On Hemispheric Views episode 155 we got to talking about old computer peripherals. We agreed to put something on our respective blogs about our favourite peripheral1 of all time.
I mentioned on the show that I had a memory of an early flatbed scanner I had. It may have even connected to my Amiga, but it was definitely connected to my Packard-Bell 166MHz MMX PC.
I couldn’t remember the name of the device at time of recording, but I knew it was a SCSI-connected Canon flatbed scanner. I remember that it created “massive” files when scanning at full resolution.
Subsequent research has helped me narrow it down to either the Canon CanoScan 300 or CanoScan 600. I am pretty sure I had the 300. But I can’t be absolutely certain. I also can’t find any pictures of it online to verify it, or even show it.
I do know I loved that scanner. I don’t even know why I wanted a scanner so badly. But it does track with my personality. I’ve been obsessed with digital management and paperless from a strangely young age. I used to want to be a ‘businessman’, whatever that meant to a young boy. This was my way of mainfesting a future life, I guess?
Anyway, Canon, thank you for making awesome late 1990s scanner hardware.
If you want to play along with this topic, I encourage you to listen to the podcast, and blog/post about your favourite peripheral. Throw it up on Mastodon and give it a tag #HemisphericPeripherals. Let’s gather up all those favourite peripherals - old or new!
Whenever I hear the word peripheral, I have memories of a departed friend of mine from my tweenage years who could never say the word, so would instead call them “preherfals”. To this day, when I see or hear the word peripheral, my internal voice says preherfal. ↩︎
About a year ago I had my home wired with Ethernet. The previous house I had lived was cabled, and I couldn’t live in the new house without wireless backhaul. Aint nobody got time for that.
The other day I noticed that my network transfer speeds seemed slow.
Running iperf3 between my mac mini server and my laptop, I identified the network was throttling at around 97 Mbps - far from the gigabit speeds I would expect. However, that 97 number was so perfectly close to 100 Mbps that it just had to be a failed cable or terminator. The problem was, which one?
More problematic was that I couldn’t remember how the house hasd been wired. The contractors didn’t leave me with a diagram, so to diagnose the fault it was also helpful to build a map of the network.
To help my future self, here is one I created using the wonderful software Curio:
With my topology now clear I moved on to testing, slowing spanning outwards from the mac mini that was my listening end of iperf. Starting with a direct connection between it and my laptop, confirming gigabit speeds, then moving out from the server, a network layer at a time, to see where the speeds dropped.
I determined that it was a single Ethernet patch wire that was running from an Ethernet drop in my TV Room to the switch in that room that was damaged. I replaced it with a new cable, and continued to test other connections, and all were good.
My home network is performant once more, and I’m so pleased that it was a simple cable that was damaged, and not any of the infrastructure. That would have been annoying.
At work I’ve reverted back to ‘old’ Outlook. It’s still so much better than ‘new’ Outlook. It makes me sad to see how old powerful applications are being set aside for lowest common denominator webapps. Dumbing down. Or enshittification.
Joan Westenberg’s post, The Case for Blogging in the Ruins has been working around the ‘blogosphere’. Is the blogosphere even a thing anymore? It used to be massive, which is exactly the point of Westernberg’s piece.
I’ve blogged for decades now. The early Blogger and Movable Type accounts are gone now. Some of the latter I saved, but despite not having a full archive here on this site, there is certainly enough.
Over the years my blogging has had different foci, probably reflecting the growth and change in me and my own interests over the years. My blogging has also been influenced by short-form social media, in that most of my posts now are short. I rarely have the time or motivation to put forward a longer think-piece.
Westenberg says this in their post about what makes a blog work:
“They build. The best blogs create posts that reference and extend earlier posts, developing ideas over time rather than starting from scratch each week. Gwern’s site is an extreme example, with entries that get updated for years, accumulating evidence and refinement. But even a modest version of this works: a body of work that compounds.”
To confirm this, I can refer back to a post I made on August 14, 2018, Blogging As an Exercise in Thought where I also talk about my history of blogging. I’m reminded by this post that I also hosted a blog on Blot for a number of years! There we go, my blog has supported my own memory!
I still read many blogs every day, mainly via RSS. I still prefer them to social media. I hope that they don’t wither and die completely, and that people will continue to find ways to use the medium to build their own long-lasting presence on the web.
I appreciate Westenberg’s post and I hope that I will find time to blog a little more this year.
Finished reading: Are You Mad at Me? by Meg Josephson 📚Like so many “self-help” books there is a lot of fluff around built around some short but core concepts. A book where I think, “this could have been a blog post”, which might actually be where the book originated - but I haven’t done my research as I bought the book on a whim.
I finished The Drifter. What a great game. Adventure point and clicks are the best!
Is this the best subscription cancellation deal ever?
Christmas movie on the outdoor screen at Perth Stadium. 🚴
Summer Ride
I couldn’t take anymore Tahoe Liquid Glass shenanigans. So I’m back to this classic look.
If there is a change from my list last year, I’ve indicated it with a leading ✨.
Change?
Category
Default
Comment on Change
✨
Mail Client
Fastmail
Goodbye Fmail3
Mail Server
Fastmail & Apple Mail
iCloud is there, but I don’t actively use it
Notes
Obsidian for Work; Apple Notes for Home
To-Do
OmniFocus
iPhone Photo Shooting
Camera.app
Photo Management
Photos.app
Calendar
BusyCal (plus Calendar.app)
Cloud file storage
iCloud (plus OneDrive)
RSS
Reeder with FreshRSS
Contacts
Contacts.app
✨
Browser
Safari
Despite trying Vivaldi and Firefox, I always come back to Safari
Chat
Signal
Bookmarks
Safari
Goodlinks is gone; back to basics
Read It Later
GoodLinks
Rarely used now; very few worthwhile things to read (later) on the web
Word Processing
n/a
I don’t process words
Spreadsheets
Numbers (plus Excel)
Presentations
n/a
I don’t do presentations
Shopping Lists
AnyList
Meal Planning
AnyList
Budgeting & Personal Finance
Actual Budget on PikaPods
✨
News
RSS & NYTimes
Music
Apple Music
✨
Podcasts
Castro
I got bored with PocketCasts
Four changes this year from 23 categories. 8 of the 23 are true defaults.
For about the 14th time in my life I am once again experimenting with David Seah’s Emergent Task Planner sheets.
It’s Hemispheric Views episode 150 Or is it 152? Or 153? Who knows, but it’s here! We’ve got mail and Martin has coffee! Pay attention, there is homework for you in this one.
I’m sure I’m not supposed to see the icons being drawn consecutively onto the screen in iOS 26.1. Such poor software quality.
