Probably more on the insanity side, but back about 17 years ago, we had a couple of hot-swappable fans go out on a Compaq Proliant ML370 file server that handled file and print sharing at one of our school buildings. If the fans didn’t spin, the motherboard knew it, and refused to go past the BIOS self-check. As I didn’t have any hot-swap fans on hand, the workflow went something like this (pictured, in left-to-right, top-to-bottom order):

1) Command server to start back up by pointing at it and talking sternly to it. This was unsuccessful.

2) Take side cover off of server to verify that the two red lights were indeed “bad things”.

3) Borrow a carpet drying turbo fan to place on the floor in front of the server, which serves 2 purposes. One, to start the internal server fans spinning to turn the bad red lights to good green lights, and two, to serve as auxiliary cooling to the server while operating in this state.

4) Savor a 20 oz. carbonated beverage in triumph.

There are no bad solutions.

Part of the holiday experience back in the 1980s was to fire up the Apple ][ computer, put in the diskette for “The Print Shop”, and print out Christmas cards and banners.

If this flooded back some memories for you, perhaps you’d like to do it all again this Christmas!

Head over to https://theprintshop.club which is a complete Apple ][ emulator with “The Print Shop” preloaded, where, from your own web browser, you can create a card, sign, letterhead, or banner, just like you used to do 40 years ago. When you’re finished, the website will generate a PDF file for you that you can print on your home printer. Likely, a lot less loud and annoying than the old dot-matrix printers of days gone by!

Netflix showed last night that while its content delivery networks (CDNs) continue to work well delivering static content, I believe their edge infrastructure in regional internet exchange points (IXPs) were completely unprepared for a live presentation that millions of people were watching.

Netflix can start by adding more infrastructure in the 511 Building in downtown Minneapolis, because most people in this area that I talked to had to keep hitting refresh or go back 10 minutes in order to view a potato 240p stream of the fights.
However, if you used a VPN to modify your perceived location to a different area of the world, streaming worked a lot better with no buffering…HD even!

What is the most puzzling to me is how a company, that wouldn’t exist now without its technology infrastructure, and which has a net income of $2+ billion a quarter, and nearly a year in lead time before the fight, couldn’t possibly prepare better for this event. Things aren’t all well at Netflix.

This seems like a good time to remind everybody about the Electronics Technician Association (International)’s Audio/Video Forensics Analyst certification program that we worked hard on several years ago.

Since 5 years ago, AI has become much bigger, and “deepfakes” are an even bigger issue now. Check out the sample video I shared below for a little shock value! Second guess what you see and hear. It may not be real!

Check out what is covered in the certification here: https://etai.org/comps/AVFA_comps.pdf

Now, more than ever, it’s very important to use logic instead of emotion, facts instead of opinions, and multiple sources instead of a single news channel, when forming your own opinion about anything. Realize the importance of skilled experts in the future to assist with the detection of these threats.

(Video created by The Dor Brothers)

I think I’ve figured out why it upsets me so much when people use generative AI to compose material to create nearly 100 percent of a letter or other writing project, and then not source it as AI generated.

I see this time and time again in my personal and professional life.

It’s not necessarily the fact that AI derives its output from people’s original copyrighted works without the owner’s permission. Although the courts are deliberating on that question now.

It’s not the fact that AI can be used positively, and that it can help us think outside the box when we can’t find the exact words to portray how we feel.

It’s certainly not the fact that properly used AI is being used right now to crunch huge datasets and clinical data to help find cures for diseases that have plagued us for decades.

What upsets me is the ego of some of its users!

Let me explain. Most of us can tell when a piece of writing is outside of the style or ability of its author. Most of us can tell when a paragraph or two sounds suspiciously like another boilerplate AI generated piece that we’ve read before. It’s incredibly easy to run a piece of writing through several AI detectors to confirm our beliefs. Yet, the “author” of the piece believes they can fool everyone with the lack of writing effort on their part, and that their “brilliant” effort will fly right over the heads of their uneducated and oblivious reading audience.

I’m here to tell them… No. It most definitely does not.

And it damages their credibility. The readers understand they weren’t worth more than a one or two sentence prompt to a generative AI robot. A 15 or 20 second effort at most.

When used as a thank you, it’s not heartfelt. The original act leading to the thank you was one of kindness, and the resulting thank you is one of dismissiveness.

Let’s not let generative AI do what can be done best and more intimately as true conversation and correspondence between friends, colleagues, and acquaintances.

*Story image generated by DALL-E 3, “Copilot” Bing AI from Microsoft

Of course, she didn’t really. This was during a May 2017 open house at Prairie Island Nuclear Power Plant in Red Wing, Minnesota, and this was a control room simulator they use to train their staff. Don’t worry, there was really never a risk of meltdown!