Back To Work(?)

6FPS V5#10: October 9, 2023

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Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

It’s October, the length of day and nice have flipped and the Pacific Northwest is entering the Big Dark. As someone who grew up in Southern California and lived most of his life in Silicon Valley, the speed as which length of day changes still astonishes me. I was having coffee with an old friend recently — someone still at Apple that moved to Seattle during the pandemic — and asked what he really loved about this place, and his answer was “seasons”.

He’s absolutely right, too. It’s a huge shift from Silicon Valley, where seasonal changes are pretty slow and subtle. We had our first cold front move through in the last couple of weeks, and temps have gone from mid 70’s to mid 60’s, we had our first two inches of rain, and Laurie has suggested the tomatoes are done for the year.

We’re already at the point where the alarm goes off before the sun comes up, and I need to turn on a light to get ready to deal with the day. I’m not complaining.

Back to Work(?)

It’s been three months since I retired, and the summer just shot past. One thing I consciously did was choose to just kick back and not push off into new projects, but instead give myself time to recharge the batteries.

And here we are three months later,a nd I am finally feeling like it’s time to get back to work. But not a job, on my stuff. So I decided October 1 made a nice, arbitrary line in the sand, and so now I’m shifting back into “do stuff” mode.

Which… I have been doing stuff, but I haven’t really put energy into “projects”. I have a bunch of writing I’ve been mulling over, but I haven’t sat down and put in the time to write.

In the last three months I’ve done something I’ve almost never done in the past: I’ve played a lot of video games. For a while it was Diablo, which I really enjoyed but about level 80 of season 1, it got kinda “just keep running around and hitting stuff”; we’ll see if season 2 drags me back. But then Starfield came out, and I’ve really been enjoying it. There’s a level of complexity and diversity of tasks that Diablo is missing, and that keeps it from getting too boring or repetitive (so far) — I can spend some time doing planet surveys, then shift gear and go blow away masses of space pirates. Whatever suits my mood. I’m finding planet surveys fun and low key, which is nice.

And it reminds me a lot of a previous favorite, Skyrim, also from Bethesda, where at one point I spent about a month doing nothing but tracking down and clearing out vampire nests. Because why not?

Starfield’s first 10-15 hours is to be honest a slog, because there’s a lot you need to figure out about the game and how you want to play it, but it clicked for me, it turned into a really fun place to waste time.

I also did something I never figured I’d do, which is install Steam on my laptop to get Baldur’s Gate 3. Again, figuring out how to play the game was a slog, but only about 5-6 hours for me. I have it on the laptop upstairs so I can play it in the evening when I’m up with Laurie watching baseball and hockey, and it’s just hit the “okay, I get it” stage. I do know it’s coming out on the XBOX later, but I don’t know if I’ll add it in there or not. I haven’t done Mac gaming for a long time, but I think this setup is working pretty well for me.

Writing.. and things…

So anyway, the new plan is to try to put some time in every day to work on some of the projects. The first week of October I’ve scheduled in not only getting 6FPS out, but some long-waiting web site tweaking — the archives of 6FPS need some love, if for no other reason they still have active links to the thing formely known as Twitter I want removed from my site. Unfortunately editing a sent newsletter on Squarespace isn’t allowed (which is the right call), so that means converting the archives from links into the newsletter system into web pages. Only a couple of days work, but — grunt work city, so I’ve been avoiding it.

This week is also trip prep, because on the 9th — the day you get this — I’m headed out to Sol Duc Lodge in Olympic National Park for a few days of unplanned wandering with camera and binoculars. This replaces my cancelled trip to Lake Crescent this spring where my allergies put me down for a while. I’m also planning a two night stay near Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge in November to spend some quality time with the Sandhill Cranes.

When I get back from Olympic, my plan is at least one, maybe two weeks trying to get the woodshop projects moving forward again.

With the seasons changing, I’m also trying to get more birding going again as the winter birds start arriving, but the goal is to put in at least 2-3 hours a day, 4-5 days a week being “productive”.

Or at least shrinking the “oughta do” list.

Speaking of shrinking, one thing I have been doing the last three months is working harder at getting the activity levels up (with small successes) and tweaking the diet so I can get the weight loss started again. And it looks like I can claim my first five pounds gone. I told my doctor I was hoping for 10 this year, if I can keep this going I might get 15. Still a long way to go, but… progress.

If you can’t easily visualize what five pounds is, try this: find a 2 liter bottle of soda and pick it up. It weighs right around five pounds. Every time you gain five, you strap one of those on your body somewhere. Every time you lose five, you remove one. Now, imagine being your normal weight, and putting on a backpack full of all those bottles of extra weight you’re carrying. Three or four bottles? not really a hassle. But eight or ten?? I’ve still got seven bottles to get rid of to get back to my weight at age 30, but at least I’m seeing progress again. And for those of you who are newer here, at one point in life I weighed 415. Today, 325. That’s 18 bottles of soda I used to carry with me everywhere gone and never returning. That’s about the average weight of a 12 year old boy.

House Projects

The big projects at the house we’ve been working towards finished up this month, where we had the electrician out to install a new outlet in the yard (and a number of other small projects), and then the irrigation team came out and installed our new water feature. It gives us the nice sound of flowing water when we have the door to the deck open, and the birds have fairly quickly started using it as a watering source. The raccoons, of course, quickly explored it for some play and a quick dip or two, but I am looking forward to seeing what else decides to take advantage of reliable water here. I did add a security camera to watch it — Eufy has an interesting $99 solar powered job that so far seems to be working well, even in a spot (as much of our property is) with limited direct sun. The mourning doves and Stellar’s Jays will set it off, but the smaller birds generally don’t.

While it wasn’t on the original plan, the more I thought about it, since we were doing other work finishing up the irrigation upgrades, was to bring in sprinklers to the bed outside my office downstairs. As you can see, the best we can say about what is (well, was) in it is that it’s green and hasn’t died. But the bushes aren’t pretty and everything in there is pretty tired.

So it all went away. coming in down here, I think, are some nice grasses, and I’ve suggested that this would be the place to put in ferns and possibly hostas, since it’s on the northern side of the house and gets limited sun.

So the irrigation folks came in and trenched in pipes and added sprinkers, and my landscapers came and stripped it bare. They’ll be back soon to plant it and a few final plants we had planned, including a couple replacements for things that didn’t make survive the summer (sigh. It happens).

And once this is done… I do think the work on the property landscaping is done except for ongoing maintenance. The irrigation system was about 15 years old and needed more work than originally expected, but I now think it’ll mostly be maintenance free for the next decade, and we ended up ripping out a lot of older, tired stuff that didn’t really do much more than being green — the driveway was lined with juniper bushes that were overgrown and now really pretty, and the front yard with roses that — while I absolutely love roses — don’t do all that well here and are an ongoing maintenance chore to keep the mildew at bar. Juniper, along with Agapanthus, are things that I look at and see “bland corporate low maintenance” — my landscaper described the juniper as “very 90’s” and he’s right.

I’ve tried to replant with things that are more “productive” in some way, either flowering or creating some kind of fruit or berry. We’ve brought in 45 azaleas, a few camelias, a bunch of barberry and peonies, and had one bed at the front of the house planted in lavender, all of which have done pretty well, but will take another year or so to really start showing off. I expect next spring to look really nice.

One final project for the landscapers before we wind it down for the year: I’ve ordered 450 bulbs, daffodils and tulips, and they’ll come in and scatter them among the azaleas along the driveway and plant them for me, and hopefully, next spring will be amazing. And hopefully, they’ll naturalize for future years.

The other big project we did this year was the fence and veggie garden area, and that turned out great, also, where we went from a failing wire fence to this really nice cedar that I think really adds to the look of the property. Laurie’s had good results from the tomatoes and other things in there and is happy with things this year.

There is one other area where I’ve considered adding one more sprinkler to cover and then re-plant, but at this point, I’m not worrying about it until spring, if ever.

But beyond that, barring major problems or surprises, we don’t really have any house projects we’re considering.

Free Prints to Subscribers

Anyone who’s interested in a free 8x10 print of one of my images si welcome to it. All you need to do is check out the images in one of the four portfolio galleries on my photography page, and then send me an email with the request, including the title of the image (or URL to the image), your name and a mailing address. My only requirement is that the email the request comes from must be a subscriber to 6FPS when I get the request. I will mail these out at no charge worldwide for any request I get during November, as quickly as I can make the prints and get them packaged up.

And with that, see you next issue!

If I had to Stop Using Apple

It’s fall, which means Apple just had their annual event where they announced the new iPhone. The new iPhone 15 has some interesting improvements, but the only one I’d consider compelling is the new 5X zoom, and I don’t want to spend the money to carry around the huge Pro model. I’ve threatened for years to stop upgrading my iPhone every year, but this is the year I’ve actually decided to stick with my current model — the iPhone 14 Pro. As this new pentaprism moves to the lower end units in a year or so, you can bet I’ll bring pick upan upgrade, but this is a good year to just sit tight.

I did, however, upgrade my watch, from an 8 to a 9, because I’ve found I use and depend on it a lot for various small things — I use notifications a lot, and always have timers going, it seems.

The Apple Watch 9 is literally impossible for me to tell from my 8. Laurie also upgraded her watch (from a 4 with a failing battery), and where for me the big differences are in WatchOS 10, she’s found a huge improvement in how the watch works from her older model.

This is an important thing to keep in mind when reading most reviews — most reviewers are upgrading year to year, and seeing the changes from last year’s model, so they’re typically incremental. Most users, however, don’t do that, and when upgrading from a few years back, the changes can be quite significant. So when reviewers talk about boring upgrades, they’re almost always saying more about themselves than about the actual product.

WatchOS 10, unfortunately, has been flakey for me — and for others. I’ve been seeing crashes multiple times a day where it reboots on me. Mostly annoying, but it’s been a while since I’ve lived with a flakey device. Bad enough that a couple of days ago I decided to try the 10.1 public beta, which hasn’t completely fixed things, but I’m only crashing 2-3 times a day instead of 6+. This has the feel of the old-timey “weird crashes, reset you PRAM three times” on the mac days to me. Since the crash rate dropped a lot with the 10.1 beta, I’m confident this will get sorted out, and now, it’s only minor annoying.

I’m now running Sonoma on the Macs with no issues, but just starting to play with features. I want to try stage manager again, see if the updates make it work better for me. And I’m enjoying the widgets; it’s nice adding my calendar to my desktop along with a couple of other things, but I think the widgets make more sense if you’re on a larger screen than on a laptop. Still, overall, the updates this year seem solid and nice steps forward.

This is the time of year where I always take a look at my Apple gear and think about what changes I might want to make. I have done some updates recently, with the addition of the Mac Studio here in the office and moving the laptop upstairs.

What do I have?

As someone who’s been a Mac user since the Mac 512K and who worked for Apple for 17+ years, it shouldn’t be a surprise that my gear is Apple-centric.

My office has a Mac Studio (M2), with a Studio Display on it. It also has a nice LG 4K secondary monitor. Also here in the office are a HomePod mini and a pair of AirPods Max for all those video meetings I never do any more.

Upstairs I have my laptop, a first generation 14” MacBook Pro. Out in the shop I have a full-sized HomePod and an older WIFI-only iPad. And my daily carry is my iPhone 14 Pro and a 2nd generation pair of AirPods pro.

If I were to make any changes to this setup, it’d be to replace the MacBook Pro with a Macbook Air. With the power and performace of all of the laptops today, I’ll got for lighter over power. That said, I have no intention of replacing the laptop for another year or two, at least. It’s a good, solid machine.

And yes, I have purged all Intel devices from my gear. Having lived through multiple architecture changes with Apple over the years (68K to PowerPC, PowerPC to Intel, and now Intel to Apple ARM) I’m just a lot happier when everything is on the same architectural base and I don’t have to worry about compatibility issues. Having said that, though: the shift from Intel was absolutely painless and invisible and I’m loving how well Apple has figured out how to do this. The first two weren’t nearly this smooth…

What Could I do Without?

A fun thought exercise is to try to figure out what I could do without. It forces me to consider just how important each piece is in my life.

The easy answer would be the HomePods. I rarely use either, and often in the shop I just play things off the phone and forget to connect to it at all. I could happily live without the Airpods Max — the reason I have it is because I just didn’t like the first generation Airpod earbuds, but I gave the 2nd generation airpods a try, and while I still futz with the fit at times, I prefer them to the headphones. They live upstairs, and yes, I happily will keep a downstairs gear set and an upstairs gear set to avoid having to go chase something constantly.

But this is kind of cheating. Of the core set of devices: Desktop, Laptop, iPad, iPhone and Watch, if I had to do without one, which would it be?

That question is tough. I think a lot of folks would say the watch, but it solves a lot of little, convenient things for me. And since the watch is tethered to the iPhone, I can’t get rid of it. Honestly, probably the easiest shift for me would be to shift my phone to Android, if it weren’t for the watch. Although, to be honest, the idea of going to an Android phone makes me twinge.

The iPad? Maybe, but it’s a really great device for carrying around or sitting on the couch in the evening consuming content (creating content on the iPad and I simply don’t get along, and boy, have I tried). I’d really hate having to shift that casual consumption back to a Mac.

So if I had to drop one device from my collection, it’d be the one I added within the last few months, the Mac Studio desktop. I did live with “just” the laptop until earlier this year, and I could go back to that, reluctantly. Having both an office device and a portable device is a luxury, but it’s a nice quality of life improvement that I find quite nice.

If I were only using one Mac and I had to answer this question, I’d tell you to go away. Although to be honest, probably the least painful change would be to shift from the Mac to a windows box at this point. Would I do that, or would I do away with the iPad?

Honestly, not sure. I’d probably lean towards the iPad, but then, I’d really really want to shift to the MacBook Air as my Mac, given the weight reduction.

But no, it’d be really hard to convince me to give up any of the core devices I have, not after decades of building my life and workflows around them….

For Your Consideration

Birds and Birding

Photography

Science and Technology

Interesting Stuff



Chuq

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (chuqvr@gmail.com).

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