Nine years ago, I migrated all my local house storage from a massive Dell with Debian and software RAID, onto a tiny little Synology NAS. Well, not exactly tiny, but probably 1/3 of the volume of the Dell. It serves as a file server, Time Machine target, and destination for various rsync and other low-level backup tasks from the rest of the network. At other times, it’s run a Plex server, the Channels DVR, and…I honestly don’t remember what else I’ve experimented with here. It’s a pretty capable little box.
Technology today is flat-out amazing. When I was a kid, walking uphill through the snow to get to school, cordless phones were massive (and amplitude modulated near the broadcast band), and video recorders had wired remotes. If you could quantify it, I’d venture that today’s capabilities are 3 or 4 orders of magnitude above what we had 30 years ago.
And at some point, almost without exception, I’ve hated every piece of technology I own.
Scene: February, 1979. My fifth grade classroom. A large-for-the-time 17" or so black-and-white TV (the kind with a faint greenish tinge) sits on a cart. Everyone watching a total solar eclipse happening live in the Pacific Northwest. I don’t remember the mood in the room, but I suspect it was a mix of breathless, half-bored, and “meh.” I do remember, very clearly, learning that the next one was in 2017 and thinking how far away that seemed. And yet, resolving to see it.
I just voted, even though pundits and statisticians have proven fairly definitively that my particular vote won’t matter. My district has had a Republican congressman for 30 years and his hand-picked heir is likely to win, and I don’t live in one of the 6 states all the news organizations tell me will decide control of the Senate. I voted because it’s the right thing to do, and because if I don’t vote, I lose the moral right to complain about the idiots in power (and anyone who knows me knows I love to complain.)
One of the things I was most looking forward to with my new iPhone 5S was faster switching between applications. It seemed like my 4S always took 5-10 seconds to toggle between two programs, even simple apps. Jumping from Angry Birds to YouTube (to see what I’m doing wrong) and back again was agonizing.
Unfortunately, though the 5S is significantly faster, switching has in some ways become worse. The slowest reloads are faster, but I feel like I need full reloads more frequently. I’m convinced this is simply due to memory usage. Many applications (especially those with lots of full retina artwork) are taking the device to its RAM limits. No amount of new processor power can mask the fact that there’s just not enough memory in the device.
Pop culture, miscellaneous geeky things, rants, crazy ideas.
Jan 28, 2025 - 2200 Words -
