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Website News

AI or not AI

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I’ve been resisting AI up until very recently. At this point I can no longer ignore it. It’s everywhere and in everything. I have a very automated home with smart things everywhere. At first (and sometimes still) AI actually made some devices “dumber”. I’d request things that once worked fine, such as “Hey Google, turn on panty lights” and I’d get a response back saying “I’m sorry, I can’t do that”, when it always worked before when I didn’t have AI enabled. At this point it’s no longer so bad. Now it at least tries, and if it can’t do something it will ask for more details rather that flatly reject the request.

It’s scary, at least to me, how quickly it’s advancing too. I’m using AI in Google Fit / FitBit now for my daily walks and exercise, and once or twice a day it summarizes my daily activity, suggests little changes to my routine, and tells me how I’m doing. It’ll even often refer back to things and details I previously provided in my feedback. I don’t respond to it often, but occasionally it’ll ask me a question and I’ll reply to it just to see how it responds. It’s getting closer and closer to sounding like there’s a human on the other end acting as my health and fitness coach. Creepy.

A lot of the apps I use (probably more than I think) use AI constantly now, especially Amazon, many other shopping apps, and photo apps. Even the camera in my S26 uses it. My FitBit reminds me several times a day when I forget to get up and move, to walk at least 250 steps per hour. How the heck am I supposed to watch a 90-minute or 1-hour movie?! And what if I were in a theater?

Actually, I haven’t been to a theater since before COVID. During and after that time I upgraded most of our TVs to bigger and better versions, and created a pretty comfy theater experience right here at home, and it has served us pretty well thus far. I can pause it when I need a bathroom or snack break, and rewind when I miss something or need some clarification. Can’t do that at a theater. The only things we miss are the crowd reactions and the movie theater popcorn. But I think I recently resolved the latter with the popcorn shown in the photo above. We tried several different popcorn poppers over the years as well as several types of pre-popped popcorn, but we’ve found that this Palo seems to be the closest we’ve tasted yet. It’s even as messy as authentic theater buttered popcorn. We love it. It’s probably (definitely) not the healthiest popcorn option, but mmm is it good! We save it for the blockbuster movies.

The navigation app I use in our car uses AI for just about everything now too. To report traffic issues, road work, or police taking radar you used to click an icon, then get a list of other icons, and you’d click the one most appropriate to the issue you’re reporting. Now you just click a generic icon and AI asks you to explain the issue as you drive. You explain it in as much or as little detail as you want to provide, it chews on that, then explains what it understands as your request and you either confirm that it is correct, add followup information, or cancel the whole damned request in frustration. I’ve gotten used to it at this point, and it has actually become very easy and much simpler that before when I need to report a speed limit correction around town. It works well too – the AI will send the correction to a “Waze Map Editor”, which is a real person in the area, to verify the correction. Sometimes later the same day, or usually the next day I’ll get a response from a map editor either asking for a few more details (like the beginning and ending crossroads of the speed limit correction) or letting me know that they have made the correction already.

When you get a new smartphone these days everyone has to deal with AI. By default now, they even setup the POWER button to activate AI when you click it! I’m not quite to that point yet though, so that’s pretty much the very first change I make. I look up how to change the Power button back to the Power Off settings when you long-press it, and how to simply turn off the screen by clicking it, and I switch it back to that–like NORMAL. They really expect you to use AI and say “Turn off my phone” or “Power off my phone”, or pull down the Quick panel two times, then click the “Power” icon? Nope, not me. Yet.

Internet, Technology

Fiber

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Well, we’ve hopped on the fiber bandwagon. We were paying about $140/month for Spectrum cable with only internet – no TV, no phone lines, no DVR, nothing else. Earlier this year I had also returned my Spectrum router when I finally realized we had been paying an extra $10 per month just for that. We had the 1GB plan, which offers speeds of up to 1GB download and 35MB upload. The download speeds were decent, but often dipped below 500mbps probably due to our neighbors also using the same circuit. That wasn’t too bad for download speed, but for personal reasons, 35MB upload speed was quickly becoming a bottleneck.

T-Mobile Fiber was offering 2GB up AND down for $70 as part of their “Founders Club Deal”, which includes a 10-year price lock guarantee, among other things. To be honest, this deal was too good to pass up and I couldn’t wait for it to get here. A few months ago I was able to pre-order it, then it was just a matter of time before they contact me to schedule an installation date & time.

T-Mobile has been installing fiber in Kenosha from the North side to the South side for about the past year and a half. They dug up many lawns along the way installing the fiber connection boxes next to the sidewalks on the street side. Lucky us–we would up with two of those in-ground connection boxes in our lawn since we live on a corner lot. We have a box in front of our house and one on the side of our house. I wondered which box they would run our fiber from, hoping it would be the side-of-the-house box, since that one was closest to where I knew they came in with cable years ago.

On our installation day, a couple hours before the actual install time, a fiber truck came and started digging near the side-of-the-house box and ran their orange fiber line under the sidewalk and left a roll of fiber there next to the sidewalk. When the actual installer arrived later the same day, I gave him a walk-through and showed him where my router needs to go and where he needs to bring the line into the house. I also requested that he put the router in Bridge mode so I can use my own router, which was already configured for all of my (100+) devices and it’s actually a newer router than what T-Fiber provides. They give you a Wifi 6 router built into their ONT. My router is a Wifi 7. I purchased it when I returned Spectrum’s router to them to save the extra $10/month. T-Fiber doesn’t charge for their router, it’s all built into the ONT device they provide, and it’s a decent router, but T-Fiber provides very limited access to their router–I found that devices couldn’t even be renamed in the admin to identify them on the network easily. I need Bridge mode enabled to avoid the usual issues whenever you try to use two routers on one network. You basically have two of everything – two Wifi routers, two DHCP servers, two firewalls, etc. It can get pretty complicated trying to get everything to work that way. In bridge mode all of those features are disabled and bypassed. The internet signal passes straight through the ONT and into my own router.

As it turned out, the installation tech couldn’t enable Bridge mode, and neither could the tech at T-Fiber Support who he talked to. He told me I had to call support and request it myself, then they’ll enable it. I did this immediately after confirming my installation was successful and my speed test results were good for 2GB symmetrical internet service. I was told by support that they would put in the request and that someone will be contacting me within 24-48 hours. I assumed it might flip to Bridge mode at any time, so I kept an eye on the network during this time. I had a few issues, especially with having Double NATs, but this was expected based on my research into using your own router for Fiber.

The next day a T-Fiber Support Tech called me, but only to confirm that I wanted Bridge mode activated and that I would be using my own router from then on. I confirmed and he said he initiate the request and it’ll take up to 24 hours to complete, but it’s usually completed well before that time. I didn’t quite understand why this wasn’t done the first time I called, but it seems like there’s a second level of service that a ticket has to go through for Bridge mode, so my ticket had to get to that second team, then, after confirmation, the ticket can be processed. Anyway, at 5:30am the following morning (two days after the install) Bridge mode finally activated, so I rebooted my router and everything came back online as expected and my issues with have two routers were gone.

Everything is working great now, and they even came out exactly 1 week after the install and buried the orange fiber cable going from under the sidewalk to our house. They had estimated 10 days to bury the cable, so 7 days was even better. They did a nice job too, and didn’t destroy much of our lawn. They dug a thin trench, but only folded the top lawn over, then placed it back where it was afterward, leaving very little sign that it had been dug up at all.

All in all we’re very happy with our fiber so far, and having full control of my router is something I’m very relieved about. We had Spectrum for many years, and i even remember posting on my blog about them, especially when we kept killing hard drives in our DVRs. I think we went through 3 or 4 of them. I’d have to go back and read my old posts to be sure. That was back around 2004…wow, over 20 years ago now. My blog and really old. Today we have only internet service, and we subscribe to YouTube TV for TV and DVR services. No DVR except YouTube TV’s cloud DVR, which works great for us. No more landlines or FAX machines either, but internet. My, how things change. Now I have to start pulling out all of the old cable coax that runs to all the rooms in the house. It’s useless now. I think I still have all the wiring hanging from the ceiling in the basement for the old telephones too. Time to clean up.

Family News

Catching up

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A lot has happened since I last posted here, which was in December of 2023. And by a lot I don’t only mean with me, I mean with everything, including my family, friends, the country and even the world. So much so for the latter that I’m pretty reluctant to post ANYTHING these days.

The whole world has gone AI in an instant, but that’s only part of it. Everything has become so different, free speech has become compromised, and our country has become so screwed up. I’ve never seen things this bad before. Our new government seems “upside-down” now, somehow, and I can’t even comprehend how it keeps getting worse and worse and how we somehow let it continue like there’s no way to stop it.

That’s all I’ll say though, I’ve probably said too much already. I don’t get political at all, so even writing just that bothers the hell out of me, and I’ll probably delete it, or this entire post, before you know it.

That’s primarily why I haven’t posted in a couple years. Lord knows I have the time to, having lost my job in May of last year. At that time I was 61 and couldn’t start Social Security yet. I had planned on working until at least 62 so I could go on Social Security after that and retire with my 401k intact. Being forced out at 61 was a real kick in the teeth and I’m too old to start my career all over again. So we struggled for a year and I ended up taking from my 401k and DoorDashing until my Social Security could finally start.

We’re in a little better shape now, having paid off a majority of our debt, and I’m finally collecting social security. Sandy has had another surgery on her foot (this is the second attempt to repair it, the first one was unsuccessful) and is in outpatient therapy now to get better but she’s not to the point of weight-bearing on it yet.

Sandy’s brother Rick has made much progress since his last fall when he was living up North in Wisconsin Rapids, which nearly killed him. He’s completely sober now, since March, and he has moved back to Kenosha so we can help him. He was in a rehab facility for a few months and just recently moved into his own apartment in Lakeside Towers here in Kenosha. He really likes it down there. Right on the lake with an awesome view.

I’ll be back with more soon.