It happened once before, an unusually acrid smell and smoke wafting out the door that leads to our small, centrally located utility room; the one that holds the heat exchange system, water heater, alarm system, door bell, vacuum cleaner, and IKEA shelves holding boxes and piles of shoes, boots, winter hats, sewing machine and notions, light bulbs, extension cords, spare cushions, fabric ….
Just outside the door to the utility room is the security system smoke alarm. It makes a phone call to a light bulb in Central Alarm headquarters and someone there calls the house (Are you okay? What is your security code?), or the person calls the fire department and they also call us, or all of them call us.
The alarm went off. We ran towards the noise and immediately noticed the smoke coming out from the utility room. We ventured inside fearful of flames. There was just acrid smoke coming from an electronic control box of the heat exchange system. The unit was fried.
A heat exchange system has two parts. A large unit inside and another large unit outside and plumbing in between that circulates a heat-cold retaining fluid. If it runs one way, it takes heat out of the house. If it runs the other way, it brings heat into the house. It was an old system that probably dated back to when the house was built, 1978.
We replaced the entire system. We even paid for the rental of a crane to hoist the outdoor unit over the concrete block wall that serves as its enclosure. The gate was too narrow.
In the nine some years since, we have enjoyed our new system. It is much quieter than the old. It's still pretty noisy, but that old system, each time it turned on, made an exploding noise like someone hit the metal ducts with a sledge hammer.
Friday a week ago: déjà vu. Acrid smoke smelling like burnt rubber poured out from the utility room. Disturbingly enough it did not trigger any smoke alarm. Fortunately, it was early morning when Shari and I are most active. Shari noticed it and grabbed me as I returned from walking Nazar the Wonder Dog. We were frantic. The water heater was smoking.
I rushed outside to the circuit breaker box, realized I needed reading glasses to decipher the electrician's handwritten labels, rushed back, couldn't identify the water heater circuit, and started guessing. I never did find it, but the smoke did stop. The stench lingered for days, but it stopped smoking.
I unscrewed the panels that cover the two heating elements, the one above with sensors and controls and the one below. It was the one above. It fried. The tank itself had failed. Probably the slight alkalinity of our Tucson water had eaten through the sheet metal and water had leaked into the surrounding insulating layer and filled it up all the way to the control box electronics which shorted and smoked and fizzled until it fried itself out. (And, thank God, tripped the circuit breaker. I just hadn't noticed.)
The good news was that July means summer in the Old Pueblo. This time of year, cold tap water isn't. It's quite tepid. So cold water showers are actually quite pleasant and refreshing.
The water heater replacement took place four days later. It took Jeff and Tracy six hours.
See, we have a solar panel on the roof that heats another circulating, heat absorbing fluid that is piped down into the utility room through a heat-exchange manifold that heats water circulating out from the water heater tank. When the sun is out, the water heater doesn't need to fire its electric heating elements. The solar system takes over.
A Borg. "Resistance is futile."
New water heater. "Vacation mode is futile."
What the solar-assist system means from an installation perspective is a lot of copper tubing. Our water heater doesn't look just like a water heater. It looks like a water heater that has been absorbed into the Borg collective. It has copper pipes all over the top — water out and back into the tank, gel from and back to the solar panel on the roof — the copper-clad heat exchange manifold itself, and the small pump and control panel that governs the solar gel circulation.
We kept the front door open so Jeff and Tracy could do their work and gather tools more easily. The indoor thermometer read ninety degrees.
They fabricated new copper piping to replace the old. The soldering produced enough smoke to trigger the smoke alarm. We got calls from both the fire department and Central Alarm. Well, at least we knew the alarm system worked.
After six hours of installation, Jeff showed us how the touch screen worked on the solar control box. To put it in vacation mode, tap up here, see the icon appear there, then tap down there three times (I kid you not) and the vacation mode icon appears here and you touch there to confirm. To turn off vacation mode, you do the same in reverse. His fingers seemingly raced over the panel like a teenager's two thumbs texting on a smart phone. After six hours of increasing owners' heat exhaustion, we didn't really need to know vacation mode.
We were more interested at looking at Tracy's and Jeff's smart phones. While Jeff was writing up the bill, Shari showed Tracy her paintings in the living room. Turned out Tracy was an artist by training and avocation and a plumber only by necessity. He pulled out his smart phone. Turned out Jeff also painted. He pulled out his smart phone. Both showed us photos of their paintings. They were not only good, their styles were very original.
Evenings are warm, the garden is pleasant, and we can pick up our Wi-Fi signal in the garden. For years I have been wondering about watching video outdoors -- like the drive-in movies of long ago.
We finally did it. In these times of social distancing, we can invite a couple over and entertain outdoors and watch the telly, all the while keeping a discrete distance.
For my birthday, Shari and I mailed some of our saliva to be tested. Not for rabies. DNA.
We got our results earlier this week. They were a bit of a let-down. It turns out we are from Africa and we are related to people all over Europe, the Near East, and North Africa. That's not exactly a mind-numbing revelation.
Tom's genetic material traced to its relatives going back ten generations.
I was hoping for evidence that I was Magyar and connected to folk in central and eastern Asia. In my Magyar pride, I would claim not to be Indo-European. The Magyar language is unrelated to any Indo-European language. It turns out language has precious little to do with genes. My central Asian connection, at least for the last ten generations or so, is a mere 1.3%.
I have a south Asian connection in India. I can only speculate that a Gypsy slipped somewhere into the bloodline.
My mothers' line (mitochondrial DNA, hapgroup H10h) is most common among the Tuaregs in the south of Libya, then with folks in Galicia, Wales and Spain (presumably Celts?) before we get to 39% of Hungarians. Now Mum is from a rural area in the Great Plains of Hungary, an area that is pretty much homogeneous ethnic Hungarian (whatever that means). I would expect lots of connections with central Asians and Finno-Ugric speaking peoples, plus Turks who, like the Gypsy, slipped into the bloodline. The Turks occupied Hungary for several centuries, so they have a better claim to have mixed in their DNA than the poor Gypsy. But her mitochondrial DNA is prevalent in only about twenty percent of the folks in central Asia and Turkey.
By comparison, Shari's mothers' line is haplogroup H1bm. Lots of Tuaregs in southern Libya are in that group, about sixty-one percent of Tuaregs. The group is also prominent among the Basques (27%), Portuguese (25%), Cantabrians in northern Spain (24%), and Andalucians in southern Spain (19%). That's a major connection with the Iberian peninsula that may account for Shari's ability to tan in the sun. Her mothers' line is prominent among 14% of Volga-Ural-Finno-Ugric folks (compared to my own mothers' line that is shared with 22% of such folks). Go figure. We can each claim Finno-Ugric ancestry.
My fathers' line (Y-DNA, haplogroup E-V13) is most prevalent among Albanians (one-third), then Romanians, Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbs. My Dad is turning over in his grave. His family hails from what was northern Hungary, now Slovakia, which historically is a mixture of peoples, languages and ethnicity. He prided himself on being Hungarian (turns out, only a 9% connection) with occasional Slovak (8%), German (only 4%), and Italian (5%) ancestry. The good news for some of Dad's anger arising from Hungarian history, his haplogroup has no connection with anyone in Britain.
Mum's, Dad's and Shari's Mum's lines have representatives in French Guiana in South America, but not Dutch Suriname or British Guyana. I wonder if taking DNA tests is more common in French Guiana than Dutch Suriname or British Guyana.
Shari had to explain to me that she doesn't have a fathers' line, something to do with X and Y chromosomes, and that each person takes only some of the genetic material available from the parents' pools. Therefore, there can be significant variations between siblings of the same parents. So my report is most interesting when it ascribes the origins of my personal genetic material, going back about ten generations, about three hundred years. That's where the Indian gypsy and a sliver of Caucasian show up, as well as — gasp — British. It seems that some 17.6% of my DNA is shared with people who lived in various parts of Britain over the last three centuries. Dad just turned in his grave again.
Shari's genetic material traced to its relatives going back ten generations.
Shari's relatives would be the envy of an Australian immigrant schoolboy. They are virtually all in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. For this son of Hungarian immigrants attending a Jesuit school crammed with English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish boys, Shari's pedigree matches that dominant culture ethnicity. She would blend right in. Just like "Rees" or even "James" blends in the Anglo world much better than "Palotas."
I wish I had saved some spittle from Mum and Dad to see how much those results would mirror mine. Even more interesting would be to compare DNA results from my niece and nephew born of my Hungarian brother and his Chinese wife. I wonder if that mothers' line has any connection with the Tuaregs, or the fellow in French Guiana who ordered a DNA test.
To cite a trite cliché, the world is getting smaller. What is remarkably odd in these DNA reports is the superimposition of genetic distribution onto a map showing today's political boundaries. It's like Mexican restaurants in Hungary, or the largest community of Japanese (in Brazil) outside of Japan. It's all mixed up. Ethnicity doesn't really correlate with much of anything political or national. We may have our languages, cultures, and political boundaries (and the Hair Product in Chief's wall), but the notion of ethnicity really has no meaning. The notion of nationalism is equally arbitrary. The concept of different modern human races is patently absurd. Folks, we all came out of Africa and adapted. That is the mind-numbing revelation. We are all related.
. . . of Hardware and Software to make a home movie.
Scenes from a movie about Thomas Edison (Edison, the Man, 1940) come to mind. Spencer Tracy, playing the role, keeps trying different materials to serve as the filament for his electric light bulb. After numerous failed attempts, he hits upon carbon and the commercially viable electric light bulb is patented.
Home video editing is like that, only without the commercial viability or the patent.
Depending upon the medium — a computer file resident on a hard drive, a Blu-ray disk, or a regular or high definition DVD disk — it takes experimenting with different combinations of hardware, software, and techniques to produce a viable product.
I think video editing is a wonderful expression of creativity. But then, it is my hobby. I would not want to discourage anyone from the hobby. Editing home videos is a form of storing and sharing memories and, hey, who isn't into a bit of self-indulgence? But in my experience, it is also a frustrating process of trial and error. I suppose that also is a form of creativity. Like Edison and his filaments, I was forced to think up different trials of computers, programs, and settings to hit upon a satisfactory result.
I began editing video in the late 20th Century using multiple video-tape recorders and a switch box. It's a process called linear editing and it is not only frustrating, it's not very rewarding because with each copy, the picture quality gets worse. With the advent of affordable, consumer non-linear editing, I took the plunge. I am on my fourth system and, as it turns out, in order to share videos taken in Europe this September, I need each of the previous three.
A Simple Video File that Plays on Television
For our own use, I store video files on an external hard drive that hooks up to a new Roku box via a USB cable. My tiny four terabyte drive is only half full and replaces some fifty DVD boxes. But I did have to buy the new Roku box, and it took several tries with different file formats on my iMac before I discovered the one that the Roku could read. It's got to be in H264. The lesson here is that if you are using a Mac, you live in a small world.
Then the problem was jerky playback. What looked perfectly fine on the Mac was intolerably jerky on anything else. I won't go through the details, in large part because there were so many frustrations that I have shoved the memories into oblivion. All I remember is what worked.
First, edit the raw clips in Final Cut X in their native format. In my case, I am using a high definition, 1920x1080 pixel video camera that shoots 60 frames per second. I am rounding up. Owing to accidents of cathode ray televisions, it's actually 59.94 fps, which is double the standard NTSC 29.97 fps. Web search "frames per second" and your head will spin looking for rhyme or reason. There are more settings than you can imagine in a nightmare. At any rate, FC-X and its extra-price "Compressor" software which is supposedly "professional" and gives the user even more control over output (it doesn't) is incapable of producing a movie file that does not jerk on my television.
Second, copy the edited file into MyDVD (a hybrid Roxio-Apple program) and have it rendered into a high definition DVD. Why MyDVD? Because Toast Titanium, the much touted standard for playing, copying and authoring CD, DVD and now Blu-rays on Macs, particularly important because Steve Jobs and Apple refused to support Blu-ray (it had to do with patent royalties), does not work. Another lesson: do not use Toast Titanium for anything other than copying.
Third, strip the actual movie file from the DVD image (an "ISO" folder), now in television-legible 29.97 fps, and import it back into FC-X.
Fourth, render the imported DVD file from the ISO folder because without the DVD envelope, no Roku box or pretty much anything else will read it. By stroke of good fortune, FC-X does. It takes several agonizing minutes to import, then more time to export (the term used now is "share") the .mov file (in H264, naturally).
Oh, I forgot something. While Toast would not work at all, MyDVD has the curious habit of shifting the sound track almost two seconds ahead of the video. Like, you hear the words from my mouth one second, then my mouth moves the next. Unacceptable. The fix? Start each edit with two seconds of test frames and loud noise, then two seconds of blank video and audio. When the file is imported back into FC-X for the final rendering, detach the audio and, using the test frames, noise, and blank, shift the audio track into place.
The end product is high definition video on my television. It's quite satisfying to watch.
A High Definition Silver Platter
Shari wants to send copies to her Mum. Of course, I am flattered with any audience. Shari's Mum doesn't have a new Roku box with a USB port, but she does have a Blu-ray player. I am scared because I know the frustrations of authoring and burning silver platters are even greater than just producing a viable video file. Plus, it takes several hours for the computer to render and burn a disk, so the frustration of each trial and error is magnified.
Apple, courtesy of Steve Jobs, does not support Blu-ray. Which is why I have MyDVD and Toast. Both have facilities for authoring Blu-ray and high definition DVD (called "AVCHD" DVD) discs. Like a gullible fool, I fiddled around setting up menus and chapter markers for scenes on each program. The time was wasted. Toast would hum along for several hours then, when its little ticker-tape reader stated it was 99% done, it froze and delivered the always assuring dialogue box that reads something like "unknown error 3640137. Toast must shut down." MyDVD would hum along for several hours and produce a wonderful disc — with the audio track almost two seconds off-kilter. Unacceptable.
I thought of using my Windows laptop. There are two "big" video editing programs for consumers: Final Cut on Macs and Premiere on Windows. I also have Premiere. I had purchased it before my iMac and FC-X, only to be frustrated trying to use Premiere. So I switched back to Macs. Now came the time for Premiere and Windows glory. I copied the end product files from my iMac onto a thumb drive and loaded them onto my laptop and into Premiere. I even figured out menus and chapter markers for scenes. First I produced high definition DVD's, the AVCHD variety. Lo and behold, success!
Blank DVD's are much cheaper than blank Blu-rays. Trouble is, a DVD is good for 4.7 gigabytes compared to 23 gigabytes for a Blu-ray. My product took six DVD's, about twenty-five minutes of video each. I progressed to Blu-ray. I burned two separate Blu-rays and got perfect results, except for the photo of Shari I used for one of the menus. No worries. I had finally figured out how to produce a Blu-ray.
A Regular Definition Silver Platter
Shari wants to send copies to her Aunt. Of course, I am flattered with
any audience. Shari's Aunt has only a regular television and a regular DVD player. That adds another complexity: reducing wide screen, high definition, 16:9 aspect video to the old standard resolution, 4:3 aspect video.
I tried the iMac. FC-X hummed along for several hours and produced a disk with chopped off menus and images. It's what low resolution TV broadcasters do to wide screen movies: mutilate them. MyDVD hummed along for several hours and produced a good looking disk with the audio track almost two seconds off kilter. Unacceptable. Toast hummed along for several hours and choked. It delivered an assuring dialogue box stating that the last
instruction failed because it had to open too many files. Say what? It had
successfully processed, interpreted, de-shrunk, sampled, re-shrunk and multiplexed some three hours of video, that's over 22 billion
pixels plus audio, and it got hung up opening thirty files? Premiere hummed along for several hours then choked. It just froze.
After aborting a couple of times, I thought to myself, "Maybe it needs a lot of
time." I left it on overnight. It was at 23% when I went to bed. It was
at 23% when I woke up.
Shari suggested taking my files to a commercial place to have it authored and burned onto DVD. My ego took that as a personal affront. She intended only to help, but I would not give in.
After some hours, I thought to myself, "What about the old Mac?" I bought the Mac G-5 in 2006 because the custom built PC that I had bought specifically for video editing a couple of years earlier was incapable of burning a DVD without skips. Its connection between computer and burner was too slow. The G-5, like its Windows-based predecessor, is a desktop. Does anyone remember desktop computers? They are the ones so big and so heavy that you had to put them on the floor. They came with cathode ray monitors.
The G-5 version of Final Cut had never failed me editing. Its version of MyDVD worked seamlessly because, back a decade ago, Apple actually supported and integrated the then current video technology.
I experimented. I converted one of my end-product files to the DV format. Thank goodness, Final Cut on the G-5 read the files. I loaded all the files on the G-5 and Final Cut. The old ways came back, like riding a bicycle. I quickly loaded a timeline with about half the files, inserted chapter markers, rendered it, imported it into MyDVD, then designed menus. The G-5 hummed along for three hours and produced a DVD that worked perfectly.
My smart phone died a month ago on Naxos. It just crashed. Attempts to reboot it were hopeless. Only wearing out the battery stopped it from a hopeless and continuous reboot cycle. I used Shari's iPad to research the web. The technical term for my problem was "brick". That is, my smart phone was as useful as a brick; or a paperweight.
Occasionally it did boot up so I managed to do a factory reset. That's when you wipe out all your data and the Android operating system is re-installed. It seemed to work, but then it crashed again and the reboot never again worked. I figured it was a hardware problem that had to be fixed back home.
We made it back to Tucson and I looked up smart phone repairs. I decided to use a local outfit called "Quick Fix". Almost two weeks later and me having to call Trevor almost every day, he gave up. First they blamed the battery. A new battery did nothing. Then they blamed software and Trevor was their software man, a very busy software man. Hence the need to call him regularly. I had to remind him that I already did a "factory reset" with no beneficial effect. I asked him to swap out hardware parts to see if that was the problem. He insisted upon re-installing the operating system anyway, then admitted he had no access to the Verizon version of Google Android so he gave up. Neither Quick nor Fix.
This morning I took my "brick" to Verizon, not a Verizon franchise, but the Verizon-owned store itself where we bought my top-of-the-line Motorola Droid 2 for $624 less than two years ago. They are very helpful in that store. Andrew fiddled with my phone and concluded it was a software problem. We explored options of replacing my "brick" with an upgrade. Andrew spent a good fifteen minutes on the Verizon website looking for good deals. Have you ever tried to
price smart phone service off a website? It's about as user-friendly as
interpreting a phone company invoice. His conclusion was that I was looking at $500-$800 for a comparable phone after every discount that Verizon corporate permitted him.
What about just getting my "brick" fixed? Andrew didn't recommend sending it back to the factory, and I didn't ask why. His discouragement was enough. "Got any recommendations locally to get it fixed?" Andrew gave me three: All Mobile Matters (a local place inside Tucson Mall) and the national chains Best Buy Geeks and Batteries Plus Bulbs. Each one, Andrew assured me, was certified to reformat my phone and reinstall the Verizon version of Google Android.
Among the last photos my Droid 2 took on Naxos before its motherboard failed. It now serves as my wallpaper.
The young man at All Mobile Matters scoffed at the idea of doing any software work. They only replace broken displays. Ditto for the Geeks at Best Buy. Nobody does software, she said. Ditto for Batteries Plus Bulbs, but the manager did call Gamers Warehouse and recommended that I try them.
I figured Gamers Warehouse was my last hope before returning to the Verizon store with Shari to pick out a new iPhone. The business name did not inspire much confidence and its Tucson Mall location is hidden on the second floor behind Dillard's in a corridor where no one goes. But it had a sign advertising smart phone repairs, and its window display consisted of a pile of many hundreds of discarded, disemboweled smart phones.
All this time, my "brick" kept trying to reboot and failing. The guy at Gamers Warehouse saw the pathetic reboot recycle, heard me explain that I had done a "factory reset" myself, and quickly concluded "motherboard". He explained that the labor for anyone to reformat and reinstall would be expensive, but a new motherboard would cost $112 including his labor. Bargain.
"Wait a minute, I may have one in back." He reappeared with an open Droid and explained he had cannibalized it for the camera. Its motherboard would fit just fine. I didn't ask questions.
An hour and a half later, I returned and the phone has been working ever since. I have new found respect for gamers. I also have a restored confidence in my own hunch, having done the factory reset and the damned thing still crashed, that it was a hardware problem.
Editing video on a computer used to be called non-linear, as distinguished from editing on film media, or even running one VCR and recording on another. Using two video tape players was how I began video editing. Non-linear means one can assemble and re-assemble an edit in any sequence. Those were the days, about a decade ago, when I plunged into editing video on a computer.
Since then, we got high definition consumer video. Time passed by my mini-DV tape camcorder, my Apple G5 computer, and the state-of-the-art Apple Final Cut editing software on which I edited probably fifty to a hundred different programs. I stopped taking video. I put off upgrading to high definition knowing that it entailed a new camera, a new computer, new editing software, a Blu-Ray drive, new DVD and Blu-Ray authoring software, and the learning curves to figure them all out.
Four months ago, my niece asked me to videotape her wedding. I took the plunge and bought a new high definition camera, the subject of an earlier blog post. Fumbling with its controls, I managed to get about an hour and a half of video. Returning home, I thought I would go back to Windows since I already had a relatively new Windows laptop. My first non-linear editing program, way back when, was Adobe Premiere on a Windows machine, so I thought I would give the current version, admittedly, the basic Elements version, a chance. That proved too frustrating, so I decided to return to Apple editing. Hence my new iMac and the current Final Cut Pro X.
Technology has changed in a decade, much to my frustration. I used to be able to assemble an edit from multiple clips in a few minutes. That was non-linear editing. Now, the powers that be at Apple have created a "magnetic" timeline which cannot be turned off. It automatically inserts, arranges and shifts clips. What used to be non-linear has reverted back to linear.
That is the state of today's software. It's too automatic. Fortunately, I found a YouTube video showing how one can fill the magnetic timeline with a slug then proceed to non-linearly assemble clips.
Edits done, I proceeded to use four different DVD authoring programs (three on the iMac and, after transferring huge files on a thumb-drive, one on my Windows laptop) and various different settings to burn DVD's in about a dozen different ways. I felt like Thomas Edison experimenting with hundreds of different materials for filaments before he came up with a working light bulb. High definition my foot. Different burns competed with each other for the most miserable picture quality, complete with pixelation and artifacts. I began to get depressed about the project and put it aside.
I thought to myself that perhaps I should just stick to a Blu-Ray product. I burned my first Blu-Ray disc and, thank goodness, the picture quality on our television was gorgeous. The thing is, we hardly ever use our Blu-Ray player. Even when we rent videos, we go for DVD instead of Blu-Ray. There are two reasons. First, we only have two HDMI (high definition) input plugs in the back of our television and they are used for the DirectTV dish and for AppleTV (i.e., Netflix). I tried using an HDMI splitter, but it doesn't work on our TV. I am not going to buy a new TV just to get an extra HDMI input, and reaching in back of our existing TV with a flashlight to switch connections is a pain in the neck. The second reason is that DVD quality looks very nice on our big TV, almost as good as Blu-Ray.
In my technological malaise, I thought maybe I could transfer my edits to my old Mac. After all, both machines are Apple products (although my G5 is pre-Intel chip). To cut what is already a long story a bit shorter, here is what I had to do: (i) I exported (the current terminology is "share") my edited product by converting the 1080x1920 resolution to 720x480 DV, being careful to not to chose the anamorphic version. Anamorphic was my first attempt and the image was squashed a bit. I hate squashed video images. (ii) Because a 64 Gbyte thumb drive that works on a new iMac cannot be read by my old G5, I copied the humongous file onto my Windows laptop. This was the key to my success. (iii) I reformatted the thumb drive to the old Windows NTFS format, then copied the humongous file back onto the thumb drive. (iv) I loaded the file onto my old G5. Oddly enough, it worked.
Now for the second punchline. I have already exposed the meaning of the "Non-Linear" title to this post. The other theme to this story is the value of patience. It takes a lot of time to compress a video file so it fits onto a DVD. If it is done well, it means going back and forth several times sampling the individual frames to know where pixels can be compressed. The more movement in the images, the less compression.
If you look up comparisons of DVD and Blu-Ray authoring programs on the internet, you will notice that the reviewers place considerable value on a software's ability to do it quickly. It took only about a half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes for all my previous DVD attempts to compress and burn. Every product was wretched. On my old G5 Mac and its good old iDVD software (the freebie and sophisticated DVD authoring program that is no longer supported by Apple or even capable of running on new Apple machines), it took about six hours.
The product? Very nice, thank you. One ought not sacrifice quality for time.
Jumps & Spins, the Video
The deeper technological and philosophical question is preservation. What formats and media will survive the passage of time? Over the course of a scant decade, optical media have become passé. How does one watch video nowadays? YouTube? Smart phones? What about the future? In the world of still photography, JPG and TIFF files are reasonably universal, but there is no such standardization for video. [Witness my frustration getting two video clips visible on this blog post.] How can we archive video so it can be enjoyed decades later?
We just bought two Droids, one for Shari and another for me, so that's two.
We each have our front line laptops, Shari's MacBook and Tom's new HP, so that makes four.
Then we have three tablets: two that we use each morning to wake up and play solitaire, and to keep us occupied while we have the telly on in the evening. Plus there's the virtually free Verizon tablet that we got with our new Droids. It was a package deal we could not refuse. So that makes seven.
Then I have a bad habit of hanging onto laptops that still serve a function. My old Toshiba that runs Windows 2000 (I bought it at Costco with Windows 97) and operates the old scanner that scans slides.
Does anyone remember slides? You know, film that used to thread through a camera that when processed was a positive, as opposed to a negative. The images on the roll were individually cut and framed in cardboard or, if the film processor was upscale, in plastic. Never mind. the nice young man who sold us the Droids had no idea what I was talking about either.
That's eight, although since Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 2000, I don't use it to access the web. It was also my computer of choice to create websites, but Microsoft decided not to support its own Expressions, the web design program I use. But it is a working laptop, so it counts as number eight.
Then there is my full sized Mac G something or another. It's so big it sits on the floor. It's so old it's pre-Intel processors. Just try to find anything that runs on a pre-Intel Mac. I bought this machine over a decade ago when I was editing video and burning DVD's from our 2004 tour in Eastern Turkey. The behemoth still edits video nicely, and I have no great desire to buy a current version of Final Cut. (I have Express. Apple long since has
pulled the plug on that application.) Anyway, the behemoth makes nine.
And of course, counting as we do in a decimal system, there has to be a tenth. That's the MacBook I just retired. A few years old, it fried itself because -- gasp -- I would leave it plugged in. The battery overheated, expanded, and rendered the "Superdrive" inoperable pretty much within the first year, then proceeded to damage the touchpad, hard drive and motherboard. It didn't work. So in a fit of unbridled loyalty to Apple, and considering the outrageous prices Apple charges for its products, I got it fixed. All the parts I have identified had to be replaced. Machine worked okay. Then I made the mistake of upgrading to OS El Capitan. Ask me about Apple. Go ahead, ask me.
So my MacBook is retired and I'm trying to figure out whether I can make it work running music on my stereo system.
Anyone remember stereo systems? You know, receiver, amplifier, CD player, turntable, and big speakers, all connected with stereo cables? No, I didn't think so. But I still have stuff connected to my thirty year old Bose speakers.
Now my music system originates in an iPod Touch that Apple and time have passed by. That is, it can't take the current iOS or whatever operating system runs the little beast. That means current "apps" (short for applications) can't run on my iPod Touch. Apple is the leading technology business when it comes to planned obsolescence. They are masters at it. But the iPod Touch, only about six years old, does connect to the internet. That's eleven.
I won't count another four iPods rarely used, two of which no longer work. So the number is at eleven. If you know a little about numerology, eleven is a master number. Trouble is, when it comes to all these devices, I feel more like a slave.
Oh, there's a twelfth device. Surely twelve is the number of completion. The Sumerians thoughts so. The twelfth gadget is my work laptop, the one I use to earn money so I can afford the other eleven.
My favorite new gadget? A hand-crank ice crusher. To make a good martini, the ice should be crushed.
