When I posted about climbing Elbrus in 2017 I asked the question “where next” - the literal answer to that question turned out to be Ben Nevis - but the ultimate answer (in terms of climbing big mountains) seems to have become Aconcagua, which I’ve moreorless just got back from.

Aconcagua, in the province of Mendoza in Argentina, and a stone’s throw from the border with Chile stands at 6961m. It is the highest mountain in the Americas, and the highest mountain in the world outside of the Himalayas. It is also the 2nd most prominent mountain in the world.

This is possibly one of the most disappointing tech business rants I’ve had to write because I’ve always genuinely liked Garmin as a company. Their products are generally (a) very well built and (b) work really well, it didn’t seem too much of a stretch to extend that to the company. I’ve had a load of Garmin products over the years… satnavs (including, for a time, a backup camera!), car head units with Garmin GPS built-in, a variety of sportwatches in preference to Apple Watch¹, cycle GPS and assorted accessories.

Whilst some big tech businesses are very much imploding publically in a high profile ball of flames (I’m looking at you Twitter and Ticketmaster) for so blatantly not caring about being evil, it would be easy to overlook some others who are doing exactly that, but just a bit more discretely. Except when you anger them, of course.

I could be talking about any number of tech companies and not even just generally - because more than one has behaved badly recently. Maybe I’ll write about Garmin another day because today I have my sights set on eBay.

I’ve talked in the past about my cynicism of so-called “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning” and so on.

That’s not because I doubt the technology, but because of the way it is marketed. The technology is powerful, but it is not what people think it is (or want it to be.)

Lightbulb

And then a short while ago, this Tweet¹ from @MarkStockley appeared in my timeline:

YouTube is offering me ads for Gantt charts.

After showing me 9 million Grammarly ads and me not buying Grammarly it’s decided I might not buy Grammarly, so it’s moved on to selling me the singular representation of everything wrong with modern work.

Read more

Some innovation truisms:

1. it is not uncommon to perceive innovation as the ’big bang’ introduction of high-tech solutions to hard problems or creating brand new industries;
2. most innovation is actually achieved through the incremental and continuous improvement of existing processes;
3. the big bang commonly occurs when either all opportunities to innovate have been exhausted or external factors, such as advances in technology or some fundamental shift (entropy) is introduced, and
4. anyone can be an innovator.

We’ve always done it like that

If you’ve ever wondered why something is done a certain way, or worse, uttered the immortal “we’ve always done it like that”, then opportunities for innovation are likely all around you. Just this morning I realised that the little dish used for the day’s teabags (before going en masse to the compost bin) should be situated next to the kettle (where the mug is filled) and not all the way on the other side with the condiments.

Pi-Hole should need little by way of introduction. If you know what it is, happy days. If you don’t know what it is, then read on to find out why you need one.

In summary, it’s a hardware-based traffic blocker for a network.

In technical terms, it becomes a DNS proxy for your network - all your traffic flows through it, and it cleanses out a lot of the ads and other scummy shit that you don’t want to see.

Some words and thoughts about the process of building a home office in my back garden.

Background

I’ve worked from home from time to time a fair bit in recent years, but thanks to Covid this turned in to much longer and much more frequently.

You can cope with being surrounded by house shrapnel for so long (kids’ toys, dinner things, shoes, boxes, excess furniture…) but we hit a point where it became time to do something a little bit more fit for purpose. This was to double up as not only my home office space but also a bit of a man cave / sanctuary away from the spoils of normal life. Well that was the theory, anyway.

2022 was going to be The Year. The year that I got shit done, learnt new stuff, and generally felt all fluffy and cozy about myself. That hasn’t really gone to plan.

At the start of the year, I migrated this blog to Hugo which was an initial step that as part of a larger concerted effort to get back in to doing more creative things.

This was actually a part of an even bigger thing - New Year’s Resolutions. NYR are either your thing or they’re not, but for me, they’re a thing - I’ve had a system in place over the years which has worked really well, which I have stuck to and has made a difference for me.

This article popped up with a review of the Samsung M8 Smart Monitor. The review itself seemed pretty fair, but as is reasonable for The Reg, the comments were ablaze with people slating the device, despite it being pretty likely that none of them actually has one of these. As it happens, I do, so I decided to leave a comment, which seemed to make sense to reproduce here.

My use case was pretty specific - I have a 49" LG ultrawide already (so not exactly short of screen real estate) but there are some occasions having the screen physically separate makes sense. If I’m working late then I tend to like to have something ‘on’ in the background… e.g., sports, some other low commitment event that I can flick eyes to when necessary but otherwise focus on the main display, and having something I can occasionally beam to from the main computer would be a bonus, and also connect another computer/laptop/device from time to time.

I am not a marketing expert. Or even a marketing, um, “average”. I’m not a marketing person at all.

Well not willingly. Or knowingly. Or acceptingly.

I mean, I’ve done some… sales… in my life. Bits and bobs… this and that. Made some cash along the way. Mostly through honesty and doing what I said and just delivering stuff.

But. I am a consumer. In fact, my approach to sales and marketing is almost entirely predicated on the experiences I’ve had as a victim of marketing techniques; I know full well what annoys me and so my approach to sales and marketing is mostly just endeavouring to not repeat those same mistakes and do stuff that I know would annoy me. Simplistic.