Weeknotes 3

• Still going for Weeknote Tuesdays. Four weeks and counting.

• This last week got unexpectedly expensive. A new dishwasher (replacing a 13? year old one that had started to play up), a new phone (replacing a 3 year old one that had started to plummet from 50% battery to 0 in a matter of seconds) and a new MacBook Pro (decided it was time to have my own personal machine rather than lean too heavily on my work-provided laptop).

• The dishwasher was easy quick and easy to replace. Only one incident where I thought the water supply was turned off but it the little plastic valve handle was broken, so when I turned it, it actually rotated in place and left the water very much still on.

• The phone, a Google Pixel 4a, wasn’t too much work to migrate from my previous phone. Sure, I had to get 1Password installed early on to save me typing all of those randomly generated passwords too much. Oh, and I had to migrate all the 2FA tokens over. The last time I had done that, 3 years ago, Google Authenticator didn’t (as far as I can remember) offer a way to migrate. So with that in mind, I spent an hour manually resetting the 2FA setup on about a dozen services so I could get it setup on the new phone. I tweeted my angst and of course someone helpfully pointed out that Google Authenticate does now provide a way to migrate the tokens without having to reset anything. Lesson learnt for next time.

• The laptop, a Macbook Pro with the new M1 chip is a lovely machine. Not had time to do a lot with it yet. Didn’t have the energy to do the 1Password dance on a second device whilst also getting my phone setup. I went with the 8Gb rather than 16Gb version. Whilst it saved some money, the main reason was the 16Gb version had a month-long shipping delay whereas the 8Gb would arrive the next day. Having done some research, I convinced myself that 8Gb would be plenty for what I’ll be asking of it.

  I did weigh-up whether the new machine needed to be a laptop at all. I’d seen a few people on twitter have this debate. Given I’m working at home for the foreseeable future, there’s no real need for a device I can take out of the house. So something like a Mac Mini would do the job just as well. Not to mention, it’s a personal machine and not a work machine, so the whole working-at-home thing is a bit of a red herring.

  Ultimately I decided I still wanted to be able to roam the house with the machine. How else would I get these weeknotes written at 11:30pm at night whilst watching TV?

• I did my first Node-RED Office hours last Friday. I had two calls with people in the community, the first discussing how to remotely manage Node-RED across a collection of devices in far-off locations. The second call was looking at a plane tracking system that uses Raspberry Pis and Software-Defined Radios to intercept the various radio signals (and satellite comms) emitted by planes to track them in the sky. You can find out more here.

  I’ve got another two calls scheduled already for this week - looking forward to see what topics they bring.

  If you want to schedule some time with me for a chat about Node-RED, then you can do that right here.

• I’ve failed to read a single page of my book this week; too busy getting things done in the evening to leave myself any time to read.

• I did review four chapters of a Node-RED book that is being published later this year. I’ve always wanted to write a Node-RED book - and have certainly been asked. But there are two things that hold me back. Firstly, I’m aware the Node-RED project documentation needs lots of work. My natural sensibility is to think any effort writing words about Node-RED ought to go into the documentation for all to benefit from, rather than into a book for people to buy.

  My other worry is the time it takes to do properly. Dale has written a book which I look forward to getting. But I know from our conversations how much work that was to do. Anyone who manages to do something like that above and beyond they day job has my admiration.

  So I was happy to act as a technical reviewer for this new book. It’ll be nice to add an English-language Node-RED book to the two Japanese ones I already have.

  I think there is still plenty of room for other Node-RED books to get written. Something for another day.

• We watched Wonder Woman 1984 this week. It was okay. The DC universe just don’t engage with me the way the Marvel universe does.

• Speaking of which, WandaVision is very good. I have to admit, after three episodes of retro-style sitcom it didn’t feel like it was getting anywhere. It felt like it needed to shift gears and for things to start happening.

  And then episode four arrived and the gears were definitely shifted and things happened.

• Are these weeknotes interesting to anyone? The content may not be riveting, but as long as I keep writing them, then they are working for me.

  There’s some stuff on the horizon that I’m itching to write about. But as these are meant to be about what I’ve done this week, not what’s coming up, I mustn’t get ahead of myself. Maybe I’ll start blogging non-weeknote things at some point.