It was a busy week.
US readers are seeing this an hour earlier than usual, because of Daylight Saving Time. I’m all in favor of ending the time change, but I don’t think it’ll happen any time soon. But as long as we’ve got this semi-regular reminder, everyone should be testing their smoke detectors and changing the batteries. And diabetics, change your lancets.
Firefighting
Yeah, I was a cop, not a firefighter, but I’m still a public safety geek at heart. I’m more focused on cops but I’m interested in anything regarding public safety.
I caught a cool post on FB from Oklahoma City PD about how their Air-1 chopper helped with a wildfire south of I-44 on Monday. The concept makes perfect sense when you think about it, especially for a place like OKC.
Oklahoma in general sees a lot of wildfires, due in part to the whole “wind sweeping down the plain” thing we’ve got going on here. Winds combined with generally dry vegetation can turn a smoldering cigarette or other ember into a decent-sized fire pretty quickly. OKC has large swaths of undeveloped areas that are hard for brush trucks to reach, too. Having water-drop capability close at hand helps everyone out.
As I often do when I see a neat concept like this, I started searching to see what other police agencies use their helos this way. For starters, NYPD, Michigan State Police, and Oakland’s East Bay Regional Park District all carry Bambi Buckets in their air support units.
Just one of those cool factoids that I absorb.
Computer
The new monitor mount arrived Monday, and I spent an hour and change getting it installed Monday evening.
The wall mount isn’t quite as high as the clamp mount was, and it has different arms, so the monitors don’t go as high. That’s possibly a problem, but I’ve already imagined a workaround if I need it. Part of what makes it difficult to place is the window right in front of my desk. But I like the window, so I don’t want to block it completely.
My plan, once the computer arrived, was to shift some furniture around and put the case on a file cabinet sitting to the left of my desk. That’s how I’ve got it set up for now, but I don’t think it’s going to stay that way. For starters, I can’t see the cool lights on the fans and such. They’re facing the wrong way, and the third monitor blocks the view anyway.
I spent Thursday moving things around again. The computer moved from the file cabinet to the right side of my desk. I also moved the monitors off the wall mount and onto the stands they came with. That makes them a little higher than they are on the mount, and I’ll have maybe a little more flexibility with their location. I moved the third monitor over to the file cabinet, too. Had to buy a longer HDMI cable for that monitor though.
Setting It Up
I knew it was coming Wednesday within a two-hour window thanks to UPS tracking. When Athena started barking around 9:30, I got all excited and went out to meet the truck. The FedEx driver had two packages that were much too small to be what I was waiting for.
And she was a FedEx driver, not a UPS driver.
Big Brown showed up about ten minutes later though.
Man, but this is a big honking machine.
18” deep by 9” wide by 23” high and 31 pounds. That’s about four times what my old laptop weighs.
I also got a keyboard, which came in a box with the computer power cord and some paperwork for the freebies (Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Civilization VII). I’m much more interested in the latter than the former despite the early reviews.
I took my time unboxing and setting things up, including double-checking with Youngest Son about the likelihood of the water-cooling system already being filled. We decided that since there weren’t any warnings about filling it prior to starting the system, it was likely already filled.
The next thing was naming the system.
I try to come up with fun names for my computers. It’s not dissimilar to what I do with housing. I’ve had Homestead (the big MSI laptop) and PaperbackWriter (my HP writing machine). I’ve named several of my other machines over the years but I can’t recall them now. I think I used Westphalia for my old Toshiba. That was the ship my great-grandfather traveled on from Germany to the US in 1868.
At any rate, I had it in my head that I’d riff off of Buffett—no great surprise, I know. The first name that came to mind was Hemisphere Dancer. That phrase though is 16 letters, and you’re only allowed to use 15 characters for a computer name. At the moment, it’s HemisphereDance, but I’m thinking about changing it to HemisfereDancer at the suggestion of my favorite dance instructor. Maybe.
Files and Software and Accounts. Oh My!
This is the tedious part about setting up a new machine. You’ve got to remember so many account names and passwords—unless you use a password manager like I do.
Logging in to your browser makes it easy to transfer settings from one computer to another. It was practically instant for Firefox.
The only annoying part so far involved moving my Thunderbird files over, and that was because they were in a couple of different directories. And there were so many of them. I’ve still got most of my emails going back to 2014. And back then, I had probably 20 years of emails saved. There was some miscommunication with a computer repair shop that resulted in them formatting the hard drive prior to running a backup. I was…annoyed.
At any rate, I spent Thursday evening reading and rereading the process for finding the files. Then I copied them to my OneDrive account and waited for them to sync up.
And waited.
And waited a little longer.
Then I gave up waiting and went to bed. Friday morning I looked at it again and realized that my laptop wasn’t signed in to OneDrive.
Yep, that’ll slow things down.
As of Friday evening, I’ve got OpenTTD and Steam installed, along with Thunderbird (though I’m still playing around with getting my email properly functioning). Still to install/update: Affinity Suite, KDP Rocket, and Dragon Naturally Speaking. I’m somewhat on the fence about Dragon though, because I haven’t dictated anything in a couple of years. We’ll see.
I also installed the Spotify app and so far have been keeping it open on the HP monitor. It’s nice to be able just glance over there instead of switching tabs in the browser.
Writing
The only writing I got done this week was this blog post, but that’s no great surprise, and I wasn’t expecting to get much more than this done.
I’ve noticed though in the first few days that the keyboard feels more different than I expected. It’s a Nohi 02 with CyberpowerPC branding, and it’s the first detached keyboard I’ve used in many years. Since we moved into the RV, I think.
The key spread for the primary keys is about the same, around 11 inches. The overall width is larger though, about 13” vs 16” or so. It just feels…smaller? I think that’s the right word. The keys are larger and travel more than the ones on the MSI laptop, so I find I have to correct the bad typing posture I’ve picked up over the years.
I’m also developing carpal tunnel syndrome, I think. I’ve had some odd tingling in my hands, mostly around my index and middle fingers, and often happening at night. I’d planned on getting an ergonomic keyboard with the new machine, but decided to hold off for a bit. I’m getting an EMG test done in a few weeks to see what’s what, and I’ll make decisions once I know more.
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