The Flag's a Plus

I'm going to lose some of the non-geeks on this one. I've been playing with cryptocurrency lately. Bitcoin (BTC), Dogecoin (DOGE), etc. It's interesting technology. Essentially, it's a way to buy and sell things without a centrally owned repository (like the federal reserve, or Visa/Mastercard/etc.) In a nutshell, if I want to send you a bitcoin, there's no central authority who approves the transaction (just a consensus that the transaction was valid), so there's nobody who can stop me. It's the same advantage that gold has, but it can be done over the internet. It has one enormous downside, though: it's SLOW. Because of the way that these currencies are designed, it can take more than an hour for a transaction to go through and be finalized. (You can see that it has started after about 10 minutes, but it's not truly final for about an hour.) Some of them, like Litecoin, have developed ways to speed up the process, but it still takes 10-15 minut...

Since moving, I've had to rely on Google Translate a lot. Everything from government websites to local news websites has to be translated. I'm slowly learning German, and I can occasionally make out simple articles without translation, but that little "This page is in German. Would you like to translate it?" notification gets a lot of use. Somewhere along the way, the algorithms have noticed. I'm seeing a lot more German spam, the web page ads that sneak past my adblockers are increasingly in German, and  Google Play has been playing a lot of Europop lately. Tonight, for a change of pace, Google's "I'm feeling lucky" song guesser decided that I wanted to listen to French pop. Ça joue .

I recently checked in on my retirement fund for the first time in a while. I was up 16% from this time last year. Yay! Go me! Of course, most of my retirement is in index funds that track the market as a whole. (I keep about a third in relatively low risk bonds). So, how's the market as a whole doing? Up 17% from this time last year. So, uh, I did almost as well as everyone else. Participation medals all around!

I'm visiting Leukerbad again. It's a Small town in Switzerland with beautiful mountains, hot springs, and lots of hiking trails. Today, I took the cable car to the top of the mountain and went hiking. I should mention that Swiss trail markings are different from Pennsylvania markings. In particular, the scale is different. A PA "Moderate" is a Swiss "Easy", and a PA "Difficult" is a Swiss "Moderate". I'm​ reasonably comfortable​ with difficult hiking trails in Pennsylvania. I had nowhere to be the next day (though I was hoping for more hiking and sightseeing), and I was in a town full of spas. There was no better time to push myself. Unfortunately, I only had a few hours before the cable car down the mountain stopped for the night. So, I chose a middle difficulty trail that was supposed to take about two hours and took off. It was easy going at first, but it started to get a lot harder somewhere along the way. I was expecting a ch...

I had a slightly disappointing experience with Apple support today. I've been an Apple user for many years. I created an Apple ID back when they introduced the iTunes music store. I've used it ever since. A few years ago, when Apple was getting a lot of bad press because people's Apple IDs were getting hacked, Apple introduced 2-step verification for Apple IDs. When you switched to 2-step, you're given a recovery key (an RK) -- a long password-like string. They warn you at the time that you must store your RK in a safe place. I thought that I stored it in a known, safe place. Back in mid-May, after returning from overseas travel, I decided to change the password on my Apple ID. Something went wrong. Neither my old password nor my new password worked any more. It turns out that if this happens, you eventually end up at this Apple support page . Short version: you must have either your password or your RK. Lose both, and you're screwed. So, I went...

A small computer success story: I have a Synology NAS at home. For those who aren't familiar with them, they're small computers that are set up to make storing and sharing files easy. They keep your data across multiple hard drives so that if a hard drive fails, no data is lost. Or, at least, that's the theory. After we moved last year, I set up the NAS and ran all of the status checks. It reported that one drive was still working but starting to have problems. I bought another drive, plugged it in, and set it as a "hot spare" (basically, the system knew about it, but it wasn't being used). I also turned on monthly disk checks. Months passed with no more problems. ...until last Tuesday. On Tuesday night, the system automatically sent us mail to tell us that The troubled disk had finally failed. Since we had a hot spare, it would be used as a replacement disk and our data would be copied to it. When everything was finished, the system would let us k...