As I’ve built out my home network, I’ve ended up with a hodgepodge of different machines. Various Raspberry Pi machines perform small tasks from managing 3D printers to custom DNS. A Windows machine with WSL2 provides local AI inference on an NVIDIA 3090. And a handful of other machines around the house run automation, backups, collect IoT style sensor data, and more. The challenge with this is that it can be very easy for me to forget what machine I’m working with over an SSH connection.
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Over the last couple of weeks, Texas has faced a massive heatwave and their misregulated electric grid has once again began to strain. Thankfully, this has been less of an issue than the deep freeze in early 2021. It also has presented an opportunity to owners of home storage batteries who have been able to sell energy for more than $5/kWh, sometimes netting themselves more than $100/day.
Here in Connecticut, our grid is typically in slightly better shape than Texas.
A lot has been said about the fact that Amazon has exclusive rights (with the exception of local markets) to Thursday Night Football this year. Also, there were some major concerns over the quality of the streams at the beginning of the year, with many people saying the streams would cut out or look like they were remarkably low quality. I haven’t watched every Thursday Night Football game this year, but I have watched a few.
With the introduction of WSL2, it’s now pretty easy to do great work inside of Windows, specifically training machine learning models. This is doubly so as Microsoft brought DirectML support to WSL2, meaning this is one of the easiest way to train models if you don’t have an NVIDIA card.
However, I’m usually not directly at my Windows machine. It’s a desktop machine with a nice RTX 3090 in it.
Eight years ago I moved to rural Northeastern Connecticut. It’s beautiful out here and after 20 years of living in urban cores, the switch to the rural lifestyle was something that came fairly naturally for me. However, living in a rural area has some notable drawbacks. There’s no natural gas avialable, so instead we have a 300 gallon tank of fuel oil in our basement. Perhaps, more significantly, when power goes out, it can sometimes take days to be restored.
In the past, when I had more time to write, I made a nearly yearly event of creating a list of technology predictions for the next year. It’s ironic that as my professional role has taken on more of a leadership component, I’ve stopped doing this as much. However, now that I’m officially responsible for emerging technologies at Verizon, it’s time for me to again publish a list of predictions. Without further ado, here are my technology predictions for 2020.
About a week and a half ago I did something that a six months ago would’ve seemed nearly unthinkable. I left IBM, and more specificially, IBM Watson Group. It wasn’t easy, but now that I’m a few weeks past it, I’m know that it was the right move.
Perhaps the biggest challenge that I had when I was interviewing for positions was when each interview asked the inevitable question “So, why are you leaving IBM?
There’s a ton of reasons why nearly everyone should consider using a VPN. They allow to get around various region blocks, secure your traffic when on public wifi networks, and generally can keep annoying prying eyes away from your internet traffic. I’m not one of those people who thinks that you should always use a VPN even when at home - I’m not that paranoid — but I recognize there are reasons why you may want to.
Hey world, long time no blog. Last time I wrote an article I had barely moved to Connecticut and IBM Watson Group didn’t even exist yet. Anyway, I’ve taken some time to do two major changes to my website. First, I’ve migrated everything over to Hugo. As I get more content this becomes less and less trivial, but Hugo seems like it’s a great balance between usability and performance. I’ve also refactored my personal website to run my web pages through a series of docker containers.
This marks my fourth attempt at being a technology pundit after previous attempts in 2010, 2011, and 2012. I honestly have no idea what happened to my 2013 predictions or if I ever made them. As usual, these predictions are intended to be concrete and testable, rather than vague things like “the singularity happens” without providing a definition of the Singularity.
America finally sees chip and pin credit cards It’s no longer a rarity to find a credit card with a chip on it, but they’re almost always chip and signature cards.