Words On Wednesday

It’s that time of year. Not Christmas, it’s Plex Day. We’re now four years in since I  started using Plex in 2020, and my use case has certainly evolved in that time. It’s still my main music platform, and I’ve started using it more for video as well. We still have some streaming services (namely YouTube TV and Netflix), but I’ve gradually started shifting from Prime Video and Hulu after we canceled those subscriptions. Netflix has enough exclusives that the kids like, and until Plex gets college football, I’m going to need some sort of cable TV source. Hardware Last year , I was still up in the air about DVD piracy. The Surface Pro 6 I was using for the server didn’t have a disc drive, so I was considering buying a USB Blu-ray drive. I had also brought my old desktop out of storage, which I was considering migrating the whole server to, but I hadn’t yet booted it back up. My hand was eventually forced when the kids asked to watch something that wasn’t on any streaming services we...

The Carolina Code Conference was the first developer conference I attended as well as my first time speaking at a developer conference. It was new and exciting, if a little scary. Now that I’m on the far side of it, I wanted to look back at the experience and the weeks leading up to it. My first foray into the conference scene was submitting a talk for Carolina Code Conference 2023 . At the time, I was pretty heavy into MuleSoft (for work, definitely not because I wanted to be). A coworker mentioned the conference to me and suggested that I should submit a talk for it. With MuleSoft taking the lion’s share of my current work responsibilities, I figured that low-code/no-code solutions were probably the thing I was most qualified to talk about. Looking into the submission process, I couldn’t figure out exactly what a “good” submission would look like. The only required details were a title and description. I decided to put together what I WOULD present as a talk, record a  video of i...

Work in any industry is often broken down to man-hours, the expected amount of work that an average person can finish in an uninterrupted hour. While that’s great for planning and budgeting purposes, I think it’s a terrible measure that gives inaccurate estimates at best and coerces people to work absurd amounts of unpaid hours at worst. And much like Fred Brooks probably suggested in 1975 (I’ve never actually read the book that I based this title on), there are several reasons why basing expectations on the work capability of some theoretical person in some theoretical hour is unhelpful and often harmful. The first problem with man-hour estimates is the amount of work. Who is this average based on? In the software engineering industry, there are vast differences in experience, specification, and familiarity with different products. If you ask me to build something in a language I’ve never written for an industry that I have no exposure to, it’s going to take a while. A recent code sch...

After discussing my  smartwatch experience , it occurred to me I haven’t talked about how I ended up with a Pixel 8 Pro. In July 2023, we went tubing with my brother-in-law. I had recently purchased a wet bag and I was itching to use it. I threw my phone (a Google Pixel 6 at the time) in there, my sister-in-law had her phone, and my brother-in-law had his vape. My wife asks me, “are you sure you don’t want to leave your phone in the truck?” Nah, the wet bag should keep it safe. Remember this, it’s important later. We get maybe halfway down the river and my brother-in-law wants to hit his vape. Cool, no problem. We drift over to a sandbar for a quick break. He gives me his vape, we throw everything back into the wet bag, and we continue on our way. Apparently, when I put everything back into the wet bag, I didn’t capture enough air in it or seal it properly. Once we reach our destination, I pull everything up onto the bank and notice that the wet bag is suspiciously heavy. I open i...

Wearable technology has been a thing for a while now, but is it still relevant? Is the Galaxy Watch by Samsung worth your money and your attention? I’d say yes. After skimming through some old posts, I realized that I discussed my old  Moto 360 watch, but I never got around to writing about the Galaxy Watch 4. You see, the Moto 360 was a fine watch. I really liked it. Problem is, I am absurdly clumsy and I dropped it. In the shower. Yes, I realize that wearing a watch in the shower is stupid, whether it is waterproof or not, but I was curious to see if the waterproofing actually worked. Physical shock is known to gradually reduce water resistance, and dropping it from eye-level into an actively running shower is probably the worst thing I could’ve done to it. It sorta kinda worked for a few days after that and died altogether soon after. RIP. Looking back through messages to establish a timeline, I didn’t realize how quickly I broke the 360. The guy I bought it from first mentione...

A lot of people in computer science and software engineering share the opinion that bleeding edge is always the best option for any new project. Newer is better, right? I would argue that this isn’t consistently the case. Occasionally newer is better, but often the reliability and availability of documentation makes older technology the superior option. Some people may not be familiar with the term “bleeding edge,” as it seems to be pretty specific to the information technology industry. “Cutting edge” is pretty universal, but “bleeding edge” suggests a step further. Something that is cutting edge may be appropriately described as “latest and greatest;” bleeding edge is even newer, albeit maybe not greater specifically. The difference in my mind is that cutting edge is very new but already widely adopted, where bleeding edge is so new that most organizations haven’t yet begun using it. Bleeding edge technology creators and supporters often tout the vast improvements over existing optio...

I got a MacBook Air for my wife a while back when her Surface Pro 7 started critically failing, and the process of setting it up and learning macOS has been super weird. For a very long time, I was aggressively opposed to anything from Apple. Their products were a bunch of overpriced, underperforming junk that didn’t have any place outside artsy studios used by media content creators. At least, that was my take on the brand. People who paid big bucks to use a browser at a coffee shop were just wasting their money for a faux status symbol. Eventually, I became apathetic to Apple and its presence in the personal computing device arena. It wasn’t for me, but I wasn’t everyone. There are plenty of people who like Apple hardware, they prefer Apple software, and I want those options available to them. I wasn’t interested, but why should I care what other consumers choose to use? I wasn’t a Google fanboy anymore, since Chromebooks really just aren’t a valid replacement for a full laptop or de...

In order to keep myself current on trends in the technology space, I want to start regularly blogging about various things going on in the field. Call it “Talking Tech.” This isn’t going to be a regular monthly segment. Book Report and Thirsty Thursday Eve chew up enough of the month as is. And maybe most months end up having a Talking Tech post in them anyway, but I don’t want to be beholden to it. I don’t know quite yet what this is going to look like, so it’s partially experimental. There are a few ideas floating around that I want to discuss and would fit well with the Talking Tech moniker. First post is most likely going to be an article spin on the no-code solution talk I suggested for the Carolina Code Conference and briefly discussed on the Carolina Code Cast. I’ve already created a short video presentation on it, but it makes sense to have that tied in with Words on Wednesday as well. Beyond that, the Raspberry Pi 5 came out, so that’s a pretty cool piece of hardware. If I’m a...

I’ve long said that I don’t really like laptops because they don’t seem to last long, and they are difficult or impossible to upgrade. One company is trying to change that. A coworker introduced me to the  Framework laptop . I had recently purchased my  Surface Pro 7 , but I was immediately intrigued. I’ve always gone budget tier with laptops, mostly because I treat them as almost disposable. It’s going to break down and become obsolete pretty soon anyway, and there’s no sense in paying a lot for one if my best option is going to be replacing it with a new model anyway. My Surface was a tentative bet on more premium lasting a little longer, but there still aren’t many ways you can upgrade it besides swapping out the solid state drive. The master plan of Framework is a device that is modular. You pop open the case with the provided tool and switch components as necessary. Need more RAM? Pop in a larger chip. Processor isn’t fast enough, or you’re working with a model that’s a f...

I’m trying to consider the best way to organize a data store. Maybe some of my IT friends can shed some light on it. I want a collection of standard household food products. The problem is how to handle different brands or sizes of the same product. Consider rice for example. We usually purchase family size bags of Success Boil-in-Bag white rice. When the grocery store doesn’t have the family size bags, we’ll purchase the normal bags. Occasionally, they don’t have any Success brand rice, so we’ll buy store brand or some other brand. With just white rice, that would be at least four unique items that all serve effectively the same purpose. If I’m going to the grocery store to get rice, I don’t truthfully care what brand or size at the end of the day. Once the rice makes it to the place, I couldn’t care less what the box looks like. I need some way to consolidate each of those records into the same group. UPC as Primary Key At first, I considered making the UPC the primary key and having...

I’ve often heard the adage that “storage is cheap,” when referring to computer drive sizes. And honestly, it is. Plus, it continues to get cheaper year after year. I got a 5TB external hard drive from Costco a few years back for about $120 if memory serves. This past summer, a similar drive from the same company at 8TB in size was available at the same price. This trend isn’t just for hard disc drives, either. I’ve seen some popular solid state drives at roughly $100 for a 1TB external. The same goes for SD cards as well. The storage capacities continue to rise, while prices stay mostly similar or drop. Not to mention data transfer speeds that tend to go up as technology improves. Realistically, if you wait a few months or years, any drive that you might want is going to be cheaper, larger, faster, or some combination of the three. In almost every case, a superior drive will be available later on. The problem then, is how soon you need the drive, or how much you need it now. This isn’t...

After using free forms of cloud storage for several years, I believe it’s almost time that I pay for more storage. With all the options available, what should I choose? I held off for a long time. The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back is Google’s decision to make Google Drive files count against user storage. Part of what drew me into using mostly Google Drive was the fact that I could make Google Docs and Google Sheets files with reckless abandon. Now that they count against my quota, that previously unlimited source of storage is going to dry up pretty quickly. Logically, I could continue using Google Drive and just pay for a Google One subscription to get more storage. But really, why should I throw money at something without determining if there are better options. Tons of services provide cloud storage now. I personally have used Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox as well. If I’m going to start paying for a service, I should at least do some research and make sure that I ge...

I finally picked up a Raspberry Pi to play emulated games on, and I am tremendously satisfied with the purchase. Making the Decision The interest has been there for a while. Especially around the release of the  NES Classic Edition and  SNES Classic Edition , I really considered getting a Raspberry Pi, but I just elected not to. At the end of the day, I had other platforms that I could play emulated games on. My phone, my PSP, and my laptop could all technically do the same thing. Around December 2020, I started playing Super Mario World with my kids. To get it on my living room TV (the only logical place that you play video games as a family), I loaded it onto the laptop I use for my Plex server and ran an HDMI cable to the TV. It worked, but it was tremendously cumbersome. The laptop sits behind the TV, and the lid stays closed, so I launched the game by using Chrome Remote Desktop on my phone to control the laptop and start the emulator software. I had to do this every tim...