it, but I’m not quite ready to leave it out of my wallet.

Health insurance card - always asked for at doctors’ offices.

CERT identification card - card explicitly says “not for identification purposes”. Used it once to get into an evacuation site to volunteer.

Looking at what was really needed, I slimmed down my cards to carry to 5 and decided to give a MagSafe wallet a try. The first thing I was kind of surprised at was how strong it held. The wallet also holds the cards pretty tight, so they’re not going to fall out. As I generally only wear long pants, I’ve made sure that all my pants have a side pocket on the leg; this allows me to carry my phone with attached wallet without making it hard to side down or walk. If I wore jeans and put my phone in my front pocket, the MagSafe wallet might be a bit more awkward.

I’m now a few months into this “experiment” and while it does feel weird to no longer have anything in my back pocket, it is kind of liberating. When I get into the car, I pull out my phone (with wallet) and put it in the cubby where the CarPlay connector is. Since I’ve gotten into the habit of always putting my phone there (for the last 8 years since I first got a car with CarPlay), I don’t forget my phone when I get out of the car.

The only weird thing about a MagSafe wallet is that when I want to take a picture, I have my wallet hanging off the back.

I’m quite happy with this change and feel like I’ve been dragged into this century by relying on more things to be on my phone (yes, as technology person, this sounds kind of weird).

USB-C cables under deliver

2024-01-08T19:46:44Z

When I started learning about USB-C, I was excited to standardize on cables instead of having all kinds of cables and having to travel with a ton of cables. However, years ago, I read about a Google engineer who analyzed USB-C cables to find out which ones had charging problems or could damage devices. Fast forward, many years later there is still no way to tell what cables are good and which ones are bad.

Now that Apple has adopted USB-C, I’ve read about what adapters to use to charge without breaking the bank. The article concerned me as the author recommend some adapters that were not USB-IF certified. Without any type of certification, there is no way to know if you’re going to get a cable that could cause a problem with your device.

In my research to find cables that are quality cables, I watched a video where various cables were put under a CT scan and analyzed. It was fascinating to see the varying quality of cables. The cheap cables may not last and if they break, they could damage your device. In fact, some of the cables directly connect the power without any type of chip managing power. I have a flashlight and a bar code scanner that charge via a USB-C plug. However, neither one can charge with a USB-C to USB-C cable plugged into a power supply! They came with a USB-A to USB-C which probably just wired the power and maybe a few other lines. The only way I can charge them using a USB-C charger is to use a USB-C to USB-A adapter and then a USB-A to USB-C cable. So even if I carried a few USB-C to USB-C cables and chargers, I couldn’t charge these devices. That’s pretty disappointing that manufacturers implemented USB-C in non-standard ways so my hopes of having a single set of cables has been dashed.

I’ve started acquiring USB-C cables and am making sure that all the cables are USB-IF certified (note that this appears to be self certified). Will that keep my devices from having problems? I have no idea, but it is at least lets me sleep a little better at night.

A year without Paperless (ReceiptWallet)

2024-01-06T13:19:07Z

Last year, I wrote about ditching Paperless and storing all my documents in the Finder. This was driven by 2 main things. The first was I didn’t know how long Paperless would be around as it was getting kind of dated. And second I wanted to be able to see my documents and receipts on any device.

Now that I’ve been using the Finder for a year, I can say that the transition has been pretty seamless. My initial plan was to only use the Finder for new things and keep using Paperless for older documents. However, when discussing this with my father, I went ahead and wrote an app that took all of my old Paperless libraries and extracted the PDFs into folders just the way I wanted. So after the extraction, I had all my receipts dating back to 2006 accessible on my Mac, iPad and iPhone.

This is great and has come in handy when I want to find things when I’m not at my Mac or when I’m out and about (my wife has asked me what we paid for something and I was able to look it up in the store). With the Finder being able to search contents of the documents, it is pretty easy to locate a receipt or document. One thing that I still do is when I scan receipts using my ScanSnap, I have it OCR the documents. Unfortunately sometimes receipts are so cryptic that even with perfect OCR, a search may not turn up what I need. However, by stored the documents by year and month with the file name being the merchant name and date, I have a good chance of finding what I need. Note that while your can scan from an iPhone or iPad using the ScanSnap, it won’t OCR the documents, so I still scan all receipts that I don’t get electronically on my Mac.

Now back to my first reason for transitioning to the Finder and that was the longevity of the app. As of the writing of this entry, the website for Paperless has been offline for at least a few weeks and all email bounces. I have no idea what happened to the company and I hope the owner is OK.

If you’re still using Paperless and would like to transition to using the Finder, I hope my Paperless Extractor can help and bring you some piece of mind that you won’t be stuck when/if Paperless eventually breaks (all apps break at some point).

It was a good run, ReceiptWallet/Paperless!

Review: UniFi UXG-Lite

2023-12-02T08:02:10Z

Several years ago, I replaced the networking gear at my parents’ place with a UniFi Security Gateway, access points, etc. The setup has been working reasonably well and the only major issue was when the USG died and I had to replace it (turns out it was probably just the power supply, but I learned that too late). While the USG performed adequately (they only have a 100 Mbps down/10 Mbps up Internet connection), finding a replacement USG in case it failed was getting harder and harder (I had a spare on my shelf just waiting for it to die). Ubiquiti really didn’t have a decent replacement for the USG until recently when the UXG-Lite came out.

Prior to me seeing that the UXG-Lite had been released, a friend of mine sent me a UniFi Cloud Key Gen 2 Plus which I setup to replace the outdated UniFi NVR (no longer supported and no remote access was available) and CloudKey Gen 1. This allowed my dad to use UniFi Protect and view his cameras remotely.

Once I saw the UXG-Lite released, I immediately purchased one as it looked (for the most part) like a direct replacement for the USG. One of the requirements to running it was a newer UniFi controller which I had just installed so I was good to go. One of the immediate differences in the UXG-Lite was that it only had 1 WAN port and 1 LAN port while the USG had 1 WAN port, 1 LAN port and then 1 WAN/LAN port. I had originally setup my parents network with 2 separate LANs, but realized that all the traffic on 1 LAN was wireless so I could simply set a SSID to use a specific VLAN and still be able to isolate traffic.

Installing the UXG-Lite was a breeze. First I updated the controller to the latest version, then I forgot the USG in the controller and then adopted the UXG-Lite. All the settings were transferred and the whole process only took a few minutes. Since the USG was not powerful enough to handle IDS/IPS, I had that turned off. Once the UXG-Lite was setup, I turned that on just for some added piece of mind.

I also setup a WireGuard VPN into the box (not possible with the USG) and that seemed to work just as flawlessly as it does on my UDM-SE. I can’t imagine using it much, but it is there if I ever need it. The remote management of the network does all that I need to do without connecting directly to the network.

The UXG-Lite has been running for a week and I haven’t heard any complaints, so I’m going to call it a success. I was just looking for a modern replacement for the USG and that seems to be what it is. I’ve seen various reviews/complaints about the device, but in my limited testing I’m not seeing any issues.

Pros

Easy setup
Integrates with the rest of the UniFi line of equipment

Cons

Lacks second WAN/LAN port

Summary

If you’re looking for a replacement for the USG3, the UXG-Lite seems to foot the bill. While the UX (UniFi Express) has also been released, it wouldn’t meet my needs in the case due to using UniFi Protect to run cameras. If I hadn’t needed that, the UX may have worked. Remember that the UXG-Lite still needs the controller running on another piece of hardware so if you need an all-in-one box, this isn’t it.

I no longer have to worry about trying to replace an outdated equipment when the USG eventually broke. I’m still a huge fan of UniFi equipment and while it may not be commercial grade, it works for my home needs and being able to manage my parents’ network remotely is a lifesaver.

Amazon Returns and Bin Stores

2023-11-11T15:07:01Z

This past summer I was reading 3D printing posts on Reddit and saw the mention of “bin stores” where people were purchasing filament and other 3D printing accessories for cheap. I started looking at what a “bin store” was and learned that they are stores that buy up Amazon (and other company) returns by the pallet load and sell the contents by spreading them out on tables that have lips (i.e. bins) to keep in the products. In addition to returns, the stores sometimes have items that didn’t sell so there may be multiple of the same item.

I was quite intrigued by the concept and mentioned it to my wife and she was also curious. I looked at a store about 20 minutes from our house and we went the next day. The stores that I’ve found use a similar strategy where they re-stock once or twice a week, have a higher price per item the first day, i.e. $10 the day after restocking and then reduce the price each day until re-stock day. Some stores will clean up the tables before re-stock day and sellable merchandise they take down to Mexico to sell.

Walking into the store, we were overwhelmed to see how much random stuff was for sale. We quickly realized that we had to be good shoppers by actually looking up the products that interested us to see if they were a deal or not. Some things for say $7 that sell new for $10 aren’t that much of a deal; however, something that sells for $25 we can get for $7 may be worth it.

After our first excursion, we decided to go back on the day after re-stock to see if there was better stuff. We got there early and had to wait in line before they opened. While waiting, we talked to a man that says he looks for just tools so that he can resell them and he mentioned another store to also check out. We went to the other store which was huge and spent several hours there looking around. We developed a system where my wife was on one side of the table and I was on the other and we’d go down each row so that we could see if there were any treasures in there.

As each trip is an adventure, my wife and I have been going every few weeks to kill some time. We also stop by the Grocery Outlet next door and do a little grocery shopping. Some of our trips are more productive than others; my son came with us once and picked out a Sony professional microphone that retails for about $250 that he picked up for $7. He sold it on eBay for $95! We’re not always that lucky, but have found some interesting products that at $5 an item (I like $5 day is it is a good balance between impulse buy and decent mix of available products.) are worth the trip.

Here’s a small sampling of what we’ve picked up for $7 or less:

Non-contact thermometer (human and surface)
Strainer that clips on pot
Bluetooth barcode scanner (I wrote an app for this that lets me easily scan items and look them up on Amazon for use on future trips)
Shoe orthotics
Foot stretcher (for my plantar fasciitis)
Fidgets for my wife to use at her school
Grabber tool (for picking up trash and hard to reach items)
Brita water bottles (built in filter)
Webcams (can be adjusted whereas the one on my monitor always cuts off the top of my head)
Name brand kitchen scissors
Bluetooth hygrometer/thermometers
HDMI capture device

So while we’re enjoying this new “hobby” and have picked up some useful items (we usually put stuff in our cart and at the end go back through and ask each other if we really need/want it and if it is worth it; we tend to put back a bunch of items), I’ve started to think more about the return problem.

These bin stores don’t seem to have a shortage of merchandise and the stores we’ve been to are only a small sampling of stores across the country that are doing the same thing. I’ve pieced together what happens from some articles as well as what I’ve seen at the stores. When an item is returned to Amazon (or Kohl’s or Target), a number of things could happen to it depending on the seller. If things are sold by a third party, I’ve read that the seller can either pay to have the return sent back to them or basically just eat the cost and have Amazon “dispose” of it. In addition, if things don’t sell, they may be in the same situation. Shipping costs money and it may cost more than the item resulting in items being “disposed” of by selling by the pallet load.

In some cases, items may be resold if they are new and unopened. However, this has a cost associated with inspecting and restocking the item. I don’t believe that this problem is going to go away any time soon. While it is great for my wife and me to have a treasure hunt adventure, the environmental costs in both shipping the products and disposing of what doesn’t sell even after the bin stores is huge. If companies move towards charging for returns and discouraging returns, that could reduce this slightly.

However, there is still the issue of producing things that don’t sell. For instance, we routinely see metal signs with various slogans on them and it is obvious that they didn’t sell. If a company makes them, ships them from China to Amazon to sell, it may take a few months to arrive. Then they try to sell them for a few months; in the meantime they are producing more. If they don’t sell, they may have part of the initial inventory to get rid of as well as the additional items produced before they were told to stop. Local manufacturing could cut down on the lag time and cut off production sooner, but using the theory “if we make it, we can sell it”, creates more products that people may not need.

Is there an easy answer for reducing the waste caused by returns or over manufacturing products that aren’t purchased? Unfortunately no. I try to do my part my thoroughly researching items before purchasing and rarely return items. This is especially true having seen where the returns end up and thinking about the impacts of my decisions.

Review: Consumer Cellular

2023-09-25T06:52:59Z

As I’ve written, I switched to Consumer Cellular in July in an effort to save a little money. While I’ve been an AT&T customer for many years, I periodically have looked to save money by switching carriers. When I turned 50 this year, I received an offer to join AARP and in the offer was a discount for Consumer Cellular. This was another wake-up call to check for a new carrier. Unfortunately Consumer Cellular didn’t support the Apple Watch. This changed over the summer and I switched all my lines.

Despite a few hiccups in the transfer process, I’ve been quite pleased with the service. Consumer Cellular uses AT&T’s network so there was no change in coverage or my experience using my phone. Prior to the switch, I had 2 phones, a hotspot and an Apple Watch on AT&T and then my son’s phone on US Mobile (5 GB plan).

AT&T allows a maximum of 3 GB of hotspot data on the phone, so having a hotspot with unlimited data was quite useful for traveling and other times I needed to use my laptop or iPad. With Consumer Cellular, you can use any of your data on your phones as a mobile hotspot; this meant I didn’t need a separate hotspot line and anyone in my family could use a hotspot without borrowing the actual device.

This summer, AT&T announced that if you paid by credit card you wouldn’t get a $5/line discount. I always pay by credit card as I get cash back (2.5%) meaning that my AT&T cost went up by 2.5%; that was kind of the last straw on switching.

Pros

Cheaper than AT&T
Easier to get a US based human on the phone for support
Support folks seem to actually care (I had a conversation with one about San Diego while we were waiting for something to complete).

Cons

Switching carriers is not always a straightforward process

Summary

Consumer Cellular is AT&T repackaged for a significantly lower cost. 5G+ is offered as well as mobile hotspot on the phones. The unlimited data plan is really 50GB of data, but that’s plenty for my family (I think we hit 20GB when we went on vacation this summer).

I’m saving almost $60 per month by switching to Consumer Cellular! This is a huge savings with no change in service. In addition, my son no longer has to worry about his 5 GB of data (I put him on a separate plan as it was cheaper) and we don’t need a separate hotspot device.

Consumer Cellular - 3 lines and an AppleWatch (unlimited data)
Total bill (including taxes & fees):	96.53
Credit card cash back (2.5%)	-2.41
Net	94.12

AT&T 2 lines + hotspot (unlimited data)
Total bill (including taxes & fees)	132.45
US Mobile 1 line - 5 GB data
Total bill (including taxes & fees)	19.91
Credit card cash back (2.5%)	-0.50
Net	152.36

Attempting to Save Money By Switching Cellular Carriers

2023-07-22T06:53:44Z

As someone who tries to be thrifty, I routinely look at recurring charges and see how I can save some money. I’ve been using AT&T for cellular service for many years on various plans with various discounts. Last year I added a teacher appreciation discount (my wife is a teacher) and brought the rate down a little. I’ve been eyeing other carriers and MVNOs for awhile and gave Visible a try as they supported the Apple Watch and there were only a handful of MVNOs that supported the watch. That test didn’t go so well at the time as my phone was unusable when I went to Costco. They have since changed offerings and I would be tempted to try again.

This week, AT&T sent email saying that if I didn’t switch my AutoPay to use a debit card or bank account, they would charge me $5/line ($20 total) which got me thinking about switching again. My credit card rewards pays me 2.5% so on a $132 bill gives me about $3 per month which effectively increases what I pay. I decided to revisit carriers and discovered today that Consumer Cellular started supported the Apple Watch. I saw it on Apple’s website and then called them to verify. What I didn’t realize until later that they only support the latest versions of the Apple Watch (Series 8, SE 2, and Ultra) and not my 3 year old Apple Watch Series 6.

I was so excited about potentially saving $50 per month ($600 per year) that I ported my number over, added the eSIM and went through the process to get setup. There were a few hiccups as I entered the wrong PIN for the port (you have to request a time limited one from your carrier) and I had to call Consumer Cellular. Each time I called, I was connected to a rep quickly and was able to easily communicate with the US based support. Each person seemed empowered to actually handle my issues. After a little bit, I was up and running on my phone. I tested out mobile hotspot and discovered that I had been assigned an AT&T eSIM giving me basically the same coverage as I already had. Unfortunately things started going down hill when I tried to activate my watch. I called again and finally realized that they didn’t support my watch; I immediately asked for a port out PIN as I don’t want to give up my Watch for running (I don’t like being tethered to my phone).

I went to AT&T’s site and started the process to add my phone back to the account (my wife’s phone is the primary one on AT&T and I hadn’t ported it out as I wanted to make sure everything worked well before subjected her to a switch). After I put in the order (it says I’ll have to pay a $35 activation fee which I hope isn’t correct), I received an email that I had to call to finish the port. So I called and explained the situation and spoke with an outsourced rep. The rep wasn’t able to help; I went through this a number of times as well as the online chat.

After I think 4 hours of getting hung up on, transferred, having to explain the situation over and over, going through phone tree hell, and receiving strange error messages on the website, I finally called again and was connected to a very nice US based woman who was sympathetic and understanding. She asked why I went with Consumer Cellular and I told her; she asked about coverage and I said it was identical to AT&T which kind of surprised her, I think. She was very patient and did everything she could do and unfortunately had to transfer me to another department and I ended up “outsourced” again. None of the outsourced reps seemed sincere about helping me and read from their scripts. I have trouble understanding accents and that made the experience even worse.

Throughout this ordeal, I was about ready to just forget the phone number that I’ve had for over 25 years as I was so frustrated with AT&T. While I created my own mess, dealing with AT&T makes my blood boil. Eventually I was able to get my phone reactivated, but am still stuck with no cellular on my watch. That’s a problem for another day.

I wasn’t planning on getting a new Apple Watch this year as my Series 6 works fine. However, after this experience with AT&T, I am definitely getting the next watch so that I can jump ship and goto Consumer Cellular. Not only will it save me money (about enough in one year to pay for the watch), I won’t have to deal with AT&T’s archaic website, outsourced support, and high rates.

I can’t wait to say “good riddance” to AT&T.

Paperless Extractor

2023-03-31T19:34:44Z

When I was designing ReceiptWallet, I was concerned about the database being corrupted and losing all my data. I decided that as a backup to the database, I'd store all the files as PDFs (later in life it would store other types of files, but for the most part people only stored PDFs) and would embed all the metadata as PDF keywords that could be recovered. The keywords in the PDFs also served as a transport mechanism where you could send a PDF from ReceiptWallet to someone else with ReceiptWallet and when imported, all the metadata would be filled out. In addition to being used as a backup of the data, I envisioned the day when I no longer used ReceiptWallet as I didn't want to keep supporting it.

While this original idea seemed pretty solid, writing the keywords for the PDFs proved to be somewhat problematic. At the time, Apple's PDFKit wasn't completely reliable and could corrupt files when writing them out or crash. Reluctantly I added a switch to ReceiptWallet to turn off this feature (default was to have this on). So depending on the PDF, some PDFs may not have keyword data in them so metadata would basically be lost.

As I wrote earlier this year, that day has come. In my transition away from Paperless (formerly ReceiptWallet), I manually dragged out all files from one of my libraries into the file system and organized them into folders by categories. I placed the folder (named Document Library) in iCloud Drive allowing me to access all the files from anywhere including on my phone. At one point in the past, I started looking at an iPhone version of ReceiptWallet that would sync files; it didn't go anywhere. Now I finally have that feature!

While I moved a document library over to the file system, I left all my libraries for receipts (one for each year) in Paperless and left them to deal with another day. A few weeks ago I was talking to my father about his transition away from Paperless (he likes to follow my lead sometimes) and I asked him if he had a tool to extract all his files, if he'd use it.

I spent a few hours that day working on a small Mac application that did just that. I had a chance to do a little SwiftUI and Swift concurrency. You drop a Paperless library onto the app's main window, it walks the library (the library is a bundle which is just a folder which a file extension) looking for every PDF and then opens each file to find the date and merchant. It then creates folders by year and month for the files.

I've made the source to this app freely available. It comes with no warranty and I will not make a binary of it available; the tool has worked fairly well for my father and me, but may have some quirks (at one point, extra PDFs without metadata were added to the Paperless libraries).

This app was made without using any source to ReceiptWallet or Paperless; the directory structure of a library can be viewed in the Finder by control clicking the library and choosing Show Package Contents.

I have no information on the future of Paperless and I'm switching away from it as the file system handles my needs better than it did when I wrote ReceiptWallet over 16 years ago.