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.

If you’re reading this then chances are you already well aware of the recent AI-themed issue: operator of Google-owned LaMDA, Blake Lemoine, was suspended from his job for claiming that his AI was sentient. (Well actually, he was suspended for sharing company secrets, in the form of the chat transcript.)

If you’re not up to speed, then you won’t have to look far to find the story. I first read about it on The Register.

The huge interest initially was sparked because of Google’s handling of the situation - everyone loves a little-person-vs-big-corp scenario but everyone soon got bored of that and then piled in on the actual claims - was the chatbot indeed sentient?

Quick update on this as I’ve just migrated to a new Mac. For some reason I opted to do a sort of half-half job using the Mac migration assistant which, I may write about separately, because ultimately it’s been a bit of a mission to do this.

One issue was how to get Music set up on the new Mac. The music library on the NAS is fine and nicely organised but despite the media itself being somewhere else, the Mac still relies on a file called ‘Music Library’ (by default) which is effectively a big list of everything.

I’ve used “the Mac OS” for longer than I care to admit but through many, many incarnations over the years. In the early days, you would look forward to the releases/updates of new major versions because they would bring major innovation. But over at least the last 5 major versions, I’ve updated but experienced very little in the way of new functionality that has been of any real use or interest. In most cases, it usually just becomes more irritating to use. I don’t begrudge Apple making changes for e.g., security purposes, but I couldn’t tell you one new feature over the last 10 years that has genuinely changed the way I work or made me step back and notice.

Over on the Cortex blog we have a janky-ass blog system that uses some filthy PHP and MySQL to do news article type things. I wrote it, it’s disgusting, we should do better, but it is what it is.

The plumber’s toilet, and all that.

Pending some time to actually do it properly, we wanted to polish the turd enough that it was semi-functional - and this included having in-post navigation - so that, from a post you could either jump forward or backwards to the post. Much like on this blog. Which Hugo somehow just does automagically.